Transsexualism In A Cultural Context

I spent my last two years of high school in Bethesda, which even in the 1960s was in the vanguard of secularism -- where I definitely lucked out was that even though my sister went to the exclusive National Cathedral School, some of my acquaintances there went to Sidwell Friends, and my college roommate went to St Albans, I went to one of the county public schools, although the culture there was equivalent (I dated the daughters of the DC Bar Association president and the US Ambassador to Mali). Somehow in that culture there was a sense in the atmosphere that the human race was evolving, and it was time to leave behind any childish or primitive reliance on religion.

It wasn't just Hugh Hefner who argued that religious proscriptions on this or that were of a piece with Old Testament dietary restrictions, which were perfectly fine for their day as a way to prevent food poisoning and such, but now we have refrigeration, so we have to rethink these things. By the same token, traditional natural-law ideas about chastity and marriage no longer apply, because now we have penicillin -- and when The Pill came on the scene, the arguments were so much the stronger.

It didn't help in my case that I was raised Presbyterian, which was weak tea indeed in the face of these arguments (my parents sent my sister to NCS for reasons of upward social mobility; the family continued to attend Bethesda Presbyterian until I left for college, but when I returned for Christmas, they'd moved on to All Saints Episcopal Chevy Chase). In college I was hearing about Darwin and Freud as established truth, and this effectively continued the argument that traditional natural-law moral theory was obsolete. What took place soon enough isn't really relevant to this account, but let's say for now that The Episcopal Church had nothing to do with it.

Nevertheless, recent developments that I've noted here, the apparent effort of the FBI to infiltrate the Catholic Church, and the effort of the Walter Reed medical center to decertify Catholic clergy for providing pastoral services there, follows the implicit public health policy during the COVID pandemic that religious services were "inessential" to remind me that the argument that religious belief is equivalent to childhood belief in Santa Claus is very much current, and it's driving public policy more than ever.

So I'm intrigued to see what's represented as the first part of a series at Breitbart News by Emma Jo Morris, who is currently Politics Editor at Breitbart News and had previously reported on Hunter's laptop at the New York Post. I believe she is a lesbian who is ardently opposed to trans ideology, which isn't actually unusual for traditionally same-sex attracted people.

In the piece, she ventures into religious issues as they relate to transsexualism. She talks with Estella Suarez-Hamilton, a young woman who “transitioned” as a teenager and presented herself as a man:

Estella views the transgender movement as a pseudo-spiritual belief system she describes as “modern Gnosticism,” which includes initiation, rituals, and rules.

“If you are thinking about how to describe the sect, it is very much connected to, like, the modern Gnostic principles. This is a syncretic cyber sect of modern Gnosticism,” Estella said, “and I love how complicated it sounds, because the trans community loves language, and they love to complicate language to the nth degree. So, I think that this term is just very — from my experience — very accurate to explain what I went through, that’s what I think happened, and that’s how I can articulate it.”

“The trans community has this stupid line, ‘When you become trans you become your authentic self.’ It’s actually the complete opposite,” Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), told Breitbart News. “You’re actually becoming somebody else, you’re actually, in a way, killing off, or getting out of touch with your authentic self, and you’re now becoming this almost fake identity.”

The term "gnosticism" is productive here, as it actually is in reference to a wide range of New Age beliefs not immediately associated with transsexualism. This essay at Word on Fire puts the traditional Catholic view of gnosticism in a contemporary context:

Gnosticism tends to set up the material and the spiritual – the body and soul in particular – in opposition, spurning the former as “the darkness” and clinging to the latter as “the light.” But this is far from some extinct or esoteric belief system. As Ross Douthat argues, “the Gnostic spirit is everywhere in contemporary religion” – from new age spirituality to the New Atheism.

For instance, we see the “utter pessimism” of Gnosticism in the hit series True Detective when Rust Cohle reflects on the tragic death of his daughter. His neo-Darwinian commitments notwithstanding, Cohle’s pessimism pushes him into Gnostic territory, where the soul is “yanked” out of non-being and “forced” into being, flesh is “meat,” life is a “thresher,” and parenthood is a “sin”. (Most Gnostics in the ancient world, not wanting to perpetuate the bondage of bodily life, were notoriously ascetical when it came to sex and reproduction.)

As a practical matter, that the current corporate-political establishment is endorsing transsexualism is not a Marxist-derived atheism, but in fact, it's a radical revision of gnosticism, the idea that your soul is so unattached to your body that you can simply adopt a whole new "gender identity". There's a lot to consider along this line -- I relize now that I need to reread Tom Wolfe's 1976 "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening".