Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
On this feast day of St. Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers, we're going to pause our series on Franciscan spirituality in respect to St. Dominic and begin a short series of reflections, a catechesis of sorts on sexuality.
We don't promise that our preaching will be as elegant or as polished as the Dominicans are since I'm not a Dominican, but I think we do need to speak a little bit more about these things.
So with the slingshot in hand, in our next reflections, we'll be confronting the juggernaut of our day, which is gender theory.
It's probably more accurate to speak of gender theories plural rather than gender theory singular, because the paradigm continually morphs.
We'll see why.
To put it in preternatural terms, gender theory is not just one demon you have to battle.
It's many.
It's legion.
But there are some basic general concepts, which consistently apply.
So we'll begin by giving a brief summary of what gender theory is today.
The resources we'll draw from will be indicated in the description part of our video online.
Gender theory is the new philosophy of sexuality.
A person's sex and their gender have always been understood to be biological, a given element of nature.
Gender theory says no to that.
Gender theory affirms a radically constructivist view of reality.
What does that mean?
Simply means that in their eyes, reality is something that's socially or culturally, or individually constructed.
Reality is not what it is or what it appears to everyone to be.
Some of their slogans today are, you probably heard them, right?
Woman is just a social construct.
Man is just a social construct.
Gender is just a social construct.
Now virginity is just a social construct.
You see this on their sign.
In a word, it means that those things, woman, man, gender, sex, they're all just made up.
And we can unmake them if we want to.
And when you read the gender theorists, you realize that that's actually their goal, to undo and remake humanity itself.
So just keep this in mind because gender theory is not anchored or is not tethered to an objective concrete understanding of reality, a reality that's true for everyone, whether you like it or not.
Then gender theory can constantly morph, it can change like a chameleon, and it often does.
Society, as the theory goes, simply assigns a sex to you at birth, and they say that that assigned sex may or may not conform to your gender.
Of course, sex isn't something that's assigned, it's empirically discovered, and anyone without a PhD in certain social sciences can understand that, we have always understood that.
But gender theory pivots a lot around this distinction between sex and gender.
Those two words used to always basically be synonymous.
Gender was simply maybe a more polite or prudent way of saying sex, depending on who you were talking to and the content of the discussion.
Gender theorists say, no, sex and gender are not just distinguishable, they really are distinct.
Again, your biological sex might be one thing, but it has little or nothing to do with the gender that you identify with.
It's you who construct or determine your gender.
Have it your way, that used to be the Burger King slogan, right?
That's the gender theory slogan.
In fact, gender theory says that in the name of your perceived or preferred gender, your sex can now be eclipsed.
It can be wiped away, canceled, transformed.
Often gender theorists will say sex refers to biology, gender refers to social meanings attached to sex.
Okay, there might be some nuanced truth to that distinction, but they go a lot further than that.
They say that society, again, just constructs the idea of gender and says that gender is binary, male or female.
So biological sex and personal identity have no necessary connection and might, in fact, contradict each other, says gender theory.
In other words, human identity is self-defined and becomes the choice of the individual.
It's what gender theories promoters say, but of course, in reality, they don't practice what they preach.
And this is clear from the fact that children who experience or seem to experience what's called gender dysphoria, so that's when a biological male or female feels or believes that their emotional or psychological identity doesn't match their biological sense of sex, that's gender dysphoria.
When this happens with children, the children are often immediately put on the fast track of gender transitioning, changing of clothes, changing of names, changing of pronouns, hormone blockers, and the like.
And as an FYI, children who are given puberty blockers and they're placed on cross-sex hormones, those children actually never go through puberty.
As Abigail Favale in her book, The Genesis of Gender says, not only does this lead to permanent sterility, but it also arrests critical brain and bone development that occurs during puberty.
So the idea that a child who's barely arrived at the age of reason or hasn't even arrived at the age of reason, the idea that that child is making a mature, informed, personal choice about transitioning is totally absurd.
Now that choice is being imposed on the child, and it's an imposition that has lifetime consequences.
After abortion, this is arguably the worst form of child abuse sanctioned in our culture nowadays.
And people struggling with gender dysphoria, you know what they're told?
They're told that if they don't transition, they'll likely kill themselves.
And they're also told if they regret their transition, they'll likely kill themselves.
So much for personal choice.
Gender theory is, at its heart, a godless theory about reality.
With gender theory, there is no creator God.
God did not create human beings, male and female, it was society that did this.
Now we will undo that societal imposition.
There is no such thing as human nature for them either.
The words that we use, man and woman, again, they create the illusion that sex is binary.
They say the illusion that there's an essential male identity and an essential female identity.
But when we think of reality, again, it's just an illusion.
Just again, what they call social construction.
As the gender theory ideological godfather, Jean-Paul Sartre said, he said, there is no human nature since there is no God to conceive it.
And that's what they believe.
And since there's no preordained duality of man and woman in creation, then the family itself is no longer a reality established by creation.
Its meaning is fluid, it's changeable.
It can mean anything and nothing at the same time.
This is because for gender theorists, life itself has no ultimate meaning or purpose.
Life only means what you or I want it to mean.
We give life whatever meaning we want to.
Reality, gender, sex, truth, it's all just, again, socially constructed.
The famous line of the Supreme Court's Planned Parenthood versus Casey decision in 1996, abortion decision is, quote, at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life, unquote.
So freedom just becomes a pursuit of unfettered choice, an open-ended process of self-expression and self-definition.
Who I am today might not be who I am tomorrow.
This is how often gender theorists present their case now that life means essentially what you want it to mean.
The next step is that life will mean whatever the state tells you that it means.
Because the gender theory movement itself is very political, very totalitarian.
It won't stop at just personal choice and personal freedom, it'll work to eventually eliminate both of those.
Gender theory has a very communist, totalitarian streak to it.
For them, again, the human person itself is just a blank slate, a tabula rasa, and that blank slate can be written on and fashioned in any way, shape, or form.
In this case, the blank slate in question tends to be the human body.
The tattoo fad, I think, is tangentially part of this as well, the idea that your body is just a personal billboard, right?
But gender theory goes far beyond that.
For gender theory believers, the human body tells you nothing about who you are as a person.
As Dr. John Grabowski notes in his book, Unraveling Gender, he says, the body just becomes a surface or a screen onto which to project a self-articulated identity.
The body can be manipulated at will.
And the given sexual characteristics of the body, says gender theory, can actually inhibit an individual's desires and self-articulation, and so can and should be reshaped or remolded, as they say.
With gender theory, the human person itself is just their mind or their spirit and their will.
Their mind might say one thing about who they are, their body might say something else.
When that happens, they say it's the body that has to change, not the mind.
It's the body that has to be physically mutilated and technologically manipulated to conform to the mind or to the will.
Some doctors, and I think rightly so, say it's akin to performing liposuction on someone who is anorexic, okay?
An anorexic person thinks that their body is wrong and their mind is right, but wouldn't it be cruel to actually agree with that person and mutilate their body based on their own subjective skewed perspective?
That's exactly what gender theorists and doctors do to those who have gender dysphoria.
David Crawford and Michael Hanby write this.
They say, quote, it's impossible to redefine human nature for only one person.
When a fourth-grade girl is required to affirm in thought, word, and deed that a boy in her class is now a girl, this doesn't simply affirm the classmate's right to self-expression.
It calls into question the meaning of boy and girl as such, and thereby also calling it to question both her own identity and that of everyone in her life, from her mother, father, her brothers and sisters, all of her friends and relatives, as well it should.
If each of us is defined by a gender identity only arbitrarily related to our male and female bodies, now relegated to a meaningless biological substrate, then there's no longer any such thing as man or woman.
We're all transgender now, even if your sex and gender identity accidentally coincide in an overwhelming majority of instances, unquote.
We're all transgender now.
That's essentially the gender theory position and their goal.
Gender theory believes that we have or we should have total control over nature.
We are the master, we are the gods, the makers of humanity.
The integrity and the health of my body matters only when I want it to matter.
My body is not the foundation or the external expression of my personal identity, no, it's a blank slate, it's a lifeless tool.
It's ornamental, can be changed at will.
Unmoored from bodily sex, the categories of gender endlessly replicate.
I don't go on Facebook, I don't watch Facebook, but how many genders are there on Facebook nowadays?
I've heard that there might be close to a hundred genders on Facebook nowadays, believe it or not.
Gender theory divorces femaleness from the concept of woman, it divorces maleness from the concept of man, creating a schism between identity and body.
The reason they can't define what a woman is is because they believe that the term woman has no real meaning.
It's like an empty taco shell.
Fill it with whatever you want to fill it with, male, female, woman, man, they're all terms without meaning.
In a sense, gender theorists are philosophically what's called nominalists.
Nominalism says the names we give to things, so tree, house, man, woman, love, those names have no correspondence in reality because there are no universals, there are no essences of things.
That's what gender theory believes too.
Gender theory promoters use the terms man and woman, lesbian or transgender, but they just use those words because they're necessary for political activism.
They admit that too.
As a side note, I may have mentioned this before, when I was in formation with a different religious order, not the Dominicans, one of the brothers who was in formation said to us that he didn't believe in canon law, he actually didn't believe in the law which governs the church, but he said, I'll use it when it suits my purpose.
Last I checked, that man is now a Jesuit priest, believe it or not.
Gender theorists aren't much different.
They don't believe that the terms that they use really mean anything, but they use them for political purposes, for social activism.
Abigail Favale in that book Genesis of Gender, says that a transgender identity is not primarily rooted in material reality, but in language.
This is why there's so much fervor over words, a concerted effort to use language in a way that reflects a transgender anthropology.
So if I use the word he to refer to a male who identifies as a trans woman, then according to transgender activists, I'm denying his existence as a woman, which for these believers is a form of violence and aggression.
In reality, the gender theorists and their followers are worried about losing control over language because language and control equal power for them.
This is a big hallmark of gender theory.
It believes that language is just an exercise of power, that the use of language and words, again, doesn't correspond to reality or truth, because there's no such things as objective reality and objective truth.
And so language then just becomes a power play.
And they've played us very well when they've gotten us to say yes to their understandings of sex and gender.
When they've gotten us to say yes to referring to a boy as her, referring to a girl as him.
When they've gotten us to say yes to the idea that someone's body doesn't match their gender and, therefore, their body needs to be changed.
When they've gotten us to talk about transitioning in a civil, matter-of-fact, polite way, they've played us very, very well.
So again, what's done by gender theory is to take those terms sex and gender, split the meaning of those terms, sow doubt about what you and all of humanity have always believed those terms to mean.
And then, like you do with an empty taco shell, they fill those terms with various meanings in a way that keeps those terms always malleable and open to various interpretations.
In the meantime, the term gender eclipses the word sex, which is too much rooted in biological reality for them.
They want to ignore or deny reality as much as possible.
You, in turn, begin to think that your, quote-unquote, lack of clarity that you once had about the terms gender and sex is probably due to your own ignorance, even though you were right all along in what you thought.
And so gender theory's rhetorical sleight of hand has worked when that's happened.
They've got you right where they want you, and you begin caving into their language and intellectual gymnastics, and you begin to buy into their false understanding of reality.
And the next step for them is the total abolition of male and female as we know it, the unraveling of the created order itself.
In a 2017 address, Pope Francis called it the utopia of the neuter, a horrific utopia, actually.
Hopefully, we'll never have to live in that.
Let's ask Our Lady for the grace to protect us, her children, from these false doctrines of gender theory, the new greatest heresy of our day, the new Gnosticism, which is essentially what gender theory is.
We'll be looking more at it closely in our future reflections, we'll look at where it comes from, and also how faithful Catholics need to respond to it.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.