Who Made Us This Way?

I started using the Penny Catechism at home on my children. It’s a tiny book, and my intention with it is simple: indoctrination. The format is simple questions and answers. The first two alone impart an entire understanding of the self and the world.

“Who made you?”

“God made me.”

“Why did God make you?”

“God made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next.”

I want them to know that their lives were not just intended by their two parents — not just answered prayers — but their lives are imbued with the intentions of a depthless benevolence, a loving Creator who has imprinted on them His image more than ours. They are also capable of love and can participate in the glory of creation — whether it is just developing their own personalities, making sounds and stories and games, or planting grass in our backyard. Eventually, if they are so blessed and determined, they will be creating artwork, or whole institutions, enterprises — and even families of their own.

Indoctrinating my children means giving them a set of truths that help them make sense of the world. To help them understand that the tribulations of life are woven into a plan — a divine conspiracy — in which God intends not just to show His glory but to share it with us. Indoctrination also relieves them of the jobs and duties that aren’t theirs alone — like fully understanding their own identity.

“Who made me?”

“God made me.”

In other words, you don’t have to create yourself, like an author has to create a story on a blank page. When it comes to you, your identity, you have a lot to contribute. But you don’t get a bottle of Wite-Out, or the privilege of the paper shredder as a last raging resort.

Really, every child is indoctrinated. That is, propositions are given to them without their consent. Sometimes explicitly, as in our catechesis, but usually just by implication. If I surrendered the job as father, it would only mean that I had surrendered to others’ giving my children these things, unchallenged. In fact, as a father I’m very much fighting a tremendous battle against “culture” — the spirit of the times — which talks to us incessantly. Cultures spit out judgments the way hoses spit out water. But the premises by which a person can understand the world are hidden in that stream and usually are as invisible as the bacteria in hose water.

In his moving, meditative book, Beyond Consolation, John Waters tried to describe our relationship to a culture.

The culture is like a human being, but the most capricious and mysterious human being I have ever come across. She is with me all the time, except that I am mostly unaware of her presence. If, for some reason, I were to become aware of her presence and betray it in the company of other people, they would begin to think me insane.

The culture we live in now is complex and devious. It defines us in ways we do not think about and therefore cannot even hope to understand. Any attempt to make visible the culture is partly doomed to failure, because it moves and shifts all the time, being governed by the desires and prejudices and terrors of all its members and what they want each other and the world in general to believe about them. I give my tithe to the culture every living moment, feeding into it what I want it to know about me, what I would like it to relate about me, but also much that I do not intend to betray. I blush, an involuntary function, and the culture understands this far more than anything I have said. And the same is true of everyone else, in their relationships with the culture, so the result is something we cannot even begin to describe but at best can acquire an intuitive sense of. And yet the culture is ever-present, policing me without my knowledge or consent, as surely as the presence of a parent conditions the behaviour of a child.

“Who made me?” — the very first question in the Penny Catechism is perhaps the white-hot core of our culture’s war over transgenderism.

For a long while, T was sneaking in as the caboose of the LGBT choo-choo train. People avoided talking about it. The word “tranny” was the slur, but I’d never heard it uttered at anyone in my life. For most of my life, T meant troubled. Who could possibly want to harass adults who wore the letter T openly? Many were down and out. A few were campy club performers such as the Lady Chablis in Savannah. Others were alpha males with peculiarly demanding fetishes.

My view of T until recently was no different than my view of being a Jehovah’s Witness. I seriously doubt the professions involved in this enterprise are in any way true. And no, I don’t recommend getting involved. But the variety of human experience being what it is, I’m sure some are, in the words of Tim Gunn, “making it work.” But, seriously, probably don’t get surgery. It seemed major hospitals, and even some nations, which had pioneered surgical sex change as a therapy, had quickly determined that it makes things worse.

And then, almost overnight, the subject of T shifted away from these exceedingly rare adults — some sad, some knowingly playing, some world-wise — to something involving an alarming number of children. T had stopped asking for sympathy, and instead came — with Adam’s apple bobbing and bits dangling out of a one-piece — demanding girls’ sports championships. And it came armed with phrases such as “gender-affirming hysterectomies” — which, yes, are being performed on minors.

And it came with all sorts of pat stories. T meant “being born in the wrong body.” Or “having a female brain in a male body.” Things that are either metaphysical assertions — unprovable doctrines about human life — or metaphors that have no relation to observable science. The culture war is obvious. If one can be born in the wrong body, or if our sex is a mere construct, one that we can play with and reformulate into as many flavors as Baskin-Robbins, then we cannot say, “Male and female, He created them.”

And that is why the T word now inspires so much anger, so much dread, and for the vast majority of people so much frightened silence. On the one hand, the culture still rings with a message of self-creation that makes T thinkable.

But at the same time, millions of people are suddenly understanding that if you admit T is right, then we can’t really be thankful for our givenness, for Nature, or believe that Nature’s God is good and intends good for us. Some of us, looking into what T is all about, have seen the surgical scars of double mastectomies on children. We’ve read the accounts of surgically made facsimiles of genitalia that make it not only impossible to procreate, but difficult, painful, and embarrassing to urinate.

If God made these children in His image, if our procreative power is a share in God’s great gift of creation, then T as it would be practiced in “gender-affirmative hysterectomies” is a form of sacrilege. It’s a Vandal’s barbaric attempt to destroy an icon bearing God’s image. It is not motivated by anything “affirming” at all, but hateful.

T is inspiring people who never thought of themselves as pious, or religious, or aligned with the Right at all to suddenly brace themselves to stand in front of these young people and protect them from this iconoclasm in the flesh. They feel that gratitude for our bodies, for who we are, is one of the treasures of this life. Gratitude aimed where? They are finding their way back to the very first question: Who made you?