The Trans Movement’s Long War with Nature

T here is an illusion in our political culture that our deepest debates could be resolved if only one side or the other would resile their private, inexpert opinions and submit to the facts, the experts, and the guidance of technocrats from the relevant fields.

But in fact, our deepest debates are beyond the experts. They are worldview conflicts, touching on anthropology and philosophy as well as theology and metaphysics. They involve questions such as: What are the limits imposed on human beings by nature? Is nature our oppressor or a guide and our home? And in what ways? Are our innermost desires an indicator of our deepest selves, or untrustworthy impulses to be mastered? These are questions that no body of scientific inquiry can answer.

Consider a recent New York Times column on the “trans kids” debates — including whether schools should help kids socially transition to another gender without informing parents. In it, columnist Michelle Goldberg makes an honest admission about running into the taboos that surround the issue on the progressive side. Namely, she spoke to doctors who acknowledged that some of the spike in reported gender dysphoria among minors may be the result of “social contagion.” For progressives, even broaching this topic, or the reality of “de-transition,” can feel like capitulation to the forces of reaction, the TERFs, and others who deny that some children and adults need to transition from a gender identity consonant with their biological sex to another.

Goldberg goes so far as to empathize with the subject of another Times news story, a parent who was appalled to find that her public school had socially transitioned her child six months earlier, without informing her. But, in the end, consistent with her progressive convictions, Goldberg confesses that children know best and that our social institutions need to facilitate their liberation from the confines of nature and their parents. “The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the school did the right thing,” she writes. “Teenagers deserve a measure of privacy and autonomy to work out their identities, gender or otherwise, even if some of their choices and decisions seem like bad ideas to the adults in their lives.” She argues that parental-rights laws would harm trans kids and that laws requiring schools to notify parents about social transition and pronoun changes “put absurd burdens on school officials.”

Taking the last assertion first, I find it strange that notification laws like this would present a unique burden. Schools in New York State cannot even offer students topical sunscreen without written parental permission. If schools can’t offer Banana Boat Light without Mom or Dad’s say-so, how in the world are they competent to make the call on “social transition”?

But what particularly strikes me is the dogged commitment to the worldview that the intuitions, desires, and ideation of children are indicators of a true identity that is in some way at odds with biology. Trans-advocacy literature will vary between metaphors about being “born in the wrong body” or having a “girl brain in a boy body.” But it has a view that fundamentally trusts the expressed desires and assertions of individuals and looks at nature as a source of oppression from which we must be liberated.

It reminds me of Mary Harrington’s contention that we are already living in a transhumanist society, which she defines as one “in which ‘human nature’ has no special cultural or political status. And in which it’s not just legitimate but morally necessary to use technology — especially biotechnology — to improve on that nature.” It may be true that, without thinking it through, entire medical fields end up adopting the transhumanist philosophy, which then shapes and ultimately determines the conclusions they reach, because it rules in and out certain forms of evidence before the evidence is even collected.

The Left’s commitment to this idea is what is driving some formerly left-leaning social types to the right. Cultural conservatives, shaped by a Judeo-Christian anthropology, tend to view human desires and human reason as easily distorted. And once these desires are given free rein, they become our masters and oppressors. Our idea of self-government is in regulating and mastering these impulses, not trusting them to lead us on a path of self-discovery. Our culture still carries room for this worldview — and applies it selectively to gambling addicts or alcoholics. But it is a worldview that is on the defense.