A Heresy for Our Times

H ave you ever stopped and asked yourself: How, in the year 2023, did humans begin to debate propositions like “Can men become women?” How can a society that invents vaccines and sends vehicles to other planets start to doubt the sexual dimorphism of humanity? Or begin to wonder whether our children were routinely “born into the wrong bodies”?

How did these questions not just arise, but seize the cultural heights, become the day-to-day obsession of all opinion-formers and tastemakers? How could anyone take seriously the “scholarship” that purports to find support for modern transgender equality in the life of Roman emperor and sex degenerate Elagabalus?

Well, you aren’t so different from your forebears in the twelfth century, who woke up one day hearing about the latest snobbish doctrines that had traveled — improbably — from the Balkans to southern France and wondered to themselves, “How could a society vigorous enough to send armies from Lombardy to Jerusalem start debating whether marriage and procreation was sinful? How could a society founding universities and hospitals fall for the ridiculous, primitive superstition that all matter is evil, and only pure spirit is good? Hadn’t we put down a similar heresy in Manichaeism five centuries ago?”

Partisans of the modern age like to think that the age of true metaphysical debates — of heresies and orthodoxies — was settled by the Enlightenment, and the treaty of Westphalia. And from Newton on, we would confine publicly consequential debates to the political. Goodbye metaphysics.

In fact, the Enlightenment and the secularizing age that followed didn’t end metaphysical disputes by making them impossible or unattractive. They only purported to end them by settling on what was basically common metaphysics to Protestant and Catholic alike: We are rational but erring creatures who live in an intelligible universe, governed by laws. All other questions were deemed either impossible to settle, or dangerous to entertain.

But there is no reason why this settlement should hold, particularly when the baptism and youthful religious formation common to Protestants and Catholics is less common than ever in our society. In many ways our transgender debate resembles heresies from the past, not only in its gnostic content, but in the way it spreads and maintains itself sociologically.

“The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian,” observed Saint Jerome at the kudzu-like spread of the Arian heresy in the fourth century. The belief that Christ was not truly equal to God the Father was led by a charismatic preacher, Arius. Armed with slogans that were deployed in the streets — “There was a time when he was not” — the Arian heresy became debated among the common people, not just the bishops. It was fashionable, and it attached itself to existing political forces for ballast.

According to Hilaire Belloc, Arianism “became the rallying point for many strongly surviving traditions from the older world: traditions not religious, but intellectual, social, moral, literary and all the rest of it.” Later in its life, the Arian heresy would hang on due to the nationalist, anti-Roman sentiment in Germania. Belloc frequently wrote about the recruitment of snobbish opinion in favor of heresies. They were often the vehicle for those with some power to shake a political order and seek more.

The twelfth-century Catharist heresy mentioned above has many similarities to the transgender debate today. It aimed to destabilize the natural family and the political order that rested on it. It could view the physical body as a “prison” that hampered the spirit. Catharist dualism led to double-mindedness. The “perfect” led lives of strict chastity and vegetarianism, but others following the same doctrines could urge themselves to participate in debauches. Similarly, trans-identifying persons are tempted toward extremes in sexuality, either to infantilization, portraying themselves as pre-sexual innocents, or cold-hearted dissipation and depravity.

The trans heresy lives in a matrix of tech and biomedical business interests that thrive on the idea of humanity reconceiving itself as a thing as malleable as a social-media avatar. It fits hand and glove with a managerial elite that would prefer to govern a different kind of human subject, one without a soul or heart, one incapable of loyalties that supersede the managerial apparatus, and totally dependent on the state to vindicate its dignity.

The trans movement runs up against the old Christian orthodoxies, of course. But it also makes an enemy of anyone who is grateful to be a creature of this world, who appreciates and even piously trusts what Nature bequeaths to us as a species. We are not contending with a mere political movement, but a destructive and fundamentally sacrilegious revision of the Western creed. And the stakes could not be higher. Heresies that triumph take from the orthodox the tools to establish themselves as the new faith: crusades and inquisitions.