Published July 31, 2024
Note: This essay is based on the author’s talk entitled “Sex and Sanity: Man and Woman He Made Them” at the Napa Institute Summer Conference, July 25, 2024.
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Last week, Elon Musk, known for his boldness and entrepreneurial genius, abruptly announced he is moving his businesses out of California to Texas. In an interview with psychologist Jordan Peterson, Musk explained why: California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a new bill that prohibits schools from telling parents when their own child identifies as “transgender.” For Musk, it was the “last straw,” saying he previously warned Newsom that, “If you sign legislation that…puts children in danger, I will move my companies out of California.” He is making good on that promise.
The most powerful moment of this interview, however, came moments later, when Musk spoke from the heart—not as the billionaire businessman—but as a father in deep pain.
Peterson asked Musk why he is such an outspoken foe of so-called “gender-affirming care.” Musk countered that “gender-affirming care” is “a terrible euphemism…it’s really … child mutilation and sterilization.” “It’s very possible,” Musk explained, “for adults to manipulate children who are having a natural identity crisis into believing that they are the wrong gender…and that they need to be the other gender…and that will solve their problems…Then they give them sterilizing drugs…called puberty blockers. Sterilizing drugs… so they can never have children…. It’s macabre. It’s evil.” Those were his words.
Then, pain etched on his face, he went on: “It happened to one of my older boys. I was essentially tricked into signing documents [giving permission for puberty blockers and hormones] for one of my older boys, Xavier…I was told Xavier might commit suicide.” He repeated again: “It’s incredibly evil.”
Then Musk spoke softly, haltingly—the way a person in pain speaks when they are just holding it all together—and said, “I lost my son, essentially. They call it deadnaming for a reason. It’s called deadnaming because your son is dead. My son Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus.”
“A woke mind virus.” It’s an apt description of the ‘transgender revolution.’ Pure insanity. The transgender revolution reveals a culture that has lost its grip on reality.
Elon Musk’s suffering, unfortunately, is not rare. The families who have gone through the exact same experience say that the pain of watching a child self-destruct, cheered on by gender evangelists (often other family members), is searing, raw, and unrelenting. The anger also runs deep. Anyone with a heart would feel great compassion for Musk, his son, and anyone who faces such pain, loss, and alienation because of a child’s so-called “transition.”
But zoom out from the personal tragedy for a minute and look at this story through a wider lens—and ask some questions.
First, what’s the heart of the problem here?
Taking our cues from legislation and public policy, we might think that these questions of sex and identity are merely medical questions, the types of disputes we need experts to sort out. Remember Matt Walsh’s famous question: “What is a woman?” Isn’t it a question of biology? A matter of evidence? 25 states so far have indeed sized up the issue of “gender transition” from a biological and medical perspective, passing laws that in varying degrees ban medical and/or surgical interventions in minors for “gender transition” purposes. These laws, based on the government’s duty to protect its citizens – particularly children – from harm, tackle limited, identifiable issues of informed consent, minors’ immaturity, and the evidence base—is it sufficient to justify experimental procedures with lifelong consequences for minors?
These are valid concerns. Everyone knows teenagers are too young to make life-altering decisions with permanent consequences. The mantra of “gender-affirming care” (“Let the child lead”) is pure nonsense. Every parent knows this intuitively unless ideology overrides their parental instincts. Musk himself points out the contradiction of prohibiting teenagers from getting a tattoo while permitting them to seek life-altering hormones and surgery. Deferring to a child’s every want and desire is the very definition of poor parenting—except, apparently, when it comes to sex and identity.
We should be grateful for those laws—and the courage of medical professionals who expose the harm of medicalized “gender” interventions and the lawyers who craft protective laws and defend them. Even so, those laws are not the answer. They can contain the damage, but not reverse the tide.
The heart of the problem is much deeper: it’s an anthropological problem.
When a teenage boy identifies as a woman, our objection cannot be that he’s simply too young and impressionable to decide for himself whether he is a man or a woman. It’s simply not true that, if he waits a few years until he’s more mature and then still claims a female identity, we can relax and say, “you know, he must be right.”
When an adolescent girl seeks a double mastectomy because she has convinced herself that she “feels like” a “man,” and she hates her female body because it doesn’t match her feelings, our best answer cannot be that “Honey, the evidence base is just inadequate right now. Let’s wait until the research definitively shows a lasting emotional benefit to amputating your healthy breasts.” It’s simply not true that a sound study showing some sort of psychological benefit to removing the healthy breasts of a teenager would somehow make it all OK.
This isn’t an age or maturity problem. It’s not an evidence problem either. It’s a deeper problem.
Young people like Xavier have been seduced by an anthropology—a belief system premised on the oldest lie known to man: “You decide. You decide what’s true for yourself.” You decide who you are. You decide what’s good or evil. You decide what makes you happy. You decide what to do with your body. (My body, my choice, incidentally, is the shared slogan of both the abortion movement and gender activists. Their movements are very intertwined, with Planned Parenthood now the second largest provider of cross-sex hormones for “gender transitions.”)
The whispered backdrop, the unstated premise of this refrain, is that “You know better than God what’s right for you.” You can disregard his moral precepts, his design for your bodies and relationships. Or even deny his existence, because you are the master of your universe. You decide.”
Many of you are familiar with the gender unicorn or gender bread person. These images sell children on a false anthropology, convincing them that there is no truth, no coherence to their creation as male or female or to the design of their bodies—that what’s most important is “my choice.” These images present the human person as a bundle of disconnected dimensions with little meaning—except for their feelings and choice of “identity.” The individual gets to decide his or her “authentic self,” regardless of the fact of the male or female body.
That’s a pretty heavy burden to lay on a child or teen. Imagine waking up every day, taking your emotional temperature, and trying to figure out if you feel more like a boy today or like a girl. (You’ll find plenty of videos of trans-affirming parents asking their children exactly that, as if each day might bring a new answer.) Imagine doing this if you’re only five years old.
A more recent image is the gender galaxy, which magnifies the lie. Children are told that “gender” is this amazing world that is theirs to imagine, a place to fashion themselves—and the world around them—after their own desires. Masters of their own universe, they can name themselves, like the stars in the sky. They can choose their identities, set embodiment goals, and change their bodies accordingly. It’s magical thinking. But children believe it.
I decide. This is the refrain, the narrative, if you will, of man’s rebellion against sex and sanity—of our rebellion against God himself.
How did we get here?
One of the seeming conundrums of the transgender issue is “why” so many parents—mature, well-educated, thinking adults—why have so many parents almost reflexively acquiesced to or even endorsed the claims of the transgender revolution? Why is a child’s claim to “be trans” even plausible to them? Why didn’t we hear a collective outcry, saying, “No! this is insane!” swelling up from parents across the land over the past decade? Yes, there were some. But more often thousands of parents, teachers, counselors and physicians simply accepted the precepts of gender ideology as true.
A few years ago, most Americans passively supported gender ideology as well, agreeing with the statement that a person’s identity can be different from sex. That statistic has flipped in the past two years, as about six in ten have moved to embrace reality: the person is immutably male or female. The same is true of self-described Catholics. But why, I wonder, isn’t that figure higher?
Consider the claims of gender ideology—and how they compare to the Christian understanding of the person. (As a side note, constraints permit only a summary comparison between the truth of the person and gender ideology. If you want more, I invite you to attend a fantastic conference—titled Man and Woman and the Order of Creation–to be held at Franciscan University on October 24-26, 2024, which will be livestreamed. The conference is the brainchild of Franciscan Professor and Thomistic scholar Deborah Savage, co-sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center.)
Let’s do a head-to-head comparison.
As Christians, we know we are created by a loving God, in his image and likeness, possessing an inherent dignity, with an eternal destiny. We are created male or female, equal in dignity but complementary. Our primary identity is as a son or daughter of the Lord—our identity is relational.
Gender ideology, in contrast, is atheistic—with no room or need for God. It claims that the person is self-creating. Dr. Norman Spack of Boston Children’s Hospital, who first used puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to “transition” identity-confused children in the U.S., spoke of the marvel of children “creating themselves.” Gender ideology claims that “who we are” is “whoever we say we are.” Identity is self-determined, even fluid, unbounded by the reality of the physical body. Without God, the person has no inherent dignity, so dignity becomes contingent, dependent on external validation or legal recognition.
Christianity teaches that we are a unity of body and soul, gifted with a human nature – a design for our good. Our bodies have meaning. They reveal something about who we are – that males and females are made one for another, oriented towards the gift of self in sexual union within marriage. Sex has a unitive and procreative meaning, and children are the fruit of that relationship, to be raised in a family—a communion of persons—that images the Trinity.
Gender ideology rejects the concept of human nature and posits a separation of mind and body. The mind is what matters; the body is merely a tool, a thing to be used, or a canvas for personal expression. Sex is reduced to a quest for pleasure, disconnected from reproduction, with no boundaries on who, how, or how many others we use, as long as there’s legal consent. Gender ideology redefines marriage as an arrangement to fulfill adult desires; “family” is a chosen association, for personal benefit. Importantly, where Christian anthropology recognizes that we are all sinful and broken, in need of grace and redemption on the path to eternal life, gender ideology’s adherents have no transcendent purpose. Life is merely a quest for power, the drive to defeat one’s oppressors while journeying toward a personal utopia.
Every significant truth about the human person, as understood by Christians, is contradicted or undermined by gender ideology. Gender ideology’s beliefs about the human person are the core of the sexual revolution. An individual doesn’t even need to consciously subscribe to every tenet of gender ideology to be influenced by it.
Msgr. James Shea, author of From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age, notes that every society rests on… “a set of assumptions and a way of looking at things that is largely taken for granted…” The “fundamental assumptions” of a society weave a “compelling narrative” into the culture—a narrative that shapes human decisions and gives individuals “a sense of meaning and direction.”
In the past, this narrative was the Christian vision of the world—a culture largely shaped by Christian beliefs and assumptions about how the world should work.
Not so today. The implicit assumptions woven into today’s culture, the “compelling narrative” that shapes people’s decisions and defines their purpose (sometimes without them realizing it), are no longer Christian. Our culture is being reshaped, rendering the claims of gender ideology our default narrative about what it means to be a human person and how to be happy.
Gender ideology—and the normalization of all its fruits, from casual sex to masturbation, to pornography, to contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and now transgender identification—is irreconcilable with the truth about the human person. This false anthropology is being “baked into” our assumptions, judgments, and relationships. Inevitably, it will make Christians less receptive to the truth.
In truth, gender ideology is a preposterous belief system.
It’s easy to understand how children can become convinced of a preposterous idea—that they are born in the wrong body or that they can change sex. Children and young people have little life experience. They lack perspective. They don’t know anything. And when a trusted adult assures them that they have the power to re-imagine themselves and become someone new—and promises that their adolescent angst, their mental health struggles, their insecurities, or peer difficulties will all disappear if they transition—that’s a pretty attractive package. It solves their problems. And it puts them in charge. “I decide.”
Children are children. Their world is saturated with gender ideology. We can expect confusion.
But here’s the question worth asking. Why would a genius like Elon Musk even consider it plausible that his child might be happier if he follows his feelings and decides he’s a girl? Yes, Musk was manipulated by the false suicide threat to consent to puberty blockers, but why was it even plausible to him that his son would be happier rejecting and destroying his sexed body?
It’s not just Musk. Dozens, hundreds of families have done the same.
And here’s the answer. The transgender deception is plausible when parents have already bought into its premises in their own lives.
Perhaps they have accepted the lies that they can live their lives as they choose, regardless of the moral law, and “it’s all good,” as long as they choose it. Or the lie that there is no natural order, no Creator’s design—particularly in matters of sex—that a person must live by to flourish. Or that God, and by extension the Church, has no say in their sex lives. They get to decide.
This theme is a continuous thread winding through the past decades of sexual anarchy. The truth is that when you reject God, his created order, his moral laws—and disregard even the logic of the body—when you reject the basic truth about the human person, then you’re making it up as you go along. Anything is plausible. Anything is possible, given the right technology.
Isn’t this the story of the sexual revolution? And the role of technology in supposedly freeing us of natural constraints and enabling us to fulfill our desires?
Sixty-five years ago, the birth control pill won approval from the FDA. The Pill, in my view, was the very first, widely accepted “transgender” intervention.
Why? Because it established the premises; it set the narrative. The Pill’s widespread use conditioned people to see God’s natural design for sex—the complementarity of male and female bodies, the purpose and fruits of sexual union (children)—as a barrier, an obstacle to the self-defined human happiness to which they feel entitled.
Married and singles alike embraced technology’s power to sever the natural link between sexual union and procreation, in pursuit of a social goal—sex with no consequences. It met their subjective criteria for personal happiness. They were convinced that they knew better than God what sex and sanity meant.
The transgender revolution differs only in magnitude, not in kind.
The Pill also implicitly taught women that their bodies and their fertility were also problems—additional obstacles to freedom. There must be something wrong with God’s design. The solution: to exercise the power of choice, discard God’s plan, and do it their way. Women were persuaded that their freedom “to decide” their futures depended on thwarting and altering God’s natural design. They needed to be able to have sex like a man, sex without consequences. What a bad idea.
Interestingly, Jack Turban, a Stanford psychiatrist and one of the most vocal champions of hormonal castration and gender surgeries for adolescents—recently defended the use of cross-sex hormones in adolescents by saying (paraphrasing): “It’s no different than putting these adolescents on the birth control pill. And probably safer.” The Pill disables the healthy body’s natural functions to achieve a social goal. We’ve already accepted that. Why shouldn’t we accept puberty blockers, which do the same thing?
Consider another aspect: once that link between sex and procreation was broken by technological manipulation, we—as a people—largely forgot what sex is for. We forgot that sex is about babies.
The consequences were predictable, as anyone who has read Humanae Vitae knows. When sex is neutered of its procreative potential, and its purpose reduced to personal pleasure, there’s no logical reason to limit sex to opposite-sex, married couples. There’s no reason why any non-normative sexual activity should be labeled deviant. If it brings the participants pleasure and complies with legal consent requirements, then why not? Homosexuality, polyamory, kinky sex, open marriages. It’s all being normalized now. Remember the mantra: “I decide. My choice.” There are no boundaries.
Activists have long pressured the psychiatric profession to stop giving psychiatric diagnoses for sexual fetishes or violent, degrading sexual activity (BDSM) between consenting adults. The latest edition of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases complied: as there’s no “public health” implication to an individual’s sexual activity, it should not be stigmatized or labeled. One of the few remaining categories that has not been normalized is pedophilia—but of course, there’s pressure to rename that (“minor-attracted persons”) and normalize it too.
So, where do we go from here?
First, a word of caution:
It is very possible that, in the short term, we may win the battle against medicalized gender experiments in minors, but lose the war against the bigger evil: the social, cultural, and political embrace of a false, degrading, and dangerous vision of the human person.
The consequences of embedding a false anthropology not only in our cultural soil but also in the human heart are far-reaching. They include:
- the coerced participation of medical and counseling professionals in “transgender” medicine
- the suppression of conscience rights for Catholic healthcare providers and educators
- restrictions on the religious liberty of Catholic employers, institutions, and individuals
- the denial of free speech
- the normalization of dehumanizing, “transhumanist” medical experiments to satisfy consumer desires
- the absolute decimation of parents’ rights and family integrity
- and the promotion of a sexualized, misogynistic, and inhuman culture
It’s a good thing to fight gender ideology on the level of medical evidence, exposing its harmful effects on identity-distressed minors, just as we highlight other human costs of the sexual revolution, for example, in our fight against abortion. But we must recognize that the entire body of “gender medicine” rests on a false premise: the belief that there is no human nature and that each person is free to self-determine an identity, in contradiction to the reality of sexual difference.
Early public arguments to advance “transgender medicine,” however, relied on a distorted appeal to Christian compassion. Dutch clinicians who performed hormonal and surgical interventions on adult “transsexuals,” as they were called, cloaked their actions in Christian compassion and the alleviation of suffering. This strategy enabled them to overcome the moral and medical misgivings of their peers and to open the flagship Amsterdam gender clinic in a Christian-affiliated hospital. Dr. Louis Gooren, a self-described homosexual and fallen-away Catholic, played a pivotal role in justifying the use of hormones in identity-distressed minors as an act of compassion. He popularized the idea that adults and “juvenile transsexuals,” as he called them, were “trapped” in the wrong body and needed medical and surgical interventions to liberate them, and invoked God as authority, saying: “God has given us the ability to repair a congenital heart defect. Why should we not intervene if body and mind are not in harmony?’”1
Today, gender medicine is marketed less by appealing to Christian compassion, and more as a bold “human rights” claim rooted in the false anthropology of gender ideology. This is dangerous ground. As the Venerable Jerome LeJeune cautioned, “Human nature exists…and whether we like it or not, we are obliged to take it into account.” And to the extent that men “deny eternal Wisdom, they [will end up] doing foolish things, however intelligent they may be.”
So, what should we do?
First, live with integrity. As Catholics, we need to examine our lives. Are we fully surrendered in our own lives and relationships to God’s plan, to his design for our bodies, and the gift of sexuality?
Second, don’t be discouraged: Remember St. Paul, “My power is made perfect in weakness. My grace is sufficient for you.” And Pope St. John Paul II’s words of encouragement: “We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of His Son.”
Third, be courageous and be convinced. There’s no daylight between truth and charity. Stand up for the truth and share it with others. Invite—don’t impose. But be fully convinced that God’s plan is indeed the only way to eternal life.
Fourth, be kind, prudent, and patient. Evangelization is the art of presenting the right truth, at the right time, and in the right manner. (So, we don’t have to dump the entire Catechism on Elon Musk! Let’s take it slow.) There are millions of people like Elon for whom the glimmers of truth about the human person are breaking through, often because of great suffering. Reality (designed by God) is attractive. So be present and patient, recognizing that conversion—except for St. Paul- doesn’t happen all at once.
Finally, let’s use all the tools at our disposal. Certainly prayer, Scripture, and Catholic teaching. But also science, personal experiences, and genuine friendship. Let’s walk with others, with great patience and love, towards sex and sanity—and the peace of Christ.
Endnote:
1 Gooren, L. (2021). Interview. In A. Bakker (Ed.), The Dutch approach: Fifty years of transgender health care at the VU Amsterdam gender clinic. Los Angeles, CA: Boom
Mary Rice Hasson, J.D., is the Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., where she co-founded and directs the Person and Identity Project, an initiative that educates and equips parents and faith-based institutions to promote the truth about the human person and counter gender ideology.
