Rights, and Wrongs, and Affirming Gender

The English language, like all other languages, has some interesting quirks. One of them would be the word ‘right’. It can mean the direction opposite to ‘left’, it can mean the opposite of ‘wrong’ (which itself has several meanings), or it can mean ‘to be allowed to’. As in ‘I have the right to…’. Sometimes, that last can even mean that someone else has to do something for me, as in ‘the right to a speedy trial’.

The two meanings I wish to focus on today are those of ‘I have a right to do something’, meaning no one should be allowed to stop me, and ‘It is the right thing to do’, meaning the moral thing to do. And I wish to point out that these two meanings can, and frequently do, clash. Something is not morally right because you are allowed to do it, and not everything that is morally wrong are you not allowed to do.

So when someone says that in some places, you are no longer allowed to do something that is a great moral evil, the calculus is not as simple as it might seem.  You cannot, or should not, merely analyse things on the ‘liberty’ scale… that now people have less liberty. In general great moral evils do not, in themselves, increase liberty. They are generally, although perhaps not always, seen as hiding a loss of liberty.

Take prostitution, for example. While a good case can be made that prostitution should be legal, and a very good case can be made that it is a moral evil, the case that making it illegal where it was legal will result in less liberty is not cut and dried. Most stories of prostitution include one or more individuals who are not using their liberty to be prostitutes but who have been forced into the trade and sometimes kept there by force.

Even something like cigarettes, which seem to represent a clear case of individual liberty, were argued against not just on the ‘health’ issue, but on how they affected others… second-hand smoke and hospital admissions and the like. (Which was a liberty issue because we are not free to stop funding their hospital admissions. A subject for another day.)

But the subject for today is ‘gender-affirming care’ (if you listen to one side) and ‘castration and sterilisation and mastectomies’ (if you listen to the other.). Now, reading that above, you will notice one thing right away: one side is using euphemisms. That’s usually a bad sign. If you say ‘terminating a pregnancy’, hopefully most of my audience, at least, hears ‘murdering your child’.

From a Christian perspective this issue is part of a larger issue, which is that Christians (and all humans) are required by God to do the opposite of what the euphemism ‘gender-affirming care’ means. We are required to support good old-fashioned gender roles, where men are men and women aren’t. In any kind of rational polity, if a boy comes to his mother, or teacher, or nurse, or… anyone at all… and says, “I think I am a girl,” the correct answer is, “Well,  you’re not.” If there is genuine confusion, then the dictionary and the child’s genitals should be appealed to. Boys have these bits, and girls have those bits, and Vive la difference and all that.

And doing the opposite, at any time, by anyone, is morally perverse. It is an active evil. This is true no matter what age the individual is, but it is doubly true when children are involved.

But should it be legal?  Or, contrariwise, should it be illegal to ‘affirm gender’, meaning to lie about gender? And, going beyond that, should it be legal to do what is euphemistically called ‘gender-affirming care’… meaning castrating, sterilising, and mastectomy?

The first answer is that it is illegal, as in it is against God’s law. But, as far as I can tell, without punishment.

But how do we bring that into our legal system? I think the most obvious way is that there should be no statute of limitations, or qualified immunity, or anything like that, for suits covering this issue. So a teacher that ‘affirmed’ a child’s gender then, when that child wakes up a few years later, she should be liable for massive lawsuits, liable for their castration, etc. They should be liable for emotional distress, social destruction, you name it. A mother who ‘affirms’ her child’s gender should immediately lose custody in any kind of divorce suit. 

And a doctor, or nurse, or receptionist, etc., who actually made the appointment for the castration? They should be just as liable as if they had tied the child down and performed the surgery. There should be no ‘informed consent’ on these issues… the idea is ludicrous. How can a child or their parents possibly give ‘informed consent’ to such a thing? No one can possibly even dream of being able to describe the physical, mental, emotional, and social consequences of such a thing. No one can tell the child how much they would have liked sex, how much they would want children, how much they would want to be a normal member of society.

We need to start by using the correct language. You ‘misgender’ someone when you call a boy a girl, not the other way around. You ‘affirm the gender’ of a boy when you tell them that their penis means they are a boy, not when you tell them that their feelings mean they are a girl.

The correct punishment from a Biblical standpoint would involve millstones and deep water. But we can’t always get everything we wish. Although judgement day is coming, so…

I love comments, especially intelligent comments that disagree, so please…

Links