‘Born this way’? It’s way more complicated than that

If the framework for discussing matters of sexual identity and practice is the question whether it is rooted in necessity or freedom, then the opposite of “I was born this way” is “I choose this way.”  Almost all public discussion hinges on whether we ‘have to’ or ‘choose to’, and it seems mean-spirited and inhuman to stand against people’s choices ‘if it doesn’t harm anyone’.

For example, one popular defense of same-sex marriage is to argue that gays and lesbians have no choice whom they love, and therefore their love ought to have equal social standing.  As the Lady Gaga lyric declares with bravado, they were ‘born this way.’

That argument works well in the court of public opinion, though there is still no evidence of a ‘gay gene.’  More troubling is the fact that it is disingenuous to argue that marriage is a part of family law as a demonstration of social approval.  The historic social and legal recognition of marriage explicitly approves of the goods of marriage for a healthy society, i.e. the benefit children derive from maturing in the nurturing presence of a mother and father.

But the discussion is thrown into total disarray once the matter of gender identity is raised.  Gender is a term without any scientific basis.  Its sole claim to anything like objectivity is the legal standing it has achieved in the public square, and the idiosyncratic terms that have been granted to it that defy the standards of common law: no witnesses are required, gender is a matter of self-identification.

For unlike sexual identity, the claim of the transgendered is not rooted in natural biology.  It is solely based on an unverifiable subjective assertion.

Because of the dominance of the discourse of Enlightenment humanism and its terminology of equality, autonomy, and freedom in the West, this has been allowed to stand even though its acceptance must constitute the absolute ruin of civil society.

For the term identity gains its entire currency from its appeal to the laws of logic.  If they do not hold, then thinking is impossible.  As the Wikipedia entry explains:
‘The law of identity is the first of the three classical laws of thought.  It states that each thing is identical with itself. By this it is meant that each thing (be it a universal or a particular) is composed of its own unique set of characteristic qualities or features, which the ancient Greeks called its essence.’

But the appeal for the legitimacy of gender identity isn’t based on being identical with itself.  It is based on being essentially different from biological sex, and with the further claim that natural sex, male or female, is an arbitrary ‘assignment’ upon the individual, violating the freedom of the person involved.

So now biological necessity not only isn’t necessary, it is a socially assigned ‘oppression’ of the gendered essence of the person.

Perhaps the matter of human sexuality and its proper use doesn’t hinge on the question of choice vs. necessity, or freedom and compulsion.  There are writers who published on the subject before Michel Foucault.

And perhaps politicians, legislators, and educators need to return to such writers, and to the laws of logic, before they act to harm in the name of healing, and to reconsider the entire basis for the historic defense of the human person in Chirstendom, namely the fact that he or she bears the imago Dei.

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