Unraveling Gender

The Battle Over Sexual Difference

John Grabowski

• Publisher: TAN Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781505117219
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

In the modern era certain ideologies have appeared with growing rancor that threaten the truth and meaning of human sexuality. Gender ideology is one of the greatest moral errors of our times. It is essentially the mistaken notion that gender is not necessarily connected to the sex of the body, but is a personal construct. The Church in her wisdom has stood up to stem the tide of this harmful new attack. In this book, Dr. Grabowski lays out where gender ideology comes from and identifies its sources—the poisonous currents of modern secularism, the chaos of the sexual revolution, and the ever-expanding reach of technology. In the end, Unraveling Gender shows that what may seem like a new fad is actually the most recent manifestation of one of the oldest heresies in the Church's history, one which is best refuted by the enduring beauty and clarity of her teaching about the body and the gift of sexuality. Drawing upon Scripture and Church teaching, this timely book equips parents, religious educators, and clergy with the information they need to confront this dangerous ideology with clarity, confidence, and charity. As gender ideology continues to spread its errors, infecting our culture like a deadly virus, this book is a must read for every Catholic.

CHAPTER ONE

THE BEACONS ARE
LIT: WARNINGS ABOUT
GENDER IDEOLOGY

“On Shadowfax! We must hasten. Time is short. See! The beacons of Gondor are alight, calling for aid. War is kindled. See, there is the fire on Amon Dîn, and the flame on Eilenach; and there they go speeding west; Nardol, Erelas, Min-Rimmon, Calenhad, and the Halifirien on the borders of Rohan.”¹

—Gandalf the White, The Return of the King

The wizard Gandalf says these words at the beginning of the third volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Gandalf is here addressing his great horse Shadow-fax as he and Pippin the hobbit ride to war in Minas Tirith, Gondor’s main surviving city. The people of Gondor lit great fires atop some of the flanking White Mountains to warn of the impending attack by the forces of Mordor and to implore its neighbor and ally, Rohan, to send aid for the coming battle. These beacons thus functioned as an alarm system for the peoples of Middle Earth.

In recent years, the Church has sounded, with increasing force, a series of warnings concerning “an ideology of gender.” This term describes a set of ideas that challenge and undermine basic Christian beliefs about the human person: male and female, made in the image of God, the goodness of the body, and the importance of marriage and family. Gender ideology is not, as some have suggested, “nonsense” that has “no clear referent.”² It is very real and poses a formidable threat to the Faith and to human flourishing.

In many ways, these warnings are like the lighting of the beacons on the White Mountains—they announce the coming battle and call for aid—from both those inside of the Church and those of goodwill outside of her. In this case, the battle is not against corrupted human beings and an array of evil creatures such as orcs and trolls as in Tolkien’s mythology, but against a set of ideas antithetical to human dignity and flourishing. The battle for the soul of our age is being fought—not on the fields of the Pelennor—but on the terrain of ideas about family, marriage, and sexual difference.

A Different Kind of Battle

Before proceeding, it is worth thinking more fully about the nature of this “battle”—what it is, and what it is not. The opponents in the battle are not people who identify as LGBTQ+. Tragically, such persons have been and continue to be targets of rejection, discrimination, persecution, and even overt violence within our society—at times by members of their own families or church communities. This hostility, along with more subtle forms of rejection, often leads to depression or other mental health issues for such persons. Meghan DeFranza describes the problems facing people who identify as transgender:

Fifty-seven percent have family members who refuse to speak to them, 50–54 percent experience harassment at school, 60 percent have been refused health care by physicians, 64–65 percent have suffered physical or sexual violence, 57–70 percent have been discriminated against/or victimized by law enforcement, and 69 percent have experienced homelessness. Even more harrowing are the suicide rates. In the general population, the 4.6 percent rate of suicide attempts is deeply troubling, but this rate is more than double (10–20 percent) for lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons, and skyrockets to 41–46 percent for transgender and gender nonconforming people. For gender noncon-forming and transgender people of color, the rate is terrifyingly high: 54–56 percent.³

To respond with abuse or violence toward persons with same-sex attraction or struggling with their gender identity is morally wrong and deserves unequivocal condemnation.⁴ Further, the Church teaches that “every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided,”⁵ so the basic human rights of these persons should be protected by law, public policy, and by their neighbors.

Many persons who might describe themselves as LGBTQ+ have no desire to advance a particular political or social agenda—they simply want to live their lives in peace and without harassment from others. Those who are Christian also hope to find in their churches support in living out their call to follow Christ, while also contending with the experience of same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. Some of these people might describe themselves as “gay,” “lesbian,” “queer,” or “transgender.”⁶ Some might reject these terms as reductive and simply speak about their experience of same-sex attraction or gender discordance. The Catechism notes that the pain and difficulty of such an experience can be an opportunity for these believers to unite themselves to the Cross of Christ and so to grow in holiness.⁷ Like any form of suffering met with faith and love, this particular struggle can bear fruit and become a gift in the life of the individual Christian and in the wider Church community. But to acknowledge the miraculous ability of God’s grace to bring good out of suffering and pain is not a license to inflict still more suffering through mistreatment. Christians are called to respond with “respect, compassion, and sensitivity”⁸ to the suffering of their same-sex attracted or gender dysphoric brothers and sisters.

Yet, there are those—both inside and outside of the group of persons who identify as LGBTQ+—who have a political and social agenda aimed at deconstructing or exploding what they see as an oppressive gender binary. These proponents of gender ideology often use their positions of influence in government, the media, academia, or the culture to advance their views and to silence those who question or disagree with them. These activists, however, are ultimately not the opponents in this battle to which the Church’s warnings draw our attention. Rather, it is the ideas that they promote and disseminate, and the spiritual roots of these ideas, that are the primary opponents in this battle. In a Christian context, the language of warfare always has a spiritual referent. Our battle is against the powers of evil—sin and the devil—in ourselves, and in the world around us (see Eph 6:10–17). Other human beings are not the real enemy in this battle.

Gender ideology’s ideas and views of the human person are antithetical to both human reason and Christian faith. When implemented, they work to undermine the goodness of the human body, the reality of sexual difference, the distinctive gifts of men and women, sexual complementarity, the connection between marriage and the gift of children, and the irreplaceable nature of the family as the basis of a healthy human society. When these goods are threatened, all the members of society suffer and their ability to flourish is jeopardized.

The nature and origin of these ideas will be made clearer in the pages that follow, but, for now, two things should be evident. First, the language and imagery of a “battle” used in this book or in the Church’s teaching is in no way an invitation to hostility, animosity, or violence against human beings—even against the most strident advocates of gender ideology. These individuals are made in the image and likeness of God and are offered redemption in Christ, and they too have the same human dignity and value as all other persons. They deserve to be treated with respect and charity, even in the midst of debate and disagreement aimed at refuting their ideas. Second, the Church holds that her members are called to speak out against these false views of the human person precisely because of her commitment to the dignity of the human person. To fail to do so would be an abdication of the Church’s responsibility. The justice and charity that we owe to others is grounded in and demands the truth—the full truth about the human person as made and loved by God. Because she has received the truth of Revelation, the Church believes herself to be “an expert in humanity” and qualified to speak on behalf of the human person.⁹

The Culture of Death

The first person to use the term “expert on humanity” to describe the Church and what she possesses in her teaching was Pope St. Paul VI in a 1965 address to the United Nations.¹⁰ The same pontiff was also the first to describe the Church’s mission in the world as helping to build a “civilization of love” that he described as one characterized by the love and peace brought into the world at the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.¹¹ Both of these ideas were further developed in the magisterium of Pope St. John Paul II. And the latter notion would come to serve as the foundation for the warnings about gender ideology that the Church has been sounding.

The idea of a “civilization of love” appears frequently in the teaching of the Polish pope, including in many of his major documents.¹² In his 1994 Letter to Families, Gratissimam sane, he develops the idea at length. The civilization of love is founded upon the duality of male and female who are created in the image of God. It finds its center in the covenant of man and woman in marriage and their capacity to bring new human life into the world through their bodily self-gift to one another in cooperation with the plan of the Creator. The community of persons of the family in which spouses and children live in mutual love is a created reflection of the eternal communion of love among the divine Persons of the Trinity. The child who comes into the world through the self-giving love of his or her parents is not only a gift for them but for the whole of human society. The family and the civilization of love built upon it are, therefore, interdependent realities.¹³

Against this civilization of love stands another reality—an “anti-civilization”—it is the inverse of what it opposes, the shadow cast by the other’s light. This anti-civilization denies the truth about the person and his or her dignity, about marriage, and about the family. Instead of persons being treated with respect and unconditional love, they are used as objects. Utilitarianism thus becomes the moral coin in this realm. Pope St. John Paul II writes: “Utilitarianism is a civilization of production and of use, a civilization of ‘things’ and not of ‘persons’, a civilization in which persons are used in the same way as things are used. In the context of a civilization of use, woman can become an object for man, children a hindrance to parents, the family an institution obstructing the freedom of its members.”¹⁴ This false morality has entrenched itself in our culture. For example, it is weaponized in an educational context by so-called “safe sex” programs.¹⁵ It reduces happiness to mere pleasure and freedom to selfish license. Such a view poses a fundamental threat to the family and to the society built upon it.

In his Encyclical Letter Evangelium vitae, Pope St. John Paul II returned to this contrast with new language, describing there what he called “the culture of death.”¹⁶ In this document, the danger posed by the “anti-civilization” is more clearly focused on the myriad threats to human life. In this view, the human being is constituted by performance—that is, the ability to do things like communicate or work. Freedom is simply the exercise of autonomous choice, and human society is simply an aggregate of such self-directed individuals. Human rights are merely extensions of individual autonomy and, therefore, can be denied to those who lack the ability to perform valuable functions (e.g., work, live independently, and think). The natural world and the human body are increasingly viewed as matter to be exploited for purposes of efficiency or pleasure. Morality is organized on the basis of either maximizing pleasure (hedonism) or efficiency (utilitarianism once again). Even life can be reduced to a commodity and is increasingly threatened through contraception, abortion, euthanasia, and hostility toward the weak and vulnerable. In Pope St. John Paul II’s terms, gender ideology can be understood as a further sign and symptom of this “culture of death” at work in our world.

In response to a “culture of death,” Pope St. John Paul II once again proposed a profoundly different view via a “culture of life.” In this vision, it is being in relation (to God and other human beings) that is constitutive of human personhood. Freedom is found in the act of “entrustment” of self to others in love. Rights are grounded in the dignity of the person created by God and redeemed by Christ and cannot be taken away by the whim of a group or government. Nature is seen not as mere matter to be dominated, but as mater (i.e., a “mother”) to be treated with reverence and stewardship.¹⁷ Morality and freedom are founded on the truth of the human person, made in the image of God. Included in the document was Pope St. John Paul II’s call for “a new feminism” that would reject “the temptation of imitating models of ‘male domination’, in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society, and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation.”¹⁸ Among the unique gifts of women, the pope underscored women’s unique openness to other persons and to life, both of which are realized in a unique way in women’s capacity to be mothers.¹⁹

The Warnings

It was during the long pontificate of Pope St. John P...