Trans Ideology Exploits The Left’s Fallacy That We Can Be Liberated From Our Sex

Liberals in good standing are finally permitted to question transgender ideology. Just look at a recent piece in The New York Times — the high holy chronicle of upscale liberalism — in which columnist Pamela Paul denounces the crude stereotypes that inform transgender ideology (e.g. a girl who likes short haircuts and playing with trucks is really a boy). Though she did not challenge the full transgender agenda and ideology in the way that conservatives or gender-critical feminists would, she has written an important column.

Taken alongside the Times’ reporting on puberty blockers and men in women’s sports, this piece establishes a permission structure for good liberals to disagree with transgender orthodoxy, and especially transitioning children.

Even though a few pieces in The New York Times will not in themselves turn the tide, they show that dissent from transgender dogmas is allowed while remaining a liberal in good standing. For a long time now, a multitude of doubts and misgivings have been swallowed by liberals terrified of being seen as on the wrong side of the latest frontier in rainbow identity rights. But they can take courage.

This is a wonderful development. Still, as welcome as Paul’s piece is, it still demonstrates the liberal weaknesses that transgender ideology has been able to exploit. The problem is not just that liberals were afraid to dissent, but that liberalism is ill-equipped to address human embodiment as male and female.

This is seen in Paul’s reminiscing about the “Free to Be … You and Me” album and book of her childhood. She writes:

I accepted the reality of biological science that I was a girl—and rejected the fiction of gendered social conventions that as such, I should incline toward pink dresses and Barbies. Now we risk losing those advances. In lieu of liberating children from gender, some educators have doubled down, offering children a smorgasbord of labels—gender identity, gender role, gender performance and gender expression—to affix to themselves from a young age. Some go so far as to suggest that not only is gender “assigned” to people at birth but that sex in humans is a spectrum (even though accepted science holds that sex in humans is fundamentally binary, with a tiny number of people having intersex traits). The effect of all this is that today we are defining people—especially children—by gender more than ever before, rather than trying to free both sexes from gender stereotypes.

There is a lot to cheer in this. But the insistence on “liberating” children from gender is a mistake that goes beyond the commonsense observation that some girls will be tomboys and that some boys will be more sensitive. Gender, rightly understood, is the social and relational expression of our embodiment as male or female. It therefore allows for variation, both between cultures and between individuals, but it cannot be separated from our physical embodiment. Masculinity and femininity are derived from the reality of male and female. Therefore we cannot be “liberated” from gender because

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