CitizenLink, a blog of the Focus on the Family, is concerned with trans* people and what they (and their requests of society) do to God’s plan:
- We’re in a World of Gender Confusion
- ‘Transgenderism’ and the Deconstruction of Gender
- What about “Transgenderism”?
- What about Intersexuality?
If you’re concerned with these issues that Focus on the Family raises, you might check out a book by Justin Tanis that deals with issues of faith (blog entry here) in a different, but still biblical, way.
More to the point, I suppose, is that Focus on the Family is trying to apply some sort of biblical law to current civic and social realities, and I simply don’t believe that such an argument carries any logical weight. It’s not a matter of my not hearing the arguments, but rather a case of not recognizing those arguments’ validity.
One may argue about the nature of rationality, and that’s precisely where a recent discussion took a friend and me. On this friend’s view, I was delusional for not recognizing that there are two natural and god-given genders. On my view, my friend is delusional in insisting on promoting simplistic narratives of gender and sex in the face of documented evidence that tells us gender fluidity is real and that intersex, transgender, and transsexual people are real and would like to be recognized as real people with real rights.
I suppose it becomes a matter of the basis for our rationality, whether it be logic, or common experiences, or empiricism, or faith, or ancient texts, or consensus, or what-have-you. We don’t have to take ideological sides on modernism versus postmodernism, or religious versus secular, in order to arrive at a concept of rationality that serves the largest number of us, but we do have to make an effort to cast the rationality net as broadly as possible. Social discourse depends on it.
December 28, 2010 at 11:28 pm
Nice to see you blogging again Joyce! You know, I get very angry when all these groups tout “family values” to try to put all us trans and queer people in our place. As though we didn’t have and care about families.
April 1, 2011 at 9:52 am
Substitute Qur’an, Woman, and Identity and some of the same issues come up. I can swap out something “Muslim woman” in almost every one of your sentences! Thankfully the narratives are changing because those who don’t fit the neat little check boxes are demanding new narratives. What we need are women like you to keep populating the narratives with lived experience. I’m hopeful that all of those living in the white spaces surrounding __male __female (and all that is contained in those boxes) will eventually be able to change the grand narrative as well and the rules that determine who gets labeled delusional are shifted.