There is a certain Republican type—decent, red-faced, hates the Democrats, owns a business, loves America—who frowns in disbelief at the thought of a girl cutting off her breasts to align her flesh with whatever feverish ideal it lacks. This man, I am afraid to admit, is also paying for his wife to have her own breasts cut open and stuffed with silicone. Both women will end up with scars, and while we might indulge a moment to rank their vices in the manual tradition—obviously, the wife is beset by a vision of her perfection that is nevertheless an ideal of the female sex, while the girl is involved in a more tenuous repudiation of her sex altogether—still, the difference between the cosmetic surgery and the “gender reassignment” surgery is hardly so mountainous as to stick a flag in it. Both view sex, in its surprising, interrupting nature, as a disappointment vis a vis an invisible, ideal body; both attempt to control the thing by the rational application of scalpel and capital—about $10,000 in either case. The one becomes, she says, a male—or, more likely, a trans-identifying non-binary freedom fighter. The other becomes, she says, more “confident”—and presumably her husband agrees. Both become something more fundamental—something worth spending money on.
Here is a young man who wishes to be castrated to stop the hairier effects of testosterone, a surgery which he believes would complete a busy regimen of shaving and waxing, smoothing himself into conformity with a non-binary ideal—a pretty androgyny that has haunted him since he first began devoting his time to social media. Here is another man, a gruff man, a working class man, proud of his beard—the government is paying for his vasectomy, a surgical event to which he looks forward as a prerequisite for pleasures without the payment of pregnancies. The doctor snips one, then he snips the other, and though his afternoon appointment severed a vas deferens, while his morning appointment severed a good bit more—it’s no vast difference. Both have been upgraded.
What, exactly, does the conservative moral high ground consist of, here? We are prone to stick it to the libs by asking, over and against all transgender nonsense, “what is a woman?” We rest assured in the knowledge that we, suddenly and refreshingly on the side of The Science, have the facts at hand: a woman is a biological reality known in the organs and the genes that determine them to the production of female gametes. While the statement is certainly true, it doesn’t really ring—struck, as it is, by conservatives who wouldn’t dream of challenging, say, the goodness and normalcy with which teenagers insert barbs into their fallopian tubes in order to scrape up enough scar tissue to block ovulation.
Being a woman may be a biological reality that has to do with having ovaries—but this doesn’t exclude her being at war with her ovaries. Sex may be proven by the sexual organ—but this does not stop anyone from mutilating the organs which prove their sex. For all the trans-exclusionary feminist pathos—that “you can’t call yourself a woman if you haven’t experienced menstruation!”—this biological fact doesn’t come with any injunction against chemically suppressing menstruation from the age of fifteen. “It’s a biological fact,” we say, as we drag that biological fact behind the shed to shoot it in the head. Between arguing that the body tells us who we are, while tacitly accepting that we can and should spend good money to shut the body up—it seems that conservative America has a choice to make.
For “even the pagans” think as much. Even the trans activist—especially the insincere, liberal, public-school style “ally,” reading his lines at gunpoint—will admit that the biological reality of sex is a dimorphic fact, oriented towards the activity of male-female gamete production, and divided into two basic modes of the human body that we call the sexes. What is disdained is not the obviously sexual nature of the parts, but the idea that a proliferation of sexual parts make up a sexual whole. It is not controversial that anyone has a male organ, or a male gene, or even male pattern baldness—what is controversial is that he is a male thereby. The process of sperm production does not give so much offense as the process by which sperm production becomes a synonym for the whole person. This is why, in the kerfuffle over Lia Thomas, the press could report, without blinking, that “her teammates were uncomfortable with her male genitals.” The claim of transgenderism is that one can have a male part without being a male.
And so the libs—bless them—wield sex/gender distinctions in order to relegate that pesky, sexed fact of gamete production to a limited part of the bodily anatomy, keeping it partial and barely meaningful: “Sure, I was born with testes, which produce male gametes, but consider some other biological facts about myself, like my brain chemistry, for instance. This produces my gender identity, by which I identify with the female sex. Why would I let this one activity, largely contained in a scrotum, define and determine who I am, my innermost essence, over this other activity?”
Is this a bad argument? Yes, obviously, as it can only ever pit one sexed part over another sexed part and arbitrarily declare a winner. There is no reason why the conflict might not have yielded the sex of the body as the victor and so the representative of the whole person: “Sure, I have a female gender identity, produced by a certain brain structure, but here’s another fact about myself—my testes, my production of male gametes.”
But can we really blame anyone for making it when it is in such profound continuity with every Christian denomination besides the Catholic Church, which have universally made the argument that the “biological facts” of sex are not so important that they cannot be contracepted? “Sure,” says the Christian, “my body produces eggs. I am fertile. But this is not the whole meaning of sexual difference. I am not bound and determined by this one part to only engage in procreative sex. Here, consider these other achievements of the sexual organs—the unity of spouses, the pleasure of the body. Why would I subordinate these goods to the partial production of eggs, to the apparent teleological purpose of the ovaries?”
Both view the procreative reality of the body as something extrinsic to the body as a whole; both indulge in the hormonal suppression of their bodies for the sake of attaining an ideal which the unsuppressed “biological reality” renders impossible; both are open to mutilating their bodies to achieve that end; both occupy the fundamental position of keeping sex in hand, so that it precedes, in its effects, from the rational, individual, self-interested decision of man, who chemically and surgically crafts it towards his own ends, rather than the natural ends of the organs.
“You are what your body says you are” is hardly convincing, if one follows it with, “unless your body says you are fertile, in which case, wrap it in rubber, cut it up, scar it over, pump that stupid body full of ethinyl estradiol until it thinks it’s pregnant, and otherwise change the body so that it fits with your plans.”
It is not that the conservative is wrong to say that the trans person is waging a war against nature and reality—but he is wrong to disown him as anything but his child. Obviously the conservative purchasing breast augmentation is different than a self-identified queer purchasing a chest binder, but if there is a moral superiority of the one over the other, it seems to be a matter of quantity: the conservative takes sex in hand to inscribe a sexual ideal into the disappointing flesh, the queer does the same, but the former does not go so far as to repudiate or challenge her basic identification with the female sex. The non-binary child is taking testosterone pills to grow a beard, and his mother, who can’t believe it, is taking estrogen pills to avoid pregnancy, and if they are not talking to each other, they might ask Francis Bacon or John Locke to serve as a go-between—for both mother and child are liberals, at war with the body as a surprising, unanticipatable given that must be coerced, through technology, into conformity with the rational, self-interested plan of the sovereign self, always floating above and beyond whatever meanings might be apparent in the flesh.
In short, conservatives will either become Catholic or remain unconvincing.