Why I Will Fight for the Men's Room

On Friday, May 13, 2016 the Justice Department issued a “Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students.” The document was in response to North Carolina’s HB-2, and states that students have the right to use whichever bathroom corresponds with their “gender identity” instead of their biological sex.

This issue has been brewing for a long time, perhaps even since gay “marriage” was ruled a constitutional right in the Supreme Court’s decision on Obergefell v Hodges last summer. But we are told by many sources, even those who fought for traditional marriage, that this bathroom regulation is a non-issue; it’s simply not important. Social conservatives are caving to external pressures. I have even seen prominent priests back off from this issue, surrendering to the White House regs. “Leave it how it is,” we are told. “It doesn’t matter” and “It’s not worth the fight.”

But it is worth the fight. This is a battle that we cannot walk away from. The stakes are far too high.

We cannot simply look at the particulars of this case. Rather, look at the long term precedent that this sets. If we do not fight this, what does it say? What, for that matter, is all this controversy about? Why care about who uses which bathroom?

This is not a battle over bathrooms. That is merely a devilish disguise meant to distract our attention from the real things at stake. This is an issue about the definition of gender. The Justice Department’s letter provides us with several helpful definitions which hint towards the real issues at stake here. “Gender identity refers to an individual’s internal sense of gender. A person’s gender may be different than or the same as the person’s sex assigned at birth.”

You can’t make this stuff up. These are not the words of some fringe social radical. This comes straight from our elected government. What nonsense! Gender is different than sex? It hasn’t been for the last several thousand years that humanity has walked the earth. Gender has never been different than sex. And it isn’t now.

Newsflash: “And God created man in his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Not “God made them male and female as an arbitrary social construct that can be changed at will.” The Word of God is clear, and yet even Christians equivocate in the face of accusations of hatred and bigotry.

Take a deep breath here brothers and sisters. Put down the coffee so you don’t do a spit-take. Gender IS sex. They are the same. You are not “assigned” a sex and birth arbitrarily; at the moment of conception, your sex and gender are determined. This is scientific. Your parents’ DNA combines and you either have XY chromosomes or XX chromosomes. And you are either a male or a female. You don’t get to choose.

Transgenderism is not a legitimate state of being. It is inherently disordered. Up until DSM-5, it was in fact classified as gender identity disorder just as homosexuality was only recently removed from the list of disorders. These changes do not reflect breakthroughs in the science of abnormal psychology. Instead they reflect social fads. It has suddenly become “cool” to be transgender. But this behavior is nevertheless disordered. It is contrary to our human nature which was ordered by God.

While the mental disorder itself is not sinful, just as homosexual inclinations are not sinful, acting upon the disorder, trying to change your gender, is sinful. It is the height of arrogance to say that you can decide upon your gender, something that God has already determined. If “before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee” (Jeremiah 1:5), then God knew our gender before we were born. Transgenderism implies that God makes mistakes, that personal inclination trumps physical, biological reality. We have no right, no power to decide that our “gender identity” is different than that which we were born as.

This is why we must fight. Not because of the importance of bathrooms, but because of the importance of the immutable reality of gender. If we let the sword fall from our hands now, what justification will we have to pick it back up later on? If we sit on the sidelines, we may never again be able to stand up when it counts. If we gag ourselves in order to not offend sensibilities, who will remove the gag?

It is not the battlefield that matters; it is the war. What matters is what we are fighting for.

We are fighting for the Truth. We hold this “revolutionary” belief that sex and gender are the same. That a man is a man and a woman is a woman. That God does not make mistakes!

Know brothers and sisters, that this is indeed a fight. Believing as we do will not make your lives easy. It will not be a walk in the park. It will be hard. At times, it will hurt. The world will hate us even more than it already does. The world will scream at us, telling us that we are wrong, calling us ignorant, hateful bigots. They will attack our beliefs, try to undermine our faith. Do not be shaken!

And as is evidenced in this letter from the Justice Department, the government is against us as well. The document hints that schools who do not comply with the transgender regulations – allowing students to use whichever bathroom they feel they identify with – will lose their federal funding. What next? Will Catholic hospitals be forced to provide transgender surgeries just as they are being pressured to provide abortions? Will refusing to call someone by the gender of their choice become a misdemeanor? Will parents have to consult with their children before calling them a boy or a girl? Will the truth, the words that I am writing, become defamation or slander? Prepare for the struggle to come. There will be persecution from people and from the law. And with the way this election cycle is going, we cannot have confidence that things will get any better. I for one do not trust that a new president, from either party, will instantly solve these problems. We cannot place our hope in Caesar. Place your hope in God.

As “the life of man upon earth is a warfare” (Job 7:1), why not fight for that which is true? The assault on gender will not end with the bathroom. That is why we cannot let this go.

Our Vicar of Christ, Pope Francis, is leading the way. He called the bathroom guidelines “deeply disturbing.” In “Amoris Laetitia,” he tells us that “the young need to be helped to accept their body as it was created.” “Biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished, but not separated.”

“Male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Remember these words. Believe in these words. Fight for these words.

DEUS VOLT!