Rep. Nancy Mace’s crusade to keep men out of women’s spaces reveals a tragic irony.
Prompted by the election of Delaware Democrat Sarah McBride to Congress, Mace (R-S.C.) introduced two resolutions last week aimed at preventing transgender women (that is, biological men) from entering single-sex spaces designated for biological women. In defending her stance, Mace repeatedly emphasized her commitment to protecting women and their spaces.
The triumph of transgenderism is the murky puddle at the bottom of the woke slippery slope.
Mace should be commended for fighting back against the encroachment of transgenderism.
At the same time, Mace is defending her support of gay marriage. “We support gay marriage, and voted for the Respect for Marriage Act twice,” she boasted on social media last week. In another post, she bragged, “I voted for gay marriage twice in fact and would do it again.”
There is loud dissonance between these two positions.
What Mace appears not to understand is that to support the destruction of traditional marriage — in which functional and biological differences between a man and a woman are its most important property — is a wholesale rejection of the framework that distinguishes a man from a woman. It’s a signal that differences in biological sex do not matter in marriage, the family, and, therefore, society.
To borrow from the language of Carl Trueman in his book “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,” supporting the triumph of the LGB in the acronym LGBTQ+ naturally leads to the triumph of the T.
This is because, as Dr. Andrew Walker, a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, explained, the LGB and T “share a rejection of human telos. The T rejects telos at the level of our individual embodiment, while LBG rejects telos at the level of our relational complementarity.”
The triumph of transgenderism, then, is the murky puddle at the bottom of the woke slippery slope.
At the top of the slope is the rise of radical expressive individualism whereby one’s identity is self-determined, subjective, and fluid. This philosophical framework, which now dominates our culture and politics, discards biological realities in favor of personal feelings and desires. It’s the liberation of the self to be free from the constraints of external determinations and influences — even biological truths about sex differences.
In a society where one is free to throw away sex difference in marriage — at the behest of personal feelings and internal perceptions of identity — then one is eventually free to discard embodied sex differences altogether.
This is the glaring incoherency in Mace’s stand against transgenderism.
By endorsing the LGB framework that it is good and right to prioritize personal feelings and identity over sex differences in a fundamental human institution like marriage — fundamental, of course, because a marriage between a man and woman results in children, and, therefore, families, communities, and a society — Mace is inadvertently supporting the very same philosophical principles that erase the realities of biological sex altogether.
If the functional differences between a man and a woman can be discarded at will in the realm of marriage, then they can also be discarded at will to liberate people from all embodied biological distinctions.
This is how we’ve found ourselves in a world in which the people who believe they were born into the “wrong body” use personal feelings and internal determinations about identity as navigational beacons to rectify, via technology, what they believe nature (i.e., God) got “wrong.”
Mace, then, is “trying to impose a limiting principle where none can exist,” observed writer John Daniel Davidson. Or, as another person put it, “You can’t sign up for the first 49 feet of a free fall [and] then try to exempt out of the 50th foot.”
The road to transgenderism’s triumph was paved by those willing to erase biological realities when it was convenient. The journey back to reality — and the battle for truth — cannot be undertaken with half measures.
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