Trans Ideology: the Modern Hydra

It is a mistake to believe that by taking down one head of gender ideology, you will achieve success. You must strike at the foundation: the heart of the hydra.

There is a movement that began as a slow and quiet stirring. As it spread through online spaces, it latched onto other causes and weaseled into education and political interests. Seemingly overnight, its heads appeared in pop culture, the medical industry, political policy, and had even begun rearranging language.

This movement has been coined as “Gender Ideology” and was born from another called “Queer Theory.” Both are deconstructionist, postmodern movements that seek to undermine, if not dismantle foundational aspects of society such as biology and safeguarding children.

The difficulty with gender ideology and perhaps the key to its success is the number of institutions and subjects it has threaded itself into. From the medical field to candy corporations, it has invaded western culture unlike anything in recent memory. I would even go so far as to say that it’s started permeating culture across the globe. It hasn’t been a shock to me.

True authenticity and constant celebration with no downsides? Happiness and free self-expression in a world where so much oppression still exists? Parades and rainbows as a distraction from the miserable news cycles counting down climate change calamities, war, shootings, and stabbings? Why wouldn’t these platitudes capture the hearts and minds of outcasts and worriers of all ages?

As anxiety rates rise, as society seemingly is collapsing around us, it is natural to seek escapism. And what better form of that is there than reinventing your entire self? To be born anew in the body that has imprisoned you, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Posts have popped up all over social media comparing pre pandemic “cis” selves, often looking dower and sloppy, to their new and improved trans identities: bright smiles, and styled as ideally as they can manage.

It’s a movement that needs no formal advertising campaign. It merely preys on the consumer’s insecurities and social media does the rest. However, this has not stopped major brands such as Oreo and Skittles from proudly announcing their support for “trans rights”. Nor has it stopped the push for changes in language and practices in the law, education, medicine, and businesses at every level.

On the surface, this seems like an obvious push for inclusivity and kindness. However, in practice, it has devastated all these areas in society and has been a struggle to overcome thanks to the nature of the hydra that is gender ideology. Once one head of the beast is challenged, the others swarm to its defense.

The Heart of the Gender Hydra

It is a mistake to believe that by taking down one head, you will achieve success. The others will always be there to distract you while the former regrows in the background. Try to stop males in female spaces and sports, the legal sex change and sex spectrum arguments swoop in. Try to stop pediatric transition and the threats of suicide, and false equivalency of LGB rights chomp at your feet. So, what can be done about it? You must strike at the foundation–the heart of the hydra–the fiction upon which the rest depends: legal sex change.

Why is legal sex change the heart of the beast? Because law is how we shape society and how we establish precedent upon which boundaries are built.

Thanks to legal sex change, we have eroded the very definitions and protections around biological sex and thereby made the reality of the sexes up for debate.

It is a legal descriptor of an individual based entirely on a subjective belief that impacts how they are treated within the law. There is, to my knowledge, no other such defining legal characteristic with such profound impacts attached to it.

One could argue race is comparable, but there is no racial segregation in sports, spaces, and medicine – nor should there be, as there is no significant difference between the races that impacts health and safety. Sex segregation of these things is meaningful and backed by unimpeachable data. To challenge that data on the basis of a psychological disorder is absurd.

The only difference between a man walking into the women’s bathroom or locker room without a legal sex change, and one who has had their sex legally changed is the documentation. Essentially, a letter on their ID is what allows them to commit an otherwise criminal act and violate that single sex space. The same is true in sports such as Power Lifting, which recently saw a loss in a discrimination lawsuit that tried to prevent biological males from competing in the female category.

Its Origins in Queer Theory

This comes from the core of the beast and is inherited from its mother, Queer Theory: the idea that everything considered the “norm” or even “biological” must be subverted and dismantled. If there is no difference legally, then there must be no difference biologically. The undeniable male advantage and reason behind sex segregated sports can now be argued as a paltry matter of averages in “people” that has nothing to do with the “social construct” of “man” and “woman”. Those are “genders” anyway, and have nothing to do with “sex”, which to them is just another arbitrary construct.

This is because once the social and legal categories of “man” and “woman” have been dismantled, the biological reality can now be undermined. If there are no differences between the sexes socially or legally, if one can become the other simply by feeling and asserting it in society, then what makes someone a man or woman biologically? It’s here that we see heads that use the term “intersex” (rare congenital disorders within males or females involving the development of the reproductive system), and “feminism” to further their push. These edge cases of sex development (that we are only able to adequately treat by distinguishing which are males and females) are used because of their abnormal chromosome compositions and anatomical structures.

While that head misrepresents medical conditions, another appeals to feminism to shame you for believing men are stronger and faster than women on average. How dare you believe that women are inferior to men? You must be a misogynist. There are plenty of women who can best plenty of men in physical competition. This type of rhetoric is meant to distract from and obfuscate the fact that the difference between male and female physical performance is massive. The most physically elite males outperform the most physically elite females by significant margins and the overwhelming majority of males outperform the overwhelming majority of females in physical competition. It’s a fact that we do more harm by obscuring than we could ever do by revealing and accepting.

This leads, of course, to language and practices in medicine being rewritten to reflect the deconstruction. Websites that discuss sex specific health conditions such as the menstrual cycle, cervical and prostate cancers, and pregnancy have had “male”, “female”, “men”, and “women” removed and replaced with “people” or “patients”. Even worse, some have even been replaced with dehumanizing language such as, “birthing bodies”. This leads to confusion in situations in which clarity and reality are imperative. Who has a uterus? Who can give birth? Why do some people have uteruses and others don’t? How do pregnancy and birth happen? This can’t be clearly specified because of the deconstruction. It is considered offensive and meaningless to discuss these facts.

This trickled into all levels of education and now, we see elementary school children being taught that biology is not only ambiguous and arbitrary, but that it is second to gender identity – an immeasurable and totally subjective belief about oneself. It is made worse by its inconsistency and ambiguity.

“What is a woman?”

“Anyone who identifies as one.”

“How do I know if I want to identify as one? What does that mean?”

“It means that you feel like a woman or want to be one.”

“What does it feel like to be a woman? What does it take to be one?”

“It doesn’t take anything to be a woman. A woman can feel or be like anything she wants!”

What are we supposed to learn from this? If any gender can be anything, why bother with the distinctions? Why medicalize anyone or try to resemble a desired sex or lack thereof? What does it mean to be trans if it can be anything? Why do people with gender dysphoria get to have their trans identity considered with more validity than people who aren’t diagnosed with it?

How Legal Sex Change Affects the Law

The permeation of this ideology in the culture brings us back around to an issue that was minor, but presents itself more commonly now that the deconstruction has spread so far: how the legal sex changes affect the law and everyday life.

As it stands currently, legal sex changes on birth certificates aren’t available in every state, and even in states where it is legal, the legality and regulations around changing it on ID vary by county. While the laws surrounding this are now touted as a push for trans rights, the beginning of these changes in the law were to circumvent the illegality of gay marriage. It was only because two males couldn’t be considered legally married that legal sex change was proposed. It was during these instances where doctors, testimonials, and the courts started to redefine what a woman was and what constituted “living as a woman.”

The laws started slowly changing in 1959 with the case of Charlotte McLeod, with the restriction that the individuals seeking legal sex change must have had genital surgery. However, since then, things drastically started picking up speed around 2006, and now, some states have gone so far as to allow people to register their sex as “X” without any restrictions, such as notes from clinicians.

The most obvious and hotly contested of the issues stemming from this is the public bathroom. While many have advocated for third and single occupancy facilities, it fails to address the current dilemma. How can women maintain a sex segregated bathroom? There may be no way to make this foolproof – people who want to violate the boundary of sex segregation who can “stealth” will continue to do so. However, because of legal sex change, women can’t really challenge an obvious male who comes into a bathroom, spa, gym, or locker room, even if he were to expose intact male genitals in a communal space or shower.

At an infamous incident at Wi Spa in Los Angeles, California, women attempted to have one such male removed from the women’s spa area, only to be rejected by staff and ridiculed by another man in the lobby. Further ridicule and harassment followed the women who protested and voiced their concerns. It was later revealed that the male in question was previously arrested twice for indecent exposure and for failing to register as a sex offender.

Unfortunately, the laws in question make it so, even with this criminal history, men like this can continue to invade women’s spaces and expose themselves. There is no way to discern which males are “living as women” in earnest, and which are opportunistic predators. For example, males who have made predatory comments about young girls and threatened violence such as “Jessica Simpson (Yaniv)” from Canada, have even gone to the lengths of having “gender affirmative” surgery to make their genitals resemble those of the opposite sex.

Although I wish this were the extent of it, this even affects national security. Recently, I was informed by a friend who works for TSA that the policy surrounding the body scanners has drastically changed to value “inclusivity” over safety of flights and other passengers. The body scanners that TSA uses have settings for male and female bodies that speed the check process along by noting which areas of the body may have more mass or bulk under an individual’s clothing. Likewise, TSA agents are trained to do pat downs that take someone’s sex into consideration. From what I understand, male agents are not trained on how to pat down females, and female agents are not trained to pat down males.

However, because of the government pressure to be “inclusive”, a new button was added to the machine that is to be used as the primary scanner setting: gender neutral. Unfortunately, the machine settings were barely changed, and this setting cannot always adequately read the bodies of the people walking through it. This causes the machine to alert on individuals, at which point the agents running the scanner must decide for themselves which bodies are male and which are female based on their own judgement and not based on the identification of the individual. This forces the agents to use their best guess based on observations of sex characteristics or regressive stereotypes surrounding expression.

Silly as it may be, it impacts national security, as it could lead to terrorists and cartels taking advantage of the policy to store drugs, weapons, or explosive devices in the clothing or bodies of the prospective passengers. By having them claim alternate gender identities, they could bypass the awkward and inaccurate scanner and pat down policies, as alerts and untrained staff may not be able to identify hidden parcels. This is the same government agency that has gone so far as to scan flip flops as potentially housing dangerous items within the rubber soles. As we’ve seen time and time again with this ideological push into government, logic and consistency, and even safety, take a backseat to identity.

I want to be clear – I have compassion for people with gender dysphoria. I am one. I understand the fear of bigotry as a female, bisexual, and child of immigrants. However, I don’t believe it is fair, inclusive, nor kind to entertain this legal fiction for the sake of feelings. In my (Hispanic/Cuban) culture, pale skinned females are seen as highly valued sex objects, and I felt the constant danger of sexual assault and objectification from family and the community. Family friends wanted to arrange my marriage to their sons when I was as young as five. I couldn’t and can’t hide my sex nor my skin color. Neither can others who are oppressed or in danger because of theirs. Your age cannot be changed on your ID, despite some niche groups arguing that it should be because “trans age” is a way for them to process childhood trauma. So, why should we continue to allow legal sex change that was only established as a way around bigoted restrictions on marriage?

Legal Sex Change Harms Everyone

It’s not inclusive to allow some groups to engage in legal fiction and not allow it for others. That kind of radical inclusivity would devolve into a free-for-all. Every unique identity and subjective change would be allowed, and government identification would become meaningless. We are already seeing this with the “X” marker and restrictions around legal sex change dropping.

It is also unkind to allow someone to engage in a lie, especially one that allows for the erosion of others’ rights and affords privileges above the others. Nor is it kind to redefine language and safety to suit the subjective beliefs of others. In no other case that comes to memory do we as a society deem this acceptable. So why here?

Although the beast has many heads and the battle will be long and messy, as most bureaucratic combat is, I believe striking at this foundational element will fell it much faster. As my empathy for those affected by this who are not trying to be opportunistic or predatory runs deep, so does my sense of morality and rationality. And this is the only way I can see the ideological hydra coming to rest on all fronts permanently: eliminating legal sex change.

This article was originally published on the Paradox Institute website on April 11, 2023. It has been re-published here for Substack.