(LifeSiteNews) — Winston Churchill said in 1943 that “[s]ome people’s idea of [free speech] is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.”
We live in a world where not everything is explicit and transparent. But, little by little, we begin to see the landscape, like shapes emerging out of a dawn mist, and as the sun rises, we start to grow a little more confident that what we are seeing is real and not just imaginary: that there is both a beautiful landscape and damaged, but still attractive buildings, on it.
So begins a quest for what is going on in our society, in the global society in which we live. It is impossible to overlook the flaws that exist: the contraceptive industry, the abortion tsunami, the anti-population lobby, and a massive increase in suicide. We are witnessing a relationship deficit: a kind of relational sink out of which people scarcely emerge because so many of us, in one way or another, are affected by it.
Social media could be thought of as a good thing, for it puts people in contact with each other. However, it also gives strangers the ability to influence anyone vulnerable enough to take notice of them and, it seems, there are many who no longer know what is real and so have become more and more vulnerable.
Because of vulnerability, because of a lack of a grasp of evidence, or of philosophy, or of outdoor life, or of the help of the Church, more and more of us are being led where online “influencers” can take us.
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Influencers lead the vulnerable to cosmetics or to surgery, and the surgery can be anything from facial changes to outright mutilation. Social media contagion and opportunist transgender activists are ruining many young lives. They are leading unwary, unschooled, and fearful young people to life-changing processes. One of activists’ manipulative arguments is the unsubstantiated claim that if young people aren’t permitted to mutilate themselves in search of an out-of-reach identity as the opposite sex (or no sex), they will commit suicide. However, according to the evidence so often denied, little quoted, or cited as the possible aftereffects of this inhumane process, the suicide rate increases after people have accepted mutilating operations.
Those who alter their outward appearance and come to regret it, especially when they emerge from the uncertainties of their adolescent years, discover too often that their decision is not reversible, as they had been told. To whom can they then go? They do not want to return to the advisers who separated them from family, disrupted their schooling, gave them a new, almost unintelligible, constantly changing vocabulary, and set them on a path of outright self-disfiguring changes ensuring lifelong medication and multiple kinds of damage to healthy bodies. But the society in which we live persecutes those who want to provide real help to identity sufferers. As with those who now lose their liberty – such as those peaceful pro-lifers who are going to prison for praying and offering help to abortion-minded women – so those individuals and countries who object to transgenderism run the risk of incurring grave penalties for telling the truth in love.
Although the different ideologies are shifting and confusing, many changes in society are tending towards certain endpoints. These are that (1.) any change is possible, irrespective of its reality; that (2.) the public affirmation of self-declared changes to a person’s sexual identity is a “right”; and that (3.) medicine is no longer about healing but the expression of even unnecessary money-making services. The devastating impact of all this on vulnerable people, their families and society cannot be overstated. It is almost impossible to trace and govern, even medically, what is happening, because the so-called gender health clinics do not keep adequate records and cannot necessarily follow up on people who have been through their doors.
But as reports and investigations emerge, we can see an origin to all this. At the Beijing Conference on Women in 1995, it was agreed that men are biologically men and women are biologically women. However, there has been a systematic attempt to redefine language in a manner that makes contraception, abortion and now gender ideology more and more “immersed” and “implied” in non-binding agreements emanating from the United Nations bureaucracy.
Certain parts of the UN are also redefining pro-life groups as “anti-rights” to discredit them and “alienate” others from them. However, the so-called rights they defend are not rooted in human nature and justice but are “claimed” rights that powerful agencies are pushing on the entire world: contraception, abortion, and now an almost unintelligible language of multiple identities that are not real and do not express the reality that each of us is male or female.
This has engendered such confusion that even the UN’s own Special Rapporteur on violence against women is saying that UN bureaucracy has so departed from its binding 1995 agreements that women’s real needs have been jeopardized. These include safe places that are no longer safe and sex-separated sports where women are endangered or unfairly defeated and demoralized by the growing injustice of their contests being dominated by men claiming to be women.
The indifference to objective reports about gender mutilations shows that there is a certain “deafness” to the harm done to those herded down the body-changing path. There are two obvious reasons for this. The first is the staggering sums of money to be made from unnecessary and harmful operations and the dependence on equally unnecessary chemicals that young people may have to consume for the rest of their lives. The second is the increasingly aggressive language tactics of gender ideology advocates. These activists target anyone and everyone who disagrees with them while taking no responsibility for the harm done to individuals, many of whom are very young, and the chaos they have caused society, both nationally and internationally.
What can we conclude but that gender ideology is yet another form of anti-population propaganda? That ideology has been spreading its tentacles for many years and is beginning to strangle both free speech and the natural objection to harm being done to individuals and societies. If bureaucratic processes and the coincidental wealth they generate are not corrected, and if the UN is not returned to its original and just foundations, where will they lead if not to a mentality that is profoundly anti-human?
Fortunately, there are many reasons for hope, not least the many organizations that recognize the concrete harm transgenderism causes young people, the apparent imperviousness of gender activists to constructive feedback, and the help of God, His Church, and other people of goodwill.
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The three books listed below are particularly clear and insightful in explaining what is happening in the world today:
Ryan T. Anderson, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, Encounter Books, London and New York, 2018-2019.
Mary Eberstadt, Adam and Eve after the Pill: Revisited, Foreword by Cardinal George Pell, Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2023.
Gender Ideology and Pastoral Practice: A Handbook for Catholic Clergy, Counselors, and Ministerial Leaders, edited by Theresa Farnan, Susan Selner-Wright and Robert L. Fastiggi, St. Louis, MO: En Route Books and Media, LLC, 2024, pp. 468.
Francis Etheredge is an author of 17 published books, with another forthcoming, 2024-2025, on the subject of this article: https://enroutebooksandmedia.com/francisetheredge/.