(LGB)T-Ball in the Courts:  Gaining a Big “W” but Whiffing on Worldview

Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?^[1]

Preface

Welcome to Dicta Express – Dicta Express is an occasional Dicta edition that presents an intentionally succinct worldview take on a breaking cultural issue.  This week we consider an important legal ruling relating to so-called “gender transition.”

Introduction

Last week a Missouri federal court – following a nine-day trial – handed LGBTQ activists a comprehensive loss – sustaining a Missouri law that protects minors from unnecessary and dangerous “gender transition” procedures.^[2]  Christians and citizens of good will, especially parents, should be grateful for this direct and clear ruling.  It is a legally and medically correct decision and affirms a sound, common sense policy.  Yet, the underlying – and decisive – worldview matter received no attention.  Let’s get to the gist.

The SAFE Law at Issue

Missouri enacted Senate Bill 49, entitled the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act.  As the court described it, the Act 

[R]estricts the ability of medical practitioners to perform gender transition surgeries on minors and to use puberty-blocking drugs or cross sex hormones “for the purpose of a gender transition for any individual under eighteen years of age.^[3]

The Court’s Findings

The court rejected – in their entirety – the Plaintiffs’ claims attacking SAFE.  This ruling stemmed from factual as well as legal considerations.  The court, after hearing evidence, found:

The evidence from trial showed that the medical ethics of gender dysphoria treatment for children and adolescents are entirely unsettled.^[4] . . .

Furthermore, the credible evidence shows that a vast majority of children who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria outgrow the condition.^[5]

The court then summarized and explicated thousands of pages of testimony over the next 35 or so pages of its written decision.  Then the court analyzed the legal standards applying to Plaintiffs’ claim and determined none of them possessed merit.  In other words, the SAFE Act did not violate Equal Protection, Due Process, nor manifest sex discrimination, nor establish any other breach claimed by the Plaintiffs.  

This result comprises a rock-solid rejection of what amounts to the LGBTQ push for modern day alchemy applied to vulnerable children.  This ruling should be praised for its sanity and legal soundness.  Yet, from a worldview perspective, a gap exists, and that gap must be kept in the thinking Christian’s mind, if not the court’s.

Gender Transition’s Missing Analysis:  A Lesson from Combating Slavery

Chattel slavery comprises a shameful part of US history.  The public debates that engaged that issue are telling.  On the one hand, pro-slavery statesmen like John Calhoun and Stephen Douglas contended that popular sovereignty – the vote of the people – determines the legitimacy of the institution.  “Let the people decide” became their highest moral standard for the slavers.  The rather obvious problem is that “the people” can get it wrong.  As the recent election showed, the populus overwhelmingly approved the killing of the innocent unborn in droves.^[6]

Those opposing slavery like Lincoln, John Quincy Adams, and Francis Scott Key focused on another pre-political matter:  Is a slave human?  If so, how can a slave properly be considered “property”?^[7]   In other words, does slavery possess a righteous moral status? If not, then no popular vote could change that status.  In pressing this question, these statesmen focused on metaphysics – the actual nature of things, not purely political operations or arbitrary political categories. 

This matters here, because at some point, “the people” could do the wrong thing and legislatively approve administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children in the name of medicine and compassion. In fact, this is already the case.^[8]  If popular sovereignty is the highest standard, then how can that action be addressed, let alone reversed?

What is needed is a bold return to “first things” rooted in real reality.  This means realizing that a law exists above the positive law.  This higher law instantiates creational norms – matters that are true at all times, in all places, and for all peoples.^[9]  One of these norms establishes that God created humans as immutably male and female.^[10]  The “elephant in the room” is the fictitious premise that asserts boys CAN become girls. 

The court’s ruling in analyzing the statute focused on the transition procedures’ timing:  According to the SAFE Act this “treatment” may not be applied to minors.  The SAFE Act assumed that a boy aged 17 + 364 days would be protected from these scarring procedures, but that one day later, that same boy could “become” a girl if he so chose.  The SAFE Act, while admirable, simply shifted the time of using the scalpels and chemicals.

“Gender transition” treatment remains available under the Act to those reaching the age of majority.  But that “timing issue” likewise fails to account for metaphysical reality; it simply kicks the alchemy can down the street.  Yet, it still embraces a fable:  that men can become women.

Humans are sexed creatures from the cellular level outward (DNA) – that cannot be changed.  Every human possesses a respiratory system, a circulatory system, a nervous system, and a digestive system.  However, no human possesses a reproductive system.  Critically, humans only possess HALF of a reproductive system – men possess a male component, and women possess the corresponding female component.  Together, they become sexually one, as Jesus taught, forming one reproductive system.^[11]  

Humans are sexually hard-wired by design.  They cannot be interchanged and still function, let alone flourish, as humanity. This is why same-sex relationships are both inherently sterile and inherently futureless.  In the nature of the case, same-sex coupling requires the commodification of other humans (or their parts) to “fulfill familial desires:” Wombs, sperm, ova, surrogates, etc.  Procreation becomes manufacturing – all because the culture has bought the myth that men can become women and vice versa.  They cannot.

No amount of cosmetics, chemicals, or carving alters that reality.  Instead, “transition treatment” results in pharmacologically dependent and irreversibly sterile people with mangled and mutilated bodies.  The transition never actually occurs because it cannot occur.  We should stop pretending otherwise.  Claiming a man can become a woman is like trying to draw a “square circle” or seeing a “married bachelor.”  Alchemy should play no role in law and policy.

Law and policy should stand on immutable reality.  The Trans-agenda instead asks the law to function in metaphysics rather than ethics.  Law, however, is inherently an ethical enterprise, not a metaphysical one.  The law differentiates based on metaphysics; it should not attempt to “do metaphysics” via law.  That’s a bad idea and bad ideas have victims.  Just consider the scores of wrecked lives who now regret their faux “transition.”^[12]

We would do well to consider Lincoln’s point regarding slavery and then apply it to gender ideology:

“When Judge [Stephen] Douglas says that whoever, or whatever community, wants sales, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.”^[13]

Put more bluntly, 

“You may turn over everything in the Democratic [party]  policy from beginning to end, whether in the shape it takes on the statute book, in the shape it takes in the Dred Scott decision, in the shape it takes in conversation or the shape it takes in short maxim-like arguments – it everywhere carefully excludes the idea that there is anything wrong in it.

That is the real issue. . . . [T]he eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world.”^[14]

In the same way, just as men cannot be property, they cannot become women.  The political struggle with “gender transition affirmation” cannot be well-revolved until the culture jettisons this pernicious lie and instead embraces the truth that mankind – men and women alike – have been and remain – “fearfully and wonderfully made.”^[15]  The law must increasingly recognize, promote, and protect that reality.

^[1] Jer. 13:23a

^[2] Noe v. Parson, https://adfmedialegalfiles.blob.core.windows.net/files/ParsonOpinion.pdf

^[3] Op. 1

^[4] Op. 3

^[5] Op. 3 – the court cited The Endocrine Society which notes that 85% of gender dysphoria diagnosed children do not remain gender incongruent.  The court also cited the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel which notes that 98% do not remain gender incongruent.

^[6] Jeffery J. Ventrella, Decision 2024:  Delight and Dread, https://truthxchange.com/decision-2024-delight-and-dread/

^[7] For an exploration of these developments, see Justin Buckley Dyer, Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition(2006).

^[8] In fact, many blue states have already taken this position:  https://www.npr.org/2023/04/21/1171069066/states-protect-transgender-affirming-care-minnesota-colorado-maryland-illinois

^[9] Creational norms and their political and policy implications were identified and noted recently here:  Jeffery J. Ventrella, Parsing Political Parties in an Age of Paganism, https://truthxchange.com/parsing-political-parties-in-an-age-of-paganism/

^[10] Gen. 1:27; Jesus affirms this as a universal normative teaching:  Matt. 19:4

^[11] Matt. 19:5, 6

^[12] https://www.newsweek.com/i-was-trans-eight-years-usa-1863862 see also, https://waltheyer.com/ and https://sexchangeregret.com/

^[13] Justin Buckley Dyer, Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition (2006), citing Lincoln, 122.

^[14] Id. at 123

^[15] Ps. 139:14