“Gender Dysphoria” is a legitimate diagnosis of mental disorder. It can still be found in the pages of the DSM-5, the manual of mental disorders produced by the American Psychiatric Association. However, unlike with other ailments, the accepted treatment for gender dysphoria is attempting to make one person’s illness into a universal delusion. That is a problem.
If a white person is under the impression that she is African-American, she will be laughed at - no one takes her seriously. This actually happened in the case of Rachel Dolezal. She may have a legitimate mental disorder - in fact, nothing is more likely - but no one thinks that humoring her delusion is a good thing, either for her or for society. Rather, it’s clear to almost everyone that getting her to accept her white ethnicity is the healthiest thing for her, and to encourage her in her delusion would be to make racial categories meaningless.
So why is it so different with sex and gender? Why is someone’s sex, which is even more central to their God-given identity than race, up for grabs?
If we know anything about our culture, it is that we will go to great lengths to justify our sexual proclivities. Since the Sexual Revolution it has been almost taboo to say that the male/female binary is normative and healthy. Men who abandon their families to live as homosexuals are lauded for their courage, for expressing their individuality - instead of losing social status for abdicating their roles as husbands and fathers. Ironically, there is perhaps more social stigma now for a husband who leaves his wife for a female secretary than for a man who leaves his wife to be with another man.
Ultimately, even the way we were created - male and female - is under threat by this desire to justify and normalize every proclivity. Homosexuality? Perfectly normal - anyone who says otherwise is a bigot. Polyamory? Why Not? Believing that a man can become a woman? The same.
The cultural confusion wrought by the sexual revolution is impressive, but as with all revolutions, the real victims are individual people - young men who are confused about what their manhood means. Young women, who see men putting on a dress and a padded bra and pretending to be women. Is this okay in a restaurant? In a changing room? On a sports team?
We have to push the reset button and reestablish God’s categories for sex and gender - they are not “assigned at birth,” they are given by God at the moment of conception to each new human being, and they cannot be changed. Nothing - not makeup, not hormones, not surgery - can change that.
If 98% of men don’t want to date a “trans woman,” it is because they recognize this fact. That isn’t a problem - it’s the solution.
