The Expanding Gender Agenda

Students at progressive universities are in the vanguard of a sexual identity movement that is in denial about reality.

Last month The New York Times published an article on the latest expansion of sexual identity among students at progressive universities in the United States. LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) no longer covers it, according to a handful of students who seem to have nothing better to do than reinvent themselves. “Generation LGBTQIA” want recognition for queer, intersex and asexual proclivities as well. According to the Times, this list by no means is final but continually being added to as students “move beyond the binary of male/female”, heterosexual/homosexual and reject the normal.

Most people are unaware of the inroads made by gender theory -- the ideology that has produced “Generation LBGTQIA” -- or of the dangers it presents. Part of the confusion lies in the fact that there are several different theories of gender each of which is based on a false understanding of the human person. The various theories -- the gender perspective, gender identity and expression, and gender queer -- are not logically consistent and are continually changing, making it difficult for those who try to critique them.

The term “gender” has become ubiquitous. The forms we routinely fill out, which previously asked for our sex, now asked for our gender. Most people assumed that gender was simply a polite synonym for sex – preferable since sex has a secondary meaning, namely as a shortened form for sexual intercourse. But those pushing the use of “gender” did not do so out of an over-scrupulous sense of propriety, for them gender and sex are not synonyms.

In the past, sex referred to the totality of what it meant to be a man or a woman, and gender was a grammatical term – some words had gender – masculine, feminine, or neuter. However, in the 1950s, John Money, who was on the staff at Johns Hopkins University, promoted the idea that sexual identity could be broken down into its constituent parts: DNA, hormones, internal and external sexual organs -- and gender, the sex that the person identified with. He argued that a person could be one sex physically, but identify with the other. Money promoted so-called sex change operations, in which men who believed they had the brain of a woman were surgically altered to resemble women. When Dr. Paul McHugh took over at Johns Hopkins, he commissioned a study into the outcome of these supposed sex changes and, finding that they did not address the underlying psychopathology of the clients, discontinued the practice. Unfortunately, other hospitals continued to perform this mutilating surgery.

Money also pushed the idea that if a baby boy were born with deformed genitals, he could be castrated and raised as a girl and he would never know the difference. In other words, one’s sense that one was a man or a woman was socially constructed by the way people treated you. However, studies done on these boys raised as girls found that many of them rejected the reassignment and demanded the right to live as males, even without intact genitals. In 2006 a book by John Colapinto, As nature Made Him, exposed Money as a fraud who covered up the failure of his most famous case and abused the boys brought to him for help.

The rest of this article describes some of the main developments in gender theory.

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