Why We Can't 'Ban Transgenderism'

Michael Knowles needs to re-read the Constitution

Michael Knowles is fond of speaking about persecution of Christians.

I speak often about how trans ideology is a religion.When I say that trans is a religion, it is not a metaphor. It was my dearly held faith and fellowship for many years. If I had not seen the harms with my own eyes, if I had not received treatment that allowed me to no longer rely on my religion as a crutch, if I had not had personal objections to the fundamentalist direction my specific group was trending, which is the dominant strain politically, I would likely still be trans. There’s no ‘banning transgenderism’ without a lot of bad results. Just please divorce that thought from your mind.

As a religion, ‘transgenderism’ actually does have a right to continue to exist and to be practiced in an organized fashion, including in public life - just not on the public dime. There’s no such thing as ‘banning transgenderism.’ We can only hope to reasonably restrict it to the lane it is very much out of, while limiting the participation of licensed medical personnel distributing controlled substances without informed consent, especially to minors, under the pretense of a covered medical treatment.

You cannot take a person’s religion from them by force. You cannot take them out of their church if they don’t want to go. Attempting to cancel a religion, even one you think is a cult, especially when it’s a death cult obsessed with suicide and destruction of the body and family of origin, goes nowhere good. It is a bad idea. They are already primed to pull a Jonestown and their kids will go with them, because they’ve been convinced that suicide is what is appropriate if they cannot commune with their gender deity. We have to persuade and deprogram. We have to get consent and ostentatiously respect religious freedom to any extent that is reasonable and practicable, or we will not like the outcome. We must disconfirm their bleiefs about people outside the fold. “Come now, let us reason together.” Isaiah 1:18.

We can only hope to limit them to reasonable accommodation for these religious practices in schools, workplaces, and elsewhere, not ban them outright. Not without banning our own rights to religious liberty in the process. We must fight their attempts to make participation in transgenderism mandatory, but they have a right to practice this religious faith on their own time and dime, and to wear religious garb in schools and workplaces, if other people do. There’s no fair way to ban men from dressing up in gender hijab as pseudowomen in the men’s or disability/unisex third option locker room at the gym, but that’s not necessary to allow women to have our own lockers on the basis of sex, a secular, stable, and objectively real division among humans. There’s a middle ground between participation and persecution.

If they want to inject kids with steroids and invert their penises, we’ll need a more serious conversation about whether licensed doctors should be allowed to give out addictive, controlled drugs to minors for religious practice, and how children are allowed to be cut in the name of faith. We generally don’t allow religious practices that alter the female genitalia of minors for any reason. We have weirdly conflicting and incoherent rules about allowing parents to withhold medical care or perform other procedures on males for the purposes of religious ritual. I am extremely partial to the argument that children cannot consent to participate in adult religious ritual that is against their own best medical interests. The unintended consequences that conservatives like Knowles are not making any attempt to outwardly foresee are legion, and the caselaw in this area is something I’m only slightly familiar with as a legal nerd with a passion for secularism stretching back to middle school. There’s a lot of it!

As ludicrous as Michael Knowles may find the premises of the religion of transgenderism, I find his religion (Catholic) equally absurd, equally problematic, equally dangerous. I do not want to be forced to pretend I believe Catholicism is true, or obey its rules. I will defend forever Knowles’ right to wear a headscarf at work, or take reasonable breaks to pray, or cannibalize his church’s version of Elon Musk, or eat fish on a specific weekday; I support whatever it is that he does to feel a connection to his version of a gender identity, as long as this does not impose an undue or unreasonable hardship on the employer, violate the rights of others, or require any pretense of shared belief from me. We live in a secular society with freedom of religion. If the transgenderists and nonbinitarians want to say the pronoun prayers, that’s their right. If they want to require me to say the pronoun prayers, that’s where the line gets drawn.