Girl Boy Scouts … and 71 Other “Gender” Options

Paul Kengor

The Boy Scouts of America has announced a major policy reversal, a rather dramatic shift in the foundational policy of the organization. It is now accepting girls as Boy Scouts. Yes, girl boy scouts. That is to say, the Boy Scouts of America is accepting “transgender boys”—girls who are biologically female but are declaring themselves “boys,” or, at least, are currently declaring themselves boys, for now, at the moment, for as long as they feel like wanting to be called boys.

These “transgender boys” will be permitted to proclaim their gender identity of preference on their application and thereby gain entry to Boy Scouts’ programs. Michael Surbaugh, the chief executive of the Scouts, explains that the policy change has been dictated by the “complex topic” of transgender identity.

Boy, I’ll say.

This latest Boy Scouts’ capitulation to our culture’s human-nature redefiners comes on the heels of other Boy Scouts’ white-flags-of-surrender, such as the organization accepting openly “gay boys” as members in 2013 and dropping its ban on openly homosexual scout leaders in 2015. The Boy Scouts should have learned then that when you cave to the secular left, even (seemingly) just once, the left keeps coming back. Let leftists whack you with a club once and they’ll keep beating you until you completely submit to their never-ending list of demands of compliance. The intolerant left is hellbent on remaking the Boy Scouts in its own image. Just as progressives have remade sexuality, marriage, family, and gender in their own image.

And so, now, girls—or, that is, girls who currently call themselves boys—can be Boy Scouts.

What to make of this? Let’s not pussyfoot around. Let’s call this what it is: cowardice and madness.

Today’s Boy Scouts organization has cravenly bowed to the mad dictatorship of relativism. The organization is suffering an obvious lack of virtue and common sense, not to mention faith, reason, and science. As to the latter, here’s a quick biology lesson:

A girl has 74 trillion X chromosomes in her body. Think about that. Try to wrap your mind around a number like that. Start cutting and stacking 74 trillion pieces of paper and see how far you get.

Thus, a seven-year-old girl who calls herself a boy does so despite the reality that she has 74 trillion X chromosomes vs. ZERO Y chromosomes. To repeat: ZERO Y chromosomes. Biological reality could not be more stacked against whatever she might be feeling. 74 trillion vs. zero are utterly enormous odds. You’ve heard the saying that every fiber in your body tells you something? Imagine every chromosome in your body telling you something. What they tell you is your gender. You don’t tell your body your gender; your body tells you your gender.

Yes, I understand that perverse political correctness and radical-leftist ideology has warped and disordered our culture, but secular liberalism cannot alter the absolute laws of nature. Call it that pesky Natural Law thing.

Do our schools no longer teach biology or math?

I’m sorry, but if a seven-year-old girl has 74 trillion X chromosomes, and not one Y chromosome, then she’s a girl. And someone in the Boy Scouts organization needs to man-up and tell her the truth. What happened to the Boy Scouts pledge of courage and honesty?

And despite my necessary bluntness, I say all of this with sympathy toward young people struggling with various such issues. (How about a little sympathy for the seven-year-old boys in the scout troop who will be very confused by this “transgender boy?”) I know three young people who have suddenly started questioning their gender, including one college-age young man close to our family. But biological reality is biological reality. Don’t try to fool with Mother Nature. You’re playing with fire, liberals.

And as for Catholics being duped into this, you’re playing with God, your Church, and your pope.

Pope Francis is a longtime adversary of gender theory, which he has candidly called “demonic” and compared to “the educational policies of Hitler.” Francis protests that the transgender movement seeks to erase the image of God in man. Indeed it does. From the very opening of Scripture, in Genesis, it is proclaimed that God “made them male and female,” which is reaffirmed and repeated by Jesus Christ himself in the New Testament (see both Mark 10:6 and Matthew 19:4). (Christ says this in affirming male-female marriage, incidentally.) God “created man in His own image,” says Genesis 1:27.

Francis thus understands the profundity of what progressive fundamental transformers are doing in messing with God’s image of man.

“We are living a moment of annihilation of man as image of God,” Francis told Polish bishops last summer in Krakow. And what is worse: “Today, in schools they are teaching this to children—to children!—that everyone can choose their gender.”

They sure are. It is another maniacal manifestation of the “ideological colonization” of the family, marriage, sexuality, and gender that Francis has denounced, an “ideological colonizing” (he notes) backed by “very influential countries.” “This is terrible,” he said.

As Francis shared these thoughts last spring, he related that he had recently discussed this gender claptrap with Pope Benedict: “Speaking with Pope Benedict, who is well, and has a clear mind, he was telling me: ‘Holiness, this is the epoch of sin against God the Creator.’ He’s intelligent! God created man and woman, God created the world this way, this way, this way, and we are doing the opposite.” Francis urged these bishops to reflect: “We must think about what Pope Benedict said—‘It’s the epoch of sin against God the Creator.’”

Pope Francis has addressed this many, many times. I could give numerous examples from off-the-cuff remarks he made in interviews to statements at formal Church gatherings to homilies to official Vatican letters. As to the latter, he addressed this several times in his apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, particularly section 285, where he wrote the following (twice citing himself in previous statements, including his encyclical letter, Laudato Si):

The young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created, for “thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation…. An appreciation of our body as male or female is also necessary for our own self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment.” (Encyclical letter, Laudato Si, May 24, 2015) …. Sex education should help young people to accept their own bodies and to avoid the pretension “to cancel out sexual difference because one no longer knows how to deal with it.” (Catechesis, April15, 2015)

Indeed, because one no longer knows how to deal with it. A young person might be having questions or struggles about his feelings as a male or female, but trying to trick 74 trillion chromosomes, or even a few sexual parts, surely is going to be a tall task. Such is an enormous subjective battle against objective reality.

And that brings me in closing to an especially apt phrase of Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI: if ever there was another clear-cut case of what Benedict unforgettably dubbed the dictatorship of relativism, this is it. Like their reinventions of marriage and sexuality, the leftist human-nature redefiners don’t seem to give much thought or a rip about the latest can of worms they’re opening. Like the inherent problem of the redefinition of marriage, once you try to kick down absolute standards for gender, you open the floodgates to all sorts of novel reconfigurations that even the most “open-minded” liberals will be uncomfortable endorsing.

In the case of gender, consider the ideological crazy-house that is New York City, where city employees now have the option of choosing from a minimum of 31 different gender identities. Not two gender choices, or even three, four, five, six, or 12, or 20, but 31.

In categorizing oneself, New York City employees are free to fluidly fluctuate among various male-female combinations and derivations. It’s a fascinating thing. You cannot merely change your gender identity once or twice or a handful of times, but you can keep changing it over and over, daily if you’d like, or even hourly—and the government will legally support you in your whims and fancies. The selections include not just “transgender”—which is merely the breach in the dam—but “pangender” and a myriad of other possibilities ranging from “androgynous” and “agender third sex” to “drag queen,” “drag king,” “femme queen,” “Butch,” “MTF,” “FTM, “Hijra,” and (among many others) the particularly convenient “gender fluid,” which is more elastic than the more limiting (presumably) “gender bender” option. There is also the PC-esque choice, “Person of Transgender Experience.”

Also listed by these high-minded New Yorkers is the “two-spirit” gender option, which was spearheaded by the pioneering “gay” communist, Harry Hay.

In responding to this lunacy, a city official confirmed to The Daily Caller that the panoply of gender identities are all protected by the city’s anti-discrimination laws, and added that the current list posted online is “not exhaustive.”

Indeed, why would it be exhaustive? How could it be? Like progressivism, transgenderism is in a state of constant evolution. There will be new forms tomorrow, rest assured. New York’s merry liberals are generously allowing lots of room for yet new gender forms that a person is apparently free to create for himself, herself, or (better) oneself.

As for New York-based businesses that do not accommodate the “gender” choice, they risk six-figure fines under rules established by the city’s Commission on Human Rights. No surprise there. In fact, if you dare not refer to a transgender person by his or her preferred pronoun, regardless of their vast XX or XY chromosomal reality, there are a bunch of angry New York progressives who would fine you and shut you down—in the name of “tolerance” and “diversity,” of course.

For the record, not among the 31 options in New York is “dragon lady,” which is the gender choice of 55-year-old Richard Hernandez, a transgender banker who has had his ears and nose removed in order to become a new gender species altogether. Hernandez now identifies as “Eva Tiamat Baphomet Medusa,” a name taken from a video-game character, and wishes to be referred to as an “it.”

But even then, all of this is limiting, is it not, liberals?

Consider that Facebook lists more options than New York City does, and even those generous options remain (inevitably) in a constant state of flux. Facebook has at various times in the last two years listed 51gender options, 53, 56, 58, and 71. The list, too, is fluid. Of course, it is. How couldn’t it be?

What a farce. Who died and made Facebook God?

I ask liberals in all seriousness, and I want an answer: which gender options among the lists of 51, 53, 56, 58, or 71 are invalid? Which are illegitimate? Tell us, dear pioneering progressive—which, if any, of these would you rule out? How do you arbitrate acceptable choices? Please, help us, just as you’ve helped so many of these multi-gendered persons.

Will you say? Can you say? Who’s to say, eh?

The answer, of course, is that the logical (or illogical) assumptions of secular liberalism/progressivism inevitably lead to an endless possibility of identities. And dare I say that liberals will not be comfortable with some of those identities. But too bad, liberals—reject the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God and this is what you get.

And that is to say: this is another insane consequence of your dictatorship of relativism, liberals. And so is the idea of girl boy scouts.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/girl-boy-scouts-71-gender-options