Sex

WE ARE ALL fALLEN:

New Testament scholar NT Wright weighs in on transgenderism and the Christian faith (Katelyn Webb, 5/22/25, Christianity Today)

The 76-year-old noted that current conversations often emphasize internal feelings over biological realities, explaining, “People have gotten used to thinking in terms of, ‘Never mind what my body is or how I was physically born, what matters is who I feel deeply within myself I really am.’”

Wright clarified that while he has served as a pastor in many complicated situations, he has not personally counseled someone wrestling with gender identity.

“So what I’m going to say is cautious and very much aware that there are enormous sensitivities around this issue,” he said.

The Surprised by Hope author also warned against the politicization of such matters. “There are people who are capitalizing on the discomfort of some people in order to make, as it were, political points — and some who would say that all gender is entirely fluid and you can make up … who you want to be and how you should behave.”

In addressing the biological aspect, Wright pointed to the distinction between chromosomes and identity: “Females quite clearly have XX chromosomes; males have XY chromosomes. So I’m assuming that our correspondent still simply has XX and hasn’t somehow, through hormone treatment, acquired a Y chromosome. I may be wrong, but I don’t think that’s an option.”

“I’m not a scientist,” he said. “I do not understand the biology, nor how the hormones work.”

Nonetheless, Wright returned to a theological perspective grounded in grace. “Again and again, I want to say, as with Jesus in the Gospels, God meets us where we are and loves us as we are. That’s absolutely vital.”

“Grace enfolds us in the love of God,” he said. “Then when we are enfolded and know that God is with us, then God may want to say to us, perhaps through a wise pastor, through our own voice of conscience or in prayer or whatever, now, there are certain ways forward that you now need to travel.”

The theologian emphasized that this process is not about condemnation, stressing, “It’s not to say, ‘Oh, you’re wicked. Oh, you’re a sinner. You shouldn’t be doing this, that, or the other.”

“It’s to say, ‘Well, where we are now is quite complicated, and let’s see how we can move forward step by step knowing that the God of grace and love is with you.’”

Wright cautioned that saying “God is with you” does not mean affirming all past choices uncritically. “This is not an ‘anything goes’ question,” he said. “God wants you to be a genuine, fully flourishing human being.”

When asked whether God can love and accept someone in this condition, Wright responded, “I want to say absolutely yes. That’s basic to the Gospel and all that it’s about.”

FREAKY FARM WIVES:

Is the Tradwife just a kink? Don’t underestimate the happy housewife’s power (Poppy Sowerby, December 30, 2024, UnHerd)

The “traditional-wife” lifestyle has recently become a cultural juggernaut. Born of the reactionary idea that women must stay at home to care for children and the household, it teenaged into an aspirational trend which involved everything the dream Fifties stay-at-home mum did plus a soupçon of farmgirl hardiness (the most viral tradwives are those who run homesteads, muddy, ruddy and graceful). In 2024, she came of age, with Mormon model Nara Smith becoming one of TikTok’s top influencers by baking in exquisite ballgowns, baby perennially on the hip. Hannah Neeleman (or “Ballerina Farm” on Instagram), then broke the internet in July. An article in The Sunday Times profiling this “queen of the tradwives” crystallised the fantasy. It kept X busy for at least two weeks, as commentators argued over whether the newspaper had unfairly implied that Neeleman was oppressed. For part of the fascination these women hold is the conviction that beneath their mild and milky exterior, torment and frustration must surely lurk. As a result, the article focused heavily on Neeleman’s pre-trad career as a ballerina at Juilliard; look what you could have been, the piece seemed to say — and you packed it all in… for this? Feminists have, after all, been trained by Betty Draper, Mrs Robinson and the Stepford wives to spy the Prozac-popping crackpot beneath the painted-on smile; exposing the tradwife’s purgatorial “real life” has become a favourite pastime of internet curtain-twitchers — not out of concern, but prurience.

But speculation that these influencers are trapped by male fantasies is all part of the grift: it is no coincidence that Neeleman wore the infamous milkmaid dress on the cover of Evie last month, with the headline “The New American Dream”. Flirting with the aesthetics of Simone de Beauvoir’s archetypal housewife — a woman condemned to “immanence”, a passive and internal state of drudgery — is a deliberate provocation by influencers like Neeleman: dressing like a milkmaid transfigures the common-or-garden microcelebrity into both a sex symbol and a challenge to modern feminism. This is the secret to their success.

Inevitably, then, pulling off the “homesteader” vibe has become the focus of a multimillion-dollar industry, with blogs and books springing up left, right and centre — well, mostly on the Right. But the guides betray an irony of this trend: the real tradwives aren’t just about frilly dresses — there is a serious and sober set of moral values at the core of trad ideology, one shot through with puritanical and paranoid beliefs about the state, Big Pharma, the food industry and so on interfering with the closed, controlled unit of the family. This, after all, is why Nara Smith spends four hours making her kids cinnamon-toast-crunch cereal from scratch. Being this evangelical takes dedication. So the delusion that young mums can dip into this aesthetic without engaging with the conservatism at its foundations is worth a lot of money.

There’s a reason that the tradwife’s appeal has endured — it has, let’s remember, been a trend for a decade or more. It’s partly because the media adores the whiff of oppression that clings to her, hence the Ballerina Farm hysteria. She is also an ideal foil for feminism — beautiful, natural and meek, she is everything conservative men love, and everything radfems hate: perfectly poised for virality. And that’s because her role as a lifestyle guru means that her actual values — though generally Mormon, conservative and modest — are mysterious and therefore intriguing. Her fans are not looking for direct precepts; being told that abortion is wrong, or that premarital sex makes you worthless, would not be appealing. Instead, they want to cosplay a nebulously traditional woman by baking rye bread in a long dress.

STOP EXPLOITING THE DISORDERED:

German Study: Vast Majority of People Will Grow Out of Transgenderism Within 5 Years (Ben Johnson, 6/16/24, Daily Signal)

A massive, yearslong study shows the overwhelming majority of young people who identify as transgender will grow out of the diagnosis within five years.

A similar supermajority of trans-identifying people suffered from at least one other psychological condition, found researchers, who tracked all children and young adults diagnosed with gender dysphoria over a nine-year period.

It’s ideology, not medicine.

REORDER DOES NOT HEAL DISORDER:

Adults who undergo trans surgeries at 12 times higher risk of attempting suicide – report (Samantha Kamman, 25 May 2024, Christianity Today)

Trans-identifying adults who undergo body-mutilating surgeries as part of an effort to look like the opposite sex have an elevated suicide attempt risk, according to a recent study.

MUTILATING DEPRESSIVES:

Development of Gender Non-Contentedness During Adolescence and Early Adulthood (Pien Rawee, Judith G. M. Rosmalen, Luuk Kalverdijk & Sarah M. Burke, 2/27/24, Archives of Sexual Behavior)

Adolescence is an important period for the development of gender identity. We studied the development of gender non-contentedness, i.e., unhappiness with being the gender aligned with one’s sex, from early adolescence to young adulthood, and its association with self-concept, behavioral and emotional problems, and adult sexual orientation. Participants were 2772 adolescents (53% male) from the Tracking Adolescents’ Individual Lives Survey population and clinical cohort. Data from six waves were included (ages 11–26). Gender non-contentedness was assessed with the item “I wish to be of the opposite sex” from the Youth and Adult Self-Report at all six waves. Behavioral and emotional problems were measured by total scores of these scales at all six waves. Self-concept was assessed at age 11 using the Global Self-Worth and Physical Appearance subscales of the Self-Perception Profile for Children. Sexual orientation was assessed at age 22 by self-report. In early adolescence, 11% of participants reported gender non-contentedness. The prevalence decreased with age and was 4% at the last follow-up (around age 26). Three developmental trajectories of gender non-contentedness were identified: no gender non-contentedness (78%), decreasing gender non-contentedness (19%), and increasing gender non-contentedness (2%). Individuals with an increasing gender non-contentedness more often were female and both an increasing and decreasing trajectory were associated with a lower global self-worth, more behavioral and emotional problems, and a non-heterosexual sexual orientation. Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development.

NOT NEARLY SKEPTICAL ENOUGH:

The sadness of Sceptical Man (Victoria Smith, 28 March, 2024, The Critic)

As a topic, sex and gender causes particular problems for the man who views himself as a lofty, rational observer of other people’s madnesses. This is because in order to pass as occupying “the middle ground”, you still have to give a free pass to lots of insane things, as opposed to lots and lots of them. Instead of going full-on Long Chu — which would of course be too far! — you have to ignore plenty of stuff which, deep down, you know to be total bollocks. This probably makes you quite cross, only not with yourself. It’s the people who keep pointing it out who are the problem.

If it wasn’t for all those bigots who keep reminding you that human can’t change sex, no one’s born in the wrong body, and a twelve-year-old autistic girl who’s terrified of puberty is in no way comparable to a middle-aged man who gets off on wearing his wife’s tights, you’d be fine. Sure, these people are saying things that you, too, would have said six or seven years ago, but they’re the ones who have gone insane. It’s definitely not you who’s been radicalised. It’s the people who lack the nuance, curiosity and intellectual ingenuity to have started saying a few mad things and ignoring a few medical scandals on the basis that most people in their social circle are saying and ignoring them, too.

For those whose brand values — rationality! curiosity! scepticism! — are quite incompatible with any serious engagement with what has been happening, it has been necessary to portray it as a “culture war” between two equally extremist sides. There are the people who think sex isn’t binary, male people should be welcome in female-only spaces and sports, it’s fine to experiment on the bodies of children, JK Rowling is a terrorist, and then there are the people who think that sex is immutable, women are definable as a class of human beings and that biological sex is socially and politically salient. Both sides have to be treated as though they are equally irrational, in order to make it possible for self-styled voices of reason to shake their heads and performatively muse on what drives perfectly ordinary people to adopt such ludicrously polarised positions. Can’t they find some middle ground? Like, experiment on half the number of kids? Let uterus havers and bleeders call themselves adult human females every other Tuesday?

An alternative reading of the current situation —- one which acknowledges those who can still be bothered to speak the truth as whistleblowers, rather participants in an ever-increasing exchange of crazy ideas and violent threats — is not permissible.

EXPLOITING THE DISORDERED:

Why did it take so long to ban puberty blockers? (Patrick West, 22nd March 2024, spiked)

For too long, these drugs were handed out to mentally troubled youths, to confused young gay people caught up in vortices of social contagion and to children pressured into potentially life-ruining decisions by ideologically driven adults.

For this ban, we must thank Lucy Bannerman and Janice Turner of The Times, author Helen Joyce and the many other gender-critical feminists who campaigned tenaciously against the use of puberty blockers. But a troubling question remains: how on Earth was the practice allowed to continue for so long?

An intriguing answer comes from Helen Joyce herself. As she explains in a recent article for the Critic, the trick the radical trans movement played was to persuade people that according blanket rights to trans people was simply the next step in a narrative of liberation. The thinking among many has been that, ever since the Enlightenment, we have been on an emancipatory trajectory in the West. It began with religious toleration, then came the campaign for racial equality, moving on to women’s liberation and then, by the 1960s, gay liberation. With these goals achieved, the next step was surely liberation for the trans community. As Joyce explains: ‘During the past decade, the trans lobby has been stunningly successful in selling false analogies… [such as] that separate toilets for men and women are like racial segregation and that insisting people can change sex is “gay rights 2.0”.’ […]

The recent craze for mutilating children will most likely one day be put in that same category of warped, weird thinking. As will Butler’s belief, that both gender and biological sex are socially constructed.

The ‘Detransition’ Time Bomb (WILFRED REILLY, March 14, 2024, National Review)

More striking than the total numbers involved, to me, was their mappable rate of increase. The summed year-over-year increase rate, during only my five-year window of analysis, was 119.6 percent for the use of puberty blockers and 122.1 percent for hormone use. Conservatively applying the rate for the last year that I have on record to the next two, we would expect prescriptions for puberty-blocking drugs to keep rising to above 2,000 in 2023, and for hormone prescriptions to over 7,000 in 2023, with hundreds more mastectomies for teen girls across the same two years. Our 2017–23 totals would then indicate tens of thousands of minors were given some combination of puberty blockers, human sex hormones, and top surgeries.