AP

LEVIATHAN OVERGROWN

Churches today are sorely distracted by the poison arrows coming at us from our state governments through laws that impede our ability to function independently and biblically. Our first response is often to attempt to turn legal somersaults. Then we settle down to argue over godly obedience, civil disobedience, or faithful disobedience (as in China).

Each of the hate speech laws, diversity, equity and inclusion laws, work health and safety laws, religious vilification and gender laws or possible climate emergency laws has its own history and progression, but Victoria’s gender-focussed transition laws are especially pernicious. Their reach extends across the entire globe, and penalties involve heavy fines or imprisonment. It is now illegal in Victoria to discuss, counsel, advise or pray with persons with gender confusion or an intention to begin transition, except to affirm them, even if they ask you for help.

The Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act derides Scripture and sets itself up in direct opposition to God. It denies the truth of God’s good creation, threatens his people, and defies the reality of the created human body, made in the image of God.  

It deliberately distorts language and meaning, forcing us to adopt new words and different understandings, transporting us by stealth into alien territory. The intention is to force us to think in these new and alien words and concepts, and eventually to act in accordance with them. This will leave us defenceless, since we have willingly made this shift from sound, rational, historical meanings and understandings.

Not surprisingly, the law perches on a platform of ideologies: Marxism, humanism, atheism, Gnosticism, feminism, queer theory, and gender critical theory. Biology and anatomy have become slaves of this ideology that re-interprets sex as something separate from gender, and asserts that gender is non-binary, uncertain, fluid, and assigned at birth rather than revealed at birth. 

Preschool aged children are being told this, and schools everywhere now are ensuring that sex education refutes the traditional belief that gender accords with chromosomes, asserting that we need to teach gender fluidity. We are told there are 58 (and counting) gender terms – agender, bigender, trigender, demigender, demifluid, demiflux, pangender etc., and we are to believe that a significant number of people are not really male or female but either, or neither, or both, or fluid. Many insist we all exist on a gender spectrum, somewhere between male and female.

What we are witnessing is a perverse and unrestrained ideological revolution conjured up and promoted by influential philosophers, feminists, critical theorists, certain academics and activists, and Marxists. The shift that’s jolting us is contrived, and aggressively pushed by people with an agenda that they are far from coy about acknowledging.

One who is upstream from this is the French intellectual/philosopher Michel Foucault, who sexually abused young boys while a teacher, advocated the normalisation of the gay sub-culture, sodomy and pederasty, and no age of consent. He died of AIDS in 1984. Another profound influence on gender ideology is John Money who was a psychologist and sexologist, with a PhD from Harvard, professor at Johns Hopkins University for many years and considered to be the founder of gender theory and the trans movement. He was the first to seriously posit that a child is not born with a fixed biological sex but is a blank slate at birth, his sex determined by his rearing. Money conducted a catastrophic experiment on twin boys to prove his theory about gender, which ended with both men taking their lives.

After a botched circumcision on one twin, Money set out to prove that the lad could be successfully raised as a girl. When the subject of this experiment discovered the truth about himself at age 14, he tried to revert to being a male but spent his entire life traumatised and depressed, ending it by gunshot when he was 38.  

In the 1970s and 80s Money was famous and feted, highly sought after for television appearances and newspaper interviews, always pleading for sexual liberation. It wasn’t mentioned that he was a sexual experimenter, believed in paedophilia and incest, and described himself as bisexual. Yet Money’s experiments have been used to justify thousands of sex realignment surgeries and gender affirming interventions.

In this twisted paradigm, to state that a newborn baby is a girl, for example, is to assert power over one who is powerless and to impose on her the rigidity of western, patriarchal sexual dominance. She must decide her gender, in her own time. The only model of care permitted everywhere for the confused, is gender-affirming care. If child expresses a wish to change genders, doctors and gender clinics immediately affirm that desire, and set up a plan of treatment involving puberty blockers, followed by cross-sex hormones, followed often by surgery. Puberty blockers do not merely arrest sexual development, they retard critical brain development and ensure sterility. We in the church are required to affirm such people, or to refer them to someone else.

Now, tens of thousands of young people are submitting to physical mutilation and thousands are trying to revert back to their original body. Most end up with ongoing pain, infertility, dysfunction and physical and emotional trauma.

Healthy breasts and penises are chopped off. This is truly horrifying. Every person – including the infinitesimally small number of people born with ambiguous genitalia – has reproductive organs that produce either large gametes (ova) or small gametes (sperm), which means that the reproductive organs of the human body really are binary.

But ideology has replaced the science of biology and anatomy, and truth and reality have been scuttled. The postmodernist paradigm of gender ideology rejects all concepts of a stable nature: predictability, certainty, historicity, visibility and truth. It regards bodies as uncertain, unknowable, and fluid. The result is confusion and chaos.

Recently, a Rainbow Libraries Toolkit was sent to all 290 libraries in Victoria. It advises staff not to assume gender pronouns for primary- aged children, saying it’s important to recognise that identity and sexuality can shift or evolve over time. It says to leave room for children to express a change in their identity and to ask them if they still go by the same pronouns. This is to “let the child know that you are safe, accepting and flexible… and so is the library”.

Redefinition and euphemism abound in this murky world. What was once gender disorder has been renamed gender dysphoria. Self-care is actually self-harm. Gender- affirming care is really biology-denying care. Being inclusive is code for exclusion. Being your authentic self is really being the self you created. Top surgery is really breast amputation. There are tens of thousands of girls wanting this surgery. Nullo or Eunuch means genital nullification – the removal of all external genitalia. It’s even possible to have a penis and a vagina if you wish – custom-made genitals. Bullying might simply be that you have a problem with gender lies and fabricated bodies – it could be just saying to your classmate, “But yesterday you were a BOY!” To be safe, to feel safe, is really to be left alone to your delusion.

We have been gradually worn down, smothered with this ideology and frightened by slurs of bigot, extreme right wing, transphobic, homophobic, hateful and more. We now accommodate gender language and thought reform, the ideology that pervades everything from this Change or Suppression Act to drag queen story hour and the ubiquitous DEI requirements.

Love for our neighbours cannot mean we support, indirectly, the radical, untested, and dangerous sex change treatments which will ensure young people are life-long medical and mental health patients. Churches have hastened to lawyers for advice in order to find a way to comply, or, they will ignore the law and carry on as before, hoping to stay below the radar.

The world no longer cares what serious Christians think, but this is a rare opportunity to be heard. It’s a chance to be light, to illuminate the darkness of the death culture we inhabit, and rescue those who would grasp at that light, to offer an alternative for the thousands of young people gripped by fears and phobias and confusion and depression. Our Christian duty compels us to protect them, and offer an alternative to the affirmation-only model that the government and medical establishment is insisting on.

Besides, the shocking truth is that we do, in fact, believe in change and suppression. These are at the heart of Christian repentance, conversion, and rebirth. They go hand in hand with restraint, denial, and obedience to God, and we must not deny this. While governments are insisting that change or suppression are not possible, and harmful and dangerous in the attempt, we might preach and teach the glories of change and repentance, suppression and self-denial.

We may have less time than we think.

–   Morag Zwartz