Let’s face it, being transgender is the new black. Simply being homosexual is so last year. So much so, in fact, that according to The Guardian, those born after 1984—an ominous date to be sure—have been dubbed the ‘gender-fluid generation’. Maybe that explains why Tumblr lists over a 114 different ‘gender identities’.

What kind of changes, then, can we expect throughout Western civilisation now that X and Y chromosomes are no longer the determining factor in regards to one’s biological sex? Well, according to Family Policy Alliance there are at least ten ways that society has been affected.

1. Sporting competitions. I put this change up front because for many Australians this will be of the most concern. The examples are legion. But one of the most shocking is the biological man who recently won the 2018 Track Cycling World Championships in Los Angeles for the 35-39 years age bracket.
2. Mixed Bathrooms. There was a huge push for this under the former Obama administration. The tragic assault of an eight-year-old girl by a thirty-three-year-old man in the unisex restroom of a Chicago restaurant highlights the inherent danger with this proposal. Or then there was the more recent example of the five-year-old Georgia (U.S.A) girl, who was sexually assaulted in the school bathroom by a transgender boy.
3. Children’s Story Time. With increasing regularity, public libraries—as well as schools— are hosting drags to entertain impressionable children through ‘story hour’, as this example from NBC America shows.
4. Secret Information. According to Regent Law Family Restoration ‘, The New Jersey Department of Education recently directed schools to keep vital information on about a child’s gender identity secret from their parents.’ What’s more, if a parent disagreed with their child’s gender identity, school staff were urged to report it as an incident of child abuse.
5. Forced compliance to provide ‘intimate’ services. A transgender-identifying man is currently sueing an ‘esthetician’ in Vancouver because she refused to give him a ‘Brazilian’ bikini wax. This was because a ‘Manzilian’ is totally different, using a different kind of wax and technique.
6. The erasure of criminal records. According to the London Times, a transgender man is seeking to have his criminal record erased because the law he was convicted under only applied to men. The man is arguing that his criminal conviction “outs” him as a male, and is therefore unfair and discriminatory. The article incisively observes that “A right to removal, if established, could cover rape, another crime that can legally be committed only by a person with a penis.”
7. A man in Canada has acknowledged that he intentionally lied about his gender—claiming to be a transgender female—so that he could save over $1000 on his car insurance. Apparently, the process was incredibly easy, only requiring a note from a doctor, which was easily obtained. What’s more, according to The New York Post: “In June, officials in Alberta scrapped the doctor’s note requirement and began allowing adults to declare their gender as M, F or X, for gender non-binary people.”
8. According to NBC news, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has rolled back an Obama-era transgender mandate. In short, “Federal prisons now avoid placing transgender inmates with the opposite biological sex, because doing so has exposed women to degradation, humiliation, harassment, and assault.” For instance, the 2014 National Inmate Survey found that: “Transgender prisoners are at higher risk for sexual violence than any other group. The survey found approximately 4% of all state and federal prison inmates and 3.2% of those in local jails suffered sexual victimization by other inmates or staff during the previous year. The same survey found 35% of transgender prison inmates and 34% of trans inmates in local jails experienced incidents of sexual victimization during the previous year.”
9. Military. As a result of a thorough investigation, the Department of Defence and Department of Homeland Security found that admitting transgender-identifying individuals into the military was fundamentally unfair, cost prohibitive, and ultimately compromised the mission of the armed forces. As such, it is now acknowledged that President Trump has made the right decision in repealing Obama’s Transgender Mandate.
10. In Australia, the current debate concerning protections for religious freedom has highlighted the issue of transgenderism in single-sex schools. As the Moderator-General, Rev John Wilson, of the Presbyterian Church of Australia—who was later supported by prominent Muslim, Keysar Trad—wrote in The Australian: “Currently, an exemption exists for our Christian and church-connected schools to keep distinctions such as: insisting on distinct uniforms for boys and girls, providing separate male and female toilets for comfort and privacy, building separate accommodation quarters (for boarding schools) and having distinct boys and girls sports teams. The removal of the exemption clause in the act will make it possible for a claim of ‘direct ­discrimination’ against such schools…Why is it that the government wants to undermine the integrity of our much-loved and valued schools where currently more than 300,000 students across the nation are flourishing?”

In 1871 Charles Darwin argued in The Descent of Man that primaeval man judged values as good or bad solely as they affected the welfare of the tribe. Now, approximately a hundred and forty years later, we are living in a world where any idea of tribalism has been displaced by radical egalitarianism and individualism. Personal autonomy is the new virtue and unchallenged right.

As such, when Australia recently legislated for the redefinition of marriage to include persons of the same sex, the Federal Parliament effectively set aside several thousand years of Judeo-Christian values and permitted far-reaching freedoms with respect to gender identity and sexual expression.

Transgenderism flows directly out of this. In effect, it is the ‘freedom’ to reject one’s biological sex in a rebellious decision of autonomy that is fully supported, both legally and financially, by the state.

Where this will lead is anyone’s guess, but the early evidence suggests that it is already rending the fabric of society and leaving very little unaffected.

Mark Powell is the Associate Pastor of Cornerstone Presbyterian Church, Strathfield.

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