Julie is 14. She sees gender ideology as a kind of social contagion:
“Controversial gender ideology has taken over my school. There’s been a rapidly increasing number of teenagers ‘coming out’ as ‘transgender’; entire friend groups suddenly emerging as ‘Non-Binary’ or ‘Gender-Queer’….. Teachers are basically encouraging it. Lessons feel more like political activism than education.”
Julie’s observation appeared in a report in the Telegraph on Saturday, entitled “Why teenage girls are on the front line of the trans war”. The author of the report, Harry de Quetteville, wrote:
“Across the country…something profound is occurring in schools under the banner of tolerance and inclusivity. Children are being encouraged to challenge their fundamental biology, to question their sex and the deepest assumptions they have made about their identities. It can be the beginning of a journey leading ultimately to irreversible sex-change surgery. And it is adolescent girls who are most affected.
Sex, society and religion have been seen as a complex mix. And once again the quote attributed (inaccurately) to GK Chesterton was right: “The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.”
Remove good religion and the vacuum sucks in all manner of very dark credal material.
If there is any antidote to be found, it might be for authentic, well-tried Catholicism to re-present Christianity to a destabilised and disturbed culture. But to do that we need to confront the reasons why faith was cancelled in the first instance.
It was in 1907, when Sigmund Freud, misattributing cause and effect as he so often did, wrote in his paper, Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices, that a terrible untruth had found its way into the European psyche.
We don’t need to psychoanalyse Freud here, but there is scope for noticing that he dealt with his own unresolved religious conflict by demonising all religion, something which has had the most debilitating effect on the resources Europe might otherwise have used to draw on to contain the worst of secularism.
In this profoundly influential paper he dismissed all religion as a universal neurosis. This was as philosophically clumsy as it was psychologically bogus. But, European society, for its own reasons, liked this very much and adopted it without critique.
Why does this matter today? Because the shadow that Freud cast over the authenticity of religious experience has been a long and dark one. Only in the last thirty years (under the dubious, but for these purposes helpful, auspices of CG Jung) have psychologists dared to entertain a different hypothesis; namely, that authentic religion may be good for you. As they asked the questions, questions that had been taboo until the end of the past century, the answers surprised everyone.
A recent academic study claimed:
“A large and growing number of studies have shown a direct relationship between religious involvement and spirituality and positive health outcomes, including mortality, physical illnesses, mental illness, HRQOL, and coping with illness (including terminal illness). Studies also suggest that addressing the spiritual needs of patients may facilitate recovery from illness.”
(Religious Involvement, Spirituality, and Medicine: Implications for Clinical Practice 2019)
Gender dysphoria, the belief that one has been born into the wrong sexual body, is a terrible mental illness. But it has become a factor in the culture wars, and particularly impacted our teenage daughters.
It has never been easy to grasp why certain psycho-social disturbances have invaded the collective minds of our adolescent daughters.
We have watched as both anorexia and self-harming, almost like psychological destructive waves or fashions, have swept through generations. Both have recently receded and gender dysphoria has taken their place.
A decade or so ago, the statistical studies told us that about 0.01 per cent of the population suffered from this dreadful conflict of misperception. Suddenly, it has exploded. In England, in 2009, 40 girls were receiving treatment. By 2017, the number had exploded to 1,806.
Why?
David Bell, the eminent psychiatrist who wrote the whistleblowing report exposing the Tavistock clinic, writes:
“Among girls in particular, contemporary sex education policies can be the background to “outbreaks” of gender questioning ripping through social groups.
Even in Freud’s day it was known that sometimes one girl had a fit, the next day there were 20 girls with fits. We don’t know why. We do know it’s much more common in girls. Social contagion is very important. People treating them haven’t recognised that. You see epidemics of gender dysphoria.”
At the hands of an intensifying progressive education culture from early in childhood, children are encouraged to think about gender as something quite distinct from biology. PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) lessons introduces children as young as eight to the terms “cisgender, transgender, sexual orientation, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, gender expression, biological sex, intersex, non-binary, gender fluid, pronouns, transition, gender dysphoria, questioning and queer.”
What is the role of the Church at this point? Does our spirituality and the faith schools which offer it have any virtuous alternative?
We need to recognise the fact that we are in a life or death struggle for the soul of our culture, and that we offer a number of antidotes to the social contagion.
Commentators constantly note that there is no agreed philosophy of the person or of sexual ethics at the heart of our society. We are faced with an existential crisis set in an increasingly hyper-sexualized context where there are no handholds for the terrified teenager. Faced by the explosion in pornography for example, girls face increasing demands for sex they don’t want from boys who feel they are required to imitate what they have seen, and are rightly threatened and repulsed by it.
There is an escalating sense of adolescents suffering from a perception of having little or no control over cultural expectations.
In such circumstances there is one increasingly accessible way of regaining control, and that is to abandon or renounce one’s sexual identity. Gender dysphoria, among girls, becomes a way of claiming an immunity against the trauma of having to own an emerging, unwelcome and anarchic sexuality inflicted by adolescence.
Christianity, so far from being a neurosis as Freud sold it, offers a variety of antidotes to secular hyper-sexualised anarchy.
A sense, as St John Henry Newman has it, that we were created for a purpose is a profound existential asset. The pressure to discover or invent who we are is lessened, because our identity was gifted to us in an act of personal creation. Pornography is repudiated; the aspiration for chastity becomes a potential protection. The frictionless threat of gender fluidity is replaced with the traction of emerging personal vocation.
It should be no surprise to us and Catholic educators that the abandonment of Christian sexual ethics has led to madness and misery. But without some kind of push back by the Church there cannot be the kind of public debate through which a wounded hedonistic secular society can be given the opportunity to discover that what was mistaken for constraint was instead protection; what was mistaken for neurosis was sanity.
We need to turn the tables on the secularised assumptions of our contemporaries and compare the empirically available evidence that faith if good for you, that children raised in disciplined faith environments do better than their peers carrying the burdens of unwanted pregnancies, navigating the world of STDs, impossible expectations and the anarchy of unlimited so-called gender-fluidity.
Through Catholic education in particular, we are entitled to point out that our children can be given and deserve an informed choice choice between sin and sanity.
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