A “rebellion against transgenderism has broken out” on Mumsnet, a web portal written “by parents for parents,” reports Carolyn Moynihan of Mercatornet. The reason? ”Some users were banned for ‘misgendering’ and ‘transphobia’ in referring to certain persons.”

The backlash is spreading, around the globe. In August, for example, thousands marched in Colombia against attempts to place gender ideology in the textbooks of the nation’s schools.

The American College of Pediatricians has boldly issued a report titled Gender Ideology Harms Children. They pointed out that “when an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria.”

They condemned “conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful,” calling it “child abuse.” The report warned that public endorsement of “gender discordance” will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to “gender clinics” where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs. This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will “choose” a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults.”

The Reason for the Backlash: Reality

There’s a good reason for this. Most people recognize the truth: Men and women are different, period. Medical science shows that being male or female even affects our brains, and no sex-change operation will change our brains. Wearing the clothes of the opposite sex, taking hormones to develop the secondary sexual characteristics of the other sex, the surgical removal of a person’s genitals and artificial construction of others — none of those change the structure of reality.

Most people know there’s something wrong with the gender identity movement. It promotes a dualistic notion that “sex” is what a person is biologically but “gender” is what the person decides he is. It insists on legal recognition of a new “right to choose.”

They seek to compel the rest of us to recognize their brave new world or face the police power of the State. To give just one example, the Health and Human Services Agency released regulations under the Affordable Care Act to compel physicians to perform “gender reassignment surgery” even when they object for moral or religious reasons.

Our culture has redefined freedom as a right to choose anything we want, even when that means rejecting reality, like the reality of being male or female. Sexual freedom becomes the right to treat the body as an instrument, as something we use to get what we want. The spirit of the age fails to recognize the integral unity of the human person, body, soul and spirit, and seeks to turn the human body into a machine with parts that can be interchanged.

Pope Francis recently called gender theory  a form of “ideological colonialisation.”  While still pope, Benedict XVI exposed the “profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it.” Many people “dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, which serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”

Man and Female Essential

Christianity, and most of the rest of humanity, have believed that being male and female is “an essential aspect of what being human is all about,” in Benedict’s words. Now, when we can decide for ourselves what sex we will be, “Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will.” The pope continued:

The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.

That’s the reason for the backlash. We don’t want to be abstract human beings, we want to be real men and women. From that duality, recognized by every human civilization until ours, comes many of the best things in human life, especially family and children. The backlash against gender ideology and against bender bullies will continue to grow. Men and women are different and that difference is not a problem but a gift.