They showed their hand in California. They want to use vulnerable senior citizens as pawns. They want to make our parents and grandparents their next victims.

Who do I mean? The Gender Bender Bullies. They reject the truth of sexual difference and demand that everyone else agree — or else.

The “Bill of Rights”

Look at California Senate Bill #219. It is called the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Long-Term Care Facility Resident’s Bill of Rights.” It tells senior citizens’ facilities that they can’t recognize the difference between men and women. Here are some actions the bill outlaws:

• Putting residents in rooms according to their sex and not their “gender identity”
• Moving people to different rooms because their roommates complain about their “gender identity or gender expression”
• Refusing to use “a resident’s preferred name or pronoun”
• Keeping them from using “a restroom available to other persons of the same gender identity”
• Not letting them have sex

The Pacific Justice Institute wrote a well-reasoned letter explaining the dangers. They point out that the law binds religious institutions. Catholics believe sex should only be enjoyed within marriage. Should a Catholic nursing home have to let the residents have sex with someone they’re not married to? That would make the home more like “a bordello” than a Catholic nursing home.

The Gender Bender Revolution

Supporters of what I call the gender bender revolution claim people have a right to choose their gender. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI called this a “profound falsehood.”

He explained that people “have a nature, given by their bodily identity, which serves as a defining element of the human being.” They are male or female. Because God created us this way, being male and female is part of “the essence of the human creature.”

Some people, Benedict says, “deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.” They reject God’s creation. They say that society made up the idea of gender. It’s not real. Therefore everyone can choose for himself.

The Gender Bender Bullies don’t stop there. They demand that state and federal law recognize a newly manufactured right to choose one’s own gender. The California bill wants the State to make even Christian nursing homes recognize this right. Even more disturbing, they want to force the rest of us to recognize their brave new world or face the Police Power of the State.

Liberty Into License

Look at what’s happening. Our culture rejects what Benedict called “the essence of the human creature.” It treats the body as a machine with parts that can be interchanged just as people choose. You don’t have to be male or female if you don’t want to be. This has many bad effects.

One is the increase of sex change surgery. Though those who suffer from Gender Identity Disorder (GID) deserve empathy, the fact remains that each one is male or female. No surgery can change change anyone’s sex. In effect, they mutilate the body and destroy the person’s bodily integrity.

In addition, to keep looking like the opposite sex, the people must take massive doses of synthetic hormones. People reject putting this type of chemicals into the environment. Benedict commented on this irony in the same speech:

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.

We reject “Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human,” he says.

A second bad effect is what this does to the family. Benedict noted this too. “If there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation,” he says, “then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him.”

Rushing Into Darkness

The Gender Bender Bullies in California won’t even leave the elderly alone. Even they have to be dragged into the “gender revolution.” And so do the people who take care of them.

We live in an age rushing into darkness. A world with no givens takes away the gift of our sexual difference as male or female. That doesn’t free us to be whoever we want to be. It frees us to be someone we’re not. As Benedict saw, bad things happen.