Most of us know the story of the giant wooden horse used by Greek soldiers to finally defeat the city of Troy. After a multi-year, unsuccessful effort, the Greeks pretended to retreat, leaving behind the giant horse as a parting gift. The Trojans pulled it into their city as a spoil of war. Hidden inside were an elite group of soldiers. Later, the Greeks slipped out of the horse and destroyed Troy from the inside.

I submit that the Gender Identity Movement is a Trojan horse, a fatal assault on the moral foundations of freedom, sold to us as fairness and empathy.

The Gender Agenda

Todd Starnes reported last week that the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education had compelled the public schools in Fairfax County, Virginia to “revise their non-discrimination policies to include gender identity” or risk the loss of federal funds. The School Board, over the clear objections of parents, voted to bend the knee to Caesar. This will result in so-called “gender neutral” bathrooms.

Smith College in Massachusetts has been all female since its founding in 1871. The Board of Trustees recently voted to accept men who self-identify as women. In announcing the policy change, the president of the College said that “concepts of female identity have evolved.”

These are only two examples of the growing movement to reject sexual differentiation as a given — and a gift. That rejection is being foisted on us by the Gender Identity Movement.

Precise Language

We need precise language, lest we play into the hands of the modern Greek soldiers with their new Trojan horse who are preparing their battle plan.

C.S. Lewis, in his book Studies in Words, coined the word verbicide — the murder of a word. That is what has happened with the word gender. It has been hijacked by those intent on eradicating the difference between men and women in pursuit of a revolutionary new social order.

Modern medical science and psychology already make a distinction between gender and sex. The Gender Identity Movement goes further, by insisting that the state recognize a civil right to choose one’s gender, and the right to change one’s mind, at any time. They want to use the police power of the State to compel the rest of society to recognize their brave new world.

In a 2012 address Pope Emeritus Benedict underscored “the profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it.”

“According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature,” he said. “This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God.” Unfortunately, there are those who “deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.” They dispute “the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, which serves as a defining element of the human being.”

In sum, they reject the words of creation recorded in the first chapter of Genesis, that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The rebellious sin of Eden (Gen 3:5) is affirmed as liberation: we can make our own reality and determine our own moral code.

Benedict 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.”

What are the consequences? First, the truth that man and woman are “complementary versions of what it means to be human” is obscured. And “if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation.” Then, too, “the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him.”

It Gets Worse

In the Gender Identity Movement’s Brave New World, children must now be empowered to choose their gender. If they are too young to do so, parents will do it for them. The Washington Post featured an article commending parents for doing just that. A March 23, 2011 Reuters news story entitled “Transgender New Yorkers Sue over Birth Certificates” revealed that public interest legal groups such as the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund demand that so-called gender reassignment surgery now be paid for by tax money.

Another article, this in the  March, 2011 Mercatornet, “Gender Bending: Let Me Count the Ways,” disclosed that gender identity activists pushed the Australian Human Rights Commission to recognize 23 genders. In a culture where freedom is redefined as a right to choose anything and liberty has degenerated into license, the new-speak of the age calls the instrumental use another’s body sexual freedom.

Sadly, the same spirit of the age fails to recognize the integral unity of the human person, body, soul and spirit, viewing the human body instead as a machine with parts believed to be interchangeable. Sexual parts are artificially removed and attached, the human body mutilated, reproductive ability sacrificed, and the new physical appearance sustained only through massive doses of synthetic hormones.

I have a deep compassion for such souls. Western culture has rejected God and His Truth and embraced the autonomous self as the measure of all things. License masquerading as liberty has seduced our age, offering a new morality that is no morality at all. It has no capacity to inform a just social order and is leading to cultural collapse. This collapse will not be averted by political conservatism, or any political movement, or party, for that matter. Wise political leaders can play a positive role, but politics and political campaigns are inadequate to the task.

Western culture needs conversion, from the inside out. We need a Christian revolution of the heart. Christians need to once again take the eternal and timeless values of the classical and orthodox Christian worldview and knead them again into the loaf of Western culture.