An Article in honor of Charlie Kirk, May He Rest in Peace.
Is gender transitioning children worse than abortion? I have been pondering this question for about a decade but it is Charlie Kirk’s death that emboldens me to raise the question publicly for discussion in the pro-life community.
I have been active in the pro-life movement since I was a child. Growing up, my large family was considered to be some kind of bizarre freak show, so I found myself defending women who had large families and devoted themselves to staying home to care for their children’s moral formation. Snide remarks in the grocery line about how “disgusting” my mother’s life was, how she must be ignorant of contraceptive methods, or not care about over-population, drew me to my mother’s cause. This happened more than people might think: having large families is one of the last social sins that Americans feel free to condemn openly and freely.
When my most precious baby sister was born, I became a confirmed pro-lifer. Nothing had ever glowed with such a sense of the sacred as her adorableness.
I started the first pro-life club at my high school, at my college and at my graduate school. I attended the Annual National March for Life, started going to pray and protest outside of abortion clinics and regularly staffed a Charlie Kirk-style table in the main hall of the student center at Boston University and Rice. Our main goal was engaging in conversation, discussion and debate with anyone who would stop by to talk about the morality or politics of abortion.
After getting my job at the University of Dallas, my participation in the pro-life “movement” was more muted. I still attended the pro-life marches in Dallas or Austin, I occasionally prayed and protested at abortion clinics, I voted pro-life. But I felt I was contributing to the movement in less direct ways– mentoring, teaching and writing and helping friends and family who were struggling to raise large families.
I felt pulled back to activism when I heard that there was a pediatric gender transitioning clinic in my very neighborhood–at UT Southwestern Medical Center. I was struck with horror that 15 minutes away from my home and my school, there were so-called doctors sexually mutilating children. Yet, I went about my business, doing nothing direct or immediate.
Taking a human life is a grave sin and a great crime. But torturing and abusing children and leaving them to deal with the social, moral, emotional, and psychological consequences is surely just as grave a sin and great a crime. Every cell of our body is genetically coded as male or female. No amount of surgery or hormone treatment can permanently slough off that biological identity or win the battle of the body’s amazingly insistent cellular self-replacement mechanism. To fight against our own healthy organism– to destroy our own healthy reproductive system– is not a form of medicine. It is a form of destructive biomedical engineering–technologizing the body and ignoring its own healthy signals.
We should have immense sympathy for the young people somehow drawn into the social net of this horrific, diabolical trend. Many young women who have started transitioning have expressed their regrets to me. As Christians we feel empathy, tenderness, concern and understanding for how they got to the place where this seemed a valid solution to their pain. But sympathy cannot stop us from speaking out in the face of serious moral evil.
Are abortion and gender-transitioning equivalent moral evils? The physical, mental, emotional, and psychological torture aggravates the evil of gender transitioning. Just as pro-lifers have not been afraid to argue that abortion is an intrinsic moral evil, we need to move forward with equal courage to discuss this new threat to human life.