An article by Lionel Shriver showed up recently in the Spectator. Who is she?
Lionel Shriver is a woman and a very well-known writer. She has won literary awards, is pretty well-known. She does not identify as LGBTQ, but she sees a big problem with the gender confusion pushed by our culture and the previous presidential administration. So do I, and just about everyone else with a biblical worldview.
Shriver is kind of an analogy to what’s happened to JK Rowling in England. Both are authors and both have made public statements about their understanding that male and female are objective categories and that it’s wrong to have biological males in female only spaces. Both women have been sanctioned out of the literary community in some ways. When it comes to JK Rowling, frankly, she’s got enough money, she doesn’t care what they say, and when it comes to Lionel Shriver, she’s got a lot of literary respect and doesn’t really care either. Would that our church members would have this kind of clarity and raw courage.
I don’t think Shriver’s too worried about cancel culture and the Woke mob, but she does write in this article about what she sees as the larger lesson. The headline is “Why the Trans Debacle Matters.” She writes about the recent decision of the UK Supreme Court saying that sex means gender means biological sex.
She says,
“I joined the celebration of last month’s UK Supreme Court decision that sex in law means biological sex. You’ll forgive a fortnightly columnist for being late to the party.”
Fortnightly, of course, means publication every two weeks. She goes on to say, “This is a subject about which I feel strongly.” In other words, she’s got a real interest in it. She also writes,
“Following Donald Trump’s shocking declaration that there are only two sexes, obviously, the Supreme Court decision is a salutary juncture, but it oughtn’t to be. Why should a legal definition of women that excludes, well, men be controversial? The purple-faced outrage of protesters in Parliament Square, exemplifies how far we’ve drifted not just from common sense but from physical reality.”
With great clarity, she writes,
“Any culture that squanders its efforts on drug regimes and plastic surgery meant to deceive both patients and the world at large that they are the sex that they are not is profoundly decadent if not debauched, we’ve a shortage of neither men nor women and pretending to swap them back and forth is a waste of money, medical expertise, and social aggravation. Private insurance and national health service coverage of this elective ‘treatment’ is a scandal. If people want to play fleshly dress up, they should do it on their own dime.”
She goes on,
“This entire fiasco is based on lies and a society that embraces bald falsehoods is eating itself hollow. You can’t change sex. Trans women aren’t women. There’s no such thing as gender identity, brain sex, or being born in the wrong body. Sex is not assigned at birth. It’s observed. Sex is not a feeling, but an external, immutable biological truth. All these mystical notions are medieval, and by institutionalizing them across the western world, we’ve made ourselves ridiculous.”
She says,
“We’re inflicting those lies on a whole generation of children who are taught that their sex isn’t a fact but a decision. We’re convincing misfits that the solution to their misery is mutilation. We’re enticing both kids and adults into an indefinitely medicalized future and make no mistake, loads of these awful surgeries go wrong. We still have no idea how badly adults are damaged by skipping puberty. We’re emotionally imploding whole families.”
Commentary
She knows how to use the English language and she uses it to make essential moral points with clarity. She makes observations here that anyone with eyes and ears should fully understand, but we are living in a time of deep confusion and the truths we’re talking about are routinely being denied. Therefore, we understand at least our Christian responsibility is to celebrate where a little bit of truth breaks through and it certainly does with the courage represented in this article. I hope that this kind of clarity will increasingly take hold, especially among the Seventh-day Adventist brotherhood.
Feminism started the ball rolling, homosexuality took it further, and transgenderism said the sexes don’t even matter. We don’t have a shortage of men and women, we have a shortage of reality.
How do we know what truth and reality are? We have to go to the incarnate Word of God. We must also understand that ultimately, if someone’s going to reject the Law of God and then reject creation order, there is really no mechanism for return or recovery. Their only hope is outright repentance, conversion, and turning away from sinful moral confusion and licentiousness.
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“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18).