Disregarding The Body – Podcast
The Crisis of our Time
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art
Companion Posts
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Starting Again
I was born in the sixties. But I am not a child of the 60’s. My family was lower-middle class, and by the standards of the time, traditional in most every way. Dad was a minister. If he or mom had lived into their 90’s they would not have imagined the social changes we have witnessed in the last 20 years. It would be too easy to say the sexual revolution of the 60’s caused all this change, as some conservatives maintain. But the roots of this change go back much further than the swinging 60’s.
So I’m embarking with some misgivings on a survey of cultural history. There are deep intellectual and cultural traditions that have shaped our everyday lives. We’ve come to a point in the Western world where the statement “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” is comprehensible to many public leaders, at least in public. That phrase would be completely incomprehensible to my parent’s generation, in public or private, not to mention every preceding generation. It is still incomprehensible to many, if not most people today. But if you express your bewilderment in public, say at many workplaces in the Western world, increasingly the odds are you will be regarded as stupid, immoral or worse. You may be reprimanded for your irrational “phobia.” You might even have your career derailed. If you broadcast your view on a public forum, say Twitter, expect the Twitterati to pounce with the ferocity of a caged unfed Tiger. In certain parts of the world you may even be charged with a hate-crime for your expressed incredulity at the latest massive cultural shift. (See the following posts, here & here.)
As a 60’s poet might say, “The times they are a changin.”
The tectonic cultural shift in the last 20 years is quite breathtaking. Regardless of what you think about gay marriage, we have gone from year 2000 where the majority of Americans were opposed to gay marriage to today where normalization of Transgenderism is fast approaching.
A long and winding road brought us to this point. I want to offer a thoughtful and hopefully generous exposition, from a Classic Christian point of view, of how we got here. As I go, I’ll be documenting some disturbing current events. (Read my next post). I hope that even those who disagree with Classic Christianity will find here a fair and readable assessment of our state of affairs. (post continues page 2)
When Science Silences Itself: Censorship in Gender Medicine Research
In recent years, debates around gender medicine have become some of the most polarized in the scientific and cultural landscape. What was once the realm of cautious inquiry has, in many institutions, hardened into dogma. Researchers who raise empirical or ethical concerns about puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgical interventions for minors increasingly find their work censored or discredited—not through evidence, but through social pressure and editorial gatekeeping.
A new paper by J. Cohn in the Journal of Controversial Ideas shines a bright and uncomfortable light on this phenomenon.
In “Censorship of Essential Debate in Gender Medicine Research,” (see below) Cohn exposes a disturbing trend in modern medicine: the systematic censorship of scientific debate in the field of gender medicine. The piece reveals how leading medical journals and professional societies have created an echo chamber that suppresses scrutiny, silences dissent, and promotes ideology under the guise of science.
The Core Problem: Debate Is Being Shut Down
Cohn argues that medical research on gender dysphoria—especially regarding hormonal and surgical interventions for minors—has been overtaken by advocacy rather than evidence. The core claim is simple but explosive: major journals like JAMA and The New England Journal of Medicine routinely reject well-documented critiques of published research, allowing false or exaggerated claims to circulate uncorrected. Letters highlighting factual or methodological errors are blocked, and even platforms like PubPeer have removed accepted criticisms without explanation.
This, Cohn warns, is not merely academic malpractice—it is a corruption of science itself. When editors silence valid scientific debate, public policy and medical practice are shaped by untested assumptions and political pressure rather than by evidence.
What the Evidence Actually Shows
The article points to a striking fact: despite the confident tone of many advocacy-driven statements, there is no scientific consensus on the effectiveness of medical transition, especially for youth. Systematic reviews—the gold standard of evidence—consistently find the evidence base to be weak or of very low certainty. The long-term outcomes of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries remain largely unknown.
Even basic questions about etiology, persistence, and predictors of benefit in gender dysphoria are unresolved. Yet, U.S. medical bodies have promoted these interventions as both safe and necessary—often claiming they are “lifesaving” while dismissing alternatives like psychotherapy or watchful waiting.
False Claims and the Refusal to Correct Them
Cohn provides concrete examples of misinformation that have been published and then protected from correction. Some articles claim that regret rates after transition are “low” or “rare,” despite the fact that true rates are unknown because of poor follow-up and incomplete data. Others assert that randomized controlled trials would be unethical—a claim that is scientifically indefensible, since experimental rigor is what distinguishes genuine medicine from ideology.
Cohn recounts instances where he attempted to submit brief corrections or letters to editors, only to see them rejected without explanation. One such letter challenging NEJM was dismissed; another, initially accepted by JAMA, was later withdrawn before publication. In both cases, his critiques were grounded in empirical evidence.
How Journals and Societies Reinforce Error
The article describes what Cohn calls a “closed loop” between medical journals and professional associations. Guidelines by groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics cite the very same uncorrected journal articles that overstate the evidence for gender transition. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: advocacy-based claims become the official line, while attempts at correction are buried.
The International Picture: Caution Abroad, Ideology at Home
Outside the United States, several nations have already reevaluated their approach. Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom have all pivoted away from automatic medicalization toward a more cautious model emphasizing psychotherapy and holistic care. The 2024 Cass Review in the U.K. and a 2025 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review both acknowledge the same reality: the evidence for pediatric gender medicine is extraordinarily weak.
Why This Matters
The censorship of debate in gender medicine is not just a matter of professional ethics—it directly affects vulnerable patients and the integrity of public trust in science. When unsupported claims about safety and efficacy are treated as settled facts, doctors cannot give truly informed consent, and policymakers are misled into endorsing experimental treatments for children.
Cohn concludes with a reminder drawn from JAMA’s own editorial policy: “The integrity of the scientific process hinges on the free exchange of scientific ideas grounded in rigorously conducted inquiry.” That principle, he argues, is being betrayed by the very institutions charged with upholding it.
The Way Forward
True science welcomes scrutiny. It is strengthened by disagreement and refined by debate. Cohn calls for the restoration of open, evidence-based discourse in gender medicine—a return to the first principles of inquiry: transparency, humility, and courage. Until that happens, medical journals risk losing what makes them credible in the first place.
The article ends with a simple warning that resonates far beyond gender medicine: when science silences itself, ideology rushes to fill the void.
You can download a PDF version of this article for easy sharing and reference.
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Grace and Truth
Europe’s New Anti-Sex, Anti-Family Revolutionaries: From Foucault to O’Flaherty
When almost 70 left-wing French MPs recently proposed removing biological sex from national identity cards, they claimed to be advancing equality. In reality, they were advancing an anti-human ideology—the same ideology that has spread across the EU and now infects its highest institutions.
As Faika El-Nagashi and Anna Zobnina explain in The Critic (Europe Must Not Erase Sex), this latest move is not an isolated gesture but part of a coordinated push rooted in the European Commission’s newly published LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy. Ostensibly, this effort aims to protect LGBTIQ+ individuals from discrimination and social exclusion, but in practice it extends far beyond that limited goal. That strategy, as they observe, promotes self-identification of sex without age restrictions across member states—an intermediate step toward the total abolition of sex envisioned in the Yogyakarta manifesto drafted by Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.
This direct institutional alignment shows how activist philosophy has been absorbed into the machinery of governance. O’Flaherty, as the author of the Yogyakarta Principles, embodies this bureaucratic radicalism: he is the face of a movement that trades truth for theory and biology for ideology, converting the abstract ideals of postmodern “liberation” into binding European policy.
O’Flaherty’s position stems from his long-standing advocacy to eliminate sex from law and practice, which culminated in his drafting of the Yogyakarta Principles in 2007, later updated in 2017 with a clear demand: that states must cease registering sex on all legal documents, including birth certificates.
Faika El-Nagashi and Anna Zobnina
It is this demand, alongside other Council of Europe and EU references, that the French politicians cited in their proposal, concluding that “the inscription of sex on national identity cards is a form of discrimination.” A similar conclusion was reached by Finland’s Social Democratic government, which in its 2020–2023 Gender Equality Plan proposed removing the sex-based digits from national identity numbers. While this may sound absurd to most Europeans, few are aware of either its repercussions or its history.
Europe Must Not Erase Sex
This kind of thinking is not uniquely Irish or European—it is quintessentially French. The same intellectual impulse that gave us Michel Foucault’s “liberation of desire” has now metastasized into EU policy. What began as abstract deconstruction of “power and knowledge” has become a practical project to dismantle every category by which human beings understand themselves—male and female, husband and wife, father and mother. In the name of equality and freedom, it seeks to dissolve the very foundation of society.
The Assault on the Family
The logic of sexual “liberation,” as articulated by its most candid theorists, leaves no room for the family as a stable or normative institution. Its advocates have been forthright about this. The philosophical roots lie not in grassroots activism but in a deeper intellectual rebellion—one that sees moral order and family structure as mechanisms of control. French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose ideas remain foundational for today’s gender theorists, framed the matter bluntly:
“Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized. They are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who have used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them. Controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.”
—M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 151, quoted sympathetically in R. Goss, Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto, p. 62.
Foucault’s project, spelled out further in The History of Sexuality, was nothing less than the subversion of the moral universe that Western civilization inherited:
“If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required.” (The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, p. 5)
In other words, liberation requires not reform but revolt—an overthrow of what Foucault called “the rules.” And what institution embodies those rules more clearly than the natural family, with its inherent moral and generative order? To challenge the family, then, is to challenge the very structure of reality as given.
Foucault’s disciples have carried that revolt from the lecture hall to the culture at large. As one of the more extreme voices put it, the family must be eradicated altogether. Michael Swift declared without apology that “the family unit—spawning ground of lies, betrayals, mediocrity, hypocrisy, and violence—will be abolished. The family unit, which only dampens imagination and curbs free will, must be eliminated.” (After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s, p. 361.)
These are not isolated voices on the fringe. They articulate the philosophical engine behind the broader sexual revolution—an assault on the givenness of the human person and the stability of human relations. What was once academic radicalism now guides public policy, from the French Parliament to Brussels. The rhetoric may have softened into the bureaucratic language of “rights” and “equality,” but the underlying goal remains: to dismantle the traditional family, erase natural distinctions, and replace them with a new social order shaped by the will to power rather than the wisdom of creation.
The Biological Foundation of the Family
At the heart of this struggle lies a deeper truth that El-Nagashi and Zobnina rightly defend: the family cannot be understood apart from the biological reality of man and woman. Our complementary male and female existence is not a social construct to be reprogrammed—it is the very architecture of life, the biological building block upon which human society stands. From this complementarity comes new life, and with it, the moral and social bonds that form the family. To erase sex, as the French proposal and O’Flaherty’s activism would have it, is to erase the foundation of both human identity and civilization itself.
The authors of The Critic article warn that this ideological erasure masquerades as compassion but is in fact a profound act of cultural suicide. Europe’s lawmakers, seduced by Foucault’s logic of perpetual rebellion, now seek to “liberate” humanity from the very structure that makes it possible to exist. To defend the truth about sex, therefore, is not reactionary—it is an act of preservation, an affirmation of reality against the fantasies of power. The future of Europe depends on recovering that truth.
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Defend God’s World
Sex Week at Harvard: And the Pursuit of Sensation
At one of America’s most prestigious universities, Harvard is hosting its 13th annual “Sex Week” — featuring, among other events, a workshop on “BDSM and kinks” led by a self-described “queer-trans Jewish certified sex educator,” Jamie Joy. This is where American academia has led us: a campus culture that claims to liberate young minds but instead distorts the most basic truths about human sexuality.
For years, universities have been the incubators of gender ideology and the sexual revolution’s latest iterations. The result? An environment where the denial of the created order is celebrated as enlightenment. When the stewards of higher learning host events that teach students how to pursue pleasure without purpose and few limits, it becomes clear that the pursuit of truth has been replaced with the pursuit of sensation.
Among the featured sessions this year: a discussion on dismantling the so-called “cult of virginity.” In other words, rejecting chastity as outdated and oppressive.
But the Christian understanding of sexuality isn’t about shame or repression; it is about reverence. Sexual self-gift belongs within the covenant of marriage because it is meant to express the deeper truth of our embodied nature: we are made for communion, not consumption.
It is tragic that the same institutions once founded to seek wisdom now confuse freedom with indulgence. Harvard’s “Sex Week” is not progress. It is a symptom of a culture that has forgotten what it means to be human.
Read the full report here: Campus Reform: Harvard to host BDSM, kinks workshop as part of 13th annual ‘Sex Week’.
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Celebrate God’s Good Creation