Category: Identity Politics

Posted on

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.

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.

Faika El-Nagashi and Anna Zobnina
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.

+++

Defend God’s World

Posted on

Reality Restored: A Federal Court Upholds the Truth About Sex and the Human Body

On October 22, 2025, a federal judge in Mississippi handed down one of the most significant rulings yet in the legal struggle over “gender identity” mandates. In State of Tennessee et al. v. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, Judge Louis Guirola declared that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had exceeded its statutory authority when it redefined “sex discrimination” to include “gender identity” under the Affordable Care Act.

The ruling does more than settle a technical dispute about regulatory authority. While the court’s purpose was to determine whether HHS exceeded its legal authority, its conclusion coincides with a deeper truth I affirm as a Christian — that our bodies are not social constructs or psychological projections, but part of the created order.

The law, in this instance, has returned to reality.

The Case: Tennessee v. HHS

In 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a sweeping regulation titled “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities.” The rule reinterpreted “sex discrimination” to include five categories: sex characteristics, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex stereotypes.

That redefinition would have required states, hospitals, and insurance providers that receive federal funds to cover or perform “gender-affirming care” — including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries — regardless of conscience or medical judgment.

Fifteen states, led by Tennessee, sued. They argued that the rule went far beyond the authority Congress gave HHS in Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination “on the ground prohibited under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.” And as the court noted, Title IX’s meaning of “sex” is biological, not ideological.

The plaintiffs weren’t asking for special treatment. They were asking that federal law mean what it has always meant: that “sex” refers to male and female — not to self-declared identities.

What the Court Decided

Judge Guirola’s 26-page opinion is a model of clarity. He ruled that HHS’s 2024 rule:

  1. Exceeded its statutory authority under Title IX and the Affordable Care Act.
  2. Misapplied the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which concerned employment discrimination under Title VII, not healthcare or education.
  3. Was unlawful in its entirety and therefore vacated nationwide.

The opinion states plainly:

“Congress only contemplated biological sex when it enacted Title IX in 1972. Therefore, the Court finds that HHS exceeded its authority by implementing regulations redefining sex discrimination and prohibiting gender-identity discrimination.”

The judge further held that the refusal to perform or cover procedures for “gender transition” is not discrimination “because of sex.” As he explained, if a doctor performs mastectomies for women with breast cancer but declines to perform them for patients with gender dysphoria, the distinction is not based on the patient’s sex but on the diagnosis itself.

In other words: medicine is about biology, not ideology.

Bostock Doesn’t Apply Here

The court’s analysis directly confronts HHS’s reliance on the Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling, which found that firing an employee for being homosexual or transgender violates Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination.

But Bostock explicitly limited its holding to employment law and said nothing about education, healthcare, or the broader cultural questions now before us. Title IX, unlike Title VII, contains explicit sex-based distinctions — for locker rooms, dormitories, sports teams, and bathrooms. Those provisions would be meaningless if “sex” were redefined to mean “gender identity.”

As Judge Guirola noted, interpreting “sex” as “gender identity” would create legal chaos. Schools could no longer maintain separate facilities for men and women. Sports competition would lose integrity. In the healthcare context, even legitimate medical distinctions — like sex-specific treatments — could be labeled “discrimination.”

That is precisely what the rule attempted to do, and why the court struck it down.

A Restoration of Constitutional Balance

Beyond the immediate issue of gender policy, this ruling restores a key principle of constitutional government: agencies do not have unlimited power to redefine law by executive fiat.

Quoting recent Supreme Court precedent (Loper Bright v. Raimondo), the court affirmed that statutes “have a single, best meaning fixed at the time of enactment.” Agencies are servants of Congress, not substitutes for it.

This is a vital reminder that the administrative state cannot function as an ideological laboratory for social experiments. The judiciary has begun to reassert the boundaries of delegated power, curbing the long pattern of executive agencies imposing cultural revolutions under the guise of “civil rights enforcement.”

The court’s language is unmistakable:

“Agencies do not have unlimited power to accomplish their policy preferences until Congress stops them; they have only the powers that Congress grants.”

That line deserves to be remembered.

Reality, Restored to Law

The court’s approach to statutory interpretation is refreshingly rooted in reality. Citing 1970s dictionaries, Judge Guirola observed that “sex” was universally understood to refer to biological distinctions between male and female. There was no concept of “gender identity” in 1972 law — because there was no such category in common understanding.

As simple as that sounds, it’s revolutionary in today’s legal landscape. The court refused to participate in the linguistic shell game that has corrupted public discourse. It chose to honor what words actually mean.

The Cultural and Moral Stakes

This case is not just about regulatory overreach or administrative law. It’s about truth-telling in a time of cultivated confusion.

For over a decade, we’ve watched federal agencies, medical institutions, and activist networks work to erase the distinction between man and woman — replacing embodied reality with subjective identity. In medicine, this ideology has demanded that doctors violate conscience, that parents affirm medical harm, and that the state compel participation in a collective fiction.

From a Christian Viewpoint: Creation and the Meaning of the Body

From a Christian perspective, this ruling affirms something far deeper than statutory interpretation. It affirms the created order.

Scripture tells us that humanity was made “male and female” (Genesis 1:27), and that this distinction is not arbitrary but sacramental — a sign of the divine image itself. As Notre Dame Professor Abigail Favale has written, the difference between man and woman “is not about completion, but communion.”

When law denies that created truth, it participates in what St. Paul called “the exchange of the truth of God for a lie.” The lie of our age is that the self is sovereign, that the body can be remade at will, and that nature itself must yield to the will of the autonomous individual.

This ruling marks a step back from that precipice.

Rejecting the New Gnosticism

Modern gender ideology, at its core, is a revival of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism — the belief that the material world is an obstacle to true identity, that salvation lies in self-knowledge detached from embodiment.

The court, perhaps without intending to, has reaffirmed the opposite: that embodiment is integral to who we are. Our bodies are not meaningless matter to be “corrected” by technology; they are the visible expression of the person God created.

When the judge wrote that Title IX’s use of “sex” referred to biological distinctions, he was defending more than a word. He was defending a vision of human integrity — one that law, medicine, and theology once shared.

Law and Compassion: Not Enemies but Allies

Critics will call this ruling “cruel,” claiming it denies care to transgender patients. But compassion severed from truth is not compassion — it’s abandonment. To affirm someone in a self-damaging illusion is to cooperate with harm.

True compassion tells the truth even when it hurts. The court did not deny anyone’s humanity; it denied the government’s power to redefine humanity.

Christians must remember: Love without truth is sentimentality. Truth without love is cruelty. But love in truth is the only path to healing.

This ruling doesn’t forbid care; it forbids coerced compliance with an untruth.

The Broader Implications

This decision will likely be appealed, but its reasoning aligns with the broader judicial trend of rejecting agency-driven redefinitions of “sex.” Other courts — particularly in the Fifth and Sixth Circuits — have already pushed back against the Biden administration’s interpretations of Title IX and the Affordable Care Act.

If upheld, the Tennessee ruling will shape how federal law treats sex distinctions in medicine, education, and beyond. It signals the end of a bureaucratic era in which ideology could rewrite biology by regulation.

For Christians and others who believe in the moral coherence of creation, this is not a moment for triumphalism but for thanksgiving and vigilance. The cultural pressure to conform to unreality will not disappear overnight. But truth has a way of resurfacing, and in this case, through the language of the law.

Conclusion: Living in the Truth

Judge Guirola closed his opinion with a reminder:

“Neither Defendants nor this Court have authority to reinterpret or expand the meaning of ‘sex’ under Title IX.”

The law is at its best when it reflects the created order rather than attempting to erase it. For years, American jurisprudence has been asked to pretend that male and female are mere social scripts. This ruling breaks that spell. For now.

In the words of St. Irenaeus, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” To be fully alive is to live in the truth of what we are — body and soul, male or female, created and loved by God.

Source: THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF MISSISSIPPI

+++

Stay Human

Posted on

Confusion about Creation and the Rise of Political Violence

When Rebellion Against Nature Turns Deadly: The Troubling Pattern of Political Violence and Gender Ideology

In a culture that increasingly confuses affirmation with compassion, we risk ignoring some very disturbing truths.

Last week, court documents revealed that Nicholas Roske, the man who plotted the assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, now identifies as a transgender woman named “Sophie.” Roske was arrested in 2022 outside Kavanaugh’s home, armed with a gun and burglary tools. He admitted to targeting not only Kavanaugh, but other justices, in response to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

This isn’t just an isolated incident. According to the Justice Department’s sentencing memo, Roske had spent months researching, planning, and preparing for the attack. He looked up how to break into homes, strangle someone, and escape prosecution. He studied the anatomy of the head and neck. He searched mass shooting footage and sniper techniques. All to eliminate jurists whose legal opinions conflicted with his ideology.

This was a politically motivated assassination attempt—by someone immersed in pro-abortion and transgender-affirming circles.

Unfortunately, Roske’s story is not unique.

A Disturbing Trend

In recent years, we’ve witnessed a growing number of violent incidents involving individuals either identifying as transgender or deeply embedded in trans-activist ideology:

  • In 2023, Audrey Hale, a woman who identified as a man, opened fire at Covenant School, a Christian elementary school in Nashville, killing six people—including three children.
  • Just months later, Robin Westman, another trans-identified shooter, murdered two children and wounded others in a mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School. Authorities later confirmed Westman harbored anti-Christian sentiments and fantasized about “killing as many children as possible.”
  • In a different case, Tyler Robinson, the man charged with murdering conservative activist Charlie Kirk, reportedly told his trans-identified partner that he couldn’t “negotiate out” the “hate” Kirk represented. According to family members, Robinson had recently become more radicalized around LGBTQ political issues.

These are not mere outliers. Each case represents a violent collision of grievance-based identity politics with moral nihilism. Each involves individuals who had become deeply politicized in the context of gender identity or allied ideologies. And in each case, the targets were Christians, conservatives, or children.

When violence is repeatedly justified or rationalized on the basis of perceived “oppression,” it becomes clear that we are dealing with more than mental illness. We’re dealing with an ideological deformation of conscience.

The Fruits of a Fractured Worldview

These violent acts raise urgent questions about the psychological and spiritual consequences of building one’s identity around inner feelings detached from truth, nature, or moral law.

When people are told that their subjective sense of gender is sacred—and that opposing it is tantamount to violence—we should not be surprised when violence becomes their chosen response to disagreement.

When political movements elevate personal identity over public morality, and self-definition over objective truth, they create the conditions for extremism. They reward victimhood with moral license. They justify hatred of anyone seen as standing in the way of “liberation.”

This isn’t compassion. It’s chaos.

And it’s being fueled—unwittingly or not—by cultural elites, academic theorists, corporate sponsors, and even church leaders who confuse mercy with moral surrender.

Political Violence is Still Violence

There was a time not long ago when political violence was uniformly condemned—regardless of the source. But we now live in a moment where leftist rage is often indulged, and even celebrated, as “understandable” or “justified.”

When pro-life groups are firebombed, or Christian schools are targeted by shooters, or conservative justices are hunted in the night—too many remain silent. The media covers it reluctantly. Activists deflect. Politicians equivocate.

But violence is violence.

The attempted assassination of a Supreme Court Justice is not a form of protest. It’s terrorism. And when it comes from someone driven by a radicalized view of gender and justice, we should stop pretending this is a coincidence.

A Better Way

As Christians, we must be both compassionate and clear. Those who struggle with gender confusion deserve our prayers, our care, and our truth-speaking—not our silence.

But compassion does not mean complicity.

The gospel calls us to affirm that we are not self-created. We are made in the image of God—male and female. To reject that creational truth is to invite disorder into the soul and body, and eventually into the world.

Christians must be prepared to name this disorder—not with hatred, but with courage. Because love without truth is just sentiment. And truth without love is just noise. But love with truth? That is the medicine our world desperately needs.

Courage to Speak

If you’re wondering whether this trend of violence will continue, ask yourself: are the cultural forces driving it slowing down?

Until the church finds the courage to speak plainly about the dangers of identity idolatry, and until society recovers a moral center rooted in something higher than self-expression, we will continue to reap what we have sown.

And the fruit will not be peace.

+++

“Grace and Truth Came Through Jesus“
(John 1:17)