A dear friend recently responded to an Andrew Sullivan article I had sent her with a simple observation:
“It seems that most anything taken to the extreme is not good.”
As a general rule, I agree.
Political ideologies become dangerous when they become totalizing. Patriotism can become toxic (idolatrous) nationalism. Individual liberty can become selfishness. Concern for justice can become ideological fanaticism. The instinct toward moderation is often a sign of wisdom because it reminds us that human beings are prone to excess. We are finite creatures, and history is littered with examples of movements that began with legitimate concerns but ultimately became destructive because they lost all sense of proportion.
For that reason, moderation has often been regarded as a virtue. It encourages humility. It restrains zeal. It reminds us that our opponents sometimes possess insights we lack. In a deeply polarized culture, moderation can be a healthy antidote to ideological certainty.
But moderation has limits.
The problem is that some questions are not questions of degree. Some questions are questions of reality. There is no moderate position on whether the earth revolves around the sun. There is no middle ground between slavery and freedom. There is no compromise position between saying human beings possess inherent dignity and saying they do not.
Certain realities simply are what they are, regardless of our preferences. Wisdom, in such cases, consists not in finding a midpoint between competing claims but in recognizing reality and conforming ourselves to it.
And this is why I believe moderation ultimately fails as a response to the modern debate over sex and gender.
The question before us is not whether one side has become too extreme. The deeper question is whether we are willing to acknowledge realities that exist independently of our feelings, desires, and political commitments.
That observation came to mind as I read Andrew Sullivan’s recent essay, The TQ+ Threat to LGB Rights.
Before proceeding, a word of disclosure. Sullivan and I disagree on a great deal. As a Christian, I believe marriage is a covenant established by God between a man and a woman, and that children are ordinarily best served by being raised by their married mother and father. Sullivan, a gay man, was one of the most influential advocates for same-sex marriage in the modern era. I believe he was mistaken on that issue, and that redefining marriage has consequences that extend well beyond adult relationships, especially for children. But that is a subject for another day.
(For an example of what I believe are some of the terrible consequences of redefining marriage, see my post about three “married” gay men who were allowed to adopt a young girl in Canada. Polyamory and Adoption in Canada.)
But disagreement should not blind us to truth when we encounter it. And Sullivan is identifying a problem that many people—gay and straight, religious and secular—have begun to recognize.
Sullivan’s Warning
Sullivan’s central concern is not complicated. He argues that the movement which successfully persuaded much of the public to support gay rights and same-sex marriage was rooted in the following claim: gay and lesbian people are human beings deserving equal dignity and equal treatment under the law.
For decades, that argument gained support across the political spectrum. Americans who held vastly different religious, moral, and political convictions increasingly agreed that gay men and women should not be treated as “second-class citizens”—to use the language of the gay rights movement.
But Sullivan believes that movement has increasingly been overtaken by a far more radical ideology rooted in contemporary gender theory and queer theory. As a result, causes that once enjoyed broad public support have become associated with increasingly controversial claims: that biological sex is largely irrelevant, that male and female are social constructions, that children can meaningfully consent to irreversible medical interventions designed to alter their bodies, that language surrounding motherhood and fatherhood should be rewritten, that disagreement constitutes harm, and that institutions should compel affirmation of contested beliefs.
One does not need to agree with every detail of Sullivan’s argument to recognize that he is identifying a real cultural shift. His deeper concern is that this shift is generating a backlash that may ultimately undermine causes he spent decades advancing.
Whether he is right about every political consequence remains to be seen. But I think he has correctly identified something deeper than a political problem.
He has identified a crisis of reality.
The Sex Binary Is Not An Ideology
One of the strangest developments of our age is that affirming the existence of only two sexes is increasingly portrayed as some sort of extremist position. Yet the male-female distinction is not a political theory, nor is it primarily a religious doctrine. It is a biological reality.
Human beings are a sexually reproducing species. Every healthy human body is organized around one of two reproductive pathways. Male bodies are organized toward the production of sperm. Female bodies are organized toward the production of ova and the capacity for gestation. This reality is so fundamental that entire branches of biology depend upon it.
Of course, someone will immediately point to intersex conditions.
And here we need to think carefully.
Every biological system has developmental anomalies. Some people are born with congenital heart defects. Some are born without limbs. Some possess chromosomal abnormalities. Some experience disorders of sexual development (DSD’s). These individuals deserve dignity, compassion, care, and respect. Their value as human beings is not diminished in the slightest by the challenges they face.
But the existence of developmental anomalies does not erase the existence of the underlying design. In fact, the very word anomaly presupposes a norm from which it departs.
A child born with six fingers does not prove that the human hand has no standard structure. A congenital heart defect does not demonstrate that the heart lacks a normal form and function. Likewise, intersex conditions do not transform a sexually dimorphic species into a sexual spectrum.
From a Christian perspective, this is not an insult to anyone. It is simply an acknowledgment that we live in a fallen world where God’s good creation is frequently affected by disease, disorder, suffering, and brokenness. Christianity has never taught that every aspect of creation currently functions exactly as God intended. Rather, it teaches that creation itself has been subjected to frustration and decay.
Recognizing that reality is not cruelty.
It is honesty.
The Real Question: What Are Human Beings?
But the biological debate is not actually the deepest issue. The deeper question is philosophical and theological.
What is a human being?
Historically, Christianity has affirmed the goodness of the body. Genesis declares creation good. The Incarnation affirms the goodness of embodied existence. The Resurrection is not the escape of the soul from the body but the redemption of the body itself.
Our bodies are not prisons. They are not mistakes. They are not obstacles to our true selves.
They are gifts.
Modern gender ideology turns this vision upside down. Identity is relocated from the body to an internal psychological self. If the body conflicts with inner feelings, then the body must change. Subjective experience becomes authoritative. Desire becomes sovereign. The body becomes negotiable.
This is why many Christian thinkers have described gender ideology as a modern form of Gnosticism.
Ancient Gnostics believed that the material world was somehow inferior to the inner spiritual self. Modern gender ideology often treats the body in remarkably similar ways. The body becomes raw material to be reshaped according to an inner identity. The goal is no longer to live in harmony with reality but to transcend it.
What is presented as liberation often amounts to alienation from our own embodied nature.
From Tolerance to Coercion
Sullivan also highlights another reality that deserves attention.
Ideas rarely remain private. They eventually become institutional.
What began as a request for tolerance increasingly became demands for affirmation. Disagreement became discrimination. Questions became harm. Biological language became offensive. Terms such as “mother” and “father” suddenly became suspect. Professionals who questioned aspects of gender medicine found themselves marginalized. Parents expressing concern were frequently dismissed. Women objecting to male participation in female sports or private spaces were branded bigots.
Consider Sullivan’s example from New York, where lawmakers are replacing traditional parental language such as “mother” and “father” with terms like “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.” Whatever one’s views on transgender identity, it is difficult not to notice the broader pattern. Language that has described human reality for millennia is being revised, not because it is inaccurate, but because it conflicts with a new ideological framework.
Reasonable people can debate individual policies. But the larger pattern is difficult to ignore.
History repeatedly demonstrates that movements seeking freedom can become tempted to enforce conformity. No movement is immune from that temptation. Not the political right. Not the political left. Not religious movements. Not secular movements. And certainly not gender ideology.
Why Moderation Doesn’t Solve This
This brings me back to my friend’s observation.
The problem before us is not merely that a good idea has been taken too far. The problem is that reality itself is increasingly being treated as negotiable.
Moderation works when we are balancing competing goods. It works when both sides possess part of the truth. It works when the dispute concerns prudential judgment rather than objective reality.
But moderation cannot resolve questions of reality.
If one person says the earth is round and another says it is flat, the answer is not that the earth is moderately round. If one person says human beings are male and female and another says sex is whatever we declare it to be, the answer is not some compromise halfway between the two.
Reality eventually wins.
The only question is how much confusion and suffering we create before acknowledging it.
At some point, moderation ceases to be wisdom and becomes evasion. It becomes a way of avoiding the uncomfortable responsibility of saying that one claim is true and another is false.
A Better Way Forward
Sullivan fears that gender ideology may ultimately damage causes he spent decades advancing. That concern may prove justified.
My deepest concern lies elsewhere.
As a Christian, I am less worried about the future of political coalitions than I am about the future of truth. A civilization cannot flourish if objective realities are continually subordinated to subjective desires. Human freedom is not found in escaping our nature. It is found in understanding it and living faithfully within it.
The Christian vision begins with a simple but profound truth: we are creatures. We did not create ourselves. Our bodies are not accidents. They are not obstacles. They are gifts.
And genuine human flourishing begins not by transcending those gifts, but by receiving them with gratitude.
That may not sound particularly radical.
But in our present cultural moment, it has become one of the most countercultural things a person can say.
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