From Transubstantiation to Trans Rights

History may not repeat, but it almost rhymes

Transubstantiation is the process by which devout Catholics believe that the bread and wine consumed during the Eucharist literally become the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. To anyone who is not a devout Catholic, the idea of bread and wine turning into human flesh and blood because of the words of a priest might seem absurd, and if they actually did transform, the idea that you would eat them is pretty disgusting. But that is missing the point; the point is the belief.

The Eucharist is a ritual that ostensibly expresses devotion to Jesus Christ, but since Jesus isn’t around, in practical terms it expresses devotion to the Catholic Church. A believer’s devotion is expressed through their suspension of belief in material reality, in favour of belief in the mystic powers of Christ channeled through Catholic priests. It’s impossible to know whether those taking part in the Eucharist truly believe that the bread and wine they are eating is the body of Christ, or whether they merely say they believe, but again, that doesn’t really matter: what matters is that they partake in the ritual and repeat the incantations. This isn’t meant to be disrespectful to Catholics - faith is an important thing for many reasons, and it gives people’s lives meaning in a way that secular beliefs can’t.

There’s no point trying to argue from a scientific point of view about how transubstantiation might occur, because it obviously can’t. The assertion amongst devout Catholics that despite the fact that it can’t happen, it nonetheless does, is an expression of the power of the Catholic Church to inspire faith. It’s like a magic trick, but one in which the magic happens entirely in the mind of the believer, and it only works because everyone else agrees it does. In itself it might not seem to mean much, but it belies a greater coercive power left unstated.

As a non-Catholic it’s easy to laugh at a belief like that, when the Catholic Church holds so much less authority than it did in the past - most importantly, the authority to burn you at the stake for laughing at or disagreeing with it. Once upon a time, writing a blog post (or tract, or pamphlet) like this would mark one out as a heretic to be shunned, spat at and possibly immolated. Religious faith might be a potential force for good, but it’s unquestionably a Very Good Thing that we no longer have such brutal punishments for such absurd crimes - literal thoughtcrimes - here in the ‘civilised’ world, at least.

Nowadays, doubting the veracity of transubstantiation is entirely acceptable and even normal, although most people would still concede that Catholics have the right to believe in it, since holding that belief doesn’t hurt anyone. The issue has never been the question of whether transubstantiation is real, but whether one is forced to believe it, or to say that one believes it, on pain of excommunication.

And so to Trans Rights (again, sorry, but I think it’s important). Consider the following questions:

• Can a man become a woman, or vice versa?

• What would one have to do to become the other?

• What even is a man or a woman?

For someone who believes in material reality, the answers are very simple. A man or a woman is defined by their body: women (females) can have babies and men (males) can’t, because we’re mammals and mammals reproduce sexually, which means individuals are either male or female. One cannot become the other, much as one might wish to. Wearing the clothes of the opposite sex, behaving like a member of the opposite sex or even having surgery to make you resemble the opposite sex, does not make you the opposite sex. There is nothing one can do to become the other, and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with accepting that.

For those who have accepted gender ideology into their hearts, the answers are much more complicated, but only because the ideology requires that they must be in order for it to exist. Man and woman are just words, used to describe people who identify as one or the other. Physical sex is real, but gender is an entirely different quality, a social construct about which we have a choice: we can identify as a man, a woman, or something else entirely. For this reason, a person doesn’t have to make any physical changes to their body to identify as a gender different to their physical sex. All that is necessary is that they believe (or say that they believe) that their gender differs from their sex, and it’s up to the rest of the world to affirm that belief.

This leads to strange and academic (put a pin in that) arguments about whether being a man or woman is the same as being male or female. For example: Can men have babies? Males by definition can’t, but trans men are female, so if you accept that trans men are men and trans women are women, then some men can have babies and some women can’t. As Slick Willy said nearly 30 years ago, it all depends on “what your definition of is is”, and it’s as evasive a statement now as it was then. Does that mean that all men should be entitled to maternity leave because trans men can have babies, or that all women should lose that entitlement because trans women can’t have babies? It might sound like an outlandish proposition now, but women’s rights have already been quietly erased in other areas as a result of giving gender identity precedence over physical sex.

Trans women have won a number of prizes and broken records in women’s sports, female athletes have pulled out of competitions out of fear for their safety, at least one woman has been vilified online for requesting only female staff attend to her intimate care after she suffered a sexual assault (instead the hospital cancelled her surgery), and violent male sex offenders have been moved to women’s prisons and even assaulted female inmates because they decided that they were actually women, until they got out. These are all situations where the precedence of physical sex over gender identity should be as obvious as it is with entitlement to maternity leave, yet gender identity has won out on the basis of treating the men who identify as women as victims (even when they are guilty of awful crimes) whose minority status should be respected; a vulgar display of power if ever there was one.

It’s all about exercising that power by playing with language: although believers in trans ideology might insist that gender and sex are completely different qualities, this distinction is very new (they will insist that it is not), and there are plenty of instances of the terms being used interchangeably in the past before the gender identity craze took hold¹. The Gender Recognition Act in the UK allows a person to amend the gender on their birth certificate from either male to female or vice versa, because gender is what is recorded on one’s birth certificate, despite the fact that by the rules of gender identity, this should be one’s sex.

UK birth certificates can only record an M or an F in the gender field; not even non-binary is legally recognised, let alone the host of other made-up categories that get thrown around like genderfluid, genderqueer or ‘third gender’. So what does it mean when a male announces that they are female, although they have a male body? They’re not just saying that they are a woman (whatever that means), they’re saying they are Female, i.e. capable of having babies, which is obviously and provably untrue, yet the UK has an official procedure to make that clearly false fact legal.

Just like transubstantiation, it’s a question of belief in something for which there can be no physical proof, and also just like transubstantiation, the question of whether or not you believe in gender identities is not the issue: the issue is whether you are compelled to believe in them, or to act like you do. A document like a birth certificate is legally binding, so if a person can change their gender on that document, then it follows that we are all compelled to believe in gender identity, on pain of legal action. Personally I find that worrying and I’m not even female, the group that very clearly is put at risk the most by this compulsion to deny material reality.

Transubstantiation was an expression of the power of the Catholic church, when it was the dominant culture. Trans Rights - which in every practical application equates to Men’s Rights, because trans men aren’t suddenly breaking records in men’s sports or demanding to be incarcerated in men’s prisons - is an expression of the power of the unrestrained chauvinist ego, the individual as the centre of its own universe, an inevitable endpoint of a service culture that believes in nothing but marketing and branding, that values messaging over substance. The thing that both ideologies have in common is that they treat male zealots, whether Catholic priests or trans women, as imbued with a magical power that you need faith to understand, not reason.

“But trans men!”, you might say, “They’re not male, what about them?” No, I’m afraid they fit into the chauvinism of the ideology just fine. Medically transitioned trans men are victims twice over, having in fact lost the actual, tangible magical power that womanhood bestows as compensation for all its vulnerabilities, in exchange for nothing at all: their newfound identity as men gives them no rights that they didn’t already have, but also none of the physical advantages that males have by virtue of biology. If a trans man goes into a male space (which they could have done as a woman anyway) they can expect to be ogled by men the same way they would have been previously, but with an added element of morbid curiosity. The power play is entirely one-sided, as it always has been.

One need only look at the sad story of Ellen ‘Elliot’ Page to see how a beautiful woman was convinced of her own imperfection by a callous industry that proceeded to mutilate her and cynically hold her aloft for a while as an ‘icon’, insisting that ‘he’ is much happier now. Elliot now looks like a sulky teenager, but one who will never grow up, and the grotesque farce was all completely unnecessary - but most importantly, some surgeons got paid to do it, and it probably influenced a lot of impressionable people to do something similar. There are also plenty of men and children of both sexes who have been deeply harmed by the ideology, tricked into making permanent changes to their body to ‘affirm’ a temporary psychological malaise that they got from too much time spent on the internet.

Both transubstantiation and Trans Rights have their roots in academia, although in transubstantiation’s case, academia meant the sincere study of Christian theology. Since this amounted largely to interpreting biblical texts and drawing conclusions from them about the supernatural nature of Christ, it is not so different to the work of Gender Studies departments, who are also dedicated to studying and researching a topic that only exists and has relevance if one believes in it. Sociology and Gender Studies departments produce no end of studies demonstrating the importance of gender ideology, liberally referencing earlier studies, because their continued existence and funding depend on it.

The Umberto Eco novel and later film, The Name of the Rose, was set in a fourteenth-century Italian abbey famed for its library. The main character, a friar who takes on the role of detective in the murder mystery, gets into some heated debates with other monks about the merits of laughter, and whether or not Christ laughed. It might seem an absurd question to debate, similar to the question of whether bread and wine turn into flesh and blood, but the friar never even hints at the idea of it being ridiculous because such an opinion was outside of the spectrum of acceptable discourse for people like him. Is it so different to a modern conference like Trans Disruptions: The Future of Change held at the Columbia University in New York, which promises to “bring together activists, theorists, artists, and writers to explore the pasts, futures, and in-between times of transgender lives, narratives, and theories”? No doubt all the attendees took that word salad terribly seriously, too.

The Name of the Rose ended up with accusations of heresy from an inquisitor (who really existed), leading to torture and witch-burning, and eventually the library burning down. That hasn’t happened with gender ideology just yet, but the way detransitioners are abused after leaving the cult that love-bombed them so enthusiastically when they joined, does go some way to showing its true face. ‘Acceptance’ is very subjective, it seems.

Trans ideology in practice offers nothing but harm and humiliation one way or another, and one of the many harms it has done has been to the reputation of ‘the left’, which has embraced it as a core principle, mostly out of fear of being called transphobic and because ‘leftists’ are just awful. It’s much easier to use the language and aesthetic of class struggle to promote culture war stuff that doesn’t threaten the ruling class, than it is to use it for actual material analysis that might threaten that class. Notionally left-wing media like The Guardian has been most vociferous in its support for all things trans.

This ‘left’ has little to do with actual left-wing politics, and the way self-described Marxists have adopted transgenderism has discredited Marxism hugely, and given its detractors an easy target to attack… almost like that was the point all along. What does gender identity have to do with class struggle, and how can a condition with no material basis be subject to analysis of material conditions? As with practically everything about gender ideology, it is the opposite of what it claims to be, but if you ask questions about it that the ideologues don’t have answers for, then you must be the problem.

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Once again, thanks to The Revolution Report for republishing this post.

1. To anyone with even a passing knowledge of gaming or hacking, this leveraging of terms (or variables) whose uses have changed over time smacks of an exploit.