There are a lot of really strange creatures to be found in Greek mythology. There are such creatures as:
Medusa – A woman with living venomous snakes for hair. People who looked her in the eyes would turn to stone.
Chimera – A fire-breathing monster with the body of a lion with a goat’s head protruding from its back, and a tail that had a snake’s head at its end.
Centaur – A creature with the lower body of a horse and the upper body of a human.
Pegasus – A pure white stallion with wings.
Hydra – A many-headed water snake.
And then there was the Minotaur. A Minotaur had the body of a man, but the head of a bull.
Now you would surmise that, as mythological creatures, all of these are just the fancy imagination of ancient writers. But perhaps not these days.
Diane Ehrensaft is the director of mental health and chief psychologist at the University of California San Francesco’s (UCSF) Benioff Children’s Hospital gender development center. She is also a professor at UCSF School of Medicine. She is a self-identified “feminist” and specializes in pediatric “gender-affirmative care for transgender and gender-expansive patients.” The focus of her research is on how genders before puberty develop, as well as the mental health effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
These credentials might lead a person to believe that Ehrensaft is all in on gender transition for children. And anyone who thought that would be right. She believes that kids can identify as “gender hybrids,” and can change their genders by season, or even by location. In other words, they can change their gender anytime and anyplace they want at the drop of a hat.
But what is this “gender hybrid” thing? Sometimes it is called gender fluidity or gender expansive. Some people identify it as “half boy and half girl.” In Ehrensaft’s world, any and every possibility is considered legitimate – including the possibility of being a minotaur – part man and part bull.
At a talk given at the San Francesco Public Library, she said, “I totally agree we are in the midst of a gender revolution and the children are leading it. And it’s a wonderful thing to see. And it’s also humbling to know [children] know more than we do about this topic of being gender expansive.” Ehrensaft also believes that the transgender revolution is the next phase of the 60s feminist movement that featured challenging stereotypes about gender.
Philosophically, Ehrensaft believes that transgenderism is derived by a “gender web” which is influenced by culture, upbringing, and nature. She asserts that each person’s “web” will change over time as they age. Or put another way, gender is not the same thing as biological sex, and, in fact, supercedes it. That is, a person is what they identify as, not what they are biologically. On top of that, she believes that biology should give way to identity, not the other way around.
So, what can we gather from all of this? The first thing is that Ehrensaft, in spite of working at a hospital, has no use for actual science. Her gender expansive beliefs have no backing in science whatsoever.
A second thing we can gather is that, in Ehrensaft’s world, ideology trumps everything else. It is certainly true that kids can be influenced by culture and their upbringing, but that says absolutely nothing about the actual reality of gender. What does affect a child’s gender is the last of her three sources – nature. Every person born on the planet has the DNA of a male or a female. The concept that gender is something separate from a person’s biological sex is simply a fabrication. She can claim that gender is fluid until the cows come home, but that doesn’t make it true. She lives a delusion.
Ehrensaft’s beliefs derive from a naturalistic worldview – which demonstrates one of the major flaws of that worldview system. There is no source for morality that science can study. At the same time, every human has a strong internal moral compulsion that cannot be ignored.
And here’s where the serious problem emerges: If people get to make up their own morality, it is quite possible that in some circumstances, moral beliefs might conflict with some things we know from science – as in the case of transgender ideology.
A child can pretend to be a Minotaur, but cannot be one. A child can pretend to be someone of the opposite sex, but cannot change biologically. And when that child is unable to know the difference between reality and their pretend beliefs, they have begun to live a delusion which constitutes a mental illness. Beyond that, those who encourage children to defy reality actually cause them real damage – possibly both physical and psychological – and are themselves suffering from a delusion. In spite of Ehrensaft’s belief that her point of view reflects reality, her Naturalism simply does not.