Surgical and Sexological Practices? Not Today, Satan

Andrew Sullivan, Judith Butler, and CS Lewis

“I hate this book,” said my child, removing an earbud.

“What book?” I asked.

“The Screwtape Letters,” he replied.

“Oh yeah,” said another child. “That’s the worst. Get out of my head, Dr. Lewis. You Don’t Know Me.”

Except he does though.

Photo by Soyoung Han on Unsplash

I wanted something light and fluffy for today, since I have so much to do and so little time to do it. But then a dear friend sent me this long rant by Andrew Sullivan, who afflicted himself by reading Judith Butler’s latest book which he describes as “decipherable” but “inelegant.” He takes this new readability as a hopeful sign, that the tide of gender confusion and insanity is perhaps turning. Butler, and that extraordinarily wicked person, Andrea Long Chu who made a case for the transing of children in New York Magazine, are not relying “on the media, the government, and the courts to impose their ideas by fiat” but are taking their arguments to the general public. This must represent some measure of desperation. The release of those WPATH files combined with the airtime de-transitioners are getting in places like the New York Times indicates that there is plenty of work to do to convince both lofty academic and humble normie to persist in doing “the work.”

I am not entirely persuaded about the hopefulness of this shift, but I was delighted to hear what is happening, in general, to the entire “community” that persistently attempts to find their essential identity in anything related to sex. In the words of Sullivan:

That’s why the Trevor Project, the massively-funded TQ+ organization, now tells troubled young gay kids that a gay man is defined as someone who has sex with biological women as well as with men. A gay man is not attracted to the same “sex” but to the same “gender” and that now includes biological women. Trevor has abolished homosexuality! It’s why woker-than-woke Grindr, formerly an app for gay men, is now full of straight dudes with profiles that say “NOT INTERESTED IN MEN just don’t bother,” “I don’t like men,” “Str8 4T”, “do not message me if you’re cis or a man,” “Fems and Them No Men,” “No gay men u will be blocked,” and “Im straight not gay.” Just another part of the straight “queer” community.

In the postmodern world where we invent reality hour by hour, depending on how we feel, being gay now includes heterosexual sex — and by far the biggest group in the “LGBTQIA+” umbrella are bisexual women in relationships with straight men. At some point, gay men will wake up and realize that they have abolished their own identity — indeed merged it into its opposite. But they have another tea dance to get to and another Instagram vacation pic to post. Most are pathetically uninformed, or programmed by tribal insecurity to follow the queering herd.

All my children, not just the two aforementioned, are binging on Lewis right now. If I made up a drinking game for every time I heard “C.S. Lewis” or “Tolkien says,” around here I would have to be locked away. Instead, I’m just folding laundry and eating cheese, and listening to them argue. No matter what I’m reading or thinking about, eventually, I’m going to end up back in Narnia or St. Anne’s

This paragraph, indeed Sullivan’s whole article, strikes me as a prescient amalgamated illustration of some of Lewis’ most visceral images. The idea of a lot of gay men getting onto an app to hook up with other gay men, only to find the site populated with women and straight men, is deeply comforting to me. All of the letters of the l.g.b.t.q.i.a.+. acronym suddenly being devoured by themselves is basically the end of That Hideous Strength. (spoilers ahead—but the book has been out for quite long enough that it’s not my fault if you haven’t read it) I’m sure you remember how babble descended suddenly over the dinner at Belbury, of course. Wither was speaking, but no one could understand him. The Fairy realizes what is happening, only in time to be devoured by a tiger or something. As violent death overtakes most of the assembled throng, Mr. Bultitude manages to find Merlin—if I’m not completely jumbling the events of the evening.

Even more to the aesthetic point, as the chaos winds down, Lewis shifts the scene to the weird dance of Wither, Filostrato, and Straik, to their grotesque communal murder. I can’t describe this part because I always skim it, in horror, praying that the details won’t lodge themselves in my dreams, though I do love how Lewis describes Frost bending his whole will to “the Message” (Lewis didn’t say it like that, but the Critical Drinker does) and then lighting himself on fire.

The second image that popped to mind, after reading the whole of Sullivan’s piece, was Lewis’ bus ride to heaven, the seats replete with people from hell who thought they might be able to bear it. If you thought the image of an Anglican Bishop wandering around heaven arguing against the existence of God was on point, imagine what it would have been like to have Judith Butler show up in The Great Divorce. This ghostly body is just a social construct, she would say. When will everyone repent of their whiteness? Do you even know, checks notes, how dimorphism serves the reproduction of the normative white family?

Everything she says is so dumb, and yet, because it sounds important, and because she really believes it, so many students, and now regular people I guess, have had to suffer through her obtuse and exhausting writing “style.” Take this bit quoted by Sullivan (I’m not going to read her book, you can’t make me):

The hetero-normative framework for thinking of gender as binary was imposed by colonial powers on the Global South, to track the legacies of slavery and colonialism engaged in brutal surgical and sexological practices of determining and “correcting” sex in light of ideals of whiteness … Gender norms were created through surgical racism. Black bodies were the experimental field from which white gender norms were crafted. Dimorphism serves the reproduction of the normative white family in the United States.

Remember, whenever you’re reading anything like this, that the necessary conclusion of terms like “brutal surgical and sexological practices” is two demon-possessed men trying to negotiate the third demon-possessed man up to the hidden guillotine in the wall so they can offer another “head” to the “Head.”

Butler, though overweeningly serious, is yet not nearly as serious as Satan who really does want every man, woman, and child to die and go to hell. And along the way, to consume as much unreadable prose and be as miserable as possible in the name of the Revolution.

Fortunately for us, Satan lacks self-control. He can’t keep anything within reasonable proportion. He can’t be content with transing just some of the kids. He must trans all of them. He must destroy every human body on the way to devouring every precious soul. And so, eventually, all the confused speech becomes such a deafening cacophony of lies, that all the “surgical racism,” whatever that is, will be seen for what it is—total and complete evil.

Back away, my Dears. Rapidly back away. Flee to the mountains. Run as far as you can from this ugly madness as quickly as you can. Eat toast. Take a walk. Buy a pretty dress if you’re a biological woman or a nice suit jacket if you’re a biological man, or, better yet, a hat if you have sense and gumption. Rearrange your living room furniture to make the effect more comfortable and pleasing. Start your seedlings (in a few weeks). Read a funny book. And when someone tries to make you feel uncomfortable in your body, or lie about the purposes and designs for which you are made, make merciless fun of them while eating chocolates and drinking a thimble of sherry. Oh, and go to Church. Ye gods, Go To Church.

Have a nice day!