In the cultural whiplash of the first month of President Trump’s second term, two executive orders on gender ideology have brought government-sanctioned gender activism to a screeching halt. On his first day in office, the president affirmed the biological fact that male and female are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” Eight days later, he prohibited federal funding for “gender-affirming care” for children. The actions are a welcome step in the right direction, as federal agencies under the Biden administration hailed “gender-affirming care” as “medically necessary and life-saving.”
But lasting social change will take more than executive and legal changes, positive and significant as they are. Because the cultural “ingredients” that created our age of gender confusion have been marinating into our collective consciousness for the last 60 years.
Political scientist Samuel Huntington observed that cultures experience a moral revolution about every 60 years. These revolutions are marked by institutional distrust, social revulsion, and what he called “creedal passion.” In 1981, Huntington even predicted a new moral revolution would erupt in America … right about now.
But to understand where we are now, we must consider the preceding moral revolution, the previous time of “creedal passion” that occurred 60 years ago. Because, some two generations later, we’re still living its fallout.
The sexual revolution in the 1960s and concurrent 2nd wave feminist movement upended cultural baseline views on everything from sex, gender, and marriage, to morality, family, and personal fulfillment. Every tradition was held in suspicion. Every social expectation, scrutinized as a preservation of power imbalance.
Now, 60 years later, the movements have come full circle. Women have become so liberated from their biology that, in the name of gender equality, they no longer have an unquestioned right to sex-specific spaces and sports. Now that they’re free to approach marriage purely in terms of emotional fulfillment., iIf their husband decides to live as a woman, they become a “trans widow.”
This tidal wave of gender dysphoria, gender ideology, transgender identities is not a departure from the sexual revolution and the feminist movement. It’s not as though some kind of ideological tributary originated in the last decade. Rather, the trans movement was and is now, the overflow of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement. The chaos we’re living in is a consequence of the ideas preceding it.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine)
Katie McCoy is director of women’s ministry at Texas Baptists.