What My Son’s Soccer Taught Me About The Gender Revolution

The question hit me with fresh force as I read it:

‘What gender is your child?’

I had read and answered similar questions before, at least about my gender. But this question from my son’s local soccer club about his gender gave the following options:

‘Male’, ‘female’, ‘prefer not to say’, or ‘gender fluid’.

Gender fluid. 

For a local soccer club (not to mention Football Australia) to ask whether your child is ‘gender-fluid’ made me realise something: the transgender revolution is not something out there amongst inner-city secular progressives who accept gender ideology. It’s now affecting everyone, including my children. Sure, we haven’t, as a family, signed onto the (trans)gender revolution. But our culture has, and in a big way.

Just think about it: Five years ago, for a soccer club to ask if your child is gender fluid would have raised parental eyebrows. And ten years ago, such a question would have been unthinkable (most of us then didn’t even have a category for ‘gender fluid’). 

But today, most soccer mums and dads shrug their shoulders and move on.

And across our culture, the number of gender non-conforming children has skyrocketed. Writing about the British Tavistock Centre and its Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), author Hannah Barnes writes:

‘Since 2007 [GIDS] had grown from a small team that saw 50 young people each year to a nationally commissioned service treating thousands.’

And just as disturbingly, the people presenting at the clinic had changed:

‘Whereas most of the literature on gender non-conforming children was about boys who had a life-long sense of gender incongruence, GIDS’s waiting room was overpopulated with teenage girls whose distress around their gender had only started in adolescence.’

It’s the cultural sea we’re swimming in.

While these changes raise urgent questions – such as why the sudden increase in gender non-conforming adolescent girls? and how we care well for gender non-conforming people (especially children)?, my question is more basic:

How did such a moral revolution happen so quickly? 

It’s made me think of the various steps of moral revolutions outlined by English writer and thinker Theo Hobson. In his view, for a full moral reversal – a moral revolution – to take place, three conditions much be met: 

1) What was condemned must be celebrated

Until around 20 years ago, the Biblical (and historical) view of marriage as between one man and one woman was widely celebrated.

Heterosexuality was the norm, and there were only two genders (aligned with our sex). Anything outside that was seen as being outside the norm. 

But today, homosexuality and gender fluidity aren’t merely tolerated as equal views: they are actively celebrated and promoted – even to school children. From Wear It Purple days to the mass marketing of Pride Week, all LGBTIQ identities are honoured and held up as good, true and beautiful. 

2) What was celebrated must now be condemned

The Biblical understanding of marriage and gender is now condemned as oppressive and harmful.

Teaching these values to children is increasingly considered suspect, as the recent Australian Law Reform Commission Report argues. If you haven’t heard, the Federal Government tasked the Australian Law Reform Commission Report to report on Religious Schools and how to handle Religious Freedom. Its recent report argues for removing religious freedom protection for religious schools. 

As Neil Foster, an Associate Professor of Law and expert on Religious Freedom, points out:

‘[The Report] effectively recommends the removal of protections enjoyed by religious educational institutions which have been designed to safeguard the ability of these organisations to operate in accordance with their religious beliefs. The “fences” protecting these bodies from being forced to conform to majority views on sexual behaviour and identity (and hence losing their distinctiveness as religious bodies) are to be knocked down, the ALRC says.’

 If the ALRC had it’s way, religious schools will no longer be allowed to be…religious. At least not when sexuality and gender are concerned. 

What was celebrated must now be condemned – culturally and, increasingly, legally.

3) Those who will not join in celebrating the moral revolution must be condemned

The transgender moral revolution doesn’t believe in ‘live and let live’ disagreement.

You must be condemned if you have the audacity to raise some basic questions about the moral revolution.  Just ask J.K. Rowling.

She was cancelled for raising the concern a few years ago that ‘trans-women’ (i.e. biological males identifying as women) are different from biological women.  

But it’s not just celebrities and public figures that face cancellation if they speak up. Any parent who dares raise questions about why their daughter has to play against biological boys in a girls-only soccer competition will not be popular with the likes of the ABC or The Age. 

Any religious leader who promotes Biblical sexuality is at risk of attack.

And if you’re an employee who doesn’t wear purple on said days, the questions from colleagues and HR will soon come if they’re not already coming. 

What might be next?

While it’s impossible to know what’s next in the moral revolution, there are signs that it has overreached, at least regarding gender ideology. Like all revolutions that try and overturn God’s good creation order (communism, anyone?), reality has a way of pushing back and making itself known. 

Many medical practitioners are raising questions about the ethics of carte-blanch gender-affirming care. Regarding gender ideology, ‘de-transitioners’ – those that have transitioned but now regret it, are making their voices known. Some sporting bodies are pushing back against rules that allow biological males to compete against females. And even the Secular-Left newspaper like the New York Times has run articles questioning gender affirming therapies of trans kids (earning the ire of LGBTIQ activists, in line with point #3, above).

Those are encouraging signs. But, on the other hand, perhaps this revolution has a long way to go before it burns itself out.