When President Trump announced on Inauguration Day that there were “only two genders” he pulled the Overton Window in an inch or two. There would be no more “T” in “LGBT.” Whether Trump was standing on principle or merely reading the room doesn’t really matter in the end. The “window” offered little resistance. A weary public, relentlessly forced to disbelieve what it plainly saw, was relieved.
Liberals were against the “T” for minors, because minors could not yet consent to what were life-altering procedures and life-long pharmaceutical regimens. Old-school feminists were against it for everyone. The “T” erased the demographic they had spent years fighting for: actual biological women with unique claims and grievances. It threatened their privacy in bathrooms and their hard-won achievement in that equal-but-separate domain of women’s sports. Most importantly, it threatened their greatest accomplishment: the production of the new girl, purged of any recommended course of action—especially the traditional one—by which she would become a woman.
As Helen Joyce said in Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, feminists had established the being of women, independent of their doing. No sooner had women become free “to do whatever the hell they wanted,” than they had to become “men” just because they liked playing football or were attracted to women. Being compelled to affirm that men were really “women” because they liked wearing lipstick and were attracted to men was no less galling. Years of effort to establish the “LGB” and the “F” had vanished, and all because of that one crossed letter!
Labelled “Trans Agnostic Reactionary Liberals” (TARLs) or “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists” (TERFs)—and these were the polite names—these dissidents from the new unreality took refuge on Substack. Then they won. With characteristic reserve, the Wall Street Journal reports that the “honeymoon phase for trans acceptance may be over.”
But the victory is a pyrrhic one and unlikely to last. To reject the “T” on grounds that it is “homophobic” and “sexist” is to affirm that we are for the “LGB” … and the “F.” But what is so sacrosanct about being a man or a woman, when it has been gutted of its dynamism, its marital and procreative end, and everything that helps men and women get there? If it is a “stereotype” that men and women are ordered to each other, and not what it means to be a man or a woman, then there is little to no reason why a man “must” identify as a man, and a woman as a woman. The “T’ made that clear.
Transgenderism was the culminating battle in a decades-long war against marriage and (giving) birth. Contraception, sterilization, abortion, IVF, divorce, gay marriage, surrogacy—had long been, and still are, part and parcel of the broad and technologically-powered refusal to acknowledge and live by the obvious, symbolic, and purposive status of our male and female bodies.
The fact of being male or female, however, still stood there in stubborn defiance. The war would not be complete unless and until we were free from that, the condition of our own births. That was Ground Zero. And transgenderism was its atomic bomb.
Social conservatives, who, of course, are not for the “LGB,” are nevertheless partially to blame for this “victory.” When they decided to die on the hill of “biological sex” with the TERFS, they joined the feminist chorus against “stereotypes,” the word used to mis-name, then dismiss, the entire tradition of cultivating the sexes in distinct ways in view of their common and generative life together. If the sexes could not be interchangeable in the bedroom, they could be so at least socially in the boardroom (and the nursery and the kitchen). Indeed, conservatives now rush into the public square flaunting their feminist bona fides and wielding the new “conservative consensus,” denouncing any laggards who would dare suggest what once was obvious, namely that the two realms are not so easily separated.
Naturally, a man is not a man because he likes football and is attracted to women, or that he ceases to be one because he wears lipstick and is attracted to men. It is the other way around. Because he is a man, he is encouraged to play football—or something like it—and discouraged from wearing lipstick. Far from a rigid straitjacket, this encouragement keeps him out of one, because it helps him to distinguish himself as a man with respect to a woman, so that he will move toward her.
The commonplace that nurture is a “construct” is itself a construct. Nature demands nurture. So much so that even the most apparently “merely biological” aspects of it require to be raised, cultivated. As biologists say, the human baby is “born a year too early,” such that were it deprived of the “extra-uterine” year in the “social womb” of the family, it would not even learn to stand up and speak. And just as these two quintessential aspects of being human would be crippled without nurture, so too would a child’s development as a boy or girl.
Indeed, every civilization has sought to guide boys and girls into mature men and women, through education and custom (manners, dress, dance, etc.), so that they would be capable of meeting each other in a human way, prepared for taking up the cultural task of raising children in a home at the heart of society. Civilizations depended on it.
That meant, too, that they took seriously the different demands of children on a mother and a father. Both, of course, raised, nurtured, and educated their children, and worked for them; but they did it differently, just as they had both generated their children, differently, through different contributions and activities. The mother nurtured the child in, then from her body, and directly. The father from outside his body, and indirectly, by providing food and protection for the mother. They weren’t just two generic parents, divvying up generic care-giving functions, or taking turns doing the same things in the way any two adults could do. They were living out what made them necessary to each other and to their children in the first place, doing different things—and giving each other different things—at the same time, together. And that made all the difference.
That is why, for millennia, girls were prepared for what their mothers did: the kind of work that could be done in greater proximity to children. This work solidified and manifested the necessity of the sexes for each other, providing the child—and the world—with its most “primary education”: an image of what stands at the origin of the whole ordered cosmos: a communion.
When a culture like ours decides to suppress, rather than cultivate, the reality of manhood and womanhood, these become crippled to the point of un-meaning. The tragic irony of the relentless “you go girl” message is that “being a girl” becomes nothing but a stereotype—because it means nothing but what the cognoscenti tell her it means. Transgenderism has done us a great service here: it took that feminist construct of an end-less, atomized, uncultivated and yet still (somehow) factual sex and put it on like an empty dress.
The result is as catastrophic as it is inevitable. Eros has disappeared. The sexes, especially the female one, have been inoculated against their hearts’ desires. They are on parallel tracks, both “going places,” but not towards each other. Meeting each other is a project to be undertaken, and late in time when all their “ducks are in a row.” Children are an afterthought, if a thought at all (as is increasingly the case in the most progressive countries). Or, in the conservative case, they are a thought—if it’s not too late. But their “care” is outsourced to the “Child Development Center,” the institution dear to all the early enemies of the family, as it happens. At home the couple negotiates their “parenting.” Their marriage is as Wendell Berry puts it: “an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and … a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended.” The sexes may be together but not as necessary to each other.
This new arrangement, of course, came about in large part because of the alienation of the economy from the home, as Lasch, Carlson, Illich, and now Mary Harrington have all pointed out. Since everyone wants to be where the action is, women are now caught between “participating in the economy” or participating in the lives of their children (no longer considered an essential part of “the action”). They practice detachment parenting. But it is no solution to cede to “the economy” the last form of home production: mother’s milk, and everything that goes with it, most especially quantity time with her children.
The most recent battle proved to be a bridge too far; but excommunicating the “T” is bound to remain as short-lived as it is arbitrary, if we are simply returning to the project that made transgenderism possible in the first place: the hollowing out of “biological sex.”
The “window” will be opened again, unless we recover the full and living reality of men and women, all the way up, and the fundamental importance of their distinctly common activity for a society that is human, one that is at home with the thing that makes human life possible in the first place.
For a start, we should release the next generation of girls from the forced march their mothers and grandmothers were on toward disembodied goals (and fruitless heartache).
Margaret Harper McCarthy is Associate Professor of Theological Anthropology at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington DC, and the editor of Humanum Review. Come and hear her keynote address at our 2026 New Polity Conference: Man, Woman, Tyrant, Slave.
