Only slightly less extreme ideas are being propounded by queer theologians. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, for example, suggests that:
All of us are therefore called to confront the binary gender construct for our own good and the good of those who are transgender. Because gender roles are by no means equitable, binary gender assumptions and roles are devastating to all of us – “masculine” men, “feminine” women, and those somewhere in the middle.26
Mollenkott, therefore, anticipates and champions an omnigender future in which everyone “would have their own unique sexuality, falling in love with another person because of their emotional response to the person’s entire being, not the person’s genitals.”27 In such a future, birth certificates and driver licences would not record a person’s sex or gender, individuals would be free to change their bodies by any means available, and all bathrooms, sports and even prisons would be unisex. Those who fear such a prospect, Mollenkott claims, are reacting “out of loyalty to the idea that there really is an essential feminine and masculine binary that is either God’s will or nature’s perpetual norm or both.”28
d) The shape of the future
This is the future that LGBTQ+ ideologues and activists are seeking to realise and, to some extent, have already achieved. In 2014, for example, the Vancouver School Board instructed teachers to replace he/she with xe, him/her with xem, and his/hers with xyr.29 In a slight variation on this, the University of Iowa has more recently opted for ‘ze’, ‘zem’ and ‘zir’.30 Numerous other schools and colleges are fast following suit with various alternative sets of pronouns.31
Going a step further, in January 2015, City University in New York (CUNY) announced the introduction of a policy not only banning all gendered titles and salutations but banning all pronouns completely. Students and staff are all to be referred to only by their first and last names. In fact, according to Dominique Nisperos, co-chair of the Doctoral Students’ Council at CUNY, “eliminating the use of pronouns … is a necessary step toward protecting the rights, privacy, and safety of students.”32
Going further still, in 2015, at Washington State University, students who enrolled in a class called “Women & Popular Culture” were threatened with “failure for the semester” for using offensive language, such as “referring to women/men as females or males.”33 In this case, the university authorities were forced to step in and reassure students that no one “will have points docked merely as a result of using terms that may be deemed offensive to some.”34 Nevertheless, such is the momentum of the sex and gender revolution, that the making good of such a threat may not be too far off.
As a final indication of where things are heading, on March 10, 2017, The Multnomah County Court in Oregon granted a 27-year-old video game designer named Patch, a “General Judgment of Name and Sex Change,” so that he might only be registered as mononymous – that is, as only having one name instead of a given name and a surname – but also registered as genderless. In defense of her decision, Judge Helen Hehn told an NBC reporter: “I made these decisions, like all decisions, because they were supported by facts and law, and out of respect for the dignity of the people who came before me.”35
But while Judge Hehn and those of like mind believe that their decisions and advocacy reflect “respect for the dignity of the people,” others cannot help but conclude that the deconstruction of sex and the undoing of gender is a recipe for psychological confusion, sexual anarchy, social disintegration, and moral chaos. In any case, this is where many western societies are fast heading. As The New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, wrote in a 2016 Op-Ed piece, there is “a clear movement in our society toward L.G.B.T. equality, a trajectory with only one shape and only one direction.”36 This is confident, triumphalistic language, to be sure, but it is not without a basis. Indeed, despite President Trump’s recent ban on transgender people serving in the military, evidence of such “a clear movement” is all around us and growing daily.37