By Joshua Arnold
The Washington Stand
U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine professed to be shocked — shocked — at the backlash to President Joe Biden proclaiming a Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday. “I felt that it was faux outrage. It was manufactured,” the biological man who identifies as a transgender woman told The Advocate, an LGBT activist publication. Underneath its facial absurdity, this remark actually conveys profound insights into the transgender ideology, so it’s worth examining closely.
1. Calendar Coincidence
The Biden administration attempted to defend their actions as merely a coincidence of the calendars. “It’s just that this Sunday was Easter, which is a very important holiday and very important event, and it also just happened to be the 31st” of March, Levine explained. This explanation likely makes very little sense without the additional knowledge that, 15 years ago, an LGBT activist selected March 31 as the date on which trans activists would celebrate their visibility.
This fact is only a part of general knowledge among two groups: participants in LGBT activist culture and members of the Biden administration. The first group is aware because they created the Transgender Day of Visibility and added it to their pseudo-religious calendar.
The second group is aware because Biden previously proclaimed March 31 as “Transgender Day of Visibility” during his first year in office (the reader may guess how Biden initially stumbled across the idea). Biden then promulgated such knowledge throughout his administration through his “whole-of-government initiative” to advance the LGBT+ agenda.
But those not steeped in the mythology or religious calendar of the LGBT+ ideology — I’ll call them “normal people” for convenient reference — would have little reason to know that the Transgender Day of Visibility falls on March 31, for the very good reason that it has little cultural influence. Someone might have told Biden about this, except that Biden’s “whole-of-government” LGBT propaganda has banished normality from his administration.
By contrast, normal people do know about Easter. Committed Christians observe this day to commemorate Christ’s resurrection, the basis of our hope in the final resurrection, without which “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19). Even those who don’t attend church regularly, and who may not even profess faith in the risen Lord Jesus, have some vague notion that the day is special, sacred, or holy. Many non-Christians will likely make one of their two or three annual church visits on Easter. Even people with little to no exposure to Christianity or church are still exposed to Easter through grocery store displays.
Unsurprisingly, normal people — not just Christians — reacted strongly when the President of the United States appeared to override Easter Sunday to observe a niche, LGBT-activist day instead, and the Biden administration seemed totally unprepared for the backlash. Biden himself flat-out denied issuing the proclamation when asked, insisting, “I didn’t do that,” and reiterating when pressed that a politician claiming otherwise was “thoroughly uninformed.”
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also denied the claims, repeatedly calling them “misinformation done on purpose,” “dishonest,” and “untrue.” “This misinformation out there [is] bad, and it is dividing,” she insisted. It may be bad for Biden, perhaps, due to it dividing his administration from normal people, but that doesn’t nullify the facts. “Easter falls on different Sundays every year, and this year it happened to coincide with Transgender Visibility Day.” Ah yes, that’s all it was.
2. Illegitimate Criticism
The implication of “faux outrage” is that no one could be legitimately offended by the White House acknowledging the Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday. According to Levine, every utterance of protest against this move is disingenuous, motivated by political considerations rather than moral, ethical, procedural, or any other type of concerns.
Yet, consider a few facts:
- LGBT+ activists have accumulated more than 50 special days, weeks, and months to observe throughout the year. Not counting “Pride Month” (June), six of them have to do with transgenderism, including “Trans Awareness Month” (November), “Transgender Awareness Week (November 13-19), and “Transgender Day of Remembrance” (November 20). Calendars vary among Christian traditions (Romans 14:5), but most recognize Christmas and Easter as the most significant.
- The date for a “Transgender Day of Visibility” has no significance, while the date for Easter corresponds each year to the day when Jesus Christ rose from the dead, on the third day after his crucifixion, as Christians have testified ever since.
- The “Transgender Day of Visibility” was invented 15 years ago in 2009. Easter dates back nearly 2,000 years.
- President Biden is the only president to recognize “Transgender Day of Visibility” with a presidential proclamation. While Easter is not an official American holiday due to its religious nature, the White House has paid homage to it by hosting an “egg roll” since 1878.
Both the date and the substance of Easter is more significant to Christians than “Transgender Day of Visibility” is to the LGBT+ movement. Both in history and in American practice, Easter has been established for far longer than the “Transgender Day of Visibility.” Such facts support the conclusion that Easter is the more important day to observe.
Yet the Biden administration appeared to reverse the priority; the “Transgender Day of Visibility” got a full-blown presidential proclamation, published on the prior Friday, while Easter had to settle for a statement of less than 100 words, released almost as an afterthought on Sunday itself. Are there no legitimate grounds for criticism or outrage in these facts?
A corollary of Levine’s position is that all criticism of the transgender agenda is illegitimate. That is, no one has any right or reason to be offended by what transgender activists preach, practice, and force others to recognize. This bizarrely sets transgender ideology as the moral plumb line by which all other moral and political viewpoints will be judged.
3. Misunderstood Religious Disagreement
Levine’s comments also misrepresent the nature of the disagreement between Christianity and transgender ideology. His remarks conveyed the sentiment that the days coinciding is no big deal, that both days are important and can both be celebrated. In reality, the days represent a fundamental clash between incompatible and hostile worldviews. One might as well inaugurate a holiday for Jefferson Davis on Juneteenth (I’m sure this suggestion will only generate “faux outrage”) as attempt to reconcile a celebration of transgender ideology with Christ’s resurrection.
Scripture teaches that “God created man in his own image,” both “male and female” (Genesis 1:26). That is, God created both men and women to reflect his own character in distinct but complementary ways. The goodness of God’s design is consummated in marriage, when “a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gensis 2:24).
Jesus interpreted these verses from Genesis as morally prescriptive (Matthew 19:4-6). Even after Jesus’ death and resurrection had established a new covenant in place of the old, the early church still followed the teaching of Jesus and forbade any form of sexual immorality (Acts 15:29). Sexual immorality includes anything that runs counter to God’s good design for sex and marriage, from homosexual behavior and seeking to change one’s sex, to heterosexual intercourse outside of the marriage covenant, to lust (Matthew 5:27-30).
Unfortunately, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). What sets Christians apart is not their sinlessness — although they do strive to put it to death — but their repentance from sin. That is, Christians side with God’s Word against their own sin, bringing it to light, confessing it, and renouncing it. Christians believe the Holy Spirit’s promise, “If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 John 1:9-10).
Where the Transgender Day of Visibility proves most antithetical to Christianity is that it celebrates a lifestyle contrary to the word of God. Jesus Christ offers hope of salvation to “all who are far off” (Acts 2:39), to all who repent and believe. But those who avail themselves of Christ’s blood must not “continue in sin” (Romans 6:1). According to Christianity, those who live proudly in their sins are not role models to be placed on a pedestal, but lost sinners who need God to regenerate their hearts so that they can see their sin as he does and renounce it.
4. Overlooked Provocation
The disagreements between Christianity and transgender ideology do not run in only one direction. As much as Christianity objects to transgender ideology, transgender ideologues also object to Christianity. Trans activists demand totalitarian allegiance, and, like Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 3:19), they are enraged when followers of Jesus refuse to bend the knee.
One consequence of this is that trans ideologues often try to be as deliberately provocative towards Christianity as possible. In February, trans activists under false pretenses obtained permission to hold a funeral for one of their number in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. The ensuing “political theater” was “sacrilegious” and “scandalous” as funeral attendees mocked the church and celebrated the deceased for being a prostitute.
In fact, the “Transgender Day of Visibility” is indistinguishable from this posture of provocation. While many people with gender dysphoria “wish to be perceived as the opposite sex without distinction from those who were conceived as that sex” and so “become unnoticeable,” wrote National Review’s Abigail Anthony, a trans day of visibility serves the interests of “vocal activists who emphasize their status as ‘transgender,’ perhaps as a means to garner more attention.” The goal of such visibility is to force others to notice them and be appalled.
5. Logical Inconsistency
Levine’s comment unintentionally backed himself up into a logical double bind. On the one hand, he argued that any complaint against the Biden administration proclaiming a Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday was “manufactured” and “faux outrage.” At the same time, he accused opponents of transgender ideology of succumbing to fear, hate, and the dark side of the force (in a quote from “Star Wars” character Yoda).
While both positions can be false, they can’t both be true. If it’s fake outrage, then it’s also got to be fake hate. If it’s real hate, then you’ve got to admit that it’s real outrage, too. If might be neither real hate or real outrage, or it might be real outrage for a reason totally unrelated to hate (this option seems likeliest). But it makes no sense for Levine to argue that a group really hates trans-identifying people, but that same group only experiences fake outrage at their very public celebration.
6. Foundational Feelings
Alas, such arguments about logical inconsistency will fail to persuade because it can’t reach to the foundation of the argument.
Levine’s exact quote was, “I felt that it was faux outrage.” It’s right there in the first two words: “I felt.” Feelings are the ultimate source of truth for transgender ideology, and they don’t care about logical contradictions.
All reason, morality, and biology must give way before feelings for the trans ideologue, or else be reshaped to conform to the feelings. No argument of God, Scripture, morality, sanctity, tradition, history, or logic can reach this mysterious wellspring. Feelings are the ultimate trump card.
But this raises another sticky situation. Levine felt that the outrage was manufactured. Many who felt outraged that Biden proclaimed a Transgender Day of Visibility to coincide with Easter — particularly Catholics — felt their outrage to be real. With different people’s feelings asserting contradictory claims, it seems we are at an impasse.
Originally published at The Washington Stand!
