“Pick your gender” the cultural soothsayers tell us, suggesting that even children can make the decision. Oh, but wait a minute. Isn’t there something these devious hucksters are missing? You bet there is, and without it, anything goes.

We know what’s missing here. The expectant couple knows what’s missing. What’s missing is the truth. Basic biology reveals the truth, and of course, the word of God tells us the truth as well: Barring a chromosomal abnormality, gender is either male or female. There is no third gender. Or fourth, fifth, sixth, or so on.

When the first man and first woman were created by God, He did not provide either of them with an option to change their gender. In fact, scripture tells us (Genesis 1:27): “God created man in the image of Himself, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.”

Cardinal Robert Sarah wrote of this very thing, saying: “Gender ideology is a Luciferian refusal to receive a sexual nature from God.” Such an evil system of belief can, as Bishop Peter Elliott makes clear, only lead to ruin for those who embrace it because they are enmeshed in the still-evolving sexual revolution which rejects God, distorts the nature of the human person, and separates fertility from sexual intimacy.

All we need to do is look around us to witness firsthand what Bishop Elliott is saying. Our gender-bender culture is on a tear. The antidote is more spiritual leaders who will help shine the light of truth sooner rather than later.

One who has shined this light is Michael Burbidge, the bishop of Arlington, Virginia. He prepared “A Catechesis on the Human Person and Gender Ideology.” Burbidge teaches that

in keeping with the authoritative witness of scripture (cf. Gen 1:27), the human person is created male or female. The human soul is created to animate and be embodied by one particular, specifically male or female, body. A person’s sex is an immutable biological reality, determined at [creation]. The sexed body reveals God’s design not only for each individual person, but also for all human beings, by “establishing us in a relationship with other living beings.”

Expanding on the obvious versus our cultural fascination with gender discontent, Fr. Shenan Boquet puts everything into proper perspective, writing:

As I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, human beings have assigned biological sex at birth using an extremely simple procedure for untold ages. It is true that in extraordinarily rare cases a child may be born with ambiguous genitalia, making it difficult to determine sex. This condition is called “intersex” and happens about 0.018% of the time. The rest of the time, however, a quick glance at the baby’s genitals is enough to assign biological sex with certitude. This is the “consensus criteria” that every doctor or midwife for thousands of years has used, and there is no compelling scientific reason to abandon it.

It is incomprehensible to many of us that we have to address this matter. But obviously the slide from free love to eugenics to value-free sex instruction to contraception and abortion and more continues to create depravity at every level of society. If you cannot believe that there are folks who are working to ensure that birth certificates no longer indicate the sex of the newborn, then this entire crazy juggernaut has left you in the dust. That is not where anyone needs to be right now.

One of my favorite journalists, Michael Cook, uncovered a very old book by H. G. Wells, and he wrote this about Wells: “As early as 1913, H.G. Wells, the pioneering British science fiction writer, predicted the emergence of transgenderism. If he were alive today, he would probably be one of its most effective propagandists.”

In the opening sentence of the obscure novel The World Set Free, Wells wrote: “The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power.” And Cook points out, “In other words, we are not homo sapiens but homo faber [man the maker]. Humanity’s destiny is not wisdom or communion with God, but discovering how to dominate nature. It is a very Marxist notion and unsurprisingly Wells was a fervent socialist.”

So we return to the simple truth that, without an understanding of God, nature, and the human person, anything goes. And it does. Gender choice is not the end, but it does remind us that once man loses his sense of God, the human person is a mere thing to be disrespected, manipulated, and killed.