Claims by LGBT activists philosophically inconsistent

Dear Editor,
Recently there has been much talk about the issue of gay rights and the decriminalisation of same-sex relations in Guyana. Many of these arguments, however, do not provide a single substantive basis for gay rights. The reason for this is that the pro-LGBT position lacks robust philosophical arguments to support it. The following explains why:
Contrary to what they may want us to believe, the claims of the LGBT activists are philosophically inconsistent and filled with internal contradictions. These activists never acknowledge the internal contradictions.
If one should listen to them carefully, they opportunistically depend on whatever claim works best for them at the moment. At the heart of the LGBT movement is the radical idea about the human person: people are who they claim to be, regardless of evidence to the contrary. And so the argument is an ontological assertion that a person is the gender identity they claim to be. That’s their claim; that’s their metaphysics.
Yet they do not admit that this is a metaphysical claim because they want to avoid the debate on the philosophical level. What they do is dress up their argument with all sorts of pseudo-scientific and medical assertions.
They argue that a person can have, as the American Psychological Association puts it, a “gender identity, gender expression, or behaviour that does not confirm to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth”. Please note the political language used here: a person’s sex is “assigned at birth.”
This phrase is favoured because it allows for one’s gender identity to be the real basis of a person’s sex. Thus Dr Deanna Adkins – a professor at Duke University School of Medicine and Director of the Duke Centre for Child and Adolescent Gender Care – can state, in an expert declaration to a federal district court in North Carolina concerning the HB2 law, that “the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity.”
This is a very remarkable statement, because she argues that gender identity is, not only the preferred basis for determining sex, but the “only medically supported determinant of sex.” This method, according to Adkins, “is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for the purposes of classifying someone as male or female.” What she is saying here is that biological sex is a social construct and gender identity is reality. And what is gender identity? The American Psychological Association defines it as “a person’s sense of being male, female, or something else.” Thus they assert that gender is not restricted to the binary identity of male or female: a person may be one, both, or neither.
Editor, this is where their position becomes philosophically inconsistent and contradictory. On one hand, they embrace a materialist philosophy, while on the other they claim that the real self is something other than the physical body. They say that gender – the maleness or femaleness of a person – is a social construct while asserting that a person is somehow “trapped” or “was born” in the wrong body, with the wrong gender.
They say that truth is whatever someone wishes to define it and that people are free to do whatever they want to (thus promoting a radical expressive individualism), and yet they assert that there is a real person to be discovered inside of us and they are calling for everyone to accept their ideology. They want us to acknowledge that this is who they are and give them the right to live their real lives.
Is one’s gender determined biologically in the womb? And is gender binary or not? If it is not, how is it defined? If it is “fluid”, why is it different from biological gender and expressed on a spectrum? What does it mean to have an “internal sense of gender”? What is this “internal sense” and how do one know they have it? What does being male, female, both, or neither feel like apart from the physical body? Furthermore, how can these feelings make someone a man, or a woman, both, or even neither?
The challenge for LGBT activists is to explain what these feelings are, and if they can adequately explain what they are, they need to explain how they arrived at that. Yet I believe the tougher challenge for the LGBT activists is, why do our feelings determine the reality of our gender and not anything else? Can my feelings determine my race, or height, or age? If persons whose identity makes them the gender they identify, why doesn’t this apply to other characteristics or attributes of being? Why can’t someone identify as another species, say a horse or a dog? These are the inconsistencies they need to acknowledge and explain.
Editor, the LGBT activists in Guyana want the authority of science and the state to be on their side as they make metaphysical claims. I am challenging them and anyone who supports their position to articulate some conception of truth as the basis for how we understand the common good and how our society should be order. Until they are able to do so, I advocate for the legislation prohibiting same-sex relations to remain in Guyana.

Sincerely,
Ronald N Emanuel
University of the
Southern Caribbean
Trinidad