The Supreme Court in the United Kingdom recently ruled that the legal definition of a woman is someone who is biologically female. In the United States, a return to sanity from the madhouse of transgenderism is apparent in our Supreme Court’s recent ruling that people who believe they were born in the wrong body may be banned from serving in the military. Earlier this year, employees with the Federal Government were prohibited from indicating preferred pronouns in email signatures (see here). These are hopeful signs, but we are not out of the woods yet — not by a long shot. The temporary reprieve from the sick fantasy that sex is an opt-out, malleable category may end up being a harbinger of better things to come, or it may be the eye of the transgender storm. My personal view is that we have only begun to be chastised for the depravity we have chosen.

Here at this turning, however, when glimmers of good sense are again visible on the cultural horizon and we have some room to breathe, let us pause to take stock of how we got here, of why the path through the season of transgenderism has been so twisted and dark.

It is true, as has been pointed out elsewhere (here), that transgenderism is at root demonic. The devil hates us. He wants to destroy our humanity and confound us into joining him in Hell. There are few better ways to do that than by tripping us up at the very platform of our human natures, at our sex, our bodily mode of existing in the physical world. To whisper to us that a man can become a woman, or a woman a man, is to upend our humanity and send the weaker-minded among us tumbling into the abyss. But there is another thread to the story, one that has not often been followed. Between the devil and the soul sometimes passes a complicating veil of psychological rupture. Some of those who today claim to be transgender may be trying, heroically in a way, to repair the breach between the sexes, caused in turn by the blanket denial of sexual difference in our postmodern world. Transgenderism may be a medicine, however poisonous, for a psyche that is truly sick, but sick because others have cavalierly pretended that what is sinful is beneficial, and what is harmful is liberating.

For decades, Americans, and many in other countries, too, have practiced radical individualism and even self-worship in a variety of forms. Children born during the “Me Decade” (see here) and after have seen the rotten fruits of that decadence firsthand. Can it be a coincidence that divorce rates in America skyrocketed two generations before widespread confusion about sex — often peddled as the pseudo-scientific ravings of gender theorists — began to take hold? The children of the Me Decade grew up gravely wounded by their parents’ family-wrecking selfishness. Their children grew up resigned to the sexual nihilism of American society, wholly barbaric, devoid of moral code. And yet, for some sensitive souls in both generations, the conscience will prick all the same. Something, they will intuit, is not right. Transgenderism for such people could be a way to bring back together the sexual mores that the Me Decade destroyed, a way of groping toward a higher morality while remaining mired in the rank depravity of the age. To put it bluntly, a man in drag may be making a statement that he proudly believes in nothing. Or, rarely, he may be trying to say that he wishes there was a world in which men and women could come together in communion to form families, a communion that he can now only mock by pretending to be the idealized image of a mother.

This psychologizing notwithstanding, the age of gender dysphoria is probably not entirely a byproduct of divorce. Surely most people who strut about in the opposite sex’s clothing today do so for attention, or out of boredom, or because everyone else is doing it, or in pursuit of even more sinister designs such as preying on children. But there must surely also be some lost souls who don a dress, in the case of a man, or lop off their breasts, in the case of a woman, in hopes of bridging a chasm that others, not they, have formed. To be transgender in 2025 may, perhaps, be a pathetic confession that one hurts deeply because of a childhood divorce and has no idea what to do about it apart from pretending to be both mother and father in one person. For every garden-variety lunatic who slathers on lipstick and plops on a wig and thinks he has truly become a female, there may be a woman or man whose attempts at changing sex may be, in fact, an attempt at re-marrying, in the child’s body, the mother and father whose split was a trauma that never healed.

I have long suspected this because I, like so many others my age, know that divorce is an irrecoverable loss. When I was five — now well more than four decades ago — my parents told me they were divorcing. I never got over it. At five, one doesn’t understand the legal and social ramifications of the word “divorce.” But one understands perfectly, all too clearly, that it means that one’s father is going to be living in another house. But as clearly as I knew what was going on, society around me was intent on lying about divorce, probably for society’s benefit, although everyone seemed to believe that the lying was to help me. At any rate, what came after that day when my little world was broken in two was a series of pathetic attempts at make-believe. In the spirit of the New Age-y day, my brother and I were taken to a counselor who had us draw pictures of a “divorce monster” and throw rubber darts at it, as though we were too stupid to know that the real problem was not a crayon sketch on construction paper but the fact that our father was no longer in our home.

But the hard reality of a broken family was always the same. The shattered days stretched on forever. Our parents each eventually remarried and thus began the idiotic adventure of the “blended family.” Our years, our lives, were warped by split holidays, shuttle diplomacy between warring family camps, strangers called step-siblings, even stranger strangers called step-uncles and step-aunts, and the unconquerable sadness of a life lived in the shadow of the one that ought to have been. I would have given anything, done anything, to bring my parents back together. I still would.

When I was growing up I never heard the word “transgender.” Dressing up in women’s clothes was a Halloween prank, maybe, but not something anyone did expecting to be taken seriously. I look back now, though, and shudder, for if transgenderism had been part of American life earlier, while I was in my formative years, I might have decided that bringing my mother and father together in my own body was the only way to get over the death of our family when my parents divorced while I was still in kindergarten. Had the horrors of transgenderism been in my field of vision when I was in my early teens, I might have gone to such extremes to re-harmonize, by the ghoulish alchemy that transgender offers, what I knew should never have been torn asunder, on God’s law or man’s. In jumping, albeit impossibly, from my male body into that of a woman’s, I might have attempted a kind of latter-day onanistic Oedipalism, bringing back together in my self what had fallen to pieces around me when I was a boy.

How we became transgender is a complex tale, to be sure. I do not suggest that everyone who flirts with that demonic mummery has the good of others at heart. Probably the number of those who succumb to transgenderism out of altruistic motives is very few. But I suspect that there must be some, somewhere, who know deep down that the lie they tell themselves and others about their bodies and souls is a lie that comes from a wound cut deep in their childhood. If people who claim to be transgender are honest with themselves, I wonder how many will admit that their grotesque make-believe is the distortion of a desire to make whole again what divorcing parents devastated long ago.