The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

This distinction between gender and sex is now a basic element of contemporary notions of identity. The whole transgender question depends on it, for if sex and gender are inextricably connected, then a mismatch between what one is biologically and who one is psychologically must inevitably be regarded as a dysfunction of the mind. Once the two are detached from each other—something that can only really be plausible in a world in which psychology rather than biology is seen as fundamentally determinative of identity—then the problem becomes one of the body, to be treated with medication and surgery. Technology therefore makes the whole claim plausible. Technology, one might even say, defines ontology.