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Book reviews

Joshua Hren’s How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic (TAN Books, 2021)

Written in a high register of literary technical vocabulary which PhD students taught by leftist professors in English would understand more than the average man or woman, Hren’s collection of essays is still worthwhile as substantial reading to understand the idiocy of much contemporary fiction.

Although the 463 pages contain few mentions of fictional literature concerned with the pro-life issues (my central research concern), Hren’s essays can help readers who are forced to suffer through LGBTQ and transgender accounts of quasi-fictional gender dysphoric literary diarrhea.  Moreover, readers will appreciate that the bizarre, sinful, and often laughable elements of those two categories of fiction (among others in the leftist realm of American publishing) are topics which Catholic readers must analyze, evaluate, and even teach.

Hren relies heavily on major Catholic saints and literary figures to justify why not only Catholics, but even secular persons should read novels exploring ideas contrary to ingrained natural law beliefs, including Dana Gioia, Jacques Maritain, St. John Henry Newman, and Flannery O’Connor.

For example, Hren quotes St. John Henry Newman often: “literature is largely a record ‘of man in rebellion’” (2; internal quotes in original), and another quote soon after expands on this idea: “You cannot have a sinless literature of sinful man” (4-5).  With such assertions, it is easy for Hren to conclude that “Catholic thinkers should and even must analyze and teach, appreciate and criticize the sinful literature of man.  Why?  Because most men are not destined for the cloister” (5).  The most significant words from Newman for Catholic writers which Hren quotes may be the following: “Take things as they are, not as you could wish them” (29).

O’Connor’s words about writing fiction can assuage the horror that many moral and righteous readers may feel when they delve into novels deemed important new works by young authors, but which to them seem not merely naughty, but often outright pornographic.  Hren cites O’Connor’s “pious trash” (33) comment, and one can understand how many “religious” novels are often boring, making their hero characters flaccid caricatures or allegories instead of fictional characters meant to represent living human beings.  This is especially true if the “good” characters end the novel with a “come to Jesus” moment, Evangelical Christian fiction being particularly disposed to resolve plot conflicts with such a righteous yet saccharine denouement.

On these bases, for example, the good priest’s famous (for me), infamous (for some) masturbation scene in Brian Moore’s novel Black Robe as he witnesses coitus by two youths is justified.  Whether a reader delights in the prurience of the scene or not is something which he or she should consult with his or her priest in the confessional.  For me, Moore’s novel goes beyond pornography to bring my attention to God’s deeper truths about not only sexual sins, but also sexual delights which should obtain between a married man and woman (since they are unmarried, the young people are committing the sin of fornication).  While it’s odd that Hren doesn’t cite Moore’s novel as a solid example of Catholic fiction which depicts challenging matters, perhaps a future edition will include this novel and others.

Hren does, however, examine works by many twentieth- and twenty-first century authors, Catholic all (whether devout, lukewarm, or fallen-away), and his criticism of the various works can overwhelm readers with a literary load that seems insurmountable.  Reading Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future (which concerns euthanasia); Katherine Anne Porter, a “sometimes-Catholic writer” (133); David Foster Wallace, who “took his own life in 2008” (139); James Joyce, whose work includes short stories about altar boys most likely molested by priests—a topic considered long before the current pedophile and pederast scandals; Walter M. Miller, another suicide, whose major work, A Canticle for Leibowitz, examines euthanasia; Christopher Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder, which also contains a euthanasia element; and Michael Chabon’s short story about abortion may seem suitable only for those lucky English professors who achieved early retirement ten years ago and have time to sit back, crack open a book from interlibrary loan that no one reads, and annotate at his or her leisure.  (Ahem!).  Hren, however, thinks we all should read these works to show the great expanse of Catholic fiction.

And why we should read such works is answered well.  Hren argues that “Good fiction helps us better grasp the fact that everything we deliberately do—from amusements to our acts of mercy—assumes moral significance” (2).  Thus, “we ought not dismiss or underappreciate the importance of well-rendered sin in good literature” (4)—the phrase “well-rendered” not being ironic.

Hren further claims that the purpose of Catholic fiction differs greatly from a purely secular understanding of the art.  If “the Catholic literary tradition has been marked by writers who understood that human nature finds its final cause not in mere beauty, not in mere inclusion, but in salvation” (48), then, he states, “a Catholic literary culture that works in continuity with its rich heritage will give us a contemporary literature that both gazes unflinchingly at the messiness of our present moment and artfully works out its characters’ salvation or damnation” (48).  This conclusion is necessary because “Christian love is never aimed at the neighbor in-and-of-herself, but at the Imago Dei that is found in every human being” (199).

To bolster his conclusion, Hren quotes Dana Gioia at length about a “Catholic aesthetic”:

Catholic writers tend to see humanity struggling in a fallen world.  They combine a longing for grace and redemption with a deep sense of human imperfection and sin.  Evil exists, but the physical world is not evil.  Nature is sacramental, shimmering with signs of sacred things.  Indeed, all reality is mysteriously charged with the invisible presence of God.  Catholics perceive suffering as redemptive, at least when borne in emulation of Christ’s passion and death.  (342)

Unfortunately, the volume does not have an index, so the reader must guess that the various chapters may contain what he or she is seeking.  Sometimes, the content of a chapter is obvious; sometimes, chapter contents are ambiguous from the title.  The volume does contain two reading lists which can help the reader, whether faculty member or student, check off those items which Hren suggests as required reading to appreciate the depth of contemporary Catholic fiction.

Finally, since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture zealots and bans conservative and pro-life material, purchase this book from TAN Publishers directly: https://tanbooks.com/products/books/liberal-arts/literature/how-to-read-and-write-like-a-catholic/.  Instead of paying $34.95, purchasing it from TAN through its $5 a book program makes this scholarly tome a deal.

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Book reviews

Re-Introducing Christianity: An Eastern Apologia for a Western Audience, edited by Amir Azarvan (Wipf & Stock, 2016)

Dr. Amir Azarvan’s collection of essays works to advance Catholic and Orthodox ecumenism.  It will also make Protestants wonder how much they lost by separating themselves from branches of Christianity which prospered for 1,500 years before their revolt against authority.

The above is a recurring idea which one will obtain on reading the often trenchant essays in this 188-page volume (8 more pages of a bibliography).  That is, if Byzantine and Roman Catholic Christians may not know much about Eastern Christianity, specifically the Orthodox Church, then they will be struck by the numerous points of comparison between the traditions, including the compatibility between science and faith, Scripture, devotion to the Virgin Mary, and salvation.  Protestant Christians, in contrast, may perceive that they have lost much after the misnamed “Reformation” removed them from two branches of Christianity which developed theology derived from the apostles and asceticism meant to assist Christians on their journey to salvation.

For example, one essayist mentions that Hubble disproved Einstein’s idea of an “infinite past” and that the universe is only 13.7 billion years old (17).  Some Protestants would not be able to reconcile the facts of science with a fundamentalist interpretation of the Genesis creation passages.

More importantly, regarding Scripture, Protestants have some “splainin” to do if, as several contributors remarked, the idea of “sola scriptura” is not in the Bible and was fabricated by Martin Luther to justify his revolt against the hierarchy of the Church.

Beyond sectarian insights, however, some quotes from the book can be useful not only for evangelizing, but also for apologetics.  For example, if you encounter someone who argues that it is uncertain if Jesus ever existed, then cite Eugenia Constantinou, who writes in her masterly essay “The Historical Jesus” that “more independent evidence exists for Jesus than for the existence of Socrates, Homer, Abraham, Moses, and many other important historical figures whose existence people would never think to question” (32).

Several “new” ideas discussed in this collection of essays will probe deeper into theological tenets long understood by scholars and theologians but which may not have been perceived by ordinary practicing Christians.

For example, Jonathan Resmini argues two such novel propositions.  First is his claim that, “If God is love and his love is eternal, indiscriminate and inescapable, then it stands to reason that there is nowhere that God is not present.  Not even hell” (183).  Resmini’s second claim is that “The Orthodox believe that heaven and hell are relational realities, that is, they are reflections of the way in which the human being perceives the love of God” (184).  One can see how Catholic theologians would be able to agree with these claims while Protestant Christians would stumble over the deeper philosophical principles.

Overall, Azarvan’s anthology is a profound book, discussing theological concepts written by Orthodox scholars in language that ordinary people will easily comprehend.

Since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture zealots and bans conservative and pro-life material, purchase this book from Wipf & Stock directly: https://wipfandstock.com/9781498224048/re-introducing-christianity/.

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Book reviews

Stephen M. Krason’s Family and Sexual Morality Issues

While it’s only 61 pages documenting how damaged American society has become because of feminism and leftist ideologies, Krason’s work suggests hope despite the frightful state of American culture.

Key ideas after reading this book are: for men, maintain sexual self-control until you’re married with a woman, have sex with your wife, make babies with her, work hard, and raise them well; for women, do the same with your husbands.

The above paragraph is not a simplistic reduction of solutions for the vast problems destroying American life.  Heterosexual normativity and morality worked throughout human history, and no propaganda from feminist zealots, abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood, or the Democratic Party (same things) can overcome essential human nature.

Some statistics which Krason provides are shocking.  How many of us know that children attending day care “are at a 50-100% increased risk for contracting certain fatal or maiming diseases” (15)?

Or that “40 percent of all births in the U.S.” are to single parents (21)?

Or that the claim that 10% of the population is gay or lesbian is false, the true figures ranging in the single digits or below 1% (28)?

Or that “nonvirgin brides have a 60% greater chance of divorce than virgin brides” (39)?

Or that the feminist claim that women make a quarter less than a man’s dollar “is outright untrue” (45)?

Or that “of the 3.3 million reports [of child abuse] in 2009 only 14.4% were substantiated” (53)?

Or that “To underscore the ineffectiveness of classroom sex education, during one ten-year period in the 1970s to the early 1980s government funding for it increased by a massive 4,000% but teen pregnancies increased by 20%” (67)?

And these are only statistics which Krason cites.  His explanations in each of the chapters are eminently readable and cogent.

Granted, most Americans have come not to trust “scholars”, those leftists in community colleges, colleges, or universities who indoctrinate our children with racist theories like “white privilege” and who try to eradicate 5,000 years of Jewish and Christian thinking with cancel culture mindlessness.  However, Krason is one of those who deserve the title of scholar without quotation marks.  His commentary is sound and always supported by eminent sources, 394 endnotes to be exact.

Highly recommended for parents, first, and students, next, people who want to know what’s wrong with divorce, fatherlessness, absent parents and day care, polygamy, the welfare state, artificial birth control (commonly called contraception), sex education, pornography, homosexuality, prostitution, cohabitation, feminism, sexual harassment, and the false allegations of child abuse (these topics being the order of the chapters) will be shocked by sixty years of feminism’s stranglehold on all aspects of our lives.  Hopefully, the shock will change to anger and then motivation to work against these corruptions of human life.

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Book reviews

Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby (One World, 2021)

Compelling and intricate, Peters’ novel demonstrates that transgenderism and pro-abortion policy are incompatible, especially when human life follows heterosexual normativity.

Readers may not be able to follow the 337 pages of Peters’ novel unless they remember the gender recognized at birth of the main characters.  Reese is a biological male who passes himself off as a woman; Amy is also a biological male, who passed himself off as a woman but then detransitioned to his gender recognized at birth and is now known as Ames.

Clear?

Knowing this makes the rest of the novel easy to understand, despite several passages and pop culture references which include verbose academic language or items not in common knowledge but well-known to LGBTQ activists.

The plot is simple.  Ames wants Reese to be the mother of the child he fathered with his boss, Katrina.  Katrina spends most of the novel wondering if she should acquiesce to Ames’ demands or abort the child.  While the novel ends ambiguously, the final literary evidence may swing more to a pro-life ending, for Ames, Katrina, and Reese

are together, and miles from each other, their thoughts turning to themselves, then turning to the baby, each in her own way contemplating how her tenuous rendition of womanhood has become dependent upon the existence of this little person, who is not yet, and yet may not be.  (337)

Thematically, this narrative examines transgender philosophy, its refusal to accept heterosexual normativity, and whether adopting a pro-life position is possible for transgender persons.

Ames suffers from a warped idea of what it means to be a father, because

fatherhood remained the one affront to his gender that he still couldn’t stomach without a creeping sense of horror.  To become a father by his own body, as his father was to him, and his father before him, and on and on, would sentence him to a lifetime of grappling with that horror.  (25-6)

“Affront”?  “Horror”?  “Sentence”?  Who teaches such a negative view of a man’s opportunity to generate and protect human life?

Perhaps Ames’ negative view of fatherhood is based on his having been a mere sexual object for those men who gratified themselves when he posed as a trans woman, Amy.  His reflection about those encounters disgusts as much as it generates sympathy:

After sex, the spell could dissipate, and she saw herself as she truly was: a boy, lying dazed on his back on a stranger’s bed with a dress hiked up to the waist, a string of his own pre-cum on his thigh, and a stranger lifting himself off the bed to sheepishly pull off a reservoir-filled condom.  (151)

At novel’s end, the ruminations of being a mother to Katrina’s unborn child lead Reese to a conclusion which most transgender political activists would abhor.  Reese

had given the baby up to Katrina, and now, it was with dismay—perhaps even horror—that she had to acquiesce that the baby’s mother had the right to abort.  That another woman could end the existence of a baby that she had come to imagine, softly, tentatively, at the center of her future life.  She had found her emotions and, in the two days since Ames told her about the abortion, had veered in the direction of pro-life politics.  Never before had she found her thoughts trending to the personhood of an unborn child.  (334-5)

Peters has written a novel which is truly controversial—not because of the inclusion of a transgender theme (every author does that ad nauseam).  Unlike other transgender authors who think they must support an anti-life ideology, what Peters contributes to the genre is the possibility that a group of persons steeped in transgender practice are able to consider supporting an unborn child instead of killing him or her.

This was the last of five novels I examined for a presentation before a scholarly audience on recent transgender literature and the right-to-life issues.  My recommendation is that, while it is not necessary to purchase this novel (especially not from Amazon, which supports pro-abortion politicians), pro-life readers may want to borrow it from their local libraries instead to enjoy a delightful narrative which counters the anti-life focus of most LGBTQ and, specifically, transgender fiction.

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Book reviews

Aimee Herman’s Everything Grows (Three Rooms Press, 2019)

Preachy novel of a lesbian teen’s pornographic mind, pass this up and read Dickens or Hawthorne instead.

Readers may find many lines in Herman’s novel difficult to understand; they’re written in English, but the ideas are straight from leftist academia.  For example, Flor, Eleanor’s mother’s lesbian friend, is “making room for myself in spaces that try to exclude me” (19).  Come again?  Also, why Eleanor would say “my body will feel less like mine” (56) when she would begin to menstruate is an idea that must have originated from a leftist professor, not a teenaged girl.

Maybe the preachiness of the novel comes from the author’s leftist ideology.  According to the “About the Author” section, Herman is “looking to disembowel the architecture of gender and what it means to queer the body” [226].  Wha-what?  Since such a troubled woman mentions “my own suicide attempts” [224] in the “Acknowledgements”, the compassionate reader, therefore, hopes this novel is, if not of literary, then at least of cathartic value.

An annoying grammar error occurs throughout the book.  Are constructions like “Dad had Gret and I” (66) deliberate to show that Eleanor is just a stupid teenager, or is it ignorance on the author’s part?  The former may be the cause; after all, Eleanor thinks that being “a feminist is someone who believes in the equal rights of men and women” (80), omitting completely the main purpose of feminism in today’s culture (forcing everybody to accept abortion throughout the nine months of pregnancy for any reason whatsoever).  Even more ignorantly, Eleanor asks if abortions can be obtained at Planned Parenthood (114).  Who in the world does not know that Planned Parenthood is primarily an abortion business?

The novel has the typical elements that are supposed to attract teen readers: an abortion sequence which spans four pages (112-5), Eleanor’s lesbian episode with a stranger (142-3), or another long and laughable lesbian sex scene (188-191).

Recommendation: read only if you must write a report for school or college.

This was the fourth of five novels I examined for a presentation before a scholarly audience on recent transgender literature and the right-to-life issues.  My recommendation is that it is neither worthwhile nor necessary to purchase this novel (especially not from Amazon, which supports pro-abortion politicians), but pro-life readers may want to borrow it from their local libraries instead.

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Book reviews

Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (Black Cat, 2019)

A lugubrious yet creative novel intended to illustrate that black lesbian feminists and transgender persons eventually achieve social success, the reader would be more interested in the ultimate success of heterosexual normativity among persons with gender dysphoria.

Evaristo’s work is certainly challenging since it lacks ordinary punctuation and reads like 452 pages of a stream-of-consciousness free verse poem.  However, it never reads as preachy despite its anti-Trump/pro-racist Barack Obama allusions or the feminist, lesbian, and transgender nonsense permeating the work.

Much of it is, in fact, comic.  Several passages can make the reader howl with delight, especially when the leftist characters talk about the usual canards of their philosophy, such as “the evils of capitalism and colonialism and the merits of socialism” (12).  The Babylon Bee should film the litany of leftist groups’ demands on management of a building they appropriated for themselves (17-8) or the passage concerned with “white privilege” (65-6).

Furthermore, the tired feminist ideology and the newer transgender lunacy will make readers laugh at the passage where a character’s mother “was unthinkingly repeating patterns of oppression based on gender” (307) or another passage where “Megan was a woman who wondered if she should have been born a man, who was attracted to a woman who’d once been a man, who was now saying gender was full of misguided expectations anyway, even though she herself transitioned from male to female / this was such head fuckery” (321).

Despite the lesbian and transgender blabber, most ordinary readers will appreciate the ineluctable trend to heterosexual normativity in the narrative.

The lesbian main character, Amma, manifests the inherent heterosexual normativity of her gender when it is disclosed that “Yazz [her daughter] was the miracle she never thought she wanted, and having a child really did complete her, something she rarely confided because it somehow seemed anti-feminist” (36).

Moreover, the abstract importance of the heterosexual family is obvious, even among these lesbian and transgender characters.  For example, the crucial role of the mother is illustrated in one powerful line: “when your own mother pretends you don’t exist, it is like you are dead” (159).  Another female character acknowledges the inherent natural law against lesbianism when she objects to her husband’s approval of Amma’s lesbianism thus: “it’s not that she’s backwards or anti-gay, it’s more of a gut response to something that doesn’t feel natural” (234).

Of course, given the leftist politics of the characters, heterosexual normativity is never completely respected and is often disparaged.  For example, Dominique and her lover Laverne reverse the usual practice of marriage between a man and a woman (getting married first and then having children) by adopting children and then entering a “marriage” which may be legal but not sacramental.  Similarly, the heterosexual appreciation of unborn children is negated in this work.  One character views unborn children as “fatherless timebombs” (128); the concern for fatherlessness is evident again in another character who “had three kids […] / who’d grow up with no fathers in their lives” (212).

One character’s anguish over being adopted (a variation of heterosexual normativity to some, but excruciating for her) is painfully succinct: “she was an orphan / a bastard / unwanted / rejected” (282).

Of course, it wouldn’t be a feminist take on the British family in the 1950s and 1960s if the novel did not include a Tarzan-like summary of patriarchy at work (in the tired language of feminist theory, “oppressing women”), as one character’s husband puts it: “me hunter – you homemaker / me breadwinner – you bread-maker / me child maker – you child raiser” (289).

Given all of the above, it is surprising, then, that, despite all the feminist, lesbian, and transgender instances which could have been vehicles to indoctrinate readers to their respective philosophies, the novel ends with an eminently heterosexual resolution.  Hattie, an old matriarch who had never disclosed that her father had taken her bastard daughter away from her and who never knew what happened to the baby, reunites joyously with her daughter at novel’s end.

While feminists, lesbians, and transgender persons, therefore, may not appreciate this denouement, the rest of us ordinary readers will laugh at the leftist lunacies scattered in the 452 pages and then simply rejoice over a happy ending.

This was the third of five novels I examined for a presentation before a scholarly audience on recent transgender literature and the right-to-life issues.  My recommendation is that it is neither worthwhile nor necessary to purchase this novel (especially not from Amazon, which supports pro-abortion politicians), but pro-life readers may want to borrow it from their local libraries instead.

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Book reviews

M-E Girard’s Girl Mans Up (HarperTeen, 2016)

A typical teen abortion novel with transgender stuff thrown in for no sufficient reason except to try to make a longwinded narrative sexy, read only if you must write a report for school or college.

Pen, the main character, is supposed to be a lesbian and transgender character, but most readers would conclude that wanting to style her hair or wear jeans as men do isn’t a sufficient reason for a biological female to pursue an aggressive LGBTQ lifestyle, which distorts heterosexual normativity.

The abortion episode in the novel is just as irrelevant as the transgender ones.  The father abandons both mother and unborn child, the child is killed, and the teen lovers split up.  Pen’s role is the same as any other collaborator in the abortion killing.  Her being transgender has nothing to do with the killing of the unborn child.

Finally, the sexual scenes in the novel are standard fare for publishers to entice teens to read their books.  The lesbian sex scenes are juvenile and laughable.  Somewhat more interesting are the depictions of the male characters who obviously have not learned what male sexuality is all about.  Pen’s video-game buddies, the males in Pen’s high school, all think that male sexuality just concerns ejaculation.  These boys have obviously swallowed the secularist philosophy of the abortion business Planned Parenthood, which grooms young people to think that sex is an activity that anybody can (and must) engage in solely for pleasure.  Is it possible those selfish sacks of male hormones will realize that sex is an expression of love between a husband and wife for the two purposes of uniting them in intense sexual pleasure and having their activity be open to the creation of new life?

Nah, these boys just want to squirt.  As one says, “I just wanna have fun and get laid” (30).

More interesting, however, are the passages where Pen’s language falters as she considers her gender dysphoria.  She knows she is a biological female; she recognizes that she is “a girl” (323) and that “Girls can’t decide they’re not girls anymore” (335).  The reader should therefore feel some compassion for how screwed up she has become in not understanding that her gender was not “assigned” at birth, but recognized.

Pen’s confusion over language can be illustrated by two passages.  The first regards the words “dude” vs. “girl”: “It’s like one second, I should be a better dude.  I should stop being such a girly douche, and I should just man up.  Then, it’s the opposite: I’m too much of a guy, and it’s not right.  I should be a girl, because that’s what I’m supposed to be” (42).

The second passage questions language which offered standard definitions in American English for years, some for centuries, to denote sexual deviancy in general:

“I don’t think of myself as being gay, because that word sounds like it belongs to some guy.  Lesbian makes me think of some forty-year-old woman.  And queer feels like it can mean anything, but like—am I queer because I like girls, or because I look the way I do?  Maybe I don’t know enough words” (65; italics in original)

Is this novel worth reading?  It can be if you must write a report for school.  It can be worthwhile if only to illustrate that even transgender authors like Girard will eventually produce novels which support heterosexual normativity.  It can even be helpful to show that transgender authors incorrectly presume that they must write pro-abortion works when they should realize that being transgender has nothing to do with abortion, which harms women, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers—an eminently heterosexual thing for them to consider, which may account for their difficulty in depicting abortion episodes from the real world.

This was the second of five novels I examined for a presentation before a scholarly audience on recent transgender literature and the right-to-life issues.  My recommendation is that it is neither worthwhile nor necessary to purchase this novel (especially not from Amazon, which supports pro-abortion politicians), but pro-life readers may want to borrow it from their local libraries instead.

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Book reviews

Vickie Weaver’s Billie Girl (Leapfrog Press, 2010)

A typical anti-motherhood and pro-euthanasia narrative, Weaver’s novel almost makes the reader happy that the godforsaken eponymous main character commits suicide at novel’s end.

Weaver’s novel traces the life of Billie Girl from babyhood to old age.  Abandoned by her parents, raised by transgender “mothers”, manipulated by a boy who wanted her to masturbate him, and living with various men who use her as their sexual objects, one would hope that a woman who undergoes these abuses would realize that she has the opportunity to rise above her trauma, to love life, and to help others.

Unfortunately, Billie illustrates the opposite, and so the novel repeats a common plot of women with tragic lives who perpetuate tragedy in fellow human beings.  Billie does not change her life’s trajectory from being a victim to overcoming bad influences in her life.  She will continue to slither from one man to another, never considering that marriage is a sacrament.  The sexual activity she engages in with the various men in her life is just something to do to occupy her time.  Billie’s philosophy is succinctly offered in the ambiguous claim that “We do what we have to do” (132).

Most distressing, however, is Billie’s adoption of standard anti-life ideas.  She never wanted her stillborn child because “I had never wanted to be a mother” (132).  Moreover, like other novels with characters who deny motherhood or who support abortion, Billie’s attitude toward the elderly is explicitly anti-life.  She calls the elderly in the nursing home where she resides “other old, useless, decomposing human beings—most of them not in their right minds” [221].  The cavalier way in which she describes killing people is remarkable.  The tortured syntax of saying that “The next two residents I sent on their way” (225) is brutal, yet a literary gem.  Killing a nursing home resident because “She had pooped in the bed” (228) almost gives the reader delight, if not a sense of divine justice, in knowing that such an evil person as Billie eventually commits suicide.

Billie thus has a didactic function to perform for contemporary readers.  Pro-life readers can use Weaver’s novel to be vigilant against those who disrespect human life, whether the life of others or their own.

This was the first of five novels I examined for a presentation before a scholarly audience on recent transgender literature and the right-to-life issues.  My recommendation is that it is neither worthwhile nor necessary to purchase this novel (especially not from Amazon, which supports pro-abortion politicians), but pro-life readers may want to borrow it from their local libraries instead.

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Papers Presentations

Transgender Fiction and the Right-to-Life Issues: A Study of Recent Transgender Fiction on Abortion and Euthanasia Using Right-to-Life Literary Theory

Abstract:  After reviewing some contemporary scholarship which attempts to connect transgenderism and the right-to-life issues, this study applies the five questions of right-to-life literary theory to recent fictional work concerned with transgenderism and abortion and euthanasia.

           When Ryan T. Anderson wrote his When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment in 2018, transgender activism may indeed have been perceived as a moment, a blip, in the otherwise distorted perspectives of LGBTQ and transgender activists against heterosexual normativity.  These distortions have since been forced by the academy on students, by the leftist media on the entire nation, and by the Democratic Party on its candidates running for office.

Certainly, claims by transgender activists that the transgender population of the United States merits more government and social acceptance and support can be questioned by statistics from valid gay and lesbian sources regarding whether there is an urgent need to do so.  In terms of raw political power, the numbers of persons affected by gender dysphoria suggest that transgender activism does not merit increased government promotion.  The Nation, for example, reports that, while 11,000,000 persons in the United States purport to be LGBTQ, the “Portion of US adults who are transgender or nonbinary” is estimated to be 1.6%, or 5.3 million (“By the Numbers”).[2]  Now, as the end of 2022 approaches, the past four years of transgender political activity seem only a prelude to an entrenched philosophy which must never be questioned in academia, the media, or in government.

          Moreover, the oppression of those who uphold traditional sexual values regarding gender dysphoria is abetted by academics who should support them in the interests of freedom of thought and speech but do not because academia has fallen victim to the aggressive transgender ideology, a belief system characterized by two inherent logical fallacies in gender identity discourse that most scholars fail to recognize.[3]

First is a phrase used often in transgender political discourse which functions as a rallying cry for extremist transgender activists.  While Anderson correctly points out that gender is not “assigned” but “recognized” at birth (77) and, as fetologists know, perceived well before birth, many scholars persist in using the erroneous language of sex assigned at birth, probably because doing so comports with the political view that gender is a social construct instead of a natural factor of human identity.  For example, Heidi Moseson and her fellow researchers preface their definitions of the various categories of sexual identities with frequent use of the “assigned” phraseology:

[slide 2]  Gender identity can be consistent with or different from the sex that someone was assigned at birth.  Sex assigned at birth is typically based on external genitalia, and is recorded as female, intersex, or male.  “Transgender” is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned to them at birth, while “cisgender” is a term for people whose gender identity aligns with their sex assigned at birth.  (2)

Second is a recent phenomenon (within the last year or so), the biologically fallacious yet politically correct idea, according to leftist theorists, that pregnancy can occur in men as well as women.  One thinks of how the phrase “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant woman” or “mother” has been excoriated in social media by those who affirm that only women can become pregnant, often ridiculing leftist theorists for sacrificing biological facts of gender identity among humans for the cause of advancing an LGBTQ or transgender agenda.  The illogicality of this newest trend has not disturbed some researchers, however, such as Sydney Calkin and Cordelia Freeman, who answer a question about the connection between gender identity and abortion in their field of feminist geography thus:

[slide 3]  How are social and cultural geographers leading work to understand the diversity of bodies in relation to reproductivity to better account for the diversity of gender experiences among pregnant people?  Research on abortion often uneasily navigates the tensions of gender diversity and fluidity.  Restrictions on abortion access are widely understood as gender-based discrimination against women, but not all pregnant people self-identify as women.  Moreover, trans and non-binary pregnant people often face the greatest vulnerability in accessing reproductive care.  Geographers should do more to account for the intersection of gender with other axes of inequality including sexuality, class, ability, and race in abortion access.  (1329-30)

It would seem as though any claim for “rights” of persons experiencing gender dysphoria have only the vaguest connection with any of the three right-to-life issues (abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia), the sexual factor of abortion being the only possible nexus where a transgender person could argue that his or her “rights” are somehow being ignored, frustrated, or trampled.  Beyond this vague possibility, however, what does any argument for transgender sexual rights have to do with three practices which kill human beings?

          The scholarship surrounding transgenderism has not yet questioned the union of any claim to transgender “rights” and an anti-life mentality.  Instead, scholars have decidedly placed themselves fully in support of abortion and other anti-life practices often without delving deeper into the rationale behind the conjoining of the two radically different political issues.  For example, Barbara Sutton and Elizabeth Borland argue that

Abortion has also figured prominently in feminist politics, activism and theorizing.  Yet as gender binaries are deconstructed in dialogue with queer theory and movements, the meaning of “woman” and “man” cannot be taken for granted, and contemporary abortion politics reflects these contestations.  There have been increasing calls in activist spaces to “queer” abortion rights advocacy, to incorporate non-normative understandings of gender identity and sexuality into abortion struggles and services.  ([1378])

Furthermore, the naiveté by which these scholars have accepted abortion as being a transgender concern can be reduced to the notion that supporting sexual “freedom” means supporting abortion.  One can concede how this political position could have been obtained by leftist activists, for it does seem ineluctable to argue that, if a woman not only wishes but also has a right to engage in unrestrained sexual activity, she then must have the right to kill the unborn child who was not desired yet created by that sexual activity.  If there is a “right” to sexual activity, then the domain of that purported right extends only to sexual activity and not to the domain of another person’s body, the person in question being an unborn human being.  Moreover, as transgender activists assert, a human body is not necessarily recognized as one of only two genders, but whatever gender a person believes he or she is, disregarding the evidence of his or her genitalia and chromosomal endowment from his or her parents.  The scholars who ally themselves with transgender activists, therefore, have unfortunately failed to see the logical fallacy of such a conclusion.[4]

          Of course, pro-life academics are able to contend with the assault on heterosexual normativity by LGBTQ and transgender activists by emphasizing the scientific data in their respective fields.  Psychologists can assist persons with same-sex attraction to negotiate their unnatural affections, sociologists can direct persons with same-sex attraction to appropriate social services providing support, and medical staff can aid LGBTQ and transgender persons in understanding their bodies as male or female entities with discrete advantages for the promotion of human life.

Given that most faculty and scholars in the humanities, however, have acquiesced to the premises of LGBTQ and transgender political activism (probably because of a misunderstood or distorted sense of what diversity, inclusion, and equity mean), how can any faculty member or scholar in the humanities, particularly in literature, contribute to the severe gap in scholarship which affirms heterosexual normativity and refutes the claim that transgenderism must align itself with practices which lead to the death of human beings, specifically, the unborn by means of abortion, the handicapped newborn through infanticide, and the elderly or medically vulnerable by euthanasia?  The balance of this paper will venture to answer that question.

          For several years now, I have applied five questions of what I name right-to-life literary theory to various works written on the life issues, a method of literary criticism which, unlike the various theories used in the academy, can assist students of literature to understand a work’s perspective on human life more comprehensively than any of the current literary theories which are restrictive, such as feminist literary criticism, which emphasizes the tired concepts of patriarchy and oppression of women; deconstruction, which strives to prove the instability of language; or Marxist literary theory, which emphasizes the importance of economic power on human life.

          [slide 4]  The following are the five questions which constitute right-to-life literary theory.  First, does the literary work support the perspective that human life is, in the philosophical sense, a good, some “thing” which is priceless?  Second, does the literary work respect the individual as a being with inherent rights, the paramount one being the right to life?  Third, if the literary work covers the actions of a family, does it do so respecting heterosexual normativity and the integrity of the family?  Fourth, does the literary work comport with the view that unborn, newborn, and mature human life has an inherent right to exist?  Finally, when they are faced with their mortality, do the characters come to a realization that there is a divine presence in the world which justifies a life-affirming perspective?  These five questions will be applied to two representative transgender novels: Vickie Weaver’s Billie Girl (2010) and M-E Girard’s Girl Mans Up (2016).[5]

          [slide 5]  The plots of the novels can be briefly summarized before the questions of right-to-life literary theory are applied.  Weaver’s novel is mostly a first-person account by Billie Girl, who was abandoned by her birth parents and raised by various people, including two transvestites who called themselves her mothers; she eventually learned that “Big Mom was a boy” and that “Mama Edith was a boy, too” (42).  She ends her days in a nursing home where she euthanizes fellow residents.  Girard’s novel concerns Pen (Penelope), an eleventh grader who thinks that she must engage in same-sex activity because she is attracted to females and who thinks she is transgender because she likes to wear men’s clothing and style her hair as males do.  In the course of her ventures, Pen assists another high school student in obtaining an abortion and engages in both hetero- and homosexual episodes with her high school friends.

          These synopses may suggest that the novels may not be worth examining.  While Weaver’s is the better novel in terms of deeper issues to explore, both novels suffer from a discursive, if not insipid, style.[6]  Moreover, an adult reader (both novels are written for the young adult audience) may not appreciate the emotional trauma that the main characters experience and may thus consider the narratives verbose and immature.  However, both novels provide a rich insight into the minds of transgender characters and, certainly, into the views of Girard, a transgender author.  Moreover, when the five questions of right-to-life literary theory are applied, readers will discover the life-affirming ideas of both novels even though they seem to support abortion (as in Girard’s work) or euthanasia (as in Weaver’s novel).

A.  The Pricelessness of Human Life

          [slide 6]  To answer this first question of right-to-life literary theory, both novels do not convey a sense that human life is either precious or priceless, a standard principle typical of much modern fiction.  Perhaps this can be attributed to the lack of religious sensibility that the major characters in the novels display.  Perhaps the characters’ lack of piety, a necessary foundation to appreciate the value of human life, is displayed to meet what the publishing world thinks is the dominant secularist view of the young adult demographic, if not of the entire American reading public.  Both novels indicate that life is more a drudgery than an opportunity either to fulfill one’s life according to set values (a purely secularist view) or to collaborate with the Supreme Being to accomplish good works in this life as a preparation for eternal life (the Judeo-Christian view).

          The evidence that human life is more drudge than delight permeates the novels.  Pen’s motivation in life, which matches that of her friends, is that she is “a boyish, video-game-playing girl” (Girard 2).  Billie Girl seems merely to advance from one episode to another, without any direction or goal beyond satisfying her immediate needs; the men in her life are as migratory as the jobs they pursue.

B.  Respect for the Individual’s Right to Life

          On this second question of right-to-life literary theory, the selfishness which permeates contemporary fiction for young adults is evident in both novels.  Thus, while characters would be hard pressed to assert the right to life of other people, the young adults in these novels seem much more concerned about their own lives.  Adolescence is supposedly the time when young people define and refine themselves, their places in society, and even their relationships with other people and God; Girard’s characters perform none of these adolescent tasks.

Similarly, Billie Girl’s beginnings as an abandoned child should give her reasons to explore her purpose in life; she, like Girard’s characters, also does not operate in her fictional space to consider these questions of life and her place in the world.  Her philosophy is encapsulated in the commonplace that “We do what we have to do” (Weaver 132), an expression which is unclear regarding moral purpose, suggests dominance of one human being over another, and carries a fatalistic tone (“having to do” something cannot be as joyous as “wanting to do” something).  That the characters in these novels are self-centered to an extreme precludes any other interpretation than that they care more for themselves than others.  (The moral implications of such self-centeredness will become evident in response to other questions.)

C.  Heterosexual Normativity and Integrity of the Family

          One would presume that the global answer to this third question of right-to-life literary theory would be negative since both novels depict transgender characters who are not only comfortable with their gender dysphoria but also aggressive or militant in supporting the transgender distortion of heterosexual normativity.  There is sufficient evidence for this generality and for the characters’ distorted views of sexuality.

          Unlike religious-based persons who recognize that sexual relations are the province of a husband and wife to accomplish the goals of sacramental marriage (being able to engage in sexual activity to satisfy the human need for pleasure and to be open to the possibility of children), the characters in both novels have a warped sense of sexuality as merely a pleasurable activity, almost on a par with video games to satisfy their entertainment needs.  For example, Colby, one of Pen’s friends, uses her to obtain other girls as his sexual targets so that the girls won’t think he is “a jerk just trying to get laid” (Girard 8).  Tellingly, it is this same character who later says that “Getting in their pants isn’t worth it” and “I just wanna have fun and get laid” (Girard 29, 30).  Another of Pen’s friends, Garrett, has a distorted sense of male sexuality.  His philosophy, uttered in the commonplace expression (noted above) which evokes more humor than rational thought, is that using condoms is what men do: “A man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do” (Girard 130).[7]

          Similarly, Billie Girl’s first exposure to sexuality is a distortion of the sexual act; she learns about male sexuality from a boy whom she masturbated and was masturbated by a man later in life ostensibly as a cure for heavy menstrual cramps.  Although not explicitly stated in the novel, these sexual experiences may have affected Billie Girl’s attitude toward her reproductive powers: “I had never wanted to be a mother”, she claimed (Weaver 132).

D.  The Inherent Right to Exist of the Unborn, Newborn, and Mature Adults

          Both novels fail in answering this fourth criterion of right-to-life literary theory, and the failures are expressed in a surprising and ironic manner.  For example, one would expect that Pen, who is steeped in the transgender ideology, would think that assisting a fellow student in obtaining an abortion is consistent with her philosophical beliefs about gay and lesbian activism, which anti-life feminism distorted to include the killing of an unborn child.  One does not expect, therefore, that the abortion episode in the novel would be so cavalierly handled.  Perhaps the author did not want to make her novel preachy.  More likely, the brevity of the abortion incident suggests that, in a transgender character’s (and author’s) mind, abortion is not as important a matter as asserting one’s “right” to unlimited and unrestricted sexual activity with persons of the same sex.  After all, the six pages which mention Olivia’s abortion (191, 241, 262-3, 286, and 353) constitute 1.6% of the entire novel of 373 pages.  Granted, this is only one calculation in one novel, but this example counters the ideology asserted in scholarly literature that abortion is somehow vitally important to the rights of transgender people.

          More disturbing is the idea that animal life may be more valuable than human life as when Pen declares that she is emotionally bothered by blowing up video game dogs: “It kind of bugs me that I have to blow up dogs” (Girard 32).  Similarly, Pen later expresses in strong language her sadness about killing snails in her back yard: “I kind of feel like crap for destroying their home and murdering them” (Girard 51).  Since this idea is not contained in a solitary incident, one must conclude that the author deliberately conveyed these bits of information to convey the anti-human mentality of such a character.  Remember that it is Pen who assists her friend Olivia in obtaining an abortion, so an unborn child’s life obviously is not as valuable as a real snail’s life or even a video game dog’s.

          [slide 7]   Both novels express well the confusion over language at the center of the abortion and transgender issues.  For example, Pen’s confusion over words like “dude” and “girl” is central to the transgender debate: “It’s like one second, I should be a better dude.  I should stop being such a girly douche, and I should just man up.  Then, it’s the opposite: I’m too much of a guy, and it’s not right.  I should be a girl, because that’s what I’m supposed to be” (Girard 42).  Furthermore, Pen’s inability to understand English words which have stood the test of hundreds of years is evident in the following passage wherein she examines LGBTQ vocabulary:

I don’t think of myself as being gay, because that word sounds like it belongs to some guy.  Lesbian makes me think of some forty-year-old woman.  And queer feels like it can mean anything, but like—am I queer because I like girls, or because I look the way I do?  Maybe I don’t know enough words.  (Girard 65; italics in original)

Perhaps this is why Pen is confused in identifying her relationship with Blake, her lesbian lover; she wants “to be a boyfriend who is a girl” to Blake (84).

          [slide 8]  Consistent with the characters’ faltering over ordinary language to denote their sexuality is their failure at using language to denote the acts of killing in both novels.  Although she recognizes, albeit using incorrect anatomical language, that “there’s a baby inside Olivia’s stomach” (Girard 190), Pen falters when she asks Olivia when she will “start looking…you know?” (Girard 117; ellipsis in original).[8]  Pen falters again when she begins to state, “You’re going to get an abor—” (Girard 118).  That Pen is unable to recognize, let alone utter, the words “pregnancy” and “abortion” suggests the inherent philosophical problem that transgender persons represented by this fictional character have in overcoming the denotative power of these heterosexual terms.

          If verbal recognition of the unborn child occurs in the novel, then there is also the urge to keep the abortion of that child secret.  Pen urges Olivia not to talk with Colby, who fathered the child: “Say you wanted to decide stuff.  I just don’t think letting him in your head would help.  Things would get all twisted and confused” (Girard 161).  Pen’s justification for Olivia to abort is purely subjective more than rational thought based on religious principles, such as the sacredness of human life: “I think maybe you shouldn’t think about doing what’s right, and maybe you should just do what feels less wrong “(Girard 193; italics in original).  Pen is utterly unable to perceive the logical consequences of her decision to assist Olivia in obtaining an abortion; rather, she “was hoping the whole thing just went away” (Girard 242).  After the abortion, Pen uses a string of “feeling”-based expressions in a conversation with Olivia to reinforce her standard of adhering to a pure subjectivism:

[slide 9]  You don’t have to feel bad for having done it, but I think you might end up feeling bad about something, anything.  Like feeling bad you could never tell your mom, or feeling bad you didn’t get the pill, or feeling bad for liking Colby, or…anything really.  (Girard 269; ellipsis in original)

          It may be the author’s intent to show that Pen is not a static, but a dynamic character.  Pen is able to overcome a significant linguistic inability and seems to recognize that an anti-life philosophy is anti-human.  For example, only much later in the narrative can Pen utter the word “abortion”, as when she debates whether she should text Olivia, using first the third-person neutral pronoun followed by an apposition: “I want to ask her if she regrets it, the abortion” (Girard 286).  Also, Pen seems to understand the anti-human nature of abortion as when she accuses Colby of discarding his friends and his former lover, Olivia: “They’re people you threw away” (Girard 318).  It is ironic, of course, that she chides Colby for doing what she and Olivia have collaborated in doing, discarding the unborn child by having him or her killed in an abortion.

          One of Pen’s final lengthy reflections towards novel’s end functions as a summary of her adventures throughout the work, and it is interesting that this passage contains not only the explicit mention of Olivia’s abortion, but also her claim that she has no regrets about her involvement in the killing or, apparently, her lesbian activity:

          [slide 10]  I’m full of bad feelings.

          Not because I feel guilty, or because I regret what I’ve done, though.  It’s like I keep telling Olivia when she thinks about the abortion: it’s okay to feel bad about how things went down, but it’s not okay to drown in guilt and regret every day for having made decisions other people don’t agree with.  At some point, we all have to man up and decide to do what we have to do, despite the people around us who try to get in the way.  (Girard 353)

The astute reader would recognize the repetition of the commonplace “do what we have to do” and, hopefully, see that such a philosophy incarnates the logical fallacy of begging the question (what exactly is the “what” that anybody must do and is it moral?).  Also, like Hemingway’s famous character in the short story “Hills Like White Elephants” who feels “fine” when she discusses abortion with the father of the child, the repetition of “regret” twice in this brief passage should trigger the reader to question whether Pen is indeed free of guilt.

          Readers may fail to understand how Weaver’s novel also does not meet this fourth criterion of right-to-life literary theory without understanding its surprising and ironic dénouement.  The reader has followed Billie Girl from babyhood, through her adolescence, to young adulthood, to mature adulthood, to old age.  One would expect that a life negotiating and overcoming major disappointments would convince Billie Girl to appreciate her inner strength and live the remainder of her days knowing that throughout her life she accomplished “what [she had] to do” (Weaver 132).

          [slide 11]  The contrast in character development, then, which occurs at novel’s end is profound.  Billie Girl calls the elderly in the nursing home where she resides “other old, useless, decomposing human beings—most of them not in their right minds” [Weaver 221].  With such an attitude, Billie Girl obviously favors mercy killing: “Though I had helped Grandma meet her Maker, it took me being life-wounded myself to understand the mercy of killing” [Weaver 221].  She decides to kill fellow nursing home residents with pills, and her further killings are expressed casually, as though the people she dispatched were taking some means of transportation for a long journey: “The next two residents I sent on their way” (Weaver 225).  The hyperbatonic structure of this sentence should signal the reader that something is indeed wrong about the activity of killing people.

          Unlike other pro-euthanasia fiction which dwells on the terminal status of some patients and their pain (which, for some reason, is never alleviated by proper palliative care, even in circumstances which are the most technologically advanced), Billie Girl decides whom to kill based on the most specious of reasons.  For example, she kills her roommate because “She had pooped in the bed” (Weaver 228).  Given such a positive view towards killing fellow human beings, it is not at all surprising that Billie Girl would commit suicide: “I covered up and shoved my hands into my sweater pockets to keep warm.  Out of habit, my fingers groped around.  I came across two pills in the right-hand pocket.  Two pills” (Weaver 231).

E.  Realizing the Divine Presence When Faced with Mortality

          As is typical with most modern fiction, the word “God” is almost never used in both novels as the noun to refer to the Supreme Being, but as an interjection (usually lower case) or as the vulgar command to damn someone or something.  The personal lives of the characters do not manifest any sense of piety.  Pen recognizes that her Portuguese parents are devout Catholics, but she does not follow the faith; Billie Girl, similarly, never expresses a belief in God or in Scriptures.  Answering this last question of right-to-life literary theory, therefore, is especially challenging unless one deconstructs several passages to locate characters’ sense of their mortality and any relationship with a Supreme Being.

          The closest one can come to perceive that Pen has a sense of the divine presence in the world occurs when she states her antipathy towards killing animals.  (Recall that she was distressed when she had to “to blow up dogs” in video games and felt “like crap for destroying [a snail’s] home and murdering them” (Girard 32, 51).  Her code of ethics, then, must align with a sense of the divine, most probably derived from her parents’, especially her mother’s, Catholicism, for she uses highly connotative words to describe her actions.  “Blow up”, “destroying”, and “murdering” indicate that she knows that these actions are morally wrong; not being able to see how these negative actions kill unborn human beings is her moral blind spot.  Furthermore, that she maligns her mother throughout the novel is beside the point; Pen had expressed her opinions about the Portuguese traditions of living the Catholic Faith often, so the concepts must have been internalized.  Since Pen is only sixteen, one must conclude that her spiritual journey can only be fulfilled with decades more of soul-searching.

          In contrast, Billie Girl’s sense of the divine in human life comes almost exactly at the end of her life, when she asserts that, “Though I had helped Grandma meet her Maker, it took me being life-wounded myself to understand the mercy of killing” [Weaver 221].  The reader must conclude, therefore, that the use of the words “Maker” (note the capitalization, unlike other modern novels where the term is always lower case) and the phrase “the mercy of killing” presumes some religious sensibility obtained at this, the end of her life.  Even though the terms indicate a generic and warped sense, respectively, their presence in the novel at the crucial step in the plot where the drama ineluctably ends with her death can be interpreted as, first, evidence that Billie Girl recognizes a Supreme Being (denoted by His function of Creator) and, second, that she is aware of the benefits that death provides to a weary life.  Note that she did not use the more commonly understood phrase “mercy killing”, but the lengthier prepositional phrase; although it is one involving “killing”, the term “mercy” is thus highlighted as the major noun in the phrase since “killing” is subordinated by the preposition.  One hopes, therefore, that what Billie Girl was striving for in killing others and herself was God’s mercy more than anything else.

          What summary comments can conclude this brief study of only two recent transgender fictional works on the life issues?  I offer two comments and recommend a course of criticism to respond to such works of fiction.

First, recent transgender fiction reinforces the anti-life ideas of traditional pro-abortion fiction.  The same plot devices occur in transgender fiction as in fiction written by or involving heterosexual characters; one thinks, for example, of Pen’s collaboration with the mother to abort an unborn child, a template dating from pre-legalization times involving a willing accomplice to the abortion killing.  Billie Girl’s euthanasia activities mimic those fictional works which suggest that killing the elderly or the medically vulnerable equates with the alleviation of pain or emotional distress.

          Second, transgender fiction on the two life issues discussed here includes an abortion and euthanasia episode for no apparent reason beyond being activities which comport with a distortion of the purposes of human life and, most importantly, human sexuality.  Abortion and euthanasia have no bearing on sexual activity of transgender persons per se; their engaging in immoral sexual activities concerns sexual morality more than the first civil right to life.

          Why transgender activists (especially those in academia) and writers support abortion, therefore, indicates an irrational philosophical position that must be disclosed and countered.  When transgender fiction includes an episode involving the life issues and seems to accept the killing of the unborn, the newborn, or the elderly, I recommend that it is every faculty member’s, student’s, and reader’s duty to challenge the forced connection between transgenderism and an anti-life philosophy.  Criticism of these two novels using right-to-life literary theory is a good beginning.

[slide 12]  Works Cited

Anderson, Ryan. T. When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. Encounter Books, 2018.

“By the Numbers.” Nation, vol. 315, no. 1, July 2022, p. 13. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=157599203&site=ehost-live.

Calkin, Sydney, Cordelia Freeman, and Francesca Moore. “The Geography of Abortion: Discourse, Spatiality and Mobility.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 46, no. 6, Dec. 2022, pp. 1413–30. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.eresources.cuyahogalibrary.org/10.1177/03091325221128885.

Evaristo, Bernardine. Girl, Woman, Other. Black Cat, 2019.

Girard, M-E. Girl Mans Up. HarperTeen, 2016.

Goenawan, Clarissa. The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida. Soho Press, 2020.

Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” Men Without Women. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927. 69-77.

Herman, Aimee. Everything Grows. Three Rooms Press, 2019.

Kelly. “YA Abortion Books: Fiction About Terminating a Pregnancy as a Teen.” Stacked, 13 September 2021. https://stackedbooks.org/ya-abortion-books/.

Lacombe-Duncan, Ashley, et al. “Minority Stress Theory Applied to Conception, Pregnancy, and Pregnancy Loss: A Qualitative Study Examining LGBTQ+ People’s Experiences.” PLoS ONE, vol. 17, no. 7, July 2022, pp. 1–24. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271945.

Moseson, Heidi, et al. “Development of an Affirming and Customizable Electronic Survey of Sexual and Reproductive Health Experiences for Transgender and Gender Nonbinary People.” PLoS ONE, vol. 15, no. 5, May 2020, pp. 1–15. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0232154.

Peters, Torrey. Detransition, Baby. One World, 2021.

Sutton, Barbara, and Elizabeth Borland. “Queering Abortion Rights: Notes from Argentina.” Culture, Health & Sexuality, vol. 20, no. 12, Dec. 2018, pp. 1378–93. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2018.1437221.

Talcott, David. “Building a Culture of Life.” Human Life Review, vol. 45, no. 4, Fall 2019, pp. 53–60. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=140951020&site=ehost-live.

Weaver, Vickie. Billie Girl. Leapfrog Press, 2010.

Works Consulted

Abi-Karam, Andrea, and Kay Gabriel, eds. We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Nightboat Books, 2020.

Ebershoff, David. The Danish Girl. Penguin Books, 2000.

Jenkins, Christine A., and Michael Cart, eds. Representing the Rainbow in Young Adult Literature. Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Tolbert, T. C., and Trace Peterson, eds. Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Nightboat Books, 2013.

Tremain, Rose. Sacred Country. Washington Square Press, 1992.


[1] This paper was first presented on Saturday, 29 October 2022, at the annual conference of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists held at St. Vincent’s College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

[2] While his assertions that “millennials appear to be slightly more pro-life than their parents, not less” is not only encouraging but also statistically accurate, citing Michael New’s research, the idea embedded in the dependent clause preceding this claim (“While traditional ethical views on gay marriage, transgenderism, and other anthropological innovations are being rejected by young people”) seems incorrect, given both conservative and liberal reaction to the numbers of students who claim to be transgender. especially in public schools (Talcott 53). More research needs to be conducted to determine if the high number of students who claim to be transgender can be attributed to genuine gender dysphoria or to the efforts by their transgender activist teachers to push the LGBTQ agenda on them.

[3] The opinions of scholars are emphasized in this study if only because those who meet the criteria of being called such (persons who, first, have terminal degrees, second, have been published in their respective fields of study, and, finally, who are working in those fields) should be able to discuss controversial issues such as transgenderism in an objective manner.  Claims made by unknown entities on internet sites which suggest that transgenderism and abortion are intimately connected can be discarded as scholarly opinions but appreciated as an indicator of the “mood” of activists on the issues, such as this posting by “Kelly”:

[slide 2]  Abortion isn’t a women’s rights issue.  It’s a human rights issue, and we need to address it as such.  Nonbinary, transgender, and agender folks, as well as those who identify outside those labels who can get pregnant deserve to be heard in this discussion, too.  Their already-marginalized bodies and experiences are only further harmed with the language we use to discuss abortion.  It’s not a decision between a woman and her doctor.  It’s a decision between a pregnant person and their doctor or other healthcare worker who can do the procedure.

That the author of this posting lacks the courage of her (the Stacked website uses the pronoun “she” in her biographical entry) convictions to supply her surname should be significant enough for any reader of her work.  However, one can appreciate this passage as an example of a transgender activist willing to sacrifice logic and grammar to advance her political purposes.  Unfortunately, what this nondescript web author posted mirrors many “scholarly” opinions mentioned in this essay.  Faculty, students, and the general public may therefore be justified in disregarding whatever academia has to say about such controversial issues and trust the values taught in their families or in their places of worship instead.

[4] To compound the problem of scholars’ inability to perceive anything but a pro-abortion connection with the LGBTQ or transgender movements, gender activists  may further fail to understand that some LGBTQ persons strive for life-affirming choices in reproduction, as Ashley Lacombe-Duncan and other researchers have claimed, when they noted that “Many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (trans), queer, and other sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ+) people desire to conceive children” (1).

[5] In the interests of time, four other novels with transgender themes have been excised from this presentation but will be discussed in future research at another conference in 2023: Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (Black Cat, 2019); Aimee Herman’s Everything Grows (Three Rooms Press, 2019); Clarissa Goenawan’s The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida (Soho Press, 2020); and Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby (One World, 2021).

[6] Consider, for example, the following insipid lines of needless dialogue:

“I’m smothering, honey,” I said.

He set the fan on the dresser and aimed it at me.

“Is that better?”

“Just right.”  (Weaver 204)

[7] It may be more than a coincidence that both novels contain this expression.  Billie Girl states that “We do what we have to do” halfway through the novel after she admits that she was relieved when her child was stillborn because she “had never wanted to be a mother” (132), a negation of the maternal function.  Likewise, Garrett’s use of this commonplace reinforces a negation of his paternal function.

[8] One can argue that the confusion over “stomach” and “uterus” may not simply be bad writing but a deliberate attempt to show that Pen is not only sexually immature but also ignorant.  Such a claim may not be tenable, however, since Pen is depicted as an intelligent student.

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An American nightmare ended

The death of a nation’s nightmare

is cause enough to celebrate,

especially if it wasted

forty-nine years of the culture.

Irrational Roe is damned by Dobbs.

Let every prolifer rejoice!

The refused and voiceless unborn child

is vibrant with his or her voice.

And we in this prolife nation

are binding the demons of choice

and voting red in elation.

6 July 2022