“There is nothing new under the sun,” says the Book of Ecclesiastes (1:9), and that includes today’s fashionable trans madness. While men mutilating themselves and taking hormones and calling themselves women may be a new aspect of this phenomenon, men have been donning dresses and prancing around pretending to be women from time immemorial. And now a detransitioner, a woman who spent several years pretending to be a man before awakening from her delusion, has rooted the trans phenomenon in another extremely old idea: Gnosticism, an ancient religious belief that derided the material world as evil and is combated in the New Testament.
Estella Suarez-Hamilton, who began pretending to be a man as a teenager, explained Wednesday that at the heart of the trans fad is a desire to escape from reality: “Oftentimes, people are looking for an escape. There’s a lot of escapism in my generation, and this is especially true with the trans ideology. It was a distraction that I needed, to not look at the parts of my life and the relationships in my life that I was not succeeding in, and were falling apart. I was looking for escape — and the political, kind of spiritual, aspects of trans ideology, when they’re combined with the online [community], that offers a type of escapism. A lot of times people will say that it’s a ‘cult,’ and in a way, that could be applied, but I think a more accurate term is a ‘cyber sect.’” This sect has surprisingly ancient roots, in an old version of escapism.
“If you are thinking about how to describe the sect,” Suarez-Hamilton continued, “it is very much connected to, like, the modern Gnostic principles. This is a syncretic cyber sect of modern Gnosticism, and I love how complicated it sounds, because the trans community loves language, and they love to complicate language to the nth degree. So, I think that this term is just very — from my experience — very accurate to explain what I went through, that’s what I think happened, and that’s how I can articulate it.” A syncretic cyber sect of modern Gnosticism is actually a remarkably apt term.
Gnosticism was a secretive and multifaceted movement that was based on its adherents gaining access to a secret knowledge, or gnosis in Greek. This secret knowledge involved the idea that the physical world was the source of evil: an evil god had trapped the souls of human beings inside material bodies and a material world, and that was the reason why evil and suffering existed there. Different Gnostic sects had various ideas of how souls could be freed from this plight; the Christian version of Gnosticism depicted Jesus as a spiritual being who did not become man, as orthodox Christianity teaches, but who merely took on the appearance of being in a physical body, so as to save the souls that were trapped within those bodies. Thus in Gnostic Gospels, Jesus is a phantasm; one of the disciples at one point passes his hand through Jesus’ body, showing it to be merely an apparition.
This idea was based on the Gnostics’ negative view of the physical world. If matter was evil, the Savior would not have taken it on. The New Testament is aware of Christian Gnosticism and resolutely stands against this, emphasizing that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Risen from the dead, Christ tells his disciples to touch him, so that they can see he is no mere phantom: “Handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). The apostle John insists that when he is speaking about Jesus, he is speaking about “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1).
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The idea that matter is not evil and can indeed be sanctified by the incarnation of the Son of God, stands opposed to the trans notion that one can only find one’s true self by mutilating one’s physical nature. Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), explains: “The trans community has this stupid line, ‘When you become trans you become your authentic self.’ It’s actually the complete opposite. You’re actually becoming somebody else, you’re actually, in a way, killing off, or getting out of touch with your authentic self, and you’re now becoming this almost fake identity.” Indeed. It would be like thinking that one can only find salvation by somehow departing from one’s physical body.
Estella Suarez-Hamilton sums it up: “Language is part of their rituals, part of the initiation is understanding the terms. It’s so alien, it’s another type of language. … That’s a lot of where they get their power from — in the Gnostic principles. It’s like you have this otherworldly knowledge … You have this deep understanding of the world, and yourself, and your soul, that no one can fully understand unless they also, you know, have the Gnosis.” The New Testament offered the antidote to this long ago.
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