The insanity of transgenderism continues unabated in some places.  The University of Washington is one such place (thanks to Moon Griffon for mentioning this on his radio show):

A transgender volleyball player and high school junior from California verbally committed to play for the University of Washington, which could make him the first known male recipient of a women’s Division 1 athletic scholarship.

If the university signs athlete Tate Drageset’s offer next fall, he will take one of 12 National Collegiate Athletic Association DI volleyball scholarships available for women at the school, Reduxx reported Wednesday.

It is hoped that parents, courts, laws, rules, the NCAA, etc., will rein in this kind of madness, but if folks do succeed in banning transgender men from women’s sports (and we hope they do), we have dealt only with a symptom and not with its underlying cause.  That would be the theory of evolution, which posits a universe devoid of a holy, all-powerful Creator, that is constantly in flux, in which there are no fixed forms:  One thing may ‘evolve’ at any moment, or over a long period of time (thousands or millions of years), into another – a fish into a bird, a worm into a snake, etc.  This being the case, it is perfectly consistent with that belief system to hold that a man may become a woman and vice versa.

But this is the opposite of reality.  In the real world, God created the universe and all that is in it in fairly quick succession (there are no hard numbers here, but a young cosmos of several thousand years in age is the usual estimate).  And the living things that God created do not shift and change; their forms and natures are fixed for all time.  The Holy Fathers of the Church, in their commentaries on the book of Genesis, make it clear that altering the nature of any species is forbidden:

What pure and untarnished generations follow without intermingling one after another, so that a thymallus produces a thymallus; a sea-wolf, a sea-wolf.  The sea-scorpion, too, preserves unstained its marriage bed….  Fish know nothing of union with alien species.  They do not have unnatural betrothals such as are designedly brought about between animals of two different species as, for instance, the donkey and the mare, or again the female donkey and the horse, both being examples of unnatural union.  Certainly there are cases in which nature suffers more in the nature of defilement rather than that of injury to the individual.  Man as an abettor of hybrid barrenness is responsible for this.  He considers a mongrel animal more valuable than one of a genuine species.  You mix together alien species and you mingle diverse seeds.

–St. Ambrose of Milan (+397), Hexaemeron, quoted in Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision, 2^nd edn., Hieromonk Damascene, ed., Platina, Cal., St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2011, p. 185.

St Basil the Great (+379) adds to that,

The nature of existing objects, set in motion by one command, passes through creation without change….  …it continues to preserve each of the animals by uninterrupted successions until the consummation of the universe.  No length of time causes the specific characteristics of the animals to be corrupted or effaced, but, as if established just recently, nature, ever fresh, moves along with time.

. . . from seeds spring forth plants related to the seeds sown.  Thus, what was put forth by the earth in its first generation has been preserved until the present time, since the kinds persisted through constant reproduction.

—Hexaemeron, quoted in Fr. Seraphim, pgs. 182-3.

There will of course be changes within a species, but one species was never meant to become another, or to be mingled with another, or to change from one sex to dozens of others.  But while those things are certainly dangerous on their own (see, for instance, the dangers associated with genetic tampering of crops and animals here), The Powers That Be wish to employ them in an even more sinister way, as propaganda tools to soften our resistance to the idea of genetic (and other) changes to humanity itself in order to create a higher form of humanity, an improved human.

This is an ideology known as transhumanism; a Christian priest, Fr. Vitaliy, will walk us through the various facets of this new techno-religion.  His essay begins with a short overview, and at its root, as with transgenderism, is evolution:

What is transhumanism? This is an ideology that is becoming dominant in the United States and most other developed countries in the West.

Transhumanism is a set of various doctrines that set as their main goal the achievement of earthly immortality, the creation of a superman.

Transhumanism is a natural stage in the development of science, based solely on rationalism. The most important foundation of transhumanism is the theory of evolution. Transhumanists believe that human evolution is not complete, and that it will continue on. Moreover, with the help of the tools offered by science, transhumanists consider it possible to completely overcome humanity itself.

These ‘enlightened’ men and women, using the tools of science, will now direct their own evolution into superhumanity.  This will proceed by stages, first by genetic manipulation, then by merging with machines, and then shedding the human body altogether:

Transhumanists consider the cardinal improvement of biological nature to be the first, auxiliary stage of a further round of human evolution. For this, the path of gene modification is most often proposed.

They propose using genetic engineering to achieve the cultivation of humans with desired genetic properties. They usually say that it is necessary in order to overcome hereditary diseases and ensure full health. It is assumed that people will eventually be immune to any disease, tolerate any temperature, endure radiation, live under water, or even be able to fly.

Next, the synthesis of man and machine should take place. This is supposed to be done by introducing artificial implants and chips into the body and brain, resulting in cyborg humans [for an example of this kind of ghoulish research, read this—W.G.].

However, this biological and technical path is not considered to be the main one.

The main efforts are now aimed at using information and nanotechnology when creating the superman. The human personality is perceived by representatives of transhumanism exclusively as a set of gene information encoded in DNA, plus a carrier of consciousness — the brain — which is considered to be a neurocomputer.

Consciousness, in this view, consists of a certain information set based on the electronic impulses of the brain. Therefore, it is believed that by completely copying such pulses, you can transfer them to other, technical carriers.

When contemplating the hypothetical transfer of consciousness from a biological brain to a computer, transhumanists call it the “loading of consciousness”, “brain reconstruction”, or simply “loading”. After such a transfer has been realized, the consciousness, from the point of view of transhumanists, will live in virtual reality. And this, they believe, provides unlimited possibilities for human self-realization.

For those with eyes to see, this bodes extremely badly for those who reject the transhumanist path:

Those people who now belong to the elite, who have concentrated most of the financial resources of mankind in their hands, would become an immortal super race, having moved to a new level of existence. The rest of humanity — that is, all those who are poor, who do not occupy the corresponding social niche — will become, in fact, unnecessary garbage under the feet of the elite. Humanity would clearly be divided into the “superintelligent” minority and everyone else.

In fact, this is not just neo-feudalism. All previous forms of enslavement and suppression, even Auschwitz, were at least relations between people. Now we are on the verge of suppressing people, not only by robotic superhumans, but also by those who will deny humanity as such.

In fact, for modern transhumanists, humanity is an outdated primitive form. Accordingly, all aspects of modern social human life are obsolete.

With this end goal in mind, the wild promotion of transgenderism and the rest of the alphabet sexualities (LGBTQIA) makes sense, as it will help undermine the old, traditional, Christian form of humanity and give rise to the new, better humanity:

In this sense, the active imposition of homosexuality and lesbianism, and the destruction of the traditional family, is simply a means of preparing for a transhumanistic future, where the human mind on a new medium can, as the bearers of this worldview suggest, use virtual reality to turn itself into anyone.

The people behind this new religion will probably not surprise anyone:

In the US, NASA and Google are the active architects of the “transhumanistic future.” In 2009, NASA and Google created Singularity University, located in Silicon Valley in the NASA Research Center, a stone’s throw from the Googleplex, in order to train relevant personnel — potential leaders promoting the “technologies for solving global problems of mankind”. The US government is allocating colossal amounts to solve the problem of combining human consciousness with computer technology [a very recent example is Pres. Biden’s executive order on ‘biotechnology and biomanufacturing’—W.G.].

All of this is simply man’s effort to achieve immortality apart from the Holy Trinity and the Church – which means it is a continuation of the satanic lie whispered in man’s ears in the Garden of Eden:  You can become equal to God even if you eat of the forbidden fruit, even if you rebel against Him (Genesis 3:5).  The antidote to all of this is therefore a complete rejection of evolution and all the ideas that flow from it, and a resolute stand within the Church established by the Lord Jesus Christ:

Man is not just a set of genes, not merely a set of electrical impulses in the brain. Man is an immortal person created in the image and likeness of God. The creation of man was not the result of evolution in the animal world. It was a creative act of God. But a man called to heavenly life fell away from God in the act of sin. As a result, he received “leather robes” — the current conditions of human existence. Moreover, the result of the fall was physical death. Death is a gift to God’s people, for it puts a limit to the rooting of man in sin. If there were no death, then people would endlessly grow in evil, closer and closer in their condition to fallen angels — demons.

. . . Only Christ redeemed us from the curse, sin, and death, giving us the opportunity to reunite with God. He gives us cleansing from the ancestral sin, acquiring the conditions of a new eternal life with God which takes place in the Sacrament of Baptism, where a person dies with Christ in order to resurrect with Christ. Next begins the path of ascension to God, the key to which is union with Christ in the Sacrament of Communion. Only on this path is it possible for a person to achieve his salvation — that is, his everlasting dwelling with God, deification.

. . . Man is called to become a god, but this can happen as a Divine gift, as the mercy of the Creator to his creation. And the possibility of this is achieved in personal effort, to combat the sinfulness that is rooted in man, in the struggle against passions, in the feat of acquiring divine grace.

Man consists not only of soul, but also of body. The body is important. The souls of all people will be precisely reunited with their bodies after the general resurrection from the dead. And it is with these transformed bodies that they will remain in eternity.

It is to the glory of the South that she led the way in opposing evolution early in the 20^th century.  The Southern States should not spare any effort in opposing it and its baneful offspring like genetic engineering and transgenderism today.  One of the most valuable things the incoming Landry administration and Louisiana Legislature could do for the future of Louisiana would be to ban the teaching of evolution altogether (which continues to pilloried by serious scientists), mentioning it in schools only in passing as a dangerous theory that led to evils like communism, Nazism, and the other aforementioned social sicknesses.  If they refuse to do this, the future looks mighty bleak for maintaining what is left of our Christian culture:

It is the problem of transhumanism that actualizes all the main aspects of our Orthodox worldview. We are faced with a serious worldview — to maintain our faith or continue to go along with everyone along the path of unlimited information and technological “progress.”

Transhumanism challenges God. In fact, it is assumed that supermen themselves will become gods, and that they will not need the Creator. Indeed, transhumanists do not believe in God. They embrace purely rationalistic constructions.

. . . Transhumanism proceeds from the theory of evolution. It argues that the human race will continue to evolve further until it overcomes itself in the near future. Therefore, the question “Can a Christian be an evolutionist?” moves from a certain marginality to a category of vital importance. If the theory of evolution is accepted, then what are the limits of this evolution, and why should limits be set? How can we stop dehumanization?

Why should human evolution stop? . . . if we proceed from the logic of the development of evolutionary science itself, and accept such logic, then it is really impossible to put limits on the transformation of man into something completely inhuman.

If the leaders in Louisiana and the other Southern States fail to act, then they will force God to act, which will also place us in a dangerous position:

Will transhumanism triumph? It can be assumed that the Lord will not allow such abuse of our God-given human nature. Something must stop humanity on the path of endless “progress”, leading into the abyss of dehumanization.

What will it be? War, global catastrophe?

Perhaps we will find out soon.

May God save us from such a catastrophe.  But the choice is ours – whether to continue down into the abyss via the path of demonic ‘evolutionary progress’ or to repent and ascend the mountain of Christian deification instead, to become ‘new creations’ in Christ (II Corinthians 5:17).  In a world full of trifling, meaningless choices, this ain’t one of ’em.