Don't Listen to Carl Trueman: This is how the Left views Transgenderism

Conversations That Matter

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Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. This is going to be a short episode. I want to share with you a clip that I saw the other day from Matt Walsh, who is a commentator at the

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Daily Wire. And I don't know how I stumbled across this. Somehow, I saw this clip, though, and I thought,

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I got to share this with everyone because it illustrates so well, something that I talked about a few months ago when

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I was evaluating Carl Truman's book, The Rise and Fall of the Modern Self. It illustrates why

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I think Truman is actually wrong in his analysis of what's going on. So we're going to get to that.

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But before we get to that, I want to share with you very briefly a sponsor for this particular podcast.

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All right. Well, let's now talk about this video that I saw, and I'll explain to you why

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I think this is so significant. So here it is. It's Matt Walsh at a university talking to someone who is a man who thinks they're a woman.

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I'm transgender. I'm born and raised here in New Mexico. I have a graduate degree in information technology, marketing, business, and finance.

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I own my own home. I pay taxes. I have a six -figure job.

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I'm a respected professional in Albuquerque. I'm a mother. My life experience is that I'm an awesome person.

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I am well -liked. I'm responsible. And I think

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I'm pretty cool. You touched on something. You said something earlier that for you and some...

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I want you to notice something and see how often this comes up. My life experience is that I'm all these things.

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Just take note of that. Somebody calls you a man, it doesn't faze you because, like, you just know that you're a man.

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That was interesting to me because I feel the same way about my identity as a woman. My question leading up to this, you've asserted that no one would ever see me as a woman, that nobody would ever see or could see a transgender person as a woman, and yet I have dozens of friends from diverse backgrounds, women from the reservation, a woman from Japan, several immigrant women.

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I have my coworkers. I have my boss, my VP, my CEO, all respecting me as a woman, my family, my long -term friends who are actually here with me.

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Notice the variety of people that he's pulling from. There's a diversity argument here that all these people that have intersectional scores and they come from all these different perspectives, they can all see that I'm a woman.

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Where's the proof that this person is, in fact, a woman? We've heard experience, and then what?

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Other people's opinions, their experience. All of these people assure me

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I'm a woman. They'll tell me, girl, there is no way you are a man.

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They see me as a woman. The question, how can you assert that nobody would ever see me as a woman when my material experience tells me you're wrong?

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Matt Walsh responds to this in a good way, but this is the crux of it. My material experience tells me that I'm a woman.

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All these people in my life verify that I'm a woman. This is how

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I experience the world is really what's going on here. Maybe we'll come back to this and play some more, but let me just give you some commentary on why

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I thought of this. What does Karl Truman do in his book, Rise and Fall of the Modern Self, or Rise and Triumph, rather, of the

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Modern Self? He actually brings this phrase up a few times in the book.

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How do you make sense of the statement,

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I am a man trapped in a woman's body? He brings that up a few times, this idea of being trapped.

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That was my first clue that I didn't think Truman's analysis was correct. I thought,

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I don't ever hear that. That's a conservative critique sometimes.

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That's how older conservatives especially view people who pretend to be another gender.

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That's how they rationalize it. They must think that they're a split self. The true self is not reflected by their biology.

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It's deep within, but that's actually not how transgender people who think they're transgender think about this primarily.

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They think of it in different terms. They wouldn't ever say, I am a woman trapped in a man's body, or I'm a man trapped in a woman's body.

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I'm not saying no one's ever said that, but I'm saying in general, especially today, that's not what you hear. What they say is that I am a woman.

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It's what this person's saying. I am a woman. There's no trapped anything. It's biology.

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That's irrelevant. What's relevant is experience, how

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I experience the world, my viewpoint, the viewpoints of others. Those are the things that determine whether or not you're a woman or a man.

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It's a social construct. That's what I'm trying to say. That's what Carl Truman, his analysis is exactly off on this.

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This is not a gotcha quote or anything. This is just the basic argument he's making in his book. He says this in the book, the idea that we can be who or whatever we want to be is a commonplace today.

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Consumerism or late capitalism fuels this notion with its message of the customer as king of the goods we consume as being basic to who we are.

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Now, I'll stop there. That's not exactly true. You can't be whatever you want to be. You can be who your experience says that you can be.

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That's the guiding light, if you will. It's your experience. No, you can't be anyone.

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I know conservatives, and it's fun to joke about this. We'll say, I'm going to self -identify as a woman today so I can get

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A, B, or C discount. It's not accepted by the left. We wonder, well, hey, why aren't you accepting it?

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The reason is because you have to show, you have to demonstrate that you've been accepted into society in that way, that this is part of your experience.

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It's part of the way you experience the world. It's part of the way others are experiencing you in the world.

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It's that interaction that forces businesses and government institutions to refer to you by preferred pronouns and all of that.

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It's not because you are able to arbitrarily just decide what you want. We know that that's what's going on in a way.

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We know that it is arbitrary. It's not based on anything concrete, but they are deceiving themselves into thinking that experience is necessarily concrete, this experience of feeling like you're a woman or something.

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He says this, commercials communicate this message in the way that we present particular products as the key to happiness or life improvement.

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You have the power to transform yourself by the mere swipe of a credit card. The possession of this thing, that car, that kitten, that item of clothing, will make you different, a better, more fulfilled person, underwritten by easy credit, consumer self -creation is the order of the day.

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This is a critique against, I guess, what the blessings of free market have brought us.

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That's what this is. This is a critique from the left. Carl Truman, read his book, Republicrat. He is not a conservative.

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I'm saying politically conservative. I'm also saying that this also gets into his theology, to some extent.

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I'm not saying he's not orthodox in his basic understandings of God and so forth.

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I have no reason to believe he's not. His analysis is messed up by some of the political leftism that he's imbibed.

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In this case, he's so off the mark. I think it's interesting with his book.

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It was universally reviewed and universally praised, pretty much. Universally reviewed, universally praised.

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I know of conservative pastors who are just using Carl Truman's book and stuff.

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I'm not saying there's nothing to glean from it, because I think there are things to glean from it. This is the basic critique he makes, and it's just not exactly what's happening at all.

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That's what I wanted to share with you. At the time that I did this, I was just spitballing.

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Now, when I saw that, I was like, oh, that's a good, high -quality representation of what I'm talking about. This also plays into the whole argument that Baptists are the people that are bringing in transgenderism.

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It's because somehow they believe in making this choice that you can, I guess, choose to be in an

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Arminian way into the covenant of God. Presbyterians aren't responsible for transgenderism.

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It's Baptists. I know that was a controversy a few months ago. It's all based on Truman's understanding, though.

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I'm not saying they're getting it from Truman, the people who advocate that, but I'm saying it's the same analysis.

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It's this idea that it's individualism. It's your hyper -individualism, thinking that you have the power to define yourself however you choose to define yourself, is the problem, when it's really not.

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The people who are experiencing transgenderism in their minds are people who don't think that they have that arbitrary power just to willy -nilly decide what they are.

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They think they have to first have an experience, a set of experiences, actually. Generally, they need to be confirmed by other people in that community or other people who also affirm that because that's part of the social construct thing.

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That's why it's so important for them to get societal recognition of this. It wouldn't be important for them to get societal recognition as much if everyone thought, well, you can just define yourself and that's fine.

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If someone just wanted to define themselves as a woman or a man or whatever and go through life that way, it wouldn't be as big of a deal.

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I guess what I'm trying to say is they wouldn't have to use the opinions of others to affirm their identity if they thought it was rooted in just their personal choice.

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That's what I'm trying to say. The fact that they need the opinion of others, the approval of others in order to justify their identity means laws are put into place, policies are made.

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You have no option but to also affirm that person's experience. It's part of the truth suppression going on.

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Let's just play a little more of this. Matt Walsh, I think, somewhat hits it out of the park in his answer here.

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Let's just play that. Interesting that that's the part of my talk you chose to ask a question about because that's not in my talk at all.

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I don't believe I said that no one would ever see you as a woman. I mean, it's possible, I suppose, that you could fool someone.

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Now, you brought this up, so I have to tell you that you brought this up. You've put your identity on the table for conversation, and so I'm going to say you wouldn't fool me at all.

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I mean, I see a man 100 percent, and I think most people would. Now, the fact that you have people in your life who are saying to you, oh, you're totally a woman, that's exactly what

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I'm talking about. No one in my life has ever once said to me, you're totally a man,

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Matt. You know, if a friend of mine called me on the phone and said, listen, Matt, I want you to know you're really a man,

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I would think that there was something wrong with him. I would say, why are you saying that at all? It doesn't make any sense. So the fact that this is a conversation to begin with tells me it only proves the point that I'm trying to make, that your identity, even in your own mind, is something that you need to be assured of.

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Now, what I would like to ask you, again, because you're standing here, and so you've brought your identity on the table for discussion, so how do you know that you're a woman?

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It was first when I heard transgender persons describe their experience in their own words, and this was only about two years ago.

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Hearing somebody describe things, it was a woman from like England, describing her experience, her childhood, her teenage years, and it blew my mind to be listening to her, because it was just some podcast that I was listening to while I was like doing laundry, but it blew my mind to hear somebody so eloquently and precisely describe things that I had experiences, that I had experienced.

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What did they say? Okay. So I am honestly hesitant.

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I know that you touched earlier about the difficulty that transgender women might have in describing their identity, but I want to state

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I honestly don't feel that you would engage in this conversation in good faith. Why are you here?

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Why did you stand up to talk to me if you don't want to have a conversation? All right. I have to land the plane, but you can go online and watch this more.

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Maybe I'll try to get the link in the info section. The point I wanted to make is that it was all experience.

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This particular confused individual, it was for them all experience that determined who they were.

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It wasn't a consumeristic choice of like, well, it would be preferable to be that, and therefore

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I'm making a conscious choice to be that, and my choice determines who I am.

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No, it's a discovery of who they think they are based upon their experience. That's what's going on.

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Gender and sex and race and all these things are now social constructs.

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They're determined by the way that you experience the world in society.

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That's why I don't recommend his book, because I think he misses that.

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I think Matt Walsh was right to approach it the way he did by trying to first appeal to the fact that the majority opinion, and he probably should have camped there a little bit, but majority opinion, how does that determine who you are?

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Is that really what we metaphysically base someone's or ontologically base someone's existence in?

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We know what they are in essence because of what people say about that person and because of how they experience supposedly the world.

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We need to probably think more about how to approach this. There really hasn't been a lot of resources put out there on it because people are busy imbibing the nonsense that this is simply just an arbitrary consumeristic choice.

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It's not. That's not really what's going on. I hope that was helpful for some of you.

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It's more of a critique than an actual solution, but I have to go. I don't have a lot of time. Maybe this is something we'll talk about more in this.

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I'm writing a book right now where I'm touching on some of these things. I think that one of the things

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I do actually agree with Carl Truman on, to some extent, I suppose, is getting back to natural revelation, that there is a natural law that God has placed down, and arguing from definition and principle rather than arguing from pragmatic concerns, which is what happens with these things.

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Arguing from the definition that He made them male and female from the beginning, and we all know this, but we suppress it, and not budging on that definition.

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That may seem like it's not meeting them halfway or it's not neutral enough or something, but it's just the truth.

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I think Matt Walsh, if you watch the rest of the video, I think he does a pretty decent job at trying to do just that.

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Anyway, the Carl Truman approach, I just don't think works out all that well.