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Sex education was simpler when I was a girl. There were only two sexes back then, and the word gender had not yet leaped from the declension of nouns to an identity.

Sr. Edmund Marie, the biology teacher in the girls’ department of our parish high school, visited the grammar school every year. She spent a day talking to us about plant biology and brought a black portfolio of oversized botanical posters. One was a standard line drawing for classroom use, the rudimentary kind that appears in countless textbooks.

But she toted other more engaging ones: enlargements of antique cross-cut illustrations of plant anatomy. Delicately drawn and colored, these old prints testified to the beauty inherent in the function of nature’s designs. That is why Edmund Marie went to the extra trouble of bringing them. She loved her subject and wanted to elicit a response that went deeper than bare information.

Without the benefit of previous instruction from a learned source, we all understood — who knows how — that Sister’s botany lessons were proxy for sex-ed. Long before she arrived, we all knew who the pistil people were in the room. And there was not a single doubt about which classmates had stamens.

Brother James from the high school boys’ department would drop by to add a few notes to Sister’s presentation of floral reproductive processes. A strapping Marist, he carried a distinct masculine gravitas — daunting, really — that dampened inclinations to snickering from any of the boys.

With young eyes on those lovely old botanicals, we absorbed inklings of the splendor of purpose revealed in the facts of botanical construction. Moral lessons would come later. They could wait. Our first formal schooling in what nature had in mind by giving us sexed bodies had a grandeur to it. 

None of us could have said so at the time, but the eye has its own way of knowing — an organ of the brain, it conveys its own counsel. Our eyes testified to an ineradicable truth: human bodies share the same ordered framework, the same stimulus to create life that animates every bloom.

Place any one of these prints — any botanical from the eras that produced them — next to today’s teaching tool: the Genderbread Person. The descent in quality of mind and in the character of hand between then and now requires no words. 

You have only to look. 

The drawing, a crude cartoon, makes no impression on the mind’s eye. It makes no demands on the imaginative faculties of the child viewer. It touches no soul.

The Genderbread Person’s sexual ambiguity grooms the child for lessons in the “social construction” of innate categories of male and female. A tacky graphic, it presents sexuality as a colorful blank slate on which youngsters can project whatever subjective imaginings are fed to them.

We know that words matter and that they have meaning. So do images. They communicate differently, more obliquely perhaps, but no less forcefully. In truth, in our increasingly image-saturated culture, images have become the lingua franca with which words have to do combat.

The Genderbread Person (and they/them’s fellow traveler, the Gender Unicorn) are vehicles for ideology. Information about human sexuality is irrelevant unless it serves gender dogmatism. Youngsters are coached to believe that they are free to choose an identity that separates them from their own bodies — from the oppression of biology.

The Gender Unicorn diagram, a popular infographic and teaching aide, was created by Trans Student Educational Resources (TSER), a sophisticated, well-funded organization led by trans-activists.

TSER rolled out the Gender Unicorn in 2014. In 2018, Gary Yagel, a Presbyterian pastor, wrote a refutation: “The Gender Unicorn: The Worldview that is Shaping Our Children.”

“We must view those in the LBGTQ life through the lens of grace. Those who hold these views …  need to be loved and valued as those made in God’s image, much more that they need to hear our arguments against their worldview,” the pastor wrote. 

However, the issue is not about that shape-shifting bracket called a worldview. It is about relationship to reality. It is about recognizing the corporeality that begins with certain irrefutable facts about such phenomena as chromosomes, skeletal structure, brain development, the function of the endocrine system, et al. 

The argument is precisely what is needed. Appeals to religious belief are matters of faith. That means they’re less effective as elements of argument with the faithless.

To speak of the beauty of God’s design falls on ears deaf to God-talk. Yet most Christian pulpits still repeat, in their own way, Yagel’s instruction in “how to be winsome, understanding, and compassionate towards those who don’t hold the biblical worldview.” Yagel’s kindly, pious rebuttal-lite epitomizes the reigning homiletic stance even now, six years later.

Every effective rebuttal aims to score the most points in an argument. It stands to defeat the opposition. 

What well-meaning Christians need to remember is that winning comes first. Scrap sentiment; argue to prevail. Repudiate the fallacies and rhetorical strategies of the opposition. Leave understanding for later. 

In the end, withheld sympathy is more compassionate than squandered forbearance.

Maureen Mullarkey is a painter and a critic. A member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), she writes on art and its intersection with religious and politics. Her essays have appeared in various publications, including The Nation, The Hudson Review, Arts Magazine, Art & Antiques, and The American Arts Quarterly. She was a columnist for The New York Sun during its life as a print publication. Currently, she is a senior contributor to The Federalist, an irregular contributor to The Weekly Standard, and keeper of a weblog titled Studio Matters. She is represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC. Follow her on Twitter, @mmletters.