Transgender Ideology
Every cattle producer knows it’s BS.
Pat feeding our bottle calf Lulu at Coyote Run Farm in fall 2020.
Fortunately, we were moving some fence to shift the cattle when we noticed the cow showing all the signs of giving birth. That wasn’t supposed to be happening, a full month ahead of schedule. I was frustrated as the cow kept circling and smelling the ground. There wasn’t an easy way to get her to the barn. So I hung out in the field while Pat went back to the house. It was his birthday.
I continued to mess with the fence, killing time so I could watch her, assuming she was going to drop a dead calf. I had turned my back on her for a minute or two and when I turned around she was on the ground and clearly giving birth. I ran to her in time to finish pulling the calf and to tickle its nose with grass to get it sneezing and breathing. The cow was up. The calf was alive but slow.
And then the cow laid back down. Ah, it made sense. This was a set of twins. The second one was much smaller. It took more effort to get it breathing. I cupped its nose and blew into its lungs. I vigorously rubbed its sides. I even said a little prayer. I had been frustrated that we were going to lose our first calf of the year on Pat’s birthday. Instead we had a set of twins. It would take a lot of work but maybe what appeared to be a disappointment could turn into a bonus of an extra calf.
I ran back to the house to get the barn set up, grabbed Pat, and brought the four wheeler and the trailer out to the field. We loaded up the twins with Pat holding them in between hay bales while I drove, and the cow followed to the barn.
The bigger calf sucked within a couple of hours. The smaller calf couldn’t even stand. We tube fed it for a couple days before it would suck. By the time it was strong enough to introduce it to the cow, we were past the window of an easy introduction. We had a bottle calf.
Today the Iowa Republican Legislature and Governor Reynolds are barreling towards removing transgender Iowans from Iowa’s Civil Rights Act. The effort goes farther than removing them from a list of Iowans granted protection from discrimination based on race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, ancestry or disability.
Aside from being the first state in the history of our nation to go backwards and permit discrimination of a group of people previously protected, the bill will enshrine into law a strict definition of male and female. No ambiguity. No sense of science. Just a clear rejection of what Republicans call transgender ideology. Because everyone knows there is a black and white distinction about gender.
If you’re wondering why I started with a story about twin calves, here’s the natural law, God of creation proof that every cow-calf farmer and rancher knows, the boy parts and girl parts ain’t that simple.
Those twin calves on Pat’s birthday were both heifers. We ended up keeping our bottle calf to breed. Had her larger twin been a bull, we wouldn’t have kept her.
When you have a set of twins where one is a bull and the other a heifer, you have a high susceptibility to a condition known as a freemartin.
“This condition causes infertility in the female cattle born twin to a male. When a heifer twin shares the uterus with a bull fetus, they also share the placental membranes connecting the fetuses with the dam. A joining of the placental membranes occurs at about the fortieth day of pregnancy, and thereafter, the fluids of the two fetuses are mixed. This causes exchange of blood and antigens carrying characteristics that are unique to each heifers and bulls. When these antigens mix, they affect each other in a way that causes each to develop with some characteristics of the other sex.”
And when I say every farmer and rancher understands this, I really mean, just about everyone. You simply don’t keep a heifer to breed when she has a bull as a twin. You don’t have to understand all the science. You simply understand that this is nature. Farmers don’t insist that because the calf has heifer parts, it must be fully female. And there’s also something going on with the bull. In both cases, the farmer and rancher is going to butcher these twins and not keep them to breed.
“Although the male twin in this case is only affected by reduced fertility, in over ninety percent of the cases, the female twin is completely infertile. Because of a transfer of hormones or a transfer of cells, the heifer's reproductive tract is severely underdeveloped and sometimes even contains some elements of a bull's reproductive tract. A freemartin is genetically female, but has many characteristics of a male.”
Yesterday, Robert Leonard provided a detailed account of Monday’s House subcommittee and then committee considerations of the bill at Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture. He also lays out the science of gender, which is anything but black and white.
We’ve gone down a rabbit hole of radical ideology in Iowa and across the country. Let’s apply that radical ideology to those of us raising cattle. There are only two black and white genders. God and nature never throws diversity into the mix. Ignore what the history of domesticated cattle tells us. If it looks like a heifer on the day it was born, it’s a heifer through and through. If it looks like a bull, definitely a bull. No need to think outside of that black and white reality. Believe it, preach it, and anyone that dares to try to show you an exception, claim that they are the ones who are radical and ideological.
Here’s another thing you won’t see a farmer or rancher do, ignore the gift of a healthy set of twins. In the end, you accept that freemartin and you embrace the gift. Nobody tries to make that heifer or bull into something it isn’t. What we do is we feed them, care for them, celebrate them, and give thanks that they’ve been a part of our operation. That’s just common sense thankfulness.
When it comes to the human family, we should expect nothing less. Republicans have invested in a clever strategy to bait Democrats into a battle over policies while throwing transgender kids and their families under the bus.
We don’t have to avoid the policy debates. But we can’t allow ourselves to be baited into only trying to defend policies or oppose policies.
We’ve got to be able to find ways to tell stories grounded in values. After all, that’s what moves people. And Republicans have done that by telling stories about fear and reinforcing gender stereotypes.
That gender by nature is less black and white than Republicans are now trying to codify in Iowa law, doesn’t mean that gender doesn’t exist. That freemartin set of twins doesn’t change anything about the rest of the bulls and heifers in the herd. That a small percentage of cattle have more fluid gender doesn’t diminish the notion of gender. It simply expands it.
That a child and their family are wrestling with a diversity of gender that most of us don’t have to deal with personally, doesn’t diminish us. But consider this, if gender is more fluid, does it help all of us be more reflective about how we want to express a wider range of human expression?
Every time we advance greater equality for the full expression of the human condition, we have always become better human beings. When we do the opposite, history always reveals we do not become better human beings.
I pray that in Iowa today, we don’t embrace a radical ideology about gender. I pray that we don’t codify into law a black and white ideology that simply ignores nature and the gift of diversity. Diversity is in fact the foundation of the Christian story of creation. Here’s a quote from Genesis 1:26.
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Hmm. So if I’m going to speak about God in this passage, do I need to say they, them, their since God refers to themselves in the plural? And in case anyone thinks I’m playing around with a politically correct translation, this is the King James Version.
If Iowa passes this law, we will need to double our efforts because this radical ideology won’t stop with going after trans kids and their families. We need to stand on our moral ground. We need to find our voices. If you raise cattle, talk about your cows. If you have friends and family members who are wrestling with the burden of being gifted by God with greater diversity, tell their story.
I will stand with the families and individuals wrestling with this gift of diversity. Consider all that they teach us. The kindness they are calling us to embrace. The new insight they are calling us to understand about being human. They are part of creation. They are a gift from God. When they are bullied for political reasons, I will stand with those families and individuals and against the political bullies. Because if radical gender ideology wins the day, they will be coming for the family wrestling with autism next. And the family with two dads. And on and on.
In fact, it’s already happening. Consider our Republican Attorney General who has joined the lawsuit to eliminate Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. This is a federal law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. Laura Belin at Bleeding Heartland has that story here.
We cannot back away from this fight. We have to find ways to tell a story grounded in our own experiences around the values we share.
Every good rancher raising cattle, and even bad ranchers, understands that not every calf is born exactly to a black and white category of gender. But I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t see the inherent value of that heifer calf with a twin bull brother. They aren’t going to do something stupid like try to make that heifer into something it isn’t. They are going to embrace that calf as a valuable part of their operation. To do anything else is to undermine the ranch itself.
And that is what Republicans are doing when they ignore nature, ignore science, and dare I say ignore common sense. We’re undermining humanity, all of it, when we try to project an ideology onto humanity that undermines the values of embracing the gifts that each of us offers in helping all of us grow in our love.
My family also has the gift of so much diversity, Matt. You have written a beautiful, articulate, easy to relatable essay, and I applaud you. I also stand with you, as I know you do with me. Our humanity is at stake in Iowa, and we all need to give voice to our resistance to the fear and hate being sold by our state’s “leaders”, as we stand in support of love and care of and for each other.
Glad you took this approach. When I entered my own comments for the proposed bill, I mentioned our own observations and knowledge regarding poultry. If you work with animals enough, you know binary doesn't describe what happens in the world around us.