Josue Sierra: When politics can’t tell the truth about the human person
Not long ago, debates about public policy assumed a basic agreement about reality. We argued about solutions, not about what things are. A chair was a chair. A human body was not a suggestion. And truth existed outside of our feelings about it.
That shared foundation has been seriously damaged.
What we are witnessing in American politics, and in Pennsylvania, is not simply another so-called culture-war skirmish. It is a deeper shift in how we understand what it means to be human. And when that foundation erodes, every institution that depends on truth — law, medicine, education, even basic trust between citizens — becomes unstable.
At the center of this shift is a new idea: that identity is primarily something we create inwardly rather than something shaped by our bodies and the world we inhabit. In this view, who we feel ourselves to be is treated as more authoritative than what can be observed, measured, or known. Reality becomes negotiable. Biology becomes optional. Disagreement becomes harm.
For some people, this deceptive shift seems motivated by compassion. They claim to desire to protect vulnerable individuals from cruelty or exclusion. But good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes. In fact, when compassion or empathy detaches itself from objective reality, it often produces greater harm than what it claims to seek to prevent.
Grove City College Professor Carl Trueman has noted that modern politics increasingly treats the self as something to be constructed rather than received. In everyday terms, this means we are being taught that our bodies do not tell us the truth about who we are, and that society must reorganize itself around our internal sense of identity, even when it conflicts with biological reality.
That idea may sound abstract. It is not. Some Democrats in the House are now seeking to write that into Pennsylvania law.
One example is HB 300, which adds “sexual orientation and gender identity or expression” into our current Human Relations act. This legislation is presented as narrow anti-discrimination measures and sold with deceptive, compassionate arguments. But this type of legislation does something more significant: it elevates self-declared identity over biological sex in law, and it treats dissent from that framework not as disagreement, but as discrimination.
This is not a civil rights issue in the classical sense, protecting individuals from discrimination based on immutable characteristics, but an attempt to enshrine a contested, ideological understanding of sex and identity into law while forcing public affirmation and participation.
This bill is expected to be passed by Democrats in the Judiciary Committee and move to full House consideration in March.
This matters because law is not merely expressive; it is coercive. When the state adopts a contested definition of reality, it does not simply signal values; it compels behavior. Doctors, teachers, counselors, parents, and employers are no longer free to speak or act according to their professional judgment or conscience if it conflicts with the new false orthodoxy.
To be clear, no one should be harassed, demeaned, or denied basic dignity. Every human being deserves respect and legal protection from unjust treatment. But dignity does not require us to deny biology. It does not require us to pretend that sex is a feeling rather than a bodily reality. And it certainly does not require the government to police language or punish those who speak plainly about observable facts.
In medicine, compassion depends on truth. A doctor cannot treat a patient well by ignoring the body. In education, care for children requires honesty about human development. In law, fairness requires stable categories that do not change based on personal declaration.
When we teach people that their bodies are irrelevant to who they are, we do not liberate them, we leave them unmoored. And when the state enforces that message, it places everyone else in an impossible position: affirm what you know to be false, or face legal consequences.
This is not progress. It is a quiet form of coercion.
A society that cannot tell the truth about the human body will struggle to tell the truth about anything else. If words lose their connection to reality, then rights become arbitrary, laws become tools of power, and trust between citizens collapses. That outcome should concern liberals and conservatives alike.
The choice before Pennsylvania is not between compassion and cruelty. It is between a compassion grounded in biological reality and a harmful, toxic empathy that demands reality’s surrender. The former allows disagreement, debate, and humility. The latter requires conformity to radical ideology, enforced by law.
We can and should protect people from unjust treatment without redefining the human person. We can uphold dignity without abandoning truth. And we can legislate with care without turning contested ideological claims into mandatory beliefs.
Under HB 300, that redefinition would not remain abstract: it would open women’s private, sex-segregated spaces to biological males, force girls to compete against males identifying as female, compel citizens to use language that affirms a view of identity that is divorced from biological truth, and punish people of good will who disagree..
But that requires the courage to say something increasingly unfashionable: reality is not an act of aggression, and truth is not a form of hate. If we lose the ability to speak honestly about what it means to be human, no piece of legislation, no matter how well-intentioned, will be able to hold our common life together.
Josue Sierra is the Director of Communications for the PA Family Institute. He lives in the Mid-Atlantic region together with his wife and 5 kids.
