6
Transgender, Transreality

“God Should Have Made Me a Girl”

From the time Brandon was an infant, he was quiet, sensitive, and compliant.When he was a toddler, his babysitter told his mother, “He’s too good to be a boy.” In preschool, while the boys roughhoused on one side of the room and the girls sat in a circle and talked, Brandon sat with the little girls. He was not interested in playing with guns or trucks. He preferred playing imaginary games with toy animals, acting out complex interpersonal relationships. From an early age, he sensed that he was different from most boys.

Today we would call him gender nonconforming.

By junior high, Brandon was experiencing painful tension. He felt sharply out of step with the prevailing John Wayne masculinity image. And he still preferred the company of girls. Boys talked about sports and video games; girls talked about emotions and relationships—the things Brandon cared about. But of course girls never shared their feelings with him as openly as with their girlfriends. So he felt he was neither really a boy nor accepted as a girl.

No matter where he went, Brandon felt agonizingly out of place. “I feel the way girls do, I am interested in things girls are,” he told his parents. “God should have made me a girl.”

In high school, his classmates organized a “Christian manhood” group, but it stressed stereotypical male virtues like leadership and assertiveness. What about men whose character strengths are caring and nurturing?

By age fourteen, Brandon was spending hours scouring the internet for information on sex reassignment surgery. Eventually, however, he concluded that it would not give him the results he wanted. “I realized that surgery would not turn me into a girl. It would not change my genes and chromosomes,” he told me. “A person is not a computer program that you can delete and redesign from scratch.”

The last time I talked to Brandon, he had graduated from university with honors and was working at his first job. At the end of our conversation, though, he tapped his chest and said with a shy smile, “But I’m still a girl on the inside.”

Young people today live in a society that prompts them to question their psychosexual identity as never before.1 Laws are being passed that treat sexual attraction and gender identity as a protected category (like race and religion) in public schools, businesses, housing, health care, prisons, and even churches.2 These are called SOGI—Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity—laws, and when we analyze their language we find that they assume the same two-story divided worldview we diagnosed in earlier chapters. SOGI laws are based on the assumption that a person can be born in the wrong body. Thus they set up an opposition between the body and an inner sense of being male or female, between physiological facts and subjective feelings.

Christians must respond by offering a positive biblical worldview that affirms the value of the body and the unity of the human being. At the same time, Christians should be the first in line to nurture and support kids who don’t “fit in” by affirming the diversity of gifts and temperaments in the body of Christ.

Your “Assigned” Sex

Many people find it easy to recognize the two-story dualism in the transgender narrative. A BBC film titled Transgender Kids says, “At the heart of the debate about transgender children is the idea that your brain can be at war with your body.”3 Today the accepted treatment is not to help persons change their inner feelings of gender identity to match their body but to change their body (through hormones and surgery) to match their feelings.

In other words, when a person senses a dissonance between body and mind, the mind wins. The body is dismissed as irrelevant.

This low view of the body can be detected in the language used in SOGI laws and policies. Here is a typical example from the California education code: Gender is “a person’s gender identity and gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth.”4

What’s the operative word here? Assigned—as though a person’s sex at birth were arbitrary instead of a biological fact. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) says, “Transgender is a term used to describe people whose gender identity differs from the sex the doctor marked on their birth certificate.”5 A person pictures the doctor wondering, Hmm, which sex shall we mark down for this baby? instead of observing it as a scientific fact.

What this language implies is that scientific facts do not matter. SOGI laws are being used to impose a two-level worldview that disparages the physical body as inconsequential, insignificant, and irrelevant to who we are. As O’Donovan writes, the transgender narrative suggests that “the body is an accident that has befallen the real me; the real me has a true sex” apart from the body. “The body is an object set over against the personal subject located in the thinking-feeling mind.”6

Consider a recent case in the Fourth Circuit Court, in which a girl who identified as a boy named G. G. demanded the right to use the boys’ restroom. The judge ruled that “G. G.’s birth-assigned sex, or so-called ‘biological sex,’ is female, but G. G.’s gender identity is male.”7

Her “so-called ‘biological sex’”—in sneer quotes? This is a judge writing a formal ruling for a federal court, and he treats the very existence of biological sex with suspicion and disdain. Apparently he thinks the facts of physiology, anatomy, chromosomes, and DNA are less real or knowable than the girl’s subjective feelings about her gender.

I ran across an internet forum discussing transgenderism, where a commenter wrote, “What does some little bit of flesh between the legs matter?”8 Why should that make a difference to your sense of who you are?

This is a devastatingly reductive view of the body. Young people are absorbing the idea that the physical body is not part of the authentic self—that the authentic self is only the autonomous choosing self. This is ancient Gnosticism in a new garb. Policies imposing transgender ideology on children as early as kindergarten are teaching them to denigrate their bodies—to see their biological sex as having no relevance to who they are as whole persons. The two-story dichotomy causes people to feel estranged from their own bodies.

Biology is more than a bit of flesh between the legs. In a popular TED talk, cardiologist Paula Johnson says, “Every cell has a sex—and what that means is that men and women are different down to the cellular and molecular level. It means that we’re different across all of our organs, from our brains to our hearts, our lungs, our joints.”9 In other words, no matter what your gender philosophy, when you are ill and the doctors put you on the operating table, they still need to know your original biological sex in order to give you the best possible health care.

Genderqueer, Bigender, Pangender

The term transgender has been expanded into an umbrella term covering several categories that used to be distinct, such as cross-dressers, transvestites, and transsexuals. Because transgender is more socially acceptable than most earlier terms, it has mushroomed in recent years. Today it is also used to include a host of newly minted categories such as genderqueer (people who do not consider themselves either masculine or feminine), bigender, pangender, gender fluid, and many more.

Among the public, there is a sense that there must be a genetic or hormonal basis for feelings of being in the wrong body. There is some scientific evidence to support that assumption.10 In chapter 5 we learned that virtually all our thoughts and feelings have physical correlates. Being aware of the mind-body connection can motivate us to show compassion to people who are navigating cross-gender feelings. Yet there is no conclusive scientific evidence that transsexualism or transgenderism is caused by genes or any other biological factor.

More importantly, transgender activists themselves argue the opposite: They insist that biology is irrelevant to gender. As we saw in chapter 1 (it might be helpful to reread that section), trans activists argue that there is no connection between body and gender identity. A BBC video features a young woman who identifies as non-binary saying, “It doesn’t matter what living, meat skeleton you’ve been born in; it’s what you feel that defines you.”11 In the two-story worldview, all that counts is what you feel. The body is demoted to nothing but a “meat skeleton.” No respect is given to the intrinsic good or telos (purpose) of the human body. No dignity is accorded to the unique capabilities inherent in being male or female.

The transgender narrative completely disassociates gender from biological sex.

Most SOGI laws and policies state explicitly that people claiming transgender status need no medical diagnosis, no record of hormones therapy or surgery, no change in legal documents, and no alteration in appearance. As family researcher Glenn Stanton explains, “Gender identity does not exist in any objective or quantifiable sense. There is simply no physiological, legal, medical, or physical-appearance criteria that a transgender person must meet to be properly distinguished as such. That ‘reality’ exists solely in the mind of the individual making the claim.”12 It is based not on biological facts but strictly on inner feelings.

The Lie of Queer Theory

The transgender “script” tells young people that embracing their cross-gender feelings will liberate them to be their authentic selves. But will it? Many who have tried it say no. Jonah Mix was a gender nonconforming young man who spent years immersed in queer theory. He called himself non-binary and wore tights, eyeliner, and nail polish: “It was in those queer circles that I first heard the common admonition to never define a person by their body.”

Eventually, however, he realized the promise of liberation was a lie. To discover whether you identify as a man, you must first define manhood. “If we are not men by our bodies, we are men by our actions,” Mix writes. Do you act stereotypically masculine? Then you are a man. Do you behave in ways that are stereotypically feminine? You must be a woman. Ironically, queer theory actually reinforces rigid gender stereotypes.

By contrast, if you take your identity from your body, Mix says, you can engage in a range of diverse behaviors without threatening the security of your identity as a man or woman. “When we are defined by our bodies, the whole width of human experience remains open. . . . There is freedom in the body.”13

Similarly, on a trans website a commenter named Trish wrote, “As a little girl, I enjoyed both ballet lessons and playing in the mud. . . . I liked miniskirts and wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. It looks to me like the trans movement is fighting very hard to force everyone to choose whether to live in the blue box or the pink box, and no playing mix-and-match. To me this is the opposite of freedom.”14

When Bruce Jenner announced that he now identified as a woman and was adopting the name Caitlyn, how was the news broadcast to the world? The iconic photo spread in Vanity Fair “offered us a glimpse into Caitlyn Jenner’s idea of a woman,” says a New York Times article: “a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular ‘girls’ nights’ of banter about hair and makeup. . . . That’s the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries.”15 The pink box.

Contrary to what postmodern gender theory says, there is greater diversity and inclusivity when we anchor our psychosexual identity in the objective, scientifically knowable reality of our biology as male or female.

Biology Wins Out

In recent years, there has been a huge spike in the number of teens identifying as transgender and requesting hormone treatment and surgery. At some schools, entire peer groups are “coming out” as transgender at the same time.16 Are these kids all simultaneously discovering their true, authentic selves?

Columnist Rod Dreher sometimes posts emails from readers in his columns, and this one captures the tone of many parents:

As a parent living the nightmare of having a teen who suddenly announces she’s transgender, I can tell you there are NO doctors who will do anything but agree. There is NO science behind this. There is NO way to medically “diagnose” her. . . . Three of her closest friends have already had full transition, paid for by their parents, so it is difficult for her to understand why we won’t do the same. It is no different than having your child captured by a cult.

Why are parents going along with it? “Because they don’t want to lose their kids.”17 Many schools have adopted the policy that parents may not even be informed which gender their children adopt at school.

Where did the idea come from that gender identity can be disassociated from biological sex? One of the earliest to popularize the idea was John Money at Johns Hopkins Medical School. His prime example was David Reimer, born in 1965, who, as a baby, had his penis severely damaged in a botched circumcision. Not to worry, Money told David’s parents. Gender identity is completely malleable and it will be a simple task to remake this biological boy into a girl using sex reassignment surgery, along with hormonal and psychological treatments. The case was widely publicized, and when I was in graduate school, it was still being touted as irrefutable evidence that nurture (choice) is more important than nature (biology). A biological male could be induced to think he was female and to live as a girl.

It later emerged that Money was lying. He knew that David was deeply unhappy living as a girl. David refused to play with dolls, tried to seize his brother’s toy guns and cars, and told his parents he felt like a boy. When David was fourteen, he grew so severely depressed that his parents finally told him what had happened. He immediately began living as a boy, and eventually married a woman.18 The gender experiment did not work. Biology won out. Yet the myth that gender identity is independent of biological sex lives on.

Love Thy Body

Why are we not encouraging people to have a higher view of the body? Nuriddeen Knight, a black woman writing for the Witherspoon Institute, says the transgender movement reminds her of a time, not so long ago, when light-skinned black people sometimes “passed” as white. She asks, Isn’t there a parallel when a man “passes” as a woman, or the reverse? In both cases, the underlying motive seems to be a form of self-hate: “A black person who wants to be white is practicing self-hate, and so is a man who wants to be a woman or a woman who wants to be a man.”

Knight asks: Why won’t we “encourage people to love the body they’re in? We tell women to love their curves and love their age and love the skin they’re in, but we won’t tell them (and men) to love the sex of their bodies?”19

At the skating rink where my son was taking lessons, a person came on the ice with long hair, heavy eye makeup, and bright red lipstick. She was wearing a shiny ice-skating costume with a short skirt and colorful tights. But something was strange about her build. She was tall with a rugged profile, broad shoulders, and knobby knees. In short, “she” was obviously male. With her exaggerated makeup, she looked almost like someone in drag. The other skaters snickered and made derogatory comments, but I could not help but feel compassion for someone so clearly trapped in rejection of his own body.

There is a proper kind of self-love that comes from accepting God’s love. A biblical worldview grants value and dignity to our identity as male or female. Gender theology is rooted in creation theology. What God has created has intrinsic value and dignity.

Blending the Binary

Because the trans narrative insists that the body does not matter—that it is not “the real you”—some transgender people do not even bother to change their bodily appearance. A friend introduced me to a local musician who identifies as genderqueer. He appears completely masculine except that he wears eyeliner and sometimes a woman’s blouse or skirt. Yet he insists on being referred to as “she” and “her.”

For some gender activists, refusing to change their appearance is part of a deliberate strategy to eliminate the binary categories of male and female altogether. Trans activist Rikki Wilchins, writing in The Advocate, says that until now, it has been relatively easy to advance transgender rights because most trans people show “at least some degree of consonance between their gender identity and usual notions of masculinity or femininity.” But what happens when they refuse to change their appearance? “What happens when a genderqueer individual, who genuinely looks and sounds profoundly non-binary or masculine, declares in a binary world s/he would be most comfortable accessing the girls restroom? To say the least, the optics will no longer work.” That is, a male-bodied trans woman will not look like a woman but will still demand access to women’s spaces, such as public restrooms. At that point, Wilchins writes, we will challenge “the entire underlying hetero-binary structuring of the world.”20

That’s exactly what SOGI laws and policies are already doing. They require people to address others by their self-identified gender even when they have not had surgery or hormone treatment or anything else to change their external appearance.

Recently a friend of mine was in a restaurant bathroom when a male waiter entered. I had seen the same waiter when we arrived at the restaurant earlier that evening, and his appearance was completely masculine. (My friend noticed that he also left the seat up.) Though he had done nothing to feminize his appearance, he was claiming the right to use women’s public spaces.

In 2016 the New York City Human Rights Commission released a list of thirty-one terms of gender expression—androgynous, genderqueer, non-binary, pangender, bi-gendered, gender fluid, third sex, two spirit, and so on—which employers must use or face exorbitant fines of up to $250,000. It will be all but impossible to keep track of which gender a person claims, especially if the person has not changed his or her appearance.21 In this way, SOGI laws are doing exactly what trans activists have hoped for: They are challenging the very existence of the binary categories of male and female.

Pomosexual

Of course, New York City’s list of thirty-one terms of gender expression is likely to keep expanding. Logically, there could be an infinite number of genders. Why? Because it is a concept that refers solely to inner feelings, with no reference to any physical trait.

Transgender policies are thus leading us inexorably to the postmodern view of psychosexual identity. In her influential book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler argues that gender is not a fixed attribute but a free-floating variable that shifts according to personal preference. Gender is a “fiction,” a “fabrication,” a “fantasy” that can be made and remade at will. This has been dubbed a pomosexual view (pomo is short for postmodern).22

What does a pomosexual view mean in practice? A psychotherapist writing in a magazine billed for “queer people” explains that people “don’t want to fit into any boxes—not gay, straight, lesbian, or bisexual ones. . . . They want to be free to change their minds.” The article was addressed to people who had come out of the closet and thought they had discovered their true identity, but later were attracted to heterosexual relationships. “So what am I?” they were asking. Not to worry, the author said. “We’re seeing a challenge to the old, modernist way of thinking ‘This is who I am, period’ and a movement toward a postmodern version, ‘This is who I am right now.’”23

When gender is severed from biology, it becomes something we can choose—and therefore something we can also change.

To use our two-story metaphor, gender has become a postmodern upper-story concept—indefinable, manipulable, fluid, and severed from any connection to biological facts in the lower story. Gender has nothing to do with having a male or female body. As Butler writes, when “gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.”24

People who still hold a modernist mindset claim that sexual orientation is natural. But postmodernists claim that nothing is natural—that sexuality is a social construction.25

In the introduction we saw that the two-story body/person split stems from the same source as the fact/value split. So it is not surprising that there is a parallel: First values were redefined as matters of subjective personal choice, disconnected from facts, and now gender has been redefined the same way.

As always, young people are the first to pick up new ideas. A 2015 Fusion survey found that the majority of millennials believe gender is fluid.26 A World magazine article says this idea “is seen as liberating, a way to take control of one’s own identity, rather than accepting the one that has been culturally ‘assigned.’” At some college clinics, “students no longer have to check ‘“male’ or ‘female’ on their health forms. Instead they are asked to ‘describe your gender identity history.’”27

That is, which gender identities have you embraced over your lifetime? They can change.

This is not some fringe idea. It is mainstream. Virtually all sex education curricula in America take their lead from the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). Its pronouncements constitute the “official” view. And what does SIECUS say? “Gender identity refers to a person’s internal sense of being male, female, or a combination of these,” and “people’s understanding of their gender identity may change over the course of their lifetimes.”28

An NPR program featured students who had embraced the postmodern concept of gender identity, speaking in terms of which pronoun they preferred. At one college, the radio host said, “things were so fluid you could make up a different pronoun for a different event.” You could go to lunch as a he, then go to class as a she. “We encountered high school students who said . . . I reject the gender binary as an oppressive move by the dominant culture.”29

That postmodern view is filtering down to even younger ages. The mother of a twelve-year-old told reporters, “Some days Annie is a girl, some days Annie is a boy, and some days she’s both.” When the pair went shopping for Annie’s graduation outfit, they purchased both a dress and suit because they were not sure which gender the child would align with for the evening. The article helpfully explains, “Annie believes gender is more of a mental trait rather than physical.”30 Gender has become a purely mental trait with no grounding in physical reality.

Facebook: “Your True, Authentic Self”?

A few years ago, Facebook announced that its users could now choose from fifty different genders. The company explained that its goal was to give people a chance to express “your true, authentic self.”31 But there are not fifty biological sexes. So what was the assumption? That “your true, authentic self” has nothing to do with your biology. The pomosexual view represents a profound devaluation of the body.

A Christianity Today article featured an interview with a female United Methodist minister who underwent a sex change operation and now presents as a man. Her explanation was, “My body didn’t match what I am.”32 What was her assumption? That her body was not part of “what I am.” She treated her authentic self as completely disconnected from her physical identity.

The body has become a morally neutral piece of matter that can be manipulated for whatever purposes the self may impose on it—like pressing a mold into clay or stamping Lincoln’s profile on a copper penny.

But if gender has nothing to do with biology, then what is it based on? No one knows. In a book titled Omnigender, former evangelical Virginia Mollenkott says all sexual identities are now up for grabs. A review of the book in a theology journal concluded (and this was written in all seriousness), “Arguments against women’s ordination need wholesale revamping since we do not know for sure now what a woman is.”

People today do not know for sure what a woman or a man is.

Christians ought to weep for people so confused about their identity—people who have absorbed a Darwinian view of nature as having no purpose or moral significance; who think their body is just a piece of matter that gives no clues about who they are as persons; who think their identity as male or female has no special dignity or meaning; who view their body negatively as a limitation on their authentic identity. By contrast, how can we present the biblical view as anything but radically positive and affirming? Christianity gives the basis for a high and humane view of the person as an integrated whole.

A defense of the body requires that we challenge the Darwinian conception of nature as purposeless and directionless. Ironically, the sheer existence of sexual dimorphism cannot be explained by any current Darwinian theories. Why did sex evolve in the first place? It is far more efficient for an organism to reproduce asexually, simply by dividing and making a copy of itself.

How did an asexual reproductive system evolve into a sexual one? What were the intervening stages? There is no universally accepted theory among scientists based on the empirical evidence. And conceptually it is difficult even to conceive any gradual step-by-step process that would lead by viable stages from asexual to sexual reproduction. Until the new structures are fully developed, they would not function and the organism would die out. John Maddox, editor of the prestigious journal Nature, writes, “The overriding question is when (and then how) sexual reproduction itself evolved. Despite decades of speculation, we do not know.”33 In his 2001 book The Cooperative Gene, Mark Ridley wrote that for evolutionary biologists, “Sex is a puzzle that has not yet been solved; no one knows why it exists.”34 It is far more plausible that sexual reproduction is a product of intelligent design—that natural processes were guided by a goal or purpose.

A teleological view of nature gives a basis for accepting the goodness of nature and affirming the value and dignity of the created order. Sexual dimorphism is not a negative limitation imposed by nature. Nor is it an oppressive move by the dominant culture. It is a positive, healthy form of interdependence that speaks of our creation as social beings designed for loving, mutual interdependence in marriage, families, and communities.

Evolution and Gender

Surprisingly, postmodernism is itself a product of evolutionary thinking—not biological evolution but cultural evolution. Its roots are in the thinking of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a nineteenth-century philosopher who taught a form of pantheistic evolution. He essentially applied Descartes’s image of the ghost in the machine to the universe itself: God was redefined as the ghost in the machine of the universe, a spiritual force evolving in and through the world. In Hegel’s theory, every individual consciousness is part of this cosmic consciousness. The implication is that the mental realm is constantly evolving. All ideas—law, morality, religion, art, philosophy, politics—are products of what Hegel called the “actualization of the Universal Mind”35 through the evolution of consciousness.

The implication is that there is no eternal, universal truth. There are only partial, relative truths as each culture develops its own perspective over the course of history. This is called evolutionism or historicism, and Nietzsche sums it up neatly: “Everything evolved: there are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths.”36

Nearly a century before Darwin, then, Hegel was already teaching people to interpret history through an evolutionary lens. (Nietzsche even said, “without Hegel, there would have been no Darwin.”)37 Hegel’s followers dropped his pantheism and secularized his philosophy. But they retained his evolutionism or historicism.38 (They did not seem to notice that it contains a fatal self-contradiction: It says there are no universal truths—which is itself a claim to universal truth.)

What impact has evolutionism or historicism had on sexual ideology? It implies that everything is in flux; there are no firm guideposts telling us who we are or how we should act. You see, the very possibility of morality is based on the conviction that there is a human nature, created by God, and therefore there are enduring norms telling us how to fulfill our nature, how to be fully human. But if evolution is true, then there is no stable, universal human nature—and therefore no stable, universal morality.

The existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre spells out the logic starkly: “There is no human nature because there is no God to have a conception of it. . . . Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.”39 Just as species are constantly changing and evolving, so individuals must leave behind all stable standards of behavior and immerse themselves in the ceaseless flux of life, constantly creating and re-creating themselves.

In short, the self is fluid. There is no blueprint for what it means to be human. Morality is constantly evolving through history.

This background explains why postmodern gender theorists like Foucault and Butler vigorously deny that any moral ideal (say, man-woman marriage) is rooted in human nature—because they deny there is any such thing as human nature. If you claim that any moral principle is congruent with nature, you are committing what they call the fallacy of “naturalizing.” It is a fallacy because, in their view, no morality is natural. All morality is a historical construct, a product of a particular culture at a particular period of history. Postmodern theorists say their goal is to “de-naturalize” gender, which means to deny that it has any grounding in nature.

Postmodernism thus takes modernism to its next logical step. Modernism denies any purpose or teleology in nature. And if nature reveals no purpose, then it cannot inform our morality. Morality is de-naturalized.

Both are forms of reductionism: Modernism reduces the human body to a product of blind, purposeless material forces. Postmodernism responds by reducing gender to a product of social forces.

Mix-and-Match Sexual Identity

Why do postmodernists want to de-naturalize gender? Because once we reduce sexual morality to merely a social construction, then we are free to deconstruct it.

And why do postmodernists want the freedom to change sexual morality? Many prominent postmodern gender theorists, including Foucault and Butler, have identified as homosexual.40 Thus their real “enemy,” in Butler’s words, is “the naturalization and reification of heterosexist norms.”41 That is, their real enemy is heterosexual morality. She writes of her “dogged effort to ‘de-naturalize’ gender . . . and to uproot the pervasive assumptions about natural or presumptive heterosexuality.” Her goal is to undermine “any and all” moral discourse that would “delegitimate minority gendered and sexual practices.”42

In other words, she wants to legitimate her own minority sexual practices. She is not even trying to do objective research, despite the academic-sounding language in her books.

Reading Butler’s works, one cannot help feeling compassion for her dilemma. She gives poignant expression to the difficulties she has faced in being gender nonconforming (she was subject to “strong and scarring condemnation”).43 We must always bear in mind that a real person, suffering real pain, is behind the academic-sounding theory. At the same time, it does not make sense to accept a theory of sexuality that was coined specifically to justify sexual practices that not only violate biblical morality but also demean the body and fragment the person.

Gender Unicorn—Trans Ideology for Kids

These days, even Butler is out of date. An organization called Trans Student Educational Resources has published a cartoon—the Gender Unicorn—that deconstructs sexuality into five separate factors that can all contradict one another: sex assigned at birth, gender identity, gender expression, physical attraction, and emotional attraction. The Gender Unicorn cartoon is clearly designed to appeal to young children, and it is being used in public school districts around the nation to teach students that there is no unified self.

The message is that a human being is composed of disparate bits and pieces. Our biological sex is a relatively minor factor, with no connection to the four other factors that feed into our psychosexual identity. If Butler’s view was akin to a child’s toy with three blocks that can be twisted in any direction (see chapter 5), today’s schools are teaching that the toy has five blocks.

Even feminists are protesting this drastic fragmentation, arguing that it alienates us from our bodies. Philosopher Carol Bigwood writes, “If we reduce the body as a whole to a purely cultural phenomenon and gender to a free-floating artifice, then we are unwittingly perpetuating the deep modern alienation of our human being from nature.” Instead we should be seeking to overcome our alienation from nature, she says; we should aim at “renaturalizing the body.”44

Another feminist philosopher, Maxine Sheets-Johnson, likewise protests the “disavowal of biology” in postmodernism. What we really need, she says, is a careful study of “biologically invariant structures. . . . We need to turn toward the body,” not away from it.45

Of course, humans are much more than biological beings. But our biological sex is an unchanging, empirically knowable fact about ourselves, whereas our feelings can change—and often do. Therefore it makes sense to let biological facts inform our gender identity.

The Body Is a Social Construction

How do gender theorists respond? They say it is impossible to base gender on biological facts because we cannot objectively know those facts—or any other facts either. After all, we can make sense of facts only when we interpret them, and all interpretations are conditioned by our culture and history. Every definition of what it means to be biologically male and female is a product of cultural forces, which in turn are products of earlier cultural forces, which in turn . . . and so on, in an infinite regress. This is Hegel’s historicism applied to the body.

The postmodern conclusion is that we have no access to what the body really is. We only know what any given culture thinks it is. Butler writes, “There is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings . . . . ‘The body’ is itself a construction.”46

The body itself is a social construction? How can we make sense of such extreme reductionism? Recall that postmodernism has its roots in Hegel, who taught a kind of pantheism—that we are all part of a cosmic World Mind. The implication is that as individuals we do not really have original ideas of our own. Instead our thoughts are merely expressions of the cosmic mind. In Hegel’s words, individuals “are all the time the unconscious tools of the World Mind at work within them.”47

Hegel’s pantheism was secularized by his successors—the best known being Marx, who famously said he “turned Hegel on his head.” By that he meant that in his theory, humans are unconscious tools not of mental forces (a World Mind) but of material forces (economic class). What remained from Hegel in all his successors, however, was the notion that individual consciousness is part of a larger group consciousness—that our thinking is inexorably shaped by the worldview of our class, race, gender, ethnic group, and so forth. We have no access to objective scientific facts. What we think are facts are really cultural constructs—including the biological facts about sex. As Butler writes, “This construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender.”48

A trans activist who is biologically female but identifies as a male states the claim even more bluntly: “It is a choice to refer to some bodies as male and some bodies as female, not a fact. . . . It is an ideological position—and not a scientific fact.”49

Apparently, saying “It’s a girl” is just as ideological as saying “Girls wear pink.”

Postmodernists claim to liberate us from oppressive rules and roles, but is this view really liberating? Not at all. It says we are trapped within our culture’s current worldview—that we have no access to truths outside what we’ve been taught to think by our culture.50

The fatal flaw in such radical skepticism is that it undercuts itself. If all humans are trapped in what their culture tells them, with no access to truth, how can postmodernists know that their own claims are true?

Reducing sex to a cultural construction is also hugely demeaning to the body. Lesbian feminist Sheila Jeffreys writes that postmodernism seems to be “based on the mystical principle that there is no such thing as biology.”51 Feminist philosopher Susan Bordo says postmodernism denies “the very materiality of the body.” Such extreme hostility to biology should be labeled “antibiologism,” she writes. It imagines “the body as malleable plastic, to be shaped to the meanings we choose.” It is “a new, postmodern imagination of human freedom from bodily determination.”52

Postmodernism is thus the latest, and most extreme, version of the body/mind dichotomy—one that treats the body itself as infinitely malleable, with no definite nature of its own.53

Why would anyone hold such an extreme view? What’s the appeal? If the body cannot be defined, then it places no constraints on our gender identity. The goal is complete freedom to declare oneself a man or a woman or both or neither.

The sovereign self will not tolerate having its options limited by anything it did not choose—not even its own body.

By contrast, Christianity assigns the human body a much richer dignity and value. Humans do not need freedom from the body to discover their true, authentic self. Rather we can celebrate our embodied existence as a good gift from God. Instead of escaping from the body, the goal is to live in harmony with it.

No Women, No Rights

The irony is that postmodern gender theory undercuts women’s rights. A Christian satire site called The Babylon Bee posted a story on International Women’s Day in 2017 featuring a protester who realized that, if sex is a social construct, it makes no sense to stand up for women’s rights.

The woman suddenly stopped and thought about how her presence at the protest suggested that the concept of womanhood represented something more significant than an arbitrary social construct foisted upon females. “Wait a minute, think about what we’re suggesting here,” the woman said to her fellow demonstrators as she lowered her megaphone, according to witnesses. “By participating in this protest, aren’t we suggesting that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are ideals that transcend culture and subjectivity?”54

The Bee was using humor to press home a serious point: To protect women’s rights, we must be able to say what a woman is. If postmodernism is correct—that the body itself is a social construct—then it becomes impossible to argue for rights based on the sheer fact of being female. We cannot legally protect a category of people if we cannot identify that category.

The postmodern view of gender is already being legally imposed through SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) laws. Recall that under SOGI laws, people claiming a particular gender identity need to present no evidence, no diagnosis, no medical treatment, and no change in appearance. A person is whatever gender they claim to be.

The implications are already familiar to anyone who reads the news. Male-bodied trans women are claiming the right to women’s public spaces such as bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons, homeless shelters, battered women’s shelters, hospital rooms, women’s conferences, college dorms, elder care facilities, sports leagues, and even rape crisis centers. Most controversial are public schools, where male-bodied trans girls claim access to girls’ restrooms, changing rooms, showers, and hotel rooms in overnight travel events.

Trans activists have even protested the use of terms like man and woman because some males identify as women, and vice versa. Activists have protested the practice of referring to “pregnant women” or “lactating mothers” because trans men who were born female can also get pregnant and lactate. The Midwives Alliance of North America changed their literature to delete the word “mother” and substitute “pregnant individuals” and “birthing persons.”55 A picture book titled The Adventures of Toni the Tampon informs young children that men as well as women are capable of menstruating. You are now deemed transphobic if you say “breastfeeding.” You must say “chestfeeding” to be inclusive of trans men.

What this means is that we can no longer define women by their biological functions—which in turn means we can no longer legally protect women as a class. If we cannot name sex-based oppression, we cannot fight it.

Mary Lou Singleton of the Women’s Liberation Front says, “My entire life work is fighting for the class of people who are oppressed on the basis of their biological sex,” including atrocities like forced child marriage, infanticide of baby girls, and female genital mutilation, which occur across the globe. But because of the gender identity movement, Singleton says, it is now deemed transphobic even to label these victims women and girls.

“What we are seeing is the legal erasure of the material reality of sex,” Singleton says.56 Protections based on sex are being eliminated from the law.

No“Unalienable” Rights

The long-term impact of SOGI laws will be even more destructive, however, erasing legal recognition not only of women but also of the family. Stella Morabito, senior contributor to The Federalist, explains: “Once you basically redefine humanity as sexless you end up with a de-humanized society in which there can be no legal ‘mother’ or ‘father’ or ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ or ‘husband’ or ‘wife’ without permission from the State.”

The state will then have unprecedented power to micromanage families. “If you abolish sex distinctions in law, you can abolish state recognition of biological family ties, and the state can regulate personal relationships and consolidate power as never before.”57 The state can make decisions regarding how parents educate their children, what medical treatment they use, what discipline they enforce, and so on, far beyond any current regulations.

More fundamentally, the state can decide who counts as a child’s parents to begin with. Until now, it was nature (biological relationship) that defined who counts as a parent. The state saw its role as merely recognizing this natural reality. But under SOGI laws there will no longer be a presumption in favor of the child’s biological parents.

When gender is de-naturalized, parenthood will also be de-naturalized.

Already federal forms are being changed to reflect the de-naturalized family. In 2011 the Obama administration’s State Department announced that it was replacing “mother” and “father” on its passport applications with “Parent One” and “Parent Two.”58 The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which virtually all college students fill out, uses the same gender-neutral terms.

Until now, the family was seen as natural and pre-political, with natural rights. That means it existed prior to the state, and the state merely recognized its rights. But if the law no longer recognizes natural sex, then it no longer recognizes natural families or natural parents, only legal parents. That means parents have no natural rights, only legal rights. You, as a mother or father, have only the rights the state chooses to grant you.

And what the state gives, the state can also take away. Human rights are no longer “unalienable.”

There is a reason Aldous Huxley’s classic novel Brave New World depicts a tyrannical world government that treats mother and father as obscene words. By making the language of family obscene, the World State ensures that its citizens form their primary loyalty to itself—rendering them easier to manipulate and control.

SOGI—So What?

SOGI laws take a huge step toward that Brave New World. Let’s unpack the logic: The only way the law can treat John, a trans woman who is biologically male, the same legally as Jennifer, who is biologically female, is to deny the relevance of biology and declare gender to be a state of mind—thoughts, feelings, and desires. By sheer logic, SOGI laws must deny the importance of biology.

Consider the definition of gender offered by the Human Rights Campaign, a gay activist group: Gender is “one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither—how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves.”59 Gender is what we call ourselves, a label we choose. We do not discover our gender identity, as though it were an objective fact. Instead we declare our identity. We speak ourselves into existence. Language takes priority over biology. It is whatever word we choose. The flesh has been made word.60

These legal changes do not affect only homosexual or transgender people. In the eyes of the law, no one has a natural or biological sex now; all citizens are defined not by their bodies but by their inner states and feelings. That’s what the term cisgender means (people whose gender matches their sex). The term was coined to imply that even when your gender aligns with your biological sex, there is no natural connection. Your basic identity as male or female, husband or wife, mother or father, son or daughter, sister or brother no longer follows metaphysically from your biology but must be determined by an act of will.

But whose will? Ultimately, it will come down to who has the most power—which means the state. “It does not matter what you or I mean by the word ‘gender’,” explains Daniel Moody. “The only opinion that counts is that of the state, as the state alone has the power to impose its belief on us. In law, our gender identity is defined without reference to our body, meaning the shift from sex to gender is the shift from body to mind.”61

By rejecting the biological basis of gender identity, SOGI laws empower the state to define everyone’s identity. (We will look more deeply into these problems in chapter 7).

How Does It Hurt Anyone Else?

Every social practice is the expression of fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human. When a society accepts, endorses, and approves the practice, it implicitly commits itself to the accompanying worldview. And all the more so if those practices are enshrined in law. The law functions as a teacher, educating people on what society considers to be morally acceptable. If America accepts abortion, euthanasia, gender-free marriage, and transgender policies, in the process it will absorb the worldview that justifies those practices—a two-story fragmentation of the human being that denigrates the body and biological bonds such as the family. And the dehumanizing consequences will reach into every aspect of our communal life.

People often ask: How does legalizing same-sex marriage hurt anyone else? The answer is that as people accept SOGI laws, in the process they will absorb the accompanying worldview—the de-naturalized definition of human personhood as a purely social construction. Human rights are based on a concept of human nature—on the recognition that there are certain nonnegotiable givens in human nature, prior to the state, which the state is obligated to respect. But if, as postmodernism claims, human nature itself is merely a social construction, something we make up as we go along, then there is nothing in the individual that is a given—and therefore there is no basis for unalienable human rights. Natural rights are reduced to legal rights, which the state can change at will.

Tragically, transgender persons will suffer just as much as the rest of us from the reduction of human rights to merely legal rights. What appears to be helping transgender people will ultimately harm them.

Terry Eagleton, a Marxist literary theorist turned Catholic, argues that you cannot have rights apart from belief in a universal human nature. “It was by virtue of our shared human nature that we have ethical and political claims upon one another.” And historically, the source of the concept of equal rights was Christianity. As Eagleton notes, “The Enlightenment itself inherited concepts of universal justice and equality from a Judeo-Christian tradition, which [ironically] it frequently derided.”62

If that Judeo-Christian tradition continues to be derided, what will be the basis for human rights?

When former pope John Paul II was a young man struggling against Marxism, he concluded that the most damaging aspect of communism (and of all atheistic ideologies) is a low view of human life. “The evil of our times” consists in a denigration of human dignity, he wrote. “This evil is even much more of the metaphysical than of the moral order.”63 To use biblical terms, there is more than one way to be lost. The Bible speaks of people being morally lost without Christ. But it is also true that people are metaphysically lost when they live according to nonbiblical worldviews.

When talking with secular people, Christians must engage with their worldview, confident that we have the power to “demolish strongholds.” And what are those strongholds? They are “arguments” and “opinions” that oppose “the knowledge of God” (2 Cor. 10:4–5 ESV). Christians need to help people see that the secular view of human nature does not fit who people are. It does not match the real world. As a result, it is inevitably destructive, both personally and politically.

Christians must also show compassion to those who are pressured by a pomosexual society to despise their own bodies and reject their biological identity. Loving God means loving those who bear his image in the world, helping to liberate people who are trapped by destructive and dehumanizing ideas. Paul wrote, “Christ’s love compels us,” (5:14) and the same motivation should drive today’s Christians as well.

God Should Have Made Me a Girl

What happened to Brandon, the boy we met at the start of this chapter? Young people are under heavy pressure to question their gender identity, and it’s likely that today any child suffering Brandon’s sense of alienation would be encouraged to identify as transgender. Instead his parents worked with him extensively to help him accept himself as a boy—just one who is unusually sensitive and emotional.

His parents urged him to take his identity from his body. Physically, anatomically, physiologically, genetically, and chromosomally, Brandon is male. Our bodies are created by God and are intended to give us clues to our sexual identity.

Brandon’s parents took him through personality tests like the Myers-Briggs type indicator to show him that it is perfectly acceptable for a man to be gentle and emotional. It may mean God has gifted him for one of the caring professions, such as psychologist, counselor, or healthcare worker. Likewise, it is acceptable for a woman to be take-charge, rational, and assertive. Brandon’s parents told him again and again, “It’s not you that’s wrong, it’s the stereotypes that are wrong.”

They pondered biblical examples like Esau and Jacob. Consider the contrast: Esau—the outdoorsman, the hunter, rough and hairy, the favorite of his father. Jacob—the quiet, gentle one who preferred the indoors (“content to stay at home among the tents” [Gen. 25:27]) and close to his mother. Yet Scripture never presents Jacob as any less masculine for having those traits. On the contrary, God honored him by making him a patriarch of the Hebrew nation, bestowing on him the name of Israel.

In the New Testament, the gifts of the Spirit are not divided by gender. Prophecy and teaching are not masculine. Mercy and service are not feminine. The Spirit “distributes them to each one, just as he determines” (1 Cor. 12:11).64

The greatest man who ever lived, Jesus Christ, described himself as “gentle and humble in heart” (Matt. 11:29).

Close friends of Brandon’s family helped bring the lessons to life. One couple had spent years in frustrating marriage counseling. In the books they read and the videos they watched, the husband consistently fit the stereotypically feminine qualities, while the woman fit the stereotypically masculine qualities. After throwing books across the room, this couple literally saved their marriage when they found a counselor who used the Myers-Briggs typology. The counselor helped them to see that the entire range of human personality traits is open to both sexes—that it is okay to be different from prevailing social norms.65 In this couple, Brandon witnessed firsthand a man who was intuitive and relational like himself, without threatening his male identity.

Princesses and Turtles

Brandon’s parents also walked him through history to show that many stereotypes are arbitrary, based on historically changing social roles. (They used chapter 12 in my book Total Truth.)66 In pre-industrial societies, most work was done on the family farm or in home industries, where husband and wife worked side by side. Work was not the father’s job; it was the family industry. As a result, women were involved in economically productive labor, while men were far more involved in raising and educating children than most are today.

What changed all this was the Industrial Revolution. It took work out of the home—and that seemingly simple change dramatically altered gender roles. Fathers had to follow their work out of the home into offices and factories, which meant they were no longer intimately involved with their families. Women no longer had access to income-producing work that could be performed at home while raising children. The result was greatly constricted roles for both men and women—which in turn led to narrower definitions of masculinity and femininity.

Many young people today who question gender roles are chafing against the remnants of these narrow nineteenth-century stereotypes. Brandon’s parents reassured him that he did not need to feel pressured to live up to whatever social roles happen to be in vogue in any particular period of history—including our own.

Every period of history has its own ways of defining gender differences. When I was a kid, my brothers and I rode the same generic tricycle. Today girls’ tricycles are pink with Disney Princess stickers while boys’ are green with Mutant Ninja Turtle stickers. Children can be pressed into suffocatingly narrow gender definitions. Mason, one of my students who has struggled with being gender atypical, commented, “The irony is that it is precisely those rigid stereotypes that drive gender nonconforming young people into the arms of the transgender or gay communities” in their search for a sense of belonging and acceptance.

Unfortunately, churches today often send young people contradictory messages. As Mark Yarhouse notes in Understanding Gender Dysphoria, on one hand, there are churches that seek so hard to be inclusive and compassionate that they mirror secular views that deconstruct sex and gender. On the other hand, there are churches that “overcorrect” by becoming stricter, narrower, and more rigid in enforcing sex roles.67 We must take care not to add to Scripture by baptizing gender expectations that are in reality historically contingent and arbitrary.68

Christians should be on the forefront of creative thinking to recover richer definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman. The church should be the first place where young people can find freedom from unbiblical stereotypes—the freedom to work out what it means to be created in God’s image as wholistic and redeemed people.

Because I knew Brandon personally, I witnessed firsthand the anguish and isolation he suffered because of his gender dysphoria. For many years I was one of a few people who had the opportunity to stand by him, weep with him, ache for him, and pray for him. As Yarhouse writes, “If you want a person [suffering from gender incongruence] to choose a path that seems more redemptive, you will want to be part of a redemptive community that facilitates that kind of decision making.”69 Even if it takes several years.

Battling the Binary

When talking about gender these days, one of the first questions you’re likely to hear is, “What about intersex?” A very small percentage of people are born with genitals that are ambiguous or not fully formed due to genetic and hormonal abnormalities. As a result, doctors may not be sure what the newborn’s sex is. (These people were formerly called hermaphrodites.) The standard treatment was to “assign” a sex and administer hormones and plastic surgery to bring the child in line with gender expectations.

In culture war rhetoric, the existence of intersex persons is being used to disrupt the male/female binary. They are often included under the umbrella of transgender to bolster the claim that there is not only male and female but also a range in between.

But that claim is self-contradictory. Intersex is a biological condition, while transgender activists insist that biology is irrelevant to gender identity.

Moreover, intersex people are not clamoring to eliminate the gender binary. According to the Intersex Society of North America, “Intersex people are perfectly comfortable adopting either a male or female gender identity and are not seeking a genderless society or to label themselves as a member of a third gender class.”70

If you’ve wondered where the trans narrative got the phrase “assigned sex at birth,” it is borrowed from the treatment of intersex babies. The term “assigned” may be useful in the tiny percentage of cases where a newborn’s genitals are genuinely ambiguous. But it makes no sense to apply it to transgender people who were clearly biologically male or female at birth. Transgender individuals have typical sex markers (e.g., genetics, gonads, genitals) that all align with each other.71

The more precise medical terminology for intersex is a “disorder of sex development” (DSD) and Christians typically explain it, like other disorders, as a result of the fall. In a fallen world, we are all born with deficiencies and malfunctions in various parts of our minds and bodies—a weak heart, a proneness to depression, a tendency to high blood pressure. The world is out of joint. So it is not surprising that the effects of the fall sometimes also occur in the reproductive system.

To say that a condition is a result of the fall does not mean it is anyone’s fault. As Jesus said of the man born blind, it is not a direct punishment for individual sin (see chapter 5). A great deal of human suffering is due to creation “groaning” in its “bondage to decay” (Rom. 8:22, 21). Christians are called to welcome and support intersex people and others who suffer from the brokenness of creation.

Yet even some Christians are using the existence of intersex persons to disrupt the male/female binary. Theologian Megan DeFranza argues that intersex conditions are not the effect of the fall but are part of God’s original good creation. In her view, God did not create only male and female but also an entire spectrum of genetic variations in between. To insist on the male/female binary is “oppressive.”72

It is true that a wide range of potential genetic variability was built into the original creation, leading over history to different breeds of dogs, varieties of roses, and races of humans. But there are also conditions that result from mutations, copying errors, and other breakdowns in the genetic code. It is reasonable to conclude that intersex conditions are an instance of breakdowns because most of them appear to be unhealthy.

Even DeFranza, in a book on the subject, consistently describes intersex using terms like “deficiency,” “malfunction,” “inability,” and “lack.” For example, Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS) results when individuals “are unable to process male hormones (androgens)” because “their cells lack the proper receptors.” Or again, Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) is an “enzyme deficiency condition, causing a malfunction of the fetus’s adrenal gland, which results in the overproduction of fetal androgen.” It “represents a real medical emergency in the newborn period. CAH can cause severe dehydration leading to death within the first weeks of the infant’s life.”73 The language necessary to describe most intersex conditions suggests that they are instances of brokenness resulting from the fall.

Interest in Intersex

In recent years, intersex persons have gained media attention because they are starting to demand the right to claim their sexual identity for themselves. When doctors “assign” a sex, in rare cases, it later becomes clear that they made the wrong decision.

Take Jim Bruce.74 Though he was born with XY male chromosomes, his genitals were not fully differentiated. Shortly after his birth in 1976, Jim’s external organ and testes were surgically removed and he was raised as a girl. But Jim struggled for years, preferring “rough and tumble” play and being attracted to girls. “I knew that I wasn’t a girl,” he told a reporter. At puberty, he was given female hormones. Finally, when he was nineteen years old and battling depression, he tracked down his medical records and was horrified: “I was sterilized at birth—and no one ever told me.”

After discovering the truth, Jim had his breasts surgically removed, took testosterone shots, and began living as a man.

Lianne Simon75 is a Christian intersex woman with an XY/XO cell line (some of her cells are XY, while others have only one X, a condition known as Mixed Gonadal Dysgenesis). Raised as a boy, she writes, “Nobody told me I was intersex when I was a child. I’m not even sure how much my parents knew. Back then, physicians often kept such things a secret.”

Yet Lianne was petite (at age nine she was the size of a six-year-old). She also suffered from micrognathia (an undersized jaw), which gave her a pixie face. She felt like a girl and was rejected by boys for her feminine mannerisms. Her body never went through puberty, and she suffered intense shame for not being the boy her parents wanted her to be. The university she attended threatened to revoke her scholarship unless she entered counseling for her obvious gender issues.

It was only after Lianne became an adult that she finally had a chromosome analysis performed. At age twenty-one, she decided to resolve her sexual ambiguity in the direction of being a woman, using hormones and surgery, and today she is married.

Intersex people like Bruce and Lianne have a genuine biological condition—and it has caused them intense suffering. When they were newborns, doctors and parents made a decision whether to raise the child as a boy or a girl, and tragically, they were mistaken. As a result, there is a push today to let the child mature for a longer period before performing surgery in order to make a more accurate assessment.76

People with genetic and physical anomalies should be accepted, nurtured, and protected, not used as political footballs by those who want to deconstruct the male/female binary. As Lianne told me, “How do you think it feels being a pawn in someone else’s game? It hurts to be shoved into the LGBT camp by either side.”77

Out of Alignment

In contrast to intersex people, transgender people have normal sex chromosomes and anatomy. Yet the psychological suffering caused by gender dysphoria is also real. A disjunction between one’s body and one’s sense of gender is, like all discordances, an effect of the fall. As Allberry writes, “Sin causes profound alienation—first and foremost from God. . . . And we’re alienated from ourselves. What was meant to be whole and integrated—our mind, body, and spirit—is now deeply fractured. We don’t feel aligned in ourselves.”78

Today ever-younger children suffer a sense of being out of alignment, and Christians need to develop a pastoral approach that is sensitive and compassionate. Feelings of being the “wrong” gender are not something children choose. Some children, like Brandon, may simply be outliers in terms of gender nonconforming personality traits. In other cases, the feelings may have complex psychological roots.

“When my son was younger, he liked to dress in girl’s clothes,” Caroline told me. “He loved skirts you could twirl around it, and all sorts of frilly, lacey, sparkly things.” When her husband saw the boy wearing girl’s clothing, he was furious. “I was concerned too, especially these days when everyone jumps to the conclusion that your kid might be gay or transgender,” Caroline confided. “But I also knew that my son identified more closely with me than with his father, who did not connect with him very well. I figured if I let him express that without shaming him, he was more likely to outgrow it at some point. And he did.”

Roughly 80 to 90 percent of children who experience some gender incongruence lose those feelings before adulthood.79 Children who eventually accept their sexual identity are called “desisters.”

The BBC film Transgender Kids features a desister named Alex. As a two-year-old, she told her parents she was a boy. When they refused to treat her as a boy, she would explode in angry outbursts. “She would literally scream, ‘I’m a boy! I’m a boy!’” while clenching her fists and punching herself in the genitals, her father recalls. Raising Alex “was like a battle, like a war zone.” Fortunately, the family found a clinic that encouraged Alex to be less rigid in her concept of gender—to consider that “there are a lot of ways to be a girl.” You can be a girl who plays with Barbie dolls, or you can be a girl who plays soccer. Both are equally acceptable.

At age eight, Alex joined a baseball team, where for the first time she met girls like herself. “I saw these other girls who were maybe more tomboy. They liked to do sporty things, and I never really had come across that before,” Alex recalls. Though it took four more years to make a complete turn-around, that was the moment “when I started to accept myself for who I was . . . a girl that also had boy interests.”80

Unfortunately, trans activists deny the existence of desisters, calling it a myth. In 2015, they even succeeded in closing the clinic where Alex received counseling. Trans-affirming therapists insist that even exploring “why” a person has gender dysphoria, instead of immediately accepting it as the person’s authentic self, is offensive, bigoted, and transphobic.81

Why is it considered acceptable to carve up a person’s body to match their inner sense of self but bigoted to help them change their sense of self to match their body? Feelings can change. But the body is an observable fact that does not change. It makes sense to treat it as a reliable marker of sexual identity.

Putting People in Sexual Boxes

Studies find that the strongest correlate of both same-sex orientation and transgenderism—far stronger than any genetic link—is childhood gender nonconformity, kids who behave in ways that are stereotypical of the other sex.82 A male friend who struggled for years with same-sex attraction told me, “When I was young, I liked poetry and music. My father was baffled and kept trying to ‘toughen me up’ by pushing me into sports and other more traditional boy activities.”

In a similar vein, Christopher Yuan explores the possible roots of his homoerotic feelings: “All through grade school and into college, I was never fully accepted. I was sensitive, nerdy, and horrible at sports, and I loved music and the arts.”83

These nonconforming children grow up feeling out of step with prevailing standards of masculinity or femininity.84 They need support and empathy as they work through their painful feelings of alienation. Churches should encourage them to value their unique temperament and to resist pressure to interpret it as evidence they must be transgender or homosexual.

After I converted to Christianity, I attended a Bible school where a fellow student was a Girl Scout leader. Her deepest friendships were with other Scout leaders like herself—women who were outdoorsy, athletic, independent, and definitely not frilly or feminine. My friend felt alienated by the church’s ideal of Christian womanhood. She and three other Scout leaders, all Christians, eventually embraced lesbianism.

Yet weren’t these Girl Scout leaders possibly mistaking temperament for sexuality? A student of mine named Liam, who has struggled with cross-gender feelings, said, “American society is in danger of sexualizing what are really just character traits—putting people in a sexual box based on non-sexual traits and behavior.”

In the body of Christ, we should celebrate a wide diversity of God-given personality types, even if they do not fit the current stereotypes. The eye is not the ear, and the hand is not the foot (see 1 Cor. 12:12–27). That diversity is a good thing. Each member of the body has its own unique gifts and makes its own distinctive contribution.

Welcoming the Stranger

The body of Christ must also become a place where casualties from the sexual revolution can find hope and restoration. The political pressure on the medical community today is to fast-track kids with gender dysphoria into transitioning. Cari is a twenty-two-year-old woman who, as a teenager, transitioned to male through hormones and a double mastectomy. A few years later, she detransitioned. Cari recalls that as soon as she had questions about her gender, she was pushed to start hormones and surgery. “If I was trans (and my therapist never gave me the impression that I might not be), my options were ‘transition now, transition later, or live your life unhappy/commit suicide.’”85

The BBC film Transgender Kids features a young woman identified as Lou who likewise had a double mastectomy and later regretted it. At the gender clinic, she says, “The assumption from the outset was that if I said I was transgender, then I must be. Nobody at any point questioned my motives. . . . [I] was very much told by the community that if you don’t transition, you will self-harm and you will kill yourself. I became convinced that my options were transition or die.”86

Under the pressure of trans ideology, fewer therapists are stopping to talk to these vulnerable teens to find out what’s really going on. Is this loving?

Walt Heyer is a former transsexual who started as a cross-dresser, then underwent sex reassignment surgery to live as a woman. After eight years, he became a Christian and eventually transitioned back to living as a man. He discovered that changing his clothing, hairstyle, Social Security card, driver’s license, and even his genitals did not change who he was. In his words, he came to realize that “the restoration of my sanity would only come by reversing the gender change and going back to living as the male God had made me to be.”87 In short, by accepting his biological identity as a good gift from God.

“I was born a man, and I was still a man; my gender never changed,” Heyer concludes, in spite of numerous cosmetic surgeries, hormones, makeup, long hair, nail polish, pantyhose, and high heels. “The biological fact is that no one can change from one gender to another except in appearance.” Our only choice is whether we accept our biological sex as a gift from God or reject it. (The very fact that crafting a transsexual identity requires such extensive body modifications—hormonal treatment, facial feminization surgery, electrolysis to remove body hair, voice and posture training, hair transplants, top surgery, bottom surgery—tends to undermine the claim that it is natural and biologically determined.)

When Heyer was still presenting as a woman, he began attending church. Tragically, the first church he visited asked him to leave. The senior pastor actually drove to his home, knocked on the door, and said, “We don’t want your kind in our church.”88 By God’s grace, Walt found another congregation that accepted him and supported him through several painful, tumultuous years of emotional and spiritual healing as he went through the difficult process of detransitioning.

Is your church ready to show love and acceptance to those whose lives have been deeply damaged by postmodern sexual theories?

Many people who experience gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction have had negative encounters in the church. They have been made to feel that they pose a danger to other people in the congregation, and that they must solve their sexual issues before showing up at church. Evangelicals preach that only Christ can save us but then contradict their own words by expecting people to clean up their behavior before they are welcome in the pews. For Christians to be credible in asking others to repent, they must model repentance for their own failings that have pushed people away from the church.

Then they need to commit to giving support—even long-term support, and even to people who may never be completely changed this side of heaven. A dear friend of mine, Stephen, was a child molester. He has repented and has been in therapy and twelve-step programs for decades. He now mentors other sex offenders. I have deep respect for his spiritual maturity. He has worked through levels of spiritual and psychological healing that most Christians have no idea even exist. For years, Stephen hoped that God would heal him to the point where he could marry and have a family. But that has not happened, and he has come to realize that he may never be completely healed in this life—that his vocation may be in helping others, while never experiencing the joys of a normal family life himself. Is the church ready to stand by people like Stephen, knowing his background but also his fierce commitment to the Lord? (Applying realistic safeguards, of course. Stephen himself refuses any position working with youth or children.)

There is a wise saying that the church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners. To attract potential “patients,” however, it must be clear that the church is a place of care and healing.89

Churches must also recognize that people with gender issues are not just needy people with problems. Many have gone through intense emotional and psychological healing and have much to offer in ministry to others. As we saw in chapter 3, suffering can be an opportunity for what therapists call post-traumatic growth. Tim Otto, who is celibate, writes, “Being gay helped me by forcing me to ask deeper questions of the world that I might have otherwise, and caused me to listen carefully to Jesus because I knew I needed help.”90 A study of Christians who identify as transgender concludes, “As with most confusing and painful life experiences, gender-identity questions and concerns raise larger questions of meaning and purpose in life that can draw a person toward the sacred.”91

Up to this point, we have discussed sex and gender primarily as they relate to the individual and personal behavior. But secular theories also affect our relationships—especially now that SOGI laws are being passed that affect marriage, parenthood, and family. This takes us into social theory, and in the next chapter we will discover that the two-level dualism is destructive not only to individuals but also to relationships. It is a major reason our relationships have grown so fragile, leaving many people today lonely and isolated.