Issue 4 - Transgenderism
Cultural Insight
One issue that has been very close to my heart for the past couple of years is the ideology of transgenderism and the harms that it is causing to people and society as a whole. In this issue I’ve provided a comprehensive, well-documented resource on the issue, and how Christians should respond. I was hoping to include it as an attachment, but I just discovered that the ability to send even small attachments with email is not part of the free version of this software - so I apologize for the lengthy letter. It’s about 10 pages long, but the high-level takeaways are below:
Individuals are considered transgender if their gender perception does not line up with their sex.
Intersex, which is a diagnosable disorder of sex development, is not the same thing as transgenderism.
Transgenderism is a sin. Christians should be loving of transgender individuals but our definition of love (and our understanding of what transgenderism is) differs from the world’s.
The world believes that men and women can truly be the opposite gender, or even no gender at all. Christians believe all people are created male or female, with biology taking precedence over subjective mental beliefs.
While the world claims that anything short of full affirmation is unloving, Christians believe that love is ultimately grounded in truth and repentance from sin, which precludes affirmation of attempts to live as the opposite sex (or as neither sex).
Christians must be clear on the Biblical definition of love, and prepare to be hated for living according to that definition.
Evidence strongly suggests that there is an ongoing explosion of transgenderism spread through social contagion. Young people, particularly girls, are the primary victims.
The current “gender affirming” model of care carries an enormous risk of irreversible harm from medical treatment, including sterility and loss of healthy body parts. However, the vast majority of transgender youth will outgrow gender dysphoria without medical intervention and there is little demonstrable benefit to medical treatment in terms of mental health.
The idea that lack of full affirmation leads to suicide is not supported by the evidence.
Major social institutions such as the media and federal government, are currently promoting transgenderism. However, accepting an obvious lie, that men can be women or vice versa, is corrosive to society, and Christians should be willing to stand for truth. In doing so, we will shine light into darkness.
I encourage you to read the whole thing below, and please reach out if you have questions or comments.
What is transgenderism?
Individuals are considered transgender if their gender perception does not line up with their sex.
Most transgender individuals suffer from gender dysphoria – a sense of discomfort caused by mismatch between sex and perceived gender - though transgender proponents note that not everyone who identifies as transgender suffers discomfort.
Gender dysphoria is related to other mental illnesses centered around dissatisfaction with one’s body:
Probably the most well-known is anorexia, where people (predominantly young girls) become convinced that they are grossly overweight, even when they have starved themselves to the point of being dangerously thin.
There are people who identify as amputees, some of whom develop significant body dysmorphia and self-mutilate or seek surgery. This article (from 2000) describes how even a fairly rare disease can form community, and potentially even spread, through the internet.
Transgenderism is now also an ideology. While people with gender dysphoria have presumably always existed, transgenderism as ideology is a more recent phenomenon. An “ideology” is merely a system of beliefs that guides an individual or social movement, usually towards some social or political end. Transgender ideology can be thought of as a system of beliefs (people really are the gender they feel they are - as opposed to mentally ill; gender and sex, are not binary but a continuum; gender is completely socially constructed) with a set of goals (some admirable, like better physical and legal safety for transgender individuals, and some more harmful, such as promoting pure affirmation in place of psychological treatment, or attempting to destroy the very concept of binary sex and order society accordingly).
What about intersex? Aren’t some people born neither male nor female?
Intersex refers to disorders of sexual development that occur in roughly 1 in 5000 births. Intersex conditions can result in ambiguous external genitalia, mismatch between external and internal sex organs, incomplete development of sex organs, or two sets of sex organs.
Intersex has body, chromosomal, and anatomical abnormalities that are medically diagnosable and empirically verifiable. Transgenderism is a psychological construct that can’t be empirically verified and has no definitive cause.
Intersex is not a 3rd sex – there are still only two possible human gonads (testes or ovaries).
The fact that some people are born with more or fewer than two arms does not mean “humans are not a two-armed species and arms exist on a continuum.”
Why even bother talking about transgenderism? Why should we care about how other people live their lives?
Christians with orthodox views on human sexuality view transgenderism as a sin. While it is not a special class of especially bad sin, it is a sin that is being promoted as an unalloyed good by many social institutions, and it is a sin that is spreading rapidly through society. It is critical for Christians to understand transgenderism to know how best to love transgender individuals without affirming their sin, and discern how best to respond to the various issues surrounding transgenderism. In particular, transgender ideology itself, and the ways in which society accommodates it, have real harms (as described more below). Understanding those harms and knowing when and how to stand against them is part of living as salt and light in our society.
In a country where Supreme Court justices can’t define what a woman is, federal public health agencies refer to “pregnant people” instead of mothers, men are listed among the “Women of the Year”, and senior medical staff of children’s hospitals promote the idea of “gender minotaurs,” many people are hungry for the truth. All truth is God’s truth and a commitment to the truth by the church will shine a bright light in this particular darkness.
Why is transgenderism a sin?
Transgenderism is embracing a feeling of gender dysphoria (and these days, typically, identifying with it) and trying to live as something other than your birth sex. This is a sinful rejection of God’s design.
The very first book of the Bible (Genesis 1:27) describes God’s binary design of male and female, and this is affirmed by Jesus in Matthew 19:4.
Male and female predate the fall, and predate all of humanity (plants and animals have two sexes).
Maleness and femaleness have a purpose.
God created a woman as man’s companion after noting it was not good for him to be alone. Even before the fall, both maleness and femaleness were required to fulfill God’s plan for mankind.
In particular, maleness and femaleness are both required to fulfill the Cultural Mandate: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over everything living thing that moves on the earth.”
We are embodied beings (that is, we are spiritual and physical) – it is not the case that our soul or mind is the “true” self that just happens to inhabit a particular body – body and soul are one.
Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, and suffering from it is not a sin. Desiring (or actively trying) to live as a different gender from your birth sex is.
Understanding the Recent Explosion in Transgenderism
Historically, experts defined two types of gender dysphoria - early onset (which typically hits around preschool years or earlier - “think effeminate boys who would grow into gay men”) and late-onset (which typically hits during or after puberty - “think men married to women who transition in their 50s”) with the former being substantially more common. [1]
The latter type occurs nearly exclusively among men, and is generally attributed to autogynephilia (men who are attracted to the idea of themselves as women). While this diagnosis is contested by pro-transgender activities, it is undeniable that some trans women (biological men) are attracted to women, which has implications for allowing men into women’s spaces.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th Edition, 2013) rates of transgenderism were historically rare, ranging from roughly 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 8,000 among males to, 1 in 50,000 to 1 in 33,000 for females.
There is very compelling evidence that most transgender people today suffer from a “rapid-onset” gender dysphoria (ROGD) that is socially contagious, a hypothesis first put forward by physician Lisa Littman.[2] This distinction is important because historical understanding of the two types of gender dysphoria assumed it was caused by factors we can’t control (such as childhood trauma or potentially even inborn condition) . However, if ROGD is not based on factors outside of our control, then the spread of ROGD can be restrained (and potentially reversed) through policy and social action. Moreover, if ROGD is an emergent illness (as opposed to a fixed condition) then it makes it more reasonable to assume it can and should be cured rather than affirmed or treated with drugs or surgery.[3]
The most compelling evidence of ROGD is that there has been an explosion of individuals identifying as trans. While this is often credited by activists to improved acceptance giving young people the confidence to live as their authentic selves, the speed and scope of the increase suggests that this is not just acceptance:
Rapid increases in transgenderism were observed across North America, Scandinavia, and the rest of Europe - official youth diagnoses nearly tripled in the US from 2017-2021.
According to the CDC, 2% of high schoolers now identify as transgender - an increase of more than 100-fold from historical norms.
Another compelling reason to believe in ROGD is that, historically, individuals with gender dysphoria were disproportionately male, and late-onset gender dysphoria was almost exclusively found in males before the 90s. However, the predominant growth of new cases of gender dysphoria is among teenage girls who did not present with childhood dysphoria.
Dr. Littman’s original research on ROGD found that 80% of children in her study had 0 indicators for childhood gender dysphoria, and over half developed gender dysphoria after puberty.
From 2008 to 2018 gender clinics in the UK saw a 4,400% increase in teen girls seeking treatment for gender dysphoria.
Internet-driven social contagion of mental illness has recent precedent. There has been a recent explosion of atypical Tourette’s cases, spread among teenagers, primarily girls, through social media, as well as similar documented increases in dissociative identity disorder (DID). It’s worth noting that new atypical cases of both Tourette’s and DID were disproportionately among transgender individuals.
Secular journalist Abigail Shrirer interviewed a professional counselor who noted that in the past, women with gender dysphoria wanted to pass as men. Now, they simply don’t want to be women.[4] Similarly, there has been an explosion of “non-binary” individuals who don’t identify as either gender, even though historically gender dysphoria entailed wanting to live as the other sex.
Abigail Shrier documented “clusters” of transgender individuals coming out around the same time. This is consistent with Dr. Littman’s research, which found that 70% of transgender children in her study belonged to a peer group where at least one other friend came out as trans - and over ⅓ belonged to friend groups where the majority of the friend group were trans-identified. “Increasing acceptance” of trans individuals, who used to have rates around 1 in 10,000, does not explain a situation where 7 of 28 students in a class all identify as trans.
Now that we’ve covered what transgenderism is, as well as the primary causes, we’ll take a look at some of the real harms caused by transgenderism, both at the personal level, as well as at the societal level.
What are the potential harms of transgenderism for transgender individuals themselves?
Most Christians I know formulate their response to transgenderism out of a genuine desire to love and help these individuals. However, it is important to note that our society’s insistence that anything but full affirmation is harmful and unloving is not true. There are numerous potential harms to the transgender individuals themselves that can arise from affirmation, both physical and spiritual - and so the most loving response is a truthful response.
First and foremost, transgenderism is a sin. To be clear, getting trans people to stop being trans does not fix their primary problem, which is separation from God. Their salvation should always be our ultimate goal. But as Christian author and former lesbian gender studies professor Rosaria Butterfield has noted, encouraging people in their sin is a barrier to their salvation, because the more we embrace our sin, the harder it is to let go of it and turn to Jesus. An individual in initial struggles with gender dysphoria is likely to have an easier time giving that up, than somebody who has fully embraced an identity attempting to live as the opposite sex.
While we are not always called to point out sin in others’ lives, we are commanded not to affirm it. And as Paul noted in 1 Corinthians 13 “love does not delight in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.”
Or as apologist Natasha Crain puts it “Godly love is wanting for others what God wants for them - even if that’s not what they want for themselves.”
One additional benefit of not affirming is that it leaves our credibility intact for wayward friends and loved ones. Rosaria Butterfield recounts the story of a transgender man (biological woman) whose parents and church loved her and continued to be part of her life but who never affirmed her identity. When she eventually quit living as transgender, she went back to her parents and church because she said “why would I return to the liars? I went to the people who never lied to me” (around minute 52 of this interview).
In addition to spiritual harms that will befall transgender individuals, the risk of physical harm, or even additional mental harm, is real.
Surgical interventions can range from removal of breasts (“top surgery”), to removal of testicles or ovaries, as well as inverting the penis to imitate a vagina, or constructing a pseudo-penis out of forearm tissue.
Surgical intervention entails the destruction of healthy body parts. There is no other mental illness where we destroy the healthy function of tissue rather than treat the underlying cause.[5]
While “top surgery” (removal of female breasts) is touted as reversible due to breast implants, implants do not replace the function of breasts (breastfeeding, and serving as erogenous zones).
In the 1970s, researchers from Johns Hopkins found that few who received sex reassignment surgery (as adults) regretted it but also found no demonstrable mental health benefit.[6] More recent data from Sweden also finds that those who received sex reassignment surgery from 1973-2003 still had substantially higher rates of suicide and inpatient psychiatric care.[7]
While not super-common, these surgeries are occurring in minors. In the US, from 2019-2021, over 200 girls per year received “top surgery” annually and at least some boys under 18 have had their penises or testicles removed.
There is a financial incentive to provide these surgeries, which are touted as money-makers for hospitals (along with hormone therapies).
Cross-sex hormones (women taking testosterone, men taking estrogen) are linked to several risks.
Cross-sex hormones introduce permanent changes quickly. If a biological girl stops taking testosterone, her extra body and facial hair will likely remain, as will deepened voice and clitoral enlargement.
Use of cross-sex hormones has been linked to 5-7X increases in the probability of stroke, heart attack, and pulmonary embolism.
Taking cross-sex hormones as a minor almost always leads to permanent sterility, and can even prevent the possibility of ever having an orgasm.
From 2017-2021 just under 15,000 minors initiated hormone treatment in the US.
Puberty blocking is typically achieved via the use of Lupron - the same drug used to chemically castrate sex offenders. It is approved for pausing puberty for children who enter puberty too early. However it is not approved for use in blocking normal puberty - the long term health effects of puberty blockers have not been established.
Puberty blockers are often touted as a temporary “pause” to allow children to better adjust to their dysphoria. However, as journalist Abigail Shrirer noted this treatment is not a neutral intervention. Going through high school as a little girl, who has not gone through the same development of her peers (no breast development, no period, etc.) is unlikely to be a neutral experience. There is also evidence suggesting that the sex hormones we experience during puberty (which are paused by these blockers) are involved in adolescent neurological development.
Puberty blockers frequently lead to cross-sex hormones with all their negative consequences. One study from UK shows that 98% of children put on puberty blockers between 12-15 went on to take cross-sex hormones. Another study from the Netherlands found the rate among 12-16 year olds was 100% - notably this same study found that while puberty blockers did improve depression, they did not improve anxiety, anger, satisfaction with body, or gender dysphoria.
In 2020 and 2021 more than 1,000 minors initiated puberty blocking drugs in the United States each year.
A recent study shows that puberty blockers were not associated with decreased suicide but actually associated with increased suicide. Another study from the UK found that the majority of youth did not experience improved mental health from puberty blockers, and that mental health may have deteriorated for more children than it improved for.
It is noteworthy that Denmark, Sweden, and the UK (not exactly known as bastions of right-wing fundamentalism) have banned medical treatment (puberty blockers, hormones, surgery) for youth who develop gender dysphoria during puberty (some make exceptions for clinical trials), citing lack of evidence on effectiveness or potential harms (UPDATE: The UK National Health Service just discontinued puberty blockers altogether outside of clinical trials, noting “We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of [puberty blockers] to make the treatment routinely available at this time.”).
Despite this, American institutions continue to double-down. The American Psychological Association just voted 153 to 9 to adopt a resolution opposing state bans on “gender-affirming care” for youths and insisting that insurance providers cover such care.
I don’t put a ton of weight on anecdotes, but when enough anecdotes accumulate, it can provide compelling evidence, particularly given the dearth research on long-term effects of medical treatment for minors. Stories of detransitioners (people who underwent some type of medical treatment for gender dysphoria, and then stopped and went back to living as their birth sex) are becoming more common, and are often tragic, suggesting that patients’ mental and physical well-being can both deteriorate as a result of affirming treatment.
One critical thing to know when considering the irreversible harms of medical intervention is that according to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of boys and 88% of girls who present with gender dysphoria in childhood outgrow it by the time they complete puberty. More conservative estimates still place the rate of “desistance” above 50%.
In addition to the high rates of desistance (children outgrowing gender dysphoria) another factor to keep in mind is that hormonal and surgical treatment are based on an inherent contradiction in transgenderism. Specifically, transgender ideology rejects a gender binary. Yet treatment is based on the idea that people can feel so strongly that they are the opposite sex, that they need medical intervention to attempt to emulate the opposite sex.
Transgender ideology also promotes “gender fluidity” - the idea that gender identity can change over time. But if gender is not fixed, then what would justify irreversible medical treatment to target a specific gender?
Lastly, as Abigail Shrirer noted, given that “non-binary” is a rejection of either sex, how can you can seek to emulate that through hormones and surgery? As she put it “But if what you want from your body is “non-binary” - something that does not, or has not, ever existed - how will you know if you’ve reached it? Doesn’t it seem more likely that you’ll never arrive? Like Michael Jackson’s “perfect” nose, it may always lie one surgery away, just out of reach.”
Keep in mind that when the media or public health officials talk about “gender-affirming medical care for youth” they really mean access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery for children.
What are the harms of transgenderism for society itself
The rights of women are being violated, as biological men are allowed into women’s private spaces
In the UK, US, and Canada, biological males can be housed in female prisons.
Wyoming federal court recently dismissed a lawsuit by female college students to allow biological male to remain in a sorority despite claims that he was “visibly erect” watching members of the sorority enter the house.
Without warning, female college swimmers were required to share a locker room with a 6’ 4” biological man who did not hide his intact male genitalia, while high school girls are punished for asking not to share a locker room with a boy.
Male athletes are participating in women’s sports at all levels, in many cases winning championships that would otherwise have gone to women.
Despite activists’ claims otherwise, boys who have gone through puberty have a lifelong advantage even if they suppress their hormones. The idea that males do not, on average, have massive physical advantages over females is completely false.
This website has a useful illustration of how dominant high school boys would be in a hypothetical matchup against female Olympians.
Thousands of school districts, covering roughly 3.2 million students, have policies in place to hide from parents if their child decides to socially transition at school. A federal judge recently ruled that hiding this information does not violate parental rights.
Although a new state law now prohibits this in North Carolina, until earlier this year, both Mecklenburg and Orange counties had such policies in place.
It is noteworthy that social transition is not a neutral step: if you change your name and pronouns in front of your peers it is very difficult to walk it back, which makes it harder to outgrow gender dysphoria and increases the probability of undertaking harmful medical treatment.
Research also suggests no mental health benefit to social transition.
Arguably the most important harm caused by transgender ideology is an erosion of truth and an affirmation of a false worldview that says that people can create their own meaning and truth rather than accepting God’s meaning and truth. As ethicist and Southern Baptist seminary professor Andrew Walker noted in “God and the Transgender Debate” (page 61-62):
If we accept the falsehood that males can wear clothing and surgically change their bodies in service of becoming an actual woman, there isn’t anything we cannot convince others to believe or fall prey to ourselves. Behind the transgender debate is not only a debate on gender, but a debate on the type of reality we live in. Does it have any purpose at all? The Bible says “yes”.
It is worth noting that habituating the repetition of things known to be false -e.g., that trans women ARE women - is a key step in fostering authoritarianism. Famed anti-Communist dissident Vaclav Havel noted that immoral systems are propped up by worldviews that gain their power from everyday people repeating slogans affirming the worldview, even if they don’t believe them. This connection was made explicitly by famed author and self-proclaimed liberal JK Rowling, who has drawn the ire of transgender activists for questioning aspects of transgender orthodoxy (despite being overall trans-affirming).
Related to this, it is important to understand that transgenderism and Christianity are fundamentally at odds in ways that will play out in the public sphere in the coming years. In his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Christian theologian and professor Carl Trueman describes why transgender ideology and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible. In our society, individual self-expression has become of primary importance, to the point that failure to publicly acknowledge somebody’s inner identity is considered real harm. Furthermore, the very existence of social norms that promote a gender binary are considered literally oppressive. Therefore, treating transgender individuals with dignity, and extending them legal protection from discrimination, are not sufficient. So long as Christians retain the belief that male and female are “normal” and unchanging, we will be considered to be actively harming and oppressing transgender individuals.
But what about suicide? I don’t want my transgender friends or loved ones to kill themselves.
One of the main concerns raised when weighing the appropriate response to transgender individuals is the documented high risk of suicide. While the magnitude of this rate is debated, it is accepted as fact that suicide rates are higher for transgender individuals than among the general population. This is something we should be aware of when dealing with transgender individuals - they may be in a vulnerable mental state, and their condition should not be taken lightly.
However, there are several factors to keep in mind when considering the issue of transgender suicides.
Data show that among youth referred to mental health clinics for gender dysphoria, rates of suicidal ideation/attempts are similar to those referred for other mental health conditions, consistent with gender dysphoria being a severe mental illness, but not uniquely leading to suicide. This finding has recently been corroborated in Finland.
A study from Sweden found that after sex reassignment surgery transgender individuals in Sweden were still roughly 20X more likely to commit suicide, 5X more likely to attempt suicide, and 3X more likely to end up in the hospital for a psychiatric condition besides gender dysphoria.
While this clearly demonstrates the severity of the problem - it also shows that surgery did not substantially alleviate individuals’ suffering.
More recent research from Finland also finds that gender reassignment treatment (hormonal or surgical) did not reduce the risk of suicide among youth with gender dysphoria.
Any potential benefits from hormonal or surgical treatment need to be weighed against potential harms, many of them irreversible, particularly among youth. This essay provides a useful discussion.
Horrifyingly high rates of suicide should not be confused with “most transgender people commit suicide.” For example, a recent study from Denmark found that suicide rates were nearly 4X higher for transgender individuals compared to the general population - but the results could equally be interpreted as “99.7% of transgender individuals did not commit suicide.” A recent study from the UK found that 99.97% transgender individuals who sought treatment at their main gender clinic did not commit suicide over a 10-year span. Transgender activists will say things like “it’s better to have a living son than a dead daughter” but the reality is that suicide (thankfully) remains relatively uncommon - which needs to be considered when weighing the potential benefits of hormones or surgery.
It is also worth keeping in mind that trying to shape reality to fit a false mental perception is not typically how we deal with suicide risk. As one clinician interviewed by Abigail Shrirer noted “If I work with someone suicidal because his wife just left him, I don’t just call the wife up and say ‘Hey you just have to come back!’ That’s not the way we treat suicide. We don’t treat suicide by giving people exactly what they want. We treat suicide first of all by keeping people safe, and by helping them become more resilient. We ought to treat gender dysphoria that way too.”
Lastly, I’ll note that the constant promotion of the idea that lack of affirmation will lead to suicide goes against CDC guidelines for talking about suicide, which is a known social contagion. Convincing children that they will likely to be suicidal if not affirmed can become a self-fulfulling prophecy.
Given the above, how should Christians respond?
First and foremost it goes without saying that those suffering from gender dysphoria are image-bearers we are commanded to love. Transgenderism is not in a special class of sin that requires different treatment. The church should be a safe place for transgender individuals to encounter the gospel, and transgender individuals we meet should be treated with respect and kindness.
This will also require some discernment, as transgenderism is now an ideology opposed to Christianity and not just a collection of individuals with the same diagnosis. Transgender individuals may try to infiltrate the church with ulterior motives (for example, to influence the church away from orthodoxy on human sexuality).
Be aware that standing for Biblical truth and applying a Biblical definition of love will often be interpreted as mean and disrespectful - it is not inconceivable that in our lifetimes doing so will become unlawful. Don’t let others’ interpretations of your actions guide your behavior.
The current cultural definition of love is “affirming whatever the individual wants.” But Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13 that “love does not delight in wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.”
Christians should be careful not to confuse “It is a sin to try to live as the opposite sex” with “It is a sin not to embrace specific gender norms.” Andrew Walker noted,
“Christians must never fail to obey all that God says about gender: but equally, Christians should never go beyond what he says….if you as a parent [place as much weight on] your son’s sporting abilities as you do his sacrificial love for others, then that suggests you have a more cultural view of masculinity than you do a Biblical one (God and the Transgender Debate - page 63.)
Christians should be aware of the ways in which transgenderism is an ideology completely opposed to Christianity, and that many major elements of society support it.[8] For example, you will see most media outlets and politicians describe bans on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for minors as “anti-trans” despite the fact that countries politically left of the US have instituted similar regulations.[9] Laws preventing males from competing in women’s sports, or using women’s locker rooms, are labeled “anti-trans” instead of “pro-women.”
In particular, parents should be aware that pro-trans messages targeting children are becoming increasingly prevalent. Blues Clues, a kid’s show aimed at preschoolers recently included a Pride parade led by a drag queen, showing a beaver with top surgery scars. Here are clips from Transformers teaching about non-binary “they/them” pronouns. A Paw Patrol spinoff show now has a non-binary character.
The “National Sex Education Standards” are in use by more than 40% of US school districts. According to these standards, by the end of 5th grade kids should be able to:
Distinguish sex assigned at birth from gender identity and how they may differ
Define and explain differences between cis, trans, non-binary, gender expansive.
Describe the role hormones play in changes during adolescence, and potential role of hormone blockers on trans youth.
Explain common human sexual development and role of hormones:
“Common human sexual development….often involves experimenting with many different identities…and sexual identity is not exempt from this type of exploration”
Christians should not promote sin or advance this false ideology by volunteering their pronouns or calling others by their “preferred” pronouns (JD Greear has some discussion on this here.[10] Andrew Walker, who wrote “God and the Transgender Debate” also provides some useful commentary, as does Baptist pastor Erik Reed). For a secular liberal perspective see here.
Rather than “misgendering” (calling someone by their real pronouns, which can get you in trouble) you can instead refer to somebody by their name to avoid using 3rd-person pronouns.
Footnotes
[1]Shrirer, Abigail. “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” Regnery Publishing, 2020. (Lest you are tempted to think that this book is rightwing propaganda, renowned British magazine The Economist named this one of the best books of the year in 2021).
[2] To be clear, "social contagion" is not the same as "not real." Anorexia is widely considered socially contagious,, but it is clearly a real condition that causes real suffering and can require extreme measures to treat.
[3]There are currently 19 states where mental health professionals are banned from “conversion therapy” - that is, trying to cure rather than affirm somebody’s gender dysphoria. (Irreversible Damage, Page 120).
[4]Shrirer, Abigail. “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” Regnery Publishing, 2020. (see page 7)
[5]I previously mentioned the existence of mental illness where people are convinced they are disabled and want to remove body parts. Society may come to a conclusion that certain adults would be better off receiving the surgery, but if we started seeing hundreds of youth every year chopping off arms and legs we would be rightfully horrified. Similarly, the idea of giving liposuction or bariatric surgery to a person with anorexia would rightfully be seen as terrible and inhumane.
[6]It is noteworthy that as a result of this research, Johns Hopkins quit providing sex reassignment surgery for several decades. The lead researcher said “I know this. That some people are satisfied and live happily ever after. And some, of course, get suicidal, depressed, and regretful. And nobody can tell the difference between the ones in the beginning that will and will not regret it.”
[7]There is a lot of back-and-forth in the literature and online about whether certain medical interventions are ever beneficial for people suffering from gender dysphoria. There is insufficient space to summarize those exchanges here. What I will say is that the burden of proof should lie with the transgender activists given the massive potential downsides to treatment, the massive surge of rapid-onset cases, and our intuition that destroying the function of healthy body parts should occur only under the most extreme circumstances (e.g., amputating an arm to save the body from infection). This is even more so for children.
[8]A recent federal court ruling upholding state bans on “gender affirming” care for youth noted the following, in response to concerns that transgender people may be a politically powerless group (which would allow the court to overthrow legislation made by democratically-elected legislators): “The President of the United States and the Department of Justice support the plaintiffs [transgender youth]...Fourteen States have passed laws specifically allowing some of the treatments sought here. Twenty States have joined an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs. The major medical organizations support the plaintiffs. And the only large law firms to make an appearance in the case all entered the controversy in support of the plaintiffs.”
[9] While it is true that US bans are generally more comprehensive than those in Europe, skepticism about hormone and surgical treatments for minors should be treated as a reasonable point of view and not as anti-LGBTQ animus
[10] While JD says we should not volunteer our pronouns, he does not take a hard stand on whether we should provide them if compelled to do so (e.g., as a condition of employment, or as a requirement for government business). Christians need to prayerfully consider what constitutes a personal red line on these issues.