Sex is ordinarily determined at fertilization. Our genetic code, either the presence of an XX or XY chromosomal composition, determines our sexed body. With extremely rare disordered exceptions the human organism begins down a road of male or female bodily differentiation.
Back to our Gender Unicorn for a moment.
You will notice under the section “Sex Assigned at Birth” a blue dot for “other/intersex.” In the past, what used to be called a “disorder” is now called by many a “difference.” In our decidedly ‘post-modern’ moment, a moment designed to disrupt the very concept of normal or the fact that a natural order exists, we are told by Gender Identity Ideologues that there are a variety of ways that humans can develop. Normal and abnormal categories are obsolete and quite frankly hurtful to those who have developed differently.
Of course any sensitive person is going to treat someone who has one of these rare disorders with love and respect. But we should not ignore the obvious for the purpose of advancing a gender fluid philosophical agenda. Christians can’t do that.
Also, it’s bad science.
Clinics are being pressured to reclassify “Disorders of Sexual Development” as “Differences of Sexual Development.” Some have adopted the new terminology over a concern about stigmatizing people.
But the distinction between order and disorder is operative everywhere in science and medicine. These categories are indispensable for understanding and directing treatments toward human well-being.
Disorders of sexual development (DSDs) occur in roughly one out of every 5,000 births. These disorders can result in ambiguous external genitalia and the incomplete development of reproductive organs. Chromosomal or hormonal defects produce these abnormalities. They are rightly regarded by most medical experts as pathologies in the development and formation of the male and female body. They are exceedingly rare.
But Gender Identity Ideologues use the fact of these rare disorders as a reason for positing a “third sex” “fourth sex” etc., along a spectrum of possibilities. They argue that because of these “differences” the old-fashioned male-female sex binary is obsolete. Some people are just non-binary, they say. As I wrote in a previous post this move is nothing more than the normalization of disorder for the purpose of pushing a gender expansive ideology. (At root this irrationality emanates from an ideology called Queer Theory.)
In 2018 Rev Randall attended a staff seminar at Trent College, entitled “Educate and Celebrate.” He raised an objection when the leader, Elly Barnes, instructed the staff to chant ‘smash heteronormativity.’ For his anti-celebratory concerns he became a marked man at the college.
Barnes’ ideological, dare I say religious, fervor leaves little wiggle room for those like Reverend Randall and myself who believe God made us “male and female.” We don’t believe heteronormativity is oppressive and something to be “smashed.”
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Dr. Randi Ettner, the chief psychologist at the Chicago Gender Center, describes the standard of care treatment plan promoted by transgender activists, otherwise known as the “Affirmative Care Model“:
• Changes in gender expression and role, consistent with one’s gender identity (also referred to as social role transition).
• Psychotherapy for purposes such as addressing the negative impact of stigma, alleviating internalized transphobia, enhancing social and peer support, improving body image, promoting resiliency, etc.
• Hormone therapy to feminize or masculinize the body.
• Surgery to alter primary and/or secondary sex characteristics.1“Declaration of Randi Ettner, Ph.D., U.S. District Court, Middle District of North Carolina, Case 1:16-cv-236-TDS-JEP, p. 5.”
This plan is often called “transitioning” but some transgender activists regard that term as stigmatizing and inaccurate. From the perspective of the transgender person they are simply engaged in a process of “settling in to themselves” or “coming home” to what they always were inside.2“PFLAG, Our Trans Loved Ones: Questions and Answers for Parents, Families, and Friends of People Who Are Transgender and Gender Expansive (2008, 2015), p. 9, https://www.pflag.org/ourtranslovedones.”
A similar linguistic jujitsu is at work when activists prefer to speak of gender-affirming therapies instead of sex reassignment therapies. (Since when did it become the primary job of doctors to affirm?). For women these affirming therapies mean life-long testosterone, double mastectomies and the creation of a penis (phalloplasty). For men, life-long estrogen, gonadectomy, penectomy, and the creation of a vagina (vaginoplasty). Here are some affirming treatment details:
“Sex reassignment surgeries available to the MTF3male to female transsexual persons consist of gonadectomy, penectomy, and creation of a vagina. The skin of the penis is often inverted to form the wall of the vagina. The scrotum becomes the labia majora. Cosmetic surgery is used to fashion the clitoris and its hood, preserving the neurovascular bundle at the tip of the penis as the neurosensory supply to the clitoris. Most recently, plastic surgeons have developed techniques to fashion labia minora. Endocrinologists should encourage the transsexual person to use their tampon dilators to maintain the depth and width of the vagina throughout the postoperative period until the neovagina is being used frequently in intercourse. Genital sexual responsivity and other aspects of sexual function should be preserved after genital sex reassignment surgery…. Another major effort is the removal of facial and masculine-appearing body hair using either electrolysis or laser treatments. Other feminizing surgery, such as that to feminize the face, is now becoming more popular.
Sex reassignment surgeries available to the FTM4female to male transsexual persons have been less satisfactory. The cosmetic appearance of a neopenis is now very good, but the surgery is multistage and very expensive. Neopenile erection can be achieved only if some mechanical device is imbedded in the penis, e.g. a rod or some inflatable apparatus. Many choose a metaidoioplasty that exteriorizes or brings forward the clitoris and allows for voiding while standing. The scrotum is created from the labia majora with a good cosmetic effect, and testicular prostheses can be implanted. These procedures, as well as oophorectomy, vaginectomy, and complete hysterectomy, are undertaken after a few years of androgen therapy and can be safely performed vaginally with laparoscopy.
The ancillary surgery for the FTM transition that is extremely important is the mastectomy. Breast size only partially regresses with androgen therapy. In adults, discussion about mastectomy usually takes place after androgen therapy is begun. Because some FTM transsexual adolescents present after significant breast development has occurred, mastectomy may be considered before age 18.”5“Hembree et al., “Endocrine Treatment of Transsexual Persons,” 3149.”
Again, like I did in a previous post I must ask, who is engaged in conversion therapy here?
Is it the one who is trying to help a person align their thoughts and feelings with the body they were given at birth or the professional who disregards the body and proposes irreversible radical surgeries combined with life-long hormone treatments in hopes of aligning the outer body with a patient’s inner desires?
Who is the conversion therapist?Gender Identity Ideologues pin that label on those clinicians and pastors who try to help an individual become more comfortable with their immutable biological sex. These concerned professionals and pastors counsel them not to transition away from their birth sex. It’s called Talk Therapy. And it is very effective, especially for children with gender dysphoria. Trans Activists and Gender Identity Ideologues regard these efforts as immoral and professional clinicians are forbidden in some states and other countries from steering individuals toward accepting their birth sex.
Leveling the charge of “conversion therapist” packs quite a rhetorical punch because these therapeutic techniques are said to be just like some of the therapies used in the past to “convert” homosexuals. That’s not true. It’s Talk Therapy! And also, as I’ve said before homosexuals don’t deny their biological sex. This is different. Helping someone align their thoughts and desires with the indisputable facts of their body is not converting them into someone different. Leveling the charge of “conversion therapist” on those professionals or pastors who don’t “affirm” is Orwellian doublespeak. Don’t believe it. And push back. Firmly. Even if you are called a bigot. Do it anyway.
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I’m a Classic Christian and regard Gender Ideology as anti-creational to the core. This blog is about “God’s Good Creation.” That’s why I’m writing about Gender Ideology. And “speaking up” as I’m confident Jesus would.
"Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female.'" [Matt 19:4]
If you would like more detail on how my Christian worldview informs my understanding of Sex and today’s Gender Ideology please read the following posts.
I have quite a few friends across the broad spectrum we call Feminism. Some of them are reading this post. And I implore them not to cut me off after they “hear” what I have to say in a moment. But first let me establish my bona fides.
I call myself a “freedom-feminist.” (Yes. Men can be feminists too.)
These are its basic principles:
Freedom Feminism> Contemporary synthesis of egalitarian and maternal feminism
> Stands for the moral, social, and legal equality of the sexes
> Affirms for women what it affirms for everyone: dignity, fairness, and liberty
> Opposes efforts to impose on women (or men) stereotypical social roles, yet recognizes that men and women will typically employ their equal freedoms in distinctive ways
> Asserts that efforts to obliterate gender roles can be just as intolerant as efforts to maintain them
> Establishes that differences between the sexes, under conditions of freedom, can be a sign of social well-being. Freedom feminism is at peace, not at war, with abiding human aspiration1Freedom Feminism: It's Surprising History and Why It Matters Today (Values and Capitalism) Copyright, 2013 by Christina Hoff Sommers.
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That establishment of my feminist bona fides was a setup for what comes next. [I hope it worked!]
It may sound sexist. But hear me out. Women and men are different. I discovered this truth from living life. To bolster my claim, I’ve read a few scientific studies on the matter. And of course there are my theological commitments.
Here’s one difference, women typically process pain and stress differently than men. And they usually do it together. Unlike the lonesome cowpoke.
According to experts there is a “collective stress response” gender gap.
This explains why most “mass hysteria” outbreaks in history involve females, not males. Especially young women. (Of course, virtually all “mass murder and mayhem” outbreaks in history involve males, not females. You could call that the “collective rage response” gender gap.)
It’s not that compared to men, women are emotionally unstable. That’s the old sexist saw. Certainly “mass murder and mayhem” makes a strong claim for the label “emotionally unstable!”
"It sounds sexist, and it's sure to raise the ire of some feminists, but the literature does not lie. Throughout history, groups of people in cohesive social units have suddenly fallen ill or exhibited strange behaviors...often all of those affected, are females. In fact, of the 2,000+ cases in my files which date back to 1566, this pattern holds true over ninety-nine percent of the time." [emphasis mine]
Okay, I just felt a “virtual” frying pan smack the back of my skull when someone read the word “hysteria.” Or was that a Louisville Slugger?2Some of my feminist friends might suspect the use of sexist language here, the term “frying pan” suggests the “lady in the kitchen” striking out the only way she can. I hope “Louisville Slugger” restores your confidence in my bona fides.<grin>
Who did that?
Abigail get me outta here!
"the nervous disorders of the eighteenth century and the neurasthenia epidemic of the nineteenth century.3Julie Beck, “ ‘Americanitis’: The Disease of Living Too Fast,” The Atlantic, March 11, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/the-history-of-neurasthenia-or-americanitis-health-happiness-and-culture/473253/. Anorexia nervosa,4Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 34. repressed memory,5Paul M. McHugh, Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind (New York, NY: Dana Press, 2008), 69 (noting that those with “false memory syndrome” were usually women). bulimia, and the cutting contagion in the twentieth.6Mandy Van Deven, “How We Became a Nation of Cutters,” Salon, August 19, 2011, https://www.salon.com/2011/08/19/tender_cut_interview/.One protagonist has led them all, notorious for magnifying and spreading her own psychic pain: the adolescent girl.7Robert Bartholomew, “Why Are Females Prone to Mass Hysteria?” Psychology Today, March 31, 2017, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/its-catching/201703/why-are-females-prone-mass-hysteria.Her distress is real. But her self-diagnosis, in each case, is flawed—more the result of encouragement and suggestion than psychological necessity. Three decades ago, these girls might have hankered for liposuction while their physical forms wasted away. Two decades ago, today’s trans-identified teens might have “discovered” a repressed memory of childhood trauma. Today’s diagnostic craze isn’t demonic possession—it’s “gender dysphoria.” And its “cure” is not exorcism, laxatives, or purging. It’s testosterone and “top surgery.” [emphasis mine] — Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier8Shrier is a graduate of Columbia College who went on to earn a bachelor of philosophy degree from the University of Oxford and a JD from Yale Law School. Her book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughterswas named a “best book” by The Economist and The Times of London. [2020, 2021]
I think she’s right.
All this is not highlighting a female flaw. It is a feminine feature (not a bug) that we adore and need!
The empathic female enters into the pain and loneliness of others. Closing ranks with the sufferer. Pulling them in. Embracing them at the moment of crisis. Sharing their pain. She is, in a word, mom.
Is there anyone quite like her? Nope.
I’m not saying that men are incapable of empathy or that you can’t find women empathic as a green tomato. But, c’mon. You’ve noticed a difference, right? You could chock this up to socialization, a “social construct” as some say. That’s a popular phrase these days. Still, the “facts on the ground” reveal, girls cuddle great!
But here’s a problem. Our young girls with their maternal instincts tend to internalize the pain of their troubled girlfriends. Combine that with pubertal anxiety induced by changing bodies, some changes they may never like, and then toss in the unwanted attention of boys and men as they “develop.” Not to mention all those comparisons with each other. It’s a mixed up challenging time for girls. And given their tendencies, if they find someone hurting like they are hurting it can present a peer problem.
For example. Hospitals that have anorexic patients, another dysphoria, are careful not to place them in the same area. Because the girls, if they find each other, will “feed off” one another.
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A critical factor emerged a few years ago. Social group formation started to change for boys and girls. Which brings us to the largest dysphoria cafe the world has ever known, a smorgasbord ideally situated to “nourish” a peer contagionpandemic.
Social Media.
This doesn’t explain everything about our current gender-dysphoric girl crisis. But it explains a lot. Adolescents today don’t hang out like they used to. Oh they communicate, like nobody’s business. But their interactions with peers have become disembodied.
This is a problem.
Here are a few relevant bullet points.
The GOOD NEWS
< Teen pregnancy has reached multi-decade lows.
< Rates of abortion among teens have plummeted.
< Teens are more tolerant of difference.
The BAD NEWS
> Teens in the West evince record levels of anxiety and depression.
In the past, if you were hurting, you got a hug, a real hug from a friend, especially if you were a girl. And if it was really bad, you sought therapy, religious counsel with real people. Today, increasingly, you get an electronic message and a super cool emoji, and receive counsel from an every growing group of Internet “Influencers” who are there for you 24/7, well their videos at least, to coach you through your discomfort, helping you blaze a trail to a “new you.” And words, words, words flow like a river, easy words, frictionless, effortless, blissful, abbreviated words, OMG, LOL. Distant words. From across the wide world words. Echoes really of what everyone else is saying. Teens follow trends, after all. But cliches without a body attached.
This is different.
Some of these supportive, affirming words, “group hug!” “you can do this!” discourage bodily life itself. At least the body you were given. Today’s affirming storyline is really different. And it is hurting us. Especially our anxiety ridden girls. (Our boys too, but I’ll talk about them later.)
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The most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) the clinician’s “bible” written in 2013 puts the expected incidence of gender dysphoria at .005-.014 percent for natal males. Much lower for natal females. Fewer than 1 in 10,000 people were expected to experience this dysphoria. Until about ten years ago the overwhelming number of cases were young boys usually presenting around ages 2-4.
According to Shrier’s research:
Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all. In the last decade that has changed, and dramatically.
The numbers for this decade: Two percent of high school students now identify as “transgender,” according to a 2017 survey of teens issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).9 Michelle M. Johns et al., “Transgender Identity and Experiences of Violence Victimization, Substance Use, Suicide Risk, and Sexual Risk Behaviors among High School Students—19 States and Large Urban School Districts, 2017,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 68, no. 3 (January 25, 2019): 67–71, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6803a3.htm.
Some have argued that the reason for the “western spike” is because we’ve finally learned how to be more tolerant and excepting of difference and people now feel free to express themselves openly, especially our women.
Why then do we not see 30, 40 and 50 year old women “coming out” as Trans? Where are they? We’ve seen (MtF)10Male to Female Caitlyn Jenner. Where are the adult women identifying as Trans-men? Now is their moment.
It’s not happening. Rather, the unexpected spike is among teenage girls.
A new chapter in our story is being written. We need to read about it now.
This is the story of the American family—decent, loving, hardworking and kind. It wants to do the right thing. But it finds itself set in a society that increasingly regards parents as obstacles, bigots, and dupes. We cheer as teenage girls with no history of dysphoria steep themselves in a radical gender ideology taught in school or found on the internet. Peers and therapists and teachers and internet heroes egg these girls on. But here, the cost of so much youthful indiscretion is not a piercing or tattoo. It’s closer to a pound of flesh. Some small proportion of the population will always be transgender. But perhaps the current craze will not always lure troubled young girls with no history of gender dysphoria, enlisting them in a lifetime of hormone dependency and disfiguring surgeries. If this is a social contagion, society—perhaps—can arrest it. No adolescent should pay this high a price for having been, briefly, a follower. — Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier
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CHRISTIAN FIRST PRINCIPLES
Here’s where I put on my Christian hat and encourage my Christian sisters and brothers, by God’s grace, toward the Truth. (Non-Christians, give us a minute.) Although it may be difficult to apply in practice, especially in our modern context, here’s a basic principle of God’s ongoing revelation to us.
The fresh wind of God’s Spirit will never contradict God’s purposes from the beginning.
“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.” All things visible and invisible, as the first stanza of our Ancient Creed says. Over the years I’ve expanded my understanding of God’s bi-natured world. Heaven and Earth, Spirit and Matter, Soul and Body, Male and Female make up the vital, indispensable components of God’s Good Creation. And I believe all of God’s Good Creation was, in the beginning, created equal.
Heaven and Earth, equal.
Spirit and Matter, equal.
Soul and Body, equal.
Male and Female, equal.
Different. (We are not Pantheists.) Yet equal. And meant to harmoniously overlap and interlock. As an integrated whole. A loving Unity with Plurality. Like our Creator. Our Triune (3in1) God. Before there was any created thing, there was loving community.
I call this view of creation equal dualism.11I want to clear up what may be puzzling to some. By juxtaposing Heaven and Earth, Spirit and Matter, Male and Female, Soul and Body, as I have done am I not saying that maleness corresponds with Heaven, Spirit and Soul and that femaleness corresponds with Earth, Matter and Body and isn’t that dichotomy more than slightly demeaning? Some might say, objectifying? Well, first of all, the main point is the union of each pairing, or the complementarity of each pair and not the correspondence between the different pairings. For example, both males and females are a mysterious unity of spirit and matter, or if you prefer, soul and body. But let me question a further assumption that many make here, an assumption made especially by disciples of Plato (It’s possible to be a disciple of Plato and not know it!). That assumption is something I’ve called, unequal dualism. Unequal dualism regards the second place position in each pairing as inferior to the first. For example, Plato linked the irrational and physical with the female sex, and the rational and spiritual with the male sex. Making males superior to females in his mind. And only in his mind! Unfortunately his was a very influential mind. Our Big Picture Story.
Here is another excerpt from the Past, Present, and Future story of a Triune Creator:
“Have you not read that the one who made themat the beginning ‘made them male and female,’” [Matt. 19:4] - JESUS
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By 2016, Facebook, the worlds largest social media platform had 56 profile possibilities under the category: gender.
