Five Resources For Addressing Transgenderism

I have personally experienced gender dysphoria, and I explored transition in my early twenties. I am aware of the emotional struggle, but I am also aware of the empowering realization that I alone control how I perceive the world.

The Christian worldview accepts the validity of people’s testimony that gender dysphoria is a real experience resulting in heartrending distress. The Christian worldview cannot, however, countenance the idea that men can become women or that women can become men.

The problem with basing a diagnosis and irreversible treatment on people’s feelings, no matter how deeply felt, is that feelings can change.

A desire to be protected from the meaning of our body has led only to a need to be protected from the ravages of reality.

Transgenderism is based on feelings that can change over time.

The recent “Dear Colleague” letter from the Departments of Justice and Education relies on an ideology of expressive individualism to handle issues of gender identity. It does so to the detriment of community, family, and those it intends to serve. It also eliminates one of the most basic and universally accepted forms of privacy.

The gross misappropriation of executive power to utterly remake the meaning of very basic legal terms threatens not only the structure of our government. It threatens the rule of law itself. This distortion of legal language is a particular threat to laws concerning women.

A federal court has said a student’s subjective understanding alters the meaning of an unambiguous, federal law. And it alters the meaning of the law for everyone in the Gloucester County school district and, potentially, everyone who resides in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

In a domain in which the proposed “therapies” are so drastic, it is not too much to ask for a solid, evidence-based statement of who is being treated, for what, and why, before writing a prescription or passing a law.

A recent film accurately portrays the deep emotional and psychological problems that transgender people experience, but it fails to address the reality of life after sex reassignment surgery and the need to treat comorbid psychological disorders.

Adopting a gender persona is not given. It is something that is developed in response to one’s given sexual identity, which provides a sort of vocation—not a fully determinate life plan, but a structure nonetheless.

Conservatives do not take the introspective reports of transgendered people seriously, but there are good scientific reasons for supposing that subjective experience of gender is legitimate, even when it contradicts apparent biological sex.

The idea that one’s sex is a feeling, not a fact, has permeated our culture and is leaving casualties in its wake. Gender dysphoria should be treated with psychotherapy, not surgery.

Supporters of transgender ideology believe that they are freeing people from restrictive understandings of gender. In reality, the more our society tries to free itself from gender stereotypes, the more it becomes enslaved to them. By saying that people can be born in a body of the wrong gender, transgender activists are saying there is a set of feelings that are only allocated to women and another set for men.

The reprieve provided by surgery and life as a woman was only temporary. Hidden deep underneath the make-up and female clothing was the little boy hurt by childhood trauma, and he was making himself known.

We should make public policy and encourage social norms that reflect the truth about the human person and sexuality, not obfuscate the truth about such matters and sow the seeds of sexual confusion in future generations for years to come.

If major leaders in the gay movement cannot keep up with its constant invention of new “rights,” then they certainly can’t shame others for failing to do so.

Radical feminist attempts to divorce identity from sex put in motion a rolling revolution in marriage and family life whose latest turn is toward transgender rights.

Gender ideology demands that everyone say of what is that it is not, and of what is not that it is. Lovers of truth must courageously resist this call to falsehood.

Doctors currently have no way of predicting which gender dysphoric children will persist in their gender dysphoria, and yet they are pushing the minimum age for irreversible hormone therapy and surgery as low as possible.

Men are men, and women are women. There is no third option.

When the state insists on governing us only in terms of who we think we are, surely the proper interpretation of such an insistence is that the state has reneged on the very reason for its existence: to govern us-as-us; to govern us as male and female.

Public schools have a duty to serve all children, but a school cannot serve children and a totalitarian ideology all at once. For the sake of children’s well-being, Christian mothers are uniting with their radical feminist and lesbian sisters to reject the idea of “gender identity.”

The legalization of same-sex marriage may be associated with a short-term emotional bump for youth who identify as sexual minorities, but it is not a robust, long-term panacea for the emotional struggles of teenagers.

The LSD consciousness-expansion movement of the late sixties and today’s gender-identity fixation are both counterfeit revolutions. The two might initially appear very different, but they share similar intellectual assumptions and make analogous mistakes.

Sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) antidiscrimination laws are unjustified, but if other policies are adopted to address the mistreatment of people who identify as LGBT, they must leave people free to engage in legitimate actions based on the conviction that we are created male and female and that male and female are created for each other.

Accepting the claims of transgender ideology requires papering over one’s conscience and making a mockery of the “law written on the heart” that our bodies bear witness to in our complementary design.

National Geographic’s cover photo is exploitation. The health and well-being of a child are being sacrificed to advance a political and cultural crusade.