Truth & Transgenderism
Sunday Night Theology • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Intro: read Calvin book
What Are We Talking About?
· NOTE: I reject nearly everything in these terms and the worldview that supports them, but it’s helpful to at least understand what our friends and neighbors mean by these terms.
How Did We Get Here?
In his book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman asks an important question:
· Is it right to say the twin towers fell because of gravity?
· Yes, but it’s not particularly helpful unless we trace the reasons why gravity caused the building to fall.[i]
So too, it’s right to say we got to where we are culturally because of sin, but it’s not particularly helpful unless we trace the reasons why sin led to the transgender moment.
Carl Trueman—“no individual historical phenomenon is its own cause.”[ii]
Five Key Factors:
1. Relativism
· “Relativism says meaning and truth are relative, so that what is right for one person may be wrong for another person.”[iii]
· Just last week at a White House pride event, a trans activist was condemned by the White House press secretary for dancing topless in the south portico in the presence of a large crowd including many families. The offending individual said, “I had zero intention of trying to be vulgar or be profane in any way. I was simply living in joy, living my truth and existing in my body.”[iv]
· How relativism breaks down: contracts, mortgages, etc.
2. Radical Individualism
· “What an individual wills or wants is the highest good, and it is wrong to tell someone that his or her choices or beliefs are wrong or immoral…. The greatest sin—in fact, the only sin—is judging someone else.”[v]
· “There are people who wear pet collars, eat from a bowl and identify as dogs. There are people who perform major body modifications to look dragon-like and identify as reptiles. There are grown men who identify as little girls. There are individuals who marry themselves.”[vi]
3. Sexual Revolution
· In 1956, a popular Russian sociologist named Pitirim Sorokin wrote this:
o Among the many changes of the last few decades a peculiar revolution has been taking place in the lives of millions of American men and women. Quite different from the better-known political and economic revolutions, it goes almost unnoticed. Devoid of noisy public explosions, its stormy scenes are confined to the privacy of the bedroom and involve only individuals. Unmarked by dramatic events on a large scale, it is free from civil war, class struggle, and bloodshed. It has no revolutionary army to fight its enemies. It does not try to overthrow governments. It has no great leader; no here plans it and no [government] directs it. Without plan or organization, it is carried on by millions of individuals, each acting on its own. As a revolution, it has not been featured on the front pages of our press, or on radio, or television. Its name is the sex revolution.[vii]
· I would imagine that many dismissed this language as alarmist, but if you look in the rearview mirror it’s obvious Sorokin was prophetic. Think of the ways popular views on marriage and sexuality have changed in the last 75 years…
o Cohabitation skyrocketing
o Parenting out of wedlock skyrocketing
o Rise in divorce
o Celebration of homosexuality
o Redefinition of marriage
o Ubiquity of pornography
· All these things and more have paved the way for our current transgender moment.
4. Gnosticism
· Gnosticism is an ancient worldview that predated the birth of Christ and was a very real threat to the early church.
· Andrew Walker says this about one of the core tenets of Gnosticism: “[it] emphasizes that a person’s self-awareness is different than and more important than their physical body. Gnosticism says that there is an inherent tension between our true selves and the bodies we inhabit. The idea that our true self is different than the body we live in communicates that our body is something less than us, and can be used, shaped, and changed to match how we feel.”[viii]
· For millennia doctors have sought to align a troubled mind with the body. If you feel like you’re something you’re not, we try to help correct the mind. Now we seek to align the body to match the mind.
5. Social Media
· In 2004 a little company called Facebook was founded.
· Less than 20 years later, social media has absolutely transformed our culture. Approximately 4.5 billion people are using social media worldwide.
· There are, of course, many wonderful things about social media. It enables us to connect with long-lost classmates, keep in touch with distant family, stay informed about what’s happening in the world, and much more.
· But it has also created a platform for everyone, including people who arguably should not have the ability to spread harmful ideas. In addition, the most influential voices are not necessarily those with the best ideas, but those with the most followers.
· In her book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier documents in detail the “more than a dozen social media sites and online forums that facilitate the discovery of a trans identity. YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, DeviantArt, and TikTok are all popular hubs” for encouraging children to be trans.[ix]
o “The clear majority (65 percent) of the adolescent girls who had discovered transgender identity in adolescence—“out of the blue”—had done so after a period of prolonged social media immersion.”[x]
· But there’s another reason why social media is so dangerous. It is perhaps the most incorrectly named technology in history, because social media is highly anti-social. It has led to intensified feelings of loneliness more than perhaps any other technology in history.
o Shrier—“Today’s adolescents spend far less time in person with friends—up to an hour less per day—than did members of Gen X. . . . They report greater loneliness than any generation on record.”[xi]
· Social media is both contributing to this loneliness, and promising harmful cures.
Those are some of the reasons why we’re where we are as a culture. Any questions?
Why Does This Matter?
Why can’t we just live & let live? Why is this an issue we need to address and speak against?
Four Reasons:
1. Total Rebellion
· Read Romans 1:18-32
· Of course Paul is talking about the sin of homosexuality in these verses, but if anything the sin of transgenderism takes this logic a step further.
· The homosexual says, “I’m going to use my body however I want and ignore God’s design” the transgender days, “I’m going to change my body however I want and improve God’s design.”
· We cannot sit idly by while people run headlong into total rebellion against God. We are ambassadors for Jesus to plead with the world to repent and believe!
· 2 Corinthians 5:20—Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
2. Bodily Mutilation
· How is someone with gender confusion treated today? The answer depends on the age of the individual.
· A pre-pubescent child is usually treated with puberty blockers
o Explain the logic: why go through puberty and then have to reverse its effects later? Let’s just press pause on puberty so the child has time to decide.
o The go-to medication used to delay puberty is Lupron, a drug that once was commonly used in the chemical castration of sex offenders.[xii]
o Shrier—“We wouldn’t consider a drug that stunted your growth in height and weight to be a psychologically neutral intervention—because it isn’t one. It’s psychologically taxing, to say the least, to proceed through high school with dwarfism, remaining the size of a much younger girl.”[xiii]
· The next step is hormone therapy
o Girls are given testosterone, boys are given estrogen
o The goal is to change secondary sexual characteristics.
o Girls begin to look and sound more masculine as facial hair grows and the voice deepens. Boys begin to look and sound more feminine as breasts begin to develop.
o But the long-term effects of these hormones include heightened rates of diabetes, stroke, blood clots, cancer, and heart disease.[xiv]
o In addition, both puberty blockers and hormone therapies sterilize the body, making reproduction impossible.
· The next step is a series of surgeries
o The first round may be double mastectomies for women wanting to appear as men, or breast implants for men desiring to appear as women.
o The next round of surgeries may include multiple pelvic surgeries that attempt to cosmetically create the genitalia of the opposite sex.
Despite all these changes, the transgender person has only made cosmetic changes. The XX or XY DNA has not changed. The internal reproductive organs have not changed. Who God created them to be has not changed.
· 24 years ago, a feminist author named Germain Greer famously wrote this 24 years ago: “No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight.”[xv]
To make matters worse, often the transgender person is not helped!
· Parents are often manipulated into going along with these changes by threats of suicide if their child cannot transition.
o “Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?”
· But in his book When Harry Became Sally, Ryan Anderson reports “the rate of psychiatric hospitalization for postoperative transsexuals was about three times [higher after transition]. The risk of mortality from all causes was significantly higher, and so was the rate of criminal conviction. Suicide attempts were nearly five times more frequent, and the likelihood of death by suicide was nineteen times higher….”[xvi]
Dr. Paul McHugh, one of the nation’s first gender transition doctors, eventually changed his views on this issue after seeing for himself the effects it had on people. He wrote this: “At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered. ‘Sex change’ is biologically imposible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women.”[xvii]
3. Social Contagion
· Abigail Shrier’s entire book is about a phenomenon called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.”
· Its an increasingly common phenomenon (most commonly among girls) where a group of friends experience intense gender identity issues at the same time seemingly out of nowhere.[xviii]
· Shrier, a professional journalist, documents stories like an entire class of girls in middle school or high school coming out as trans in the same week.
· She documents how this is a social contagion that is preying upon young girls in disproportionate numbers.
4. Religious Liberty
· Carl Trueman—“The conflict between traditional religion and modern sexual identities is a clash—perhaps the quintessential clash--… so completely opposed are they at the most fundamental level. There is no compromise that can really be reached here because there is no way that the one can be assimilated to the other. They rest on completely different premises and are aimed at antithetical outcomes. Given this, it is hard to conceptualize a culture in which the rights of religious conservatives and the rights of those who identity as sexual minorities can both be accommodated.”[xix]
· Is that really true?
o In their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt talk about something they call “concept creep.” For example, the term safetyused to refer to the condition of being protected from physical harm. But in the last 20 years, that term has been redefined to include emotional safety. So many in today’s world believe that they are unsafe if they feel unsafe.[xx]
· When we redefine terms like this, simply disagreeing with transgender ideology is an act of violence and hate speech that denies that person’s existence and threatens their safety.
· John Stonestreet—“Tolerance is no longer sufficient these days. We must be affirming. If a man thinks he is a woman in his own mind, he must be a woman in your mind also. Dissent indicates bigotry. Bigotry is animated by hatred. Therefore, all bigots must be silenced.”[xxi]
We can say “live and let live” all we want to! But as long as our culture is told that love = wholesale affirmation of the person and all their decisions, it’s not enough to live and let live. You have to affirm!
· The example of J.K. Rowling
Those are some of the reasons why this matters. Any questions?
Where Do We Go from Here?
1. Know the Truth
· As social pressure heats up on this issue, you better be in your Bibles! You need to know what you believe and why!
· Recommend books. Consider starting a reading group to go through one or more of these.
· If you didn’t listen to my sermon from June 4, I’d encourage you to listen carefully to see what Jesus taught on these issues.
· If you’re struggling with one or more aspect of what we believe, come to someone and ask for help!!!
2. Love the Truth
· We need to learn how to love the truth.
· This means going beyond the place where you can affirm a list of doctrines the Bible teaches about sex. We need to learn to love those truths.
· That means digging deeper to understand why they are good!
· Example: the difference between a mom and a dad and why kids need both!
3. Speak the Truth
· Preferred pronouns
o Rosaria Butterfield—Using transgendered pronouns is a sin against the ninth commandment and encourages people to sin against the tenth commandment.
o Using transgendered pronouns is a sin against the creation ordinance.
o Using transgendered pronouns is a sin against image-bearing.
o Using transgendered pronouns discourages a believer’s progressive sanctification and falsifies the gospel.
o Using transgendered pronouns cheapens redemption, and it tramples on the blood of Christ.
o Using transgendered pronouns fails to love my neighbor as myself.
o Using transgendered pronouns fails to offer genuine Christian hospitality and instead yields the definition of hospitality to liberal communitarianism, identity politics, and “human flourishing.”
o Using transgendered pronouns isn’t a sin because the times have changed, and therefore, using transgendered pronouns isn’t sinful today but a morally acceptable option in 2012. Sin is sin. The Bible defines this as sin. Sin does not lose its evil because of our good intentions or the personal sensibilities of others. Changing cultural forces can bring sin into fresh light (as the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision did for me). But a renewed focus is no excuse for sin and no dodge for repentance, not for a real Christian.[xxii]
· Ephesians 4:15—Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ
4. Remember the Most Important Truth
1 Corinthians 15:1-4—Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.
· The Gospel as most important doesn’t minimize the importance of other truth!
· However, nobody avoids hell by having a biblical sexual ethic. You can be straight on your way to hell!
· What people like “Calvin” need first and foremost is to repent and believe the Gospel!
[i] Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020), 24.
[ii] Trueman, 25.
[iii] Andrew T. Walker, God and the Transgender Debate: What Does the Bible Actually Say About Gender Identity?(Denmark: The Good Book Company, 2017), 21.
[iv] Kevin Liptak, “White House Condemns ‘inappropriate’ Video from Pride Event | CNN Politics,” CNN, June 13, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/13/politics/white-house-condemns-video/index.html.
[v] Walker, God and the Transgender Debate: What Does the Bible Actually Say About Gender Identity?, 23.
[vi] John Stonestreet and Brett Kunkle, A Practical Guide to Culture (Colorado Springs: David C Cook, 2017), 208.
[vii] Pitirim Sorokin, as quoted in R. Albert Mohler, We Cannot Be Silent: Speaking Truth to a Culture Redefining Sex, Marriage and the Very Meaning of Right and Wrong (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015), 8.
[viii] Walker, God and the Transgender Debate: What Does the Bible Actually Say About Gender Identity?, 25.
[ix] Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2020), 44.
[x] Shrier, 26.
[xi] Shrier, 3.
[xii] Shrier, 163.
[xiii] Shrier, 164.
[xiv] Shrier, 170.
[xv] As quoted in Trueman, Rise and Triumph, 361.
[xvi] Ryan T. Anderson, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment (New York: Encounter Books, 2019), 103.
[xvii] Paul McHugh, “Transgender Surgery Isn’t the Solution,” Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-mchugh-transgender-surgery-isnt-the-solution-1402615120.
[xviii] Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, 26–27.
[xix] Trueman, Rise and Triumph, 401–2.
[xx] Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), 24.
[xxi] Stonestreet and Kunkle, A Practical Guide to Culture, 209–10.
[xxii] Rosaria Butterfield, “Why I No Longer Use Transgender Pronouns—and Why You Shouldn’t, Either.,” Reformation21, April 3, 2023, https://www.reformation21.org/blog/why-i-no-longer-use-transgender-pronouns-and-why-you-shouldnt-either.