For those of us in North America, unless you haven’t been paying attention, then you should’ve noticed that over the past few years, there has been a push for the acceptance of all things transgender: from compelled pronoun usage, to the indoctrination of children in a particular sexual ideology, to the surgical removal of sex-specific body parts, and so on. Years ago, when the debate on gay marriage was in its nascent stages, it was common for churches to affirm and be clear on the biblical view of marriage, as between a man and a woman. It doesn’t seem like there’s been a similar response in recent years with respect to transgenderism and its associated ideology—or at least, it hasn’t been as loud as the response to gay marriage. Why the apparent reticence? Maybe conservative-leaning churches assume that transgender issues piggyback off homosexuality issues, and since these churches have been clear about homosexuality, their stance on transgenderism is already clear enough, so as to not require reiteration. Or maybe these churches have become timid, given how effective (or at least demanding) the transgender movement has been in what seems to be such a short time span, and given the increase of societal pressure to conform. Or perhaps with the leftward drift of churches—both politically and theologically—we shouldn’t be surprised by the lack of vocal disapproval from such churches. As with homosexuality, these churches are ready to affirm transgenderism.
Whatever the case may be, I at least want to examine the topic for myself, and hopefully my musings can be of some benefit to readers. This is the first post in what will be a series of posts on the topic of transgenderism from a Christian perspective. Given my present schedule, and given how complicated the topic can be, this might be a slow-going series, scattered among other blog posts. But I do want to give it the attention it deserves.
For now, it will suffice to provide definitions for some important terms that I’ll be using. In future posts in this series, these are what I will mean by the following terms (most of which are taken or adapted from Merriam-Webster):
sex: the state of being male or female[1]
gender identity: a person’s internal sense of being male or female[2]
gender incongruence: a condition in which one’s sex and one’s gender identity do not correspond (viz., being male but having an internal sense of being female, or being female but having an internal sense of being male)
gender dysphoria: a condition of distress or discomfort arising from one’s gender incongruence[3]
transgender person: a person with the condition of gender incongruence
transgender behaviour: an action or practice typically associated with transgender persons, done for the sake of making speech, or appearance, or anatomy conform to one’s gender identity (e.g., preferred pronoun usage, cross-dressing, hormonal therapy, genital surgery)
Anyway, I hope you stick around for this series. If you have any questions about the topic that you’d like me to write on, please let me know in the comments.
[1] Let’s leave aside intersexuality/hermaphroditism for now.
[2] Let’s also leave side for now the idea of having an internal sense of being a mix of male and female, and having an internal sense of being neither.
[3] The main difference between gender incongruence and gender dysphoria is that the latter is characterized by distress or discomfort. This leaves open the possibility that someone can have gender incongruence without also being distressed by that fact. However, even if there’s a conceptual distinction between gender incongruence and gender dysphoria, it’s not obvious that the two are all that separable in fact. I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but perhaps a large portion of people who experience gender incongruence also experience gender dysphoria.
I believe the reticence is due to your last point. If we affirm the sin of homosexuality in our churches with the "third way" or whatever you want to call it, what's to stop us from affirming transgenderism?