Lately, the evangelical right has been obsessing over transgender identity. A lot of the rhetoric has been Bible-based and emotionally charged.
These anti-trans activists have advocated against anti-discrimination policies, bathroom integration and gender-appropriate state ID cards and driver’s licenses.
Evangelicals have succeeded in fighting gender equity in Colorado, with well-articulated legal arguments stripped of religious fervor and bolstered by academic rhetoric.
Spearheading this movement nationally is the Family Research Council, which this month published a new work, “Understanding and Responding to the Transgender Movement,” which is aimed to give anti-trans activists a veneer of scientific and intellectual legitimacy.
In recent decades, there has been an assault on the sexes. That is, there has been an attack on the previously undisputed reality that human beings are created either male or female; that there are significant differences between the sexes; and that those differences result in at least some differences in the roles played by men and women in society.
The first wave of this attack came from the modern feminist movement and the second from the homosexual movement. The third wave of this assault on the sexes has been an attack on a basic reality—that all people have a biological sex, identifiable at birth and immutable through life, which makes them either male or female.
The third wave ideology is known as the “transgender” movement. This paper offers a description and critique of that movement and ideology. Part I addresses the psychological and medical issues involved; Part II will address the public policy issues.
The document goes on to lament the evolution in psychiatry from the era when homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder. The report explains that transgender activists have borrowed from the “homosexual movement” and are degrading psychiatry by shifting from the old term “gender identity disorder” to “gender dysphoria.” (While some reformists in the transgender movement viewed this as a coup, others felt that the idea of transgender identity should not be considered a psychiatric issue at all.)
The FRC study includes a variety of sweeping generalizations about transgender identity including the importance of surgery and the necessity of “passing” – none of which are necessarily a part of any individual trans person’s experience.
The document also uses the antiquated term “transgendered” instead of transgender. The implication of the “ed” is that trans identity is a choice or something that has happened to someone rather than a stable identity. It would be like saying someone is “blacked” or “gayed.” The term is reviled by transgender activists.
These evangelicals seem most nervous about the concept of genderqueer identity that they believe could overthrow the gender binary and God’s natural design for biological sex; though the anti-trans, faith-based crusaders who authored the study are too savvy to use the words “God” or “Bible.”
Finally, the report makes a series of policy recommendations: Bathrooms should not be integrated; the law should not recognize people’s gender identity when it does not conform with their assigned sex at birth; government health-care plans should not pay for sex-reassignment surgery; trans people should be barred from the military.
The report concludes:
A person’s sex (male or female) is an immutable biological reality. In the vast majority of people (including those who later identify as “transgender”), it is unambiguously identifiable at birth. There is no rational or compassionate reason to affirm a distorted psychological self-concept that one’s “gender identity” is different from one’s biological sex.
“Neither lawmakers nor counselors, pastors, teachers, nor medical professionals should participate in or reinforce the transgender movement’s lies about sexuality—nor should they be required by the government to support such distortion.
Not all Christians share this anti-trans obsession. Several churches including the United Church for Christ affirm LGBT people and trans identity.
To read the full study, go here.
Correction: The original article referred to the FRC as the Family Resource Council. It is the Family Research Council.
Photo credit: Ted Eytan, Creative Commons, Flickr.
These peopole need to worry about the log in their own eye rather than the speck in everyone else’s. I seem to remember that being one of the things CHRIST said about how to live from my days believing in that stuff. Since it was taken over by vermin like these people, I want NOTHING to do with Chistianity at all. I still think the teachings of Christ are viable, but his followers make it impossible to see them as anything sacred.
Christ said to get your own act together and live BY EXAMPLE. The ONLY example these people are involved in is in being the MEANEST, NASTIEST, MOST JUDGMENTAL SCUM on the planet. They are doing EXACTLY what he said NOT to do.
Why these vermin have their own state paid for sign on I25 is beyond me. I’d do everything I could to keep people AWAY fropm these people possible, not direct them how to go there and be PERVERTED by the HATE these people preach. It would be FAR better for this state to have people who CARE ABOUT HUMANS, not worry about everyone following THEIR way of life, esepcially when THEY WON’T.
The FRC is the biggest group of HYPOCRITES in this country. I would be just fine if they left the state permanently. Maybe with all the weed smoke, they will consider it. I certainly hope so.
I have a word of providential warning for these modern-day Pharisees: you represent neither love, truth nor Christ with your public condemnation of a medical issue.
God is watching, has delivered the Duggars to judgment and will deliver you as well, shall you choose to continue to practice hypocrisy and interfering in the affairs of government.
How quickly your eyes become obstructed such that you forget that everything you do say would be true, were it not for immortal-created man becoming mortal. The loss of immortality as a consequence of disobedience was also the loss of immutability for perfectly created man and woman. Sin brought forth immediate judgment upon man, and with it loss of youth, health, and life.
Sin banished man from a perfect abode, and separated man from God’s image. How dare you distort biblical truth by presenting now-fallible, mortal man not as he now is, but as he was before the fall. Our bible tells us that imperfection never sprouts from a perfect God such that He created man perfect, immortal, and eternal, traits that were lost in the garden by choice of man. How dare you blaspheme biblical truth by saying that man today is immutable and indistinguishable from the only two God ever did create: the original two.
How dare you pretend not to know that sin not only introduced the pain of childbirth but the pain of a parent’s heart—-a still born infant; a malformed baby; conjoined twins; intersex infants; and transgender babies.
Your report comes not from biblical truth but from extrabiblical interpretation. God is not pleased. You MUST repent and retract this public libel about God’s children, which you know nothing about, and who are born with a body that is malformed. A blind man was born blind because of sin, but not because he nor his parents sinned, whom Jesus did heal. Transgender children so too are born and through God’s wisdom, also are healed by medicine. To them who have ears, let them hear what providence has to say.
These people are no different than the New Encyclical of the Pope. They are Transgender Killers due to lack of Intelligent Study of the Subject and Rhetorical Church BS based in fact of 14th Century thinking.
There should be a court case to show that these people are spreading Libelous information not based on Real Truths.
As a transgender person who works for the reconciliation of the LGBT community and ppeople of faith, I applaud your article
Thank you.
As a veteran, it is especially troublesome that those for whom I have served to protect, find my being unworthy. What business is it of this “family reasearch” council to determine the fitness of military men and women? Clearly, the group is fraudulent by the nature of their positions.
Hate by any other name is still hate. Just exactly who is their “god” anyway?