Week 7 – Gender Identity

Gender Identity — How To Talk to our children and grandchildren about Transgender Ideology

We will look at gender as God’s creation, gender confusion as part of the Fall, and listen to wise voices that can guide us as to what we need to believe and do to walk as God wants.

These are tough issues, and they’re not going away.

Here are some additional resources to help you speak into your family with love and Care

Irreversible Damage The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters By Abigail Shier

Mama Bear Apologetics: Empowering Your Kids to Challenge Cultural Lies by Hillary Morgan Ferrer (Author)  Nancy Pearcey (Foreword)

Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality: Empowering Your Kids to Understand and Live Out God’s Design Hillary Morgan Ferrer (Author), Teasi Cannon (Author)

Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality Discipleship Workbook: Empowering Your Kids to Understand and Live Out God's Design Hillary Morgan Ferrer (Author), Teasi Cannon (Author)

Honest Prayers for Mama Bears Paperback by Hillary Morgan Ferrer (Author), Julie Loos (Author)Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans: Tales from the Home Front in the Fight to Save Our Kids Edited by Josie A. And  Dina S.

“Transgenderism is not exclusively a battle for what is male and female, but rather a battle for what is true and real.” Sex is first and foremost a spiritual and ontological reality created by God.

PodCasts

Videos

Identity Crisis: After Top Surgery & Hormones, Female Detransitioner Decided She Wanted to Be A Mom

Identity Crisis: School Affirms 11-Year-Old’s Identity Without Parental Consent

Gender-Affirming Care Turns Kids Into Lifelong Patients: Dr. Miriam Grossman

The Real Facts About Gender Ideology

The Monster Behind Gender Theory, and the Atrocious Lie He Based It On

BreakPoint Articles

• https://breakpoint.org/the-gender-revolution-seven-years-later/
• https://breakpoint.org/did-ancient-cultures-believe-in-a-third-gender/
• https://breakpoint.org/judge-allows-missouri-ban-on-transgender-treatments/
• https://breakpoint.org/the-liability-of-gender-transition-protecting-children-from-porn-and-ais-impact-on-education/
• https://breakpoint.org/backpedaling-about-gender-in-britain/
• https://breakpoint.org/correcting-the-actual-misinformation-about-gender-ideology/
• https://breakpoint.org/what-the-science-really-says-about-gender-affirming-medicine/
• https://breakpoint.org/do-so-called-third-genders-affirm-our-contemporary-theories/
• https://breakpoint.org/middle-school-girls-told-they-are-transgender/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM-HJT8_esM
• https://breakpoint.org/richard-dawkins-says-science-is-pretty-clear-about-sex/

1. Share your vulnerable stories

Our kids also need reassurance that their experiences of insecurity, body discomfort, and social awkwardness during adolescence are normal for most kids everywhere. Parents should often say, “You’re not the only one. I remember feeling similarly. This is how life looks at 15. It will get better, I promise.”

Share vulnerable stories with your kids about when your friends laughed at you, or your parents argued incessantly, or the boy you kind of liked preferred your best friend, or how you looked in the mirror and wished you saw someone different.

We tend to lose hope if we think a problem will never change.

Children and adolescents have notoriously short horizons.

Kids need help to see that God makes a new path out of what seems like a dead end.

Finally, our kids need to know that if they’re feeling at odds with their gender (gender dysphoria), this resolves by itself over time for the vast majority of people.

The discomfort fades. We grow into a bodily reality of feeling at home as the woman or man we are.

Resorting to puberty blockers is like shooting your foot off because it’s hard to train for a race.

2. Celebrate gender.

Gender ideology (remaking the human body to comply with what one feels) is empty of real substance. It’s built on stilts. The detachment of “gender” from biology has led to a place where anyone can “be” a man or a woman simply by asserting they are. Is that a desirable world?

As Christian parents, we have a much more satisfying story on gender. Our faith brings body and soul together in an integrated life. Where “gender identity” splits a “person” from his or her body.

Christianity insists your body has meaning and purpose as an integral part of how you bear God’s image (Gen. 1:27). Humanity’s sexed (male or female) biology is intentionally designed to reveal the goodness of God. We should underline this reality over and over with our kids.

There’s much more to be said here, but these are breadcrumbs on the trail leading us to a glorious mystery: Jesus is our Bridegroom and we are the Bride he loves. God designed our bodies to mean something not only biologically but also theologically. Rightly understood, our maleness and femaleness whisper to us of the gospel.

From this backdrop, in age-appropriate ways, we can weave God’s design of gender into ordinary conversation.

We might ask questions like the following:

• How do your mom and dad look and sound different to you? How do they feel different to you?
• What do you love about being a boy or being a girl?
• What unique things do you tend to notice about females and males, and how do their differences complement one another?
• What’s one thing males and females can do together that a group of males or a group of females cannot do without the other sex?

These simple conversations can open doors to celebrate gender differences, with no implication of greater or lesser value. Other times, they provide the chance to refute the stereotypes gender-change activists use to suggest a child is in the wrong body. If a girl loves to climb trees and a boy loves to dance, it doesn’t mean the girl should become a boy or vice versa. It simply means you’re a girl who climbs trees, and you’re a boy who loves to dance. As Nancy Pearcey suggests, reject the stereotypes, not your body.

As your children approach adolescence, talk to them about romantic desire, marriage and sex, and procreation as a natural telos of sex. If you don’t, Google, TikTok, teachers, and friends will take the leading roles in shaping your child’s perceptions. Here are a few among many possibilities for conversation starters:

• What kinds of things does a girl appreciate in a guy because he’s different from her? What draws a guy to a girl because she brings something unlike him?
• When a man and woman marry, they pledge their lives to each other. What does this say to you about God’s covenant love for us? (See Isa. 62:5; Hos. 2:19, 20; Rev. 19:7.) How is this different from the way many approach love relationships today?
• Birth control and other contraceptive technologies have created a modern culture where sex is distanced from—or even set in opposition to—a beautiful outcome for which God designed sex: having babies. Today’s culture often sees pregnancy after sex as an unwanted surprise or “problem.” Isn’t this odd? How does the biblical call to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28) illuminate the meaning of why God created “male and female” (Gen. 1:27)?

Getting our kids (and perhaps ourselves) to think deeply about these things is important because today’s gender ideology offers an alternative gospel. Our kids feel the longing felt by everyone since the fall—the longing for resurrection and connection. Believe and receive a new name, a new identity, a new body, a new and loving community. Transgender ideology offers this “good news” to our kids, but it cannot deliver.

3. Connect kindness and truth

Proverbs 3:3 pairs kindness with truth in this way: “Do not let kindness and truth leave you” (NASB). It’s a relevant pairing today, in part because Gen Z doesn’t hear truth well unless the truth is framed in kindness. In their conversations with friends, compassion generally means unconditional affirmation: “You do you.” Empathy is the prevailing virtue. As the popular yard sign declares, “Kindness is everything.”

As a father of teenagers, I (Josh) missed this for a long time. In conversations with my kids, I tried to frame truth first and then season it with compassion. But a youth pastor friend helped me see that for this generation, truth doesn’t ring true if it doesn’t sound kind. Now, I’m learning to start with kindness, followed by how God’s truth leads to greater kindness. Some examples include the following:

• Studies show most kids with gender dysphoria outgrow it, but today’s culture pushes kids to treat being trans as permanent. Isn’t it cruel to force kids into a box they aren’t allowed to escape?
• I’m sorry to hear about your classmate’s depression. That’s so hard. He needs people who will take time to uncover the deeper roots of his struggles because gender transition usually doesn’t improve those symptoms.
• How can we help people who are dissatisfied with their gender in ways that will provide lasting benefits and won’t permanently damage their bodies?
• How do you think it feels for a female swimmer who has trained her whole life and risen to the highest levels of competition to have to compete against a biological male who identifies as a woman yet has a male physique?

I try to share one clear thought and then quietly step back (teenagers need time to mull things over). Then later I look for another opening to pick up the conversation or ask more questions.

4. Know Who Else Has Their Ear

While we Christian parents should seek opportunities to initiate conversations about gender with our kids, we also need to know who else has their ear. Helena Kirschner is just one of a growing number who have exposed how enticing and aggressive pro-trans influencers are online, especially for teenagers.

In an earlier interview with Rod Dreher, Kirschner makes the point that parents ask lots of questions when a child wants to go to a sleepover. Where is it? Who will be there? But a child can be sitting in the same room with a parent, chatting online with a stranger suggesting puberty blockers and cross sex hormones, and the parent is completely unaware. Helena begs the question, do you know where your children are?

Perhaps that’s the real point of stepping into regular conversation around gender with your children. It’s vital to know where their minds are, what cracks in their armor make them vulnerable to gender ideology. But more positively, you want to give your kids a vision for becoming someone whose deepest identity is rooted in the strong and beautiful reality of being created in the image of God, male or female.

The article originally appeared on the Gospel Coalition, and is used with permission.

Transcript

What I didn’t know, however, is that I would live to see my children’s children growing up in a culture which attempts to teach them that someone is a boy or girl depending on what they want, and decide to choose, regardless of the prior choice of God and biology.

Here’s what I wrote in the introduction of that first book. Forty years later it has come to fruition in ways even more radical than I anticipated:

The sexual revolution has fostered a barnyard morality that robs human dignity. It has resulted in people being seen and treated as sexual objects rather than sexual subjects. It has left us a nation of technological giants and moral dwarves.

Millions now live under the burden of sexual expectations and pressures to perform in a prescribed manner. Victims of the tyranny of the orgasm, they feel that unless their sexual experience is what they see in the media—where everyone is effortlessly erotic and every encounter is comparable to nuclear fission—they’re being robbed, or they’re not a real man or a real woman.

Instead of a spontaneous expression of other-oriented marital love, sex has become a self-oriented, goal-oriented obsession—an object of endless analysis, comparison, experimentation, and disappointment.

Like the end of the rainbow, the ultimate sexual experience is always sought, but never found. No matter how hard we try, no matter how much we pay to surgically alter our bodies, we are left pathetic creatures, different in degree but not in kind from burnt out prostitutes standing on street corners.

Our modern sexual openness is endlessly pawned off as healthy, emancipating, and long overdue. But is our preoccupation with sex really a sign of sexual health?

Who talks most about how they’re feeling? Sick people. Who buys the books on car repairs? Those with car problems. Who buys the drain cleaner? Those with clogged drains. Who thinks about, talks about, and buys the most books about sex? Those with sexual problems.

…The more we say about sex, the more we herald the new liberating sexual doctrines, the more we seem to uncover (or is it produce?) a myriad of sexual problems. The harder we try to drown these sexual problems in a flood of new relationships, erotic magazines, novels, movies, and sex education literature and classes, the louder and more persistently our sexual problems cry out for attention…

The more we have sought fulfillment apart from God, the further into the sexual desert we have wandered. Throats parched, lips cracked and bleeding, we are nomads in search of a sexual oasis that forever eludes us.

Galatians 6:7 says it perfectly: “Do not be deceived. God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”

We have turned our backs on the Architect, Engineer, and Builder of human sexuality. We have denied His authority and ridiculed His servants.

Our glands as our gods, we have discarded His directions, burned His blueprint, trampled on the ashes, and, like rebellious children, stalked off to do sex our own way. And we are reaping the results.

As pervasive as the sexual revolution was and is, I wasn’t really prepared for the fact that it would not be content to only keep pressing the borders of sexual perversion. In fact, it has led to fundamental and anti-scientific denials of gender reality.

It didn’t occur to me that this sex-crazed culture would increasingly come to embrace the belief that people have the right and power to choose their gender.

Or that some parents and teachers would encourage children to take hormones and have surgeries to mutilate their bodies in an attempt to artificially change their own biology.

Even fifteen years ago, who would have predicted that so many educated people would actually be saying, “You are the gender you choose to be, no matter if your body says otherwise”?

The world is looking for answers to spiritual and moral questions. God’s people don’t have answers for every little thing, but we do have the answers for many big things revealed to us in His Word.

They are not easy answers, but they are real ones. For the sake of our children and our culture, may God empower His Church not to doubt, hold back, apologize for, or dilute the answers He has given us.

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)

“Haven’t you read,” [Jesus] replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’?” (Matthew 19:4-5)

The more we speak to these issues with grace and truth, not just one or the other, the better we represent Jesus and the gospel. 

We should never heap guilt on someone experiencing gender confusion; instead, we should listen and care lovingly and genuinely for them, and recognize we too are confused about aspects of our life and identity.

All of us need to look to the God who created us as He did for a glorious reason.

Our kids need to see that the truth is not in what the world serves up to us about sex and gender. Rather, the truth is in Jesus, as revealed in God’s Word.