By Mark Kennedy (31 years of experience in Education)
“Gender dysphoria: Gender dysphoria is discomfort, unhappiness or distress due to one’s gender or physical sex.” The current edition (DSM-5) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
These days, some of us older people feel like we’ve suddenly woken up on the wrong planet – strangers in a strange land, that’s becoming stranger by the day. The basic things that we and most other representatives of the human race have taken for granted for millennia, no longer seem to apply. In this brave new world, the words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ aren’t synonymous anymore and, in some prominent circles, they don’t refer to biological realities either. For example, award winning Canadian writer Ivan E. Coyote prefers to be addressed as he/she and self-identifies as a “very masculine reading estrogen-based organism”. That’s because he/she, and anyone else, can now claim to be one of 31 different genders according to New York City’s official position, or even 71 genders according to Facebook in the U.K. These gender designations are based, initially at least, upon a person’s inner feelings. And these feelings are taken as facts in some very formal, official circles – despite physiological evidence to the contrary. More and more, leaders in secular education, the courts and government are forcing the legitimization of these concepts on a largely dumbfounded citizenry, with little opposition. In Canada for example:
- As of August 31, 2017, Canadians can indicate that they do not identify as male or female on their passports.
- There is an ongoing effort by the federal government to allow individuals to indicate their sex as ‘x’ on all government documents.
- Canadians in most provinces can change the gender on their birth certificates with a simple letter requesting the change – no evidence required.
- Conversion therapy (helping people escape from gender confusion and/or same sex attraction) is banned in Canada, even for those who want it and even though this therapy can help someone achieve his/her desired personal goal.So why is it banned?
- When I wrote this article, the British Columbia Court of Appeal is hearing a case of a female-born minor whose father was not told the child was receiving gender transition medical treatment and counselling. His permission was not sought or given, even though he shares child custody with the mother. Previously a lower court ordered that the father must not use the pronouns “she” or “her” when referring to this child and the presiding judge specifically forbade the father from attempting to persuade his child to abandon experimental treatments, which carries life-altering, permanent consequences.
Transgender and Intersex Are Not the Same
It is important to understand that what I’m addressing here is gender dysphoria or transgenderism, a condition initially based upon inner feelings rather than biological realities. Gender dysphoria is not the same as the biological condition called intersex (once referred to as hermaphroditism).
Intersex people are born with physical sexual characteristics that don’t fully fit the definitions for distinctly females or distinctly males. They have some physical traits of both sexes and they represent about .05% of all babies born in Canada. Usually, shortly after birth, doctors, in consultation with the parents, assign intersex babies with a sex (male or female) and administer hormones and plastic surgery to bring the child’s body more fully into the physical structure of the chosen sex. For the most part, intersex people do not identify themselves as one of the multiple genders in the transgender movement. Their condition has a physical rather than psychological basis.
“Intersex people are perfectly comfortable adopting either a male or female gender identity and are not seeking a genderless society or to label themselves as a member of a third gender class” (April Herdon, “Why Doesn’t ISNA Want to Eradicate Gender”). ISNA stands for Intersex Society of North America
Gender Theory, How Did We Get Here? A Fruit of Functional Atheism
The sexual revolution of the 1960s brought broad changes in values worldwide. Up until then, the general social consensus, at least in North America, affirmed biblical values including sexual abstinence outside of heterosexual marriage. So, movies and books were edited or censored to limit graphic depictions of sexual intimacy. Then came the sexual revolution. In its early years, it was a distinctly heterosexual movement. Popular movies, tv shows and literature ‘pushed the envelope’ by increasingly presenting positive and attractive images of extra-marital intimacy as the desirable social norm while ignoring or mocking biblical standards. Back then, it was almost always heterosexual intimacy and that eventually raised a logical sequence of 3 questions:
- If heterosexually attracted people can ignore biblical principles and laws and ‘enjoy themselves,’ why can’t non-heterosexuals?
- If the Bible is wrong about sexuality and marriage, then how can a person trust other parts of what most evangelical Christians call “God’s Word”?
- If the accuracy of “God’s Word” can’t be trusted, how can a person believe in the God it claims to reveal?
It took five decades for society to work through those questions, but eventually, the answers from our social engineers in government and the media produced society’s current functional atheism and its celebration of almost every imaginable sexual aberration and confusion, including transgenderism. So, the original heterosexual premise for sexual revolution – that God’s principles can safely be ignored – eventually brought us where we are today. It started with one attack on the authority of Scripture reminiscent of the Garden of Eden, “Did God really say…?” (Gen 3:1) and culminated in the effective denial of God’s existence in any real sense, apart from as a kind of cosmic Santa Claus.
G.K. Chesterton was right. “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
Why Should Christians Care About the Forced Imposition of Gender Theory?
- Because it starts with the assumption that the God of the Old and New Testament is irrelevant to modern sexual morality and ends with the belief that the existence of any god is just a naïve bit of cultural anthropology. In contrast, throughout the Bible it teaches that God designed us as either male or female, that our Designer’s original plans have always been for our good and that alternate conflicting plans are destructive, especially for children.
- Because there is a strong movement in Canadian and U.S. education to normalize and promote gender theory as if it is an immutable truth that must never be questioned.
- Because gender theory is so irrational, so contrary to both science and reason, it needs heavy handed interference from governments, the courts, and the media to force it upon society.
- Because 80% to 90% of gender confused children grow out of it and identify themselves according to their physical/chromosomal makeup as adults.
- Because gender dysphoria is not sin in itself. It is mental confusion similar to any other confusion about one’s true identity. ( For example, if a person believes himself to be a famous historical figure he is suffering from ‘Delusions of Grandeur’ as defined in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) , and we recognize that he needs compassionate help from a trained therapist.). Gender dysphoria could lead to what scripture defines as sin, things like lust or extra-marital sexual intimacy, but in itself, it is simply confusion. But when adult authorities expect young children to “choose” their gender based solely upon personal feelings however, while forcing others to celebrate sexual confusion and even treating confused children with surgery and/or hormone therapy in order to counteract their natural physiology, it is truly, it seems to me to be truly monstrous.
Future Consequences?
“All of our brightly minted social reforms, the sexual liberation since the war, the guilt-free divorce, the ending of the stigma of illegitimacy, have had their shadowy side. Today we have a generation of children more disturbed, more unhappy, more criminal, and indeed more suicidal than in any previous era. The sexual liberation of adults has been bought at a high price and it’s not the adults who have paid it.” Popular author P.D. James, in Time to be in Ernest
“The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Ezekiel 18:2).
- A Swedish study in 2011, showed that people who receive affirmation therapy, cross-sex hormone therapy and surgical manipulation of their bodies, experience life-long psychological trauma increased risk of cancers, heart disease, osteoporosis, and permanent infertility – and a suicide rate 19 times higher than the general population.
- In 2018, Brown University published Lisa Littman’s findings from a case study with 256 parents evidencing the rapid onset of gender dysphoria in adolescent girls. The study evidences a correlation between social media use and peer influence as twin factors contributing to the phenomenon.
Epilogue
When I asked my 5 year old grandson the standard “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question, his response was somewhat alarming.
“I want to be a police cow!” he said.
I was a bit stunned. “A police COW?!!!” Was this some kind of trans-speciesism – a new letter for the lgbtq alphabet soup. Then I remembered he has trouble saying the letter “R”, so really, he meant that he wants to be a police CAR when he grows up. And because he’s only 5 no one takes that ambition seriously, no need to visit a clinic to begin life-form to inanimate object transitioning and no cause for him to having regular oil changes. That would, of course, be too ludicrous.
So why then, in this ‘enlightened’ age, does anyone think that a child can choose his/her gender and have life-altering chemical and/or surgical procedures in pursuit of that choice. Various elementary schools, school boards and some politicians see no problem with it. Children can’t drive or drink alcohol or smoke until they’re at least in their later teens but somehow they can make decision about their gender? My grandson’s ambition to be a police car, shows how utterly incapable children are of even understanding the consequences of life changing decisions. And when adults encourage children to choose and possibly change their gender, that is unconscionable.