26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:26–27 ESV)
How has the issue of Gender Identity impacted the culture? How is it impacting the church? While it can be argued that Gender Identity is trendy, the consequences of many current decisions and practices supporting Gender Identity have far reaching, and long lasting, implications.
A girl from the United Kingdom, who had both of her breasts removed during a medical gender transition, is calling out the gender clinic that was involved in some of her care, according to a report from The Daily Telegraph, June 20, 2023. Jasmine, a former patient at the Travistock Gender Clinic, says she regrets medical interventions to change her gender.
The girl reported that transitioning made her feel worse at every stage. “I don’t really know what it’s like to have the body of an adult,” she said. “I kind of feel a little bit mutilated and like an experiment gone wrong walking through society sometimes. I feel, like, sometimes jealous of other people, women, who are biologically female. That they still have their natural voice, their natural characteristics. And I don’t anymore,” she continued.
In a report published by Fox News June 6, 2023, Boston Children’s Hospital said to the media and the public that it does not perform genital surgeries on minors at its gender surgery clinic. However, Children’s senior leadership revealed it had policies to allow vaginoplasties on minors in published medical literature years and months before public scrutiny. Boston Children’s Hospital originally faced a wave of backlash in August 2022 over since-deleted wording found twice on the hospital’s website which claimed teens as young as 17 can get vaginoplasties. The hospital doubled down, claiming it was “misinformation” that it would offer genital surgeries on minors, and the media uncritically parroted the narrative.
In a report dated June 1, 2023, Twenty Republican attorney generals are joining forces in an amicus brief against several LGBTQ+ groups that are pushing to allow minors to receive gender reassignment surgery and hormone altering drugs.
A professor at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine who is involved in a LGBTQ+ “special interest group” claimed that parents must start including gender ideology in their families before a baby is born. “This is my favorite topic,” Lauren T. Roth, is a professor of pediatrics at Einstein and a physician in the division of Academic General Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, New York. Said she has specialized knowledge of transgender medical interventions on children diagnosed with dysphoria. “Like, this is a normal thing. And we have to understand that gender is on a spectrum. There’s not just men and women,” she said. “Sometimes [a child’s gender identity] matches the chromosomes or the genitals that they were born with, but sometimes it doesn’t.”
In a report published by Fox News June 20, 2023, a federal judge ruled an Arkansas law that bans hormone treatment, puberty blockers or surgery for transgender minors is unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Jay Moody said that the first-in-the-nation law violated the due process and equal protection rights of transgender youth and their families and it violated the First Amendment rights of health care providers by prohibiting them from referring patients elsewhere.
In a news report published June 21, 2023, former college championship swimmer Riley Gaines was a witness at the United States Senate’s hearing on LGBTQ Civil Rights. She pushed back on allowing transgender students to participate in the school sport of their chosen gender. Gaines has become an activist on behalf of biological female athletes after graduating from the University of Kentucky, where she competed against trans-swimmer Lia Thomas in championship-level events.
This is but a sampling of the recent reports chronicling the ramifications Gender Identity is having psychologically, athletically, legally and politically. By the time this blog is published, there may be many more stories concerning the subject of Gender Identity.
How is the believing community of the evangelical church to respond? It must respond with the truth of God’s Word in general and the biblical Gospel of Jesus Christ in particular. This is what we will consider when next we meet.
Soli deo Gloria!
His Word Today 