“Oh there ain’t no other way,
Baby, I was born this way!”
—Lady Gaga and Jeppe Laursen
In this post, we’ll continue our series for providing a biblical framework for thinking about issues related to sex and sexuality. We’ll look at the fourth thought in the framework and explore a glossary of terms related to gender.
Here’s the fourth piece of the framework.
4. God’s original design for humanity was male and female. He called His creation “very good” (Gen 1:31).
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. —Gen 1:31 NIV
At least six times God declared his creation “good” (Gen 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). But it wasn’t until after the creation of mankind that God looked over all that He had made, including man and woman, and said that it was “very good” (Gen 1:31).
An important concept to consider at this point is the idea of “created intent.” It basically teaches that we are created by a God who had a specific intention for our life in general and our sexuality and sexual experiences in particular.
The idea of “created intent” means that the standard for right and wrong isn’t determined by whether it feels good, right or natural. The standard is determined by whether or not it’s in harmony with the original intent of the Creator as defined and described by the Creator Himself in His Word. It asks the question, “What was God’s original intention, purpose and design when He created human beings?”
What was God’s original intention, purpose and design when He created human beings?
God’s original design is described in astonishing detail in the first two chapters of the Bible — Genesis 1-2. Fast-forward approximately 4,000 years to the ministry of Jesus.
Matthew 19 contains Jesus’ most thorough teaching on marriage. It came on the heels of a question by a group of religious leaders about divorce. Verse 4 contains the first two sentences of Jesus’ answer to that question.
“Haven’t you read the Scriptures?” Jesus replied. “They record that from the beginning ‘God made them male and female.’” —Matt 19:4 NLT
Jesus was quoting Genesis 1-2. He quoted a statement about creation. It was a statement about God’s original design, a statement about what people now refer to as the male / female binary.
From the very beginning, God created sexual identity and from the beginning that identity was male and female. It was good, even very good. It was beautiful. Human beings flourished.
Genesis 2:25 gives us another glimpse of just how good it was.
Now the man and his wife were both naked, but they felt no shame. —Gen 2:25 NLT
Wouldn’t you like to get back to that? Back to when there was no shame. No blame. No sin. No selfishness. No sexual confusion. No gender dysphoria, internal conflict or disconnection between our biology and our psychology. There was a time when this was reality.
Why a series of blogs on this subject?
Here’s why it’s important for a pastor, who doesn’t consider himself an expert on any of these matters, to speak out and write about these issues:
The following are common ideologies being promoted as “truth” in 2021.
“Gender is a social construct.”
“You are born with a particular biological sex, but you can choose your gender at some point in the future.”
Further, “there more than two genders. Gender falls on a spectrum and there are an endless array of possibilities.” For instance, Facebook once listed 70 possible genders in the profile section of their platform. Now, it simply provides options for male, female and “custom”. Evidently, they couldn’t keep up with all of the options on and changes to the spectrum.
Ten years ago — only ten years ago — these ideas would have been unheard of unless you were in some kind of gender studies department on a university campus. But today, these ideas are being touted as mainstream.
For instance, there are news stories involving parents who are raising preschoolers and kindergarten children as “gender neutral.”
On a variety of questionnaires — from workplace employment, to school forms and more — people are now regularly being asked to declare their “personal pronouns.”
Abigail Shrier, in a gripping and best-selling book titled, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,and subsequent podcasts and blogs[1] describes the growing prevalence of hormone blockers becoming an option for children struggling with gender dysphoria. She even writes about girls as young as 13 receiving a radical mastectomy, now referred to as “top surgery,” to assist them in transitioning. Imagine this. At thirteen years of age? Making decisions that will have effects that are scientifically demonstrated to be irreversible?
Transition stories have become more and more common.
Several stories involving high school athletes,[2], [3] Olympic athletes[4] and even MMA fighters[5] have made the news where individuals born as biological men and now identifying as women are competing against those born as biological women. (NOTE: Take a look at the picture provided in the linked ESPN article below on the MMA fight. It shows the clear physical advantage of the trans athlete over their biological female opponent. In what world could this be considered to be fair or logical?)
The New Glossary of the Current Gender Revolution:
- Sex — The state of being male or female. A growing number of influencers and activists differentiate between sex and gender. Sex, they indicate, is a matter of anatomy. Gender, they say, is a matter of what a person believes, thinks or feels.
- Gender — Progressive academics, influencers and activists believe that gender is a social construct. They believe that a person’s sex can be compared to their “hardware” or biology, while a person’s gender is like “software” and can be upgraded or changed accordingly, several times throughout a person’s life, in fact.
- Transgender — An umbrella term for a person whose gender identity does not match their physical or biological sex. For instance, a biological female who identifies as a male (or vice versa).
- Non-binary — Refers to a person who identifies as neither male or female.
- Cisgender — is a recent term that refers to those who identify (and are comfortable) with their biological sex. The term was coined to o describe someone who is the opposite of transgender. It describes those who have never experienced a disconnect between their physical body and their perceived identity. We used to refer to these individuals as men and women.
- Gender Dysphoria — a psychological term for the distress some people feel when their internal sense of self doesn’t match their biological sex. As Preston Sprinkle points out in his book, Embodied, not everyone who identifies as transgender experiences gender dysphoria. And not everyone who experiences gender dysphoria identifies as transgender. Gender dysphoria and transgender are not synonymous.
- Intersex — a term used to describe the sixteen or so medical conditions where a person is born with one or more atypical features in their sexual anatomy or sex chromosomes. (By the way, according to Sprinkle, ninety-nine percent of people with an intersex condition are biologically male or female (and the other 1 percent are both).[6] Further, intersex refers to a physical condition, while transgender refers to a psychological condition.
The above terms are constantly being updated, revised and changed.
Only seven years ago, the cover of TIME Magazine on May 29, 2014 read as follows: The Transgender Tipping Point – America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier.[7] The issue championed the idea that transgender people represent the next group of people whose civil rights need to be reconsidered. Over the last seven years, this has not only gained considerable steam, but it has become a force that defies logic, science and every appeal to common sense.
It seems that the message of transgender and LGBTQIA” activists isn’t, “Treat everyone with honor, dignity, decency and respect, even when and if you disagree.” It is not, “Make equality possible for everyone.” The message is now, “Agree with our assessment. Agree with our ideology or we’ll ‘cancel’ you. We’ll exert pressure on you via the government. We’ll force doctors, scientists, politicians and people into compliance with our beliefs and doctrine on intersectionality and new gender rules or we will sue you, defame you, humiliate you and shame you.”
What’s shocking is that in an opinion piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Paul McHugh of John Hopkins University indicated the following:
- When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic, 70%-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings.
- Sexual reassignment surgery didn’t help the patient’s mental health.
- At Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a “satisfied” but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.
- A long-term study in Sweden revealed that the suicide rate for transgender people who had surgery was 20 times higher than the general population. [7b]
At some point someone must ask, “Why are we not considering scientific realities like those Dr. McHugh reported?” It appears that somehow transgender activists have created pressure to ignore or deny scientific facts.
This is the current cultural moment we are living in! We desperately need a faith that is rock solid and a heart that is formed by the love Jesus.
Back to Matthew 19.
It’s interesting that when Jesus was asked a question about the subject of marriage and divorce, He gave a more comprehensive answer than was actually needed. He went all the way back to creation and quoted from Genesis 1:27.
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. —Gen 1:27 NIV
Jesus reminded us that God’s good creation began with God creating humanity as male and female. We’re not androgynous. We’re not asexual. Every cell in our body is stamped XX or XY. Sex and gender are literally hardwired into our DNA.
Christopher Yaun describes it like this in his excellent book, Holy Sexuality and the Gospel.
“No matter what the world teaches, sexual differentiation is not a social construct. Being male or female is an intrinsic aspect of who we are.” —Christopher Yaun [8]
Back in 2014, Dr. Paula Johnson even presented a TedTalk titled, “His and Hers … Healthcare.” [9] In that talk, Dr. Johnson made this incredible statement:
“Every cell in the body has a sex, which means men and women are different right down to the cellular level.”
—Dr. Paula Johnson
This is a medical and scientific reality. Which leads to this important fact:
A man can’t become a woman and
a woman can’t become a man.
That is not to say that there aren’t real issues related to gender dysphoria, and that those issues need to be addressed with compassion and grace. But the scientific, biological reality is that male chromosomes can’t be re-engineered to become female chromosomes or vice-versa. Altering your appearance cosmetically or surgically can’t change the underlying reality of a person’s biological make up. Psychological belief can’t overcome biological facts.
Male chromosomes can’t be re-engineered to become female chromosomes or vice-versa.
One of the biggest claims coming out of the transgender movement is that a man who thinks he’s a woman is a woman, and a woman who thinks she’s a man is a man. There is ever increasing pressure to walk in lock-step with this ideology.
But the truth that Scripture reveals is that God didn’t begin the human race with 70 different genders. He began with two people who were created in the image of God — a man and a woman.
God’s original creation wasn’t vague, flexible or fluid. It was fixed. God originally made us man and woman. This is central to our humanity. It was God’s original design.
Biblically speaking, if we abandon the idea of gender being male and female, we are giving up an essential part of our humanity.
If we abandon the idea of gender being male and female,
we are giving up an essential part of our humanity.
The fourth aspect of the framework is: God’s original design for humanity was male and female. He called His creation “very good” (Gen 1:31). In the next post, we’ll continue exploring this aspect of the framework.
[1] https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/top-trans-doctors-blow-the-whistle
[2] https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2021/may/female-high-school-track-star-says-competing-against-trans-athletes-is-lsquo-devastating-rsquo
[3] https://www.foxnews.com/us/shannon-arena-gagne-track-trans-girls-sports
[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/first-openly-transgender-olympians-are-competing-tokyo-rcna1507
[5] https://www.espn.com/mma/story/_/id/32186035/transgender-fighter-alana-mclaughlin-submits-celine-provost-mma-debut
[6] Preston Sprinkle, Embodied, page 34, Kindle Edition.
[7] https://time.com/135480/transgender-tipping-point/
[7b] https://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-mchugh-transgender-surgery-isnt-the-solution-1402615120
[8] Christopher Yaun. Holy Sexuality and the Gospel (p. 22). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[9] https://www.ted.com/talks/paula_johnson_his_and_hers_health_care/transcript?language=en