The reckoning of trans-ing kids: Most pressing pastoral care issue of our time
If anything unites a cross-section of Americans of all political stripes, it’s the medical scandal of so-called “gender-affirming care” for children. Yet unavoidable questions are afoot given the unusual combination of people resisting gender ideology in this way.
As some post-election data has indicated, transgender issues were on the minds of voters on Nov. 5th and reputable polling consistently shows most Americans oppose medically trans-ing kids. Some important policy changes on this front are likely with the incoming presidential administration, though it remains to be seen how extensive they will be. Whatever happens in Congress or the Executive branch, these issues are making their way through the courts, a trend that is certain to continue.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for U.S. v. Skrmetti, a case centering on the state of Tennessee’s restriction on gender medicalization — puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and trans surgery — for minors. Among those present outside the high court rallying in support of Tennessee were outspoken conservatives, bold radical feminists, LGB dissenters, regretful detransitioners, and shattered parents who have lost their children to transgenderism.
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In a politically polarized time, it is encouraging to see a diverse coalition make common cause over something so consequential.
Even so, there is no point in pretending that the profound differences among these ideologically disparate groups have dissipated with this heartening unity because they have not.
On that point, one of the emerging narratives is that the children and young people being transed are simply gay or lesbian. In fairness, much of the desistance literature suggests this, and it is indeed true that a notable percentage of the adolescents and teens undergoing these experimental interventions are same-sex attracted. Most Christians I know, me included, will unequivocally say that medicalizing same-sex attraction by way of synthetic hormones or surgery is heinous and repugnant.
Lest anyone think that’s hyperbolic, none other than the infamous trans activist pediatrician Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy (whom a detransitioner is now suing for medical negligence) has claimed that a “male-bodied person with a female gender identity” may “have a stepping-stone period where they come out as gay.” Doctors like her are turning a generation of gender-nonconforming, sometimes same-sex attracted youngsters into Alan Turing 2.0 via pharmaceutical conversion, while draping themselves with pink and blue flags. It’s utterly abhorrent.
Yet for small "o" orthodox Christians, “gay” is not an ontological category of personhood. And what is not often said in the next breath but should be, however, is that neither is “straight.” Today, “orientation” permeates our society and it’s rooted in defining one’s sense of self by sexual inclinations and ideation. But Jesus only said two words about sexual identity, “male” and “female” (Matthew 19:4), and that’s a substantive distinction.
I point this out not to be needlessly tedious, but the familiar, widely-used sexuality and gender labels of today are not, in fact, biblically-rooted concepts. Lending credence to them shortchanges the Gospel. We are in the middle of what Michael Hanby of the John Paul II Institute at The Catholic University of America describes as an “anthropological revolution.”
In the United States, Americans have been psychologically conditioned to think about ourselves with modern (and increasingly postmodern) gender and sexuality terms that are now legally attached to the civil rights regime, which has significant political and emotional buy-in among the populace, enjoying total support from national Democrats and, in recent years, growing numbers of Republicans. In a marked departure from previous conventions, opposition to same-sex marriage was removed from the 2024 GOP platform earlier this year. Social conservatives — devout Catholics, Evangelicals, and a few others — are in the minority and their views regarding sexual ethics are no longer normative for many in an increasingly secularized America marred by rampant divorce and family breakdown.
Contemporary Westerners are fully inculcated with LGBT nomenclature, and a psychologized sexual self-concept presupposes, as Hanby observed, that “sexual desire and identity are only arbitrarily related to a meaningless biological substrate.” Most Americans do not know that it was not until 1869 when the term “homosexual” was first coined by Austrian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny, appearing in an anonymous pamphlet that was published in Germany. Nor do they know that it was German lawyer and sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs whose work reshaped how many think about human sexuality and gave rise to the sexual identity lingo that pervades our political discourse.
We should remember that 1869 wasn’t all that long ago.
In even more recent memory, it was President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who in 1996 signed the Defense of Marriage Act, affirming marriage as between a man and a woman. Only 26 years later, the federal Respect for Marriage Act (2022) affirmed the 2015 Obergefell Supreme Court ruling which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, passing both Congressional chambers with broad bipartisan support. American society has abandoned marriage as it has been understood for millennia and it represents, as Rod Dreher eloquently put it in 2013, a cosmological blow against the historic moral order, the seismic ramifications of which we have not remotely begun to understand.
These themes may seem esoteric, but they matter for the sake of the Gospel. That Good News is always worth restating.
Since its inception and until our present day, the Christian faith has held that the sexually differentiated human person, created male and female in God’s image, speaks something powerful about who God is. The anatomical complementarity of the sexually dimorphic human species is not a cosmic accident. By their very physical structure, males and females are correspondingly ordered toward each other. More than mere biology, the human body is designed with a telos, which is to say, an end purpose. The one-flesh union of the two sexes points to eternal realities, telling forth a divine Story.
Marriage is the interpretive metaphor, the key symbol woven throughout the whole of Scripture — from the beginning with a wedding in the garden of Eden in Genesis to its conclusion with the Marriage Supper of the Lamb in the book of Revelation. Not coincidentally, Jesus began his ministry and performed His first miracle at a wedding in Cana. God uses the husband-wife union to mirror His relationship with his chosen people in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament, marriage reflects Christ’s covenantal love for His Bride, the Church. The Bible is a nuptial story from cover to cover. If we undermine its centrality, we distort the entire Gospel.
How, then, do sincere Christians uphold and proclaim these truths while caring for persons for whom same-sex attraction or gender incongruence profoundly characterizes their lives, many of whom bear religious scars and have battled crippling, internalized shame? From where I sit, it’s among the most pressing pastoral considerations of our time; biblically orthodox ministers must face them with conviction and compassion.
But perhaps a good place to start is to zoom out and recognize the anthropological revolution for what it is — an insidious, rebellious push to redefine and remake humanity according to ill-begotten identity constructs at odds with God’s design for our flourishing.
Because at root, this is about who He is, and we will never understand who we are as persons and what God's purposes are for every person unless we first take to heart the words of the Word who became flesh and dwelled among us.
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