Tran-Wreck
Gleaming like an Amazon woman, he posed full-breasted in a tight dress–more woman than woman herself. In truth, this man on the cover of Time Magazine is a cartoon of a woman. Yet tragedy trumps comedy here; his artificial extremities emerge from the wound of a masculine soul that no amount of surgeries or hormones can restore.
Time featured him as an icon of ‘America’s Transition’ (get it?), the brave new world of gender anarchy in which ‘men in deep V-necks and necklaces walk by women with crew cuts and flannels next to boys kissing boys with pink backpacks alongside silver-haired women with broad shoulders.’ A year after the Supreme Court legalized ‘gay marriage,’ we now face the transgender transformation (one gender seeking to become the other) which Time describes as the next great civil rights battlefield in America, great because it will further ‘refine’ our understanding of gender diversity.
We who sowed indifference as activists redefined marriage now reap the whirlwind. This next ‘transition’ is a further hemorrhaging of God’s image, one most destructive to confused children who at this very moment are being primed for ‘gender reassignment’ because at 5 and 6-years-old they ‘feel’ different from their same-gender peers.
Dr. Paul McHugh, the former psychiatrist in chief at John Hopkins Hospital, debunks the myth that transgender surgery solves the profound wound at the core of gender identity disorders. He writes in the Wall Street Journal (June 14th):
‘We at John Hopkins studied the outcome of transgender surgery and discovered that those who underwent the operation fared no better psycho-socially than those who did not undergo surgery. So we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery…A more recent study revealed that 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable non-transgender population.’
He exhorts us to undo what amounts to abusing confused kids who are being groomed for a sex-change. ‘Treatment must involve removing the young person from the suggestive environment (including school curriculums that advocate “everything is normal”) and offering a counter message in family therapy…the best way to help kids is through devoted parenting.’ He concludes: ‘“Sex-change” is biologically impossible…Claiming that this is a civil rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.’
What can we do today? Extend the mercy of Jesus Christ and His healing Kingdom for persons in your world who are evidently gender confused. Pray for them. Defend them against bullies. A young African-American man at my gym acted and dressed outrageously; he was tormented by the guys there. Jesus told me to draw near to him and befriend him and to be his advocate. I helped him to receive the Father’s blessing on his masculinity.
I had the privilege of doing the same for a 4-year-old boy at my former church; his parents asked me to talk and pray with him about the goodness of his maleness as he expressed desire to be a girl. Jesus helped him at a tender age to be reconciled to the boy Jesus made him. His parents cooperated; his dad drew near and began to fight for his son’s dignity, not his mutilation.
Jesus brings a Kingdom that surpasses foolish solutions. We do little good by merely railing against bad social trends. Do something. Act like a Christian. Fight for the dignity of persons subject to cruel, dehumanizing precedents and people.
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