A few months ago, I read a most heart-breaking Australian legal case.
It concerned a 15-year-old girl who was approved for a double mastectomy because she thinks she is a boy.
By now her body will be mutilated forever.
Cari is a young woman from the USA who transitioned socially at that same age. She then started on hormones at 17. She underwent some surgeries. But at 22, she decided she didn’t want to be a man.
In her YouTube video, Cari says:
“I wanted to make a video previously… so that folks can see that I’m a real live person, but didn’t out of fear of showing my face. But I think it’s important when we talk about these issues to really understand that women like us aren’t just statistics, not just some dry data some gatekeeping doctor might throw at you, we’re real people. This is a real outcome of transition. I’m a real live 22-year-old woman with a scarred chest and a broken voice and a 5 o-clock shadow because I couldn’t face the idea of growing up to be a woman. That’s my reality.”
We may sometimes be tempted to laugh at the craziness of the transgender movement. Maybe the notion that a man can join the women’s weightlifting team and win by a mile makes us chuckle … Or Qantas suggesting its staff refrain from saying “ladies and gentlemen.”
But it’s not just funny or foolish.
We are talking about lives; the lives of children.
It is our young people who stand to lose the most from this ideology. It is being served up at schools around the country and peddled by the counsellors and medical professionals our children interact with.
Teaching tools like the “Genderbread Person” and the “Gender Unicorn” confuse children about their sex, gender and sexual orientation. Confused children who begin to question their identity can then be socially transitioned and put on puberty blockers before more radical decisions around hormone therapy and surgery are made.
Much of this can be done without their parents ever knowing.
Some Education Department guidelines leave open the option for school authorities to cut parents out if they discern that they would not be “gender affirming.”
Precisely how a pre-teen knows what it feels like to be a woman trapped in a man’s body, or a two-spirit genderqueer trapped in a woman’s body, or a non-binary is anybody’s guess.
But it is obvious how they might be confused by all this.
Queensland Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington remarked that if children are not gender-confused before seeing these teaching tools, they certainly will be afterwards.
Unsurprisingly, there is an unprecedented explosion in the number of children reporting symptoms of gender dysphoria.
Studies show that between 80 and 95 per cent of children reporting such feelings grow out of it when left alone.
And yet school counsellors, family courts, medical professionals, hospitals and clinics are increasingly putting these children on an escalator to irreversible, permanent damage. They are playing with lives.
Rather than solve the underlying causes of their mental discomfort and anguish, treatment is directed at destroying their bodies.
It’s like giving an anorexic child liposuction.
We don’t do that. Instead, we direct treatment at their mental health.
The spectacular confusion around this issue ought to be something of an “I told you so” moment for Christians. It was always going to happen if people messed with gender.
I say that simply because, ever since the moment described by those words, “In the beginning God created”, God has revealed His purposes for His creation.
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…
God impressed certain laws and principles on His creation from which it can never depart. No matter how much we mutilate our bodies or fill ourselves with hormones, it is ultimately impossible to change our sex.
But more than that, God has called His noblest creation – human beings – to bear His image.
I don’t fully understand it, but it seems that maleness and femaleness is intrinsic to that image, according to this scripture.
But it should not surprise us that people do not submit to the reality of creation or the will of the Creator.
In Romans 1 when the Apostle Paul diagnoses the way societies go astray without God, he nails the nub of the issue with these words:
They exchanged the truth about God for the lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the creator.
What is “the truth” in the context? It is the fact of God as Creator.
What is “the lie”? It is the dethroning of God as Creator, putting the creature in His place.
In short: we are the creators now.
This is the timeless and original sin of the human race. Our first parents fell because of the desire – and I quote – “to be like God.”
A 6’6” man with hairy hands can declare that he is a woman in a moment’s decision and everybody must conform to the new reality because he has made it so.
A marriage can be the union of two people of the same-sex because the stroke of a legislator’s pen has said that it is true.
We can change our gender on our birth certificate, or substitute birth parents because even the reality of history can be rewritten because we wish it was true.
We are the creators now.
Except that it doesn’t work.
More than 40 per cent of transgender people who have undergone transition attempt death by suicide, compared with roughly 4 per cent of the general population.
No man will ever compete fairly on a woman’s sporting team.
No amount of mutilation will ever mask the truth that a body is male or female.
Normally developed chromosomes will always be XX or XY.
The solution is as God intended it. We are called to live in the bodies we have been given, and to fulfil God’s purposes as boy, man, husband and father or girl, woman, wife and mother.
The compassionate and truthful thing to do is to enable children to be comfortable and mature in the sex that God gave them.
The Apostle John tells us that God who made the world is not only the one by whom all things were made in their proper order, but in Him is light and life itself. Our ultimate blessing and fulfilment is found in conformity to Him and His ways.
