This weekend we have just had our SPA weekend (St Peters Alive)…we had a tremendous time together as a fellowship looking at the whole issue of identity. Glynn Harrison was superb and I hope the talks will be online soon. One of the issues covered was of course that of gender and transgender. This is part three of my talk to the Solas Day in Edinburgh in which we look at issues of gender, transgender and children.
Re-imaging Humanity – Part 2 Sexuality, Marriage and the Fall
Re-imaging Humanity – Sex, Sexuality, Gender and the Inhumanity of 21st Century Humanism – Part 1
Gender – gender as identity makes a whole lot more sense. After all what is more basic for the cry to come from the nurse to the mother of the newborn – it’s a boy/girl! Most people today have been brought up in a world where we were just male and female aka Genesis. We no more got to choose our identity in terms of gender than we do in terms of skin colour or height. But this is now all changing. First of all we are being told that gender is much more than biological and it really is dependent on how we feel. Whereas gender dysphoria was a recognised psychological disorder now we are being told that we all have the right to choose our own gender. And it is not limited to two…. That is so binary. You can have your 56 genders if you wish. In fact one activist told me that there are as many genders as there are people.
You realise of course what is happening when you get to that stage? You’re getting rid of gender altogether. The practical effects of this are phenomenal. For a start it kills all women sports. Have you seen the Iranian womens football team – eight of whom are biologically male? Or how about This story from the US?
It will also put to an end the Scottish government’s plans to have gender quotas in terms of politics and business. It’s how you end up with the great restroom row in the United States. And in case you think this has nothing to do with us here in Scotland every new school building Scotland will now be built with specifically gender neutral toilets.
Transgender –. A recent parliamentary committee report called for a move away from viewing transgender identity as a disease or disorder of the mind, and replacement of the present medicalised process with a simplified administrative procedure based on self-declaration by the individual applicant, free of intrusion by medical and legal personnel.
The same report proposed that 16- and 17-year-olds should be eligible to apply for gender recognition, that children should be able to use puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones earlier, and that Government should move towards ‘non-gendering’ official records. In other words you could walk into a post office tomorrow, and declare that you are the opposite gender of the biological sex to which you were born.
Again I want to ask where all this lead us.. Where is the harm? Members of the transgender population are at higher risk of a variety of mental health problems compared to members of the non-transgender population. Especially alarmingly, the rate of lifetime suicide attempts across all ages of transgender individuals is estimated at 41%, compared to under 5% in the overall U.S. population. Compared to the general population, adults who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery continue to have a higher risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes. One study found that sex-reassigned individuals were about 5 times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.
Multi- Gender – The Scottish government is going to change the law to allow for non binary gender – in a recent article the New York Times celebrated the fact that Scotland has now become the most homosexual and transgender friendly society in the world!
“It’s extraordinary: We have started a conversation about a genderless society,” said Bob Orr, 66, who in 1982 co-opened Edinburgh’s first lesbian and gay bookshop, Lavender Menace. That bookshop closed years ago, as have several gay bars. Gay people increasingly go to mainstream places, Mr. Orr said, and several singers in his “L.G.B.T. choir” are straight. “The boundaries are going,” he said. “And that was always the point — that sexuality ceases to matter.”
Again what is happening here is that gender is moving from identity to being self-identity. One aspect of this is the use of non-binary pronouns – as in this card developed by the University of Wisconsin to guide students.
Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a clinical psychologist. He has found himself an enormous difficulty because he refuses to accept the current fad for gender neutral pronouns – read about his horrendous story Here
In New York there are now 31 protected gender identities. (Facebook offers you 58). You can be fined if you refuse to use the preferred pronoun. It is not just that speech is being confused, it is that freedom of speech is being taken away. In our attempt to become as God we are creating a new tower of Babel.
But again we ask – where’s the harm in the gender fluidity? Apart from the mass confusion. For me the main thing about what is happening is that it is a form of child abuse.
It has long been recognised that the best context in which to bring up a child from birth to adulthood is within the context of a family, and that family has normally been understood as being a man and a woman and whatever offspring they may have.
Whats the harm? Research on children in same sex households shows that normal households with a mum and a dad are by far the better context to bring up kids. https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/new-research-on-same-sex-households-reveals-kids-do-best-with-mom-and-dad
I don’t have time to go into the research on this but it should not be surprising to those of us who follow the maxim, or by the maker’s instructions, that children do better with mum and dad. “For couples with children, the dissolution rate for same-sex couples is more than double that of heterosexual couples.”
Children are a special case when addressing transgender issues. It is important to realise that only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.
Let us ask the question again – Where is the harm? I think that transgender people need help. It is a genuine psychological condition. But there is a world of difference between realising that a small group of people need help and support and thinking that this justifies attempting to change the whole way we view ourselves and bring up children.
Where’s the harm? Think of Aaron an 18 year man old in Polmont Young Offenders prison, accused of two rapes. He now says he is a woman called Alexis. Women prison officers have been ordered to do rubdown searches on him. Other females prisoners are concerned because he will have open access to women.s prison cells. In what world does this make sense? Putting a rapist into a women’s prison because he says he is a woman?!
But there is harm in other ways.
Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse. Endorsing gender discordance as normal via public education and legal policies will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to “gender clinics” where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs. This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will “choose” a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults. (The American College of Paedaetricians)
Also see this article about the abuse involved – Here
Let me put it very simply and quite straightforward. When the Scottish government say that they are going to enforce and promote a radical culture which says that children can choose their own gender, they are engaging in organised, systematic, state enforced child abuse. And in case you think this is some kind of fanciful horror story from the future – let me tell you about one seven year old girl who came home from school the other week and told her parents that she had been taught in school she could choose whether she wanted to be a boy or a girl. This is happening now. Today. In Scotland. It is State sponsored child abuse and for the sake of our children we need to take a stance against it.
It is important to understand that in in our post-truth society the promotion of transgender and gender fluidity has nothing to do with facts or truth. It is political and sexual ideology being imposed on the rest of us by those who regard themselves as the cultural and social elites. Their position is ‘right’ and anyone who dares question it is obviously an idiot, or a homophobe or a transphobe – and probably all three! The BBC for example are now proposing to indoctrinate children into this ideology through CBBC
Next week in part four we will look further at the implications for society…
The Re-Imaging of Humanity – Part 4 – The Impact on Society
Meanwhile I would highly recommend Vaughan Roberts little book about this subject which is very helpful to anyone seeking to understand –
Reblogged this on Talmidimblogging.
Thank you very much for this. Transgender is a potential or actual pastoral issue within churches, involving real people, but it is also a sign of a philosophical and spiritual crisis in society, as you have pointed out. Some Christians are called to focus on the pastoral, others on the big picture prophetic/diagnostic. Let them not be in conflict with one another! Please see also here http://anglicanmainstream.org/transgender-pastoral-and-prophetic-responses/
Totally agree Andrew. Both go together. I always have to deal with this in a pastoral way. I cannot of course write about specific examples because there is such a thing as pastoral confidentiality but both directly and also through people writing to me, this is an issue I now have to deal with pastorally every week! The pastoral and the prophetic go together.
I became a grandfather ten days ago. This comment is probably no more than a subliminal need to tell the world. Or that part which reads this blog. My grandchild was born. You can imagine my horror when I was told he was my ‘grandson’. GrandSON! Imagine ascribing a gender to a defenceless child. How imposingly arrogant can you get. Not only has my son (I can call him this since it is the gender he has chosen) and his wife (ugly patriarchal word) assumed for some inexplicable reason his masculinity (dressing him, would you believe, in stereotypical straightjacketing blue, a remnant of a primitive oppressive culture, sure to scar the child for life) but the hospital had the audacity to attach to his leg a label carrying the legend ‘Murray Thomson. Male’.
I was, I am, incandescent. From birth this child is being labelled, defined, confined and locked in by gender prejudice. From the outset he is damaged by a bigoted and backward society. Where is his freedom to choose? Where is his right to self-determination. Yes he may have XY chromosomes. And male genetilia. And male hormones. But what a pitiful basis on which to build gender identity. Science is discovering that gender is located in the brain more than anywhere else. It is the early brain development that determines gender. “The most important sex organ is the brain,” said William G Reiner M.D., a psychiatrist and associate professor in the Department of Urology, Oklahoma University Health Science Center. “We have to let these children tell us their gender at the appropriate time.”. How reprehensible therefore is the gender imperialism of our redneck culture. Listen to science. Listen to the experts. GENDER IS PERSONAL CHOICE. Can’t you get this into your thick heads, you morons.
Course, it’s just as bigoted and unacceptable to speak of this baby as a child or a baby. What right have we to so define it. Indeed why assume it is human or even a mammal. True freedom means being totally self determining. It may wish to be a horse, an insect, a stone. Let it choose. It is it’s right as a a a…a… . Anyway, it is its inalienable right. Any sensible person knows this.
Buddha.
Buddah , Are you for real , or am I missing something ?
I bet he (ooh!) was in one of these disgustingly discriminatory hospital wards where they only deal with small humanoids and worse, child-bearing ones!
The whole thing is getting stupider by the minute. Congratulations on the new arrival – wishing him every blessing for the future.
Dear John,
Is your answer really serious or are you taking the “proverbial” (which I suspect you are)?
I have been a paediatric radiologist for 25 years and have seen babies of physical indeterminate sex on a regular basis.
But a baby with testicles and a penis is a BOY! If he was a girl he would have had ovaries, a uterus and a vagina. His “sexuality” may be “fluid” (a vague concept) throughout his life, but his gender is hard wired in his chromosomes.
There is no substantive clinical evidence that gender is located in the brain. It is located in the genes! Sexuality may be “personal choice” but gender is not!
This is a classical post-truth concept. You believe it because you want to, not because it is based on ANY rational basis.
Ha ha, John! Well written! Congratulations on the birth of your grandson. Happy times!
John
Hope you chose your own name.
Are you really an unreconstructed male. Thought they went the way of the doddo.
Which parallel universe are you living in. And that hospital is so evidence based that it is untrue.
Congratulations on your grandson. You must be like a dog with two tails.
Thanks for comments. Just to be clear, my tongue was firmly in my proverbial cheek. However, it’s clear that many will make these gender points seriously and with even greater misguided moral outrage.
The research referred to involved 512 children in same sex households, compared to a 207, 007 children in dual sex households. The authors of the research accept that that is problematic and that a sample of at least 800 same sex households was required to make their findings valid. Also, the authors point to the factors external to the same sex household that may contribute to poor outcomes, e.g,lack of societal acceptance of same sex households, lack (at the time of the research) of civil partnerships or marriage for same sex households to support stability of the union.