What started the transgender movement?

Question 12029

The transgender movement seemed to arrive suddenly, and that impression is part of why it has been so disorienting. One decade the subject was almost unknown outside specialist clinics, and the next it was reshaping schools, hospitals, sport and law. Nothing moves that fast without a long run-up somewhere out of sight.

I think Christians are poorly served by treating this as an inexplicable outbreak of madness. It has a history, and the history is traceable. Understanding where the ideas came from will not make us agree with them, but it will make us far better at speaking to the people who hold them.

The separation of sex from gender

The decisive move was linguistic before it was anything else. Until the middle of the twentieth century, sex and gender were used more or less interchangeably in English, with gender mostly a term of grammar. The proposal that they name two different things is recent, and it is the hinge on which everything else turns.

The clinician most associated with the change is John Money, working at Johns Hopkins from the 1950s, who argued that a child’s sense of being male or female is established by upbringing within the first years of life and can be directed by the adults involved. It was a bold hypothesis, and it was presented as established before it had been tested.

Once sex and gender are separated, everything that follows becomes possible. If gender is a distinct thing, it can be discovered rather than observed, claimed rather than recognised, and revised. The transgender movement is, at bottom, the working out of that single distinction across every area of life.

The case that was supposed to prove it

Money’s theory was famously tested on David Reimer, a boy whose penis was destroyed in a botched circumcision in infancy and who was subsequently raised as a girl on Money’s recommendation. The case was reported for years in textbooks as a success and as proof that identity is socially assigned.

It was nothing of the kind. Reimer never accepted the identity given to him, was profoundly unhappy throughout childhood, reverted to living as a man in adolescence when finally told the truth, and took his own life in 2004. His brother also died by suicide. It is one of the darkest episodes in twentieth-century medicine.

What strikes me is not simply that the experiment failed but that the failure did not slow the theory down. The foundational case study of the transgender movement produced the opposite of its predicted result, and the framework built on it continued expanding regardless. That should give any careful person pause.

The clinical strand

A second strand runs through the clinics rather than the theorists. Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist working from the 1950s, argued that where the mind could not be brought into line with the body, the body should be altered to fit the mind. His book The Transsexual Phenomenon set the template for medical transition.

The first gender clinics followed, and with them a diagnostic pathway. The framing was medical and compassionate: here is a distressing condition, and here is the treatment that relieves it. That framing is important, because it gave the whole enterprise the authority of medicine long before the underlying claims had been examined philosophically.

It is worth noting that Johns Hopkins itself suspended adult transition surgery in 1979 after Paul McHugh reviewed the outcomes and concluded that the psychological difficulties were not being resolved by surgery. That decision was reversed decades later under considerable social pressure rather than because of new evidence.

The academic strand

The third strand is academic, and it belongs to gender studies rather than to medicine. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, published in 1990, argued that gender is performative: not something one is but something one repeatedly does, sustained by social convention and enforced by power.

That argument sits inside a wider intellectual movement which held that apparently natural categories are constructed by the powerful and can therefore be deconstructed. Applied to sex, it produces the conclusion that the male and female distinction is not a discovery about the world but an arrangement imposed on it.

Very few activists have read Butler, and that is not the point. Ideas move outward from the seminar to the culture through teachers, journalists, film and eventually policy, arriving in ordinary conversation stripped of their arguments and wearing the confidence of settled fact. That is how the transgender movement acquired its vocabulary.

The legal and institutional turn

Ideas become powerful when they are written into procedure. Over roughly two decades, self-identification made its way into equality law, into medical protocols, into school guidance and into the policies of employers and professional bodies across the English-speaking world.

What follows from that is compliance rather than persuasion. A nurse, teacher or civil servant does not need to be convinced by Butler; they need to follow the policy. Dissent becomes a disciplinary matter rather than a disagreement, which is why so many people who have private doubts say nothing at all.

Christians should notice how this pattern works, because it is not confined to this issue. A contested claim becomes an institutional requirement, the requirement generates public conformity, and the conformity is then cited as evidence that the claim was obviously true all along.

The internet and the change in who is affected

Something shifted around 2010 that the earlier framework does not explain. The classic clinical picture had been of a small number of adult males with lifelong dysphoria. The new presentation was overwhelmingly adolescent, disproportionately female, frequently arriving in friendship clusters, and often with no history of childhood distress at all.

That change coincided precisely with the arrival of the smartphone and the social platform in the life of the average teenager. I am not claiming a simple cause, and honest researchers are careful here. But a demographic reversal on that scale, in that timeframe, is not something a movement can wave away.

What the internet offers a struggling adolescent is an explanation, a community and a plan, all within reach at three in the morning. For a young person who feels wrong in some way they cannot name, being handed a name for it is an enormous relief. That is a human dynamic rather than a wicked one, and it explains a great deal.

Why the transgender movement spread so fast

Several things had to be true for this to move as quickly as it did. The ground had to be prepared by a culture that already treated the authentic inner self as the highest authority. It had to be presented in the language of civil rights, which is the most powerful moral vocabulary the modern West possesses.

It also had to arrive when the church’s public credibility on sexual matters was at a low ebb, partly through our own failures. And it had to be paired with the claim that dissent causes suicides, which converts a debate into an emergency and makes careful discussion look like cruelty.

Understanding the mechanism is not cynicism. It is the ordinary work of discernment. Paul told the Corinthians that we are not ignorant of the enemy’s designs (2 Corinthians 2:11), and knowing how an idea travels is part of not being ignorant.

What the Bible says about the underlying claim

Behind the history is a straightforward claim: that the self defines the person, and the body must comply. Scripture contradicts this at the first verse of the subject. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

Jesus grounded His teaching on marriage in the same act of creation (Matthew 19:4), and Paul argued from nature rather than from custom when he addressed disordered sexuality in Romans 1:26-27. The consistent biblical assumption is that we are creatures receiving a nature, not authors composing one.

Paul also warned that people would “accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” and “turn away from listening to the truth” (2 Timothy 4:3-4). That is not a description of unusual wickedness. It is a description of what human beings do when the given order becomes inconvenient, and it has happened many times before.

The retreat now under way

The last few years have seen a genuine reversal in several countries. Sweden, Finland and others reviewed the evidence for medical intervention in minors and restricted it substantially. In England the Cass Review reached broadly similar conclusions and the Tavistock service was closed.

These reviews were not conducted by Christians or by opponents of the transgender movement. They were conducted by clinicians examining outcome data, and what they found was that the evidence base was far weaker than the confidence with which the treatments had been offered.

Christians should note this without gloating. A great many young people have been harmed while the confident claims were being made, and the appropriate response to that is grief rather than satisfaction at having been right.

What the church should learn from all of this

The first lesson is that ideas have histories, and that a church which only ever responds to the latest controversy will always be a decade behind. Teaching a rich doctrine of creation, the body and the person before a crisis arrives is worth far more than reacting once it has.

The second is that a movement which grows by offering belonging is not defeated by argument alone. If the church is not a place where a lonely, unhappy young person can be known and loved, we should not be surprised when they find their belonging elsewhere.

The third is that our own credibility matters. We are asking a culture to trust the Bible’s account of the body while our own record on sexual integrity is patchy. “Let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18) is the relevant instruction, and it is directed at us before it is directed at anyone else.

Ideas and people are not the same thing

Everything I have written concerns ideas, and I want to end by separating them sharply from the people who have absorbed them. A teenager who has found a word for her unhappiness on the internet is not an ideologue. She is a girl in pain who was offered an explanation by adults who should have known better.

Paul’s instruction is to destroy arguments and lofty opinions raised against the knowledge of God (2 Corinthians 10:5), and it is arguments that are named as the target. The Lord’s servant is at the same time to be “kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness” (2 Timothy 2:24-25).

Holding both is the whole task. Clarity about the ideas, tenderness towards the people. Christians who manage only one of those will be either useless or unbearable, and the transgender movement has produced plenty of both on all sides of the argument.

The earlier history people forget

It is sometimes said that all of this began in the 1950s, but the earlier chapters matter. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin was performing early surgical procedures in the 1920s and 1930s, and the case of Lili Elbe belongs to that period. The war destroyed the institute and the work was largely forgotten for a generation.

Christian Jorgensen’s transition in 1952 brought the subject to a mass audience for the first time, generating enormous press coverage in America and establishing a public narrative years before the academic apparatus existed to support it. That sequence is worth noticing. The story arrived first and the theory was constructed afterwards.

What this longer history shows is that the impulse is not an invention of the last decade. What is new is the scale, the institutional backing, and the extension of the framework to children, none of which were features of the earlier period. Distinguishing the old phenomenon from the new one is necessary if we are to understand what we are actually dealing with.

Detransition and the voices that were not heard

A further development deserves mention because it was almost entirely absent from public discussion until recently. A growing number of people who transitioned, many of them young women, have since detransitioned and are describing what happened to them in considerable detail.

Their accounts are strikingly consistent: distress in adolescence, an explanation found online, affirmation from professionals who asked few questions, rapid medical steps, and a later realisation that the underlying difficulties, frequently trauma, autism, depression or same-sex attraction, had never been addressed at all.

These voices were dismissed for years as rare, bitter or politically motivated. They were neither rare nor, in most cases, political. They were people asking why nobody had slowed things down. The transgender movement has struggled to hear them, and the church, of all communities, should be capable of listening to people whom everybody else finds inconvenient.

None of this means the church should treat every person who has transitioned as a cautionary tale, and I would not want the presence of these accounts to be used that way. They are evidence about a system, not a verdict on individuals, and the people telling them have generally been treated badly enough already without being enlisted into somebody else’s argument.

So, now what?

The transgender movement has an identifiable history: the separation of sex from gender in mid-century clinical theory, a foundational case that failed and was reported as a success, a medical pathway built before the philosophy was examined, an academic deconstruction of fixed categories, and an internet that delivered all of it to adolescents at scale.

Knowing that history equips us to engage the ideas seriously while refusing to treat people as ideas. The suffering is real, the claims are false, and the answer the church holds is better than the one on offer. Compassion and truth are not competitors here. Where they are held together, the church is best placed to serve a generation that badly needs both. Related reading: the philosophical roots of transgender ideology, whether gender is a biological reality and a biblical answer on transgenderism.

“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.”

Colossians 2:8 (ESV)

For Further Study

For the theological anthropology underlying this article, Anthony Hoekema’s Created in God’s Image and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology are the natural starting points, both handling the image of God and the unity of the person with care. Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology provide the dispensational framework I work within, and J. Dwight Pentecost is useful on the believer’s sanctification in a hostile culture. Arnold Fruchtenbaum and John Walvoord are worth reading on the wider question of how believers should understand cultural decline without falling into either despair or the expectation that we will reverse it. On the medical history, the Cass Review and the published Swedish and Finnish evidence assessments should be read directly, since summaries on all sides have proved unreliable.