What about transgenderism?

Question 12019

Transgender identity is not really a question about pronouns, bathrooms or sport, though those are where the arguments usually happen. It is a question about what a human being is, and whether the body has anything authoritative to say about that. Everything else follows from the answer.

I want to handle this at both levels. There is a claim to be examined, and there are people to be cared for, and the church has repeatedly managed one while failing the other. Doing both at once is harder and it is what Scripture actually requires of us.

What Scripture says a human being is

The Bible’s account of the human person begins with creation, not with self-perception. “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). Sex is not incidental detail attached to the account. It is part of the statement.

Jesus treated that verse as the definitive word on the subject when He was questioned about marriage: “He who created them from the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4). He did not appeal to custom or consensus. He appealed to what God did at the beginning, and He treated it as still binding.

Scripture also refuses to drive a wedge between the person and the body. The body is not a vessel the real self happens to occupy. It is bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:19-20), it is the temple of the Spirit, and it will be raised (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). The whole Christian story runs through bodies, from incarnation to resurrection.

The claim behind transgender identity

The claim is that a person’s inner sense of being male or female is the true self, and that where it conflicts with the body, the body is what should yield. That is a coherent position and it is worth stating fairly rather than caricaturing, because a great many kind and thoughtful people now hold it.

But notice what it assumes. It assumes that the self is prior to and higher than the body, that the given can be overruled by the felt, and that identity is finally self-authored. Those are metaphysical claims, not medical findings, and they are doing all the work in the argument.

Scripture answers each of them differently. The self is a creature, not a creator. The body is given, and the giving is by God. And identity is received rather than invented, which is why the Bible’s answer to “who am I?” always begins with something God has done rather than something I have felt.

Gender dysphoria is real suffering

None of that means the distress is imaginary. Gender dysphoria is a recognised condition involving genuine, sometimes severe suffering, and a person experiencing it is not lying, attention-seeking or wicked. Anyone who has sat with a young person in that state knows how serious it is.

The Christian answer to suffering is never dismissal. Jesus met people in their distress before He ever addressed their condition, and the Gospels are full of Him asking questions and touching people whom everyone else had categorised. That order of operations is worth imitating.

What compassion cannot do is validate an explanation of the distress that is false, because a false explanation leads to false remedies. That is not a religious peculiarity; it is how care works in every field. Taking suffering seriously and accepting the sufferer’s account of its cause are two different things.

What the evidence actually shows

The medical picture has shifted considerably in the last few years, and the shift has been away from the affirmation-only model rather than towards it. Several European health systems, having reviewed the evidence, have restricted the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, citing weak evidence of benefit and real risk of harm.

In this country the Cass Review reached similar conclusions, finding that the evidence base for medical intervention in children was remarkably thin given how confidently it had been promoted. That is a striking outcome for a review that began with no religious commitments at all.

There is also the matter of desistance. A substantial proportion of children who experience gender-related distress resolve it during adolescence if they are not medically intervened with, frequently emerging as same-sex attracted adults. Anything that forecloses that pathway deserves the most careful scrutiny, particularly where the interventions carry consequences for fertility and sexual function that a fourteen-year-old cannot meaningfully weigh.

The young people caught in the middle

What concerns me most is the age profile. The people most affected by transgender identity as a cultural framework are adolescents, at precisely the stage of life when identity is unstable, distress is common and the desire to belong is overwhelming.

Add to that the influence of social media, where a young person in pain can find a community, an explanation and a plan within an afternoon. I am not suggesting anything conspiratorial. I am observing that a confused teenager is now offered a total account of their unhappiness by an algorithm, and that this is a new thing in human experience.

Parents in this situation are often frightened, isolated and told by professionals that questioning the framework endangers their child. I have found that these parents need support more than they need instruction, and that churches are frequently better at opinions than at practical help.

Why the body must not be treated as the problem

The idea that a person could be born in the wrong body has no place in a Christian account of the world, and it is worth explaining why rather than simply asserting it. The doctrine of creation says that God formed us deliberately (Psalm 139:13-16). The doctrine of the incarnation says that God took a body Himself (John 1:14). The doctrine of resurrection says that bodies are our permanent future, not a temporary embarrassment.

Set against that, the framework of transgender identity treats the body as raw material to be corrected by the will. That is closer to ancient gnosticism, which regarded the material world as a prison for the true spiritual self, than to anything in Scripture. The church fought that battle in the second century and concluded, rightly, that the body is not the enemy.

This is why I do not think the question can be settled by kindness alone. If the body carries no authority, then the whole structure of Christian anthropology loses its footing, and the consequences reach far beyond this one subject.

The trichotomist point about spirit, soul and body

I hold that the human person is spirit, soul and body, genuinely distinct though never separable in this life (1 Thessalonians 5:23). That framework is sometimes thought to help the affirming case, on the basis that the inner person could be one thing while the body is another.

It does not, and the reason is important. Scripture never sets these dimensions against one another. God addresses the whole person, salvation renews the whole person, and glorification will perfect the whole person. The idea of an inner self trapped inside a mismatched body requires exactly the antagonism between the parts that biblical anthropology refuses.

What the framework does explain is why the distress is so deep. A disorder affecting the sense of self is not a surface problem; it reaches the place where identity is formed. That is why glib answers fail, and why anyone offering a five-minute solution has not understood the question.

What the church should actually do

Begin by being a place where a person can say it out loud. If the first Christian response somebody meets is horror, they will not come back, and they will conclude that the church has nothing for them. Jesus was approachable to precisely the people who assumed He would not want them.

Then invest in the relationship rather than the argument. Most people wrestling with transgender identity are not going to be reasoned out of it in a conversation, and treating each encounter as a debate to be won guarantees there will not be a second one. Long friendship is what changes things, and it is expensive in the only currency that counts, which is time.

Teach the positive doctrine consistently. Congregations that teach a rich biblical view of the body, of creation and of what makes a person valuable will find these questions less destabilising when they arrive, because the ground has already been laid. Teaching only when a crisis appears is always too late.

Where the lines fall in practice

Practical questions follow quickly and deserve straight answers. I would not affirm a claimed identity that contradicts the body, and I would not participate in medical or social steps designed to advance a transition, because I do not believe they help. That is a settled conviction rather than a preference.

I would use a person’s chosen name, since a name asserts nothing about biology and refusing it usually ends the relationship for no gain. On pronouns I would ordinarily structure my speech to avoid the question rather than make a stand at the first opportunity, while declining any formal declaration of belief.

On church membership and leadership, the same standard applies as for any other area where a believer is persisting in something Scripture calls sin. Attendance and welcome should be open to anyone. Membership and office assume a settled willingness to be shaped by Scripture, and that is not a special rule invented for this situation.

The person who has already transitioned

This comes up more often than churches expect, and it is genuinely difficult. Someone who has transitioned, sometimes years ago, comes to faith. What now? There is no verse addressing it, and anyone who claims otherwise is bluffing.

What I would say is that the gospel is the first thing, not the last. This person has been received by God on exactly the terms everybody else is received, which is grace through faith in the finished work of Jesus. Their standing is secure before a single practical question is resolved.

Then sanctification will do its work, as it does with all of us, unevenly and over time. Some steps cannot be undone, and forcing rapid outward change can do considerable harm. I would counsel patience, close pastoral friendship, and a willingness to let the Spirit set the pace, which is what we extend to converts out of every other background.

Speaking about this in public

Believers are increasingly required to say something about transgender identity in workplaces, schools and families, and the manner of our speech is being watched more closely than the content. Peter’s instruction is to answer “with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15), and I would say the culture is currently more persuaded by our tone than by our exegesis.

I would also urge believers to check the sources they are repeating. A great deal of material circulating in Christian networks on this subject is exaggerated, out of date or simply false, and every inaccurate claim we pass on damages our credibility on the accurate ones. “Do not bear false witness” applies to arguments as well as to courtrooms.

And keep the anger out of it. “The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20). Much of what passes for courage on this subject online is not courage at all. It is contempt with a verse attached, and it repels the very people we say we want to reach.

The passages people bring to the discussion

A handful of texts get produced on both sides, and they deserve a straight answer. The first is the prohibition on cross-dressing in Deuteronomy 22:5. That verse is sometimes waved away as a ceremonial detail about ancient wardrobe, but the reason given is that such practice is an abomination to the Lord, and the concern behind it appears to be the deliberate blurring of a distinction God had made.

The second is the eunuch. Jesus speaks of those “who have been so from birth”, those “made eunuchs by men”, and those who choose that path “for the sake of the kingdom” (Matthew 19:12). Some read this as biblical warrant for a third category beyond male and female. But the passage is about marriage and childbearing, not about identity, and the eunuch in Scripture is always a man, never someone who has ceased to be one.

The third is the Ethiopian in Acts 8:26-39, whose welcome into the church is rightly cited as evidence that God excludes nobody on the grounds of bodily condition. I agree entirely, and it is a wonderful passage. What it does not do is address the question of transgender identity, since nothing in the account suggests that this man understood himself to be a woman.

Handling these texts honestly is part of the work. Where a passage does not settle the question, we should say so rather than press it into service, because arguments built on strained readings collapse under the first informed challenge and take our credibility with them.

What we can offer that the culture cannot

It is worth asking what the Christian answer actually gives a person, rather than only what it withholds. The culture offers self-definition, which sounds liberating until you realise it means carrying the entire weight of your own identity with nothing outside yourself to secure it. That is an exhausting arrangement, and the rising distress among the young suggests it is not working.

What Scripture offers instead is an identity that is given and therefore cannot be lost. You are made by God, known by Him before you were formed, valued at the cost of His Son, and secure in a love that did not begin with your performance and does not depend on it (Romans 8:38-39).

That is not a lesser offer. It is a far better one, and I think we forget how good it sounds to someone who has been told for years that they must construct themselves from scratch. The question of transgender identity is finally a question about who gets to say what a person is, and the Christian answer is that Someone already has, and that His verdict is kind.

So, now what?

Transgender identity raises questions that reach to the heart of what it means to be human, and Scripture answers them clearly. God created humanity male and female, the body is integral to who we are, and identity is received from our Creator rather than authored by ourselves.

Gender dysphoria is genuine suffering that deserves genuine compassion, and compassion does not require agreeing with an explanation the Bible contradicts. The church’s task is to hold both: to say what is true about creation, to care for those in distress without flinching, and to keep offering the hope of the gospel to people whose deepest struggle concerns who they are. If someone in that position walked into your church next Sunday, what would actually happen? That is the question worth answering first. Related reading: how Christians should react to gender dysphoria, whether gender is a biological reality and the question of preferred pronouns.

“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 (ESV)

For Further Study

Readers wanting to go deeper into the anthropology underlying this question should begin with Anthony Hoekema’s Created in God’s Image and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology, both of which work carefully through the imago Dei and the unity of the human person. Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology set out the dispensational framework I have assumed, and Chafer is particularly useful on the tripartite view of human nature. J. Dwight Pentecost writes helpfully on sanctification and the believer’s progress, which is the doctrine doing most of the work in the pastoral sections above. For the medical and social history, the published findings of the Cass Review are worth reading directly rather than through secondary summaries, since this is an area where both supporters and critics have been selective in their reporting.