The transgender delusion
The attempted erasure of the boundaries of reality doesn't lead to freedom.
A growing issue of our times, one that’s exploded in the last few years, is transgenderism. This is the phenomenon of (mostly) young people believing that somehow they are “really” the opposite sex, born into the wrong body.
Unlike most psychological delusions, this one is dangerous because it has the backing of the psychiatric and medical community. Anorexics are not given liposuction, but children and young adults who believe they are the opposite gender are offered social and psychological confirmation, and medical support, which means puberty blockers—powerful drugs that have seriously harmful effects and if given early enough mean the child will never attain sexual maturity; cross-sex hormones, which also have harmful and often permanent side effects; and body-mutilating surgery.
These medical interventions destroy healthy bodies and pathologize the normal process of human sexual maturity. They tend toward the sterilization of the patient and create lifelong medical dependence.
I haven’t been personally involved in the pushback against transgenderism, as I don’t really have a dog in the fight. But I’m more and more convinced that it is an issue every right-thinking person must oppose.
Although I have no personal experience with transgenderism, other than having known some transgender people, I am one of many people who, if we’d been born a bit later, might have fallen into the transgender trap.
I was a serious tomboy. I had two younger brothers who were my first and best friends, and we were part of a circle of friends of which I was the only girl. I played all their sports on an equal level, until puberty.
I preferred boys’ toys, boys’ company, and boys’ games. I outdid them in rough-and-tumble and refused to cry when I got hurt. I hated skirts and dresses and lived in grubby cut-off shorts and t-shirts. I climbed trees and caught insects and snakes. I shunned dolls. Every other little girl’s favourite colours were purple and pink, so mine were blue and green. One Christmas when my brothers got Tonka trucks and I didn’t, I protested until my grandmother bought me one, too.
At about age six I described in great detail to my brothers the sex change surgery I planned to have when I got older, although I’d never heard of such a thing.
I wasn’t a lesbian; I despised girls and liked boys and everything about them.
When puberty began, I was extremely uncomfortable about the changes taking place in my body and longed to return to childhood. I loathed the training bras my mother forced me to wear. They were a reminder that my body was betraying me and turning me into a mature, sexual being, whether I wanted it or not.
By today’s standards, if any child was “truly” transgender, I was. I am certain that had I been offered the chance to stop puberty and somehow permanently “become” a boy, I probably would have taken it.
However, I now realize that my rejection of femaleness was likely rooted in the dysfunctional gender roles I saw played out in my family and community. My parents held to a twisted version of Christianity that taught that men were the absolute heads of their households who had the right to beat their children and order their wives around. Women had no choice but to submit.
Is it any wonder I wanted no part of that? Women were weak, vulnerable, and under the thumb of men, who were powerful and free.
Puberty eventually convinced me I was female. I mostly stopped playing with the boys and started seeking out female friends. I started caring more about my appearance, although I never was a girly-girl.
To this day I am not a “typical” female in many ways. I find women difficult to relate to and much prefer the company of men. I dislike baby showers and women’s groups. I’ve been told by my husband I communicate more like a man than a woman. I’m not very emotional and rarely cry. I have no maternal instinct or interest in babies, unless they’re the feline type.
Although those things are all true, there are also many ways in which I am typically female. Nothing has convinced me of this more than being married. My husband is simply a different being than I am, and part of figuring out how to relate has been understanding who he is as a man, and I as a woman.
I am extremely thankful I was born too early to have been caught in the transgender cult, which might have convinced me that the answer to my dislike of femininity and my hatred of my changing body might be to “transition”. I may have ended up like the many unfortunate people who realize that the transgender delusion is just that: and that after chasing all the interventions they believe will finally transform them into the opposite sex, they are left with the same internal problems and new, physical problems due to hormones and surgeries.
The safeguard that protected me and many other children from transgenderism was simply that our culture still understood that there were created norms, that the categories of male and female were real and inviolable.
The forces of feminism and homosexual activism were swirling away like powerful undercurrents, rapidly undermining the bases of this reality, but it had not yet crumbled away to the extent it has today.
But ideas have consequences, and these ones have arrived at their logical conclusion. You cannot deny that there are meaningful differences between the sexes socially and romantically without ending up at the place where there are no differences at all, where a man might “really” be a woman or a woman a man, and what is a woman, anyway?
This is why progressives who have for decades fought for feminism and LGBT rights really have no right to be surprised when the consequences of those ideologies come home to roost. You cannot attempt to remove some of the structure of reality without all of it tumbling to the ground.
What is the root of the transgender delusion? Put simply, it is the rejection of transcendent, objective, eternal reality: the fact that there is a Creator God who made us as human beings in his image, male and female (Genesis 1:27). It is a denial of the reality that although he created us with equal worth, he designed us to have different roles and functions, a beautiful complementary union that literally creates life. It is the ancient lie, as old as the Garden of Eden, that “you will be like God” when you take the step of defying his instructions. The transgender cult claims that we can re-make ourselves into the image we have created, rejecting the sex programmed into every cell of our body by our Maker.
And just like Eve found when she fell for that primordial lie, we do not become like God. Instead, our rejection of his instructions and choice to go our own way brings death and destruction. As Jesus much later said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” Satan’s lies about how much better things will be if we just do what he says instead of what God says are just that. He delivers death instead of life.
We reject and rebel against God because we cannot bear the idea that we are not unbounded; that there might be Someone who has drawn the boundaries of reality to whom we must answer and submit. But the denial of reality, the attempts to erase the lines and live without limits does not lead to freedom as we are promised. Nothing is a better testimony to that than the confused, miserable and permanently mutilated victims of the transgender lie.
They desperately need to be told about the hope found in Christ who “came that they may have life and have it abundantly”, as well as the inherent goodness found in following his created design for their natal gender.
This whole thing is disturbing. My immediate family is going through this. I can barely read it because my family is Godless. And buying it all. I just pray and love. God help us. Come soon Jesus.
Thank you so much for your honesty and willingness to share your own experiences. Sadly there are so many children these days who are drifting with luffing sails for so many reasons. So many whispering voices to lead them astray.