[Dale Kuehne writes]:
While today’s conversations push the boundaries of how we understand gender, they don’t understand that this brave new world of identity is about more than gender.
The students with whom I associate””from middle school to college students””have understood for several years that we now reside in a world beyond gender. The youngest of them probably don’t realize that TIME’s article announced anything “new.”
For many of them, gender discussions, even of the transgender variation, are just so yesterday. When we talk about personal identity, we don’t include the mundane questions about being male and/or female. A person can certainly identify as male or female if they wish, but there is little expectation that one would do so.
After all, today Facebook gives us over 50 “gender” identities to choose from. (Conversations about this can involve questions about why there are so few options.) And rather than looking to gender or variations on a gender, more and more young people are seeking to discover their identity by widening the options to include “otherkins” (people who consider themselves to have a non-human identity, such as various animals, spirits, mediums, and so on).
Read it all (my emphasis).
What planet am I on?
Evidently the people being quoted in this article sincerely believe that they were created with the wrong bodies. What kind of pastoral care might I provide to people like these? To me it [i]seems[/i] like a form of mental illness; but I don’t want to dismiss something as insanity, just because I find it too complicated to understand.
On the other hand, I’m not ready to concede that I’m the weird one for objecting to a man in a dress sharing the ladies’ latrine with my wife or daughter. Nor that a physically intact man or woman has a “right” to undergo a violent, disfiguring surgery. (I’m not talking about the rare ones– something like 15 in 10,000 births– who are born with both male and female genitalia, or who do not clearly exhibit signs of their biological sex until later in life.)
The insanity, or confusion, crept into our language and became respectable after public figures began to say “gender” (something linguistic, cultural, and psychological) when they were referring to the biological difference between male and female.
At my 25th college reunion, one male classmate appeared in a dress and with a new, female name. He was preparing to have sexual reassignment surgery.
Another, who in his class report had written words of lavish praise for the wife of his youth, the mother of his 2 adult sons, announced a couple of years later that he was in fact a woman. He changed his name, left his wife, and then, deciding he was a lesbian, moved in with a different female partner (whom he probably married according to the laws of Massachusetts).
But he decided not to have the surgery, saying that after having lived one lie for nearly 50 years, he wasn’t going to live another– or words to that effect. I’m still trying to figure out what he meant by that.
My point is, I find it very hard to understand all this. I admit my ignorance. The only “evidence” for a person being of a certain “gender” is what the person says about himself or herself– which seems to change through the course of their lives.
Among our T19 correspondents, is there one who can recommend a sound, biblical pastoral response to the “transgender revolution”?
Chuck Bradshaw