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The Transgender Moment

Evangelicals hope to respond with both moral authority and biblical compassion to gender identity disorder.

"A lot of parents are allowing their children to switch identities from the sex that God created them to live," Chambers says. "That only sets kids up to be even more confused."

Call for Compassion

Jerry Leach, director of Reality Resources, a ministry in Lexington, Kentucky, to people dealing with gender confusion, shares Chambers's point of view. Leach says, "Rather than cutting tissue by invasive surgery and starting a new life, which for the most part doesn't work, people need to find help psychiatrically."

Leach has become the referral point person for several national Christian organizations on this topic. "The essence of who you are in your genetics, anatomy, chromosomes, and DNA does not suddenly change by surgical amputation."

Surgery or no surgery, there is no quick fix for transgendered people. Chambers says those who wrestle with such feelings don't start out with a desire to be involved in sinful behavior. It's merely a response to what they feel is natural.

"It's a psychological, emotional struggle that needs compassion," Chambers says. "It's an identity issue. At its core, there is absolute confusion about who someone is created to be."

Leach says, "This is a psychological and emotional malady. It's not like taking an appendix out."

Leach, 65, says only the sympathy of trusted Christian friends helped him emerge from his own conflict.

Sexual identity struggles consumed Leach beginning in early boyhood. His parents told him they wished he had been a girl and that they had planned to name him Jennifer. His mother made him wear dresses. His father told him he looked better as a female. The pattern of cross-dressing, applying lipstick and mascara, and wearing fingernail polish and pantyhose became a secret obsession years into his adult life. While some men who gazed at scantily clad females were overcome with lust, Leach had a different problem: jealousy. He wished he inhabited those bodies himself.

With God's help, Leach has learned to avoid occasions of temptation, including shopping for dresses with Charlene, his wife of 46 years.

Leach hoped marriage would make his gender-confused feelings go away, but it didn't. In 1989, after taking female hormones for 18 months, Leach scheduled sex reassignment surgery. But two weeks before the operation, he says he sensed God telling him to stop his covert double life.

Ultimately, Leach understood that God knit together his male body, as outlined in Psalm 139:15–16.

"God planned for me to be a man before I had ever been created," Leach says. "There was not a woman inside my body longing to be expressed. There is no human condition outside the redemptive circle of God's love and power."

The challenge before conservative evangelicals is persuading transgendered people, their families, and faith-based advocates that gender identity disorder is not beyond the reach of God's grace, compassionate church-based care, and professional help.

John W. Kennedy, a CT consulting editor, is a journalist in Springfield, Missouri. He is news editor of TPE magazine and a former CT news editor.



Related Elsewhere:

"Walking a Fine Line," also posted today, is about how pastors deal with transgender issues.

More articles on sexuality and gender are in our full-coverage section.


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Comments

Displaying 4–6 of 110 comments

Hening

February 23, 2008  8:45am

These people need our prayers in order to be lead out of temptation. These are tragic circumstances, and trying to rearrange the rest of creation around ones sexual desires (internal/external) is folly.

Another who is Transgender and Christian

February 22, 2008  6:16pm

I am transgender. I sit next to you at church. I have a husband. I have an adopted child who looks just like me. You could never pick me out of a crowd. I'm a high school teacher, and a member of the PTA. I was married in the church, and I have been a member for many years. I transitioned when I was young, so much of my early life seems a distant memory. My family completely accepts who I am. My relationship with God is one of peace, and I know that he loves me. I believe that the reality of being transgendered has been distorted by the media. Most of the people that you see on television revel in the attention, and their motives need to be seriously questioned. Jesus taught us that we should love one another, not condemn each other. If you remember he said, " Let him without sin cast the first stone." Is condemning and judging another a sin? I believe so. Is telling someone they aren't worthy of God's love a sin? I think so.

Rick

February 20, 2008  11:54am

Dalymar, would you give the same advice to parents of a child born with a congenital heart defect? Cystic Fibrosis? Spinae Bifida? If "God does not make mistakes" means that people are always, without exception, born exactly the way that they are supposed to remain, why on earth are people born with such hideous defects? Should they remain that way? This is the logical conclusion of your argument. As to blaspheming the Spirit, even the Lord Jesus, in the text you are referring to, did not dare to accuse his hearers of such a thing (though he certainly had the right to do so). Yet you freely condemn this person of such a hideous charge? Maybe you are woefully ignorant of what you are referring to (please tell me you wept for the "condemned" as you wrote that), but your accusations may be closer to that sin than her mishearing of the Spirit's voice. These comments are fundamentalism at its worst. People opining without mercy about soul-crushing issues of unimaginable complexity

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