Female

Writer Abigail Shrier goes in depth into the serious harm being caused to American pre-teen and teenage girls in her book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Numerous interviews of girls who desire to transition reveal some of the causes are not just uncertainty with their gender, which is experienced by many and soon outgrown.

The other primary causes she lists are:

• Low self-esteem because of impossible beauty standards.
• Depression and anxiety.
• The postings of cool social media influencers who advocates passionately for kids to choose to transgender at any sign of ambivalence.
• General media pro-transgender advocacy.

Surprisingly, a large part of the problem is excessively coddling parents who give their young daughters no reason or opportunity to rebel. She wonders:

Whether this transgender craze isn't partially the result of over-parented, coddled kids desperate to stake out territory for rebellion. Whether it is no coincidence that so many of these kids come from upper middle-class white families, seeking cover in a minority identity? Or is it the fact that they overwhelmingly come from progressive families - raised with few walls, they hunt for barriers to knock down.

The teen years are naturally tumultuous. Teens get emotional as they learn and mature. Parents are supposed to set limits. If you have a fight with your teenager, she might be angry with you, but she'll feel the presence of a guardrail. Sometimes, just knowing it's there may be enough. Your teenager may tell you she hates you; she may even believe it. But on a deeper level, some of her need for individuation and rebellion may be satisfied. If you eliminate all conflict through endless agreement and support, it may only encourage her to kick things up a notch.

A study published in June of 2022, estimates that nearly 1.64 million people over the age of 13 in the United States identify themselves as transgender, based on an analysis of newly expanded federal health surveys.

The study estimates that about 0.5% of all US adults, (1.3 million people), and about 1.4%, of youth between 13- and 17-years-old (300,000 people), identify as transgender (having a different gender identity than the sex they were assigned at birth).

On “Transgender Day of Visibility” in March, two Biden administration agencies released guidance promoting “gender-affirming” health care for minors. This includes puberty blockers, hormone therapy treatments, and sex reassignment surgery.

One document released by the Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs claimed that “gender-affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being” for children and adolescents.

A parallel document released by the Administration’s National Child Traumatic Stress Network claimed that providing “gender-affirming” treatment to kids is “neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.”

The executive summary from the study says that there are more "transgender women" than "transgender men."

Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.

Research shows transgender individuals are younger on average than the U.S. population. Ages 13 to 17 are more likely to identify as transgender (1.4%) than adults ages 65 or older (0.3%).

Sam Allberry writes in his most recent book:

I’ve recently been setting up a new home and therefore spending more time than I would ever choose trying to assemble furniture. If I never see another Allen key for the rest of my life, I will be a very happy man. Needless to say, the results have not been uniformly impressive. The best appraisal I can give myself at the end of a sweaty day is, "That'll just have to do." And when you're talking about a bed that you'll be spending around a third of your life lying on, "that'll have to do" is not great. I already seem to have done my back in as a result of it.

With God it is very different. There is a rhythm to the account of creation in Genesis 1. The work takes place over six days, with a repeated refrain: "God saw that it was good." God is evidently not inattentive to what he is making. He doesn't start one aspect of creation and then turn his attention to the next project. He finishes each act, steps back (as it were) and appraises it. As he assesses each day's work of creation, he is fully pleased with the outcome. So again and again we read, "It was good," "It was good," "It was good."

That is, until we turn up. At the end of the day when God has made humanity in his image, male and female, he says something different: "It was very good" (Gen. 1:31). The difference male and female image bearers makes to his creation is to lift it from "good" to "very good." Needless to say, it is not a track record we maintain through the rest of the Bible; but the fact remains, there is a deep fundamental very-goodness to the way God has designed us to be, and our being made as men and women is at the heart of it.

According to an American Family Survey, the percentage of parents who say they have spoken with their children about each topic:

Sex (birds and bees): White Evangelical Parents 66%, All Other Parents 49%

Contraception: White Evangelical Parents 56%, All Other Parents 46%

Consent: White Evangelical Parents 56%, All Other Parents 49%

Sexual Identity: White Evangelical Parents 38%, All Other Parents 42%

Keira Bell was fourteen when she first began identifying as a boy. Two years later, she was prescribed puberty blockers and testosterone. At twenty, she underwent a double-mastectomy to remove both breasts. Now, at 23, she identifies again with her biological sex and recently won a lawsuit against the doctors who allowed her to go down this path at such a young age.

At the time, Keira believed that these treatments would help her “achieve happiness.” She said, “I was stuck in severe depression and anxiety. I felt extremely out of place in the world. I was really struggling with puberty and my sexuality and I had no one to talk these things through with.”

When she sought medical help, she was given the impression that the doctors and therapists would be neutral, but that wasn’t the case. “Once I arrived [at the gender identity clinic], I was not challenged in any sense and I was affirmed [as a boy] from the beginning.”

“When I was questioning my identity there was nowhere to find support that didn’t affirm the delusion of being in the ‘wrong body.’ No organizations existed that might be able to tell me that it was okay to be a girl who didn’t like stereotypically ‘girly’ things, and that I was no less female because I am same-sex attracted.”

Keira began questioning the ideology behind her transition when she found herself upset about the case of Rachel Dolezal, a white college professor who identified as black.

“I couldn’t come up with a reason why being transgender was ‘more valid’ than transracial. It was the start of a slow wake-up call. … I had finished my physical transition and my health was beginning to decline. It was at that point I realized I didn’t want to live a lie and that it was really important to be myself.”

Keira looks back on her transition with sadness. Her treatments have left her with permanent facial hair and a lower voice. “There was nothing wrong with my body, I was just lost and without proper support. I should have been challenged on the proposals or the claims that I was making for myself. And I think that would have made a big difference as well. If I was just challenged on the things I was saying."

In December 2020, a British court ruled in Keira Bell’s favor that teenagers under 16 are unable to give informed consent about puberty-blockers, and that it may be necessary even for older teenagers to require the court’s decision in prescribing these treatments.

Psychologist David P. Schmitt has completed the most exhaustive cross-cultural research study on gender and personality. Writing in an issue of Psychology Today, Schmitt goes against the theory that men and women are basically the same.

Schmitt contends that research from neuroscience, genetics, cross-cultural psychology, and other scientific fields is conclusive and overwhelming: “There are psychological differences between men and women. And they affect matters as trivial as sensitivity to smelly socks and as significant as susceptibility to disorders such as depression and autism.”

Meta-analysis of research has found women to be more empathic, while men are more prone to sexual jealousy. Men “tend to be better able to rotate a dimensional object in their mind and to recognize, say, an upside-down character. Whereas women excel at locating an object in a visual field and remembering exactly where Big Ben is on a map of London.” Men and women are different--from puberty, size, strength, risk-taking, mortality, and reproduction.

Schmitt laments that just as all the evidence is mounting, “denial of differences has become rampant. Attempts at respectful and productive conversations about biological sex differences often end with name-calling (genetic determinist!) or outright cancellation of events.”

In Ubang, southern Nigeria, men and women speak different languages. They view this unique difference as “a blessing from God.” Dressed in a brightly colored traditional outfit, Chief Oliver Ibang calls over his two young children, eager to demonstrate the different languages.

He holds up a yam and asks his daughter what it is called. "It's 'irui'," she says, without hesitating. But in Ubang's "male language" the word for yam, one of Nigeria's staple foods, is "itong." And there are many other examples, such as the word for clothing, which is "nki" for men and "ariga" for women.

"It's almost like two different lexicons," says anthropologist Chi Chi Undie. "There are a lot of words that men and women share in common, then there are others which are totally different depending on your sex. They don't sound alike, they don't have the same letters, they are completely different words."

However, both men and women are able to understand each other perfectly--or as well as anywhere else in the world. This might be partly because boys grow up speaking the female language, as they spend most of their childhoods with their mothers. But by the age of 10, boys are expected to speak the “male language” as evidence of entry into manhood.

Chi-Chi Unde explains: “Men and women operate in almost two separate spheres. It's like they're in separate worlds, but sometimes those worlds come together and you see that pattern in the language as well.”

Possible Preaching Angles: Communication; Gender Differences; Human Nature; Marriage – 1) There is a mysterious and delightful difference between men and women which God intends for us to recognize and enjoy (Genesis 2:20-25); 2) Wouldn’t it be great if you really knew your spouse’s emotional language and used it to communicate fluently with him or her? 3) In our society, there is an increased blurring of gender differences between male and female. But as this small community illustrates there are natural differences that are instinctively known (Romans 1:18-27).

One of the main tenets of transgenderism is that gender is merely a social construct, not a biological reality. It follows that a person born a woman can actually become male or vice versa with little pushback or fanfare. Though it focuses mainly on child’s play, new research debunks the idea that there are not gender differences. It might also debunk some of these ideas surrounding transgender transitions.

A study published in the Infant and Child Development Journal November 2017 issue, examined a meta-analysis of research that reviewed 16 different studies on the topic of gender differences of about 1,600 children altogether, and found that innate biology seems to influence boys’ and girls’ toy choices. What’s more, this seemed to span across all countries, whether high or low on the “Gender Inequality Index.”

The article concludes: This study shows what many parents already know: Boys and girls have innate differences and any “social construct” surrounding gender is due to those preferences, not the other way around. To take this a step further, this doesn’t mean men and women don’t struggle with their biological gender—dysphoria is very real—but it doesn’t mean transitioning is healthy or the most helpful reaction to that, or that we should indulge personal claims of gender fluidity.

In his book Transgender, author/pastor Vaughn Roberts draws on a distinction made by John Wyatt between the "Lego kit" view of the human body and the "art restoration" view of the human body. According to the "Lego kit" view, if we have just emerged from the primeval slime by chance, then there is no design whatsoever in how we happen to be. The structure of the human body is value free, so if you want to change your sex, that's fine.

The "art restoration view" acknowledges that we are not machines; we are flawed masterpieces. If you see a work of art and you're asked to restore it, you don't look at it and say, "Well, I think he would look much nicer with a pair of spectacles." Or, "This scene would look better with a car instead of a hay cart." To do that is to break the code of the art restorer. Art restorers respect the work, and know that their job is to bring out the artist's original intention. They work at cleaning and restoring the vivid colors. They study the work and the painter so they can carefully get it back to what it once was. They work so that people can see the original in all its glory.

Roberts' states further, "The aim is to restore the Creator's intention: but we are not to try to change it. And that will certainly mean accepting the sex that he has given us.

Editor's Note: Like this illustration, sometimes a good sermon illustration raises a challenging issue or question that the sermon must address.

The 1963 non-fiction book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan is often credited as a catalyst to the modern feminism movement in the U.S. In essence, the book examined the general state of unhappiness of many middle-class American women. According to Friedan's research, a comfortable, predictable suburban life didn't give women the fulfillment they were expecting.

The first chapter of her book, titled "The Problem that Has No Name," raised a question that resonated with many women across the nation:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—"Is this all?"

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Women; Women in Ministry; Spiritual Gifts—Namely, women have so much more to offer the church and the world than just making beds, matching slipcovers, and chauffeuring kids to activities.

Historian Rodney Stark argues that one of the reasons why Christianity spread throughout the ancient world was due to its revolutionary new attitudes towards women. He writes:

Recent, objective evidence leaves no doubt that early Christian women did enjoy far greater equality with men than did their pagan and Jewish counterparts. A study of Christian burials in the catacombs under Rome, based on 3,733 cases, found that Christian women were nearly as likely as Christian men to be commemorated with lengthy inscriptions. This "near equality in the commemoration of males and females is something that is peculiar to Christians, and sets them apart from the non-Christian populations of the city." This was true not only of adults, but also of children, as Christians lamented the loss of a daughter as much as that of a son, which was especially unusual compared with other religious groups in Rome.

In January of 2007, the New York City Board of Health unexpectedly withdrew a proposal to allow city residents to change the sex on their birth certificates without undergoing sex-change procedures. Heath Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden, who enthusiastically supported the plan only a month before, told the New York Times that institutions like hospitals and jails raised concerns the board hadn't considered: Would female patients end up in hospital beds next to men? Would male inmates wind up in women's cell-blocks?

"This is something we hadn't thought through, frankly," Frieden admitted. "What the birth certificate shows does have implications beyond what the birth certificate shows."

I'd hate to think decision making was a male prerogative, or that sensitivity and nurturing were strictly for females.