In addressing the topic of child sexual abuse, we must begin by distinguishing between abusers who represent the system and abusers who work free lance. The free lance abusers are usually despised by all, but the despisers frequently support outlandish systemic abuse themselves, and to such an extent that if anyone objects to the abuse, then he is the one disciplined. Think of what would happen in the Obama military if an American soldier intervened on behalf of an Afghan boy chained to an Afghan officer’s bed. Who is disciplined? Right — the soldier who intervenes.
Back home, coming back to our version of the same kind of travesty, a recent uproar concerns two workers at a Texas daycare getting their pink slips because they refused to call a little girl a boy. The girl is apparently a trannykid, and the daycare had obtained this important information from the girls’ two fathers. Does anyone see a pattern starting to develop here?
One of those workers, Madeline Kirksey, said that her religious liberty rights were violated when the center gave her the sack, and so I would like to get that issue out of the way first. At first glance, this looks like it is actually not a religious liberty issue. The center is privately owned, or so the argument goes, and if the owner only wants to employ crazy people, that is the owner’s prerogative. If the owner wants to employ people to take care of little children all day, but wants employees who do not know the difference between boys and girls, then said daycare should have the right to fill their roster with such highly-qualified individuals.
But does a daycare have the right to require its employees to look the other way in cases of sexual child abuse? This is a religious liberty issue because society has an obligation to intervene on behalf of children who are clearly being abused, and that includes daycare workers. Suppose the two dads were not insisting that the girl be treated as a boy, but rather as a famous porn star who works for the studio they are starting up. Now what? Can the daycare workers object to that? If they do, and are fired for it, what is that?
In this case, Child Protective Services was called. Should they be, or not? Remember — there is no neutrality, ever. Some worldviews like Christianity, which actually invented childhood, object to the sexual exploitation of children, including this kind. Other worldviews, like the current kultursmog, get their jollies from such exploitation.
In the meantime, employment issues aside, on to the merits. Little girls are not little boys. Little girls cannot become little boys. But what if a female could be transformed into a male through our magic surgical prowess, or a male into a female by our jurisprudential juju? Suppose for a moment that we really could get down into the trillions of cells that make up a dude. We have isolated every single presentation of XY chromosomal machismo and we put a little dab of lipstick on each one. That would be really hard. It would be no easier with the trillions of cells that make up a chick. But we finally located every last XX display of maternal tenderness and gave each one some martial arts training, a set of nun-chucks, and some tight leather pants. Suppose we could actually do something like that.
I interrupt this argument to notify everyone that I am using terms like dude and chick intentionally. Ten bonus points will be awarded to the first commenter who can identify the reason.
Back to our thought experiment. What in the Sam Hill makes people think that a six-year-old has the emotional, intellectual, or spiritual capacity to agree to such a momentous decision? A six-year-old girl has trouble deciding at WalMart what color her lunch box should be. A six-year-old boy has the attention span of an ADHD hummingbird.
So take my point here. It is not that we shouldn’t be having little kids make such decisions — because that is not what is happening. The point is that adults who do such things to kids are the worst kind of child abusers, and societies which stand by watching when it happens are the worst kind of enablers. These people are abusing a little girl with the whole country watching.
We live in a time when credentials have been substituted for education. Certification and paperwork serve instead of thinking. So then, in the state of Oregon, if a fifteen-year-old boy gets together with a thirty-year-old man in order to have his membrum virile stroked, we have ourselves a case of sexual abuse and somebody goes to jail. But if he gets together with a thirty-year-old medical doctor, he can have that same member cut off, without parental consent, and get the taxpayers of Oregon to pay for it. Do you understand yet why some of us have nothing but contempt for the sexual intelligentsia?
Now remember what I said a few days ago about what is done to the one, and what is being done to the one hundred. Child abuse in the shadows is terrible, no doubt. The church does need to be better equipped to deal with such things when they happen. True enough, and we have done our part in fighting that battle. But what we really need is the backbone to challenge the open abuse, the plain light of day abuse, the taxpayer-supported abuse. We need to confront the abuse that is being treated by the ruling elites of our society as wholesome, progressive and enlightened.
If a fifty-year-old man is teaching teenagers the joys of masturbation, along with various techniques for furthering the pleasure, what is that? Well, we don’t know yet whether we are supposed to applaud or not, do we? We need more information. In order to know whether this is an Approved Activity, we first need to know if the lessons are being conducted on the other side of the city park, under the train trestle, or up at the government school, in the well-lit sex-ed classes. If the latter, then the gent is clearly credentialed and the fundamentalists had better Shut Up.
21st century America abuses children, and it has to be said that we do so on a massive scale. We have chopped millions of them up into little pieces. Moreover, we groom most of the survivors to tolerate all manner of abuse — which is what the government school system is. One of our highest priorities should be to get every Christian child out of those fantasy farms and into a Christian school.
Every mother who cross-dresses a little boy is participating in that abuse. Every family that entertains the kids on a diet of skanky movies is helping to groom them for life among the filthy-minded. Every person who teaches kids to accept demented sexual behavior for the sake of “art” is an enabler or worse. The issue is not what we all (still) formally reject. We all still reject the free-lancers. But most of us accept, and fiercely defend, the credentialed abusers. If the abuser is in sync with the spirit of the age, to be at all critical is to be a bigot.
Perhaps you deny it hotly. Nobody has been trained to tolerate abuse. Oh? Why do we tolerate it then?
God made us male and female in a way that is deeper than cellular. The words “dude” and “chick” are a popular way of expressing this truth. We all know it’s more than cellular. Or psychological. Or fanciful.
So is a person born with both male and female genitals a dude or a chick? What about a person born with both male and female sex chromosomes? Dude or chick?
A person with XY chromosomes and complete androgen insensitivity?
Is female
Something some people may not be aware of, genuine hermaphrodites and their parents, often advocate for non interference and allowing a dominant gender to form naturally. Many of these children were horribly harmed by their doctors and parents choosing gender for them surgically, and then when they realized their brain was female/male, in their psyche, in their spirit, they felt horribly betrayed and abused by their caretakers who made an arbitrary decision. Some even remain as they are, as God made them, somewhat androgynous.
I agree with you, especially if the person self-identifies as female. But then you have statements like this one from DW’s article: Suppose for a moment that we really could get down into the trillions of cells that make up a dude. We have isolated every single presentation of XY chromosomal machismo and we put a little dab of lipstick on each one. That would be really hard. It would be no easier with the trillions of cells that make up a chick. But we finally located every last XX display of maternal tenderness and gave each one some martial… Read more »
Complete androgen insensitivity is not ambiguous. They are female. They self identify as female.
Doug is not making it simpler, he is addressing clear cut cases. Most situations of boy thinking he is girl or vice versa in our culture do not have uncertain gentalia. Your exception does not apply. If it helps insert a bracketed (does not apply to complete androgen insensitivity in XY females) into Doug’s comment.
You think we understand all there is to know about gender in fetal development? I don’t.
What about incomplete androgen sensitivity? What about mosaic Turner’s syndrome?
Laura, there are rare problems with sexual dimorphism. This happens to be irrelevant to XY females (androgen insufficiency). Doug was not talking about the difficult cases that parents and doctors anguish over and do multiple tests. He knows there are hard cases. Jesus said that some are born eunuchs. But this is not what the issue is here. The issue is 2 dads saying their clearly female daughter is a boy at a young age. A person can say both that there are some difficult cases, and that this situation is an evil and child abuse. The hard cases is… Read more »
Well, the number of people out there who identify as transgender is really tiny. We’re talking about outliers anyway. Either outliers matter or they don’t. I see anguish here. Bradley has been in therapy now for eight months, and Carol says still, on the rare occasions when she cannot avoid having him exposed to girl toys, like when they visit family, it doesn’t go well. “It’s really hard for him. He’ll disappear and close a door, and we’ll find him playing with dolls and Polly Pockets and … the stuff that he’s drawn to,” she says. In particular, there is… Read more »
Either outliers matter or they don’t.
Untrue. Your comment about (uncommon) XY females is irrelevant to Doug’s point. He was using an illustration about adding Xs and removing Ys. Men are XY and women XX by far so his illustration stands.
Doug’s post was about a specific example of transsexual behaviour and the larger cultural response. So the fact this is uncommon is not irrelevant as it is his focus and the culture’s response is important.
I have read the article. I wouldn’t make light of that child and his family. I would feel different if they made wrong choices then went public about it insisting that their immoral choices are in fact moral, and that others affirm them. If someone takes to the public square to advocate sin he does not get to hide behind his difficult past. Strong temptations do not give you a free pass. But dealing with the situation would be difficult. And I know of people who have had difficulties that seem outrageously unfair. Some situations seem to have a precipitant… Read more »
If you had a revelation from God (not that you would, unless somehow you were directly involved,) that a particular child had a birth defect that resulted in a male body and a female psyche, and that God is fine with this child living as a girl growing up to be a woman, would that cause any seismic shocks in your theology? (Other than the fact that you may not have expected to ever have a direct revelation from God, of course.)
I guess so. But then if God said that abortion and infanticide were okay, or sodomy was okay, or murdering Asians was okay, that would shake up my theology too.
You seriously put transgender folks in the same bucket as murderers?
That is not what I said, but you are asking me if God revealed to me that something that is clearly wrong in Scripture is in fact good would throw my theology, yes that would.
Bethyada, do you eat pork? Because the OT clearly says not to. It’s true that Peter had his vision and so forth, but that doesn’t change the fact that the OT says not to eat pork. The injunction against eating pork is unmistakable. Nowhere does the OT say “if you have the body of a man, you have to self-identify as a man because that is what you are, regardless of what you know yourself to be. If you have the body of a woman, ditto.” So I don’t understand (and I don’t have to, it’s your business,) how transgenderism… Read more »
The transsexual debate is closely connected to the homosexual debate. The push is to get society’s approval. Scripture addresses transsexuality obliquely because of the nature of society and sexual behaviour. But the relationship is enough to gain insight into the problems of our culture. We can assess the sexual behaviour based on biological sex and what they are doing with whom. As far as sodomy goes, Scripture is abundantly clear that this is always prohibited between 2 men, and such behaviour makes a man hell-bound. It keeps him from God. If practiced by those within the kingdom it damns them.… Read more »
Oh, no, Either outliers matter or they don’t is entirely true.
As to the culture’s response, if we’re abandoning the seek-out-the-mutant-and-kill-him attitude we’ve had for these few sad folks for so long, in favor of trying to understand and have compassion, hooray.
That is clearly untrue. If I am doing a statistical analysis then outliers do not matter. There are plenty of situations where outliers don’t matter.
If I am talking about a small minority of people associated with something, then clearly the discussion is about them, even though they are outliers. Do you need some examples?
No. What we are taking about is the notion that intersex outliers don’t matter when we say “made them male and female” but transgender outliers do. Either that statement applies to every single person or it doesn’t. The intersex person shows us that it doesn’t.
Bethyada, does it upset you if people disagree with Doug? He’s only human. He’s bound to be wrong sometimes.
As are you.
Of course.
Reminds me of that joke—if a man makes a decision and there isn’t a woman around to hear it, is he still wrong?
Can you articulate what’s funny about that, Timothy?
That brings up another joke–“A man speaking to a feminist convention opens his speach with a joke–‘three feminists walk into a bar’…..”THAT’S NOT FUNNY!” yells the crow.”
You reveal yourself, Timothy.
Thank you.
“If I have to explain it you’ll never get it”
“Well, if you don’t know I’m not going to tell you.”
Trust me on this one – – the men get it.
OK, I’ll explain it then. The man who says this is painting all women as hypercritical harpies. Ha ha ha. Here are some possibilities. 1 – The man who tells this funny joke really is a numbskull, and it’s very fortunate that there are women in his life who are available to shield him from the consequences of his stupidity. (One wonders why none of his male friends and relatives step up.) 2 – If it is the man’s wife, who tells him every decision he makes is wrong, she is overly critical and somehow he lacks the starch to… Read more »
Yes. Try “Mrs. Parkinson’s Law.”
OK I googled it.
“Work under pressure produces a heat which expands to fill the mind available, from which it will pass only into a mind that is relatively cooler.”
I don’t understand how this supports the humor. Is this like “stuff rolls downhill”? Then you just roll it up again, don’t you?
Is this “joke” an example of that passive-aggressive thing that people do, when they have a problem with another person, they don’t express it and give the person an opportunity to correct it, they just gripe about the person behind their back?
I meant the whole book. Or you could try that “My Greek Wedding” line; the man is the head of the house but the women are the neck . . . and we can turn the head anyway we want.
“painting all women as hypercritical harpies” No, it’s that enough of them are that everyone one with eyes can spot one. Walter Mitty was married to one.
I know I come across really humorless sometimes. I do appreciate a good joke. But I also see hostility under the joke sometimes. Like that awful thing, “What do you say to a woman with two black eyes? …Why tell her anything? You already told her twice.” I was told this during my first week on a new job, by a male coworker, who was offended when I made a face and said it wasn’t really funny. He huffily said, “Yes, it is,” and turned away and wouldn’t speak to me. That line from My Big Fat Greek Wedding points… Read more »
Be of good cheer. When I quoted the old “war between the sexes/too much fraternizing w/the enemy” bit some of the ants really objected to being poked with even gently with a small stick. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love . . . (going from memory) “If there were time enough, all the men who were decent and just could learn to love all the women who were decent and just. I suppose the converse must be true.” Reasonable people of goodwill who want can reach an working arrangement can do so. Jews, Moslems, and Christians lived peacefully side-by-side for hundreds… Read more »
If you’ve worked in the quality world at all, you’re very familiar with the phrase “continuous improvement.”
I reckon we are all obligated to strive for continuous improvement in our spiritual lives.
That may mean seriously considering other folks’ objections to things we take for granted, to see if this is an opportunity to fine-tune our righteousness a little bit. I include myself here, and I do try to do it.
Do you recall when “TQMS” meant “today quit, move seattle? I watched Total Quality Management in action. When it was only killing two stripers and captains I said to myself, “One day this nonsense will kill a general and then we’ll either get rid of it or fix it.” Then it killed a general. And nothing changed. Until the jerk who inflicted on us retired. Then it quietly went away. (In fairness to Deming, I recall being told at the time that what we were trying to do was a corruption of his life’s work and that he would not… Read more »
We had TQM where I worked in the 1990s, and it was wonderful. “Quality” means “conformance to requirements”. And to have a requirement, you have to identify a client/supplier relationship, and then match a need to a capacity. One person can’t impose another requirement on another. And if you are the supplier, it’s your responsibility to understand your client’s needs, even if your client doesn’t understand them himself. (We walked around snickering about “probe your client” but then sometimes we really had to.) This was great b/c I worked at the time at an environmental lab that provided support to… Read more »
We should have gone off-line a few posts ago.
(Don’t get me started on engineers. My strength of Christian charity and brotherliness usually fails to carry the load.)
Oh, I had a lot of fun with them.
“I need a number!”
“Six! …Oh, did you want me to run your samples? That will take a while.”
I also told them that we had old instruments, that ran at the rate of 60 seconds per minute, and they weren’t upgradable. And once I told one that my crank was broken and the replacement was backordered.
“What crank?”
“The one I attach to the side of the GC so I can crank out the data.”
Witchcraft, pulling me back in . . . .
Sign on a cubicle:
1. Answers – 25 cents
2. Correct answers – $2
3. Dumb looks are still free.
Our version:
Revised Lab Rates
Answers, $1.
Answers related to question, $2.
Answers which require thought, $3.
Correct answers, $4.
Dumb looks are still free.
Also:
Fast
Cheap
Accurate
Pick any two
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8vHhgh6oM0
So do I — several husbands I know say stuff like this ALL the time. That and, “It goes without saying.” It took one couple a full year of marriage counseling to convince the husband that his wife wasn’t a “bad wife”, just not a mind reader. Friends of mine who are counsellors says this is a common thing. If the men get it, why don’t they stop playing this silly game?
“Men,” even when limited to non-Petticoat Precincts (both natural and acquired a la Caitlan Jenner), is still a VERY large place. I’m not-quite-tempted to dig out the Edwards Personality Preference Profile articles from the ’70s, with follow-up years later, comparing the “generic US male,” “generic US female,” “male general aviation pilots,” and US Navy fighter pilots. A later researcher compared the “generic US female” baseline with “female general aviation pilots.” That shrink tested several chapters of the “99’s” – – a female pilot group founded by folks such as Amelia Earhart – – to get a female pilot score. So,… Read more »
I always heard that joke the other way around: if a woman states her opinion and a man isn’t around to hear it, is she still wrong?
Don’t care much for the joke either way.
Its funny that way too. (:
I disagree with Doug. I am not a Calvinist. I am not a paedobaptist. Etc.
Doug is wrong at times. I am also aware that modern Western Christianity can have a low opinion of Scripture.
Good.
Well, it’s fair to point out the complexity that can be present in some cases – *if* we are dealing with such hard cases. But it’s also a fair and accurate point that Doug is not, in this space, at this time, addressing oddities, defects, and other outlying cases like hermaphrodites. He’s dealing with the wrongheadedness of the zeitgeist on this matter. The cultural trajectory is to deny the principle, which has the effect of getting even the *clear* cases wrong – such that the line between male and female is dispensable as a social contrivance. Once we perceive the… Read more »
The highest estimate I’ve seen of transgender folks in the population is 0.3% for male-to-female, and much less in the other direction. I’m not sure that this is such an impending emergency that we can’t afford to slow down and make sure we get this right. The way I see it there are three possibilities here. 1 – Transgender folks are sinning. Then they need to be corrected. 2 – Transgender folks are confused. Then they need to be helped to straighten out. 3 – Transgender folks really are mismatched, soul to body. Then they need love and acceptance. There… Read more »
Ah but the ole “I’m going to err on the side of such-and-such” bit, while seeming wisely judicious on the surface — ends up assuming we must err. It offers a false dichotomy as the only choice. But there are a myriad of particular applications and so it can’t be reduced to picking a poison. Of course, we will err from time to time in the difficult world of real-life applications, and I’m not saying that’s acceptable, but the point is that we ought not err on the side of permissiveness and a libertine sexual ethic simply b/c we’ve adopted… Read more »
Things are happening with lightning speed, you’re right. Probably a little too fast. I’ll say that abortion for any reason except to save the mother’s life is wrong, full stop, end of story. I won’t say that transgenderism is wrong. I don’t know enough about it to say that. If it’s not, I don’t want to add to those folks’ burden by saying it is. From the reading I have done, I view it as a birth defect. And because I think that we shed these clay vessels at death, but it’s our souls that live to enjoy eternity, if… Read more »
Well, it’s a bit like abortion in the case of an ectopic pregnancy – that doesn’t keep us from being more black-and-white about it being unacceptable in any number of other situations, including rape and incest. We can all acknowledge that we don’t know all the answers in all particulars of the hard cases, but we have to acknowledge the central point that abortion, in purely elective cases, is murder. If we waffle on that central point, then we’ll end up finding a way to justify the unjustifiable later, b/c we will have established that lee-way as there to be… Read more »
See, I’m not really sure the Bible states outright that transgenderism is sinful. Yes, it says that God made us male and female. If you try to make this absolutely literal, then what DO you do with the intersex folks? I see trying to do that as making one’s philosophy so brittle that it is fragile enough to fall to pieces when it has to confront a fact that it’s not consistent with. And I don’t think it’s necessary. For the vast majority of us, women have women’s bodies, feel like we are female, and are attracted to men. The… Read more »
Well God did make us male and female, absolutely literally. He didn’t create any third sex, trans-, hermaphrodite, androgen-insensitive, or whatever. Anything else comes from the fall, and that should tell us something. We are dealing with fallen-ness, not third options ordained by God. Even if some are not put into this by cognizant rebellion, we are born in sin. The tenancies I have towards any sin are innate -but not creation ordained, and so whether I cognitively cultivated them further and incurred cognizant culpability, or whether I do them out of the natural, innate uncleanness of my own heart… Read more »
“This doesn’t mean that every hard case out there is disobeying if they don’t find an easy solution that would satisfy every conservative thinking Christian, of course.” Well, there it is. I don’t know how much a person who perceives that he or she is transsexual is really obligated to satisfy anyone else, including conservative thinking Christians. Matt, what if it turns out that the condition of being transgender is a physical, medically confirmable fact like cleft palate or club foot is? There’s been some work done and probably more to follow. Why would it then be necessary for the… Read more »
The sex of the soul. Well that’s a new one . . . I think this is part of the disconnect here . . . if you are attributing immutable status to the way someone says they feel, to the point of assigning it inherent “soul” status, then you’ve already answer the question of where you think ultimate authority on the matter lies. As for the part you quoted, I’m not sure if we talked past each other there or if you were just reiterating the point – but to be clear, what you stated about not having an obligation… Read more »
I look at your last paragraph and I see a huge argument for letting transsexual folks do their thing. “Are we at the point at which a physical manifestation of something is the end-all-be-all of morality?” No, which is why the presence or lack of a penis is not end-all of morality. “We already know we are born in sin. Why would that not also affect our genes, our hormones, our chromosomes, our enzymes, etc.” Of course it does. But that doesn’t make these things inherently sinful. A child with Down syndrome – that’s an error in meiosis. It’s not… Read more »
Yes, I feel like a man and understand what folks mean by that. If a male says he feels like a woman, I may not be able to relate to feeling like a woman, but I get what he means, b/c if I woke up tomorrow with the outer body of a woman, and nothing was different in the way I felt – then I could understand that that would have a very significant “out of place” feel to it. So, I don’t mean to say that the “psyche’s” inner identification as male or female is not a real phenomenon… Read more »
Why do you think that the body defines God’s purpose for a person, and not their soul? If a person has a mismatch there, what is it about the body vs. the soul that makes you think God privileges the body’s sex? When we are seriously trying to be good people, we know we’re supposed to judge people by their characters and not by their physical bodies. 1 Samuel 16:7 – But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look… Read more »
God looks at the heart – but that does not mean He looks at some nebulously and slipshod defined version of what someone *says* is inherent in the soul, and submits himself to THAT standard. It means the heart must be upright before him, and an upright heart before him will not be eager to elevate their own inclinations as the overarching definition of what the soul supposedly is. That’s the issue, you keep positing this question of why I insist on choosing the body over the soul – but you keep glossing over the issue of exactly which gnostic… Read more »
I’m suggesting that God’s basic standard isn’t that the body is more important than the soul. That’s what he said to Samuel. You look at the outside, I look at the inside.
And I never actually said nebulously and slipshod defined anything. You yourself said that you *feel* masculine, right? Is that a nebulous and slipshod thing? I bet not.
I agree with that principle – but that’s a misapplication. God looks at the posture of a person’s heart towards him, prizing that above the things the world values (strength, physical beauty, charisma, wealth, etc). It does not follow from that at all, that nothing of God’s creation ordinance is to be found in the norms and features of creation. That verse is not about THAT, it’s about God prizing the sincerity of the heart over the “outward” abilities that man prizes. Yes I feel masculine, but again, that does not settle the matter. I feel lots of things, but… Read more »
“If it contradicts scripture, then I’ve got a problem.”
Sure.
I’m not seeing it contradicting scripture. And I actually think the verse I quoted goes to the “heart” of the matter, so to speak. We’re probably going to have to agree to disagree on this one.
Yeah I think we sort of reached the end of that angle.
And back to the “sex of their soul” thing, if we know the sex of someone’s body, and if you take transsexualism as a birth defect, then how can the “soul’s sex” (ostensibly harder to identify if we can’t take the body’s cues) the “proper” one? If transsexualism is a birth defect, then what is the defect – the sex they’re born with, or the neurological or hormonal mismatch that is making them feel otherwise? Why do we assume the genitals are the problem rather than the hormones/neurons, etc.?? If we resolve this by suggesting that the personal inclination defines… Read more »
Where are you seeing that the Bible calls transsexualism sin? Also, I don’t presume to know someone else’s soul’s sex, which is a huge reason why I need to at least consider taking their word for what it is. Was talking to my husband about homosexuality one day. He used to be really conservative about it. I told him that there’d been some research to show that the hormonal environment in the womb affects the developing fetus’s sexuality, and that there might be tests that could routinely start being done to discover this, and that might be followed with some… Read more »
So wait, if a similar test and fix could be done to fix say, spina bifida, down syndrome, or something else- you’d be against it? One always has to weigh risks and consider consequence of course, and I’d be real cautious about in utero hormone therapy even if homosexuality was the risk (there’s just so many questions raised) – but hypothetically – if it was a lickety-split, easy matter, preventing a homosexual tendency would be a categorical good, and I can’t square being cavalierly okay about it with a biblical worldview. That doesn’t mean that you definitely have the therapy… Read more »
The transgender person would view living as the gender he knows himself to be as correcting a birth defect, just as we try to correct spina bifida and so forth. We don’t take the “for this reason a man leaves his father and mother…” to be a commandment for every single man, do we? Some men never marry. That’s not sinful – Paul said so. Once again, it’s not 100% prescriptive for every single person. “That doesn’t mean that you definitely have the therapy done, but the issue would be the other risks and unforeseen consequences, not some nebulous idea… Read more »
Yeah I took your comments about your husband as assuming something categorically good about not “messing” with the dynamic. If that’s not what you/he meant, then I think we’re on the mostly on the same page, there. Although I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’d be okay with having children born with a propensity or predisposition to be homosexual. Not at all. Bnut, depending on the particulars, I might choose that risk over others- like miscarriage, and others. Indeed. But, if the risks were not there (and I do realize that’s unlikely, but just to isolate the principle… Read more »
It’s hard to know what we ought and ought not to change about a specific child in the womb.
If your child would be born with spina bifida, that’s a no-brainer. That’s why pregnant women are urged to take folic acid and it’s not controversial at all.
What if your child needs a hormone wash in order not to have a propensity for a hot temper, leading him to the sin of rage? Now that is a little fuzzier, isn’t it.
Yeah it’s fuzzier, and the whole hormone therapy is squirrely enough when the person is outside the womb. I’m not sure exactly how to articulate this, but there also may be some line of prudence – (quite aside from all issues of medical unforseen consequences) – some line of prudence to be drawn about how far we’d want to go in trying to “eliminate” garden variety sins. I mean, God is sovereign, and we do have the power of the Holy Spirit to mortify our sinful inclinations, and we know that we will be living in a fallen world with… Read more »
Your last paragraph is good.
I would say that in the absence of any real hard evidence as to what’s going on, my view is that we should back off and refrain from judging one way or the other. The transgender person will have to answer for himself on Judgment Day. I won’t have to answer for him. OTOH I will have to answer for myself. Will I have to answer for having insufficiently labeled sin? Possibly. Will I have to answer for having insufficiently obeyed the commandment to love my neighbor? I sure hope not.
Well, I don’t want to project some sort of responsibility to judge someone else in the final, authoritative sense. In the end they are responsible for their sins, so we certainly aren’t responsible for them in that way . . .but as broader matters go,we all have a responsibility not to call evil good and good evil. There is also the matter of shepherds shepherding peoples’ soul faithfully, being careful not to eschew righteousness in an effort to to be merely pleasant and nice, while not eschewing gentleness for the sake of external law-keeping. In some cases, holding folks accountable… Read more »
Have enjoyed, by the way, this conversation. It is always useful to me, to have my opinions challenged so that I have to flesh them out.
Amen . . . you and me both.
Easy on the Gnosticism here…
Your desire to jump to hermaphroditism is telling. Let’s first establish this, that those born with male genitalia are not potential women, and those born with female parts are not potential men.
Once we get that straight, then the hermaphrodite thing won’t be weighed down with any more complications than it already is.
The point about hermaphrodites is that we know for certain of some cases where you can’t simply say someone is a man or woman just by looking at their genitals. Seems like that should make you hesitant to confidently proclaim “those born with female parts are not potential men.”
Some people are born with both. According to your dichotomy those people are potential…what?
You know what I meant, even if I didn’t include enough qualifiers to satisfy the folks who just want to bicker. The point is that outlying cases do not define the center, and if we let them define the center, then all cases will be outlying cases.
But we’re talking about what to do with the outlying cases.
No, we’re not. Maybe some of you are – but that’s just the tactical distraction. Doug writes a piece about the principled center, and folks issue a barrage of outlying cases in order to disrupt the center with a deluge of “what if’s.” But that’s why some refuse to chase you down those rabbit trails – b/c we’re not surrendering the center. Although we are happy to discuss the outlying cases with anyone who’s granted the center – or at least defined the center in some way themselves – but of course if the center is defined wrongly, the discussing… Read more »
For the record, my examples were meant to exclude any genuinely tough cases. So when I say born with female parts, the intellectually honest mind understand it as female exclusively, with no crazy curveballs thrown in.
” A six-year-old boy has the attention span of an ADHD hummingbird.”
It’s funny cuz it’s true. I got a few of those flitting around my house as we speak.
” A six-year-old boy has the attention span of an ADHD hummingbird.”?
I’m 55. gotta goooooo! ; – )
Ya I was just thinking it may not be confined to just six year olds. ????
Girls can be boys. Boys can be girls. White women can be black women; This world is nuts. It would be really funny if it wasn’t so sad.
What does that have to do with the Obama admin? I understand that there were some U.S. Soldiers who retaliated against child abusers in Afghanastan–and were punished for it–but that had nothing to do with Obama.
The commander in chief of the armed forces sets policy for those forces.
That would be Obama.
Hope this helps.
It doesn’t help.
Then you have my apologies.
So you’d say that the commander in chief set the policy when the US Army turned Abu Ghraib into their personal sex torture playground? That would be George W. Bush by the way.
If you think you’re gonna find a lot of reflexive Bush II supporters here … sorry to disappoint.
I would certainly say Bush was responsible for everything that went on with respect to the armed forces. That is the function of being Commander in Chief.
Are you aware that some people are born with genetic abnormalities such that it’s not at all clear whether they should be considered male or female?
If you believe male or female is more than just plumbing, that it affects the brain and other parts of a person’s identity, does it not seem possible that there are some people with a genetic abnormality such that the brain and sex organs do not match?
I actually do think the Church needs a stronger, more compassionate response to the situations of hemaphroditism. It’s a lack, and I would like to have a Biblically informed response.
However, it is my understanding that such conditions are incredibly rare. If I, agreeing generally with Doug, but admitting that there is a very real grey area in that specific set of circumstances, were to ask you – but what about all the men and women who are born with clearly delineated sex, what would you say?
I think the church needs a compassionate and informed response to the problem of biologically normal people who identify as the “wrong” gender. I think sometimes we focus too much on the idea of sexual perversion as the main cause instead of looking at a form of mental illness involving body dysmorphia. I don’t see it as very different from anorexia or the desire to have healthy limbs amputated or the desire to be surgically transformed into a catwoman.
No disagreement about being informed, or the importance of compassion. However, we can’t just prescribe one kind of response without knowing other things, like whether the one facing the temptation, or engaged in the sinful action, is doing so in pride and arrogance, or doing it in broken repentance and hatred for their ongoing weakness in that area.
God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
I also tend to agree. But I don’t think the response should be, “It’s okay to make girls share a locker room and shower with a biologically normal boy,” even if the boy truly does suffer from body dysmorphia. I also don’t think that encouraging dysfunction is appropriate. I think compassion does not equal affirmation.
I agree. And I have no idea what the response should be. As someone who has lived with anorexia, I know that the most lethal response I can be given is, “You look great, and if looking like a skeleton works for you, who are we to judge? You want diet pills? Here.” But neither is it especially helpful for someone to tell me I am merely rebellious and sinful. That may be true, but that tends simply to feed the deluded thinking that makes me think I should starve myself in the first place. What I find appalling, however,… Read more »
Yes, I agree that harshness with the young and confused (or even the old and confused) is harmful. And I very much appreciate your strong analogy.
It’s my understanding that the hormonal treatment given to these children is the same given to children who due to disease are dealing with precocious puberty.
All this hormonal treatment does is delay the onset of puberty. Once it’s stopped, the process picks up again.
This Hopkins dr views transgenderism as a “mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.” http://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-mchugh-transgender-surgery-isnt-the-solution-1402615120
Is this the doctor that used to be associated with transgender surgery, then stopped because of the terribly high suicide rate? I feel a lot of sympathy for these troubled people, and I just can’t believe that surgery will give them lasting happiness. P.S. I would very much like to look like a cat, but it is not to be.
I’m having a hard time keeping up. I thought there was no such thing as a girl’s brain or a boy’s brain. That these things were just social constructs. That the things we identify as feminine or masculine, are just imposed by society. Now, when that narrative fails, all the sudden gender is the result of biology and cannot be changed. Do try to remain consistent, please.
While I do think that Urthman is deliberately bringing up a tiny, tiny minority of people as a derailing tactic rather than a genuine discussion, I do think the issue he raises is something worth considering.
People who are born with both sets of organs are, in biblical terms, eunichs. To then take eunichs as evidence that male/female is not based on ones sexual organs, or chromosomes, is the worst kind of special pleading.
I’m not convinced about the classification eunich, as I believe they can still procreate and have the hormones of both sexes. But while I agree that arguing from hemaphroditism to gender fluidity is nonsense, I don’t see that argument in Urthman’s post today.
David R’s point isn’t that it’s not worth considering, but that the progressives are utterly inconsistent on the mutability of sex.
I agree there’s an inconsistency, but (so far) Urthman hadn’t made those arguments. I haven’t been tracking this poster, so I don’t know if they have done so in the past, but based solely on the post, I thought a different response might be more interesting, at least.
No, I’m just saying that if it’s possible for a person to have an abnormal sex organs or chromosomes, it seems at least possible that a person could be born with sex organs that don’t match the rest of their brain or body. I don’t know if that’s what’s going on with many of the people who say they’re transgender, but it seems like a real possibility.
Yes, it’s possible for people to be born with sex organs that don’t match the rest of their body. That’s another hard case situation that has to be dealt with compassionately. But again, that’s not really what’s at issue with this transgender stuff. The transgender people are, by and large, people for whom every cell and organ in their bodies is definitively one sex, and they have a belief that their “actual self” is the other sex. It also includes the strange assumption that a person can decide they feel like they’re the other sex, which is based on the… Read more »
What do you mean by definitively one sex? Are you talking about the presence of an X or Y sex chromosome? Because there are expression disorders as well that could determine whether a person develops a “male” or “female” brain, if there is such a thing. I guess I’m assuming most people here think sex differences are more than just the shape of one’s genitals.
Oh for Pete’s sake… When the brain “doesn’t line up with the body” it’s a problem with the brain (at the very least), not the body. If the DNA says “boy,” the presence of family jewels says “boy,” and a mustache, bass voice, and flat hairy chest say “boy”…if a 2-yr-old can look at the dude and say “boy” without hesitation…then it’s pretty damn obvious to everyone who hasn’t chucked their brain into a blender and hit puree. There is no such thing as a “male” or “female” brain, except somewhere down in the mush at the bottom of the… Read more »
What’s funny is how these people will agree that everything is a product of materialism and evolution except for special snowflakes’ beliefs about sex.
it seems at least possible that a person could be born with sex organs that don’t match the rest of their brain or body.
What you you mean by this?
What is the name of this tactic? We see it often on this board.
Derailing tactic. It’s a classic feminist accusation against men – “but what about female on male rape?” “Derailing!” It’s basically throwing a red herring out for the purpose of distracting people from noticing the weakness of your own argument.
Thanks, but I was thinking more along the lines of ‘edge cases make bad law’, where the outlier is presented for discussion as somehow trumping the general case.
That’s true in law, but in the sciences, it’s often the weird exceptions that give us some insight into what is happening in the more general cases. In this case the extreme of hemophrodites suggests that there might also be more subtle disorders that aren’t merely some kind of confused thinking about gender.
suggests that there might also be
great. we have advanced from ‘edge cases’ to ‘suggestions there might also be’
Why do I get the feeling the ‘solution’ will be the same–to de-legitimize normalcy and to normalize nothing.
Hmmm. Kelly might be better at knowing what that is. It sounds like exception becoming the rule, or possibly the tyrrany of the minority?
David R wrote: is the worst kind of special pleading.
That is closer. If I have time today I will look into this and get back to you with the results.
I look forward to it! :)
In fairness, not all feminists have claimed that. For example, research has documented differences in how men and women communicate ideas in the workplace. Some feminists have argued that this difference should be respected, and that it should not be assumed that a woman must adopt a typically male communication style in order to be taken seriously. I was reading last week about some fairly recent brain research done in (I think) Toronto. Apparently there really are differences in amounts of gray vs. white matter, and in how neural connections typically operate. If this research is validated and becomes generally… Read more »
I never said feminists claimed that. In fact, there is a fight right now between the militant feminists and the transgender community over this very issue.
I was just pointing out the inconsistencies in the narrative.
I know; it makes one’s head spin.
I know, right? Gender is nothing more than a social construct, but when someone decides they perceive themselves to be a certain gender, that is now written in stone and caused by biology. Go figure.
What we should not do is define goodness and make policy based on outliers. This same tactic is used by abortionists when they race to the rape cases in order to define policy and excuse abortion for convenience. Setting aside rape cases (for only a moment), let us agree that cutting up unborn babies for nothing more than convenience, is murder. We can clear that up quickly and then talk about outliers. The same should be done for hermaphrodites. If there is a young orphan in an orphanage, she may read in the Bible that she is to honor her… Read more »
I agree with Kateco (never thought I’d type those words) that policy should not be based on outliers. However, neither should we pretend that those outliers don’t exist. Doug’s theology of sex works just fine for someone who is cis and heterosexual; not so much for someone who is gay or trans. Not everyone fits neatly into one category or the other, and the solution of trying to force people into categories where they don’t fit doesn’t work.
Oh my goodness, it must be the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
“Doug’s theology of sex” is not Doug’s theology of sex. It is the theology of the Judge of the whole earth, and He shall do that which is just. Regardless of opinions held by those who deny the Creator, the practice of the alphabet labeled unnatural perversions (“…exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature…committing shameless acts…”) are nothing more or less than sin. There is no one who is “gay” or “trans”, because God, as the Creator, only created a specified subset of man. We know this because Jesus Christ said so: “Male and female he created… Read more »
And yet the intersex folks, whose genitalia fit neither category, do exist. Either they disprove Genesis, or we have to accept that that verse does not describe every single human.
Your first “either” is also non-existent, since as Jesus said, “Scripture cannot be broken”. Nothing “disproves” the Word of God, not now, not ever. That is what all of these arguments are about, and always have been: “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say,…” Also, the current zeitgeist that suggests that we are more wise than our predecessors in our understanding of the Word of God is nothing more than arrogance. Additionally, the exceptional does not invalidate the rule.… Read more »
This almost reads like you are saying that birth defects are sinful and shouldn’t be corrected.
“Someone born with any physical abnormality is, by definition, not normal.”
Think about cleft palates.
Then apply the rest of your quote here.
“This almost reads like you are saying that birth defects are sinful and shouldn’t be corrected.” The defect (and you are acknowledging, in your own words that it is “defective”) is not “sinful”, but it is the result of sin, just as all other diseases and conditions. The fall was all encompassing: “we know that the whole creation groans”. If, by the grace of God, we learn to develop an antibiotic to help cure an infection, it does not invalidate the premise that the infection is not the normative state. We have clear declarations from God that He created man… Read more »
Of course it’s a birth defect. What else? I even read where one of these affected children completely viewed herself as a girl, and her penis as a birth defect.
If you see the body as more important than the soul, as more essential to the person, then I can see how you would want this child to conform her mind to her body. Otherwise, it’s really hard to understand.
Continuing to state the exception invalidates nothing. We can only understand anything by examining it through the lens that God has provided to us, which is His Word.
Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
But this whole conversation is trying to determine what to do about certain rare edge cases, those very few people who claim to be transgender.
Urthman desperately needs to go read Wilson’s blog post titled “Their Plans for the other One Hundred”. It was posted just two days ago. What Urthman is missing is that even if the little despot wearing tall boots only wants to murder one person (just an outlier), the demand for the other one hundred to accept this murder does not make all of them outliers, their acceptance of murder becomes normative across the whole culture. The result is that 100 men have been castrated. Wilson has said elsewhere that it is a problem that there are acts of sexual sin… Read more »
Urthman’s claim is precisely false in the case where the one transgender dude wants to impose himself on the entire girl’s shower room, and his progressive buddies want that to be the policy for all government schools. Urthman needs to wake up and stop being so gullible.
The obvious retort is to ask why drugs and psychiatric care to make one’s self-perception line up with biological reality isn’t considered an equally reasonable option by the tranny-promoting crowd.
Because it mostly doesn’t work. Check out the history of reparative therapy for gays and lesbians.
What’s the suicide rate for post-op trannies?
I join Jane in requesting that the mod clean out the trolling of Stone Kirk.
Oh, and JP seems to be on a similar kick.
Don’t worry about the trolling. Just add Stone Kirk, and JP to the Scarlet Letter club. They aren’t interested in any discussions. They aren’t here to seek answers, just to tell you how wrong you, we, and I are.
I personally don’t usually respond (though JP set me up for some really funny stuff, so I guess I’m part of the problem), but I see others here getting sucked into their intentional nastiness.
SK appears to be happy to troll either side of any given issue. Other than the obsession with the Loving decision he’s just in it for the lolz.
Are you using “dude” and “chick” because those words hearken back to the days of the Stonewall riots, one of the seeds which has brought forth the current transgender controversy?
Semantic shift in the words “dude” and “chick” illustrates how society sees biological realities? Just throwing out a guess. I really want to know, though.
Ha! I am curious too.
My guess was to see how many people got mad about chick but not dude.
Oh, amen to this post! How refreshing.
I think Doug’s point about abusers who represent the system is important and needs to be acknowledged by the church more readily. Germany had to pull child abuse pamphlets a few years back. Some medical paediatric societies have claimed all corporal punishment is abuse. A clinical psychologist I spoke to said that a recognised treatment of paedophiles in prison is to show them adult pornography to masturbate to try and redirect their sexuality toward adults and away from children. She was a Christian and didn’t seem to be concerned about this as a method (I think it is wrong and… Read more »
In barely 50 years, our children’s schoolbooks have gone from Fun with Dick and Jane to Fun with Jane’s Dick.
Don’t embarrass the old ladies, please. That’s just a little bit too explicit for this oldster.
I’m just using hyperbole to make a figure of speech.
“Writing for New York Magazine, meanwhile, former New Republic writer Jonathan Chait is simply exasperated [http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/can-we-take-political-correctness-seriously-now.html#] :” [Loyola then pulls out some lines from Chait, of which I’m only using the first group he repeated:] The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism. The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive is not because they… Read more »
it is all good and dandy to say God made us male and female
but then do not go and work in a center that caters to a female desire to be male and make male and female interchangeable…
that is the root of the problem…
Christian working at a daycare…
what next
Christian working at a strip club?!