Erasing Women
A few years ago, my friend and former Breakpoint co-host Eric Metaxas wrote a book called Seven Women. While researching for the book, Metaxas made a strategic decision: he would not write about women who were merely the first women to do something men had already done — even though these were the sorts of women people kept recommending he write about.
Instead, Metaxas wrote about women who improved the world because they were women, not in spite of that fact.
Since Seven Women was published in 2016, the rise of the transgender movement has further degraded our culture’s respect for femaleness. A few weeks ago, Twitter users began sharing stories of notable women in history and claiming, under the hashtag “TransAwarenessWeek2021,” that these women weren’t women at all.
“Queen Kristina of Sweden was born female, but wore male clothing,” one user wrote. “She did not marry and inherited the Swedish crown.” Thus, we are to believe, Kristina of Sweden was transgender.
The contrast between Metaxas’ celebration of women as women and the transgender movement’s aggressive decree that any woman who does something stereotypically male must therefore be a man is profound.
Until yesterday, culturally speaking, it was our bodies, not our minds or feelings — let alone what kind of clothes we wear — that determined a person’s sex. This should especially hold true for Christians, who know that God created His world good, and His image-bearers, very good. Transgender ideology tells lies, not only about the human body, but about the inherent goodness of sexual difference itself. That’s what was happening with this Twitter trend, too.
In the name of inclusivity, transgender ideology says there is a box inside which exists all the potential actions, attitudes, and appearances of a woman. Any woman, whether centuries ago or today, who does not fit neatly inside that box must be a man. This isn’t inclusivity. This is, in fact, the most exclusive possible vision of gender and sex.
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The Transgender Movement’s House of Cards Is Falling
Instead of fostering serious, objective scientific inquiry and heeding concerns from within their own ranks, the establishment continues to rely on WPATH’s guidelines for dealing with gender dysphoria. And contrary to sound inquiry, WPATH cherry-picked studies instead of conducting a systematic review of the best available evidence. As one member of the Endocrine Society recently wrote about its guidelines, “the society’s full-throated endorsement of gender-affirming care implied condemnation of anyone who holds differing views.” This cows doctors into silence and coerces them into providing dangerous interventions to children.
This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is holding its annual leadership conference at its headquarters in Itasca, Illinois. One issue that won’t be on the formal agenda but will be on the minds of many members is how to treat gender dysphoria in children. AAP, along with most of America’s medical establishment, endorses the approach of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH). This transgender advocacy group recommends that doctors irreversibly alter a child’s physical appearance to appear as a different gender through hormones and surgeries. But two transgender-identifying doctors in WPATH caution that teenage patients are receiving “sloppy care.” And there is dissent in AAP’s own ranks as to the legitimacy of this practice.
As many countries around the world turn to safer, non-invasive “watchful waiting” and psychotherapy to treat gender-confused kids instead of defaulting to hormones and surgeries, America is rapidly becoming an outlier. Now former patients (known as “detransitioners”), with the support of whistleblowers, are filing medical malpractice lawsuits and testifying in support of legislative limits on administering these experimental procedures to children. The architects of pediatric gender transition have built their arguments on flimsy evidence and the reputations of prestigious groups instead of objective, sound science. Their house of cards is starting to collapse.
Politicized Standards of Care
Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder that creates incongruence between one’s internal sense of gender and the reality of the sexed body. But unlike with anorexia, AAP’s recommended treatment does not focus on resolving the mind-body incongruence through counseling. Instead, doctors at “gender clinics” try to make a person’s body resemble their self-perception, disordered though it may be. Recently, 21 doctors from nine countries raised concerns that the American medical establishment has adopted “politicized” standards of care.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. Back in the twentieth century, another radical ideology captured the scientific and medical establishment. Eugenicists persuaded doctors to sterilize 70,000 Americans, who were disproportionately women and minorities. Medical schools taught eugenics. Wealthy tycoons funded the practice. And three presidents (Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson) lent their political support. The support for eugenics also existed on a systemic level: The American Neurological Association endorsed forced sterilization of people with schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, and Down syndrome, and the American Medical Association relied on the research of a wealthy eugenics advocate for its contraceptive testing. Eventually, the premise of eugenics, genetic inheritance, was debunked and discredited by scientific evidence. But for three decades, doctors participated in one of the greatest ethical scandals of the last century.
Legal Endorsement of Eugenics and Growing Skepticism
Sadly, courts also enabled doctors to use their licenses, credentials, and skills to carry out experiments in eugenics on their patients. In the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law that allowed an 18-year-old woman, Carrie Buck, to be sterilized against her will. After Buck reported that she became pregnant through rape, her foster parents committed her to an institution for the “feebleminded.” Doctors sought to sterilize Buck on the grounds that it would eliminate an unfavorable trait from the population. In an infamously cruel endorsement of eugenics, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., declared, “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”
The legal battle against eugenics reached a turning point when the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a prisoner’s human right to have children. In the 1942 case Skinner v. Oklahoma, the court rejected efforts to forcibly sterilize an inmate on the grounds that it violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. Advocates for the disabled finally brought an end to eugenics in America by persuading state legislatures to pass “white cane laws” to protect the disabled from discrimination. The wave that began in state legislatures culminated in Congress’s passing the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. These laws made involuntary sterilization effectively unlawful and culturally unthinkable.
But, in a tragic echo of this dark moment from America’s past, some U.S. courts are now greenlighting a course of irreversible treatment for confused, vulnerable youth that would potentially render them sterile, often with a raft of lifelong medical complications and mental health challenges.
Fortunately, a contingent of courageous doctors is working to stop history from repeating itself. These doctors have repeatedly tried to introduce resolutions in the AAP calling for systematic evidence reviews, the gold standard in medicine.
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From “Woe Is Me” to “I Belong Here”
The dividing barrier of sin has been torn down by the cross, and as a result, the children of God are welcome into His presence. And as such, we should come—even boldly—into that presence. This is what the Bible tells us to do.
What do we mean when we say God is “holy?” We are familiar with the word – we use it as an exclamation in phrases like, “Holy cow!” or “Holy moly!” or worse. So we use it frequently enough. We are familiar with the word; perhaps even too familiar. Perhaps we have become far too comfortable with a God who is holy.
The basic meaning of holy is one of separateness. Sacredness. Something that is not common or like other things. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself in a place where you clearly do not belong. Maybe it’s a fancy restaurant where you’re the only one wearing t-shirt and flip flops. Or maybe it’s in the middle of a very serious conversation you walked in on your parents having. Whatever the case, you get this sense all of a sudden that you are in a place that is too serious for you. And it’s uncomfortable.
The holiness of God reminds us just how separate and sacred God is. He is not meant to be treated trivially, and those who do so do so at their own risk. This is part of what the prophet Isaiah discovered.
If you take a look at Isaiah 6, for example, you find that beginning to understand holiness is the beginning of learning about God. “Holy” is the cry that even now is ringing in the heavens to describe God. That’s what Isaiah encountered as he was taken up in a vision and saw the Lord:
“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, and His robe filled the temple. Seraphim were standing above Him; each one has six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another:
‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; His glory fills the whole earth.’Isaiah 6:1-3
By calling God “holy” three times, the seraphim were pointing to the absolutely essential and foundational nature of God’s holiness. They didn’t chant “loving, loving, loving” or even “glorious, glorious, glorious.” They opted for holy, and therefore we must recognize that to understand a bit of who God is we must start here with this characteristic.
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Four Years Later, Do We Love Christ More?
If we have learned anything through the last four years, we ought to have learned how worthy Christ is of our love. We have seen so much more clearly the necessity of His body, the beauty of holiness, and the majesty of worship. Moreover, we have seen His unyielding faithfulness to us, sustaining us through an unprecedented period in our lives.
Recently a picture of the 2020 AWANA Grand Prix displayed on my tv screensaver. As I looked at the image and saw many familiar faces of people sitting close together and kids smiling and playing, I reflected on how this event was the last major event we had as a church before the world shut down in response to the COVID-19 virus. Little did we know during the Grand Prix how quickly and drastically everything was about to change.
In what seemed like an instant in March 2020, the entire world changed. Curfews were enacted. Many stores and restaurants were closed. All sporting events were canceled. Schools were shut down and eventually went online. Travel was halted. Gloves were initially recommended for grocery shopping to help slow the spread of the virus. Then those recommendations were eventually replaced with mask mandates. And, most shocking of all, countless churches closed their doors and sat nearly empty on Sunday mornings. Typically, only the preacher and the support staff needed to livestream a service were present, as worship went virtual for the majority of congregants.
Debates quickly began to swirl about whether the church should be open or closed due to the COVID-19 virus. Was the church essential, or could the functions of the church go virtual without losing the essence of what the church is all about? When mask mandates were imposed, the debate intensified: should churches require their congregations to mask to attend worship? Did church leaders even have the biblical authority to make such a requirement of God’s people? Churches divided sharply over these and other issues throughout the year, with the result that many people today attend a different church than the one they attended on February 29, 2020. Tragically, many people who went virtual with worship have never returned to church even four years later.
Throughout this tumultuous time, American Christians had the opportunity to reflect on the significance of the local church. The freedom to wake up on a Sunday morning and attend worship without government regulations affecting our gatherings was something we took for granted pre-COVID-19. In light of COVID-19 and the government mandates, we came to terms with the reality that this freedom is not guaranteed and is something that we should cherish.
Yet there are signs that the lessons learned during 2020 are starting to grow dim in our memories. With life returning mostly to normal, masks becoming less commonplace, and society running at full steam, we quickly forget how essential and precious the gathering of the saints is. We once again can begin to take for granted the centrality of worship. We easily might skip a Sunday because we had a long week at work and feel tired, or we allow other obligations to crowd out the central priority of corporate worship.
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