Gender Transition for Minors: What Does the Research Say?
Even while many nations pump the brakes on radical transgender ideology and healthcare practices, Americans at both the state and federal level continue to push culture-wide affirmation, social transition of minors, hormone therapies, and harmful surgeries. Advocates frequently claim that so-called and misnamed “gender-affirming” treatments—including surgery—“save lives,” that gender dysphoria is a permanent condition even among minors, and that regret by those who undergo such treatments are minimal or non-existent.
Increasingly, research suggests otherwise. Until recently, activists were able to hide behind a very limited number of studies, some of which even seemed to confirm what those activists wanted to hear. No more. With a 900% increase in young people claiming gender dysphoria, the amount of data in recent years has sharply increased.
The data is overwhelming. Contrary to what is consistently filling our newsfeeds, there is a disturbing lack of evidence that intervening in a child’s gender development produces beneficial results of any kind. More than that, many studies are showing a strong potential for lasting harm.
Last month, Dr. Stan Weed with the Institute for Research and Evaluation produced an invaluable paper on the subject, entitled “Transgender Research: Five Things Every Parent and Policy-Maker Should Know.” In it, Weed summarizes dozens of studies from around the world on five of the most hotly debated transgender talking points. For example, about the benefits and harms of cross-sex medical treatment for minors, the highly respected British Medical Journal concluded:
Puberty blockers are being used in the context of profound scientific ignorance…There are a large number of unanswered questions that include the age at start, reversibility; adverse events, long term effects on mental health, quality of life, bone mineral density, osteoporosis in later life and cognition…The current evidence base does not support informed decision making and safe practice in children.
On whether medical transition improves rates of suicidal ideation for trans-identifying youth, one group of researchers observed:
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How Jesus Satisfies Our Desire for Authentic Beauty
The resurrection points to the importance of our bodies. Gnosticism claims the body is bad, but Scripture says our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (6:19). We glorify God by taking care of our bodies, but we can go too far if we seek to glorify them now rather than waiting for God to do this in eternity. One day, we’ll receive glorified bodies and be presented without spot or wrinkle (15:5–53; Eph. 5:27). But even better than this, we’ll gaze on our beautiful Savior.
The beauty industry is rapidly changing and growing, and Gen Zers and millennials are leading the way. According to Revieve, a beauty and wellness platform, “Gen Z is changing the face of beauty.” In their eyes, beauty is defined by “freedom of individuality, authenticity, and diversity.” It’s about being yourself but also about being your best self.
Gen Zers seek brands that support their values and complement their identity, so they look to the wellspring of all wisdom—YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
This fount provides a never-ending supply of make-up tutorials, beauty hacks, and product reviews. According to a 2023 survey, millennials spend an average of $2,670 per year on beauty products, followed by Gen Zers at $2,048; and 64–67 percent say it’s because of social media’s influence.
As a millennial, I’m aware of this influence, yet I still willingly give in. When I don’t like what I see in the mirror, a voice whispers, “We can change that.” An article here. A TikTok tutorial there. Another order on Amazon. But in the end, I’m left feeling empty. And the pattern repeats.
Our longing for “authentic” beauty drives us to a cacophony of voices that promise solutions but lead to dissatisfaction. Trends change. Fads fade. Anything “authentic” is just another counterfeit.
Then where are we to look?
Look to Christ’s Beauty
What we find in God’s Word turns our culture’s definition of beauty upside down through the life and death of God’s Son. We were designed to treasure beauty; we just look for it in the wrong places. Here are four reasons we’re to look to Jesus, not social media, to satisfy our desire for authentic beauty.
1. Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory.
When Moses asked to see God’s glory, God told him no one could see his face and live (Ex. 33:20). But he’d be willing to show Moses his back. As he passed by Moses, God spoke these words:
The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation. (34:6–7)
When Moses came down from the mountain, his face was shining. To see God’s glory, to gaze on his beauty, is to know his character and be in his presence. This is why David says his one request is to gaze on the beauty of the Lord (Ps. 27:4). He knows God as the merciful and majestic King over all creation and desires to behold him by worshiping him in the temple.
Some caught glimpses of his glory, but no one had ever seen God (John 1:18)—until Jesus came.
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Hope for a World In Ruins
When the light of Scripture searches our hearts, we’re exposed as guilty. We’ve fallen short of the glory of God. We sin because we are sinners, and we deserve to reap the judgment in the darkness we love. But, grace upon grace, light shines into the world. There is hope in the ruins because Christ has entered the ruins. And where Christ is, there is light.
I don’t presume to know what your year has been like. But this I know: life is not easy. Every year has its hardships, its losses, its unmet expectations. In a fallen world filled with sinners, some manner of difficulty is not only reasonable, it is part of our day-to-day existence.
Don’t you see how every part of our world is in need of rescue? There’s nothing the curse of sin hasn’t touched. There’s no one unaffected by it. Broken families are everywhere. Loneliness abounds. Medical maladies seem overwhelming, and ultimately there is no medicine to stop death. Political and social tensions run hot and, especially in the United States, there’s pent-up anger that seeks outlets of every sort.
The only hope for a world in ruins is the redeemer of sinners. John tells us in the Fourth Gospel, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). That’s what we need—light that the darkness can’t overcome. This light is Jesus. He is the “true light, which gives light to everyone” (1:9).
What John has in mind is the incarnation of the Son of God. Jesus is the light, and the incarnation is how he came into the world.
Jesus shines in the world which was made through him (John 1:10). He was before all things, and he entered the world to redeem all things. What we need for the darkness is redeeming light, yet no one deserves this light.
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Augustine Against Gnosticism
The western world’s gnostic separation of the human person into a good soul and a bad body has manifested itself in the postmodern transgender movement. This radical, ultimately anti-humanistic form of dualism drives an arbitrary wedge between a person’s physical, biological sex and their so-called gender. To honor their “true” or “authentic” internal sense of gender, no matter how nebulous or confused it may be, many people today, an alarming number of them children, will hire surgeons to mutilate their body so as to bring it into conformity with their “soul.”
Most American Christians are aware that it is an ancient heresy to say that Jesus was man but not God (Arianism); less are aware that there were just as many heretics who promoted the opposite error: that Jesus was God but not man (Gnosticism). The reason Gnostics denied that God became fully man in the incarnation is that they held a low view of matter in general and flesh in particular. For Gnostics, matter and flesh were not products of a good creation that fell; the creation of matter and flesh was itself the fall.
Although there are very few full-blown Gnostics in the church today, many Americans hold to a soft dualism that sees the soul as good and the body as bad. It is because of that theological misunderstanding that many Christians imagine that when we die, we become angels: that is, pure souls. Although Christians affirm in both the Apostles and Nicene Creeds their belief in the resurrection of the body, a suspicion of the flesh persists.
Thankfully, this gnostic, anti-biblical demonization of the flesh was dealt a decisive blow 1600 years ago in Book XIV, chapter 3 of The City of God. Although Virgil seemed to teach, in Aeneid 6, that the body weighs down the soul, Augustine insists that the Christian
faith teaches something very different. For the corruption of the body, which is a burden to the soul, is not the cause but the punishment of Adam’s first sin. Moreover, it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful; on the contrary, it was the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible. Though some incitements to vice and vicious desires are attributable to the corruption of the flesh, nevertheless, we should not ascribe to the flesh all the evils of a wicked life. Else, we free the Devil from all such passions, since he has no flesh. It is true that the Devil cannot be said to be addicted to debauchery, drunkenness, or any others of the vices which pertain to bodily pleasure—much as he secretly prompts and provokes us to such sins—but he is most certainly filled with pride and envy. It is because these passions so possessed the Devil that he is doomed to eternal punishment in the prison of the gloomy air.
If flesh were the seat of evil, then none of the angels could have fallen. There are sins that rise up from the flesh, but they tend to be less wicked and corrupting than pride and envy, which rise up from the soul (see Mark 7:14-23). Indeed, it is more often the soul that leads the body astray than vice versa.
No, Augustine explains in chapter 4, “the animal man is not one thing and the carnal another, but both are one and the same, namely, man living according to man.” In fact, he continues in chapter 5, it is wrong “to blame our sins and defects on the nature of the flesh, for this is to disparage the Creator. The flesh, in its own kind and order, is good. But what is not good is to abandon the Goodness of the Creator in pursuit of some created good, whether by living deliberately according to the flesh, or according to the soul, or according to the entire man, which is made up of soul and flesh and which is the reason why either ‘soul’ alone or ‘flesh’ alone can mean a man.”
Those who are aware that St. Augustine played the central role in formulating the doctrine of original sin might be surprised to find Augustine here defending the body from its detractors. To be fair, Augustine, who went through a gnostic (Manichean) phase before embracing Christianity and whose pre-conversion years were marked by sexual promiscuity found it necessary to adopt a celibate lifestyle for himself and did sometimes speak in a disparaging manner of the flesh. Still, nowhere in his writings does he equate original sin with sex, nor does he treat the body as inherently fallen. Just as original sin tainted body and soul alike, so Christ’s atoning work on the cross restored body and soul alike.
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