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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Good Advice for Living a Countercultural Life
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Faith, Family, and Church Community See Jeff and Mariah through the Challenges of Aphasia
Written by The Mary A. Rackham Institute |
Tuesday, June 6, 2023
“One of his therapists made a very good synopsis, describing someone’s brain before aphasia being a neatly categorized file box but after a stroke, everything gets thrown about and put back in,” Mariah said. “The retrieval part of words that Jeff is trying to communicate is being thwarted.” “It wasn’t until towards the end of his therapy there that we realized, other than miraculous intervention, Jeff would never be able to preach again. This was very hard to wrap our minds around,” shared Mariah.Chapter 1
Jeff Windt enjoyed preaching and working with local families. The tools of his trade were words. For years, Jeff had been a pillar in his community. He was a leader at Second Presbyterian Church [PCA] in Greenville, South Carolina, where he served as the Assistant Minister of Youth and Families for four years. Leading youth groups and bringing people together had always been a passion of Jeff’s. He also has a family of his own, three young boys and a wife, Mariah.
Then, everything changed one night in June 2020. At 44 years old, Jeff had an acute ischemic stroke at home. Ischemic strokes are the most common type of stroke, accounting for nearly 90% of stroke incidents each year.
“I heard Jeff’s phone hit the bathroom floor with a smack,” said Mariah Windt, Jeff’s wife. “That was a bit alarming because it was a brand new phone he had purchased the day before.”
Mariah said Jeff had come home from work that evening and complained of having a headache, but that he seemed normal — for him. She asked him what had happened with the phone, repeating the question when he didn’t respond. He just shook his head and said ‘I don’t know,’” she recalled. “It was a little odd but I didn’t dwell on it.”A Night They’ll Never Forget, Even Though They Wish They Could
The family sat down and ate dinner together. During dinner, Jeff seemed to be acting normal. After dinner, while cleaning up, Mariah noticed Jeff pacing about the house. This again seemed odd to Mariah. It was at this point that she started keeping more of an eye on his behavior.
“I was trying not to overreact about the strangeness of his behavior but at the same time I just felt that something was wrong,” she said.
It was then that a friend called Jeff on the phone.
“They were on speaker phone, and I couldn’t really hear the conversation but I did notice that the other person was talking, but Jeff wasn’t really responding back,” she said. “The other person hung up, and when Jeff held his phone to hang up he dropped it in his lap and was having a hard time picking it back up. It was then I knew something was terribly wrong.”
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How Big Will His Kingdom Be?
Christ put His Church here so that through His Spirit we can bring about the restoration promised in the Holy Prophets. This means we must preach the Gospel so that more men will be saved, but it also means we must teach those men how to live like Christians and obey everything Jesus says (Matthew 28:18-20). And when we do that and begin discipling the peoples and nations, His restoration program will noticeably come.
How Big Will It Be?
When we contemplate the size of Jesus’ Kingdom, and by that, I mean His Kingdom here on earth, the Church, what are the expectations that come to mind? Will that Kingdom remain in the minority, ever and always in remnant status, never able to gain ascendancy among the competing worldviews and world religions that continually jockey for power in a fallen cosmos?
Or will His Kingdom grow? And by growth, to what degree are we speaking? Will the visible Church on earth grow to become ten percent of the world’s population? Will it grow to over twenty? How about fifty? Or if you are very optimistic, will it become the majority in some way or fashion? And if it is the majority, does that mean fifty-one percent? Or are we talking about something much grander?
These are the questions I would like us to consider today as we re-enter the book of Acts and examine the eschatological underpinnings of the early Church. But, to do that, we have to understand some essential concepts that Luke springles along the way.
The Briefest of Backgrounds
Series Background
If you have not been with us over the last eight weeks, in week 1, I sketched out the need for an eschatological series in the book of Acts. In week 2, we saw how Jesus’ end-time Kingdom was inaugurated in heaven at His ascension. In week 3, we watched as significant eschatological passages from the Old Testament were fulfilled at Pentecost, bringing that heavenly Kingdom down to earth. Then, in weeks 4, 5, 6, and 7, we examined Peter’s deeply eschatological sermon in Jerusalem, which explained the glorious Kingdom that believers were entering and foreshadowed the awful doom all those who reject Christ in Judah would soon endure.
Textual Background
After Peter’s sermon, about 3000 souls were added to Jesus’ Kingdom at Pentecost with each receiving the covenant sign of membership in Jesus’ Church (Acts 2:41). Early on, Christ began weaving His people together around apostolic teaching of the Word, fellowship and communion, and also prayer (Acts 2:42). The community was also overwhelmed by the miraculous outpouring of the Spirit, which was being manifest through the working of miracles (Acts 2:43). Just as Elisha was given a double miraculous portion from Elijah and did exactly twice the miracles as the former, so the Apostles were given a double portion by Christ, who empowered them to do more miracles in the first century that He did, as a part of their ministry to harken all Judah to repentance (John 14:12-14). And many did repent. But many others didn’t.
Along with the preaching of the Word, prayer, miracles, fellowship, and the administration of sacraments, many of the earliest Christians were selling their property and pooling their resources together to address the needs of the Church. This is not, as some foolish moderns would ascribe, an appeal to Christian socialism. This, instead, is the most unmistakable evidence that the early Church understood the warnings of Jesus and the sermon of Peter. Think about it: Jesus warned Peter and the Apostles that Jerusalem was going to be surrounded by armies (Luke 21:20), set on fire (Matthew 22:7), and the stench of their carcasses placed in heaping piles would attract the ravenous swarms of hungry vultures (Matthew 24:28). If you owned property in Jerusalem and this is what your resurrected Lord predicted was going to happen in that city, wouldn’t you sell too? And, if you loved your countrymen as the first-century Jewish Christians did, wouldn’t you want to pool your resources within the Church and use that money as a missions fund to reach them? By selling your home, you could live within the city with enough resources to be on mission for many years, and when all of the worst aspects of Jesus’ prophecy began happening, you could flee the city and escape its awful downfall without fear of losing your home. In fact, this is precisely what the first-century Christians did (Eusebius, “Ecclesiastical History” (Book III, Chapter 5).
For a time, the apostles were still going to the temple complex, preaching the Gospel there, teaching, and performing various miracles as a sign of Jesus’ Kingdom and Lordship. On one such occasion, Peter and John healed a man born lame just outside the temple at its gate (Acts 3:2-8). As Luke records it, the man began leaping and skipping for joy, entering the temple for the first time in His life Because the Son of righteousness had just healed Him through His anointed apostles (Acts 3:8). This is a clear fulfillment of both Isaiah and Malachi’s great prophecy, which says:
“But for you who fear My name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings, and you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall.”—Malachi 4:2
Then the lame will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute will shout for joy. For waters will break forth in the wilderness and streams in the Arabah.—Isaiah 35:6
Our Text Today
This brings us to our passage for today, where Peter begins his second eschatological sermon. Luke records:
“Men of Israel, why are you amazed at this, or why do you gaze at us, as if by our own power or piety we had made him walk? 13 The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His servant Jesus, the one whom you delivered and disowned in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release Him.14 But you disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, 15 but put to death the Prince of life, the one whom God raised from the dead, a fact to which we are witnesses. 16 And on the basis of faith in His name, it is the name of Jesus which has strengthened this man whom you see and know; and the faith which comes through Him has given him this perfect health in the presence of you all. 18 But the things which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that His Christ would suffer, He has thus fulfilled.—Acts 3:12-18
Eschatological Tidbits
Much could be discussed in the first part of this sermon. For instance, Peter does not attribute the power to heal this man to his personal piety or power but to the power and authority of the ascended and glorified Lord. He specifically points out His ascension unto glory because it was from that heavenly enthronement ceremony, that Christ sat down to rule, with His first act as King being to send His Spirit at Pentecost. By doing this, Christ made His power and His Kingdom available and accessible to the people of God on earth, which Peter is alluding to. This was an eschatological event.
Peter also refers to Jesus as the “Prince,” which is an apparent reference to the anointed Messiah of Daniel 9:25. In one of Daniel’s most Christocentric prophecies, Messiah (The Prince) would come and finish the transgressions of Jerusalem by destroying it, He would make an end to His people’s sin by atoning for their iniquity, and He would usher in His earthly Kingdom of everlasting righteousness (Daniel 9:24). By Peter calling Jesus the “Prince,” he is reminding us that Daniel 9 was being fulfilled in his day and hour.
In addition to the specific reference to Daniel 9 (especially of the Messiah being cut off in verse 26), Peter tells us that numerous other eschatological passages in the Old Testament were fulfilled in the suffering of Jesus. You may think of passages like Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, and Zechariah 12 as clear examples.
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