Culture Friday: Reversing course on “gender-affirming care”

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s the 14th day of July 2023.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s the 14th day of July 2023.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

KATIE McCOY: Great to be with you all.

BROWN: Katie, along with what I get to do here on The World And Everything In It, I also get to work with the WORLD Watch team. WORLD Watch is our video news program for students.

I bring this up because a couple of weeks ago we received feedback from a 15-year-old teenage girl, after a story we covered on abortion. And here’s part of what she wrote, “My favorite news stories have been where you incorporate God’s word, the news and education into one story. However, I have become increasingly upset by your stories on abortion.”

She continued with,“To quote your reporter from today’s story you said, “Easier access to kill more babies.” With that sentence alone you can trigger women that have chosen to have abortions. You seem to be targeting people that are pro-choice, without looking at their point of view and telling the children that you are supposed to be educating that people are simply killing babies, when the issue is much broader and much more complicated. “

Towards the end she wrote, “I encourage you to look more into the Christian view of the other side and report both instead of looking at it in a slanted or biased way.”

How would you respond, Katie, to this teenage girl?

McCOY: I wish I could talk to this young woman, it sounds like she's very aware of the factors that might cause a woman to get an abortion and that she really cares for the women who have them. But you know, it's because we care for the women who either have had abortions or are vulnerable to getting one that we need to be very clear about what abortion entails and just how damaging it often is to the women who receive them. Ephesians 4 tells us we need to speak the truth in love, and that means we need both compassion and conviction. Now, our world tells us that those two things are incongruent, that compassion requires that we don't have or express convictions, and we do that in the name of tolerance. And we can and we should recognize the factors that influence many young women towards getting abortions. But you know, recognizing those vulnerabilities doesn't change whether abortion itself is right or wrong. If anything, it helps us understand and help young women who are considering an abortion to choose life. In other words, we express both compassion and conviction, both truth and love. And one last thing, when she talks about the Christian view, sometimes people don't realize the historic Christian view of abortion has always been to condemn abortion as wrong and to support women who are perhaps in the middle of a crisis or faced with an unplanned pregnancy to help them choose life. In fact, it's one of the reasons that so many women in the early church, in the first few centuries of the church, flocked to Christianity, because abortion was happening, and it was so very damaging to the women who received them. So historically, the church, the people of God, the witnesses of Christ have been pro-life and anti-abortion.

BROWN: Katie, with your new book out now, To Be A Woman, I would imagine you are watching closely what’s happening in Tennessee. Last weekend, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld that state’s ban on transgender treatment for children. Chief Judge Jeff Sutton wrote the opinion.

Is that kind of ruling an anomaly or are you hopeful for more decisions like that to come?

McCOY: It's far from an anomaly. Now Tennessee is joining not only some other states, but several countries that are reversing course and preventing so-called gender affirming care among children, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, these are countries that have been on the cutting edge of what we would call progressive gender affirming care for teens and they are recognizing that these procedures are not helping teen mental health, you know, in our own country, something that gets buried, or at least it demonstrates just how bias most of our media is, is that our own FDA, Food and Drug Administration released a report warning about puberty blockers and some of the side effects are absolutely horrific, like brain swelling, vision disturbance, damage to a cranial nerve. There was a whistleblower in St. Louis just a few months ago who talked about the effects of cross-sex hormones, testosterone to a biological female, how it caused uncontrollable bleeding as a result of that testosterone, and its effect on her male genitalia, because her body was not meant to have foreign testosterone injections. And it's important to note, these are not value-based decisions. These are not religiously driven objections, they're just looking at the data, does so-called gender affirming care, help, or hurt adolescent and children, mental health, those who are gender-dysphoric, or transgender. And you know, Myrna, every time I see data about puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, and the damage that it causes, I think back to just a few years ago, when an over-the-counter-drug for heartburn was cleared from the shelves, you might remember that it was something called, oh, I don't know the exact name but it was Zantac, and you could get Zantac at any drugstore, and grocery store in the country. Well, they found that it could cause a risk of cancer. And within weeks, you saw this drug, this medication was completely cleared out. You know, if this were any other issue other than gender identity and sexual orientation, I think we would see people completely pull out the stops, stop it across the board, there would be congressional hearings, this would be on nightly news. This would be a national emergency, and something worthy of intervention. It certainly deserves that. And that's why I'm so glad Tennessee has joined states like Texas and Florida, in banning these procedures along with other countries that are doing that as well.

REICHARD: Speaking of your book To Be a Woman, which I am reading! Clarity of thought is so important. Hence my question: you write of the “self-contradicting pattern of cultural rhetoric” around gender identity. What are some examples of this?

McCOY: It's a great question. First, thanks for reading, and second, one example of that self-contradicting pattern, I saw it online just this week, someone was claiming that they had identified a genetic cause or a brain-based reason for trans identity. Now, first of all, scientists have not located that and then even if they have, they couldn't necessarily say whether it is originating in the brain or the result of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the way God designed our brains to create new neural pathways whenever we learn or do something new. Your beliefs, your thought patterns, and then especially your actions are all creating new neural pathways or reinforcing existing ones. So all of this talk about whether gender identity or sexual orientation is brain-based, is a really difficult thing to nail down because even if we woke up tomorrow, and found that there was some type of cellular commonality among trans identified people, we wouldn't be able to say which came first, the brain or the neuroplasticity, affecting the brain. But set that aside, one of the most self-refuting things about that is this: If the whole point of trans identity says that my body has nothing to do with my gender, then why do you need a brain-based reason? Doesn't that completely self-refute the entire claim of gender ideology? It does, but I think it even kind of betrays something else. It it shows that impulse that need that hidden instinct that even people may not want to acknowledge. It's one of the ways that Romans one says we try to suppress the truth that our physical world tells us something our biological self is revelatory of who we truly are. So when you see people trying to say there's a brain-based reason for trans identity, not only is it self-refuting, but they're kind of telling on themselves, they're demonstrating that they kind of instinctively know that the body and gender should align.

REICHARD: And how is it that so many people refuse to acknowledge what is evident?

McCOY: So the reason this area of life seems to be put into another category, goes back to a lot of the ideas that we have believed in our culture about sex and gender. So sexual orientation and gender identity or SOGI is synonymous with the fullness of our identity in our culture, today. It is the most important thing about you. It is the defining aspect of who you are. And so because of that, we are not only seeing so many people define themselves according to their SOGI, their sexual orientation or gender identity, but we also see this push to plant these ideas in the minds of children, whether through education or entertainment. I saw something perhaps you did too, of a father his his video went viral, where he was, he was speaking with such outrage over how his child's pediatrician sat down with his son, his nine year old son, and the first question was to ask him whether he was a boy or a girl or non-binary. See, these are things that are not only agendas, but they are agendas informed by philosophical and political ideas that we have been ingesting for years. And we're seeing the fruition of those things. So, much of it goes back to this idea that the core of who we truly are, is defined by our SOGI, not that we are created in God's image, not our relationships even to other people, but our psychologized self-perception.

BROWN: All right. Katie McCoy is director of womens’ ministry at Texas Baptists and author of To Be a Woman. Katie, thank you!

McCOY: Always great to be with you both.

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