Marvin Olasky: How to regard individuals with gender dysphoria

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, June 5th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from member-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. As the culture slips further from its Biblical mooring, questions about gender identity, transgender rights, and even matters of basic biology all seem up for grabs.

REICHARD: In a 2016 column for WORLD Magazine, Editor in Chief Marvin Olasky looked for scriptural wisdom to guide us in loving our gender dysphoric neighbors—and standing firm against those who want to turn them into mascots.

EICHER: Marvin’s piece appeared in his recent book of columns called Worldviews. And we asked him to record this for broadcast today.

MARVIN OLASKY, EDITOR IN CHIEF: To some conservatives, transgendered people are perverts. To some liberals they are nature’s nobility. Neither is a Christian perspective.

Genesis 1-27 states, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Chapter 2 ends this way: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”

That’s the end of the Bible, right?

Well, not exactly. Chapter 3 describes the Fall and its terrible consequences: “Cursed is the ground . . . pain . . . sweat. . . . You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Physical disease. Psychological disease. Things are no longer right.

We need to keep in mind that we are all made in God’s image, and, we are all sinners. For a small number of humans, an after-effect of Genesis 3 is gender dysphoria, a profound state of depression about one’s God-given sex, either male or female.

The widely visited website Reddit has a forum for transgendered people. It’s full of sad comments. Quote: “I’ve been crying all morning.. . . I want to die . . . why can’t I just disappear?”

Or this: “I want to look like a girl. I never could. . . My feet are size 12 . . . People say ‘suicide is never the answer’, but I need to know WHY it’s not the answer.”

We are all broken in some way. Should those of us who aren’t broken in this particular way be trans-despising or trans-phobic? No!

Our battle is not with depressed transgenders but with those who make them “mascots.” That’s a term Thomas Sowell used to describe liberals who put poor people on display. He wrote, “The problem with being a mascot is that you are a symbol of someone else’s significance or virtue. The actual well-being of a mascot is not the point.”

That’s true of those who want to turn transgendered individuals into mascots to further an activist agenda. And some trans people get it. One wrote on Reddit: “Most trans people just want to live. . . and not turn everything into a battle.”

Activists building careers, anguished and confused transgenders, and all of us, need Christ. We should pray that those in anguish learn about the mercy Christ offers. Sure, trans activists want to tell Christians, “We win, you lose.” But we do not further the cause of Christ merely by shouting back, in essence, “No! You lose, we win.”

For WORLD Radio, I’m Marvin Olasky.

(Associated Press/Photo by Elaine Thompson) Students hold stickers for a new gender neutral bathroom as members of the cheer squad applaud during a ceremonial opening for the restroom at Nathan Hale High School in Seattle.

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