God&Neighbor

“Trans people are the latest conservative whipping girl, like African-Americans in the 1950s, or gay people in the 1990s and 2000s. Nothing is more dependable now than the passion the heartless display when trans people’s humanity is offered up for mockery.”

Tirades like this one signal a major identity crisis. The memo issued by the Trump administration, maligned as an attempt to roll back Obama-era progress in recognizing LGBTQQIAetc. citizens, merely seeks only to affirm what we’ve known throughout all of human history until relatively yesterday:

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth… The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The wound here is self-inflicted. This opinion writer in The New York Times has anchored his entire identity in a transgender ideology that stands in stark contrast to biological and genetic reality. When that ideology is challenged by an attempt to clarify reality, his entire existence is threatened. “About 1.4 million Americans who identify as transgender would find that identity eradicated by the federal government,” he claims. “I do not exist.”

Jennifer Finney Boylan does indeed exist, and Jennifer is a human being gifted with dignity and eternal value as an amazing reflection of the Creator. But Jennifer, born male, prefers to be identified as female, and that last part is all that matters to him.

Our true identity is determined by the one who made us, decidedly male and female. What’s more, human beings, as confused as they can become, are made in God’s image, immensely loved by a God who saw us worthy of rescue and redemption from our own sin through the sacrifice of His own Son.

That is objectively who we are, regardless of whatever paper-thin notion of identity we might claim for ourselves. When we put our identity in anything less, we lose ourselves when it eventually collapses.