Where the Sidewalk Ends:
Why Real Trans-Activists Do Not Affirm It
by Anna Kitko, Ratio Christi Regional Director for Tennessee and South Carolina.
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Thoughtful Christianity means thinking Biblically and critically about some of the hottest issues of our day – issues like trans rights. Apologists must be well-versed in the topic to debate it. Evangelists need to understand the landscape of the culture. Students need to be prepared for socio-cultural questions of their faith.
Our great taboo
Every era has its taboos. One of the ways to identify them in our society is by paying attention to what issues, when someone has the audacity to question them, erupt immediately. The questioner is not even given a chance to speak or to tease out their thoughts and certainly to speak in public about such things would be inconceivable let alone in the privacy of one’s mind. Discussions on trans rights and transexuality in general are our great taboo.
Anyone who does so is thrown to the moral-posturing of whatever agenda is the loudest and the barrage of labels is placed upon you; bigot, phobic, you name it; your moral credibility in the eyes of your accusers and their audience crumbles to dust. Even more alarmingly, your career may come to end simply by having phrased yourself incorrectly. You have presumed yourself and your independence to have real value in order to speak yet you have done so against the sacrosanct politics of identity: the great taboo of our age. Best not to speak at all on the subject because you do, after all, value your ability to pay your bills don’t you?
Speedy Summary:
Should Christians affirm trans individuals? What happens if a trans person asks you to refer to their preferred pronoun? Research shows that transgender activism and affirmation is actually hurting trans people.
Defining Terms:
- Trans / Transgender: a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex. Also known as Transexual.
- Trans affirmation: a loose set of best practices for confirming the validity of a trans person’s self-identified gender preference. Includes offering support of the gender identity and avoiding offending the trans person by using the wrong pronouns among other things.
- Gender identity: someone’s core personal sense of their gender separate from their biological gender.
- Gender dysphoria: a psychological disorder where an individual feels strongly that their gender does not match their biology. Also known as Gender Identity Disorder.
- Autogynephilia: individuals who experience sexual arousal by the thought of themselves as the opposite sex.
- Dead naming / Deadnaming: using a trans person’s given name or birth pronoun vs. the name and pronoun that that they have chosen.
Looking at the history – context for the transgender discussion
You see this absurd phenomenon the most clearly when looking at historically Marxist nations. Here we have society legislating what thoughts, behavior, and speech ought to sound and look like in spite of those expectations being lies. Marxism preaches Utopia, but living under it is Hell. Yet, those who find themselves under the heavy hand of a Marxist regime are expected, and regularly practice, praising their society as a success. Because they must in order to try and maintain their lives. And they continue to do so until they can escape from their idealistically sadist captors.
Their Marxist society had regularly asked them to lie about the reality they were experiencing. To uphold talking points that ran contrary to the facts. And when a society demands that you accept lies, you become demoralized. “The truth will set you free” after all and that means that it’s corollary is also true, A lie will enslave you. And that’s the plan here: to incrementally remove your sense of being an individual or that you have dignity and worth apart from their agenda. If they can cripple you into obedience then they can carry on wielding whatever power they wish. And you will help them do it as the good little puppet you are to them.
This is why the truth is so exhilarating. You have no strings to hold you down. To make you fret or make you frown. It is a welcome relief to simply be able to make observations and tease through solving the real problems of our age. To risk the discovery of truth in spite of those who may feel uncomfortable with that reality.
A wolf in sheep’s clothing?
And it is in this context, loved ones, that I draw your attention to the Transgender discussion. A landmine of contradictory and ill-fated pseudo-medical jargon all packaged into a minority group. A minority group experiencing genuine suffering that is being leveraged and paraded by maniacal sycophants desiring to experiment on our little ones under the guise of liberating the discriminated. What we are dealing with in the Transgender discussion is mob cowardice presenting itself as virtue. And it’s doing serious damage to the Transgender community. Very serious damage.
Two extremes
In 2003, Psychologist and Professor at Northwestern University, Dr. J. Michael Bailey published his now famous book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender Bending and Transsexualism. In it, he outlines the evidence regarding Transgenderism; that it is actually two categories of people, 1) an innate and extreme form of homosexuality and 2) those who experience a fetish arousal pattern called autogynephilia. Since neither type were what the then Transgender Activists were promoting, they in turn, concocted a smear campaign in order to hush the study. The entire controversy was reported by Alice Dreger, a historian and bioethicist (herself an Intersex Activist), documenting this as well as other cases of harassment in her book, Galileo’s Middle Finger. It seemed, that when faced with medical evidence that does not confirm the Transgender movement agenda, they squash it before it reaches the masses.
Watchful waiting
Fast forward to 2008 when Dr. Kenneth Zucker, international authority on gender dysphoria in adolescents and children and lead psychologist at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, was chosen by the American Psychological Association Task Force on Gender Identity, Gender Variance, and Intersex Conditions to author the standards of care for individuals suffering under this disorder in the DSM-5. As chairman of the APA’s workgroup on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders, Dr. Zucker authored the standards of care for Transgender children and adolescents. This standard of care is referred to as “Watchful Waiting” as he noticed that left to their own devices, and under psycho-therapeutic counseling for patients experiencing both this disorder along with other neuro-psychological impairment, would grow out of the disorder over time. But as with the previous case, such “therapies” were seen as attempts by Zucker and his team as conversion therapy by Trans –Activists.
Activitst Agendas
Their agenda is to unilaterally espouse that once a child acts or plays in a way that suggests they might be Transgendered, that this is a permanent state regardless of their age. And so clients of Zucker began their smear campaign of his clinic in order to shut it down. And shut it down they did. The clinic closed in 2015 in spite of the fact that the CAMH has come out publicly with an apology to Zucker and his team, and the “clients” have retracted their false accusations, but still the clinic and the world’s leading expert on this subject remain entrenched in obsolescence.
More usual than you think
And these cases are not out of the norm. James Caspian at Bath Spa University in 2017, began documenting the cases of Transgender patients who returned to their doctors for reverse gender reassignment or what is known as “Detransitioning.” These are the scores of patients who regret or phase out of their Transgendered identity and wish to return to what they were before they transitioned. His proposal was accepted until the university considered the backlash they might receive from the trans community, to which the ethics subcommittee at Bath Spa admitted, “attacks on social media may not be confined to the researcher but may involve the university”. Yet again, Transgender Activist outcry becomes the driving force for hushing medical research.
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Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria
Even more startling just last year, Lisa Lippman of Brown University noticed a preponderance of what she outlines as “Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria” in adolescents who experience sexual trauma or bullying and who find solace in binge-watching transition stories online. She demonstrated that these cases appear to be a manufactured form of Gender Dysphoria by way of social contagion. Her work has been so buried that it took me significant time just to find a way for you, loved ones, to read her work.
Are you getting the picture here?
The problem of self-diagnosis
You see the problem with the Transgender diagnosis is that it is a self-diagnosis. There is no objective criteria to prove or disprove that someone is Transgender. The only thing medical professionals have to go off of is the patient’s word. Yet, very damaging and permanent hormone therapy is the Modus Operendi of gender clinics. And in increasing cases like Dr. Johanna Olson Kennedy’s study of Gender non-conforming children, we are watching children as young as 8 years old being given hormone blockers to halt puberty and girls as young as 13 being given radical mastectomies.
These are irreversible procedures on children where there is literally no way to confirm medically that these children are Transgendered – and at an age when they are still building snowmen and believing in the tooth fairy! How could a child this age possibly be able to consent to and understand the drastic level of consequences to such decisions? Or understand the burdens of these treatments? I am going to say this again, there is no objective diagnosis for Transgenderism. None. This has several implications:
- Gender clinics are allowing non-clinicians to diagnose themselves.
- Patients are in effect, practicing medicine without a license.
- Therefore, doctors like Olson-Kennedy are using children for their own ghastly personal research.
This is not medicine. This is monstrous.
True courage
This is why I am saying to you what I am here: real Transgender Activists are the ones who actually care about those experiencing Gender Dysphoria being able to seek the therapies they actually need. Real Transgender Activists are pointing to the actual science and research being done to promote the health of the Transgender community. Real Transgender Activists seek actual healing even when it is difficult or time-intensive in lieu of the naïvely simplistic affirmation that the modern Transgender agenda is promoting and manufacturing.
And just like in Marxist nations, the real heroes are the ones who stand up and call out the lies in spite of the social outcry. The real heroes are the ones who speak the truth in love for the sake of liberating the individual dignity of the rest of their fellow humans caught up in those lies. It is time to stop simply cow-towing to this disingenuous virtue-signaling and stand up for the Transgender Community honestly. To understand that children and adolescents in our day are seeking relief from the evils of the regular world. And to help them find solace and navigate the world in health and dignity.
“Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.”
*For more information or to discover the world of real Transgender Activism, I implore you to read the work of Walt Heyer and Hacsi Horvath*
Application
As apologists, we are to stand as real trans activists. Not merely capitulating to the demands of society because it will be easier, but clear about the realities of this mental illness. Transgender politics have become a sacred cow in our culture. To even start a discussion is to invite criticism. As Christians we are to remind ourselves and others that Christians do not bow before sacred cows, no matter the consequences. There are times when we must stand as an unmovable force of articulate obstinance. In the case of the general culture’s talking points on this issue, this is one of those times.
How are you presenting Christ?
However, there are times when we must let our loving actions go before such a radical stance. Apologetics evangelism to anyone suffering from mental illness is one of those times. Take great care that your presentation of Christianity is one where a transgendered individual first experiences our mercy, grief, service, and incessant prayer.
As real trans activists, we are to see members of the transgender community as the suffering individuals that they are. Apologetics evangelism looks very different for these individuals. Avoid engaging these individuals without sufficient pretext. An abrupt or direct discussion on the subject is often ineffective and at worst, negligent. Remember this as you engage on this subject matter. If you’re serious in reaching this community, familiarize yourself with the research and consider taking a counseling course. Know that you will have to reach out, form a relationship, and demonstrating through your demeanor the very same care that Jesus Christ has shown you in your brokenness.
Tenderness is key.
LEARN MORE ABOUT
Anna Kitko
Anna Kitko is a Christian Apologist who specializes in Cults and New Religions. Her writing ranges from solving biblical difficulties to training people how to avoid coercive persuasion from aberrant Bible-based groups. She is an avid reader of Christian history and loves to point out ancient heresies being re-packaged and re-distributed in our culture. In addition to being a Regional Director for RC, she personally directs the chapter at University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Anna can be contacted at annakitko@ratiochristi.org.
