Navigating Transgender Issues

And we are continuing our discussion on gender dysphoria, and understanding and ministering to people who are of mixed gender background; and my guests are Tim Yoder who is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology here at Dallas Seminary, and teaches our course on ethics, and Gary Barnes, who is Professor of Counseling here at Dallas Seminary, has his own family practice as well, and this is really part two.

The earlier portion, we examined kind of the perspective from someone who walks into a situation and meets someone who comes out of this background, and just how to minister to them.

Today, we’re gonna focus on the person, him or herself in terms of how – what they are going through, and how to understand the experience and the tensions of that experience.

And I wanna begin, Tim, with you, and that is to ask before we talk about a specific issue, it’s probably worth it to take a step back and frame, and ask, you know, what is it that’s asked of Christians in general as they’re interacting with people, particularly in a situation where the initial sense might be there’s something different going on here, this person’s coming from a very different place than I am.

In ethics broadly most of the great ethicists focus on things like law or duty, or maybe virtue or pleasure in the case of utilitarians, and those all have their place and are interesting.

But one of the things that I’ve observed that’s interesting about the Christian perspective is that Christian ethics brings the idea of love into the picture.

Jesus tells us to love the Lord, our God, with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and then to love our neighbors as ourselves, and it seems to me that those represent the two foundational commitments or principles of Christian ethics.

We have to love God. There is this human to God relationship that’s necessary. I think that’s – I think that refers to salvation, the gift that we receive through Jesus’ sacrifice, and then secondly, we need to love each other and love means more than just judging clearly or holding people to a standard, although I think that those things are – have their place but love involves mercy, love involves forgiveness, love involves sacrifice, and so that’s really in many ways our guiding principle.

The person of Jesus, one more point, the person of Jesus, he was a great ethicist and he laid out tremendous standards for ethical behavior, but he also interacted with people in a gracious and loving, and merciful way.

And when we look at Jesus we don’t see him as only someone who says do this and don’t do this but also someone who was gracious to sinners and showed love and mercy to individuals, and I think we have to find a way to mirror that.

I mean it’s a priority and it really is a significant – it is the most significant orienter, because our relationships are important, and scripture, the fruit of the spirit is primarily relational. There are all these hints in scripture —

So I have my theology but then I have my operational theology, and it’s my operational theology that’s gonna be in action, in a relational exchange.

Transgenderism, gender dysphoria, and then whatever else should go in that slot.

So let me start with probably the one that is most popularly used but may have issues, problematic issues tied to it, the term, transgenderism. What’s the issue there?

So then when you talk about it being socially, a social element to them, some practices that are defined particularly as male or female are culturally defined as opposed to being essential to being male or female.

A simple example, we tend to equate nurturing with something that’s female as opposed to being male, but actually all people nurture in one way or another.

So what these numbers indicate is I guess the – is this the big box, if I can say it that way, in that one of the questions that I think is emerging as we talk more about these kinds of situations is that people are pulled into these conversations who may not have, for example, the biological ambiguities that would be a clear evidence of a mix, and so how does that fit into this equation, that reality?

The world itself and how we feel about it, and so we’re going to experience these anatomical incongruencies, the intersex condition. That’s a part of the fall.

We’re going to have trials that are present to us and that’s part of what it means to live in a fallen world, and so part of our theology has to be that we have to be ready and expect those sorts of things.

It’s you know, there are no perfect people. There’s – we are save Jesus and we are – so we’re gonna expect these sorts of things, and we have to be prepared to deal with them.

And that is one of the things that we’re after in actually talking about this in this way is before you can engage well, and even make an assessment about how you’re interacting with people, you’ve gotta kind of understand exactly what it is that you are dealing with and the way – and this brings us back to the societal question.

The way in which society tends to handle this area doesn’t always necessarily lead to understanding about what is actually going on, particularly for the person who is – finds themselves in this condition.

You know, we’re slowly working our way in the root canal, but anyway, but it’s actually pretty important to go through this a step at a time, and to think through it almost a level at a time.

You say that there are lenses, through which we should look at this —

What we really are dealing with is a kind of a spectrum of things, and once you put the social, cultural things as a layer on top of whatever the raw biology is, you’ve actually – you actually don’t have two boxes anymore?

There’s things that don’t match up. There’s inconsistencies. There’s incongruencies.

And they require – I’m gonna say a certain kind of sensitive care that generally most of us aren’t equipped to – in one sense aren’t equipped to give because we just it’s – the whole thing about it is awkward and kind of off-kilter.

In other words, it’s a sense of I don’t wanna fight, I don’t think anyone should be fighting over this and so there’s just — there’s this pushback of saying I’m not – I don’t wanna engage this, which actually is exactly what it portrays itself to be.

It’s a form of disengagement that actually in the end doesn’t help you very much, because you don’t make the effort to understand, or to move into the space, or to get some sense of what’s actually going on and what might – what might be most helpful.

Tolerance is actually always an incomplete perspective, because we never really can reach the place where we completely tolerate everything. There’s always got to be limits to tolerance.

We never – we really, when you think about it, there are things that we will never tolerate. We shouldn’t, right, torturing babies, right.

So if we’re gonna say that tolerance is our framework, we have to recognize that tolerance is always limited, and therefore, it’s not really in a sense strong enough to hold how we should really think about the world. That’s why we go to back to the idea of —

One of the things tolerance does is it’s such a laissez-faire attitude towards life that it allows the brokenness to continue as brokenness without being examined.

Well, you know, we ought to celebrate the whole variety of what’s there, but if you step in, in the midst of that variety and say well, I’m not sure; there’s something we ought to think about here, all of the sudden, you’re shoved off to the side and marginalized.

And so there aren’t gonna be always, for lack of a better description, cookie cutter answer to how they’re gonna be dealt with.

I mean this comes out of the book of Job and really throughout the scriptures but certain – just because we live in a fallen world, right, we find ourselves in situations which are a trial, like Job’s, right.

Those things were not because he sinned, but they were a trial that he – and then how would he respond in that trial, and I think that’s what we’re seeing here.

When people have gender dysphoria, that itself is not a sinful choice on their part. It’s a trial that they undergo. Now how are they going to deal with that?

There are sinful choices they could make because they’re in that trial, and there are righteous choices they could make when they’re in the trial, but the situation itself is a part of our fallen world but it’s not a sin choice, itself.

And we see that all, in all kinds of situations when we suffer physical disabilities, you know, blindness or deafness, or a handicap. How are we gonna act because of that? I mean we can become bitter and get drunk and lash out.

Those would be sinful responses, or we can bear up under it and develop maturity and character, and that would be a more appropriate response; and so the condition itself is a trial. How we respond to it is really how we should be evaluated from an ethical perspective.

People who are legitimately in the anomaly category, and then there are people who are drawn to the anomaly, if I can make that distinction.

We may have people who may not be genuinely in the anomaly, but you don’t help yourself by denying the anomaly at the start.

We’re not going to hold rigidly to this but what we’re gonna do is be in process with one another in this.

You might allow for some changes that aren’t radical but kinda help in the process, while we’re in this watchful, waiting time period, but you’re trying to go with the least radical adjustments possible as long as you can.

There’s no doubt this is – you know the irony of this is of course 15 years ago, you probably wouldn’t have talked about this at all.

And particularly institutions like churches that face this situation within their community and it’s not – it’s not only – it’s arising for a reason, need help. So I wanna thank you all for helping us begin to think through this.

I wanna thank you for joining us on The Table. We hope this has been helpful and if you have topics that you would like for us to consider, you can contact us at [email protected] and we will take them under consideration. We are – desire to be responsive to you as an audience and we thank you for being a part of The Table, and hope you will join us again soon.