Why transgenderism is wrong

Lopez identifies as a conservative, but he has been a visible ally of the LGBTQ community in the past. The organization said it reached out to "Extra" and that the program stated its showrunners do not share the views Lopez articulated on "The Candace Owens Show" and will make that clear on Wednesday night's show. Medical and psychological experts, and parents of children who are transgender, have long discredited the ideas that MarioLopezExtra shared.

The real dangerous action is when someone with a public platform uses bad science to speak against a vulnerable group of children. Prior to the Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act of , bone marrow cancer was not legally considered a disability.

Does that mean it should not have been counted as a disability? And today, intelligent life forms like octopuses are considered food. But this hardly settles whether octopuses should be considered food. Neither are they guaranteed to be legitimate: in many cases, commonly accepted rules for social classification have been deeply unjust.

Similarly, we think that there is room to question whether currently accepted rules about who counts as women or as Black ought to be changed in the interests of gender or racial justice. The malleability of gender and race classifications suggests to us that the typical conversations about transgender identities and Black transracial identities are the wrong conversations.

Maybe you get off our boat here. We can change which animals are food as we learn more about different life forms and their cognitive and affective capacities, and we similarly might change which people are eligible voters given commitments such as gender, race, age, or immigration justice.

In philosophy, this view is called essentialism. It is the idea that the rules for gender and race classification are grounded in eternal truths—rules that we can only discover, not revise, and therefore rules that we cannot question. Even those who think about gender or racial categories as social constructions frequently nosedive into essentialist logic as soon as transgender or transracial identities arise: while holding that gender and race categories are human inventions, they simultaneously appeal to rules for gender and race classification as if these rules forever settle the question of who ought to count as a woman or as Black.

But essentialism fares poorly against the historical record. Gender essentialists typically insist that there is a single, fixed trait—biological sex—that always has and will determine gender. But not only have rules for gender classification substantially changed over time, binary categories of biological sex i. And yet, as medical anthropologist Katrina Karkazis pointed out in The Lancet last year, the facile search for a definitive trait of biological sex continues:.

Despite this dead end, commitment to sex essentialism persists. This is just because, for any candidate biological trait e. As such, there is growing support for the idea that gender classification is not simply a matter of biology, but rather is the result of complex and ever-shifting interactions between culture and biology.

Racial classification displays similar malleability. Just consider the history of the U. Even those who think about gender or racial categories as social constructions frequently nosedive into essentialist logic as soon as transgender or transracial identities arise. Anyone who took the census this year knows that things have changed. In sum, essentialism flies in the face of evidence that both gender and race classifications are changeable and challengeable, not fixed and inevitable.

Someone deeply committed to essentialism will be unflappable in the face of this evidence. For devout essentialists, essentialism is unfalsifiable —no amount of evidence will convince them to give it up. The fact that various cultures and communities differ in gender and race classifications will not deter the essentialist, who will insist that gender and race have hidden essences—even if essences that we have yet to discover.

While we cannot offer a full response here, we think the primary reason to accept essentialism would be an explanatory reason. If social and historical facts about the imposition of gendered and racial signification on various bodies were unable to explain boundaries of gender and race classification, or physical, psychological, or behavioral inferences based on those classifications, then perhaps there would be a need to appeal to hidden essences. But we are convinced by gender and race scholarship that no such appeal is needed; we can explain all that we need to explain about gender and race without hidden essences.

Let us take stock. It is not hard to see why these conversations so often take this sort of question as the central one: it is supposed to have an easy and objective answer, one that resolves the dispute for us. But in fact, these ontological questions do not have fixed and natural answers. As a result, we think a far more interesting and important question is should we change the rules for gender classification? In particular, should rules for gender classification accommodate transgender persons like Jenner—that is, count someone as a woman just because they self-identify as a woman?

And should the rules for race classification be altered to accommodate people like Diallo and Krug—that is, to count someone as Black just because they self-identify as Black? Essentialism flies in the face of evidence that both gender and race classifications are changeable and challengeable, not fixed and inevitable. Asking these questions helps to set the conversation in a more productive direction. Several U. Similar research into the psychological causes of transgender identity continues even today.

A physician at Brown University recently conducted an anonymous survey of respondents recruited via Web sites for parents who believe peer pressure and online influences have made their children transgender. The survey essentially asked the parents if they thought the Internet made their children trans , and the parents, not surprisingly, given that they were visiting Web sites about this idea, answered yes.

Conservative media latched onto the study, suggesting that transgender children are really just confused kids tricked into being transgender after reading something on Reddit. The implication is that we need to take these kids away from supportive online LGBTQ communities so that they can be made cisgender again. Reading through this literature, we need to ask ourselves some questions: What is the reason for this research?

What does it hope to accomplish? The tireless search reveals a thinly veiled dogma: that being transgender is a pathology to be fixed. This belief not only harms transgender people but also undermines good science. What good science shows us is that when we accept transgender people, they thrive. Maybe Stoller was right when he noted that those children were exceptional.

The answer to this question will be different depending on the tradition of the person asking. For example, for some Christians, affirming or not affirming transgender and non-binary people is connected to salvation and eternity. Whatever is at stake for the person asking, it is important to note the role of humility, grace and having a consistent standard to apply in discerning what is true of God. A quick survey of the destructive fruit that has come from non-affirming teaching on transgender communities demonstrates the need to explore what other theologies might have to say.

However, even though it is true that there has been an increase in transgender and non-binary visiblity in media, our society has never seen as many trans-exclusionary bills in state legislatures, public faith statements made against transgender people in churches or higher rates of recorded crimes and violence commited against transgender people.

It is always a profound act of courage to come out to yourself and to your community. Similarly, for the friends and family of transgender and non-binary people, to publicly express your love and support in many contexts can be an act of critical solidarity. The experiences of gender diversity can be found in nearly every culture throughout recorded human history.

Traditionally gender non-conforming people were given communal roles as spiritual leaders, healers, conflict mediators and cultural conduits. While not all of these experiences map perfectly on to contemporary trans experiences, what we do see similarly today are countless examples of transgender and non-binary people across denominations operating in specialized roles within the church whether formally recognized or not.

Transgender and non-binary people are actively preaching, teaching, leading, pastoring and offering their time, energy and various gifts for ministry and service.

What this tells us is that the real issue here is not whether a person can be transgender and Christian, but whether the church will acknowledge and empower those whom God is already working through to enrich the whole life of the body of Christ. Read what the Bible says about homosexuality here.

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Wrestling with Scripture Creation and the Gender Binary - Genesis ; Genesis When Christians think about gender, they tend to go back to the beginning. Changing names - Genesis ; Numbers ; Matthew Names are very important and in many cultures they are inseparable from how people connect with one another and establish meaning for their lives.

But what if these interpretations are wrong? Love conquers hate. Donate Today. Wear your pride this year. Shop Now. You are leaving HRC.