Last week the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s law banning gender imitative procedures for children. This week the American Medical Association declared the opposite, insisting that, for the gender troubled, this is the only way to go. This, the largest medical association in the country, advocates trusting a child’s self-perception about his sex. How shall we think about this?
Not Falling in Understanding the Fall
A key concept for Christians understanding ourselves and our world is the Fall. In that historical moment humanity, in the person of our head, Adam, made the fatal choice to break covenant with God. We took on ourselves the role of God in deciding good and evil for ourselves and about ourselves.
I once corresponded with another minister friend who was helping a gender-struggler in his congregation. The minister developed a theory that, because of humanity’s defining Fall in the Garden of Eden, the link between body and soul might be severed in some people, resulting in the suffering of the gender dysphoric. Just as we must now deal with physical defects from birth, like blindness or psychological weakness, perhaps one really could be a man soul with a woman’s body. For him, this was not a problem of false perceptions but of an actual fallen reality.
But this is not how the Fall works. The Fall was a fall into sin. Yes, there come repercussions in our bodies, but I felt my minister friend lacked an adequate appreciation for the great power of our fallen perceptions and desires to delude us about ourselves. Scripture yields many examples of how the Fall disorders peoples’ self-perceptions. I make the point in Across the Kitchen Table that God must contradict those He cares for on this point for them to be who they are, whom God made them to be. We also witness it in tragedies of life today…
This Isn’t You: Multiple Personality Disorder
When someone has a multiple personality disorder, therapists try to help them integrate their one person. We don’t say, “Well, maybe the Fall has gone so far as to violate the unity of persons and so, based on what you say, there really are five people in your one body.” (Note that often these different personalities are different genders.) No, to the degree that we are not simply facing the demonic, we compassionately help them see that each personality represents a damaged part of who they are. We don’t say to a grown man, “That little girl personality is really you.” We help him see that she is a hurt part of him, but he is not her.
Letting the Creation Speak: Anorexia Nervosa
I have known people with gender dysphoria and people with anorexia nervosa. Both groups are often perceptive, reasonable people. But there is one area where the anorexic feels something that is just not true. Likewise, in accepting the feeling that our bodies are lying to us about gender, we are denying the general revelation of creation, the glory proclaimed by what God has made, even in our bodies, as a source of truth. Compassion and understanding in helping such conditions means bringing the truth of creation to bear.
The healthy creation speaks truth. By healthy, I mean, her body can fulfill God’s call to femininity, as the Bible elucidates it. In allowing that the dysphoric’s healthy body was speaking falsely, my friend demeaned God’s creation. In what other case do we designate a fully healthy, beautiful creation, able to fulfill God’s design as revealed in His prescriptive will, as telling us falsely about itself?
Bringing it Home: Sugar
Yet these may be far-removed from our own problems. We might not have multiple personalities or anorexia. But the same dynamic operates much closer to home. We all have our own deluding desires…
When we eat sugar, we desire more sugar. This good feature of our bodies presumably helps us get the carbohydrates we need. But our fallen state cancers that desire so that, when we ingest the excessive sugar of modern foods, we think we need more. We really want sugar, and believe that we should have more sugar. But, judged from our nourished bodies, understood through God’s prescriptive will, we really do not need more sugar. We would be unwise to say, “Well, the Fall has made it so that, while our body seems healthy, our spirit is the kind that really needs mounds of sugar daily. That is just who we are.” That seemed to be what my friend was arguing about gender dysphoria.
But the objective truth, discerned through our nourished body and the commandment against gluttony, teach us that this belief about ourselves must be wrong. Whether the feeling’s inspiration is psychological or chemical or genetic or all of the above, the general revelation of creation, understood in the special revelation, speaks something different than our self-perceptions. They challenge our feelings and beliefs. If we do not accept that help, we’ll just get sickly large.
What Kind of Help Do We Need
To align ourselves with our perceptions or desires rather than with these speakers of truth is to go down a dark road, sometimes to act on one’s dark feelings about the world as if they were true. In response to depression, acting upon the “reality” of one’s feelings can bring one to take one’s life, as if God were not good. A dysphoric girl believes her feelings about her identity. She acts as if the general revelation from her body were not telling her true. She may then amputate her breasts.
Yes the Fall is evident in these situations. We need the help that will allow us to challenge our self-misperceptions.