Guest Viewpoint: Male and Female by God’s Design

What is your view on transgenderism? Currently, there is a strong push by liberals in almost every field — entertainment, industry, education, media and even sports — to force everyone in this country to accept the transgender lifestyle as normal.

Transgenderism has even been called the new civil rights issue by Time magazine, as Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, pointed out in a statement explaining why Southern Baptists addressed this issue in 2014: “Right now we’re living in a situation where Time magazine just two weeks ago talked about the transgender issue as the new civil rights movement, the new frontier of the civil rights movement. [We] have to be prepared to give a witness and to give an answer from the Scripture on that.”

Fred Stone

Fred Stone

One of the best Scriptural answers to questions raised by the transgender issue can be summarized like this: God created human beings to live as a male or female, which He determined by their biological sex.

Scripture tells us: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 provides helpful commentary on this verse in Article III, “Man.” It explains that a person’s gender is equivalent to his or her biological sex, which is a part of God’s design at creation: “Man is the special creation of God, made in His own image. He created them male and female as the crowning work of His creation. The gift of gender is thus part of the goodness of God’s creation.”

Since creation, human beings have clearly understood that a baby born as a biological male would be identified as male and brought up as a male. He would naturally come to understand himself to be male and would live life fully as a male. The same understanding applies equally to females.

God created us to live as either a male or female, determined by our biological sex. That’s not just for our spiritual well-being. It’s also vital for our emotional and physical well-being, according to the American College of Pediatricians:

“A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind, not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V). The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved. … According to the DSM-V, as many as 98 percent of gender-confused boys and 88 percent of gender-confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty. … Rates of suicide are 20 times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden, which is among the most LGBTQ-affirming countries. What compassionate and reasonable person would condemn young children to this fate knowing that after puberty as many as 88 percent of girls and 98 percent of boys will eventually accept reality and achieve a state of mental and physical health?”

We see from Scripture and medical science that transgenderism is contrary to creation, to reality and to the emotional and physical well-being of human beings. Such biblical teaching and scientific reasoning should compel us, as God’s people called to be salt and light to our culture, to speak the truth in love concerning this issue.

It may help us to remain loving as well as truthful to keep in mind that all of us are sinners with the common need to experience God’s saving grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Let’s ask God to enable us to provide a loving and truthful witness that will help people struggling with gender confusion to avoid the painful and eternal consequences that ultimately result from living contrary to God’s design.

— Fred Stone is pastor of Pickens First Baptist Church and former president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention.