An In-Depth Biblical Op/Ed: Exposing the history of gender identity, and why the Bible offers objective truth amidst a wildly confused world

By Summer Lane

Our society is faced with a new kind of war: a war on traditional family values, a war on Christian morality, and a war on the church (a war that is quite likely already lost unless the churches rouse from their slumber).

This month, we’ve all seen the headlines…Disney will no longer assume the gender of children in the parks. No princes or princesses. No more boys and girls. This is a direct agenda milestone that is being pushed by the corporate behemoth that Disney has become – a far cry from a family-friendly magical oasis, Disney is now a despotic agenda-driven amusement park attacking the values of millions of the families who have visited and spent their money in the parks for years. Almost comically, a company that has marketed their entertainment to children is attacking the rights of parents to protect their children from accessing sexually explicit material in school (they were protesting the Florida Parental Rights in Education bill, which 62 percent of Floridians support, by the way).

According to a report from RSBN, the bill in question, HB 1557, prohibits “school district personnel from discouraging or prohibiting parental notification & involvement in critical decisions affecting student’s mental, emotional, or physical well-being.” Additionally, gender identity and sexual orientation conversations are now banned between Kindergarten and third grade.

For most people, protecting children from sexual conversations at a young age is a no-brainer. It’s a scientific fact that children don’t even begin to grasp the concept of gender until they are around five-years-old (don’t take my word for it, the studies on this topic are pretty uniform across the spectrum). Even then, a Kindergartner’s rapidly-developing, impressionable mind should be concerned about reading, writing, friendships, and family. But sexual orientation? Are you kidding me? How are we even having this conversation in society? But I digress.

Further, children cannot consent to being presented with explicit sexual material, and in my opinion, exposing a child to the ideas of gender identity and sexual orientation is nothing less than pedophilic grooming. No teacher, anywhere, needs to be talking to a five-year-old about gender identity for many reasons…and we’ll get more into the biggest one in a moment.

Sadly, Disney’s odious decline into becoming a political-pushing corporate turnstile is hardly a surprise. They have been slowly marching forward with a progressive agenda for years, and so has everyone else. Like slowly boiling a frog, our society has been desensitized to over-sexualization and the broken and flawed philosophies that have infected our schools. And now, it seems as if it’s too late to change things.

Or is it?

Love is Love is Love is Love

Context is everything. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned about the importance of Biblical theology, it’s that when you’re looking at what the Bible says, it’s important to note the context. For example, there are a lot of people who say that the Bible preaches love. And it does. But the Biblical definition and context of love is defined by God, which is a lot different than how our culture currently defines love.

God is love (1 John 4:8), therefore God defines love. God lovingly judges, punishes, and protects. Justice is loving. Punishment is loving. John Piper rightly assessed that God’s love also encompasses His righteous jealousy for the exclusive love and worship of His people, and sometimes, in His love, His people were justly punished for their iniquities. Love encompasses truth and justice, which is a far cry from those who post Bible verses about loving thy neighbor on social media to support radical sexual agendas…forgetting that loving thy neighbor is all well and good, but it must be tempered by speaking truth and living in accordance with God’s laws.

You cannot have one without the other, because love is God, and God encompasses all things (although He is not all things, as panentheism would claim – there is a clear distinction between the Creator and his creation). Because God is loving, He has clearly defined for us the parameters of our moral behavior, and we are told that His rules are good. They keep us safe. Give us peace. And there are plenty of verses in the New Testament that clearly explain that the law (God’s law) is good and just (Romans 7:12, Romans 7:7, 1 John 5:3, etc.). Romans 3:20 is especially interesting to me, because it tells us the following: “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.” In other words, without God’s law, we wouldn’t even know how we were sinning against Him. The law sheds light on our dreary situation and points us in the right direction, and so as Christians, we can be thankful that the commandments of the Old Testament and the New Testament exist to give us both guidance and objective truth. God’s law gives us guardrails. Clear expectations. Warnings. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Obey. Be careful. Be wise.

“And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments; this is the commandment, just as you have heard from the beginning, so that you should walk in it.”

2 John 1:6

Why is gender identity such a big deal?

Gender identity is a relatively new term, but it has become pretty popular with the kids these days thanks to social media and television shows that are happily pumping out LGBTQ propaganda in commercials, literature, music, and fashion. Gender identity can be defined as how someone feels inside and how gender is expressed through individual clothing choices (this is Planned Parenthood’s definition, not mine, just to be clear). In other words, it is a person’s individual sense of ingrained gender.

You’ll hear a lot of young men and women these days claiming sexless pronouns (they, them) or identifying as the opposite gender. Heritage Foundation (which is a much better source for information that Planned Parenthood, okay?) shares that the concept of gender identity also asserts that gender is a fluid spectrum of various gender options like “gender fluid,” “non-binary” and “intergender.”

The reason why gender identity is such a bad idea – other than the fact that it is biologically ludicrous – is partly because of the research it is based upon. Gender identity is a theory that was constructed by a twisted pervert named Dr. John Money, a New Zealand psychologist who studied sexology and claimed that one’s gender was totally independent of genetics and entirely predicated on one’s environment (see this article for more on that).  Money conducted heinous experiments on little boys and intersexual children, and is perhaps most infamous for the horrendous tragedy that occurred in the 1960s with a boy named David Reimer. According to an article written by El American (and many other places), David was injured at birth, and Dr. Money recommended that his parents surgically reassign the infant’s gender as female. His name was switched to Brenda, he was prescribed hormones, and a lifetime of agony and misery ensued. Little David struggled deeply with depression and gender dysphoria – he was never told that he had been born a male until much later – and was subjected to horrendous experiments in Dr. Money’s presence, along with his twin brother, Brian. According to the El American report, David attempted suicide several times, and his parents finally stopped taking Dr. Money’s advice and told David the truth: he was a boy.

Unfortunately, both David and his brother, Brian, had been so catastrophically traumatized by the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse inflicted on them by Dr. Money, that both young men died young: Brian Reimer died of a drug overdose and his brother, David, committed suicide. Their father later committed suicide as well.

That is just one horror story involving Dr. Money, the so-called “father” of gender identity – which is based entirely on pedophilic perversion and despicable human experimentation. And yet, Dr. John Money has maintained his lofty status as a researcher and valuable asset to “science.” In reality, Dr. John Money was a pedophile who built the entire concept of gender identity on the backs of abused children. And here we are, promoting that same theory in our society, and wondering why our young people are feeling more depressed and confused and anxious than ever before? What a shock.

My Truth, Your Truth and The Truth

Once you’ve debunked gender identity (which takes a grand total of five minutes in a simple internet search, because information on Dr. Money is plentiful), it’s helpful to examine another cultural idea that has taken root with our youth: the idea that there is no truth but your own. This is the idea of subjective reality – that my truth is the only truth that matters, and that something is good if I say it is. For example, I can be a boy if I want to be, and you can be a unicorn rainbow fairy if you want to, as long as it makes us both feel good. Because it’s all about me, and my truth, and what speaks to me.

Sadly, subjective reality is duplicitous. Our emotions and our perceptions fluctuate daily, and we cannot trust our own reasoning alone. The Bible tells us that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9), and that every inclination of man’s heart from his youth is continually evil (Genesis 8:21). This is why you see so much confusion and chaos in the world. People switch genders and their depression becomes worse. They take hormones to inject their bodies with the hope of feeling more “male” or “female,” but they often become suicidal. In fact, around half of all transgender boys and “non-binary” kids have attempted suicide at some point, according to the Human Rights Campaign. This is troubling stuff. Children are confused. Who are they? What is their identity? Is their truth, as it sits in the immediate moment, influenced by life and relationships and friends, the only standard by which to measure the meaning of it all? Thankfully, the answer is no: definitely not.

Transgender-affirming theology is simply heretical. It does not exist in the context of Scripture unless the Bible is being taken wildly out of context (see above!) or it is being redefined entirely. For the Christian, Scripture offers a simple, uncomplicated view of gender and sex: Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created (Genesis 5:2).

As far as the issue of gender and sexuality go, the Bible is abundantly clear on the subject. Yes, we are commanded to love our neighbors. Yes, we are commanded to have love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). However, these fruits of the spirit are handily tempered with a fair dose of the law, which are just as important and just as relevant as the rest of the Bible. Let’s look at some examples of warnings and teachings regarding, specifically, sexual sin:

Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. (1 Corinthians 6:18)

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. (Romans 1:26-27)

Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. (Jude 1:7)

For you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6;20)

You shall not lie with a male as with a female; It is an abomination. (Leviticus 18:22)

Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering.

If anyone is inclined to be contentious, we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God. (1 Corinthians 11:14-16)

It goes on and on! The Bible is filled with passages of Scripture that quite clearly address the issue of gender and sex in both the Old and New Testaments. I’m no Bible scholar, but I know how to read, and it doesn’t take much investigative skill to flip through the pages of Scripture and realize that there is an objective Biblical view on gender and sexuality that offers order and sense amidst the gender insanity of today’s sex-drunk culture.

As corporations, schools, and our government pushes a radicalized sexual agenda on our society, specifically targeting young children, it is our duty as parents to protect our youth more than ever before against the subjective agenda of a fallen, sinful world. God created sex and gender…and it is good. It is beautiful. It is right and perfect.

The world, however, is broken. Fallen. Twisted. We should not be surprised when theme parks like Disney erase gender-based terminology or that Joe Biden gave a speech to celebrate the so-called “Trans Day of Visibility.” This is to be expected. The world celebrates it and applauds it. They mock those who don’t join in and call them bigoted or hateful. And why? Because some people believe in valuing gender and sexuality? Because some parents want to protect the innocence of their children’s minds and hearts?

Truly, our world is crestfallen and groaning, but as Christians, we can look at the disturbing, two-faced hypocrisy of a world obsessed with self-indulgence, and we can be comforted by the simple, objective truths offered in the Bible.

God is love. God is truth. God is peace. God is justice.

Protect your children. Advocate for policies that are based in truth and purity.

And take heart. Jesus has overcome the world.

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

(John 16:33)

The opinions in this editorial are specific to its author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the entire Counter Culture Mom team.

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Check out the Counter Culture Mom Show with Tina Griffin and listen to these two amazing interviews that tie in to today’s article. First, listen to the moving story of Walt Heyer on how he underwent gender reassignment surgery at the age of 42 and lived as a woman for eight years – and later came to deeply regret that decision. Also, be sure to listen to Tina’s conversation with youth pastor Jeff Grenell, who offers pointers on how to talk about sexuality with your children from a healthy, Biblical worldview.

Summer Lane is the #1 bestselling author of 30 books, including the hit Collapse Series and Resurrection Series. She is an experienced journalist and columnist who reports on news within the U.S. and abroad. Additionally, she analyzes politics and policies in weekly op/Eds on The Write Revolution.

Summer is also a mom and wife who enjoys rural country living, herding cats, and gardening. She is passionate about writing about women’s issues, parenting, and politics from a theologically-grounded perspective that points readers to the good news of the gospel.

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