Is sex Satan’s best playing field, or have the forces of evil already won the morality culture wars and now Satan is moving on to other issues, like the rejection of truth, racism, or even climate change?
Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #158 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.
As I’ve noted before, gender fluidity, the idea sex is changeable, or what’s now called transgenderism, is the current cultural soup du jour. It’s everywhere and seems to have become an outright unstoppable juggernaut.
We hear that people finding their “real sex” as opposed to their born-this-way biological sex is some kind of great brave new world. But sadly, it is not.
We hear this controversy is about sex, but it’s not really about sex; certainly not just sex. It’s about identity, who we are.
Trans ideology is not about lust or licentiousness. It’s about declaring that human beings can create “their truth,” be their own gods. It’s about idolatry. If male and female are simply arbitrary categories, then anything goes. Morality, modesty, masculine and feminine don’t really exist. We’re all just some hybrid social construct.
It’s true that for a variety of reasons, men or women have dressed or “passed” as the other sex for centuries. It is only in our lifetime that the idea a man or woman can actually become the other sex, and in so doing embrace their real sex, has seemingly been made possible via hormone therapy and the surgical technology to remove or reconstruct sexual organs.
But even these so-called “treatments” are secondary to the heart and mind proclaiming “Me, I decide who I am.”
While “the first documented male-to-female sex reassignment surgery took place in 1930, “the word transgender…which came into wider use in the 1990s after public health officials adopted it, is often used as an umbrella term for all rejections of the norm, from cross-dressers who are generally happy in their assigned gender to transsexuals.”
Since the 1990s, in an astonishingly rapid fashion, the American populace has adopted a “normalized” view of LGBTQ, and more recently, argued transgenderism is a civil rights matter.
Until 2013, gender dysphoria—confusion about one’s sexuality—was categorized as a disorder, not a dysphoria, by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The World Health Organization, W.H.O., did not move gender incongruence from mental disorders to sexual health issues until 2019.
In 2014, Time issued a cover entitled “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier.”
Two developments in 2015 acted like critical mass for transgender momentum: the Supreme Court of the United States case Obergefell v Hodges giving same-sex couples the right to marry and Olympic Gold Medalist Bruce “Call Me Caitlyn” Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover.
Then in 2016, the Obama Administration Department of Education redefined “sex” in Title IX to include “gender identity,” making it a civil rights issue. The Departments of Education and Justice required all sex-segregated facilities to be based on gender identity not biological sex.
The Biden Administration, with the President saying to LGBTQ people “I’ve got your back,” consistently advocates for legal changes giving trans individuals – a person born male identifying as female or born female identifying as male – access to sex-segregated events, services, facilities, sports competitions.
Transgenderism has become a cultural juggernaut.
American taxpayers now must pay for gender reassignment surgery for active military personnel or veterans who opt for it.
Disney is adding…queer characters in children’s programming, and is changing its long-standing greeting, “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” from its Magic Kingdom fireworks show, to “Good evening, dreamers of all ages!” to promote what it calls “inclusivity.”
The Cartoon Network is normalizing gender pronouns: It’s comic strip states, “‘We can’t tell someone’s gender just by looking at them, and we shouldn’t assume we know. There are many gender identities beyond ‘girl’ or ‘boy’: some people don’t identify as any gender!’” This is considered children’s programming.
California inmates may now request prisons aligned with their gender choices, no matter their biological sex, and once there, are eligible for costly taxpayer supported gender reassignment surgery. California bans state employee travel to several states considered discriminatory toward LGBTQ individuals.
University athletics personnel are pressuring the NCAA to withdraw or not schedule collegiate athletic events in states that have passed bills requiring athletes to compete in sports befitting their biological sex. More than 25 states are considering or have passed bills labeled by the press as “anti-trans athlete” legislation.
The NFL issued a video saying, “Football is gay…Football is transgender.” Of course, it’s easy to virtue signal corporate activism-a la-profit-motive with a rainbow-colored NFL logo because transgender athletes aren’t going head-to-head in competition like they are beginning to do in other sports.
Serious concerns are being expressed by LGB athletes that allowing transgender athletes into women’s competitions will destroy women’s sports. Some fear Title IX will be eviscerated. “Several prominent female athletes have spoken out against relaxing the traditional standards, arguing the ramifications will be drastic for women’s sports.”
We’re told the idea that men are stronger athletes than women or that sex is binary is due to misogyny and white supremacy.
But it’s gender madness. Some are trying to address the madness by calling for separate transgender competitions.
LGBTQ demands are on a collision course with religious liberty.
Transgenderism politics aggressively attacks the authority of Scripture, often indirectly by repositioning words like accepting, love, inclusive, or tolerance. They call disagreement, hate or bigotry, and they’ve been amazingly successful at pushing this Devil’s delusion into mainstream American culture.
In American culture, as touted by LGBTQ+ activists and others in the “woke” universe, Christianity is increasingly seen as optional, hateful, bigoted, discriminatory, repressive, malevolent, irrelevant, or unnecessary.
LGBTQ+ cannot accomplish activists’ ideological or worldview goals until religion, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, is marginalized or legally banished from cultural influence. Gender ideology and biblical Christianity can only co-exist in a First Amendment society, something activists have not so far demonstrated they can accept.
Christians who sleep-walk through this movement will do transgender people, the Church, and the country a grave disservice.
The rapid success transgenderism has achieved in just a handful of years puts “America…farther down this road than any other country in the Western world. In other words, at this moment of crisis for Western Civilization, or for what we used to call Christendom, the leading country of the free world is pulling the wrong way.”
While religious liberty is at stake in this “all-out cultural war to eradicate all influence of biblical values in our culture,” Christians tend to look upon transgenderism as just a matter of morality. It is that but much more.
We are in a cultural moment in which gender ideology is directly challenging the legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian heritage of the American system.
Gender ideology is not simply questioning the Bible or the Church or religion but the foundational American ideals that helped “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
The Democrat and Republican Parties are not standing in the gap. But “values matter because they translate into behavior. If (parties) become a big tent of moral relativism, who will fight for transmission of the values that sustain life and freedom?”
Not to resist, not to speak the truth in love, not to reason, not to stand in the gap defending life, dignity, freedom, and hope is to give in to irrationality, idolatry, division, destruction, and death.
Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best. If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Download an episode for your friends. For more Christian commentary, check my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com.
And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2024
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