Insanity, as the famous quote goes is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. Nowhere is this truer than with the trans zealots who constantly impose new ‘trans inclusive’ policies that repeatedly deny reality in the vain hope it will bring different results where gender change is normalised by the removal of gender from society.
Barely a day goes by without a new policy that uproots centuries of settled understanding around sex and gender. Everything, it seems must be challenged and any mention of male and female must be totally removed in order for society to fully accept the normalisation of transgender people.
This form of insanity, the denial of the reality of there being males and females defined by biology rather than ideas of the mind or ‘assigned genders’ is such a pernicious form of insanity I prefer to refer to it as ‘transanity’.
This is not to deny the very real issues going on with people who claim to be a different gender to what they actually are, it is simply to call it what it is – insanity.
Sanity accepts and embraces reality however hard and tough that reality may be. Insanity, on the other hand is an alternative existence where reality is ignored and the created ‘reality’ of the mind becomes real.
Imagination is Not Reality
Both my sister and I have vivid imaginations and when we were children we each had lots of imaginary friends and we created an alternative reality of playing out their lives. Much of it was our being observant of the world around us and creating a play world in which things were ‘real’ insofar as we agreed that between a start and end ‘theme tune’ we were acting in the imaginary world. Our parents encouraged us in it because they knew that we knew it was not reality, it was mere imagination. We knew also that once playtime was over, the reality of life continued until the next time we entered that imaginary world.
The issue with the transgender agenda is it takes imagined ideas of the mind and attempts to make them reality by force. It does this over and over expecting a different result. It is basically the old adage that if you repeat a lie enough times it eventually becomes ‘truth’.
The latest episode of this transanity comes from Brighton where a local hospital trust has decided breast feeding will now be called ‘chest feeding’ and breast milk referred to as “human milk” in order to not cause distress to the transgender folk of Brighton. Worse still, a mother is to be reduced to a mere “birthing parent” and the father a sanitised term of “second biological parent”. This is not just about accommodating the sensitivities of a troubled minority. It is about deliberately and directly attacking the basic norms and reality of what constitutes a family and how a child is made. It commoditises mothers and fathers in a desperate attempt to de-gender the most gendered of roles that biology determines.
If we pop back to the example of the imaginary world my sister and I used to act out, our parents never adjusted life to incorporate this imagination because to do so would be to start accepting the imaginary world as a form of reality when it was anything but. Yet when it comes to the transgender agenda, it is those who refuse to accept the imagined reality as normal who are expected to incorporate their imagined ideas and accept them as reality.
The trans agenda is all about dispensing with reality and imposing a new false reality where basic facts of life are denied in a vain effort to protect the sensitivities of a troubled minority.
Transphobes the Un-enlightened?
The American novelist Chuck Palahniuk said, “I would say any behaviour that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment.”
This is transgenderism in a quote. It is the idea that whilst we may label them insane, they are in fact the enlightened ones and should therefore be encouraged and followed. Furthermore, because they are enlightened and we are not, what we have assumed to be truth and reality must be dispensed with entirely in order for the human race to ‘advance’. Not to do so, they argue is dangerous and so those who refuse to accept the idea of changing gender are deemed a danger to society and so need to be silenced.
Take Germaine Greer for example. She is one of the most recognisable of the feminist mob and yet just because she refuses to accept a man can become a woman she found herself labelled a ‘transphobe’ and subsequently faced being cancelled from a university event, too dangerous are her views it was claimed for them to even be aired in public.
If this all sounds like nonsense, that is probably because it is. You don’t get a new reality by denying reality. You don’t help troubled people by affirming them in their troubles.
No Escaping the Trans Zealots
Maybe you are the sort of lackadaisical Christian who just watches from the side-lines as our culture descends into a mire of molech worship. Well, the advent of transanity and the march of the trans zealots changes all of that.
Up until now Christians have been able to bypass certain ‘tricky’ issues. Gay family members were just not spoken of and given a free pass rather than being confronted. If you are a doctor who doesn’t personally condone abortion, you could keep your conscience ‘clear’ by pointing the girl to a doctor who will sign the form to have her baby hacked out the womb. If you are not a social media user you could easily ignore the mass silencing of people espousing views contrary to the Marxist agenda and pretend it will never affect you.
The trans agenda is different. There is no escaping it. If you are a doctor you need to decide whether to affirm the trans patient in their troubled and confused state of mind or resist the agenda and face the threat of being labelled ‘transphobic’. If you try and send the patient to a more trans affirming doctor you will still be labelled transphobic for refusing to see the trans patient. This is already happening, even in hypothetical cases such as the one involving Dr David Mackereth. If you are in the workplace and refuse to refer to another member of staff by their ‘chosen gender’ you are transphobic so you cannot escape it. Saying “thank you sir” to a shop worker is insensitive because you assumed their gender without first asking for their chosen pronouns.
The transgender agenda has presented itself right in front of us and there is no escaping it for anyone. Now is the time for each of us to decide: Will we simply affirm the madness or resist the tyranny?
Responding to the Trans Zealots Campaign of Tyranny
So how do we respond to what is one of the greatest challenges of our age?
The Bible offers a number of helpful bits of guidance for us here. The first factor to consider is love. God majors on love because he is love. Everything we do must be done in love. We love because Christ first loved us.
However, we must be clear here: most love as the world defines it is fundamentally different to what real love is. When we refuse to join the trans bandwagon, the world will hate us, they will hurl abuse at us, they will try to silence us and they will claim we are not loving trans people, we are not being good Christians. None of this should deter us in continuing in godly love in our words, thoughts and deeds towards such people whilst not affirming the agenda.
Affirming transgender people in their troubled state of mind is similar to a parent encouraging their children to continue doing wrong when they misbehave. No parent in their right mind would contemplate affirming their child’s poor behaviour because the behaviour is wrong and so affirming it is also wrong. What could be more unloving than leading a child or our neighbour on to believe that their false reality is in fact reality? It is not loving for a parent to encourage a child to continue doing wrong, yet, what we are being coerced to do for transgender people is exactly that – to affirm them in their troubled state of mind. We are increasingly being forced to accept a false reality and deny actual reality where greater emphasis is placed on an individual’s ‘lived experiences’ over facts. In essence, affirming transgenderism is the triumph of relativism over absolutism and it is fundamentally unloving to go along with it.
We need to plainly state the absolute truth that we are all created by God in his image as male and female. There is no ‘lived experience’ that constitutes reality. Trans people need to know they are unconditionally loved by God and that he has created them uniquely with the body they have.
“Reach Out and Resist”
Dr Michael Brown (Ask Dr Brown) has a wonderful phrase he uses when ministering to the LGBT community: “reach out and resist“. This means we reach out in love, we meet the folk where they are at, but we resist the agenda and we refuse to affirm that which we know to be false and wrong.
Our starting basis should be to love the individual concerned. The next step is to seek to understand why they are as troubled as they are so we can support them in the most appropriate way. Gender dysphoria is a very real thing. However, to assume a physical alteration will solve what is primarily a mental challenge denigrates that person more than they may feel they already are. It is important they get the help they really need rather than rush them off to a campaigning doctor who will prescribe medication and treatment leading to permanent damage and alteration to the person’s mind and body.
A Spiritual Battle
Ultimately, we need to remember always that the transgender agenda is all part of the spiritual battle raging in society. There are often very deeply rooted spiritual issues in the lives of people seeking to change gender. Many have suffered horrific abuse, faced neglect and family breakdown. Of course, this is not all cases, but these factors are present more often than not.
The devil is seeking to divide society into victim groups and then set these groups against each other in order to cause maximum chaos and destruction. We must be careful to not get sucked in to this scheme by becoming a mere victim group and instead choose to be the victors we are in Christ by pointing the better way to Jesus whose. Our identity is not in a gender or sexuality, but in Christ who put himself in our place on the cross so that we may live.
Transgender people are people who are hurting. Their cry is one not for acceptance, but one of attention and help. They need a spiritual medicine that mends them from the inside out rather than a course of tablets or a surgeon’s knife that seeks to mend the outside only, ignoring the inside. They need transformation not so much of body, but of mind and spirit. Romans 12 says that we should be “transformed by the renewing of our minds”. Somewhere along the lines something has gone fundamentally wrong for a person to consider they were born in the wrong body. There is no such thing. We were all born in the correct bodies. Bodies that were created by God as he knit us together in our mother’s womb. We are all unique, yet we share a common feature that we are created in his own image.
Different but Complementary
Men and women have distinct differences with different abilities and callings. They complement each other and are of equal value, but they are not the same and and to claim gender is some sort of spectrum is simply to deny the basic truth that God created male and female in his own image Genesis 1).
The common feature with transgender people who have subsequently regretted their decision is they found the procedures they underwent to change their body did not solve the psychological issues they were facing. They presumed a bodily change would solve their mental struggles rather than seeking help for the mental condition that would lead them to embrace the body God has given them. Many people are being deliberately led down a path of gender reassignment surgery (note it is all about gender being ‘assigned’ like it is a choice) and being encouraged to explore being a different gender.
Increasing numbers of children are being treated at the Tavistock centre for gender dysphoria which has led to a large increase in the prescribing of hormone blockers which permanently damages a young person’s body before they are really able to make a rational decision for themselves. Multiple studies have shown that most children who experience some form of gender dysphoria grow out of it and go on to embrace the body they have. Children such as tomboys who might not fit into traditional gender sterotypes are being labelled as suffering with gender dysphoria and encouraged to explore changing gender.
In America, a young boy whose mother was convinced he wanted to be a girl was put into the sole custody of his mother who put him in dresses. The father was given a restraining order by the courts and banned from seeing his own son simply for refusing to go along with the idea his son should be a girl. Eventually, the mother was admitted for psychiatric treatment and the boy was reunited with his father and quickly reverted to living life as a normal little boy. This case should concern us all because the way in which it was presumed by activist judges that the boy wanted to be a girl without any proper scrutiny of the facts points to an evil spirit that preys on the most vulnerable in society as targets for the transgender crusade.
Just think of the untold damage being done to society through all this utter madness: Children growing up with a mother and father suddenly having two mothers because their father decided to become a woman. Or take the case of the man who decided he was attracted to other men, then discovered he was actually more feminine so started living as a woman before getting gender reassignment surgery to become a ‘woman’. Soon after that the man (who was now a ‘woman’) decided that he (‘she’) actually quite liked women so decided he (‘she’) was now a lesbian transgender woman and then eventually decided that maybe he was a man attracted to women after all. What a total mess.
In essence here we have a man who is controversially attracted to women, but yet gets caught up in all sorts of confusion. Think of all the people he has harmed in the process of all this confusion. Think of all the harm done to him and consider the absolute state of confusion in his mind. Think of the total mess he became after years of everyone around him simply affirming his ‘lived experience’ as reality which led him to more and more extreme action
Where next?
It is entirely feasible we will see laws that make it a criminal offence not to affirm someone in their gender of choice within the next few years. Many institutions are already making it normal practice to ask people for their chosen pronouns so as to not ‘exclude’ trans people. It is not far from there to outlaw refusing to take part in the transanity by fully affirming anyone in their gender of choice.
It is utter madness that merely suggesting a person’s sexuality can be changed is harmful to that person whilst simultaneously claiming that not affirming someone in their chosen gender identity which could change every other day is equally harmful. How can one be fixed and the other totally fluid?
Transanity is developing at a worrying rate. It is spreading through most institutions and businesses so it is hard to ignore or avoid it. It has all happened in the space of just a few years.
A bill currently going through the UK Parliament that would make provision for government ministers to have paid maternity leave rather than having to resign from their position has completely de-gendered the language referring to ‘pregnant person’ and the qualifications for maternity leave being the, “person has given birth to a child”. There is only one type of person who can give birth to a child – a woman, yet here we have a bill set to become law which merely talks of pregnant people rather than women and mothers.
The Christian Legal Centre are supporting James Caspian, a psychotherapist who had an application to research cases of people who have surgery to reverse gender reassignment refused by a university. The case has highlighted how some subjects have become unacceptable even for university research.
Plans to relax the law in England and Wales to provide for gender self-identification have been dropped for now, but not ruled out entirely which means it may still happen, but perhaps over a longer period of time. If you do too much at the same time it is obvious what is happening and easier to build a campaign against it, but salami slice the agenda up into manageable chunks that appear reasonable on the surface at each point, bit by bit you still end up with the same outcome in law.
It is not all bad news. A landmark case at the High Court recently ruled that children could not give assumed consent for gender identity treatment. The case was bought by Kiera Bell who was given puberty blocking hormone treatment but who now regrets the treatment and wants the law to protect children from facing pressure to accept treatment.
The Battle Belongs to The Lord
As the march of the trans zealots continues, so too must our stand against the affirming of this alternative reality where gender is some sort of fluid construct. As the battle intensifies, so too must our prayers for without the help and guidance of the Holy Spirit, we will simply not be able to withstand the onslaught of those campaigning to disrupt, uproot and ultimately destroy what it means to be male and female.
We must love those who struggle with gender dysphoria. We must come alongside them and ensure they get the help and support they really need rather than the quick ‘fix’ of a surgeon’s knife.
We must never doubt that the present state of things can be reversed. The numbers of people coming forward to say they wish to return to their birth gender is encouraging. Above all, we must always remember that God is still sovereign, he is still in control, the battle belongs to the Lord and he is working out his plans even in the midst of the chaos and confusion of the tyranny of the trans zealots.
