Far from the shouting, Christian therapists, writers, parents and their trans children are trying to create a space within conservative circles to acknowledge differences in how people experience gender. Ruth Graham writes about religion and belief.
Almost 90% of white evangelicals believe gender is determined by sex at birth, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with 60% of the population as a whole.
It went badly. They initially refused to use their daughter’s chosen name, Lilia, and Debbie James could barely be in the same room with her when she was wearing a skirt. Then a pastor at the church encouraged them to kick their daughter out of their home.Many progressive and mainline Christian congregations have moved to affirm transgender and nonbinary members.
In the most intimate cases, Christians are steering through agonizing, unfamiliar conflicts between their families and their God — or, as some put it, between love and truth. When parents ask if she can steer their child away from a transgender identity, she declines and guides them to consider accompanying their child through a range of paths from there. She has clients who have transitioned socially and who have pursued medical transition, although she acknowledges having concerns about potentially irreversible medical interventions on teen patients in particular.
She encouraged attendees to use other people’s preferred pronouns, explained why she does not like loaded terms like “social contagion” and discouraged pat catchphrases like “God doesn’t make mistakes.” Julia Sadusky, a psychologist who is one of relatively few expert voices that has stepped into that fraught territory between anti-trans fear and zeal on the right and what some see as progressive orthodoxy on the left, in Colorado, Sept. 31, 2023.
“You can see something happening that’s shaping how we understand the nature of the human person,” said Mary Rice Hasson, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she directs a program whose aim is in part to help parents “counter gender ideology.” But its writers also address gender identity, stating that God enables people to “forsake transgender self-conceptions” and to “accept the God-ordained link” between their biological sex and their gender.
Yarhouse said at least 80% of the speaking and consulting requests he gets now pertain to gender identity rather than sexuality, where his career began. “This is a wave that is going to crest over the evangelical church, and the church is not ready,” he said. Hudson-Reynolds’ own views on gender and sexuality have evolved. They have chosen to be celibate going forward and consider themselves a “Side B” Christian, a term developed by gay Christians who believe the Christian life requires them to abstain from sexual behavior outside traditional, heterosexual marriage but reject the notion that all LGBTQ people can or should become straight.
Once a month, Sadusky leads a group discussion by video chat for other therapists to seek peer advice on challenging cases. On a Friday afternoon last spring, a group of six counselors from across the country, most of them Christians who work largely with Christian clients, had gathered. Most people, including conservatives, she said, are fairly comfortable with the idea of an adult who was raised male, say, and began to understand herself as female early in childhood with little relief over many years. Those people might have differing opinions about the proper responses to that kind of distress, but they are not as threatened by its existence as a phenomenon experienced by a small minority of individuals.
But Hartke, who is active in a Lutheran church, said he would prefer that Christians listen most intently to transgender doctors, scholars and psychiatrists, who combine experience and expertise.
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