Cancelled Conversations: Transgenderism with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

I wanna welcome you here.

I want to welcome anyone who's streaming with us online.

If you're new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

And we are in week four of our Canceled Conversations series.

We're gonna address topics that the culture is speaking loudly and often about, and yet you never hear much about in the church setting.

We believe scripture has something to say about everything we experience in life, and that that clarity is not only critical to us living out our God-given purpose, but that clarity ultimately is kind.

We've decided the way that we're going to address these topics are the way we should be modeling everything in our life.

We're gonna try to do it the way we imagine Jesus would.

John's gospel said that Jesus came full of grace and full of truth.

Grace and truth are not in competition with one another.

In fact, they rely on each other to exist at the maximum amount.

We also, in week one, laid out how we believe life and faith works and what the goal of our faith is as believers in Jesus.

Simply put, we saw that there's nothing keeping us from coming to Jesus, believing and receiving eternal life.

Amen?

That's like the core of our belief.

That's like gear cue to say amen back.

Amen just means I agree with that.

Amen.

Amen.

Here we go.

Oh, we're awake.

And then we're called to follow Jesus.

And following Jesus is where we're told to count the cost.

Following Jesus often necessitates suffering, sometimes real suffering.

And it's Jesus who said to follow him, we have to deny ourselves and carry our cross.

And so once we get clear on all these hot topics, the question we have to ask is: what does it mean to deny myself and what does it look like to carry my cross with this issue?

And today our hot topic is transgenderism.

Could you pray with me?

Jesus, uh, as always, especially in this series, we're asking for an extra helping of grace, and we are asking for clarity.

Not from our culture, from our own intuitions, clarity from your word.

We love you.

I thank you for Metachurch, a place that is built on the foundation of grace.

Everyone is welcome to come and be a part of this movement.

And uh, Jesus, we thank you for your love.

We're amazed by it, and we ask all these things in your name, Jesus.

And everyone said, Amen.

Um, in the last 10 years, this issue has risen to the very top of the cultural conversation.

Uh, it was barely referenced for most of modern history.

Now it is the issue of our day.

Society has largely changed its views.

Scientists and therapists have changed their methods and approaches, and the transgender community has seen an explosion of growth never before witnessed in any demographic of society.

And of course, it's also become a very politically divisive issue.

And so before we really even start our conversation today, it's important for us to remember that every trans person's experience and journey is unique.

And almost always, the experience of being transgender is more painful than we can imagine.

We are called as Christians to flee from all temptation and sin, including the sin of divisiveness that so often pervades conversations around this issue.

And so, this will be the most necessarily technical sermon I think I've ever preached.

I'm gonna have to stay on my actual manuscript more than I ever stay on topic because of how how technical it is.

But just because it's technical, we cannot forget this is first and foremost about real people living real lives, suffering real pain.

If we forget that, we do it at great risk to the fruitfulness of the conversation that we are trying to have.

And so, with that in mind, I want to begin exploring transgenderism at this technical level.

And here's why we almost have to do that.

Because the language around this issue seems to be changing really consistently, and the arguments presented for and against this issue are changing all of the time.

And so we've got to get clear on what we mean by the words that we're saying today so that we can understand each other in this conversation.

Transgenderism has gone by other names throughout the last several decades, but they all are undergirded by the clinical diagnosis, which is gender dysphoria.

Before gender dysphoria, the same thing, it was known as gender identity disorder.

It's now called gender dysphoria.

This is an incongruence between one's biological sex and their internal sense of self.

An incongruence between your biological sex and your internal sense of self.

Now, that internal sense of self goes by a lot of different names.

Your identity or your gender, or people talk about the sex spectrum or the gender spectrum.

Some people even talk about it in religious terms as your soul or your spirit, but the broad category is a conflict between biological sex and your inner sense of self.

And I want to draw a very careful distinction as we have this conversation as well.

Gender dysphoria is a clinical diagnosis.

Transgender has become an identity that people take on.

Gender dysphoria is a clinical diagnosis, transgender has become an identity.

The question is when someone genuinely has gender dysphoria, what should be done about it?

And our culture has laid out a path or a prescription for those with gender dysphoria.

I'm gonna walk through several steps on this path.

Not every transgender person follows every one of these steps, but this is a general outlay that our culture pushes hard as the prescription for what to do if someone has gender dysphoria.

The first thing is to begin to identify as transgender or as non-binary.

Remember, gender dysphoria is a diagnosis.

Transgender has become an identity.

So the first thing you're pressed to do is to take that on as an actual identity and call yourself transgender.

The second is called social transition.

This is when you begin dressing and non-surgically modifying your appearance to present yourself as the opposite sex.

That's social transition.

The third step would be puberty suppression.

Of course, this is for kids in puberty or pre-puberty.

This is taking medicine to block puberty from taking place, to keep a young person with gender dysphoria from taking on secondary sex characteristics.

The fourth would be cross-hormone treatment.

That is where an individual begins taking increasing amounts of estrogen to appear more feminine, or testosterone to appear more masculine.

And the last step in the process would be surgical intervention, like sex reassignment surgeries.

Now let me say this again.

No two transgender individuals are exactly alike and not all take the same exact path.

For example, surgical intervention is often quite rare.

Number one, it's very expensive, and a lot of people can't afford it.

And a lot of people who identify as transgender, as soon as they get to the point where they can pass as the opposite sex in society, they are satisfied with their progress, and they don't go on to surgical intervention.

This is a general template for what the culture offers someone and these days pushes on someone experiencing gender dysphoria.

Identify as transgender and then start the transition from social to chemical and for some people on to surgical.

Now, whether you thought about it this way or not, the topic of transgenderism is just about the deepest conversation that we can have as humans.

And that's because it goes all the way down to what is called our ontology.

And ontology is about the nature of being itself.

This is an issue that causes us to question who we are at a fundamental level, and more importantly, how we know or decide who we are.

And as Christians, our job is to see what scripture reveals about our ontology.

And when it comes to gender dysphoria, here's the question we'll wrestle with all day today.

When there is incongruence between biological sex and internal sense of self, which one determines who you are?

When there is a divide between the biological sex you were born with and how you feel on the inside, which one of those decides how you move forward?

In the last 10 years, this issue has exploded, not just in the cultural conversation, but in the percentages of people identifying as transgender.

In fact, to even begin to grapple with where we are as a culture, it's important to understand that there are now distinct categories of how gender dysphoria is expressing itself in our culture.

Most people are unaware of this, and so they paint with way too wide of a brush when they try to think through or have conversations around this topic.

Understanding these categories will allow the nuance necessary to think through this and approach this with grace and truth, like we so desperately need to do.

And so look, let's look at these categories.

The first is called early onset gender dysphoria.

Now, for most of modern history, this is what people meant anytime they talked about gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder.

However, we now have a category for this.

Early onset gender dysphoria occurs early in life before you go through puberty.

And it's brought on primarily by psychological factors that we don't fully understand.

This is a genuine detachment from your biological sex and your inner sense of self.

This is when you see like three, four, five, six, seven-year-olds who just are adamant that they are the opposite sex.

Now, let me say something really important.

When you are a toddler, when you are three, four, five, six years old, almost every kid, as they begin to explore the world and the boundaries within that world, will make statements that they are or that they want to be the opposite sex.

Oh, parents know almost every kid does this.

Your four-year-old boy says, I'm a girl now, and you say, Oh no, you're not, and they say, Okay, you know, or your little girl says, I want to be a boy, and you say, No, no, no, God made you a little girl, and then they just go on with their life.

That is not early onset gender dysphoria.

That is a kid doing what kids need to do, mapping out the boundaries of the world that they now find themselves in.

That's very different than early onset gender dysphoria, where a kid is adamant and you cannot change their mind.

And often that gender dysphoria is also partnered with gender dysmorphia, where they grow to hate the sexual characteristics of their body.

This is devastatingly sad and very, very difficult to bring a young child through.

And it's also exceedingly rare.

At the most, early onset gender dysphoria affects about one in 10,000 people, at the most.

That's 0.001% of the population.

And for most of modern history, that's why people have been aware of transgenderism at some level, but it hasn't been at the top of the cultural conversation.

It has been moved into the zeitgeist by our second category.

In contrast to early onset, we now have rapid onset gender dysphoria.

This is gender dysphoria in adolescence during puberty, with no signs of dysphoria before puberty, and this is overwhelmingly found in teenage females.

This is brought on not primarily by psychological factors, but by social factors.

Rapid onset gender dysphoria develops in pubescent adolescence, overwhelmingly in teenage girls.

It happens when a teen has shown zero gender dysphoria and all of a sudden is gripped by it and desperately wants to transition.

And it's like for everyone in their life, this new identity just appeared out of nowhere.

This almost always happens in groups, especially in groups of teenage girls.

They have a community around them, either a real life community or an online community where many others have done the same thing.

There is virtually always, almost without exception, significant online and social media indoctrination involved with rapid onset gender dysphoria.

And over 60% of teens who develop it have existing documented mental health issues.

This has risen to the forefront in part by the sheer numbers.

Remember, early onset gender dysphoria affects about one in 10,000 people.

Today, rapid onset gender dysphoria affects two out of every 100 high schoolers.

We have seen other social contagions sweep through adolescents, especially adolescent females, throughout history.

This is a historical fact.

All the way back in the early 1900s, there was a fainting contagion, and young adolescent females would faint all the time, and nobody could figure it out.

In more recent history, we went through times of great, like rising levels of things like anorexia and bulimia, almost all concentrated in adolescent female populations.

However, when fainting was happening, when anorexia was prevalent, when bulimia was through the roof, everyone in the culture together unanimously decided to stand against it and not to acknowledge how they felt about themselves as reality.

Now, to question whether or not a teen experiencing rapid onset gender dysphoria is having some kind of psychological issue can get you culturally canceled.

Let me show you some statistics to show just how this has changed.

This blew my mind.

Prior to 2012, that's 11 years ago, prior to 2012, there was zero scientific literature about adolescent girls and gender dysphoria.

There was nothing in the scientific literature.

In 2018, the United Kingdom reported a 4,400% rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatment.

It's not hyperbole to say that there is an epidemic of gender dysphoria among the next generation.

There's one more category that falls under the umbrella of transgenderism.

However, it is quite different, and it's not gonna be a big part of our discussion today, but it's worth knowing that this does show itself in another form in our culture.

There's early onset, rapid onset, and there's also late onset gender dysphoria, which is probably more accurately called autogynophilia.

This is experienced by adults, almost exclusively male adults, who have no signs of gender dysphoria in adolescence or in childhood, and this is brought on not through psychological or social factors, this is brought on through sexual fetish.

Autogynaphilia literally translates to the love of yourself as a woman.

This happens when an adult male becomes transfixed with the female body as a form of sexual fetish to the point that he desires to see himself as a female.

There's a lot of new research that is beginning to hint at a huge intake of deviant pornography, potentially triggering this in some men.

Because this is founded on sexual immorality, and that topic was covered so thoroughly last Sunday, we're not gonna spend a lot of time on this, but I would encourage you, if you haven't, to watch last Sunday's message.

Now, let me stop as I'm gonna do uh periodically throughout our time and just remind you that every transgender person's story and journey is unique.

There are men and women who experience gender dysphoria all the way from childhood who are trying to figure out how to alleviate the internal anguish over feeling lost in their own body.

There are teenagers right now swept up in a massive social contagion, convinced by an online world that transitioning will solve all of their problems.

And yes, there are a small fringe of men who are in various stages of transition to live out a sexual fetish in real life.

These categories are helpful inasmuch as they reveal that we cannot paint with too broad of a brush when simply talking about trans issues or trans ideology or even trans people, first and foremost, we're talking about people.

Real people living real lives, suffering real pain.

And so now that we have sorted through the technical aspects of the conversation, the question we asked earlier remains the central question.

When there's incongruence between biological sex and internal sense of self, which one determines who you are?

The culture has decided that your internal sense of self wins out.

To even begin to question that might get you culturally canceled.

But here we are having five weeks of canceled conversations, seeking biblical clarity on these topics.

One major foundation for the transgender argument is that throughout history, humans have misunderstood biological sex and gender.

This is a huge part of the argument undergirding transgender ideology, is that for all of human history, we have gotten wrong that humans are dimorphic beings, which means we are split into two unique categories of sex.

Some scientists now say that sex is a spectrum, and everyone falls somewhere along that spectrum.

If you know scripture though, then you know there is a conflict there.

The creation narrative reveals this.

In Genesis 1.27, God created man in his own image.

He created him in the image of God, he created them male and female.

Significantly for us as Christians, and we saw this last week, Jesus reinforces this Old Testament view in the Gospels of the New Testament.

In Matthew 19, 4, Jesus said, Haven't you read that he who created them in the beginning made them male and female?

Scripture and human experience and all of modern science until about 15 minutes ago recognize that humans are in fact dimorphic beings broken down into two unique biological sexes.

The question for us then is: does our bodies given sex matter to God?

Does God care that we maintain the sex he created us with?

Isn't it our soul, our spirit, the internal sense of self that's way more important?

If we look again at Genesis 127, it says God created man in his own image.

He created him in the image of God.

Now, people have discussed for thousands of years at this point what it means to be made in God's image, to be made in the image of God.

Is it our consciousness that separates us from the rest of the animals?

Is it our ability to plan for the future?

Is it our eternal souls?

Is it our connection to each other and the unique relationships that we forge?

Theologians have wrestled for this for millennia.

However, properly understanding this foundational verse makes one thing very, very clear.

Our physical sex bodies play a significant role in imaging God.

The word image, we were made in his image, in the image of God, is the Hebrew word Salim.

Salim is used all throughout the Old Testament, which was written in ancient Hebrew, but it's almost always in a negative context because it is the word for idol or idols.

And of course, we are commanded again and again and again in the Old Testament to not worship Salim, to not worship idols.

In fact, that's a part of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament.

To not bow down to any graven images.

Salim, graven idols.

An idol is something that is carved or forged, that's made out of wood or rock or metal.

What an idol is, by definition, is a visible entity that represents an invisible entity.

And the problem with the idolatry in the Old Testament is they were creating idols to represent the invisible false gods.

The one positive use of it is Genesis 127.

We were made innocent as God's idol.

They're not categories of self-identity as we'd understand them in 2023.

These are dimorphic sexual categories.

The next verse makes that clear.

Verse 28 says, God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.

This is a call to sexual fruitfulness from sexed beings whose complete self images God on the earth.

All throughout scripture, it is consistent in seeing the entire person, body, soul, and spirit as crucial to displaying God to the world.

When we jump to the New Testament, the authors of the New Testament talk about Jesus as the ultimate Selem, the ultimate imager of the invisible God.

In Colossians 1.15, it says, Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

Jesus was the ultimate Selem, the invisible made visible, not just in spirit or soul, in his body.

We know that because in the same letter to the Colossians, Paul goes on to say, for the entire fullness of God's nature dwells bodily in Christ.

It's worth knowing that our culture has taken in the last 10 years a historic Gnostic view, which sees your body and soul as divided, separate, and distinct entities.

It sees your soul as the real you and your body as the corrupted vehicle that you just happen to be living in for now.

This is not a biblical understanding of your ontology, of who you are.

At the end of 1 Corinthians 6, we can see Paul using the word you as in your whole self and the word body interchangeably.

He says, Don't you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God?

You are not your own.

For you were bought at a price, so glorify God with your body.

The Christian understanding is that we are body and soul together imaging the invisible God.

Both the Greek and the Hebrew words in scripture for soul carry the idea of the entire person, including our bodies, from Genesis to Revelation, all of God's word sees our life as played out as a union of body and soul, displaying the glory of the invisible God.

Another unique aspect of Christian theology, what we believe, is not just in the resurrection of our souls, but at the end of time, the resurrection of our bodies.

That at the end, our bodies will be resurrected, they will be translated, means coming in back into capacity with our souls, and our bodies will be glorified, which is made perfect.

And we have good reason to believe in scripture that our resurrected, glorified bodies will in fact be sexed.

We see a good example of this in Jesus' post-resurrection glorified body.

Jesus was and is still male.

And our job in following Jesus is beginning to live out our eternal reality right here and right now.

By trying to transition the sex of the body that God gave us, we are coming into conflict with who we will be someday in eternity.

And so there are still arguments to be had, even if someone does acknowledge that maybe there are just two sexes, and maybe that's how the Bible described things, our culture today would say that doesn't mean that there isn't a wide spectrum of gender.

Maybe there's just two sexes, but how many genders are there?

And this is where the conversation can become very difficult and very confusing.

The first thing we have to note is the distinction between sex and gender does not show up in scientific or educational conversation until about 70 years ago.

For all of modern history, sex and gender were seen as interchangeable terms.

In the 1950s, there was a fringe idea that your gender actually doesn't have anything to do with your biological sex.

It is now something that is seen as completely socially constructed.

In other words, your gender is not tied to your sex at all.

And in the last 20 years, our culture and our cultural institutions have bought that whole cell.

However, here's what's actually happened if you're really paying attention.

All that has effectively done is we've begun using the word gender to refer to a whole host of concepts and categories that we use to analyze human behavior.

Things like personality and temperament and gifting and so much more.

When you really pay attention to the cultural conversation around gender, you begin to realize that what they are primarily talking about are traditional gender stereotypes.

In other words, if you are a male but you prefer cooking and sewing to football and rough housing, or you like dance and theater instead of comic books and muscle cars, or if you're female and you're more interested in things than people, or you have a high ambition in the marketplace, if you cast off the norms of makeup and dresses for sports and hunting, in today's culture, these non-stereotypical interests are not just something that makes you unique among other males and females.

Now, it is cause to question whether or not you might be stuck in the wrong body.

And I gotta tell you, from a Christian perspective, that's a heartbreaking change.

There was a short season, 10 or 15 years, where finally, as a culture, we would shudder at the thought that sensitive, non-ruff housing boys would be called sissies, and that their friends, or let's be honest, maybe even their fathers, would call them a girl or a princess to mock them and belittle them and get them to man up a little bit.

This type of gender stereotyping is unhelpful, and more importantly, it is dramatically unchristian.

The heroes of scripture paved the way for the world to understand that your temperament, your interests, your personality are not what makes you a man or a woman.

King David is not only a man after God's own heart, he's probably the fiercest warrior in all of Scripture.

And yet he reversed all types of gender stereotypes in his day.

He was a poet who would pour out his heart about love and nature, anxiety and relationships.

He was a musician, a sensitive artist.

He had a friend named Jonathan that in David's own words he loved more than all the women of the land.

This was not a sexual relationship between David and Jonathan, but it was a level of friendship most men in the West would be uncomfortable having.

Proverbs 31 describes a godly woman.

It falls into some of the gender stereotypes of the day.

She's kind and loving, she keeps a tidy house, but then it reverses all kinds of gender stereotypes of the day.

She's a businesswoman and an entrepreneur.

She's physically strong, she's a protector, she has ownership, she purchases land, all things that women did not do when the book of Proverbs was written.

Most importantly, Jesus came.

And in a world all about men showing how to dominate, Jesus was humble.

He allowed himself to be taken advantage of.

Jesus wept openly, in public.

You didn't do that as a man.

He expressed love for others without hesitation.

He taught that the last shall be first.

Jesus opened the doors for the acceptance of men and women who do not fit typical gender stereotypes.

It took a long time for our culture to recalibrate and understand that a boy with stereotypically feminine interests should be accepted and loved, not ridiculed and mocked.

And now we have digressed once again.

In the 80s, if you were a boy who is sensitive and artistic, which by the way was me growing up, the cultural commentary would be like, huh?

Your sound's kind of girly, huh?

We finally recalibrated that.

We started to get away from that.

And maybe all people are made unique and precise by God.

Now we're in a culture where depending on where you find yourself in our society, if you have a boy who's sensitive and artistic, the cultural commentary might be hey, I think your son might actually be a girl.

It is a huge regression.

It looks different, it sounds different, maybe even has different intention.

But it is falling right back into gender stereotypes that held people back for so long.

And we hear kind of the fringe stories all the time about parents beginning to socially transition their kids as young as three, four, five years old.

Sometimes you hear about parents who say they could tell from birth that their child was actually the opposite gender.

And if you pay attention to what they're saying, what they really describe are behaviors, personality, and temperamental qualities that are simply stereotypes of the opposite sex.

And so for the young people in the room, please hear me.

If you don't fit neatly into the stereotypes of your biological sex, that is okay.

God did not mess up on you, and it certainly does not mean that you are in the wrong body.

God created you on purpose and he created you with purpose.

You may be like King David, who God used to change the world.

You might be like Deborah, a woman in the Old Testament, who valiantly fought as a warrior to protect her people.

You need to know you are a Salem, the imager of the invisible God.

You were bought with a price, so glorify God with your entire life, including with your body.

So what do we do?

How do we navigate this highly technical and this deeply complex hot topic?

You remind us again.

First and foremost, this is about people.

Real people who are really struggling.

So for those of us who are not gender dysphoric, no one in your family is that you know of, no one in your social circle is, we have to approach the world trying to emulate Jesus.

And the politicization of transgenderism makes that quite difficult as you navigate through the world.

Let me say that what we're seeing in many states, an attempt to circumvent parents and teaching and sometimes encouraging this is very frustrating.

And we have the right, as followers of Jesus, to have a righteous anger about systems promoting and pushing harmful falsehoods.

But we have to be very careful that righteous anger toward systems and processes does not become unrighteous hatred toward transgender individuals themselves.

If we as Christians cannot love those who are radically different from us, then we are not upholding Jesus' first expectation for us, which is the law of love.

For those who have gender dysphoria, or parents and guardians of kids showing signs of gender dysphoria, the question remains when there is incongruence between biological sex and internal sense of self, which one determines who we are?

So far today, we've seen that biblically our sexed bodies are a part of how we image God.

Sexed bodies are a part of our Selem, unveiling the invisible God to a tangible world.

Throughout scripture, we see that our bodies matter, that they are a part of God's intention in his creation, and that we should learn to embrace and present ourselves according to our sex.

Theologically, Christians believe in the resurrection not just of our souls, but of our bodies.

Your body will be glorified and brought into eternity if you're a believer.

Jesus glorified body post-resurrection is the template for us, and Jesus was and still is male.

Your body will be sexed in eternity, and a part of our job during our time on earth is to prepare ourselves for that coming day.

Scientifically, there are only two sexes, and historically, gender and sex have been synonymous.

It's only in the last couple years that we have claimed that gender is a spectrum, and as we have seen, what that typically refers to has nothing to do with your actual biology, but rather with gender stereotypes that are far more harmful than they are helpful.

The gender spectrum is also untenable.

In 2022, it was claimed that there are 72 different genders.

One year later, we're now up to 107.

Some are honest enough to say that if you disconnect sex and gender, that the gender possibilities are infinite and therefore endless.

What that creates is massive disorder in society, which stands in stark contrast to God's created order.

Now, let me get really practical for parents.

Parents who, in the rare case, have a child with early onset gender dysphoria, only affecting at most one in 10,000 people.

But when it does affect someone, it's very painful, very difficult to navigate.

As well as parents who may be experiencing rapid onset gender dysphoria with their children going through puberty.

There are two extremes that people seem to fall into in society.

First, there is the old school approach, which is to kind of ignore and dismiss what your kid may be experiencing.

You'll say things like, knock it off with all of that, or grow up, or just stop it, stop doing that, stop acting like that.

To be sure, this might create compliance in your home for some time, but it often will result in your child finding a different adult or a different set of adults to confide in that end up doing serious harm.

The second extreme is what you get from many educators, doctors, and heartbreakingly from many therapists today.

That is a guarantee that if you don't fully transition your child, they will commit suicide.

Now, we have to be honest, people experiencing gender dysphoria are in one of the highest categories for suicidal ideation.

However, people handle the statistics on this to bolster whatever point they're making.

The largest study of gender dysphoric individuals across a 30-year span saw that the suicidal rate did not go down post-transition, even full surgical transition.

Many studies have found that around seven years post-transition is actually the highest chance of suicide.

What that means is when you are told things like, would you rather have a daughter who's alive or a son who's dead, that that is a malevolent, evil, false dichotomy, trying to force your compliance in something that will be harmful for your child.

I want to give you a few very practical steps as Christian parents for how we should navigate this very complex topic.

Number one, and you're going to tell very quickly how strongly I feel about this.

I have been talking to the parents of MetaCurch for years about this.

I've brought in experts to talk about this.

We've had round table talks, we've done interviews, I say it all the time, I say it all the time on the podcast, and still I see very few parents taking action on this.

And I have to be honest, it's quite frustrating.

Number one, get your kids off of social media.

And I know I hear it all the time.

You have no idea.

Ah, it's gonna be hell in my house, man.

I'm gonna have hell to pay if I take my kid off.

If if you are too scared of your child to s to break their Snapchat streak, okay, then you need to spend some time in God's word finding your courage and your rights as a parent.

You are the parent, they are the child, you determine what they have access to, and we have given up on this front as Christian parents.

Social media is like poison to these young, undeveloped minds.

That's not an opinion.

I've read the neurological literature.

I know what this is doing to our children.

I understand the dangers inside of it.

It's like we are handing our kids poison every morning on their way out the door, and then scratching our heads, wondering why are our kids so sick all of the time?

Your kids have no inherent right to the internet.

They have no God-given right to an Instagram account.

The youngest a child should be on social media is 16 years old, and then only if they have proven to be highly mature and trustworthy.

And when they get their first social media account, it should be on your phone as well.

It's not their account, it's y'all's account.

Your kids never need Snapchat.

That is one of the primary places kids are being trafficked from.

Your kids never need TikTok.

It is poison for their minds.

It is as addictive as heroin and crack.

Side note, you don't need TikTok or Snapchat.

I'm just gonna throw that out there.

Like, live a more productive life.

In virtually every single case of rapid onset gender dysphoria, there is massive social media indoctrination and internet indoctrination from sites like Reddit and Tumblr, where people are waiting to hear about your teenagers' problems and to point them to one solution.

Gender transition.

You should be monitoring the internet activity of your kids.

There are plenty of devices out there.

The bare minimum of parenting should be an expectation that you do the research on how to monitor these things and you demand that your kids follow those rules.

That you get active.

That is not their phone, that is your phone.

Take control of it.

Number one is to get your kids off social media.

Number two is to affirm your child's identity in the Lord.

Before we talk about affirming which side of the biological sex or internal, the first thing we should be doing as Christian parents is identifying their identity of who they are in Christ.

When parents come to me for counseling with a child who is identifying as transgender or non-binary or even gay or lesbian for that matter, the parents' first reaction is to argue against these new identities, and there is going to be a time for that.

However, the best thing you can do is to affirm who they actually are.

And our identity is found in Christ.

Then, when it comes to their sexuality or their identity, in your house, you lovingly require and demand a Christian sexual ethic.

We are not discovering our own truth in this house.

We're not making up our own identities.

We are finding our truth in the Word of God, and all of us as a family are submitting our lives to it.

And the most important thing you can do is affirm your love for them.

Remind them that they are created on purpose and with purpose, that God has a plan for their life, and that God doesn't make mistakes.

These affirmations of who God made them and how much you love them will build the equity necessary for the difficult conversations about who they are, what they're going through, and the rules that your family is going to live under.

If your teenager suddenly identifies as trans, rapid onset gender dysphoria, you may have to take drastic action.

That is the reality of the culture we're living in.

You may have to take drastic action, and they will not be happy about it.

Remember this, it is a social contagion, which means it happens in groups.

You may need to move schools.

You may need to cut off many of the friends in their current social group.

You definitely have to get on top of their online usage.

If you think that the time you spend with them in the evenings is going to trump the eight to ten hours a day, five days a week that they're spending in their group at school, you are mistaken.

If you're experiencing rapid onset gender dysphoria, it may be time for drastic action.

And anything is worth raising your child to affirm who they are in the Lord.

Number one, get your Kids off social media.

Number two, affirm your child's identity in the Lord.

And number three, be patient but purposeful.

Be patient but purposeful.

If you have a child that is truly gender dysphoric, there is actually a path that works to alleviate this almost every time, and you'll never hear about it.

As a matter of fact, when we archive this sermon, this may not last on YouTube.

You're not even allowed to talk about the one thing that has a 90% rate of success in alleviating gender dysphoria.

You're not even allowed to talk about it anymore.

To help a kid going through this, the psychological consensus historically was a method called watchful waiting, where you lovingly affirmed your child's biological sex while you allow them to go through puberty.

The largest study ever conducted on gender dysphoria found that close to 90% of gender dysphoric children were no longer dysphoric post-puberties.

Some studies saw as high as a 94% rate.

Those are better odds than any medicine you can take for anything.

90% have a dissistance in their dysphoria if you just allow them to go through puberty.

And this makes sense.

In a real way, our pre-puberty bodies are not fully sexed.

We cannot procreate.

We don't have our secondary sexual characteristics.

The body goes through massive changes in puberty, and studies show that if you just allow the body to go through the changes that are already going to happen, it has over 90% chance of helping your child.

On the other side, what the culture pushes is puberty blockers.

Now, number one, once a child is put on puberty blockers, almost 100% of those children go on to take cross-sex hormones.

And the narrative is you're just pushing pause on puberty until they can make a decision.

That in fact is not what happens.

And what no one will talk about is the danger of puberty blockers.

They lead to osteoporosis, they can increase the risk of cancer, and if you're on them for even a relatively short amount of time, they will sterilize your child.

Before your child has even gone through puberty or become an adult to decide what they want to do with their family in the future, it will sterilize them.

One of the most often prescribed puberty blockers is a drug called Lupron, which has also been used by the justice system to castrate sex offenders.

It will sterilize your children, taking away what is their God-given right to decide how they're gonna build their family in the future.

Now, it is also our job to give our kids as much flexibility as possible.

If you have a gender dysporic kid, they are not going to fit neatly into gender stereotypes, and that is okay.

Lovingly affirming your child's biological sex is not the same thing as stuffing your daughter into ball gowns or forcing your kid into peewee football.

Those are different things.

You give them as much flexibility as you can while affirming their biological sex and lovingly require that they present as their biological sex.

Let them know it's okay to not fit into those stereotypes.

Let them know that God knows that about them and He created them very precisely.

They have a purpose in the world and that you love them exactly how they are.

Now, I don't wrestle with gender dysphoria, so I have no way of telling you exactly how painful this is, or fully understanding or empathizing.

And like we've seen every week, the call to see your sexed body as a gift from God, even when your internal sense of self is battling against you, it is a high call.

And that's the call to follow Jesus.

It costs us, and if we're doing it right, it costs all of us.

It is about suffering now in order to thrive in eternity.

Let me remind you the path that we laid out for how life and faith operate.

To understand the good news, the gospel, we have to know the bad news.

And the bad news is that we are separated from God because of our sin, and yet Jesus came to deal with that sin issue.

And one of the ways the New Testament talks about the work of Jesus is that he destroyed the dividing wall that kept us from God, and now we can freely approach Jesus and the offer that the cross provides for us.

All we're asked to do is believe in who Jesus is and what he has done.

And we are given eternal life.

And that is a gift that we did not earn, and that is a gift that can never be taken away.

And the question is once you have eternal life to believe, what are you gonna do with it?

Are you gonna sit and wait for heaven?

Or are you going to follow Jesus and get busy building little pieces of heaven right here on earth?

The invitation to believe is to come to the cross and live.

The invitation to follow is to carry your cross and die.

Jesus said it like this: if anyone wants to follow me, they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and then follow me.

And the question on every one of these hot topics, whether it's about life or sex or identity, what does it mean to deny myself?

And what does it look like to carry my cross?

For those who don't wrestle with today's issue, denying yourself might look a lot like denying yourself of attacking and using your words to harm people, denying yourself of the hatred that sometimes wells up inside of you when you involve yourself in the political polarization, forgetting that first and foremost, we are called to a spiritual mission uh mission, not a political mission, being like Jesus who came and brought people to the table, radically different people.

If you are dealing with some of these issues, what does it look like to carry your cross?

What does it look like to honor God through temporary suffering?

What does it look like for us as a movement, as a church, to be a place where anyone can come to be met with a community that is full of grace, encounter teachings that are full of truth, embracing the promise Jesus gave us that you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

Would you pray with me?

Holy Spirit, we just ask that you would soften our hearts.

It's so, so easy to become hard-hearted in our world today.

It's so easy to think that's not my problem, that's not my issue.

It's so easy to disagree and decide that disagreement means division.

Soften our hearts.

An internal battle that most of us cannot even imagine.

That Metachurch would be a place where they can come and be affirmed in their truest identity at the core of who they are.

People beautifully and wonderfully made by God, created on purpose, created with purpose.

And I pray that we would stand out as a bright light in the midst of darkness.

We love you.

And Jesus, we thank you for your love, and we pray it all in your name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

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There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit.

And you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

And I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.