Good teaching is often characterized by good questions. The same goes for medical care and counseling. Good care is characterized by good questions. Unfortunately, in the name of a radical, woke, sexualized ideology laden with false assumptions and destructive beliefs, these caring questions aren’t being asked and people are being hurt and deceived because of it.
I will make my case by highlighting but one simple, piercing, and necessary question: Who hurt you? It’s a painful reality lurking behind so much of the confused sexual and gender behavior and gender identifying today: people have been hurt, abused, shamed, neglected, and made to feel insignificant, dirty, rejected, and unaccepted in sexual or gender specific ways. So they anchor their hopes for acceptance and love in alternative sexual behavior and/or gender identity.
To be more specific, many (though not all) individuals who identify as transgender or who describe same-sex attraction have experienced some sort of trauma (whether physical or psychological) in very sex-specific ways. They were specifically rejected or abused as a male or female (made to feel ashamed to be male or female) to the point that they began to fantasize about escaping their body, about transitioning to another body/gender to escape the pain. Or, they didn’t receive appropriate affection and they began to fantasize (fantasies that turned sexual in puberty) about receiving it from their same sex.
Genuine care requires us to ask, “Who hurt you?”
Genuine care requires us to ask, “Who hurt you?” Genuine care requires us to hear their pain, to listen to their stories, to grieve and hurt with them over what they’ve experienced and then to help them find acceptance as the male or female they are and to help them receive appropriate (non-sexualized) affection from same-sex peers and friends, even as they are embraced and welcomed in Christ’s Church.
But a radical, sexual ideology that rejects the body’s connection to identity refuses to ask this question.
But a radical, sexual ideology that rejects the body’s connection to identity refuses to ask this question. A radical, sexual ideology that has deified desires (making desires God) and blamed the body for being out of line with desires, has bypassed compassion in its headlong pursuit of cutting edge of cultural wokeness.
[1]
And people are being hurt because of it. Space prevents detailing case after case. If you really want to dig into this, read Walt Heyer’s story (
www.waltheyer.com). He lived for eight years as a transgender woman (a biological man who identifies as a woman) before returning to his biological identity. Read his story of feeling rejected as a male to the point that he believed becoming female would bring acceptance.
Or read Jennifer Roback Morse’s book The Sexual State in which she tells the stories of survivors of the sexual revolution and the cultural elite’s drive to silence them and to force the sexual revolution forward through well-funded propaganda.
Or read Nancy Pearcey’s Love Thy Body in which she records the firsthand accounts of people who were never asked who hurt them; they were only told to reject their bodies and to embrace a new gender identity or to find acceptance in sexualized same-sex relationships.
Or read Chad Thompson’s book Loving Homosexuals in which he tells his personal story of painful exclusion as a male and his search for inclusion through same-sex encounters and his journey out of the same-sex lifestyle into appropriate non-sexual acceptance and affirmation from his same-sex peers.
Or read Ryan Anderson’s
When Harry Became Sally[2] in which he lets de-transitioners (those reaffirming their biological identity) tell their stories of feeling pressured and led into transitioning and feeling as if their underlying psychological struggles were never addressed. Nobody ever asked them
Who hurt you?
So many voices expressing so much pain and nobody even asked them about it.
So many voices expressing so much pain and nobody even asked them about it. So many stories of sexual abuse, sexual shaming, exclusion, rejection, and confusion and nobody asked them Who hurt you? Instead, they were told, “We can fix you by changing your body.” Or “Escape your pain by embracing your desires.” In essence, “Live at odds with your body.”
This is not good care because the pain hasn’t originated from a problem with their body. Changing it, therefore, won’t alleviate the pain. The pain came from something outside their body and it left them with deep, emotional and psychological bruises. Or, the pain came from false beliefs about the body. Either way, the pain didn’t come from the body, so blaming the body or changing the body isn’t the answer.
But the pain is real and we should validate their pain by asking good questions, by asking who hurt them, by asking how they’ve been shamed, abused, ostracized, shunned, and belittled. The first step isn’t offering hormonal or surgical solutions or to look for affirmation in sexualized same-sex relationships; the first step is hearing their pain and we accomplish this by asking good questions.
Sadly, this is precisely the sort of care that is increasingly being censored and censured (read the footnote for a few recent examples of Big Tech’s attempt to silence such caring voices). And, if the deceptively named “Equality Act” is passed in Congress (it has passed the House), the forceful silencing of this sort of care will precipitously escalate.
[3] This is why the Church, more than ever, must learn to ask good, caring questions even as we reaffirm our commitment to God’s good creation as not only good in and of itself, but as good for us.
Have questions? Want to talk more about this? Need help talking to your children/grandchildren about this? Call/email/text/stop in! Zion is your partner in life. – Pastor Conner
[1] Woke is a buzzword that has to do with being “woke up” to the sexualized agenda of the sexual revolution. In other words, if you want to be loved by the world, you need to be “woke.” As Christ’s Church, our goal is not be loved by the world, but to love the world in Christ’s name.
[2] Toward the middle of February, Amazon banned the sale of this book, apparently believing it needed to be censored. You can buy Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, The Anarchist’s Cookbook (in which you can learn how to make bombs), and Adult-Child Sex: A Philosophical Defense (in which some acts of pedophilia are defended), and worse, but not Dr. Anderson’s book which makes the case that the body is good and that biology informs identity. Dr. Anderson puts it plainly: “Biology is not bigotry.” He adds, “The most helpful therapies do not try to remake the body to conform with thoughts and feelings – which is impossible – but rather to help people find healthy ways to manage the tension and move toward accepting the reality of their bodily selves” (5). This was deemed objectionable and worthy of censor by Amazon.
This is nothing new for Amazon. They also banned Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters and Health Hazards of Homosexuality (a compilation of collected research on the effects of homosexual acts).
[3] For more on “The Equality Act,” log onto www.zionmanning.com and click on “blog.” Then scroll down to the article “Beware Equality (Falsely So Called).”
