Audio only:
Joe shares what parts of Christianity he would emphasize in order to convince a trans person that Christianity is actually true.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to propose a challenge. How do we as Christians present the gospel to people who identify as transgendered?
CLIP:
You care about other human beings and you don’t want to see injustice, and you don’t want to see oppression of any sort, right? Of course. Okay, so I admire that about you. Don’t trap me, I’m not trapping you.
Joe:
In one sense, the question is easy. The truth is the truth, but the gospel is the good news. That’s literally what the term means, and it’s good news for each and every one of us individually. So what message of good news do Christians have for people struggling with gender dysphoria and what’s more? How do we help them to see it as good news? After all, the gospel is not a form of stoicism or self-denial. It’s a response to the God of love who saves us. We surely deny ourselves, but never just for the sake of denying ourselves. If you’re in love with someone, you may give up everything for them, but the sacrifice only makes sense in the context of the love. Similarly, you may take up your cross to follow Christ, but the hard news of the cross can make sense only in light of the good news of the gospel. In one sense that good news is the same for all of us, all of sin and fall short of the glory of God. We all need Christ as redeemer. So it might be easy to just tell someone who says there trends, Hey, you may not get all this stuff, but just grit and bear it.
CLIP:
That is not showing God’s love to people. That’s being it,
Joe:
But the cross is both universal and particular. In fact, St. Paul’s able to say something so radically personal as Christ loved me and gave himself up for me. So what is the gospel message for people who regard themselves as transgendered? I want to suggest two parts to that answer, but before I do that, I want to share some good news over@shamelessjoe.com because we have a couple of cool announcements. First, Mike, my editor has started putting together the sources that I’m using so that for each episode it makes it a little easier to go deep. And second, he’s even been putting together little cheat sheets for lack of a better term, summarizing the major points in an easy to follow PDF. If you’ve got a better name for that than a cheat sheet, let me know. In any case, you can get those for as little as $5 a month and you can check it out@shamelessjoe.com. Let’s start with an area of agreement and then see where we disagree. Identity is incredibly important and that is actually something we as Christians can forget. Sometimes we can focus so much on the objective truths about Christ, the truth about the moral law, and so on, that we miss the personal and subjective dimension.
CLIP:
Who are you? I’m Dylans unacceptable answer. I already know your name. Who are you?
Joe:
So the people talk meant gender identity or identity politics or identity in general? Well, they’re right to see that identity is enormously important. I’ve actually written a book on this subject and in which I point out you can’t know how to behave unless you know who you are. Imagine you’re on a football field and you don’t know which team you play for. You don’t know what position you play. You don’t even know if you’re playing or officiating or coaching. In that case, you couldn’t possibly know what you’re supposed to do.
CLIP:
Why weren’t you in that last scrimmage? I’m sending this one out. Whatcha doing with that cigar in your mouth? Why do you know another way to smoke it?
Joe:
But if that’s true, if action is rooted in identity, this means that talking about the do’s and don’ts of morality without first talking about identity can be a mistake. How we even determine the morality of an action can sometimes depend on the identity of the persons involved. For instance, whether two people should go to bed together turns on the identity of whether or not they’re married, but even more broadly, the question of whether to follow the law of Christ or not turns on questions of identity, his identity as well as my own. Now biblically, this emphasis on identity is actually quite clear. Think about Matthew 16. Jesus does not ask, what do you think of my teachings? He asks, who do you say that I am? It’s a question of identity, and when Simon correctly recognizes Jesus as the Christ, Jesus responds by revealing to Simon a new and deeper dimension of his own identity. You are Peter and upon this rock, I’ll build my church. If Christianity is all about a personal encounter with Christ, then it makes sense that identity matters more than we sometimes realize. But if we agree on that, if we agree identity is really important, where do we disagree? Well, to get a sense of that, here’s Dr. Christie Overstreet introducing a crowd in 2018 to the ideas of transgenderism and gender identity. At a TED talk,
CLIP:
I want you to think about transgender as someone who’s assigned a sex at birth that doesn’t match with who they are as a person and their sense of self. Now, this is very different than biological sex. So gender identity is sense of self. So think of it as what’s between your ears, sense of self, who you are. This is very different than biological sex, right? Hormones, genitalia, chromosomes between our legs.
Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong.
Joe:
First, sex is a biological reality that we recognize. It’s not something that we invent or just a sign. Second, it’s usually recognized long before birth, particularly today, given the prevalence of prenatal sonograms and genetic testing. Third, biological sex is actually a lot more than just what’s between our legs. And fourth, the idea that who you are is just whoever you perceive yourself to be, regardless of objective realities like biology is both unscientific and unserious.
CLIP:
Oh, he’s quite harmless. He thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt. So what? There’s a lot of worse guys. He could think he was.
Joe:
It’s true sometimes that our sense of self can contradict objective reality. As a kid, I briefly thought I was good at singing, but that doesn’t mean I was a good singer trapped in a bad singer’s body. I just had a bad sense of reality. Similarly, an anorexic might have a sense of self as fat while having a body that is dangerously thin. We would never say to that person that their real self is fat or that who they are is a fat person. When our sense of self is contradicted by reality, it is really important that we recognize reality needs to win. But the fifth thing that’s wrong is actually a little subtler. Dr. Overstreet said that
CLIP:
Gender identity is sense of self. So think of it as what’s between your ears, sense of self, who you are.
Joe:
Now, she might mean by who you are and sense of self simply your sense of your own gender. But it is all too common to conflate identity with gender identity as if the only thing that’s important about me is whether I think of myself as male or female as masculine or feminine. And as Pope Leo recently observed, this is a pretty uniquely western obsession.
CLIP:
I recall something that a cardinal from the eastern part of the war said to me, so before I was Pope about the western world is fixative obsessed with sexuality so that a person’s identity for some people is all about sexual identity. And for many people in other parts of the world, that’s not a primary issue in terms of how we should deal with one another.
Joe:
The reality is we don’t just have one aspect to our identities. We have many. Before Jesus calls Simon Peter, he first calls him Simon, son of John. Similarly, I’m a husband, I’m a father, I’m a son. I’m a follower of Christ. I’m a member of his church. I’m an apologist for Catholic answers. I’m an American, and so on. You could probably make a similar list for yourself. Certainly Meredith Brooks could child, I’m a mother, I’m sinner. But these different aspects of our identities aren’t just distinct. They can even be intention with one another. Your boss may ask you to work the weekend, but you promised your wife, you’d take the kids to their grandparents, and sometimes those conflicts are even at the level of important moral claims. You’re a member of this country or this political party and it’s promoting something that Christ and his church regards as immoral.
In those kind of cases where there’s a conflict, what wins out. So it’s important not just that we recognize that we have these different aspects to our identity, but we have a sense of their hierarchy and a sense especially of our most fundamental identity. Where is the foundation to my sense of self? And unfortunately, proponents of gender identity can speak as if the most important part about me, who I really am is reducible to whether I identify as male or female or something else. And you can find similar phenomena of people treating race or ethnicity or sex as the most important thing about themselves. But this risks turning these incidental aspects of identity into a kind of idle. Back in 1937, papacy Xi wrote a papal cyclical in German to warn people who are starting to treat things like their skin color or nationality as the most important part of their identity.
And he saw this was a problem. He warned that anyone who raises these notions above their standard value and divinize them to an idolatrous level reveals themselves to be far from the true faith in God. If some other aspect of your identity, your skin color, your gender dysphoria your job, literally anything is causing you to act in a way that is not in keeping with the gospel. You’ve allowed this thing to become an idol because it has taken a place that belongs only to God. And the message of the Bible is very clear. Here, you and I, we know ourselves only incomplete and we’ll only discover the full truth about ourselves and encountering Jesus Christ and living in that place as Matthew 16 shows, it’s only in this encounter with Christ that we can understand not only his identity but the truth about our own.
As Pop John Paul II pointed out, it’s by knowing and loving God that men and women come to the fullness of truth about themselves. Obviously, Simon had some sense of self before the events of Matthews 16, but that sense of self was transformed by Christ, and Jesus wants to do that to us as well. In Revelation two, he promises that to him who conquers, I will give some of the hidden manna and I’ll give him a white stone with a new name written on the stone, which no one knows except him who receives it. The man is a eucharistic image that is hidden suggests a kind of divine intimacy. And the new name suggests that like Simon, who didn’t realize he was Peter, there are realities about ourselves that will only come to be or come to be known in their fullness in communion with Christ. So while the gender identity crowd is right to focus on identity, they’re wrong to treat such a relatively unimportant part of our self sense as the core of our identity. The core of our identity is and must be that we’re made by God for communion with God that we’re called to be sons and daughters of God. In the words of Pope Leo,
CLIP:
I am trying to say this is what Francis said, very clear when he would say todo, todo to everyone’s invited in, but I don’t invite a person in because they are or are not of any specific identity. I invite the person in because he’s a son of God.
Joe:
That’s it. That’s your deepest most foundational identity. And here’s why this matters. If somebody thinks that their deepest identity is living a transgendered lifestyle or a same sex lifestyle or whatever else and the gospel calls them to a different way of life, then the gospel sounds like repression or hate. You can only follow Christ if you stop being your true self. Faced with that, people choose either a path of unhappy repression or a path of living their truth by rejecting the gospel call. But that’s a false choice. If who you are truly is a son or a daughter of God, then living in accordance with the way God made you and living in accordance with the law of God isn’t repressing your true self, it’s becoming your true self.
CLIP:
See, I think sometimes for me, I got the rules of God, but I never got his heart. And if you don’t capture, if you haven’t experienced God’s heart, I actually don’t know if we even understand his rules or his ways.
Joe:
If you listen to the framing of people like Dr. Overstreet, the problem is not just the exaggerated and idolatrous emphasis on subjective gender identity. It’s also the disregard for the language of the body. Her conception of who you are doesn’t seem to include the body at all. The body is or even irrelevant. It’s why activists were able to get the medical profession to stop saying sex change operation and start saying gender affirming care. The sext nature of the body objective reality is obscured in the service of focusing on one’s subjective experience of gender. So part of the good news for somebody living in this world involves revealing that biological sex isn’t irrelevant and it’s not a problem that needs fixing, and it’s not just a stumbling block to your true identity. No, the body is a gift and it’s a sign that helps point to who and what we are.
This is what John Paul II called the nuptial meaning of the body. The idea is straightforward. Your body has a complete circulatory system, a complete respiratory system and so on, but you only have half of a reproductive system. It’s the only part of the body that it takes another person to complete and it must be another person of the opposite sex. So the nuptial meaning of the body reveals both that men and women are different and that these differences are good since we are incomplete without one another. As Monsignor Charles Pulp explained, the very design of our body orients us toward a marital nuptial relationship with man made for woman and woman made for men, and that our sexual distinctions of male and female are not merely arbitrary physical aspects, rather the bespeak deeper spiritual realities that we must learn to appreciate and respect. This means that the maleness or the femaleness of your body truly is a God-given gift.
It doesn’t mean you have to walk around being a gendered stereotype of what it is to be a man or a woman. As a kid who didn’t like sports, I remember my karate teacher talking about how some of the greatest poets in Japanese history were Samurai. Prior to that moment, I thought of poetry as a girl thing, and so it was a kind of light bulb moment for me. I could suddenly see that there were actually lots of ways of living out one’s masculinity, and unfortunately, a lot of young people are not getting that message. They’re being taught whether by sexist or gender ideologues, that if they don’t fit into a narrow conception of masculinity, they’re not real men. Or if they don’t fit into a certain female ideal, they’re not real women. That is just false. It’s not your love of monster trucks or sports ball that makes you a man.
It’s your body, it’s your genetics and ultimately your God. So obsessing about identity can also lead to a kind of narcissism and naval gazing. The kind demonstrated an eat, pray love by Elizabeth Gilbert where she abandons her husband and community to go find herself on what’s essentially a year long vacation overseas. But the message of the body is that you’re never going to be complete by simply going inwards. You paradoxically have to come out of yourself to find yourself. After all, if my reproductive system is incomplete without my wife, if there’s a sense in which I’m literally incomplete without her, this tells me some important things. It tells me, for instance, that I’m not just made for myself. It is not good that the man should be alone. Now, of course, many people aren’t married, many never will be. Many are called to live celibacy what Christ calls being a eunuch for the kingdom, and that’s good.
But even in these cases, you don’t become desexed. You’re still made for others and incomplete them, and the bodies are a reminder of that. You’re still called to be a gift to those God has placed in your life and to receive the people God has placed into your life as a gift as well. Saint John Paul II explored this in a meditation he wrote on the theme of givenness. Now, even though he wrote it in 1994, it wasn’t released publicly until 2006, a year after he died, and I’ve wondered if they intentionally delayed releasing it for so long because the Pope’s words are revolutionary and challenging and provocative. For instance, he writes, that woman is given to man so that he can understand himself, and reciprocally man is given to woman for the same end. They’re to mutually affirm each other’s humanity. Odd by its dual richness he sees in the story of Adam and Eve, that awareness of gift and givenness and how for man, woman is first an object of awe and wonder.
But the Pope is quite clear that this gift of man to woman and woman to man is about a lot more than just marriage or sex or romance. He argues that every one of us, single or married priests and religious even, we’re all called the recognize the good of the opposite sex and even to help reveal it to one another. In his words, I think that every man, whatever his station in life or his life’s vocation must at some point hear those words which Joseph of Nazarus once heard. Do not be afraid to take Mary to yourself. Do not be afraid to take means do everything to recognize that gift which she is for you. Fear only one thing that you try to appropriate that gift. That is what you should fear. As long as she remains a gift from God himself to you, you can safely rejoice in all that she is as that gift.
What is more you ought even to do everything you can to recognize that gift, to show her how unique a treasure she is. Every person is unique. Uniqueness is not a limitation, but a window into the depths, perhaps God wills that it be you. Who is the one who tells her of her inestimable worth and special beauty. Look, you can imagine how easily this meditation could be misunderstood. This is not a call for priests to have emotional affairs or worse with women while telling them how special and beautiful they are. The Pope rightly warns to watch the spiritual fruits and ensure that these desires are good ones, but he’s clear even men called the celibacy, they’re not to simply shun women. After all, Jesus himself had close friendships with women, rather what the Pope is calling for, what we can all learn from is relating in a way that is sex without being sexual.
The easiest way to think about it is like this. I’ve got a daughter and it means something different from my daughter to hear from me that she’s beautiful than to hear those same words from her mother because on some level she knows I’m a different kind of creature. And so the praise is coming as it were from outside. Similarly, we’re in the habit of addressing Mary as our lady and her being a lady and not a man matters for how we relate to her. So this is what we should all be striving for, not to fit in some overly narrow box of what we imagine masculinity or femininity to be, but to recognize the gift of our body and of our sex and the gift of the opposite sex. It’s only in this way that we can ourselves be a total gift, a disinterested, sincere gift in order to recognize in every person the gift that he is, and to thank the giver for the gift of the human person and this topic of men and women, what makes us different, what makes us complimentary. I know this is a very deep topic and we’re sort of skimming the surface. It’s actually something I’ve explored in much greater depth and addressing some of the popular myths about sex and gender. So if you want to see a much deeper dive, you can get that right here. Either way, I want to say thank you for watching and for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.