It is, ultimately, a metaphysical claim to say that a separate category of gender exists in the mind and can be changed at will. On what basis is such a claim substantiated? I know few will care to answer that question, but it might be the means of planting a seed of doubt in the minds of some.

Many Christian theologians have recognized in recent years that the worst heresies and errors facing the contemporary church are matters of anthropology. In the past, the central issues were different: the Trinity and natures of Christ in the early church, the nature of salvation at the time of the Reformation, and so on. Those issues obviously continue to be matters of concern from time to time, but today the church faces the most confusion regarding human sexuality, human purpose, and other matters that get at the fundamental nature of man.

One of those issues is transgenderism. It is easy to approach the issue with the basic Christian conviction, derived from Scripture, that God made only two sexes, male and female. This, of course, is true (Gen 1:27; Matt 19:4; etc.), vitally important, and must be affirmed. But the response of the “official line” among supporters of transgenderism is not completely to deny this fact. They normally argue that humans have a biological sex that is immutable and a gender that is assigned (by doctors and parents) at birth, but that can be altered. What would bring about such a change? The answer is one’s own feelings or thoughts. If a person believes himself or herself to be the opposite gender, that makes it true. At least for many advocates of transgenderism, the binary between male and female is not actually denied. It is just made fluid. As many have pointed out, in fact, transgender claims require the retention of the sex and gender binary of male and female. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking with precise analytical rigor about this, so it is often the case the defenders of transgenderism will simply say that they “are” the gender they choose, without qualifying it by saying they remain the sex they were born as. This is not surprising, because to affirm that you are one sex and the opposite gender simultaneously is extremely confusing (utterly incoherent, really). Nonetheless, maleness and femaleness are often not denied.

To respond to transgenderism, then, by simply affirming the fact of the created distinction of male and female, while true, will not be sufficient by itself to show the problems with transgenderism. The error is one of anthropology and goes much deeper than the surface issue of claiming that a person can change genders. That is just a symptom of the underlying disease. The error can be stated simply: it is the notion that there is no necessary connection between body and mind (or body and soul, body and spirit; there are a variety of terminological pairs that express this duality).

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