We are awash in a world that refuses to believe that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Thankfully, while the pastoral and personal issues are complicated, the Biblical teaching on the trans issue is not. Deuteronomy 22:5 states matter-of-factly. 

During one of my summers as a college student—over 25 years ago now—I served as a counselor at a Christian camp. One of our responsibilities as counselor, besides keeping watch over a rowdy bunch of kids and teenagers and trying to teach them something about Jesus, was to come up with skits for the many large group gatherings during the week. Some of the skits were supposed to be serious, but most of them were supposed to make the campers laugh.

The camp director, an older man who has since gone to be with the Lord, told us there were two new rules we had to follow in putting together our brilliant sketch comedies. One, we couldn’t do anything so gross that some poor camper might get sick. Two, no crossdressing. The first rule was disappointing, but made sense. You don’t want to ruin a camper’s week by doing some nauseating food gag. But the second rule felt more inconvenient. After all, it was a staple of zany camp hijinks to have counselors dress up in outlandish outfits, especially men stuffing their shirts full to look like models of exaggerated femininity.

The director didn’t explain his rationale in great detail, and I don’t think it is always wrong for people to wear silly clothes in silly contexts. But I’ve often thought about the prescience in that older man’s wisdom. He knew that we were performing for puberty-throttled teenagers. Even in the late 1990s, he could see the potential confusion that a week of crossdressing skits might cause. Likely, no one would have been scared or led down a path of sexual deviance, but he figured why risk it? Why risk making teenagers feel (even more) insecure about their bodies? Why risk presenting drag—and I’m not sure we even knew the term at the time—as a fun, playful option for Christians? Maybe he was stricter than he needed to be. Or maybe he was ahead of his time.

Anyone with half an ear open to the news knows that we are living through a disturbing and disorienting cultural moment in which grown men and women don’t know (or pretend like they don’t know) the difference between men and women.

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