Transgenderism | Ep. 9

Cornerstone Church

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The point being is it's an immediate identity. You can identify as a victim of society, and that's why you feel the horrible way you do, and now it gives you a reason for that feeling, but now this new identity that you take on and you're surrounded by this encouragement of the world, you know, the month of June is devoted to you, you know, all your friends will applaud you and say how brave of you, you know, and so you have this new identity.

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It's the L, the G, the B, the T, whatever it might be, whatever, and interestingly, the plus at the end leaves the door open to invent other ones.

01:03

And welcome to Off the Cuff. My name's Average Joe Gornley. I'm here with Pastor Clewer.

01:09

Pastor, welcome to another episode. Excited to be here. So am I, so am I. So last week, or on our last podcast, depending on your perspective, we said we're going to talk about something very serious that's affecting the culture dramatically.

01:25

It's called transgenderism. So should we define some terms?

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What is transgenderism? I don't have a great definition except to say that someone who believes that they are trapped in the wrong body and then does something about it to try to either dress differently, so a man dressing like a woman, or even surgical or chemical responses to that, that technology now has enabled people to try.

01:57

Right, right, right. So, so I think, I think you would say that it is sinful to engage in this?

02:06

Yeah, I mean, you got to start with the Bible and male and female, he created them, and that's the truth of it that someone is male or they're female.

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I read a story online, one of these that kind of circulate on Facebook. It was a girl talking about her experience growing up, how she always had that, that feeling like,

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I should have been a boy. I should have been a boy. Always played sports more than anything girly, you know, just acted more masculine, you know, and wanted her hair to be short and to look like a boy and wanted to dress like a boy.

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And it just was something that was kind of in her psyche. And what's the, what's the reason for that? Well, ultimately, it's part of the fall, right?

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Because Genesis 3 happens after he creates a male and female, right? So there's going to be issues of this, of this kind.

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But she talks about how this was the 70s or 80s when she grew up. Okay. And there was no social contagion telling her that she is a boy trapped in a girl's body.

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Right. In fact, she went to her mom and her mom said, God doesn't make mistakes. You're a girl and that's who

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God made you to be. There you go. And she believed her mom. And so she just kind of, she dealt in her life with these intrusive thoughts.

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You know what intrusive thoughts are? Sure. They're just thoughts that come into the mind, whether oftentimes because of things you fear.

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They're, they're an anxiety kind of induced thing, but they're also at times spiritual warfare. There's a such thing as demons that introduce thoughts into the brain that are not even true or something that you would believe.

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Maybe I'm thinking of, I was thinking of something different. So intrusive thought, is that a theological term? Is that a psychological term?

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It's just a thing. I'm just, I don't know if it's a term or not. It's just the idea that these are thoughts that are just intruding on your brain.

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So they could be demonic. The source of them might come from outside of yourself. So they're intruding in territory here.

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Right? So anything that's not true, if it doesn't accord to God's word, if it's a lie, this is the enemy that wants you to believe it.

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Long story short, she's wrestling with these thoughts in her mind, but she would discount them and say, no,

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God made me this way. Hmm. Then she grows out of them as she becomes a teenager and she, she grows up and she has different hormonal changes in her body and different thoughts.

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And, and then those things kind of fade into the distance. You know, as she becomes an older teen, then she gets married and she has children and then the social contagion of transgenderism hits.

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And she starts watching little girls that like herself being told by the psychoanalysts, right?

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Who are sitting down with them saying, you are a girl trapped in a, in a boy's body or vice versa.

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And now you have to do some physical thing to yourself. Right. And she, her heart breaks because she says, if I was born 30 years later, that's me.

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I'm going through these courses and, and, and would be suffering this way. But now she has two little children that she loves and adores, loves being a mom, adores her kids.

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And she looks in their faces and thinks, how could we have a culture lying to children like this?

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Yeah. So do you think those, those kids are just trying to alleviate some pain, some suffering?

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Are they, what's their motivation? Like what are the psycho? So we do know, and we talked about this.

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We do know that a lot of cases, it's a psychologist that is inserting some ideas, planting some seeds and, and then what, what makes that seed grow?

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Yeah. The watering of it. So that kind of thought is insane.

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It's not something that would come from natural theology, let alone from special revelation. Okay. So human reasoning would say, if my body is, is male and my chromosomes are male, then

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I'm male, you know, and any other kind of thought I should dismiss as being bizarre or just contrary to the obvious perception of the world.

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Right? Right. So even without the scripture, that special revelation, you should know this, but something has happened in our culture to water that seed.

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And it really only takes hearing at one time from somebody that you consider credible. You're sitting in an office with a psychologist and they say, no, science has discovered this, believe science.

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Now that's a deep thought that is always going to plague that person. What if that guy was right?

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But beyond that, there's the watering of this, just insanity in all of culture, where in the month of June, you're bombarded with this messaging that such a thing is the case and the celebration of it.

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So, you know, if this little girl grows up playing soccer and she idolizes Megan Rapinoe and you know, you saw what she, she blew her

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Achilles this week. Did you see that story? Oh no. Yeah. Her last game. Wow. And she blows her

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Achilles tendon. And so after the game, she's cursing God and saying there can't be a God because if so, how could something so terrible as if her blowing her

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Achilles compares with what Hamas did to Israel. Like that's, what's going to undermine the idea that there's still a

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God. But it's yeah. In any case, if you're idolizing this person and she's the spokesman to your culture, maybe you begin to believe it.

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So yeah, it's, it's a social contagion. So is the big problem. We just don't know how to identify what is true and what's not true anymore.

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The age old problem. It goes back to, well, the garden of Eden, but Pontius Pilate, Jesus standing before Pilate and says, everyone on the side of truth listens to me.

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There's the Lordship of Christ. He is truth. I am the truth. And Pontius Pilate dismisses it.

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What is truth? Right. No one can know truth. And then just, Hey, the Jews, you, you judge him by your law, crucify him.

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You know, you can't, there's no biblical justice. There's, there's no standard. There's no, um, no way of knowing.

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So yeah, that's ultimately where this culture having rejected the Lordship of Christ. There's, there's nothing but this, this lostness.

08:25

I'm feeling like this episode is going to be more about epistemology. No, we got to go down that road at some point.

08:31

Cause I have an interesting view on that. Well, it's not the presuppositionalist view, but some of the arguments that presuppositionalist make are exactly what

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I'm saying right now. Sure. You know, there needs to be a standard. Yeah. What's your, what's your worldview? You have what's standard and what is your worldview?

08:48

We'll walk into this. Exactly. Let's do that next or sometime soon. All right. Let's not promise. No promises, but we'll get that on the list.

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And when we do that, I really want to bring Cody Liebold into this conversation. Cause that's his wheelhouse right there. And Jacob Brunton, those guys, man.

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Um, anyway, so yeah, circle back around to transgender. Back to transgenderism. So, um, so this is, this is really big because statistically we're reading now that, and I don't know if you've, if you've read this or not, but 39 % of 18 to 24 year olds identified with LGBTQ plus plus divided by six.

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I don't know. Do you remember back in the nineties when there'd be arguments made that there's always going to be 2 % of the population would be gay because it's just some genetic.

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And they argued five. Yeah. Then they said, no, it's really 10. They say five, but it's 10. It's really 10.

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Yeah. Right. But yeah, but now it's 39. Now it's 39. Within that. So what does that indicate?

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Wow. It indicates that, you know, it's a lot more dangerous than when we grew up and I think got in and get that tattoo

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I wanted. Yeah. And it proves also that, that it is a social contagion.

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This is not a genetic issue. It's not anything but social conditioning. So that gender dysphoria, that, that little girl that we described was experiencing just some of this weird sense part of the fall.

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That's not even the case in many cases, right? It's rather kids growing up and hearing the drumbeat of this.

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And then because of brokenness all around them, maybe they, they are very depressed and they even begin to load themselves because they don't have that kind of foundation to stand on.

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And with that self -loathing, they're willing to grasp onto whatever the culture is, is thrown out there.

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And in today's book of Daniel study that we just did a pastor talked about homosexuality being self self -love.

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And so is, does, how does that, how does that comport with transgenderism?

10:59

Let's set that up for a second because I learned this from James White on the dividing line. He talks about this a lot, that homosexuality is really to, to love or to lust after a mirror image of oneself.

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You know, he talks about the, the Hebrew Edzer Kinecto, which is the help me in Genesis.

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When woman is created for man, he's Ish and a woman is Esha. And the

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Edzer Kinecto means that the help me is of the same kind, qualitatively the same, yet very different in complimentary ways.

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So the differences are in complimentary ways. And so what's happening in homosexuality is rather than being attracted sexually and desiring or having sex with someone who is your compliment, right?

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You are attracted and desire and have sex with someone who is your mirror image, which is ultimately narcissism.

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It's to look in the mirror and to be attracted to a mirror image of yourself. So, but what is transgenderism?

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What we postulated just, and we haven't really fleshed this out, but we were talking before the show. If that's what homosexuality is, is transgenderism then self -loathing that God has made you a man, but you loathe whom

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God has made you to be. And it probably has a lot to do with father wounds, things going on in the home and mother wounds, things created there, whatever the case might be or what causes it, but such a self -loathing that though God made this person a man, he wants to identify opposite of that.

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You know, it makes me think about these conditions of the heart, the things that Jeremiah says, we can never know, right?

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Because the heart is deceitful and wicked. We want to know so bad. What's the motivation behind this?

12:54

Why are people doing this to themselves? And I think you postulated a couple of reasons and I think there's a lot, but one of the big frustrations

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I have is that the people that always end up doing this research are secular psychologists and those secular psychologists are not coming from a

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Christian worldview. They're not starting with the understanding that all knowledge starts with a fear of God.

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They come from the complete opposite side. How can we trust any of that information? Right.

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And they act like this is just science, but what they're really doing is they're believing Freud. They're not believing science.

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Or somebody who stole Freud's ideas and repackaged them because Freud was discounted, rightfully so.

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Discounted is crazy to use his own term, but it's been repackaged and repackaged.

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It's the same psychoanalytical garbage. Right. And one of the ways you know a tree is by its fruit.

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And the fruit of the secular psychoanalysis movement is not good fruit.

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It doesn't lead to a person feeling right in their body and right with God.

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It promises so much, but delivers so little. Well, besides that 39 % statistic,

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I mean, that is obviously horrible. But the other thing that I think is really fruit, that you see that's fruit, is that prior to this transgender movement, 99 % of the time, the people who had this quote unquote gender dysphoria were middle -aged men who just wanted to dress like women.

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Now, the biggest growth population are teenage girls.

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I mean, what's going on in a teenage girl's life that's going to make her susceptible to this? Well, there's the hormonal surges is one thing of just like hormones running wild.

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And that's also with young men too. You have to expect when hormones are surging that there's going to be brain chemistry affected by that.

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And then in the fall, that might be negative effects at times. So just wild imaginations of every kind, just thoughts that just burst into the brain because the brain is fallen an atom.

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And so now you have a culture around you that says, if you have a thought, which some would call an intrusive thought, or even just a thought that just comes from your own heart, like you invented it, whatever.

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The world around you is saying, if you have this thought, that thought defines you, that you have to do something with that, or it has to have some merit or something, because what is truth?

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Like you said, there's no standard for them to go back and say, what do I measure this thought against?

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And so if you have the scripture, you have wisdom and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Without that, you have nothing.

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So you're pretty much going with whatever your thoughts happen to be, and they're all over the place.

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So really it's just whatever feels right. You're going to discriminate between this thought and that thought, and what this guy says and that guy says, by what makes you feel better.

16:08

So how do we help people whose kids are being tempted by this?

16:16

How do we help parents, maybe? And we've got a lot of parents that are still sending their kids to secular schools.

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I've got mine in secular school. I've got no choice right now. And I know that's got to change, but how do we help people in that situation?

16:32

Well, so you mean in public school or just with school or issues of transgender? I'm guessing, we've only got so much time today.

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I'm thinking that if we could address what people who are bringing up kids that are really exposed to this hardcore.

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I mean, 39 % of 18 to 24 year olds. I mean, obviously we can prepare them by getting them steeped in scripture, but maybe what else can we do?

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The father and the mother have to be so invested in their child's life that the child is bouncing thoughts off of them because the child doesn't know how to open to the scripture and say, well, in Genesis, he made them male and female.

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And just reason well from scripture because he's a child. He thinks like a child. When you become an adult, you think like an adult.

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So the parent has to be so invested in their child's life that they know their struggles. They know when they're strangely quiet for a period of time.

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What are you thinking about, son? What are you thinking about, daughter? And the trust has to be built in from those hours of playing board games and reading the scripture together and talking, how was your day kind of thing.

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Just staying involved because what happens in our culture is chasing money and just trying to make it in the suburban world, which now has become like this two income world.

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What are the kids in that? There's not a parent that's just there investing in the children all the time and raising the children.

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They have so many responsibilities that the child is being raised by Fortnite or sports or whatever the

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TV program that they love. So they're hearing this indoctrination everywhere and the parents are disconnected.

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So my big answer to your question is the parent really has to have this relationship and keep cultivating that to talk through these things because the parent has wisdom.

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Christian parent has been in the Lord. It's like transgenderism. It's obvious that you don't have to be a theologian.

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We're not talking about deep things here. It's just simple. But a child's brain is not able to just make simple connections.

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It's the parent that has to have built that to draw out the heart of the child and connect with the heart.

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There's so many ways we can go with that. I think about the child -like nature of the secular world.

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The amount of amusement time that happens in the secular world.

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I know people my age that act like children. Yep, yep.

19:16

We've got to... Well, there's this decathlete. They call him Caitlyn... Jenner, right?

19:22

Bruce Jenner. That's his name. Bruce. I'll call him all that. No, I'm saying they call him. But his name is

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Bruce. He was a famous athlete. And then what did he do with the rest of his life?

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Maybe he just had too much time on his hands. He should have been producing all this wealth and whatever.

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He should have been working. Back in the day, when you're working in the field and you have this job to do from sun up, what was daylight savings time?

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Just shift this back to give us one more hour of daylight because we're all farmers. We need to get the work going.

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And then by the time you hit your head in the pillow, you fall asleep. But this guy is just playing with nonsense, probably getting into all the pornography or whatever it is that's perverting his mind.

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And I don't know anything about him. But I'm just saying, you're right. This playful culture that is just so unserious, it's leading to this absolute absurdity.

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They just got nothing better to do. They're just so wealthy. I mean, we are so wealthy. I mean, is

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God going to take that away? I mean, if we don't make a change pretty soon? I mean, do you see judgment or is transgenderism judgment?

20:33

What happened in Ohio last Tuesday is judgment on this country. I mean, yeah, passing a law like that.

20:41

Yeah. If we're not under judgment, I don't know what it is. Yeah. This country is clearly under judgment already, but there's still hope that God would bring repentance.

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I think too. I think a lot of people go into this seeking an identity and the whole LGBTQ movement is all about our identity.

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That's who we are. And we know that our identity needs to be eternal.

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Our identity can only be in Christ, right? Yeah. So my question to you is how do we help these people see their identity, their real identity in Christ?

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You said it. In Christ, you're saying? So this is a Christian kid that's struggling? Well, anybody.

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I mean, yeah, I guess it's... I mean, ultimately, this is why go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the

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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. There's an order to that.

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Until they have repented of sin, believed in Christ, been baptized as a symbol of that, then they're not going to be taught.

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They're not going to sit and learn. So it begins with evangelism and telling the good news, calling for repentance and faith.

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I wonder if Bruce Jenner, I mean, he had his identity as the decathlete, the greatest athlete in the world, which a gold medalist.

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And was he looking for a new identity? Wow. Certainly. Yeah. And he didn't find it.

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Well, that's what's happening with any of this kind of LGBTQ, the social contagion that we began with, and maybe we can wrap this up here.

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It plays on identity and the identity it's offering is immediate acceptance in a victim class.

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So to be LGBTQ, you're presented, this is a minority.

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Now, the irony here is that it's becoming 39 % soon to be a majority, right? And so many of these other victim classes, when they become majorities and how are they a persecuted minority, whatever.

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The point being is it's an immediate identity. You can identify as a victim of society.

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And that's why you feel the horrible way you do. And now it gives you a reason for that feeling.

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But now this new identity that you take on and you're surrounded by this encouragement of the world, the month of June is devoted to you.

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All your friends will applaud you and say, how brave of you. And so you have this new identity.

23:10

It's the L, the G, the B, the T, whatever it might be, whatever. And interestingly, the plus at the end leaves the door open to invent other ones.

23:21

Well, I think we know what those are, unfortunately. What would be some of them? I would think that they would be the two in the

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Bible that are talked about bestiality. And the other one would be the one everyone still, regardless of their worldview, says is horrible.

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Pedophilia. Pedophilia. And multiple partners. Because if you try to hold onto the binary -

23:46

Oh, that's a done deal already. Yeah. But I'm saying even in marriage, why is it that the so -called gay

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Christian movement that they have, the side A, well, it's monogamous. Where do you get a binary?

24:00

The binary of two, it's one and one, right? Well, that was because of the complementarity of maleness and femaleness.

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But if you're going to say that it's two men, why can't it just as easily be three? Or four.

24:14

Or four. Or ten. The marriage of ten. Twenty. And the point is there's no standard left, right?

24:19

As you've left the biblical one. Yeah. Now, this might extend us a minute or two. So I got to tell you, in 2015,

24:28

I had some Mormon missionaries come and visit me for about two or three months. And it took two or three months to get to the point where they admitted to me, oh yeah, if the gays get their sexual perversion, we get ours.

24:43

Yes. They actually admitted it to you? One guy who doesn't speak for the church of Latter -day

24:50

Saints. But he speaks for Joseph Smith, who had 33, and Brigham Young, who had more than that. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So, I mean, yeah, they said it.

24:57

They said, oh, that's definitely the way we're going to go. And if you look at what happened in Utah since then, they were the reason the

25:04

Boy Scouts were destroyed. Yeah. Just, you know, but that whole thing.

25:10

That is another fact. I would love to talk more about Mormonism. Yeah. Because I've spoken to hundreds of Mormons over the years about these things.

25:17

Because of Mormon missionaries where I was a missionary, we would just run headlong all the time. So, yeah.

25:23

I mean, I think in a lot of these cults, I say the one thing I like about the cults is they seem to be constantly drifting towards the gospel.

25:32

You know, they want to be called Christian. Yes. They want to be more like the

25:38

Christians that their founders pulled them away from. But in the 1890s, when they abandoned polygamy, they never abandoned polygamy.

25:47

No, they, well, yeah, the FLDS, the Fundamentalist Latter -day Saints did continue with polygamy, and to this day, you know, the

25:53

Warren Jeffs kind of stuff. But even the mainstream still hold in their future world the possibility of multiple wives populating multiple planets.

26:03

Yeah. So, all they did is push it out of this life to a future. That's a different.

26:09

We better end the show because we're going to go. That's why it's called Off the Cuff. That's Off the Cuff because we could talk a lot about that, a lot about that.

26:16

So, but anyway, thanks for tuning in today. We are going to talk in a future episode about epistemology,

26:22

Mormonism, what else? Wherever we go. We're going to go. Whatever else is

26:27

Off the Cuff. So, thanks again for being here. Check out, check out, what was it? We're in Daniel 10 today?

26:34

Yeah, no, it was 11. The end of Daniel 11, last section, 25 to 36, no, 36 to 45.

26:40

Yeah, you can hear Pastor Jeff talk a little bit more about that narcissistic homosexuality thing. Anyway, thanks again.