March 14, 2018 Show with David Ould on “The Transgender Controversy: The Response From The Sydney, Australian Anglicans”

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida and the rest of humanity who are living on the planet Earth listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

01:14

This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 14th day of March 2017,

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I'm sorry 2018, sorry about that. And for those of you who are expecting to hear my dear friend

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Dr. Tony Costa on the program today, he is the professor of apologetics at Toronto Baptist Seminary and we had originally planned to do a program where he was going to give an assessment of my radio debate that I had with James Bogle, who is a

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Roman Catholic attorney, as they call them barristers over there in the

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UK. I was a guest along with Mr. Bogle on the UK radio program

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Unbelievable and the interview developed into a debate between myself being a former

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Roman Catholic and Mr. Bogle being a former Protestant and myself having converted to biblical

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Protestantism and Mr. Bogle converting to Roman Catholicism. It started as just a discussion and then evolved into a debate and we were going to assess that.

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That has been moved to this Friday, so actually this Friday and this coming

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Monday because we're going to break it over two parts. So just write that down in your calendar for Dr.

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Tony Costa this Friday and this coming Monday as well. But today I'm so delighted to have returning to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio David Old.

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He is senior associate minister at St. John's Anglican Cathedral in Parramatta, Australia and I'm sure he's going to correct me on the pronunciation of that.

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A biblically faithful, theologically conservative, historically reformed and confessionally Calvinistic body who will address the very timely topic, the transgender controversy, the response from the

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Sydney Australian Anglicans and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, David Old.

03:20

Thank you Chris for that incredibly kind welcome. I didn't recognize myself. Well the last time that we had you on the program you were a rector at another congregation and this is a fairly recent development in your ministry.

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Tell us something about St. John's Anglican Cathedral in Parramatta and am

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I pronouncing Parramatta correctly? Yes, Parramatta. So yeah, we're out here in Sydney, Australia.

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We are part of that rest of humanity that somehow manages to exist outside the United States, without your help.

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So Parramatta, it's in the Sydney basin. It's out to the west of the

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Sydney CBD and it was the original seat of the colony. So when the

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British came and colonized Australia over 200 years ago now, they first landed near what is the

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Sydney CBD, but they soon moved inland where I think the land was much, much better and Parramatta, the river of eels literally in the local

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Aboriginal language. And so I was asked last year by the senior minister of the cathedral here, which is a regional cathedral within the

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Diocese of Sydney. I was asked if I would come and join the staff and we considered that.

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And then this year, about two months ago, I came and joined the staff. So I've gone from being the rector, which is the senior minister of a small parish in the southwest of Sydney, to being on the staff of this busy, bustling cathedral church, which is a lot of fun, but I'm only just beginning to get my head above water, but it's great.

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And we're in the middle of a hugely expanding second CBD in Sydney and all the challenges and excitement that comes with that.

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Well, praise God. And for anybody wanting to explore further information about St.

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John's Anglican Cathedral over there in Parramatta, Sydney, Australia, you can go to stjohnscathedral .org

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.au. That's right. That's stjohnscathedral .org .au and the saint is abbreviated st and there's no period.

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Let me just announce our email address. If anybody wants to join us on the air with a question about the transgender controversy, it's chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

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USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

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And I could obviously see this subject lending itself to the great possibility that people may have personal and private questions.

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That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. If it's not a personal and private question, please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence.

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Before we go into the heart of the matter, can you describe how the

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Sydney area, as far as Anglicans are concerned, would be set apart and different from places like Brisbane and other areas of Australia?

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Sure. So, put most simply, this is probably the most robustly, thoroughly conservative diocese in Australia.

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That's not to say that there aren't some other great conservative diocese in Australia as well, but Sydney, because of its size and history, has that status.

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It's thoroughly evangelical. It's one of the few dioceses, apart from a couple of others in Australia, where I'd be confident to say to someone, pretty much every local church is going to be evangelical.

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Not just evangelical, but mostly reformed in one way or another.

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There's obviously always going to be some exceptions, but compared to some other diocese, and certainly compared to what is the

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Episcopal Church in the United States, where most of your listeners will be, it is a million worlds apart. I think what we are here is far more faithful to the original formation of the

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Church of England at the Reformation era. That's the basic nutshell. There's some history about why that happened, mostly to do with the chaplains that came out on the first fleet and the constitution of the geography of Australia, where our major cities are so far apart from each other that you kind of get a little bit of isolation, and you get to preserve the culture in a place.

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But that's where we're at. It's a delightful place to do ministry. It has its challenges. We have a very, very, very secular population around us, but it's great.

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I love being here. We've been here for 14 years. Oh, praise God. And how close are you to Perth?

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The reason why I ask is that my church, or the church where I'm a member, I should never say it's my church. I am not an office bearer, and I know that it's the

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Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's not the church of anybody in the congregation. But the church where I am a member, since I moved from New York to Pennsylvania, Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which is a confessionally reformed

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Baptist church belonging to the Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America, we have a church plant that one of our former members is involved in as the pastor there in Perth.

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So I was wondering how close to Sydney you are to Perth. Well, it's a short walk to the train, which

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I'd have to take to the airport to then get on a five -hour flight for a transcontinental flight from Sydney, which is on the east coast of Australia, to Perth, which is on the west coast.

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It's equivalent, I think, of traveling from New York to Los Angeles. And in the same way, quite why you'd want to do that is beyond me.

09:30

Well, to go to the Reformed Baptist Church plant there in Perth. And can there be a more reformed church possible than a

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Reformed Baptist Church? And, well, one of the things that we are specifically going to be discussing today, along with the issue of transgenderism in general, we are really taking our information primarily from a report from the

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Social Issues Committee of the Sydney Australian Diocese of the

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Anglican Church. And who were specifically involved in developing this document, this report?

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I know that you are not an official spokesman for the Sydney Australian Diocese, but I know that you will be providing some very helpful information and coming with great knowledge and first -hand experience with the document.

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So if you could tell us who exactly developed this and why specifically they developed it, other than perhaps, obviously, just bringing this very difficult issue to the attention of the

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Christian community there and what a Christian response to this very comparatively new issue in the history of mankind and how we are to respond and interact with this issue.

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Sure. So the Diocese of Sydney, diocese is how we translate it, but again, you choose your own way,

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Chris. The Diocese of Sydney has its own, a whole bunch of different committees that come out of what we call the

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Synod. The Synod is our church parliament. We meet once every year for about five days.

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And we have a number of committees, so you know, the Adoption Commission and that kind of thing, and a Social Issues Committee, which we look to to write reports on social issues.

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The Social Issues Committee was asked to prepare a report on gender identity.

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So looking at the whole transgender issue, which, of course, like in the United States, has just become a big, big thing.

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And we can talk in a bit about how we've arrived at the situation where this, it seems possible to think that a man might be a woman.

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And then the Social Issues Committee, what it did is it set up a subcommittee, which is often the way that we'll do things, and it drafted in a number of people to help write that report.

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So it was chaired by a wonderful lady called Claire Smith, who is an outstanding theologian, conservative, well thought through on a number of issues, not least on gender and personhood, has done a whole bunch of work in that area already.

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We were joined by two medical professionals. One was a lady called Dr. Megan Best, who is a practicing doctor and researcher, and also

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Professor Dr. Patricia Weerakun, who is the most wonderful older Sri Lankan woman, who is a sexologist.

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There is nothing, I tell you, Chris, there is nothing better than sitting in a room full of 200 clergy having a old, just retired

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Sri Lankan woman in a sari talk to you about your sexual responses and how the brain works when you're aroused.

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And I don't mean to offend your listeners, but you've got to understand, she lives and breathes this stuff, and she's incredibly helpful, and has written a number of books for teenagers and for parents and so forth, and is a respected professor at the

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University of Sydney. Is she coming from a more conservative, if not biblical, so she's not a

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Sri Lankan Dr. Ruth Westheimer? No, she actually is a member of the church at St.

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John's Parramatta. She's a lovely, lovely lady, loves the Lord Jesus Christ, loves his word, and has ended up in this interesting field of sex, just talking about sex and how your brain works and all kind of stuff, so very, very knowledgeable.

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Then they invited myself and another licensed clergyman, but actually he's not working in parish ministry at the moment, called

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Nicholas Mole, and I think that's everybody. Yes, I think it is. And we got together and worked out what the issues were, did some research together, started drafting a report, and the end result is what you see before you.

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It went through a number of revisions with us, and then it went back to the wider committee itself, where we met with the original social issues committee and did a little bit more drafting and work just to tighten a few things up, and then it was received by our synod last

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October in your fall, along with, it has to be said, a paper by the Doctrine Commission, which just looked purely at the doctrine and got into some in -depth thought about the doctrine, but this is a wider, the paper we're talking about today is a wider paper.

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It deals with a whole bunch of different stuff that we'll be able to talk through together. Well, since I'm very interested in raising the ratings of my radio program, tell this

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Sri Lankan sexologist that I would love to have her as a guest, because I don't know... She would be fantastic,

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Chris. You would love her. I can't even think of another sexologist, let alone a secular one other than the

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Dr. Roost -Wethimer, which I'm not even sure she's with us anymore, but a conservative

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Bible -believing person. Sorry -wearing. Don't forget sorry -wearing. She's astounding, and I don't say that to ridicule her.

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Quite on the contrary. And I'm not laughing in ridicule either. I'm just... No, I know. She is lovely. Many of us know her as Auntie Pat.

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She's just a lovely, lovely lady, and has decided to spend her life serving the Lord in this area and doing it so well.

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I'm so proud to be her minister. It seems to be something that would be very needed in our day and age when there are so many problems involving sex, and to have a voice that is not only medically knowledgeable, but also one who is a

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Christian, a true Christian. Well, I think the strength of this paper, notwithstanding that we've gone into some of the biblical stuff quite well, is that you've got two absolute experts in the field, medically and academically, and you'll see that in the paper later on when we talk through some of the stuff on medical approaches and the etiology, that's the origin, and getting the medical view of what gender dysphoria actually is.

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I think that's what makes this paper so robust. It is really clear biblically, but also it has taken the very latest research on this whole phenomenon and distilled it in a really helpful, accessible way that hopefully we can get through to your listeners, not least this morning, this morning here in Sydney, this afternoon for you.

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In fact, we may have to do a couple of programs on this subject to adequately address all the points that are in this report, but obviously the best place to start for us is where your report starts.

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What is transgender? Sure, well transgender is, simply put, when you have a man or a woman who presents in their physical self, and obviously that genetically underlying that, as male or female, and yet perceives themselves to be the opposite or an indeterminate gender, and so we call that now gender dysphoria.

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That is to say that it used to be that the psychologists would say simply the thought that you might be the opposite gender was sufficient for us to talk about something that was going wrong, but now we talk about the dysphoria, that is to say the experience of distress associated with having a psychological or emotional gender identity that doesn't match your biological sex.

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More technically, transgender is the umbrella term, not just for those people, but for those who then want to express the gender with which they identify.

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So a man may dress in women's clothes or may actually then engage in cross -hormone therapy or even sex reassignment surgery.

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I think the important thing to stress at this point, and I'm reading directly from the report, is it's not about sexual orientation.

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So there's some confusion here. I think it's important that our listeners distinguish those two things in their mind.

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So transgender people can be straight or lesbian or gay or bisexual in relation to their subjective gender identity.

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So you could get a man who is attracted to women who then transitions, who remains attracted to women, and so in a sense you might argue that their sexual orientation has changed from being heterosexual to homosexual.

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So just set those things aside. It's not about that. It's about their identity of themselves and who they believe themselves to be.

18:50

Yes, the interesting thing about this sin, which I'm sure you would agree that in spite of any psychological problem that is involved here that it is a sin, it's the first one that I'm aware of where, at least in contemporary society in the 21st century, where those who are involved in this or experiencing this are also calling it by a medical term that reveals that there is a problem, gender dysphoria.

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I've heard even Bruce Jenner say that he has gender dysphoria, and other folks as well, whereas those that are involved in the sin of homosexuality typically would be outraged in our day and age by the mere suggestion that they have something medically or psychologically wrong with them.

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And I know that that was not always the case, though. I know that there was. Yeah, that's right. So like homosexual attraction, the definitions in the

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DSM have changed. Whether they've changed in alignment with research, not political maneuvering, is probably something we can debate a long, long time.

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I know where I stand on that. I might just go back a little bit to the language of sin that you've used before, Chris, and without wanting to in any way diminish the sense that for someone that's experienced gender nonconformity, that something has gone wrong.

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I think we want to be careful about the language of sin at this stage. And maybe I'm going to lose most of your listeners, even at the start.

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But I think like any other activity that you and I might carry out, I think we need to distinguish between the attraction to something, the temptation even internally to do something, and the actual carrying out of it.

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So I think there are questions around whether it's, can we say it's sin for someone just to live in a male body but experience the sense that they think that they're female?

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Is that in itself sinful? Or is it the decision to act upon it?

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In the same way that you might say to a homosexual person, someone that experiences same -sex attraction, is it sin simply to experience that attraction?

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Or is it sin to act upon it? And I think in the same way, we've got to make a careful distinction here.

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Now, don't get me wrong, and we'll talk about the theology in a while, this is another effect of the ravages of sin across the world.

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I mean, the entire creation is corrupted in many and various ways. And here is just another expression of it.

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But I think we have to be careful about distinguishing between what people are feeling, that they may not be able to help, and whether they're going to act upon that.

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And our report tries to gently tease that apart as we move forward.

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Well, when it comes to sexual issues, whether they are heterosexual or homosexual or other, even lust,

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I mean, Jesus said that even someone who thinks impurely of a woman in his heart has committed adultery already.

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And the scriptures also describe the fact that men and women burning in their hearts for one another is a sign of judgment upon them, and that they are being turned over to their own lusts.

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There's never, from what I can see in the scriptures, a neutral position on sexuality when it comes to somebody who is outside of the bonds of marriage having any sexual activity, whether in thought or deed, other than their own spouse.

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Sure, but if I might just push back gently, if we can work out what the underlying cause is of being gender non -conforming, then we can work out quite how it fits into that.

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And I agree with you, but we can work out quite how it fits into that pattern.

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So again, going back to a homosexual person, yes, they may, to quote Romans 1, they may burn with passion one for another, but there is a distinct difference, isn't there, between a man who says, and therefore

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I will give in to that passion, and another man who says, no, in Christ, I will see my identity in the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and I will not act upon that passion that I feel. In the same way that you and I, I mean, the Lord Jesus Christ skewers us on adultery, doesn't he,

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Chris? He says, if I look at another woman with lust in my heart, that I've committed adultery in my heart.

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Now, you and I both know that there is a big difference between that first and second look that we might give at a woman walking past us on the street.

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With Job, I try and say, you know, I've made a vow with my eyes not to look twice at the lady, but we still do.

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And yet, there's a difference between that initial impulse, and then you and I going and booking a motel room and inviting her for a weekend away.

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So that distinction, I think we just want to just very carefully tease out in this area, because what we've got around us is a great number of men and women who, through no decision of their own, find themselves, their experience is that they find themselves, their perception is they're in a male body, for example, but they think that they're a female.

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Now, that's just a situation that they're presented with. And that is the ravages of sin upon the world, the general corruption of the creation.

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How they then respond to that, that is then the question for us, Chris. And I think it's just important we tease that out.

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Otherwise, we're going to have a bunch of people walking around for whom we've got to be careful about our language, we've got to be pastorally sensitive about this.

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If we simply say, oh, that's sin, and not in a nuanced way, we're going to do some damage, because there'll be a bunch of people who are genuinely have dysphoria over this, that is to say they are distressed that they feel this way, and they don't want to.

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And so we want to help them move forward and move forward in the right direction, not in the wrong direction.

25:04

Yes. And I'd like you to go through some of the specifics, like for instance, the biblical and contemporary lenses and so on.

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But one final thing I just wanted to add, from my own point of view here, as we go back and forth on this issue, when you say through no decision of their own, we cannot really know that for certain, because there are things that may have begun to be cultivated and toyed with in the minds of people, even when they're very young sexually, that may evolve or devolve into something much more harmful and much greater and much more of a damaging thing in their lives.

25:47

Just as, for instance, you know, to take an extreme example, you have serial killers sometimes, when they are giving their testimonies from a jail cell of what happened to them, they will often say that, well,

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I just began looking at pornographic magazines, which escalated to films, and then they got boring with the heterosexual stuff.

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So it keeps going and going and going until it becomes not only homosexuality, but brutality and sadomasochism.

26:19

And so when somebody is claiming to be transgender, how can we know that they did not develop that way because of sinful choices to cultivate, through fantasy and other ways, a thing that became a snowball, if you will?

26:36

Well, the report, and we can come to it in due course, the report does have a whole section on the etiology, that is to say, the origins of it.

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And we discuss in detail the evidence that we do have on whether it's biological, whether it's environmental.

26:48

And I think it's fair to say at this point, the jury is out on it. Although to read the report, you can see a great amount of work has been done, but we don't really have any idea yet in the academic field quite 100 % what causes this to happen.

27:06

And as I say that, I'm not discounting the spiritual aspect to it, but I'm just saying it is, I want to just gently say it is a complex area, and we need to, we probably all need to understand it better as we seek to apply the biblical lens to it.

27:22

Why don't we talk about where it's come from, Chris? That's probably the culturally where it's come from, because that's probably a fascinating conversation to have.

27:32

We'll have you do that as soon as we come back from the first break, because I don't want to interrupt you in mid -sentence. So we're going to go to our first break, and then as soon as we come back, we will have you press forward in the best direction that you think we should.

27:45

So don't go away, we'll be right back with David Old and more of our discussion on transgenderism right after these messages from our sponsors.

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And we are now back with our guest, David Old. We are discussing transgenderism, a

33:25

Christian response to this, and of course not all Christians are going to agree with exactly how we are to respond to this, but we are specifically addressing the response from the

33:37

Sydney Australian Anglicans. And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

33:44

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And David, before I go to any of the listener questions, because we already have some, can you please tell our listeners about where this comes from?

33:58

Sure. So simply put, this is an outworking of the queering of our understanding of how society and institutions work, which we've seen expressed in other ways, not least in the homosexual movement, but now is working its way out to its natural conclusion across all aspects of gender identity.

34:18

Now, when I say the word queering, I don't just mean the word queer that's used of homosexual people, sometimes derogatively, sometimes not.

34:27

I'm talking about that broader sense in which people who are pursuing this agenda, sometimes called,

34:34

I think these days, social Marxism, and I think it's quite clear why that is from the way that it's constructed, want to deconstruct institutions and structures that previously were taken for granted.

34:48

So let me just read you a little, a tiny paragraph from a paper that we looked at together and found really helpful for describing this.

34:58

And it's referenced in our paper, quote, queer theorists see gender as an institution by which they mean a social convention or arrangement sustained by a set of accepted determinative ideas or norms.

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It is for this reason that gender must be queered because it is a harmful institution that forcibly frames society's subjects.

35:22

Queer theory seeks to undermine the view that the only existence is that which falls within the boundaries set by the institution of gender that is ordered by nature or biology.

35:33

More simply put, queer theory argues directly against natural law. You and I might say, well, a man is a man.

35:39

He has an X and a Y chromosome. He has certain sexual organs. His brain is different to a woman in certain ways.

35:47

He is a man. And a woman, conversely, is a woman. And the queer theory says, no, those are just social constructs.

35:56

There actually is no, there is no difference. Let me show you how it works out in another field. We've just had the

36:02

Ninja Warrior experience on TV happen here in Australia. We've had the Australian Ninja Warrior and they've done here.

36:08

I wonder if they've done it in the States. They had men and women run the same course. Did they do that in the

36:14

States? I don't know if you've watched the show, but you end up with a whole bunch of men and women trying to run the same sort of outdoor ninja warrior course and none of the women got through it.

36:24

So we went for equality. And actually what happened was none of the women could compete. But it's this kind of queer theory that's deconstructing everything.

36:32

So it's the reason why we as a society have gone, it doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman for marriage.

36:38

Marriage is just a social construct. We need to deconstruct it. It's just all the same, you know, just love wins, whatever.

36:46

It doesn't matter. What's happened is this has been applied into so many different areas of life that now it's going into this general idea of gender.

36:56

And so what's been bubbling away in the academia, for want of a better word, although quite how academically rigorous this is, is uncertain.

37:07

What's been bubbling like that is finally working its way out into our culture. What's really interesting, therefore, is that it's a political movement.

37:15

It's a political philosophical movement. It's not grounded in medical scientific research.

37:22

So when people go on TV and they say, ah, the latest research shows, the latest this shows, what they're actually talking about is papers written by political science academics in their in their offices with with secondary,

37:37

I would say, and sometimes research methods, not actual proper scientific study of the phenomenon.

37:44

And and it's been working its way out. And particularly seeing it in the schools, aren't we? And in and in other places.

37:52

But ultimately, it's part of a wider movement. It works its way through the homosexual thing, first of all.

37:57

And now it's getting down to to core gender identity, which, if you think about it, is what's going on in the homosexual movement.

38:03

It's about that lack of distinction between male and female. And it's all just the same.

38:09

So if it's all just the same, any two people can get married if it's all just the same. What's the problem of a man deciding that they're a woman?

38:17

So that's basically the philosophical thing that's underlying it. Now we go into more detail, obviously, in the paper itself.

38:23

One of the things that one of the things that has me troubled is that the left, they they will take a fairly new concept of transgenderism.

38:39

I'm not saying that nobody in history has has battled with this phenomenon.

38:47

But as far as it being a category of gender euphoria and transgenderism and so forth, the left seems to instantaneously come across as if they are experts on things like this and they will rebuke and mock and write off anyone with a conservative or even more specifically, a biblical worldview regarding sex and morality as just being out of touch, as being ignorant and as being neanderthal.

39:26

And to me, it's absurd that these people from the left who defend and promote and celebrate things like transgenderism and homosexuality, is that they act, as I said, as if they are experts, thoroughly knowledgeable experts, as if there are reams and volumes of scientific data that prove what they are saying and that anybody who disagrees with them is either a hateful bigot or a moron.

39:59

And it's really troubling to me that a lot of people, either naively or just because they want to prevent themselves from being condemned by the majority of secular society, they seem to go along with this snowball that is rolling down the hill and growing larger and larger.

40:17

How do you react to what I just said? Yeah, I think you're right. Not just the left. So I was on a

40:23

TV show here in Australia last year talking about same -sex marriage with a commentator who presented himself as being conservative.

40:32

And when I just laid out a pretty uniform conservative view of marriage, his first response was, well,

40:39

I'm offended. He actually had been raised by two men together and he was offended.

40:44

And I didn't have the wherewithal immediately in that context to say, well, that makes no difference, does it?

40:49

Because the offense that you feel has nothing to say about the actual truth of the matter.

40:54

It just means you're upset by it. But so it's spread everywhere. And I'm intrigued by, you're obviously all aware, as we are, of Professor Jordan Peterson and his interaction with this movement.

41:07

I think he's one of the best analysts of this kind of stuff going on today. He's a Jungian himself.

41:13

He is a Jungian. So again, I'm not here presenting him as a man perfect in all these ways.

41:19

That's just you and me and there's no one else there, Chris. But he is a fine analyst, isn't he, of this movement and to watch his interactions with it and to watch his analysis of the underlying stuff that's going on is a very authoritarian streak to this apparently liberal way of going about things.

41:40

But you're right. It's democracy by shouting. It's establishing facts by being insistent upon them rather than demonstrating them.

41:49

And it has captured our legislature in various ways.

41:54

Our media obviously is very sympathetic to it in general and so forth. And so what you actually get is, and we talk about this in the report as well, is language changes.

42:05

So they've done very well. There's something to learn, isn't there, Chris, in the way that these people repeatedly manage to get our language to change.

42:12

So even the change from talking about gender incongruence to gender dysphoria, that is to say, just the idea that you might be a man who wants to be a woman was itself considered to be something abnormal previously.

42:25

Now it's just if you're unsettled with that, that it's abnormal. So just the change of language has been interesting.

42:31

This whole stuff about the pronouns is a whole fascinating conversation we could get into. But it's important that we just see what's going on underlying it.

42:40

There is this deconstruction of structures, of institutions, which is politically, philosophically driven, which whole segments of our culture and particularly some of the key players in our culture have played into and bought.

42:57

Hawk, lion, sinker, swallowed the Kool -Aid, however you might want to put it.

43:02

And we're starting to see the great damage. I mean, probably we'll move to talk after the biblical view, we'll talk about some of the medical stuff.

43:08

We're starting to see the great damage, lives that have been wrecked by this. Well, if you want to finalize anything in that particular area that you began speaking on before we go to any listener questions, that's up to you.

43:23

Or if you want me to go to a question, which would you— No, I think the only thing to say about languages—and again, we do this in the report—is to be really clear about how we're using our language.

43:36

Understand what words—because language is a powerful thing. There's a sense in which Wittgenstein was right, that you can frame reality by the words that you use.

43:45

And the cultural Marxists have certainly demonstrated that for us in the last 30 or 40 years. But I think it's important for us as well to be really clear on how language is used in this debate so that we can be careful about our own language as well.

43:59

We can use the terms in the right way. We can then start to respond and reply to people more intelligently and more articulately.

44:07

And I think it goes back to what you said before. The left—and that's a broad term, isn't it ?—but

44:12

those advocating for this sort of change use words very deliberately and seek to redefine things.

44:20

And part of pushing back is implicitly educating our listeners in any conversation that we're having about reality by the language that we use as well.

44:30

Let's not cede the ground in it. Let's be careful about our terms, use them well, define them if necessary, and then just gently try to reclaim this ground for some sensible debate.

44:42

And I agree with you, but perhaps you'll disagree with me on certain points here.

44:50

Like, for instance, I completely—I'm abhorred—I abhor the folks from the

44:59

Westboro Baptist Church and the way that they taunt not only people involved in homosexuality but a host of other different types of people, even

45:10

United States soldiers and so on. But although I do think that these people are demonstrating that they are not born again, they do delight in the death of the wicked as the scriptures say.

45:28

God does not even delight in the death of the wicked. They have no gospel for the people involved in homosexuality that they are taunting and harassing.

45:37

They delight in the fact that these people are going to hell. They seem to enjoy telling them that they're going to hell.

45:44

Yes, it's rather painful, isn't it? There's no grace there. You can imagine them sitting with Jonah under their big sweeping vine, utterly miserable, but God would be gracious.

45:54

Right. But on the other hand, I think that the evangelical church and Christendom in general,

46:01

I think, is going too far to appease those involved in sin by sugarcoating things with language that are not offensive when the scriptures have—the

46:18

God -breathed language of scripture very often is specifically intended to offend so that someone realizes the danger that they're in and the evil that they are participating in and that they need to repent and flee to Christ.

46:35

And I'll give you a personal example. Sure. I was enslaved to drunkenness not only before I became a born -again believer, but after 18 years of sobriety,

46:49

I tragically returned to that and I went under church discipline. I went to a

46:55

Christian ministry for several months that specializes or their focus is to bring to repentance people such as myself who had fallen into this sin.

47:12

Hebron Colony Ministries in Boone, North Carolina. I cannot stop singing the praises about that place.

47:20

So from the standpoint of that sin, I am unnerved.

47:25

I cringe and I just feel horrible and I get angry when

47:32

I hear this spoken of with overly clinical terms, as I'm speaking of drunkenness right now, where people are having their guilt alleviated if not entirely removed from them, where it's dealt with as just a sickness and so on and it is not viewed as by many in the field of drug and alcohol rehabilitation and in the field of counseling in those areas.

48:04

It is not viewed as something that is a voluntary sinful and wicked and damning and deadly act.

48:14

Well, of course, they would recognize it's deadly, but they would view it more as a clinical issue and a disease.

48:20

I despise that as someone who... Yes, it's not a binary, is it

48:26

Chris? It's not an either -or thing. So I'm sure when you were there, it sounds to me that they were very clear with you that ultimately you are an agent with free, in one sense, choice over what you're going to do and so you actually ultimately, the decision rests with you to choose to stop drinking.

48:43

At the same time, I'm sure you were loved and shown a great deal of compassion and were able to work through some of the underlying issues that caused you to drink.

48:52

Yes, but of course, it was not without sternness, appropriate sternness and seriousness that was as serious as a heart attack, as they say.

49:04

So it's a mixture of all those different things. So I'm intrigued by Jesus, who, as we see here in the

49:12

Gospels, is unfailingly clear on sin, but his great wrath is displayed in his earthly ministry, is displayed against leaders who lead people into sin, as opposed to sinners themselves who quite often, while he's abundantly clear about their sin with them, and who knows what the detailed conversations were like.

49:37

I mean, the Gospels give us some indication, don't they, of the tenor of those conversations.

49:43

But he is gentle and compassionate where it's needed and sees all these sheep without a shepherd and so his heart goes out to them.

49:54

And I don't doubt that within those conversations, there were stern conversations, there was clarity and the rest of it.

50:00

And yet, so it's about trying to find that right balance. And I fear it's on a spectrum, not on a binary.

50:08

There's always going to be disagreements about where on that spectrum we fall. What we must do, of course, and I think

50:16

I hear this from you, what we must do is look to the people that we're analysing here in their response and look to their fundamental convictions and say, am

50:24

I in agreement on their fundamental convictions? You and I probably will end up disagreeing to some extent quite how we approach this, but I know that at the same time you're going, well,

50:31

I trust David's fundamental convictions. I've seen the work that's gone through here, so I have to let him work this one out as you will as well.

50:42

And the right intention and the desire to serve the Lord Jesus Christ faithfully goes a long way here.

50:49

Perhaps maybe we can move on to think about what the Bible's actually got to say on this. Yes, in fact, that might be a transition that's worth doing.

50:57

Sure, and we are going to our midway break right now, so we will do that as soon as we return. This is our longer than normal break.

51:04

It's 12 minutes because Grace Life Radio 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida requires of us a 12 -minute break between our two segments, so please be patient with us.

51:15

You who are listening, take this time not only to take down the information provided by our advertisers, because we certainly want you to patronize our advertisers and support them in any way possible, but also take this time to write in a question for David Old regarding transgenderism, and we still have some of you waiting to have your questions asked and answered.

51:37

We will get to as many of you as possible before the program is over, but if you'd like to get in line with those who are already waiting, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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by mentioning Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio. And I just have a couple of announcements before I return to our discussion on transgenderism with David Old.

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We have coming up in April the Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology, once again being orchestrated by the

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Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. It's being held at two locations, neither of which is

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Philadelphia, because of the fact that this is called the Philadelphia Conference on Reform Theology in a sentimental sense to pay tribute to the late

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Dr. James Montgomery Boyce, who held these conferences at the 10th Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for many, many years.

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And now that he is in heaven with the Lord, these conferences have been held at different locations.

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From April 13th through the 15th is the first location where the conference will be held, at the

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First Christian Reform Church in Byron Center, Michigan. And then from April 27th through the 29th the conference will be held at the

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Proclamation Presbyterian Church in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and I intend to be at that conference.

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The theme is The Spirit of the Age and the Age of the Spirit, and the speakers include Daniel Aiken, Richard Gaffin, Daniel Hyde, my friend

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Richard Phillips, who's the pastor of Second Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina, is also a friend of mine, and he's going to be speaking.

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Jonathan Master, David Murray, and Scott Oliphant. Most of these speakers have been on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

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That's also the email address to send in a question for our guest David Old. David Old, by the way, if you ever want to google that name, it's spelt

01:09:11

O -U -L -D, and he is Senior Associate Minister at St. John's Anglican Cathedral in Parramatta, Australia, and we are discussing the transgender controversy, the response from the

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chrisarnson at gmail .com, and if you would like to enter into the realm of the biblical data on the subject before we take listener questions, that's up to you, or I could go right to a biblical question.

01:09:48

Yeah, maybe we'll do that, Chris. I think that's probably a way to go. Just to simply state, and it might give some of your listeners some relief to know where I stand on this, we think the

01:09:59

Bible's pretty clear. The first chapter of the Bible tells us that God made humanity male and female. It describes that as part of being made in his image, and it receives the affirmation at the end, doesn't it?

01:10:10

This is part of God's very good creation. I find it interesting that the creation is labelled as good by God on the end of each of the five days, but at the end, when humanity is made and everything is set in its place, it's very good.

01:10:25

The binary of male, female, obviously, is the last of the binaries of Genesis 1.

01:10:33

You've got all those different sort of light and dark, sky and sea, all those distinctions that have been teased out.

01:10:40

And then the last one is this great binary between male and female. What's fascinating is that that affirmation of the goodness of that is repeated after the fall.

01:10:50

So Genesis 5, 1 to 2 is interesting to read, just because it repeats the language. In Genesis 2, we see the distinction developed as we see the intrinsic roles, beginning of the roles and the one flesh union between the man and the woman.

01:11:05

And we start to see the language of husband and wife, and father and mother. So we start to see roles and understandings of how those two are meant to relate to one another.

01:11:16

And of course, Jesus himself, when he's asked the questions about marriage in Mark 10,

01:11:21

Matthew 19, instinctively goes back to Genesis 1 and actually says, doesn't he, at the beginning of creation,

01:11:28

God made them male and female, which is a conflation of that statement from Genesis 1.

01:11:34

He also affirms the models and roles in Genesis 2 as well. So there is no doubt in Scripture that men and women are created equally human, equally blessed, but sexually distinct with different roles.

01:11:50

And so the question then goes, well, what do those roles look like? And it's interesting, I think, then to work through what the rest of the

01:11:57

Bible says, and in particular, a lot of stuff in the New Testament, where the focus is on marriage and the gathered

01:12:02

Christian community, we see whatever you make of those distinctions, we see clear distinctions between men and women in their roles, in distinct gender roles and relationships.

01:12:15

And we set all that out in the report. One observation we do make, which

01:12:21

I think is helpful, is that at the same time, the Bible recognizes that gender is expressed culturally.

01:12:28

And so in different cultures, there may be different expressions of what that looks like.

01:12:33

I think that's part of what's going on in the 1 Corinthians head covering passage. This is me speaking there personally,

01:12:39

Chris, that Paul seems to draw a distinction, doesn't he, between some universal principles of the difference between men and women, and then perhaps a way that that might be expressed in the culture of the day.

01:12:52

Having asserted in the report, actually not asserted, demonstrated in the report, the difference between men and women, we then go on to talk about the nature of the fall, that every human relationship is broken, that the whole, as we put it, the well -being of creation is affected, and therefore our bodies are no exception to this, that we're subject to frustration, death and decay, and so on.

01:13:17

And also we note that actually the scriptures do show us on several occasions where there are people whose bodies do not display all the usual characteristics of their biological sex.

01:13:28

Interestingly enough, the Bible doesn't speak about a third sex, or that God has intended it in that way.

01:13:35

And it's interesting to note that when Jesus even mentions those who are born eunuchs or made eunuchs by others, he does it in the context, in Matthew 19, of having already restated

01:13:46

God's original creation design. And then we go on to talk about the fact that we are, as humans, we are embodied beings, so we do some discussion on the fact that our bodies are not unimportant, that actually a lot of who we are is expressed in our bodies, that while we lose our bodies at death, we inherit an imperishable body at the resurrection of the dead.

01:14:10

There's some discussion about what the resurrection is like, that Jesus obviously is the model for our resurrection, and so we will go back into distinctly human bodies.

01:14:19

We have a brief discussion about whether a biological differentiation between male and female continues into the new creation.

01:14:27

We want to gently suggest that it does, and provide the evidence for that.

01:14:32

And so we come to the conclusion that Christians are to be thankful and content with their bodies, knowing that they are a gift from a

01:14:37

Heavenly Father, with which we are to serve Him, and that part of our Christian life is faithful stewardship of our bodies, glorifying

01:14:44

Him in them, and recognizing that therefore that gender incongruence, the experience of that, presents a particular challenge, as it might do with other disorders of self and body, so for example anorexia or other body integrity disorders, that kind of thing.

01:15:02

And we start to talk to therefore to some pastoral applications, that we've got to be sensitive to the depth of the challenge that's going on here, we've got to acknowledge the groaning and pain of life in a fallen world, but that any response that we make in this area ultimately needs to seek to restore and preserve the integrity of body and self, and honor and protect the biologically sexed body that God has given us.

01:15:27

So significantly our goal must be the wholeness and welfare of the whole person, in the way that God intended it to be, and I think there's no doubt in the report what we think that should be.

01:15:38

If you and I have an X and a Y chromosome, Chris, then we were intended by God to be men, and we're only going to find the amount of health and well -being that we can in this life by being conformed to that, and asking for God's help to live that out as best as we can, not to escape from it or to flee from it.

01:15:58

We then go on a little bit to talk about our identity in Christ, and I'm sure these are arguments that are familiar to many of your listeners, and also we talk a little bit about what it means to be in a body of believers, and how this ought to work out in a body that we share one another's burdens, we ought to love one another, to be clear with one another, all those kinds of things.

01:16:19

So it's quite a comprehensive biblical overview, I think it's helpful, I think it's robust, I think it provides a great framework for understanding that gender non -conformity is clearly, clearly, clearly, clearly a move away from God's good intention for us as created men and women.

01:16:38

And now we have a listener in Slovenia, Joe in Slovenia says,

01:16:45

Dear Brothers Chris and David, thank you both for increasing the international aspect of Iron Sharpens Iron.

01:16:51

I've noticed that some professedly reformed ministries in the USA are actively promoting the concept of accepting homosexuals as members in good standing in the church who profess to be only same -sex attracted and committed to chastity.

01:17:09

What is the germane biblical teaching on this topic? How should we respond to this concept?

01:17:16

May God bless you both. Very, very interesting question, because I think that homosexuality is an activity, and it's all too often referred to as a people group, as if it's to be equivalent to somebody's ethnicity or the color of their skin or something, but if you could respond,

01:17:35

David. Sure, so it is related to our topic today in the terms of we're talking about people not being as they were intentionally created to be by God, and experiencing something that's contrary to that.

01:17:53

I'm of the opinion that it actually comes down to the self -identity. So the debate that's going on within the

01:18:00

Christian homosexual grouping at the moment, by which I mean genuinely converted

01:18:06

Christians who long to be faithful to the Lord Jesus Christ, that is to say, recognize that same -sex attraction activity is wrong.

01:18:16

Within that segment there is a debate about whether they ought to identify as gay or not.

01:18:23

So I veer towards the view that they ought not to, that I don't think it's helpful for me, for example, to identify as an adulterous

01:18:29

Christian. I've got it under control, Chris. I do, you know, I like women who are not my wife.

01:18:35

That's just who I am, but I've got it under control, and I don't think that's a helpful way of talking.

01:18:42

So I don't think in a similar way, and I realize it's not quite a straight analogy, it's helpful to speak of myself if I were as a gay

01:18:50

Christian. So I think rather we want to say, be clear that this aspect of my humanity is fallen, and my identity is in Christ.

01:19:04

And I think those people who have found healing from the actual attraction, which I don't think is a guarantee at all,

01:19:10

Chris, for men and women who experience same -sex attraction who are Christians, but those who have found healing from it,

01:19:17

I've seen lots of people speaking of, concentrating on just simply their identity in Christ.

01:19:23

I will say, however, that the movement comes from good motives, that I've seen, even yesterday

01:19:29

I was reading an article by a guy I've got a lot of time for, who speaks about wanting to affirm that desire for good same -sex friendships, and there's something good about that.

01:19:42

So you and I, I think, Chris, if we lived in the same town, we'd probably become very, very good friends, and there's something good about that, and they want to affirm that.

01:19:48

I just don't think that that's helpful to be affirming within any form of the language of homosexual.

01:19:57

So that's the way that I'm going to veer. I'm trying to be nuanced in the way that I say it, because, again, I recognise it's a complicated area, and I just want to have a great word for any of our brothers and sisters who are seeking to be chased, no matter how they're going about doing it.

01:20:11

We owe them great support in that, in a culture all around them which tells them the exact opposite, to give in to their sexual desires, whether they're right or wrong.

01:20:21

And, of course, then there are people walking around calling themselves Christians who are also saying that their sexual desire for someone of the same sex, there's nothing wrong with that.

01:20:31

And so in the face of all of that, they're trying to be faithful, and I think we need to be supportive of them in that, and encouraging of them.

01:20:38

Yeah, the attitude that one should view themselves or others as homosexual

01:20:49

Christians or gay Christians, to me, is as if they are denying the transforming power of Christ.

01:20:58

Now, as you just said, there is no guarantee that somebody who comes to Christ will ever cease having same -sex attraction.

01:21:10

There is a difference between having a view like that than having a view that a person is waving the white flag and saying, this is what

01:21:18

I am. I am not going to even pray to be transformed or delivered or given a new biblical view of the opposite sex in regard to sexual attraction.

01:21:37

People are being basically said, this is the way you are, and just be chaste, but this is a category of humanity.

01:21:47

You are a gay person. I radically oppose that concept, and I think that, once again,

01:21:53

I believe it is a denial of the transforming power of Christ, even if you say, to reiterate, that someone may spend the rest of their lives battling with the sin of same -sex attraction.

01:22:09

And doing so faithfully and with great courage. Right, right, but at the same time, I don't think that a

01:22:14

Christian should or will ever wave the white flag and say, this is just the way

01:22:21

I am, and that disturbs me. Or even that this is somehow a gift from God for me.

01:22:29

They're never affirming the same -sex activity. They've got to be really clear on that, but they are saying somehow this is a gift of God.

01:22:37

I think at that point, I part company with them, although I do want to continue to try to understand why they're coming to that conclusion and seek to say,

01:22:46

I think the danger is that we take these guys and we just cast them all into the same bucket with the out -and -out metropolitan community church guys and all that kind of stuff.

01:22:55

I think, again, we just got to be really careful. We're listening carefully to our brothers and sisters, and we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

01:23:03

Let's go to one more listener question for now before we have you continue on a different thread.

01:23:10

We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who says, do you think that a lot of the problem that we have in the church and the world regarding sins such as this is that people are far too preoccupied with feelings and emotions, whether the feelings of others or their own?

01:23:28

There are certain things that we are going to feel in a negative sense that does not give us a license to commit a sin or to dabble in some ungodly behavior or thought pattern in order to appease our own emotions and salve our consciences.

01:23:50

I think that's a very good question because it does seem as if a person's feelings are trumping the commands of scripture in many cases, even amongst evangelicals the way that they discuss and treat issues like this.

01:24:08

People are saying, oh, we cannot allow this person to have an unfulfilled sex life because that would be so cruel.

01:24:16

They would be so sad and depressed. Well, there are a lot of heterosexuals who, for one reason or another, know that they are never going to be married and therefore never having sex, and they shouldn't be lusting or even fantasizing in a sexual manner.

01:24:30

And just because they're going to be depressed over it doesn't mean that we should give them some kind of an out where they can express themselves sexually if they're not married.

01:24:40

Am I making sense here? And also respond to the listener's question. Yeah, absolutely.

01:24:46

Indeed. And actually, again, every question about humanity I need to take to Jesus, don't I? And I need to say, and again, without being crude, but let's be real,

01:24:54

Jesus was fully human. If we believe that our sex drive is part of our created humanity, which surely we must,

01:25:02

Chris, then I don't think it's wrong to say—and I'm not trying to be rude or blasphemous in saying this—that

01:25:07

Jesus had a healthy, in fact, probably the only man ever to have a truly healthy male sex drive, and yet he was and he is celibate.

01:25:18

Yes, and he never lusted after a woman because that would be— That's right, exactly, exactly right.

01:25:23

So I don't think it's crude for us to say it in that way. Therefore, this is important for our single friends, and I have a friend at the moment, a lady doing a

01:25:30

PhD in this, because she's actually so appalled by some of the poor stuff going on in the evangelical field on singleness and its discussion.

01:25:39

So yes, more broadly, the question, I think, is spot on. The Church, as it does in so many areas, has succumbed to the culture, and the culture has made the individual the definer of what is true.

01:25:54

So we live in this postmodern world, don't we, where we don't go for absolutes? And again, this is part of the deconstruction.

01:26:01

So remember, again, the queering stuff from before, the social Marxists feeding into a broader philosophical climate are saying, you just can't be sure about anything.

01:26:10

So these structures that we used to take for granted in the past, you just can't be sure about anymore. There are no absolutes.

01:26:17

There is no just way of knowing things for sure, particularly in what they might say are the non -scientific areas, the sort of these philosophical areas and so forth.

01:26:27

And so therefore, what do I have to fall back on? If I can't go to an external frame of reference, the only frame of reference

01:26:33

I have is myself, and what I feel and what I think. And therefore,

01:26:38

I define for myself what is true. And of course, what will set the agenda for me?

01:26:45

Well, follow your heart. And Jeremiah goes, no, no, no, no, no, because that's deceitful above all things.

01:26:50

Who can understand it? But we do it. You know, we follow our heart. Just be true to yourself. And the devil laughs because we just, you know, the heart is a cesspool of wickedness, isn't it?

01:27:00

Jesus, Mark 7 shows us that. So that's what's going on. And there are many of us in the church today who have just bought into that be true to yourself, the experiential notion as a frame of reference, as an authoritative frame of reference.

01:27:16

That is, this is a side issue, I think, why we're seeing a resurgence as well in some of the charismatic stuff going on around us,

01:27:22

Chris, because it's buying into that same kind of personal experience as authority.

01:27:28

So the answer for the Christian is therefore to say, no, I do have an external frame of reference by which I measure my own experiences.

01:27:35

And of course, it is the Bible. And so we just worked through a bunch of stuff in the Bible about how

01:27:40

God made us and what that's meant to look like. And so that becomes my frame of reference.

01:27:46

And that also becomes the means by which I can read the scientific data around me as well.

01:27:52

So I think we're going to move on in a moment to the medical stuff in this area.

01:27:58

And when I do so, I'm not saying this is the trump card that does everything.

01:28:03

But what I am saying is interesting, isn't it, that as we delve into the scientific, the medical research and the work that we've got, we find that it begins to affirm the biblical created view that we've already seen from the

01:28:16

Bible. Funny, who would have thought so, but there it is. And we have to go to our final break right now.

01:28:23

And if anybody would like to join us while there's still time, do so now or forever hold your peace.

01:28:29

We still have a couple of you waiting for your questions to be asked and answered. So please be patient with us. Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:28:37

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01:33:46

And let's go right into the medical aspect of this before we take any more listener questions.

01:33:54

Sure thing. So it's a complex area, so I'm wary of oversimplifying, but let me have a crack at just laying out the basics.

01:34:01

The first thing to note is that the playing field for a lot of this is children and adolescents. So that's where a lot of the debate is.

01:34:07

What do we do with children and adolescents when they experience gender dysphoria? And we've got some good research.

01:34:13

So we do know, for example, that there's a lot of cross -gender behavior amongst children.

01:34:18

We cite reports of somewhere between 20 % and 30 % for young boys and girls who behave in what we might call cross -gender ways.

01:34:25

So, for example, my young boy might put on a dress and flounce around for the afternoon pretending to be a girl. That doesn't make him transgender.

01:34:32

It doesn't mean he wants to be a girl. He just, that's what he's doing. He's messing around. He's playing. What's really interesting is that activists in this area, for some of that research, take that kind of behavior and say, oh, obviously transgender.

01:34:46

Whereas when you get down to the best research, when it comes to actually wanting to be a different gender, we're looking at figures of about 0 .6

01:34:54

and 0 .2 % for boys and girls respectively.

01:35:01

What's really interesting, I think, is that you've got this really, really low rate of actual boys and girls and adolescents saying, actually,

01:35:10

I really do think I'm a girl, not a boy. It gets inflated because it's kind of the rage at the moment and it's trendy to do and, oh, yeah, if everybody around me is saying, oh, you know, you actually might be a girl, then actually

01:35:23

I'm more tempted, aren't I, in that sort of supportive environment for that way of thinking to go, actually, yeah, maybe I am a girl. What's really interesting, however, is that the persistence rate of dysphoria is fascinating.

01:35:35

So we talk about persisters and desisters. That is to say, take a child who has gender dysphoria at the age of maybe eight, nine, ten, and look at them again when they've gone fully the way through puberty, 2021.

01:35:48

Are they persisting in their gender dysphoria? And the best research we have says 2 .3

01:35:54

% of those who presented a child or adolescence as being gender dysphoric, only 2 .3

01:36:01

% of them persisted in that through to adulthood. There is an incredibly high likelihood of growing out of it, and that's declared even in the

01:36:12

DSM and is supported by a number of independent studies. Now, that is fascinating,

01:36:18

I think, because there's these big pushes at the moment for increasing intervention with children and adolescents.

01:36:23

But the actual data we have tells us for most of these boys and girls, they will grow into adulthood with a totally normal sense of their gender identity matching up with their physical, biological sex.

01:36:41

In adults, it's interesting as well. So a recent study suggested that fewer than one in 10 ,000 adult biological males and one in 30 ,000 adult biological females experience gender dysphoria.

01:36:54

But there are wide estimates, and they vary widely. Do we know where it comes from?

01:37:00

Well, we outlined in the report, there's the growing research in this area. There's a whole bunch of different theories, developing entrance brains, maybe there's something going on prenatally, maybe even within their own inner sex hormones, there's some stuff about genetic factors, and that's been largely unidentified.

01:37:21

There's something about brain structure stuff, there's been some work done in that area. There's some work on the environmental aspects, that is to say, the nurturing.

01:37:30

So is it nature or nurture? And again, we say no single factor has been linked to the development of gender nonconformity.

01:37:37

But we have some twin studies that suggest that a number of social family situations may lead to gender nonconformity in biologically vulnerable children.

01:37:47

That is to say that there might be a biological precursor, and then there'll be environmental factors that then trigger that, much in the same way you talked about your alcoholism previously.

01:37:57

So I think there's good scientific evidence now to say that some people are more disposed than others to alcoholism.

01:38:02

But there will also have been some environmental factors around you, Chris, that then drove you into that behavior.

01:38:09

So again, those kinds of things, and we talk through social reinforcement of gender roles, we talk about psychopathology, we talk about the family dynamics, and of course, we touch briefly on the influence of social media.

01:38:19

There's a social contagion element to this as well in recent years.

01:38:25

Having set out the wide background medically, we then talk about a medical approach, and talk about referral to gender clinics and all this kind of stuff.

01:38:35

We begin, first of all, with the management of children. We set out the three approaches. One is called the living in your skin approach, which is trying to convert or get into reparative therapy to get a child back into thinking the right way.

01:38:49

The other example, the other extreme would be affirmative therapy, where we affirm the child's new identity, and we even perhaps start to work on giving them hormones and things.

01:39:00

But the middle ground, and the one that matches the evidence we saw before, is a policy just called waiting and watching, where if your child, and this is important for parents that are listening, if your child actually genuinely says,

01:39:13

I believe that I am the opposite gender, don't panic, because 97 .5

01:39:21

% of those children by the time they finish puberty will not be saying that. And so what you actually just need to do, and this is backed up by the research, is just wait and watch, and love and care, and set some boundaries, and work through it.

01:39:37

And we set out the evidence against social transition, and we talk a lot about the puberty blockers that adolescents are given, and the great danger and the damage that they can cause.

01:39:51

There are many, obviously, irreversible things that can be done. Even some of the reversible treatments leave their scars behind.

01:39:59

We go through that, and of course, there are some surgical interventions that are ultimately irreversible.

01:40:05

We then go on to talk about management in adults, and we talk about hormone therapy, and counselling, and the experience, and sex reassignment surgery.

01:40:13

What's really interesting, of course, is that the suicide rates amongst people who identify as transgender are probably some of the highest in the

01:40:22

Western world. I think it's Ben Shapiro, the conservative commentator in America, who notes that there's only one group in Western cultural history who have a higher suicide rate, and it is

01:40:33

Jews in concentration camps in Nazi Germany. So there's something going on here. What's interesting is that adults who have gone through medical transition have no statistically significant change in their suicide rates.

01:40:52

So let's be really clear about this. Medical transition does not help with suicide rates amongst transgender people.

01:41:01

It just doesn't help. So the suicide rates are statistically, no statistical significance between them at all.

01:41:08

So what we've got at the moment is this crazy worldview where we're saying, because we're saying your experience is the determinative factor of who you are, and therefore, if you are a man who thinks that they're a woman, we need to affirm that and do everything that needs to be done to affirm that.

01:41:26

We're therefore putting people into all sorts of brutal stuff that's being done to them, pumping them full of hormones and stuff like that, that actually ultimately doesn't help them.

01:41:39

It might give them a short -term fix. It is, to go back to your alcoholism example, Chris, again,

01:41:44

I'm not making exact parallels, and there are obviously differences in it, but it's like saying, if I had said to you when you were in the depths of falling off the wagon, if I said to you, what will help you most right now, you would have said to me, a drink.

01:41:59

So we're giving alcoholics a drink, in essence, because that's what they really, really want.

01:42:07

And of course, in the short term, that half a bottle of whiskey or whatever your pickle of choice was would have made you feel much better, wouldn't it,

01:42:15

Chris? In the short term. And so we go, see, look, it's working, but actually what we're doing is leading people to such irreparable damage.

01:42:26

What's fascinating to me is I was just reading a thing the other day about Alan Turing, the famous British scientist who was a homosexual and was given a forcible chemical castration treatment to cure him of his homosexuality.

01:42:41

Pretty barbaric stuff that was done in the 1950s, 40s and 50s to these men. But actually, we're doing the same thing with men today who say that they're transgender.

01:42:50

But just because they choose to do it, we're saying we shall do it for you, when actually the scientific evidence is completely out.

01:42:58

And again, this progressive quote unquote worldview has gripped large segments of our medical community.

01:43:10

It's gripped their administrations. It's made it impossible for people to stand up and say no. Famous, famous leaders in this field, there's a gentleman who's the leader in the field at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in the

01:43:26

States, who just basically was barracked out of his job for simply saying, look, the evidence doesn't back what people are doing.

01:43:35

And here at Johns Hopkins, we're going to go for watch and wait, because it's the most sensible thing to do, given the scientific data we have in front of us.

01:43:42

And of course, the activists jumped and pilloried him all over. And I think he ended up resigning his position.

01:43:48

It was that untenable for him. So we've got this terrible, terrible, terrible situation at the moment where the medical, the administrations of the medical bodies all over the

01:43:58

Western world are succumbing to this political tsunami. And they're doing so under social pressure to impose an ideology.

01:44:10

And they're doing it actually almost against professional integrity. So, you know, it's difficult stuff.

01:44:17

Yeah, you said something interesting earlier in this most recent segment that is, to me, interesting as far as propaganda.

01:44:27

I don't know if you recall this in Australia, but in America, I can clearly recall while growing up watching

01:44:35

American sitcoms on television and even talk shows that there was a prevalent attitude that the left would demonstrate where if somebody had a more conservative or traditional or even biblical view of sexuality, whether they were a

01:44:57

Christian or not, if they were to say, let's say you're at a

01:45:03

Thanksgiving Day celebration and a little kid walks into the room wearing his mother's shoes, or if the kid says, when

01:45:13

I grew up, I want to be a fashion designer, or if the kid says, I love to cook, and this is a male child

01:45:20

I'm talking about. It would be the conservative's tendency to say, you better watch out for your kid.

01:45:27

I think your kid might be gay. And the liberal would say, how dare you?

01:45:33

Those things can be explored and enjoyed by people of both gender. We should never even draw that conclusion.

01:45:39

Now it seems like it's 180 degrees reversed. It's the liberal saying, I'll bet you your kid is gay.

01:45:45

Yeah, almost jumping on it and saying, well, obviously they must be gay or they must be transgender. Now what's interesting about that,

01:45:52

Chris, is that shows us, doesn't it, how foolish our previously overly conservative position was.

01:45:59

One of the things we make clear, I think I talked about it earlier, is that there's a difference between gender roles assigned to us by God in our created nature to be worked out in certain relationships, and then all these cultural accretions that come on top of it.

01:46:14

So a little boy that likes cooking is just a boy that likes cooking. And we've got to beware in our little conservative ghettos, evangelical

01:46:24

Christian ghettos, that we're not mistaking biblical norms for cultural norms, and even succumbing to some equally unhelpful cultural ways of looking at things.

01:46:39

Having said that, again, it does show you again this queering notion that there's this deconstruction of any norm.

01:46:46

So what the queering people are doing is they're saying all these norms are artificial constructions, and they all need to be destroyed.

01:46:56

They all need to be brought down. And there's a point where we've got to, we've we've overstated our case in some areas, but that doesn't mean we ought not to still be very, very clear where we need to be clear.

01:47:09

Okay, we have a listener who is going by the initials LP, like little p, in Newville, Pennsylvania.

01:47:18

And the listener may not be little or green like a p, but I'm just using that so we know what the letters are.

01:47:24

And LP says, what is your opinion about parents raising children who say they are gay, and also parents who have children who are an adult who say they are gay?

01:47:37

How do parents react to them in different aspects of life? Hi LP, a great question.

01:47:44

I assume you mean a Christian parent, so I'll speak as a Christian parent. Number one, I'm not being cheesy about this or belittling it, you've still got to love them.

01:47:54

They are your children, and they are a man or a woman made in the image of God.

01:48:01

With a child, I would say, watch and wait, especially in the transgender area.

01:48:08

It seems to me very, very clear, the biblical, the biblical, sorry, the medical scientific data is really clear.

01:48:14

The best outcomes come just from watching and waiting, loving, set some clear boundaries. Just say, look, you know, it's okay for you if you want to wear these clothes in certain contexts, however there's other contexts where you can't wear these clothes.

01:48:27

And so we're going to work that out. We're going to work that out together, and I need you to respect me in this, and we'll work it out together.

01:48:35

And if you're not panicking, if you're recognizing that, again, 97 plus percent of these children grow out of this transgender stuff, then you won't panic, and you'll just wait, and you'll work it through.

01:48:48

You may need to do some work with Christians around you to help them to understand the issue, but you need to be sensitive and loving and caring.

01:48:55

With the gay issue, again, just very, very hard. It depends upon your relationship with your child.

01:49:01

I mean, we want to be talking through what the Bible has to say. And I think as your kids hit teenage years, you've got to be wise about how you talk to them.

01:49:10

So saying to our child, look, you understand where I'm coming from, and if you don't, let's sit down and talk about it together.

01:49:19

But we're not going to be able to force our children to think certain ways. They need to make up their mind for themselves. Persuasion within a loving context is the best way.

01:49:29

Of course, in your house, set your own rules. You may decide that you will not let an adult child share a room with their same -sex partner.

01:49:39

Of course, hopefully, as a Christian parent, you'll make a decision that in your house, your adult child, even if they're not

01:49:45

Christian, won't share a room with their heterosexual partner until they're married. So feel free to set those rules and set them in a gracious manner.

01:49:56

But clearly, your children will know why you take the view that you do and why you do it, and they may either accept that with good grace and a level of maturity, or they will rail and rage against you because the world has told them unless you affirm them in every single way, you're not loving them.

01:50:13

And I want to say at that point, you're not responsible for their reaction. But you are responsible for loving them, for being clear, for setting boundaries, but also as they become adults, for understanding that you are increasingly not responsible for their behavior.

01:50:26

And so these are agents before God. They will answer for themselves. And we need to trust

01:50:33

God with it, don't we, in a lot of these things? As parents, we need to say, God knows what he's doing. I'm going to do my best and let

01:50:40

God deal with the rest. Well, how about if the Christian parent sat down with the child and said, with an open

01:50:48

Bible, you see here the Bible, which is God's Word, it's inerrant, and it comes from his very breath, that if you participate in that activity, you will not inherit the kingdom of heaven.

01:51:03

Absolutely. And of course, listing the other sins that are in that text as well. But being dead serious about this, again, as serious as a heart attack, if you choose to make what

01:51:17

I believe is a deadly and damning mistake in the lifestyle that you choose to pursue,

01:51:24

I want you to know that without the shed blood of Christ and without you repenting of this, you will not be in heaven.

01:51:32

And also, Chris, I want to say more importantly—and again, I'm not downplaying the importance of those clear warnings—almost more importantly, praising and upholding the goodness of God's good created order.

01:51:47

Because what I'm ultimately calling everybody to is not a change of sexual behavior, but to the

01:51:53

Lord Jesus Christ as their great and good master, creator, savior, redeemer, dare

01:52:00

I say it, friend in the right sense, Lord, brother. I'm ultimately saying Jesus is so very, very good.

01:52:07

We must trust him that he knows the best way for us. And this is for our good. So it's not just that I'm laying out a list of prohibitions, albeit

01:52:14

I need to, and say you are in serious danger here, but also to say this is a very good creation that God has made.

01:52:23

He's intended things for your good, and you will find that life ultimately is going to be better lived this way.

01:52:30

This is a general sort of wisdom to living life that way as well, and a goodness in knowing the

01:52:37

Lord Jesus Christ through whom I was made as all things were made, and in whom my life and identity ought to be.

01:52:43

So I'm not just saying no to something. I'm actually, even more importantly, pointing to the great yes of who

01:52:50

Jesus is and holding him up. Because ultimately what I want to be saying to this child who, and we're all in a way, our culture is made as all adult children.

01:53:00

We are so trapped in our feelings and the culture around us that it seems impossible for us, sometimes humanly speaking, to imagine that I can be happy outside of this construct that I've made for myself.

01:53:13

Well what does Jesus do? He comes along and says here is a better way of thinking about yourself. Here is actually a greater good.

01:53:20

Here is the true satisfaction of being human. Here is the wonder of life lived as it's meant to be lived, which not least of course means the knowledge of my justification and my right standing before God, and that I will make it through judgment day, and I will live in his good and perfect new creation, but also that right now

01:53:40

I can know what it means to live with him. So I want to emphasize the good as well as setting out the proscriptions.

01:53:46

Well thank you L .P. in Newville, Pennsylvania. Keep listening to Iron Trip and Zion Radio and spreading the word in Newville, Pennsylvania and beyond.

01:53:55

We have Ted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama who says, David mentioned the backing of scientific research on the psychological effects of transgenderism.

01:54:05

Just as we can reliably predict that whenever there is a natural disaster, certain

01:54:12

Christians will be citing the Tower of Siloam story, we also know that the solid scientific research on transgenderism that is referred to will come from psychiatrist

01:54:25

Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins University. I believe you just mentioned him, if I'm not mistaken.

01:54:32

Yes. Yet also predictively, those on the left will decry

01:54:38

McHugh as a kook or perhaps a quack. Is this the research

01:54:46

David is referring to? If so, can bees speak to?

01:54:52

I don't know if that's a typo there. Can we speak to perhaps to Dr. McHugh's qualifications?

01:54:59

If not, can he tell us whose research he is referring to? Sure. So McHugh is one of the pieces of research, one of the many pieces of research that we refer to.

01:55:09

So he has a, well we actually refer to an article he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, but there's also a wide body of research that he's done.

01:55:17

He was seen to be an expert at Johns Hopkins on this issue. We do, however, cite an incredibly large range of research in the piece.

01:55:27

So it's not just one guy that we're relying upon. DeVries' work,

01:55:34

Hughes, I'm just reading from the footnotes of the medical section,

01:55:40

Lawrence, Zucker, Coleman, Rubble, DeVries, Costa, and so on. We did a large range of reading.

01:55:47

When I say we, mostly the scientists who were on the panel, although I tried to read some of the stuff myself. So we're not just relying on one person.

01:55:54

We're trying to get the broadest section of research in this area that we can find and find good qualitative data.

01:56:04

So there is some good quantitative data. There is some good qualitative work with interviews and so forth.

01:56:10

And we did some, we're doing some research ourselves in the area as well. We've done some stuff in the diocese and wider field.

01:56:17

But it's the quantitative stats that are really, really interesting, isn't it? It's the actual, the raw figures measurement.

01:56:24

And for that, dare I say, you need to have a little bit of knowledge in statistics. You need to be able to understand how that research is done and be able to critique it accordingly.

01:56:35

But we had two members of our writing panel, as I said, were our academics for whom this is their bread and butter.

01:56:42

And we've worked through all that wide range. If you want to see the wide range of research, then can

01:56:48

I suggest read the report? And I'm sure, Chris, you'll link to it on the page of this podcast by the time that we're done.

01:56:55

But there's a huge amount of resources that we've gone to. And also, we try to set it out in an orderly fashion so that a lay reader, like you or me,

01:57:05

Chris, can make sense of it and understand the argument that's being made. And I would like to know, what is the difference between a kook and a quack?

01:57:17

A quack is a kook in the medical profession, I think. But, well,

01:57:25

I want you to give whatever contact information, because we have run out of time now, whatever contact information that you can give where people can read this report.

01:57:38

I know, once again, that the St. John's Anglican Cathedral there in the

01:57:45

Sydney area of Australia is stjohnscathedral .org .au.

01:57:51

That's stjohnscathedral .org .au. That's for the St. John's Anglican Cathedral in Parramatta, Australia.

01:57:59

What other contact information would you like to give? Well, probably the first instance if people want to start reading this material, then my website, davidold .net.

01:58:07

I'm in the middle of writing a series where I'm trying to summarize this report, and the header of each of those blog posts contains a link to the original gender identity report of the diocese, which is a public document.

01:58:20

So it's publicly available on the Sydney diocese website. But if readers go to davidold .net,

01:58:27

they will see a bunch of work by me at the moment in this field where I'm trying to set out the summary of this long, necessarily long paper, trying to summarize it in chunks, and also a couple of articles on some contemporary issues in the

01:58:43

Australian Anglican Church where this is being applied. And it's davidould .net.

01:58:49

That's right. Thank you so much for being on the program today. If you could hold on when we go off the air, I'd like to say a proper goodbye to you.

01:58:55

I want to thank everybody who listened, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater savior than you are a sinner.