Gender Pronouns

One of the great challenges around this issue is that Christians are people of compassion. We read multiple times in the gospels that our Lord saw people and had compassion on them. We hear about adolescents who are depressed or even suicidal, experiencing gender dysphoria, and our hearts go out to them

I was recently talking with a woman who came over to our house with her husband. They are new friends, and over the course of dinner we were just getting to know them. They are retired with grown children, though I hadn’t heard much about their children and wasn’t even aware they had any.

But at the end of the evening as they were leaving, this woman began to open up about the strain in her relationship with their son. He is in his thirties and has a girlfriend with whom he now has a child, but he calls himself “non-binary.” He had demanded that his mother call him by his preferred pronouns, “they/them,” and that she use the new name he had given to himself. A couple times, she accidentally called him by his birth name, and as a result, he threatened to cut her out of his life. Though this woman has more traditional views on gender, you can imagine how agonizing this situation would be.

This story represents the experience of countless family members and friends across the world as our culture undergoes some of its deepest cultural transitions.

As Christians think through the practical questions around “preferred pronouns,” the place they need to start is: what is the truth? It is a hallmark of the Christian life that we be people who speak what is true, whether it is publicly acceptable or not.

One of the great challenges around this issue is that Christians are people of compassion. We read multiple times in the gospels that our Lord saw people and had compassion on them. We hear about adolescents who are depressed or even suicidal, experiencing gender dysphoria, and our hearts go out to them. We desire for them to experience relief.

But Jesus’ compassion for people never meant that he then bowed to whatever demands they made of him. When the woman caught in adultery was brought to him, he had compassion (“He who is without sin throw the first stone”), but he also ordered her to “go and sin no more.” Compassion is not opposed to calling people to obedience to God; in fact, it is a necessary part of it.

The issue with our generation is that we think compassion means giving to an anxious person whatever he or she says they need in order to feel comforted. The psychologist Edwin Friedman, in his excellent book The Failure of Nerve, has pointed out that in family systems (a family can be a biological family, a church, a business, or even a nation), the system only grows into maturity when its decisions are not dictated by the most anxious people, but by the most principled or godly. He notes the importance of compassion by saying:

On the one hand, there can be no question that the notion of feeling for others, caring for others, identifying others, being responsive to others, and perhaps even sharing their pain exquisitely or excruciatingly is heartfelt, humanitarian, highly spiritual, and an essential component in a leader’s response repertoire. (p.145)

But he also insists that compassion should never negate challenge:

Indeed, it is not even clear that feeling for others is a more caring stance (or even a more ethical stance) than challenging them to take responsibility for themselves. As mentioned earlier, increasing one’s threshold for another’s pain (which is necessary before one can challenge them) is often the only way the other will become motivated to increase their own threshold, thus becoming better equipped to face the challenges of life. (p. 146)

We are now living in a system that is dictated by the most unhealthy people. I am astounded to see how public school administrators—seemingly paying some sort of atonement for sins of oppression of which they are not guilty—bow to the emotional demands of adolescents and their constant need for affirmation. How can that be? How has the LGBTQ+ community gained such a guilt-inducing death grip on the conscience of a whole society? One reason is this: in the issue of “affirming a person’s chosen gender identity,” the argument is that if we do not do this, a young person might commit suicide. Teen suicide is one of the saddest and most tragic realities in our world. Who would dare to put a teen at risk? 

But such a statement is so remarkably manipulative. I have counseled couples in which the husband has told his wife that if she doesn’t do what he wants, he will kill himself. This is how he kept control over her, used her for his own purposes, often for decades. Wouldn’t we all agree that such manipulation is deeply unhealthy and must be challenged? The husband is essentially taking himself hostage, terrorizing his wife, who must then act in complicity to save the one she loves. As much as we have compassion for anyone in psychological distress, this cannot mean that we give that person unlimited rights to demand what they want for relief. 

This issue is likely the one that will cause the most persecution and hatred of Christians in our culture right now. Nothing else will elicit the charge of “bigot” as much as denying a person their right to demand that everyone else recognize their preferred gender identity.

The Rigid Binary of Male and Female

As Christians think through the practical questions around “preferred pronouns,” the place they need to start is: what is the truth? It is a hallmark of the Christian life that we be people who speak what is true, whether it is publicly acceptable or not.

Now on the one hand, the rationale for letting people choose their own pronouns comes from a divorcing of the concept of gender from the sexed body created by God. (I have written more on this here.) Though gender does include socially learned behaviors, in biblical perspective, it can never be understood separate from a person’s body. The LGBTQ+ community distinguishes the “assigned gender” which is given by a doctor at birth, from the “gender identity” that corresponds to a person’s psychological experience. As Christians, we would not call it an assigned gender, but a recognized gender. The doctor is recognizing what God has given as a gift to this little baby.

True compassion does not support the divorce of body and soul, telling a person they are not who their body says they are.

But another rationale for allowing people to choose their own gender identity is the claim that gender is not binary (simply male or female), but that it instead exists on a spectrum. In popular rhetoric, people will often cite hermaphrodites, or the broad term “intersex,” people who are born with a variety of disorders or syndromes that make assigning a sex at birth difficult. To discern the gender of a human involves considering multiple factors: chromosomes, genitalia, testicles and ovaries, gamete production (sperm and eggs), and hormones. 

Abigail Favale, a former gender theory professor and now English professor, has written an excellent book on this topic where she explains how not only human beings, but all creation, has been created according to a rigid binary:

Human bodies are teleologically organized according to our distinct role in reproducing the species. The structure of our bodies is arranged to produce either large sex cells or small sex cells. These sex cells are called gametes. Large gametes are ova, and small gametes are sperm. A physiology arranged to produce ova is female, and a physiology arranged to produce sperm is male. This twofold distinction between large and small gametes is stable and universal, not only throughout the human species, but also among all plant and animal species that reproduce sexually. 

There is no such thing as a third gamete or a spectrum of possible gametes. This invariable feature of our humanity ties us intimately to the rest of creation. When the gametes combine, they can create a new member of the species. The sex binary, then, is the necessary foundation for the continued transmission of human existence. (If it’s just a construct, we’re in trouble.) (p. 123–24)

Statistically speaking, sex is readily recognizable at birth for 99.98% of human beings. (p. 127)

After accounting for these extremely rare exceptions, which mainly focus on genital disorders, Favale concludes: “When all the dimensions of sex are taken into account, sex can be discerned in each human being” (p. 129). This is because there are a variety of ways of determining gender, not just the presentation of the genitalia.

Christians are people of truth. And the first thing we need to come to terms with is the truth. Every single human being, without exception, is either a male or a female. To deny this is a lie. As much as science affirms the rigid binary of all human beings being either male or female, God’s word should be sufficient evidence for us: “Male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27).

Where then should our compassion lead us in the case of gender dysphoria? True compassion does not support the divorce of body and soul, telling a person they are not who their body says they are. To separate the body and soul is to do great violence to the human person, and young people throughout our society are suffering from this violence brutally. Jesus is reconciling all things in heaven and earth (Col. 1:20). So, compassionate healing means coming to accept our bodies as the gifts they are from God—which includes their innate maleness or femaleness.

The Importance of Words

It is a common experience for adults in their workplaces or adolescents on their sports teams to introduce themselves with their name and preferred pronouns. This is a very subtle move, because for me to say my preferred pronouns are “he/him” is not wrong. They are not asking me to lie. But they are asking me to recognize the legitimacy of people having “preferred pronouns” and to recognize that the other people’s pronouns should be respected just like mine. In my participation, I am affirming the premise, one that Christians wholeheartedly reject.

So what should you say if you are in a group where everyone is going around saying their preferred pronouns? I’d say “pass.” What if your workplace requires using people’s preferred pronouns? I would avoid them, and use the person’s name as frequently as possible. I actually don’t think we are called to be constantly judging everyone (Matt. 7:1; 1 Cor. 5:12–13); it is God’s work to judge them. So, I don’t need to constantly start a fight over these issues. And if a Christian finds himself in an awkward situation in which he does use someone’s false pronoun, is this an unpardonable sin? No. But the experience should be learned from and avoided.

We must not speak lies, and we must be resolved beforehand that we won’t. Lies are not compassionate. A Christian might object, “Why do I have to do this? It makes me very uncomfortable,” but we should not be surprised that we are in this kind of situation. It should be what we expected.

Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and imposters will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. (2 Tim. 3:12–13)

Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. (1 Pet. 2:12; emphasis added)

We should also remember that generally speaking, the lies we will have to resist will be subtle. The serpent was more crafty than any of the beasts of the field (Gen. 3:1), and he rarely makes full-on frontal attacks against the truth. In the garden, he just asked Eve a simple but confusing question. Antichrist never said, “There is no God;” he said, “Christ didn’t come in the flesh” (1 John 4:2–3). The devil offered food to Jesus when he was hungry and quoted the Psalms (Matt. 4:1–11)—what’s wrong with that? The ways of the evil one are subtle.

It is in keeping with his ways to tempt us with, “What is just one little pronoun?”

I’ll quote Favale’s book again. (I largely agree with her views, with some exceptions here and there.) She explains what is involved when we are asked to say the preferred gender of a trans or queer person:

The University of Edinburgh’s policy on trans equality gives the following directives for interacting with transgender people: “Think of the person as being the gender that they want you to think of them as,” and “use the name and pronoun that the person asks you to.” These guidelines unwittingly make a startling concession: you have to actively convince yourself that this person’s gender proclamation is true. Accepting that a man is really a woman and vice versa requires effort, a conscious exertion of thought, because this cuts against biology and common sense. Since the gender paradigm is not based on concrete reality, perpetuating this framework requires careful policing of thought and language. (p. 159-160)

This policing of thought and language is precisely the experience of many people, and Christians must understand that the words we use will be some of the primary resistance against it.

Hating your Family to Follow Jesus

Returning to the story at the beginning of this essay, what would it mean for this mother to refuse to use her son’s preferred pronouns? He has made it clear to her—she will not be a part of his life. He is basically saying, “If you don’t respect this, you hate me, and I hate you.”

We have to prepare ourselves that Jesus says this will be the experience for many Christians.

And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.  Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matt. 10:36–39)

In the past, I have always read this verse imagining a Muslim who embraces Christ and is ostracized by his family. I usually picture a young adult rejected by his or her parents.

But, Jesus says that sometimes it will be parents who are rejected by their children. I imagine that this is in fact much more difficult. Teens are naturally built to go their own way and create separation from their parents. But I don’t think it is ever natural for a parent to feel rejected by their children. This will only be immensely painful.

How could a parent ever bring themselves to say, “I will not honor your preferred pronouns if they don’t match your biological sex”? It can only come from a place of trusting God and a deeper love for the truth than even for our own children. The only way to truly love people is by obeying God. A parent must know that they are loving their child by speaking the truth, even if their child doesn't receive it.

This is all so heartbreaking. So even as we call our church to prepare ourselves to resist the demands of preferred pronouns in our culture, let us conclude with one more word of compassion. We will speak the truth, but we won’t push the lost away from us. Let us be a church that can look in the eyes of a trans person in our community, let us look past broken exterior to the broken interior. Let us listen to people’s stories. Let us tell them that while we disagree with them, we love them. May we make sure that anyone struggling with gender dysphoria will know that if they come to our church, they will be welcomed with the grace and truth of Jesus Christ. We should pray for, and expect that the Lord is going to bring many damaged souls to our church. May our church be a place for healing. Jesus, make us like you.