The Transgender Question

I have a friend. After high school she developed the habit of not eating food or throwing up the food she ate. Her habits have continued on and off for many years. My friend perceives that she is fat even though she has dropped to a weight of under 100 pounds. She isn't happy with her body. It never feels right. She has undergone changes psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, and I can see a dramatic change in her personality.

Does my friend have a problem that needs to be addressed?

I hope you said yes to the last question. My friend has a problem that will lead to death if she pursues it deeply enough. In our society, this is generally accepted. We would say my friend has an eating disorder.

I don't mean to treat a difficult subject flippantly, but eating disorders offer a helpful analogy in understanding another disorder saturating our news: transgender disorder.

As the defenses of readers may be alerted at the mention of transgenderism being a disorder and the impending comparison of an eating disorder to transgenderism, let me first ask the following questions about my friend.

What does my friend need? Is her impulse to not eat or to eat and throw up a part of who she is because she thinks her body is not skinny enough? Should she be encouraged to continue her behavior? Will it help to embrace and live her identity as a bulimic or anorexic person? Or should she be encouraged to seek help and change her choices? Does her perception match reality? Would she be more fulfilled by working on her identity beyond the way she eats?

I hope you recognize the compassion needed to help a person with an eating disorder to healing, wholeness, and health. As individuals in our society, I hope each of us recognizes the need to help someone like my friend to realize healthier ways to identify with our bodies and our selves.

I hope you also begin to see the compassion needed to help a person struggling with gender or sexual identity to healing, wholeness, and health.

Back in July at the ESPYs (ESPN's sports awards show), the Arthur Ashe Courage Award was given to Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender person known for 65 years prior as Bruce Jenner. Pronouns are tricky, and I will likely offend some people just in describing the story. The award predictably elicited controversy. Now, having discussed the award with many people, I would like to comment on why I found it difficult to see Jenner honored for courage.

I do not doubt Bruce Jenner's inner struggle. As an Olympic-gold-medal-winning-Wheaties-box-spokesman, Jenner epitomized American masculinity around the time of his triumph at the 1976 Olympic Games. He said in the biographical material from the ESPYs that his gender plagued him throughout the time he trained, won, raised a family, and achieved stardom.

Now, with multiple marriages, children, and years behind him, Bruce decided to make the transition to being a woman. With a combination of pills and surgery, he transitioned and appeared on the July cover of Vanity Fair Magazine with the headline "Call Me Caitlyn."

Shortly after, Jenner received the ESPY. The acceptance speech by Jenner included a call for greater awareness of transgender people and their struggle, the extremely high suicide rate for transgender people, and the need for acceptance and respect.

I agree with Jenner on all those points. Transgender people struggle. Greater awareness is needed. The suicide and bullying rates for transgender teens are heart-achingly high. They must be lowered, with each person given the love and respect needed to live fully. Transgender people need acceptance and respect. Absolutely.

But the acceptance and respect I seek to give isn't to tell a transgender person that their identity is found in embracing something their body is not, just as I wouldn't tell my bulimic friend to pursue skinniness until she is happy. The perception does not match the reality. Surgery and pills are not the solution.

Bruce Jenner becoming Caitlyn Jenner is not a courageous choice. It's a choice by a person with financial means to get an extreme and expensive medical procedure. It's a choice by a person with celebrity to point to a gender transition as the end of a longtime struggle. It's not a choice many others can make, and it's not a solution.

I ask the same question posed earlier: Does Jenner have a problem that needs to be addressed?

Yes. He does. (And I say "he" because even though Jenner identifies as female, the biology of his body still makes him male.)

He needs to work through his woundedness. He needs support. He needs love. He needs people to surround him and help him find fulfillment. Fulfillment doesn't come from changing gender identity but from recognizing the beauty of our human condition. We are creatures capable of movement, problem solving, love, collaboration, and discernment. We are physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological beings. We are body-soul composites. We are God's beloved.

That last statement is the one that really matters. We are God's beloved.

Does Bruce Jenner know that? Does he realize God knows his deepest struggles and desires, his gender confusion, and all the choices he has made in this life? Does he know he will be endlessly and fruitlessly searching for fulfillment in this life because we are pilgrims made not for earth but for Heaven? Does he know personally the Savior longing for his love? Does he know?

God allows struggles in our lives. We are made stronger if we recognize and address the struggle. Eating disorder? Self image? Bad money management? Lying? Anger? Resentment? Pornography? Homosexual attraction? Sexual addiction? God loves us all the same, infinitely the same. God loves us too much to let us remain where we are. God loves us by encouraging us to grow.

Our healing comes when we address the struggle, not embrace it. Like Jenner, I believe the transgender community is hurting more than most people realize, but I differ with Jenner on how to bring about a change among transgender people. The solution is not in acceptance of rejecting DNA to embrace a perception of oneself but in recognizing the reality of the individual person as a child of God.

Love is the answer. Love wins. Love does not, however, blindly affirm. Love challenges. Love sacrifices. Love walks beside. Love transforms.

As Father Mike Schmitz challenges us in the video below, we need to consciously pursue the hearts of the people in our lives most in need of abiding love. We can be Christ for them. We can help them to healing.

Among the transgender question and raging issues of morality, life, and values in our culture, most people can agree there is a problem. I just wish more of us would live like we honestly, deeply believe that the only adequate tonic for the wounds within us is to drink from the living streams of God's abundant life.

If we really care to answer the transgender question, we have to know and love the people in the furnace of this growing struggle. I have failed in this respect, and I think we as a Christian people have failed to show Christ's love. So let's begin anew with the goal of treating each person with the dignity of God so that as we meet the one person that most needs that dignity--whether their struggle is with an eating disorder, gender identity, over-competitiveness, pride, or something else--we will be ready to meet their need.

For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, plans for your welfare and not for woe, so as to give you a future of hope. When you call me, and come and pray to me, I will listen to you. When you look for me, you will find me. Yes, when you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me.

Jeremiah 29:11-14