Enabling Trans “Treatments” Isn’t “Loving”

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Proponents of the euphemistically named “gender-affirming care” are pushing their victims down a path that leads not to contentment but to depression, lifelong medical problems, and suicide.  

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King Solomon advises us in the book of Proverbs to “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter” (Proverbs 24:11).

This verse can have many applications, but it should motivate us to help a relatively new but still particularly vulnerable group that is now “stumbling to the slaughter”: those who are struggling with transgenderism. 

Human biological sex — the word “gender” is vague and pointless — is an unbreakable binary. Humans are born either male or female, and any three-year-old who can’t even read yet can tell you this fundamental truth. It takes a Ph.D. or an Ivy League degree to be able to obfuscate this simple fact.

But the truth is an unmovable rock regardless of what anyone thinks about it. Society can pretend that men can be women and vice versa, the media can shout “trans women are women” from the airwaves, and universities can indoctrinate their students with this mantra, but all their combined efforts will never change that stubborn X chromosome into a Y any more than they could change a rock into a unicorn. 

Pointing out all of these basic self-evident biological truths, or refusing to call a six-foot-tall, 250-pound man a “Miss” if he so identifies, is seen as “hateful” and “transphobic” and could cost you your job and your reputation. The “loving” thing to do, we are told, is to support a man or a woman who wants to mutilate their healthy bodies because they feel “trapped in the wrong body.”

But how is it loving to push someone into a lifestyle with an immense risk of suicide? A UCLA study shows that “81% of transgender adults in the U.S. have thought about suicide, 42% of transgender adults have attempted it, and 56% have engaged in non-suicidal self-injury over their lifetimes.” Those who are struggling with transgenderism are made in God’s image and deserve our love and sympathy. But we love them by guiding them away from the sinful, dark pit of “gender-affirming care” that they are gleefully being pushed into.  

The human body is a magnificent work of art that God has “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14), and it was not meant to be amputated or twisted for no good reason. Forcing a male body into a facsimile of the female form, or vice versa, involves “treatments” that are the stuff of nightmares and painful even to read about. Trans surgeries — and the forcing of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on healthy young people — violate the most basic biological truth, a core part of God’s design for the human body.

And the truth comes back with a vengeance, no matter how much someone may try to suppress it. Is it any wonder that so many of the poor souls who go through these procedures suffer from suicidal thoughts?

A critic of this viewpoint might say that the main reason suicide rates are so high among people who experience transgender feelings is that society doesn’t accept them, so they choose death over ostracism.

But transgenderism is now being aggressively promoted in the military, public libraries, schools, the White House, and virtually every other major institution. There have rarely been any social movements in history that have enjoyed such prodigious levels of support. If people who identify as “transgender” receive such a flood of affirmation and still suffer from stratospheric suicide rates, what can explain their depression if not their regret at the irreversible life decision they have been made to mutilate their bodies with surgery or nuke their mental and physical health with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones?

And if pushing adults to a path of self-mutilation is evil, how much worse is it to do this to innocent children?

The supporters of this horrendous, unthinkable trend of child abuse like to use emotional blackmail by claiming that, for any child who has gender dysphoria, the choice is clear: suicide or surgery. We are told that, if these children don’t receive surgery and other “treatments” that will irreparably ruin their bodies, they will inevitably commit suicide because they can’t overcome the feeling of “being born in the wrong body.”

But, as one recent study found, “Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development.” Nor is this data the result of just one study. In 2022, the U.K.’s National Health Service “issued new guidance saying that gender dysphoria usually does not persist into adulthood,” as the Standing for Freedom Center previously reported.

And even if some children don’t grow out of such feelings of “belonging to the wrong gender,” adults should work to find another solution instead of shoving puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones on minors that will afflict them with a lifelong litany of terrible side effects.

Those who champion “gender transition” for children never seem to accept the full implications of their philosophy. If we accept that a seven-year-old should be allowed to make an irreversible and radical decision like going through transgender “treatment,” then why stop there? Why not allow them to smoke, drink alcohol, or use drugs?

It’s easy to do what supporters of “gender-affirming care” do — support this cultural fad, be seen as some magnanimous liberator, attack any opponents as hateful bigots, wash your hands of the matter when you see trans people ending their lives because of these tragic “treatments,” and, of course, blame Christians and conservatives.

It’s actually hard to do the really loving thing, which is to point out that biological sex is unchangeable, inform the public about the dangers of trans surgeries and the evil of targeting children, and endure the scorn of social and mainstream media, universities, politicians, Hollywood, corporations, and the LBTQ mob as you try to do what’s right.

Some have already been waking up to the dangers of forcing children into this horrendous life, with more and more European countries restricting transgender “treatments” for children. The U.K.’s National Health Service, for example, recently announced that certain clinics can no longer hand out puberty blockers to minors.  

But there are still those, especially in the U.S., who joyfully push those fighting with transgender feelings into a path of destruction. There are already cases of those who have detransitioned suing the doctors who brutalized their bodies. A child who grows up suffering from sterility, cancer, or psychosis because they were misled into this horrible lifestyle will not buy the argument of his or her abusers that “we didn’t know.”

King Solomon immediately followed up his advice to “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter” with an admonition that supporters of “gender-affirming care” would do well to read:

“If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?”

–Proverbs 24:12

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