Transgender Tide Rising
By Colin J. Smothers – October 21, 2020
A moment of Copernican proportions aired on prime-time TV last week in America, but your average viewer probably didn’t bat an eye. In fact, it was designed to be rather unremarkable, right at home with the intellectual furniture that already inhabits the modern mind.
The moment came during an ABC News town hall when former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, was asked the following question about transgenderism by a young mother: “How will you as president reverse [the Trump administration’s] dangerous and discriminatory agenda and ensure that the lives and rights of LGBTQ people are protected under U.S. law?”
The mother prefaced her question with the revelation that she is the mother of a ten-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy who identifies as transgender: “I’m the proud mom of two girls, 8 and 10. My youngest daughter is transgender.”
Here was Biden’s answer — keep in mind we are talking about an eight-year-old, a third-grader:
“I will flat out just change the law. Every — eliminate those executive orders, number one…. The idea that an 8-year-old child or a 10-year-old child decides, you know I decided I want to be transgender. That’s what I think I’d like to be. It would make my life a lot easier. There should be zero discrimination…. And so I promise you there is no reason to suggest that there should be any right denied your daughter or daughters, whichever one or two [mother: “One.”] one, your daughter — that your other daughter has a right to be and do. None, zero. And by the way, my son Beau, passed away; he was the attorney general in the state of Delaware. He was the guy who got the first transgender [sic] passed in the state of Delaware and because of a young man who became a woman who worked for him in the attorney general offices.”
While Biden’s answer is trite and unserious — presidents cannot simply change laws, for one, and the word “discrimination” masks a host of controversial policy and legal decisions that would affect everything from bathrooms and sports teams to medical insurance — what it represents should be a real wake-up call to Christians everywhere.
The former Vice President of the United States — and the current flag-bearer of a major political party who could very well be the most powerful man in the world in a matter of months — thinks it is good and right for an eight-year-old boy to be encouraged to identify as a girl. He should be able to “be and do” anything his sister is or does.
In other words, one of the most basic, indisputable, scientifically-verifiable, essential, for-the-continuation-of-the-human-race-indispensable facts of our existence — that we are created either male or female, which affects our entire embodied existence down to every cell of the body — tossed out the window in a banal exchange without an afterthought about the seismic repercussions.
Of course, this revolutionary idea is not new. It is just newly non-controversial, which makes it all the more dangerous. Everyone remembers the radical policies that the Obama administration was rolling out during his second term in office, including the infamous “Dear Colleague” letter that was handed down by his Department of Education which mandated that elementary, middle, and high schools across the nation must allow biological males into the girls bathroom, and vice versa. This letter is the kind of policy the Trump administration rescinded, which has granted a temporary hiatus, at least domestically speaking, to the radical advance of transgender ideology by our nation’s federal government. This is not to say that Trump’s re-election campaign doesn’t have its own problems supporting anti-biblical gender and sexuality ideologies, but his administration has governed remarkably conservatively with respect to gender and sexuality — especially where federal policies most concretely affect citizens, such as in the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Education.
But what Biden signaled last week by his answer during the town hall is that the full-court press would be back on in a Biden administration. Buckle up, America, you haven’t seen anything yet. Transgenderism in the military? Check. Transgender bathroom mandates for public restrooms and our elementary schools? Check. Transgenderism in school sports? Check. Transgenderism in privately-held businesses and organizations? Why not? Biden was Vice President in an administration that took the Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby all the way to the Supreme Court for refusing to fall in line behind the abortion regime. And alarmingly, earlier this year the Supreme Court provided some of the legal reasoning in Bostock for such policies to gain a footing.
Christians have good reason to make the 2020 election a referendum on the abortion fanaticism so prevalent on the left and represented by the Biden-Harris platform — two of the most radical pro-abortion candidates ever put forward by a major political party. But abortion aside, Christians must not ignore the newly-energized, progressive LGBT agenda that has been infiltrating conservative circles and which led to CBMW’s efforts behind the Nashville Statement in 2017.
We should never consider it normal for a man to pretend to be a woman, or for a boy to identify as a girl. This notion will never be right. It will never be in line with God’s revelation, no matter who endorses it. Instead, we must bear witness to the truth that God’s design for male and female is good and that true flourishing can only take place when people embrace their God-given identity, not a self-conceived and self-constructed identity. When we do so, we do it for their good and God’s glory.
In Christ,
Colin J. Smothers
CBMW Executive Director