Transgender Identities, the Church, and Scripture: A Conversation with Preston Sprinkle

so glad you're joining us for this conversation on uh transgender identities and christians how do we think about this lovingly and also truthfully i don't know anybody better to talk about this than my friend preston sprinkle preston you're on not long ago we were just talking about was the word homosexual correctly put in the bible that video got a ton of hits so it's awesome to have you back now talking about your next book which doesn't release for a while but first off thanks for coming back on the show man thanks for having me back on and i'm honored to do so well your book uh to me has been a long time in coming there's a lot of good books that are out there on transgender looking at it some politically some looking at the issue more theologically some relationally but i know your heart theologically and your heart just relationally as you look at this very similar to your book people to be loved and we're going to unpack this book together and then we're going to open up for questions at the end i know people are going to have a lot of questions for you because you've researched this as much for more than anybody i know so we're going to open up for tough questions uh for preston sprinkle on issues related to transgender but first if you're new to the channel make sure you hit that subscribe button because we have some interviews coming up you are not going to want to miss this channel is in partnership with biola apologetics we want to help you lovingly and just graciously uh defend your faith preston let's come back to your book now originally it's going to come out in october and this is going to be your premier interview to launch pre-sales is pushed back to february but it's up on amazon right now and people can in fact pre-order it and i would highly encourage any thoughtful christian even non-believers if they want to think about this issue more carefully and graciously now you start this book with a story about your friend leslie can you share what that story is and i'm curious why you start a book off this way uh yeah a good question i i typically like to start books off with stories of people um most topics that christians write about have a significant effect on the lives of people and they're about people so i like to begin by talking about people leslie has been a dear dear uh friend and mentor in my life for many years leslie from the time they were four years old experienced pretty severe gender dysphoria and um long just long story short i don't want to you know spend too much time here but leslie when they were a teenager came to their pastor and said hey i'm wrestling with my gender identity i don't know what to do with this and it was just trying to make sense of it and leslie's pastor ushered them out of the church and invited them to never come back again just because they were wrestling with this and leslie didn't come back to the church for like 18 years what brought leslie back to the church was um leslie ended up getting married to another female or was married for five years i mean hadn't you know just kind of left the church but leslie's wife ended up dying in a tragic accident and leslie reached out to a pastor and said could you do my wife's funeral and the pastor who's a really conservative pastor without hesitation without hesitation said we would be honored to do this wow a real simple expression but leslie had never been like humanized in that way by a christian pastor and and uh leslie's worldview was just turned around and they ended up coming back to the church and now leslie has spent the last eight to ten years just uh pouring into people as a believer in jesus christ and is just a dear dear friend to me so yeah that's that the book actually has bookends with leslie's story at the beginning and at the end walk me through the writing process for you i'm curious as an author but also for somebody just kind of listening into this debate and and i set it up because i know this is not just an issue for you you spend hours and hours counseling and listening and studying scripture what is that process like writing a book on a topic as sensitive as transgender so this was the hardest book i've ever written um and if anybody's familiar with my other books they know i do tend to write on some tough topics this one was just i mean i i've never done more research for a topic than this one um i've and not just research in in you know the bible but i read a ton of just psychology a lot of history a lot of ethics i mean just all kinds of different disciplines but that's just the theological and scientific side of it i also did a lot of just listening to interviews i mean watch just so many hours of just even just youtube conversations of people you know talking about what it's like to be trans or transitioning or de-transitioning and um so it was just so much to take in and it i mean honestly i was kind of planning to you know publish this a couple years ago but there was just i just felt like i just hadn't studied enough i hadn't listened enough and so i just wanted to keep going so um yeah it was it was it was uh an enjoyable experience it was emotionally um very weighty um and just academically it was so incredibly challenging so yeah i was pretty exhausted when you spoke to our faculty at talbot i could just see you expressed how exhausting it is how many calls you get in emails and just really have become a pastor to so many in the lgbtq community christian and not that that love and care for people really shines through in the way that you write so commend that now early in the book you have a section you call people and concepts yes why are both people and concepts important to this conversation and how do we air just emphasizing one say without the other yeah i've seen in this conversation people typically do error on one side or the other uh for instance people will say you know i just want to love people well i'm just going to accept people and who they are is who they are and that's who god made them to be and i'm just going to embrace them as they are you know and that's again i all i can almost agree with all of that but it's like okay but we are there's also a lot of really deep intellectual even scientific questions that surround this conversation or people err on the other side they just want to win an argument they just want to listen to their favorite political uh you know pundit or you know debater who's going to destroy you know trans arguments whatever and and both those are just just wrong-headed i think we need to love people well but the best way we can love people well is begin by understanding some of the real theological and scientific complexities that surround the transgender conversation well you do that well for those of you who have just uh come into this conversation preston sprinkle and i are talking about his upcoming book which now is actually pushed back towards february 1 so you are getting an early taste of this called embodied and it's about transgender identities and the church uh preston one of the quotes that you put in the book and you kind of riff off a little bit is from a friend of ours both of us he's a psychologist mark your house and he said if you've met one transgender person you've met one transgender person why is that such a significant statement that he made that yeah he said that statement a while back and i've seen it in some of his writings since then and that really i mean in a sense that kind of statement is true of any kind of people group uh if you've met one straight person you've met one straight person but i think when somebody has a minority experience like a transgender experience it's easy for people in the majority who don't have that experience to just think that being trans is one basic kind of experience but the tran you know trans experiences are so wide-ranging you know and i say elsewhere in the book if somebody comes out and tells you that they're trans all you know about that person is that they just told you you're they're trans i mean being trans could range all the way from having like my friend leslie you know severe gender dysphoria from the time they were four years old all the way to somebody that just simply doesn't resonate with maybe certain gender stereotypes you know and this is actually a growing debate within the trans community like to be trans does this mean you have to have like a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria like a psychological condition um or and there's other people that say no if you say you're trans you're trans and that's called like the self id perspective if you just say you're trans then you're trans i mean i've all there's some extreme cases like uh trisha paytas who's a popular youtuber you know she says and she identifies as she you know do i believe i'm a i'm trans one thousand percent um do i uh resonate with my body completely one thousand percent it's like like that doesn't even make sense but there's that's an extreme case and she got sure but what it means to be trans has become very very flexible complex so that it's just a really broad umbrella term that captures many different experiences i see a great question here from brian lee brian and those who have chimed in what we're going to do is walk through some of the basics of the book and research that preston has found which i think will get us kind of on common ground and understanding and then we're going to come back to these questions so brian i will come to your questions since you posted it first the rest of you joining us tell us where you're from we'd love to see where you are joining this live stream from uh on that note let's define some terms as we start off uh so define what is meant by transgender and then gender dysphoria yeah honestly i mean transgender there's almost it's almost like you have one definition but on a general level to be trans or to identify as trans means you experience some kind of incongruence between your gender identity which is your internal sense of who you are and your biological sex so on some level you experience some kind of disconnect between who you uh who who you identify as or who you feel like you are on the inside and who your biological sex tells you you are that would be a basic and again there would be some people that might even fall outside of that gender dysphoria is again the psychological diagnosis of the distress that some people feel when they live with that incongruence gender dysphoria it can be mild it can come and go it can be severe for according to all the available studies uh 61 to 88 of children who have gender dysphoria it ends up going away after adolescence that's actually a really important point that um influences many other uh points in the conversation so one thing important super something important to understand is that transgender doesn't necessarily mean gender dysphoria like i don't think it's helpful to use these terms as synonyms so for instance percentage-wise 0.01 of the population or one out of every 10 000 people uh experience gender dysphoria according to the um the dsm but anywhere from like you know 0.6.7 percent of the population or among teenagers three to five percent in the west at least might identify as transgender well that's a lot higher percentage than those who experience gender dysphoria okay so let me ask it this way what percentage of people who are trans experience gender dysphoria is there a way to know the question in that frame that way that's really that's honestly because so many people are identifying as trans especially the younger you get it's really hard to measure that so yeah i mean it's if you took again the the two percentages i gave um 0.1 gender dysphoria 0.6 of the adult population identifies trans um but even then it's like sometimes gender dysphoria you know could be mild could come and go um so that somebody maybe just kind of deal with deals with it but they haven't actually gone to like a medical professional and been diagnosed they might just experience it you know so it's hard to measure hey by the way we've got folks from uh mexico toronto uh different parts of the us and other places internationally so this is obviously a really important topic and your book is coming out at a great great time so let me ask you this what what is the difference you talked about what transgender is gender dysphoria what about the term transgenderism or transgender ideology are you comfortable with those terms what do they typically mean i i don't actually use the term transgenderism um it's not a it's not i wouldn't say it's a terrible term but that just refers to kind of the broad maybe movement or yeah certain ideologies that have been promoted by certain activists um but there's just no it just can become a little bit too sweeping too general um some people could attack maybe certain ideologies they hear in like the news outlets and then they think that every single person who identifies as trans is wrapped up into that and that's that's one thing i've really learned is that there is an ideology being really you know promoted by certain trans activists and yet the large majority of people who identify as trans are just trying to live their life like they're not out you know um trying to you know um indoctrinate you know five-year-old children in kindergarten or whatever you know but there are certain people that aren't doing that but the majority of people who are identified as trans you know they're just maybe they experience dysphoria maybe they're trying to wrestle with who they are and they're not like we shouldn't see every trans person as some like you know activists that's really helpful so you can be trans and be a transgender activist you can be a transgender activist and not be trans i mean these are it's very important to make these distinctions so what what about the question i get off asked often which is about is there a known cause for somebody experiencing either the incongruence which is transgender or gender dysphoria or is it more like the question related to same-sex attraction where even the apa says we don't know there could be different pathways so to speak it's a combination of nature and nurture what is the consensus when it comes to the question of transgender yeah i would say it's the latter it's very similar to same-sex attraction um that you know it's it's a complex blend between nature and nurture now um there's different categories of even gender dysphoria so um again to use my uh friend leslie as an example leslie experienced gender dysphoria at the age of three to four years old so that's called early onset gender dysphoria sometimes as young as like two or two years old a kid will be expressing just a really really strong desire to be the the opposite sex so early onset gender dysphoria i would say probably has some strong biological roots um but there's another category that's actually been getting a lot of attention more recently and it's called like late onset or some people call it rapid rapid exactly and this is where teenagers who already are wrestling with lots of uh other mental health issues that they might be on the autism spectrum uh maybe they're wrestling with severe depression anxiety some of them might you know be ocd or wrestle with other mental health issues and there seems to be a very high growth rate among especially teenage females who have these mental health concerns um who come out almost out of nowhere as trans and this is but just so you know my audience knows this whole category is so debated and we're just trying to figure out what's going on so everything i just said last 30 seconds is volatile okay okay but there has been i mean it is remarkable that what we know about gender dysphoria in the past is that it's it has been primarily something guys have wrestled with much like sorry biological males more than biological females but over the last 10 years there has been an astronomical spike among teenage females with no prior history of gender dysphoria coming out as trans in fact in the uk there's been over a 5 000 increase among biological females in their teenage years coming out or seeking help with their gender identity with no prior observable history of gender dysphoria so that's raising a lot of questions so the answer question that category might have a lot more kind of social environment influences that is i'm not saying causing but playing some role in their uh trans identity so there's a comment here that's uh very thoughtful and it says avoid causation it's a moot point and can only muddy a relationship and i think i understand the hesitation because when we look at people we want to say a b and c you get d and humans aren't like dominoes that just get knocked down but interestingly on top of that at times if there are say relational factors that contribute to somebody experiencing gender dysphoria then it would seem identifying those might be important i noticed in the end of the book one of the things you talk about are we don't always know but there are cases especially with young girls who have relational trauma and this brings out a certain kind of trans experience for them could you could you talk about that i know you're not giving a blanket statement saying this is true for everybody but there's some established cases where people can trace it back to their experience many times when they're younger yeah so yeah so i appreciate the comment you know avoid causation but i would say well not it depends on the case like exactly what you said there are a decent number of testimonies who they themselves say um identified as trans and they would later admit because they had a warped view of what it means to be a woman a lot of them deal with internalized homophobia like they were so disgusted at the fact that they were same-sex attracted that being trans would in a sense give the persona of being opposite sex attracted and there's lots of testimonies of women coming out that that really was kind of an internal thing they're wrestling with or or misogyny they had such a kind of a warped and negative view of just womanhood that that played a role in their um either transition or across gender identity so in those cases i would say no it actually is helpful to kind of go back and see if there is some underlying possible cause that just needs to be kind of dealt with and in some cases yeah that's directly connected to gender dysphoria so it's just there's no one-size-fits-all answer to any of this stuff each person each story needs to be taken on its own that that's i think that's really helpful and wise as we look at this one of the questions that i have for you is related to some of the say people transitioning and the use of puberty blockers now obviously you and i have a bias we have an angle here but i really want to know as best you can because you've read this literature scientific literature more exhaustively and carefully than i can and i also know you're willing to follow the truth even when it's inconvenient and difficult and don't come to this thing with an agenda other than loving people so what is the evidence of transitioning does it make people happier sometimes sometimes not where does the science as we know it today seem to point you yeah lots of stuff to address here so uh first of all puberty blockers we have we have not done long-term tests on the effects of puberty blockers and this is something that look secular atheists scientists like her i mean i don't know his religious background but like carl henniga from oxford university and many other people i've talked to several endocrinologists and they're all saying look these are un we don't know the long-term effects of this so if somebody says they are perfectly safe they just buy time that is not a scientific answer we don't know we do know that there are some potential side effects of puberty blockers we also know that it does tend to help halt brain development so it doesn't just halt puberty it's like your whole body your whole maturation process including your brain kind of comes to a halt we also know that nearly 100 of people who go on puberty blockers go on cross-sex hormones later on and we do know we do have evidence that there are some significant potential side effects of okay what's the difference between those that you just described purely blockers and cross-sex hormones yeah so puberty blockers just pre prevent puberty from happening usually they're given to somebody i mean anywhere from 9 to 12 years old just at the very early stages of puberty and they just prevent people from going to puberty and the logic is it kind of buys some time gotcha they can figure out you know maybe who they are which to me i don't know as a parent [Music] and i got i just want to be really careful here but it's the logic of like this 10 year old doesn't really know who you they are let's wait till they're 13. and then they will know who they are i i've got three teenage times did the idea that a 13 year old girl will know who they are that just is concerning for me on just a basic scientific level um cross-sex hormones are the are the you know it's not just blocking puberty it is actually giving high doses of the hormone typically associated with the opposite sex so women would receive high doses of testosterone uh males would receive high doses of estrogen and that does you know it does you know testosterone masculine masculine masculinizes your body estrogen does the opposite um and yeah though those are there is some serious concerns about that as well um yeah we can talk more about that you ask about transitioning though and this is where i kind of chuckled at your state you know what does the science say and anybody who's dabbled into scientific research knows that scientific research around sexuality and gender identity is the most politicized almost i want to say untrusted but you just you have to be so careful with these studies if you read one study that seems to support your you know your preconceived notion make sure you read the other five that critique it and the other three that counter critique that and then you can step back and make somewhat of informed um resp uh conclusions so with transitioning like surgical hormonal transitioning there's just a there's different studies that show different things one of the largest studies done on over 300 people who had transitioned showed that transitioning does seem to reduce gender dysphoria but it didn't seem to reduce other mental health issues that surround you know somebody in their pre-transition anxiety depression suicidality in fact that study showed that of all the people that transitioned they were still 19 times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population other studies say no it actually reduced suicidality you also have to ask the question did it talk to the person you know a month after their transition a year after that transition 10 years after they transitioned was it long term or short-term so um there's just there's a lot of um yeah i'll just leave it at that there's there's a lot of differences with the studies in terms of the practical benefit of transitioning let's let's shift to kind of a christian approach to this um so you describe uh incongruence kind of between body and soul so to speak to use somewhat loaded language if there is incongruence between body and soul which one should take precedence should it be your body should it be the soul like how should christians look at this and i realize when we look at the evidence of transitioning and we look at the evidence of puberty blockers this is somewhat of a worldview neutral question if we can assess the evidence but i don't know when it comes to body and soul and actually let me take a step back and ask you a question first uh before we come to that even the question i asked last time about do uh does transitioning uh make somebody happier that seems to be loaded with a different ethic than how a christian would approach the question of transitioning could you unpack that because as christians we don't want to just look and say oh it makes somebody happier i'm on board there's other ethical considerations that arise even before that question that we should keep in mind of course we want people to be happier but there's larger spiritual and moral components as well so maybe unpack that a little bit for us yeah that's a great question i spent a whole chapter on this um on transitioning and i uh i i propose three different lenses that we should look at transitioning from a christian perspective uh what i call the ontological lens uh ontology just means the you know the study of who you are like who are you as a human uh ontological lens ethical lens and practical lens now i spent many chapters before this arguing that ontologically if somebody is unambiguously male or female um that's their biological sex then i would say that your biological sex does determine whether you are male or male or female like these are bodily categories and a christian worldview of the human body it takes the body very seriously a judeo-christian view of the human body does not say this body is just the shell that covers the real us like this is a significant part of human identity not just our bodies but our sexed bodies so ontologically i would say um and i'm going to leave aside intersex i know it might come to intersex and that's what people say let's just non-intersex people who are clearly male or female transitioning i would say is moving that person furth not not further into the image that god's created them to be but is actually moving them away from that image that's the ontological lens ethical lens we have to ask the question is it biblically you know moral or or not to um to try to change your biological sex and identify with the opposite sex that god has not created you to be um and then the practical lens is is this going to um is this going to achieve the results that i you know that i'm trying to achieve is it going to lower my anxiety depression my suicide suicidality is it going to reduce my dysphoria and even that that's a little and i make it clear that that's not an ethical argument because like you said even if it did reduce those things that is a utilitarian means of ethical reasoning which isn't really a christian way of thinking like the end justifies the means but even then there's a lot of practical problems with transitioning that again a lot of i'll just say that maybe some mainstream media outlets just don't ever mention like it's it's you'll get canceled if you've mentioned some of these things but with the help of youtube and the internet you know what more and more of these stories are coming out so um see i i do think it's it's tough to make a biblical case for transition trenches union that's fair would you compare it to say the question of divorce if somebody's in a marriage and they're not happy and they're suffering we want that person to be happier but we also say okay the purpose of marriage is not just happiness and assuming there's not sexual infidelity or physical abuse like all those things and we'd say okay wait a minute what is the purpose of marriage what's god's design for marriage like those would be a bigger part or at least equal part of the equation to somebody's experience happiness would you say the same thing applies to transgender that we want somebody to be happy but when it comes to a christian we've got to ask these deeper ethical and moral and biblical questions as well is that fair at least it goes no that's exactly right i mean divorce any kind of ethical question the only question shouldn't be does it relieve suffering like that's not again i don't know any christian view of ethics which says if you know x y and z could relieve suffering then it's morally okay like i don't know christian in the history of global christianity that that's their kind of ethical framework again and again yeah absolutely a massive part of me wants to relieve suffering that's just not the only ethical question we need to be asking that's fair now one one of the uh i guess challenges that i've heard i know you've written extensively on this and this is true for lgbtq people and for the trans question that the suffering in the lives of trans people is because of the non-accepting culture so it's nothing inherent biologically relationally wherever it comes from it's society's non-acceptance namely typically christians or people that would maybe be on the conservative right although we're seeing more people come out like obviously the writer of harry potter pushing back on this what's your response to the claim that it's actually a non-accepting society that is causing that suffering yeah it's called a minority stress is the the sociological term for that um that if somebody has a minority express uh it might if somebody has a minority experience then their stress um comes from a majority kind of oppression uh yeah my and i have a section on this in the book um i have a whole like appendix on suicidality and and the trans uh experience which is a big conversation and um yeah i think in in it depends really i mean in certain cases certainly that could be the issue um but we could just be i think it'd be inaccurate just to make a blanket statement like all trans suffering is a result of minority stress is societal persecution we also have to understand what is persecution like if somebody you know uses a pronoun that somebody doesn't like and that causes you know somebody to maybe want to even take their own life is it because somebody used a pronoun that they don't resonate with or is or is that the trigger that there's deeper things that maybe might be going on are there other mental health concerns going on i mean again the the percentage of trans identified people who also have other co-occurring mental health concerns is extremely high and again maybe even some of those mental health concerns is because they're being oppressed by society and again if you can pinpoint that then maybe that's the case but just to assume that's the case in every person's experience i think would be it'd be naive and it'd be actually unloving because you're not actually maybe helping person if you just assume some blanket generality that might not be true of every person and also like that study i mentioned that measured you know over 300 people that had transitioned that study was done in sweden i mean it's one of the most progressive countries you know so it's like yeah i mean so i mean it's um yeah again if you go to like the deep south and a bible belt conservative town or whatever like like maybe that's true but when people are also experiencing the same level of anxiety depression and suicidality and highly progressive uh countries you have to at least raise the question could there be other things you know you know factoring in here i've asked one of the leading pollsters in america and one of the leading psychologists who write on lgbtq questions i said could we create a study that showed it's the non-acceptance of society that causes this and both immediately said there's no way you can isolate that factor apart from a multi-million dollar study with so many contingencies now that's not to say there's not some people that have suffered because of this but to contribute that the main or even most significant one just simply has not been established by the data in terms of how i i've studied it okay uh let's go you mentioned this earlier and let's come back to this one of the most common questions that come up is that people who experience intersex seems to be an are used as an argument i know intersex people at least that i've talked to don't really appreciate being referred to in this fashion but it comes up on both sides of the discussion so it's important to talk about does this imply that gender is fluid and that it's on a spectrum and uh is this an argument in favor of transgender so to speak yeah honestly it's probably the first question that comes up in all of my talks on just lgbtq us is what about intersex and um when someone says what about intersex you know my response is always like what's your specific which intersex condition are you asking about like kleinfelder syndrome androgen insensitivity syndrome um you know there's there's 16 to 20 different intersex conditions um which one are you asking about you know and usually people just want to know like does the existence of intersex persons um does that for lack of better terms you know validate um you know some of the ontological claims of somebody who identifies as trans is is maybe the more academic way of wording it and i'm gonna i wanted to step back and say okay let's just let's just lay all this out like what do we mean by intersex so intersex conditions range on a a broad spectrum most inner okay so defining sorry in defining intersex is somebody born with some atypical feature in their sexual anatomy reproductive systems and or sex chromosomes and by the way let me jump in i appreciate that you're very careful to say a typical rather than abnormal just because of what that tends to communicate to somebody who experiences intersex atypical captures the truth just as well without the potential stigma that's uh you caught that i know it's so important for especially those of us who don't have this experience to go out of our way to use language that is as humanizing as it can be and yeah abnormal could be it could be dehumanizing to some people some people don't care but i mean yeah communicates the same thing so according to leonard sachs who did a massive study on like you know how common is intersex um you know he said that you know 99 and he just added up the stats it's like he's made some argument he just kind of looked at the data 99 of people with an intersex condition are unambiguously male or female the whole idea that if you have an intersex condition then you're neither male or female or that you're completely both male and female that's just not statistically scientifically true i know people that had had an intersex condition their whole life and just found out like in their mid-30s you know because it was minor it just wasn't identical klein felters is one of the most significant intersex conditions and you know almost every person with klein filters is unambiguously male um it's not like it's unclear who they are now i i have uh two friends that have pretty severe intersex conditions one of my friends has xx and xy chromosomes full male anatomy full female anatomy um that that is they yes they are a blend of male and female the important thing to understand though is that male and female are the only two biological sex categories almost everybody is born either male or female some people are born both for all you know all intents and purposes um but it's not it's not like they're in other or third sex and most intersex people don't even say that it's this is what kind of bugs me a little bit some sometimes it's some activists who aren't even trans whatever they use intersex as some kind of like faceless concept in service of some other argument that doesn't even have to do with their own experience and yeah there is a decent number of intersex people who keep saying can you stop using me as some wow and in your argument you can google claire graham who's like an intersex activist who just gets infuriated when people say she's not male or female when they use intersex as an argument certain transgender uh or certain claims by say transgender activists so in 99 of cases of people with an intersex condition uh the person is clearly male or female and this isn't 99 of the population as a whole 99 of people with an intersex condition now that one percent you talked about that a little bit but that one percent if i understand correctly either it's um it's we cannot tell so the lack is our ability or there really is both male and female chromosomes and anatomy within that one percent yes exactly but even and even in the one percent you know something like ais androgen insensitivity syndrome somebody is born genetically male xy chromosomes but their cells lack the proper receptors to it's hard i mean i don't get all the all the medical stuff but i mean it's it's the the the hormones triggered by the y chromosome doesn't do anything to the cells so that the person actually develops into a female anatomy people with ais might they would be genetically male but they would present and act and typically identify as female so even there you're not dealing with somebody who's like whoa is this a male or female i can't even tell people just say oh it's a female in fact sometimes that they don't even find out until they're like maybe they don't go through puberty or something and they go get tested and they find out that they have a y chromosome so even in that one percent it's not like they are always completely just a complete blend of both that's really helpful and i know you have a whole chapter on that in the book uh and by the way your podcast i want to commend to our viewers theology and the raw you have a range of interviews on a ton of topics that are fascinating theologically speaking but you interview some friends across the lgbtq spectrum uh some who experience intersex and it's a very humanizing eye-opening just encouraging conversation i want our viewers to hit uh subscribe right now to your podcast theology in the raw because it's really really good stuff um on this topic are there objective differences between males and females what does the data show biologically relationally psychologically and i know you're laughing because it's kind of a loaded question it involves so many nuance i get asked this one a lot but what are the actual differences between men and women boys and girls yeah that is a big question and on the one hand it is a little bit um funny that we have to even ask that question that is true yes the question itself is revealing it is i mean yeah um but yeah so let me begin by saying this there's a lot of overlap between males and females one might even say there's more similarities than differences and that might be true um but yes i mean there are absolute differences between males and females in in their biology um so i mean just scientifically you determine whether somebody is male or female based on things like you know their their chromosomes whether they have a y chromosome or not um they're reproductive sexual organs whether or not those are function or not it's irrelevant it's do they have you know a male or female reproductive organs and then external genitalia and also your endocrine systems whether it's producing you know high levels of testosterone low levels of estrogen or vice versa and that does affect even your physical anatomy wideness of hips muscle mass uh body hair and so on um where it gets a little tricky is when it comes to behavioral differences or even how people think now in popular uh cycle or maybe yeah pop culture well i'll even say it you know some people think men are from mars and women are from venus and that is a popular book and that that is quite a bit overplayed um yes we do see behavioral differences between men and women on a general level but they are not absolute most males tend to be more analytical most females or the majority of females might they might tend to be more say agreeable or whatever but those are generalities women can be analytical men can be agreeable and also the question we also have a question of the nature nurture you know are most men more physically aggressive than women because of testosterone good scientific evidence for that or are they also socialized into physical aggression are they rewarded when they're physically aggressive and are women sort of punished when they're physically aggressive that's also true too again very complex blend between nature and nurture when we talk about behavioral differences between men and women that that's a summary of like three i appreciate your approach because you're saying it's ignorant to not say as a whole there's not only biological differences but there's also certain behavioral and emotional differences but these are how did you say it like statistical generalizations so if somebody falls outside of it male or female it doesn't mean the person is less masculine or less feminine that's one of the most important things to me that you wrote in your book is that we have cultural stereotypes and within the church about what it looks like to be a man and a woman and somebody doesn't fit that stereotype or just falls outside the numerical average which is neither right or wrong good or bad it just is doesn't feel like they belong and that can contribute to somebody who doesn't fit the norm feeling at home and being loved and accepted within the church that's exactly right it sounds like you resonate with that deeply talk about that theologically a little bit um i guess in the sense you give examples of david give examples of jesus and you ask the question what does it mean to be masculine what does it mean to be feminine scripturally speaking yeah that's a great yeah i have a whole chapter on gender stereotypes um i deal with that on both a scientific and biblical level and i my my main thesis is that most of our assumptions about gender stereotypes or most of our gender stereotypes come from culture not the bible in the sense that they are like morally mandated and in fact all throughout the bible you see biblical figures kind of challenging uh gender norms and expectations um jesus was a single man of marital age uh that was seen as being very unmasculine in in judaism at that time um he was also you know um he didn't have sexual relations or you know take advantage of women that was seen as being very unmasculine in roman culture even throughout the old testament we see you know joseph and um oh i'm blinking on his name jacob and and even david you know what well david's brothers were off at war he was sitting home playing his harp writing poetry you know weeping over his best friend jonathan you know i mean in our culture we would say those are feminine traits you know some heart playing poet like crying all the time like um but that that he but that doesn't the bible never says that like there's some moral mandate to be athletic to be sportsy you know to be a guy so again i think the bible recognizes general patterns of male and female behavior just scientific fact but it doesn't morally mandate cultural expectations for masculinity or femininity the bible's more concerned about being godly than it is about being culturally masculine or feminine that's a really important distinction that i think we can do a lot of improvement on the church just to make people feel more at home and loved and not stereotyped and left out i think that's going to be really really helpful especially when i ask i ask audiences i started doing this after i read your book i'll say give me a manly man and either people say samson or they say david i'll say when was david a man they're like well he cut off goliath's head and i'll say what about when he wrote poetry what about when he sing a harp and people just kind of look at me like huh i would have a stereotype about that but the bible makes no distinction between he's acting as a man here and he's not there so i think that's very liberating for people i think all people but especially those who maybe don't fit some of these stereotypes more broadly now you in your book and in a paper you've written at the center for faith sexuality and gender um you talk about certain things the bible teaches and one of them is that god has made us male and made us female and this is an objective category where is that rooted in scripture how do you ground that yeah genesis 1 27 one of the most beautiful uh equalizing statements in all of scripture that god made humanity male and female then he says in the image of god he made them now those terms male and female are referring to biological sex these are not these categories aren't referring to like our internal sense of who we are what we you know modern day people call gender identity it's referring to biological sex we know this because the very next verse is be fruitful multiply it's kind of connected to the role that biological sex plays and male and female that that pair is used to describe the animals going into the ark you know male and female why so they can reproduce um after they get out of the ark so uh yeah so i think right there in the first statement about humanity in the bible one might even say the most important statement about humanity in the bible that were created in god's image it connects the image that we were created in with our different biological sexes so yeah this is not uh like when people say oh it's just my body like oh whatever it's like well that's not reflecting a the high view that christianity has of the body i mean paul does the same thing at first corinthians you know he has a very high view of the body he even grounds his sort of sexual ethic in a in you know sinning against your own body in first corinthians chapter six i think this is something we protestants can learn a lot from our catholic brothers and sisters having a high theology and respect for the body now the second thing you say is that the bible calls us to act in conformity with our biological sex i may have worded that a little bit differently but that's the essence act consistently with our biological sex one of the passages that you refer to is deuteronomy 22 5 which says a woman must not wear men's clothing nor a man wear what women's clothing in other words there's distinction and they're to be kept in their place now i know you've thought about this but the challenge back to that is well we're also not supposed to wear two kinds of fabric and have two kinds of seed in the land because israel was taught to be holy and separate but that doesn't apply outside of the mosaic law so how does deuteronomy 22 5 inform the fact that we should act consistently with our biological sex that's a that's a great question and that that i do caution my listeners whether you're maybe coming from a more progressive standpoint or more conservative standpoint you know i challenge my conservative readers uh if i can generalize um to let's just not quote deuteronomy 2 5 and just make a quick conclusion that this immediately lies a christian it's like look at the surrounding context there's lots of stuff in deuteronomy 22 that you're not doing i'm not doing nobody out there is really trying to practice unless you're an orthodox jew at the same time we can't just say it's a really bad argument to say well that's an that's in the mosaic law so it's not for today well so is love your neighbors yourself you know so is don't have sex with your grandma and or you know don't quit adultery like there's lots of stuff in the mosaic law that you know most humans are going to say ah that's still pretty valid for humanity today so we actually have to roll up our sleeves and do some exegetical work there and there are some translation um interpretive difficulties here and i actually spent a long time in the book in the footnote working through that um but at the end of the day just to give you my conclusion i do think that this for lack of better terms this cross-dressing prohibition which has to do with not just wearing silky cloth or whatever it has to do with presenting as the opposite sex i do think that that prohibition does resonate with other statements with the thread scripture that god created us male and female and that we should live into you know that that human identity that he has given us one way in which we could go against that is by presenting as the opposite sex now in the old it gets tricky when we apply that command to today because back then there were clear black and white dress distinctions for males and females okay in a lot of places in the world like male dress and female dress are categorically different in our day and age there's a lot of blurriness here you know i mean can a woman wear baggy jeans a backwards baseball cap cut their hair short and a t-shirt like yeah like there's nothing whatever now if a guy wore you know a two-piece bikini on a beach that would probably that's kind of that would be female entire but we're dealing we're dealing with cultural things and it gets really messy so we just need to um just kind of slow down and really think through this command how we apply it and just be kind of slow to make really quick applications from it one of your conclusions in the book was i think eye-opening to me but also said gosh i don't know if it's fully satisfying and here's what i mean by that when you said we're called to live consistently with our with our biblical sex but the bible doesn't lay out how to do this it was satisfying because i thought that's right but it now doesn't answer the question exactly what this looks like and that's not it doesn't mean it's not satisfying it just means we have more work to do and we have to be very careful and cautious about some of the stereotypes that we use i think that's your point and that's faithful to what scripture seems to say from genesis all the way through the end so we've got a little bit of time left want to come to to questions and there's been a bunch here i've been trying to track i realize i've missed some but let me go back to brian's and then if in the comments if you don't mind just post questions and uh we'll come back to these he says let me just read the first part how can i respond to my christian friend who just came out as a transgender man married to a great woman so it's a christian his friend came out as a transgender man but he said is married to a great woman um first of all i think when you say so trans man typically refers to a biological female who uh identifies as a man or a trans man i i don't so that would mean that they were in a lesbian relationship that's right so i don't think that's what there's i think by trans man you mean a biological male who came out as trans that would that would be actually considered a trans woman and the language can be tough and so i yeah but i mean it's it's hard for me to give a broad brushed response to an individual relationship that i don't know about for me my my broad brush relational advice for anybody is man just do a ton of listening up front don't assume certain things about their identity or their uh their claims like you don't know anything until you just get to know this person to listen and for me and this goes with any kind of relationship you know i try to build relational collateral with people um to love them and to be you know have them love me and and and show them that hey um i'm interested in you as a human being you know um and that doesn't mean you're gonna agree on stuff you might disagree on significant things but um the one thing we shouldn't disagree is that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves so um yeah just do a lot of listening a lot of learning uh be quick to listen slow to speak in this situation or another one that's comparable does it make a difference to you if the person says they're a believer or if the person is not a believer um i mean long term it would make some differences we don't hold non-believers to a christian ethic so i would never if i had a non-christian trans neighbor or whatever like i have no my my my main interest is that they would see the beauty of jesus and would follow his lordship over the life you know apart from that everything i was a secondary um now with a christian someone says they are a christian and if you are like in the same community with them then i i don't know i think the new testament is clear that believers have a uh a role as believers to help other believers to follow jesus um and his goal for the life so um so yeah i think i think long term it wouldn't matter but short term again i'm gonna do the same listening and loving and understanding up front with anybody gotcha that's that's great i'm gonna i'm going to questions here i see a ton of different comments um people all all over the map which is great yeah uh some comments if there's any um let's see let me uh let me ask this question one that i always get quickly is your thoughts on um gender pronouns if you would use it if you wouldn't prefer pronouns i think would be really really helpful tell us what you think and how you approach this i've worked through this a lot man and and uh i'll give you my conclusion um and then maybe say a few more things um yes i do think um as a matter of courtesy uh as a matter of meeting someone where they're at as a matter of establishing relationship i i do use somebody's pronouns um might be helpful a buddy of mine um a body mind says well i just try to avoid pronouns and i think that's probably the best case if you're like you know don't feel comfortable using uh the pronouns that don't match the person's biological sex but yeah i'm going to meet somebody where they're at use their pronouns i understand again i spent a long time in my book going back and forth on all the different arguments and perspectives and i really mean this i think there's good arguments on both sides i don't think it's an easy uh easy thing to say what i do know is if you want to immediately end the relationship with a trans person before it even begins just don't use their pronouns i'm saying that cynically like i think it's true and so may we we should want to be um in relationship with people um as a long-term goal i mean yeah i think that you know a disciple of jesus who believes genesis 1 27 believes god created the male or female um that they would want to fully identify with their biological sex um but man that that that might be the long game that's not going to be like my immediate you know prerequisite for a relationship so but it's tough man there's good people on both sides of that debate that is tough and i i think there's one side people call like the integrity position which says i just am being asked to affirm something not true and won't do it and what you might call maybe like the compassionate position for lack of a better lack of a better term let me ask you this you've been reading you've been watching youtube you've been reading so many books on this are you encouraged where like culture is going in the sense of are there voices standing up saying you know what i'm not sure i'm on board with transgender ideology is what we're talking about so let me take a step back for a second just so people watching know your book is very pastoral it's very relational it's kind of written for the christian who just says what do i need to know and how do i love my neighbor so i take it as like a bottom-up book how do i love people who are trans christian or not there's also the larger cultural question about how things are shifting in the direction they're heading and of course the author of harry potter speaks up who tends to be a little bit more left-leaning and wrote an unbelievably thoughtful critique of certain trans ideology do you see more and more people kind of standing up and pushing stop on this or is this a tidal wave that's just coming and it's only a matter of time or do you have literally no idea what's going to happen no no i got thoughts on that and actually i mean i would say my book does deal pretty thoroughly by responding to and and disagreeing with um the dominant um trans ideology promoted by certain trans activists so a bulk of my book is that um i think i just do it without yelling and screaming so i just let the data drive it um but i would say it's probably like 75 of my book um but uh yeah yeah what's interesting is that unlike the same-sex marriage debates which were basically split culturally between conservatives and liberals um that you can't neatly divide that in this conversation you have some very very liberal atheist people who are some of the most adamant voices against uh who are going against trans uh again activist ideology some of the most the most volatile discussions i've seen are between radical feminists um lesbians in particular and trans activists and it's interesting well if you think about it i mean um ace again a certain trans certain strand of a trans ideology is that um you could a biological male can live in that privilege for 30 40 50 years and then declare themselves female and then get access to female spaces but you have a lot of feminists and lesbians saying we've fought for decades centuries to get female spaces protected to um to elevate this this really this this high view of what it means to be a woman and that the woman's body is essential for what it means to be a woman so that this is a a big battle between people who aren't even close to the church or conservatives you know they all hate donald donald trump it's the only thing they agree on right so so yeah i would say most of the i would say um pretty aggressive critiques of certain trans ideologies are come from the left so yeah so there's where will this be you know i will say i'll just yeah i'll say it i do think that some of the fundamental claims made by some radical trans uh ideologues um are on par with science denying um it's flat earth kind of claims and yet that is what in some school systems like in california is the mainstream thing being taught which is that's a little eerie but there are a growing number of again very liberal professionals all across different disciplines who are just not buying into some of these claims you know like there is no such thing as bi you know somebody says biological sex is a social construct no like it's just i mean one of the basic scientific claims we learned in first grade biology is that humans are sexually dimorphic earthworms are not they reproduce you know they don't need a counterpart and humans do like that's what sexual dimorphism is this is not this is not it's not like something that needs to be argued it's just it is you know but there's certain people that say no no that's that's just of the past and that's just most people intuitively just know that that's not true they're like i think we're taking it too far so i i don't see it i see it starting to come to a head pretty soon it already is in other countries in europe in the uk they're already revisiting some of the stuff that's gotten out of control with what's being taught in public schools that's really interesting especially because in the uk and europe it tends to be a little bit more progressive than even the us and they're confronting some of those questions um preston this is great i have so many more questions for you but this will give us an excuse to have you back your book again called embodied i don't encourage those who are viewing this live and later to go pre-order it uh it's number one it's just a great book on its own merits so eye-opening so gracious so thoughtful took him years to write and it's reflected in the book really really well second it supports his ministry preston is the head of the center i always mess this up for faith sexuality and gender and when i look for resources for pastors and have questions that is one of the first sites that i regularly go to so mark that for your youtube channel uh prestonsprinkle is on twitter you can follow there i've been trying to get them on tick tock but that's a whole separate conversation we'll have some other time um so follow him there pick up his book uh if you enjoyed this give us a thumbs up and also hope that you would consider sharing this with a friend because we want to get a word out there truth about what's happening in the larger lgbtq conversation to equip christians but just do so with kindness and love and generosity towards people in the way that jesus did if you are new to this channel again hit subscribe because next week i'm bringing my father back josh mcdowell we did an interview a few months ago got a ton of positive feedback just experiences in his life that shaped him to become a radical and if i didn't know my dad and the way he lived i would be tempted not to believe some of these stories but i've seen him live a supernatural life next wednesday he'll be back on i'm just going to ask about the people that influenced him his approach to leadership to ministry to speaking who are the key people that shaped his life and there's a lot of lessons to be learned and a ton of other videos coming up if you enjoy this kind of conversation content i also teach a biola in the apologetics program they sponsor this channel if you've ever thought about getting a master's degree in apologetics we would love to have you join us it's a distance program we study the problem of evil i'm teaching a class on biblical sexuality next spring in our program a class on the resurrection scripture you name it or if you're like i'm not ready for masters but would be open to we have a certificate program we will guide you through kind of the right lectures and content if you look in the description below there's actually a very significant discount code for you and i see my friend brian beeman one of our students just gave a thumbs up and a thanks for you coming on so preston thanks again so much for joining us love your ministry and really just grateful for your friendship as well i appreciate it sean thanks for having me you got it this does not want to pause and it froze so that awkward moment it is still rolling as far as i know

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 26,000

Rating: 4.8048782 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 1sJeC3Hlvio

Length: 64min 40sec (3880 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020