Something Voting On Will Not Change!

A group of small children were taken from the big city to a farm — a place they had never been to see animals they had only seen in pictures. Wide-eyed and delighted over their experiences, they were particularly fond of a new born calf running  to and fro about its mother. Wondering if it was a male or a female, they begin to offer differing opinions. After much debate and disagreement, one little boy declared, “I know how to settle this issue once and for all — let’s vote on it!

Voting can and does change a lot of things, but all the vote-casting by all the experts or government officials will never determine one’s gender. There are males and females. People who engage in same-sex sexuality do not become a new sexual category. There is no third gender. The same is true of people who identify as transgender. It’s all made up. These new categories of gender and sexuality are social constructs.

Face Book doesn’t believe in the aforementioned statement and has started allowing users to self-identify as something other than male or female. You can make the change in your Facebook settings, and choose who will (and won’t) see your new gender classification. So, if you don’t identify as male or female, then what? Well, Facebook offers 56 options. You can use up to 10 of them on your profile. Fifty-six sounds like a lot, but actually many of them are variations on a theme — “cisgender man” and “cisgender male,” as well as “cis man” and “cis male.” In terms of broad categories, there about a dozen.

United Kingdom Facebook users can now choose from one of 71 gender options, including asexual, polygender and two-spirit person, following the feature’s successful integration in the US.

Below are a few of the categories and what they mean:

  1. Agender/Neutrois— These terms are used by people who don’t identify with any gender at all — they tend to either feel they have no gender or a neutral gender. Some use surgery and/or hormones to make their bodies conformto this gender neutrality.
  2. Androgyne/Androgynous— Androgynes have both male and female gender characteristics and identify as a separate, third gender.
  3. Bigender— Someone who is bigender identifies as male and female at different times. Whereas an androgyne has a single gender blending male and female, a bigender switches between the two.
  4. Cis/Cisgender— Cisgender is essentially the opposite of transgender (cis– being Latin for “on this side of” versus trans-, “on the other side”). People who identify as cisgender are males or females whose gender aligns with their birth sex.
  5. Female to Male/FTM— Someone who is transitioning from female to male, either physically (transsexual) or in terms of gender identity.
  6. Gender Fluid— Like bigender people, the gender-fluid feel free to express both masculine and feminine characteristicsat different times.
  7. Gender Nonconforming/Variant— This is a broad category for people who don’t act or behave according to the societal expectation for their sex. It includes cross-dressers and tomboys as well as the transgender.
  8. Gender Questioning— This category is for people who are still trying to figure out where they fit on the axes of sex and gender.
  9. Genderqueer— This is an umbrella term for all nonconforming gender identities. Most of the other identities in this list fall into the genderqueer category.
  10. Intersex— This term refers to a person who was born with sexual anatomy, organs, or chromosomes that aren’t entirely male or female. Intersex has largely replaced the term “hermaphrodite”for humans.
  11. Other— Like “neither,” this is pretty self-explanatory. It can cover everything from “I’d prefer not to specify how I don’t fit in the gender dichotomy” to “My gender is none of your damn business, Facebook.”
  12. Trans/Transgender— Transgender is a broad category that encompasses people who feel their gender is different than their birth sex — sometimes known as gender dysphoria. They may or may not choose to physically transition from their birth sex to their experienced gender.

Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, said that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment, that sex change is “biologically impossible,” and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder.

Dr. McHugh, made his remarks in a commentary in the Wall Street Journal, where he explained that transgender surgery is not the solution for people who suffer a “disorder of ‘assumption’” — the notion that their maleness or femaleness is different than what nature assigned to them biologically.

Dr. McHugh further noted studies from Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic of children who had expressed transgender feelings but for whom, over time, 70%-80% “spontaneously lost those feelings.”

Michael W Chapman writing in an article in 2015 said: “While the Obama administration, Hollywood, and major media such as Time magazine promote transgenderism as normal, said Dr. McHugh, these “policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.”

“This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken – it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.”

The transgendered person’s disorder, said Dr. McHugh, is in the person’s “assumption” that they are different than the physical reality of their body, their maleness or femaleness, as assigned by nature. It is a disorder similar to a “dangerously thin” person suffering anorexia who looks in the mirror and thinks they are “overweight,” said McHugh.

This assumption, that one’s gender is only in the mind regardless of anatomical reality, has led some transgendered people to push for social acceptance and affirmation of their own subjective “personal truth,” said Dr. McHugh. As a result, some states — California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts — have passed laws barring psychiatrists, “even with parental permission, from striving to restore natural gender feelings to a transgender minor,” he said.

Dr. McHugh also reported that there are “misguided doctors” who, working with very young children who seem to imitate the opposite sex, will administer “puberty-delaying hormones to render later sex-change surgeries less onerous – even though the drugs stunt the children’s growth and risk causing sterility.”

Such action comes “close to child abuse,” said Dr. McHugh, given that close to 80% of those kids will “abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated ….”

“’Sex change’ is biologically impossible,” said McHugh. “People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”

Author Gary DeMar rightly observes: “Even if a person says he or she can’t change their sexual desires, it does not mean those sexual desires are morally justifiable. This is the essence of the debate. We as a nation have lost the ability to think in terms of first principles.

“When is the last time (or even the first time) you have heard anyone approach the subject of same-sex sexuality and transgenderism and the more than 50 other gender identifiers on the basis of the fundamental presuppositions that undergird the worldview of forced compliance of sexual abnormalities?

“It’s time that we stop arguing in terms of rights, protecting children, freedom of association, and liberty and challenge the presuppositions that have given rise to the overthrow of a moral worldview grounded in the character and moral law of God. Man through the agency of the State has become the new god. There is no telling where such a topsy-turvy worldview will take us.”

Voting may force us to accept deviant lifestyles as normal or suffer painful consequences, but gender can never be decided by the ballot box, public opinion, or a surgeon’s knife or hormone medicines!

Wade Trimmer has been in full-time Christian service since 1971, thirty-five of those years as a senior pastor. He pastored Grace Fellowship of Augusta for 30 of those years.

In 2008, Pastor Wade formed Training for Reigning Institute of Disciple-making, a non-profit organization, for the purpose of equipping leaders, especially in Third World countries in being more effective in carrying out the Great Commission (Visit website:TRIDM.org). The past 9 years have taken Pastor Wade outside the USA to more than 25 different nations.

He is the author of 46 books, a conference speaker and leader of international mission’s training. He is married to Anne and they have three grown children, five grandchildren, and five great grandchildren. They are members of Grace Fellowship of Augusta, Georgia and make their home in North Augusta, South Carolina.