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quotes, links on transgender

Sin is and has always been the denial of reality: the serpent in the garden not only questions God's word ("Did God really say? [Gen 3:1]) but contradicts it ("You will not certainly die" [3:4]). It is hard not to see the transgender liberation movement as a transgression: an overt rebellion against the binary divide between male and female bodies and behavior.  The sex-change operation is a radical surgical intervention into an otherwise healthy body.  As such, it is a bad improvisation in which, forgetting what happened in Act One (creation), one strikes out in one's own technologically clever (but self-determined) direction, ontologically ad-libbing, laughing all the way to the organ bank.  To perform sex reassignment surgery is to encourage the worst kind of playacting: hypocrisy.  The irony, as with all sin, is that in trying to find oneself, one loses oneself.  Those who seek to rewrite their roles make God a bit player in a drama that exchanges the gospel for the pottage of self-determination.

 -- Kevin Vanhoozer, in Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology. (Zondervan, 2009)
...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...

 At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered. "Sex change" is biologically impossible. 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.

 -- Dr. Paul McHugh on why Johns Hopkins Hospital stopped doing transgender surgery.  And here. 


...I suffered through “sex change” surgery and lived as a woman for eight years. The surgery fixed nothing—it only masked and exacerbated deeper psychological problems...

 -- Walt Heyer, "Sex Change" Surgery: What Bruce Jenner, Diane Sawyer, and You Should Know 


Finally..."Bruce" or "Caitlyn"?  By what name should we call transgender persons?  Should Christians Accommodate Transgender Naming?  



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