Peter Barnes: Genesis 1:27
SERMON NOTES: TRANSGENDER (Genesis 1:27)
– I never thought this was an issue. But there is a quite a large Anglican church is Sydney which has something like ten transgender people amongst its members. Chaz Bono: ‘There is a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99% of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they’re mismatched. That’s all it is.’ Of course, that is not all it is.
- The biblical teaching on gender.
– Gen.1:27; Matt.19:4-6. Hence Deut.22:5.
– Jer.2:2; Hos.2:16; 2 Cor.11:2; 1 Cor.11:3.
- The rise of transgender.
– the Safe Schools Program has issued a Guide to supporting a student to affirm or transition gender identity at school. The NSW Education Department has a four-year old in kindergarten who is identifying as transgender. Dr John Whitehall rightly calls this ‘child surgical abuse’.
– Bruce Jenner (who won a gold medal at the 1976 Olympics in the decathlon) became Caitlin Jenner in 2015. In Britain adults can simply decide their own gender. That is the logic of the approach.
- Responding to transgender.
(a) Do not overreact. If left alone, some 80% or more of such children lose their feelings. Walt Heyer was a man, then a woman at age 42, and then a man again at age 50. He now says that he would give anything to change that. That is just so sad.
(b) Face reality. Dr Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins Hospital stopped doing sex-change surgery for adults. Dr Samuel Johnson against Bishop George Berkeley’s philosophical idealism kicked a large stone, and said: ‘I refute it thus.’
(c) Who we are comes from God, not the world – Rom.12:2; Luke 15:20-24; 2 Cor.5:17. C. S. Lewis: ‘It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.’ See John 8:32, 34, 36.