I still marvel when I hear how she’s doing. It’s been decades now, but I still think back to those days when we didn’t know if she would make it.
Back in her teenage years, she was severely anorexic. She would never eat in the presence of others; she barely ate even when alone. She often didn’t want people to see her, and if she made an appearance at all, we’d have to agree to making sure the room was dimly lit, or to sitting in an arrangement where we wouldn’t be facing her directly. On one occasion the only way she’d let me have a conversation was if I stood with my back to her. It was like this for what felt like many months: her family and friends treading very carefully around her, adapting to constantly-shifting demands and needs, doing all they could think of to help and encourage. And, over a long time, things improved. We lost touch many years ago as life took us to different parts of the country and then to different countries altogether. But as I hear news of her from others, thirty years on now, it is wonderfully positive. Those dark days feel like a long time ago.
She was always a beautiful girl, but she believed herself to be grotesquely unattractive and overweight, and stopped eating to the point where she became dangerously thin. For a significant period we weren’t sure if she would survive. The fact is, she deeply believed things about her physicality that were objectively untrue.
I often think of her in discussions about transgenderism.
Ever since Vanity Fair featured former Olympian Bruce Jenner on its cover in late 2015 under the caption “Call me Caitlyn,” the question of gender identity has been at the forefront of cultural consciousness. In the past couple of years, many of us will have had experience with someone close to us — a family member, a close colleague, a cherished friend — identifying as transgender or non-binary. It can be hard to know how to respond. Culturally, the issue seems to have been resolved: people are who they feel themselves to be. Failure to accept and affirm is looked upon as hateful intolerance. In the midst of such strength of cultural opinion, we can struggle with what to say. So when I am questioned about gender identity, these are some of the points I seek to make.
1. We’re not qualified to come up with our own identity
As the situation with my friend illustrated, we don’t always know how to rightly think about our bodies. Even some of our deepest and most sincerely-held convictions about our bodies can be profoundly mistaken, to an extent that could be life-threatening. We are not the authorities about ourselves that we often assume we are.
We are not the authorities about ourselves that we often assume we are.
The Bible shows us how this can be. We’re not properly equipped to understand ourselves. Our natural condition prevents us from doing so:
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Romans 1:21)
They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. (Ephesians 4:18)
Futile in thinking, foolish in heart and darkened in mind — this is the Apostle Paul’s diagnosis of all people left to themselves. We lack both the capacity (as mere creatures) and reliability (as fallen creatures) to truly know who we are. The standard Western recourse of looking within our own hearts crashes into Jesus’ own assessment of them: “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts” (Mark 7:21). So the sincerity of someone’s belief about their gender identity is no sign of its accuracy. All of us lack the resources to truly know ourselves.
2. Jesus affirms God’s creational design and reflects the physical complexity of life in this world
On one occasion, Jesus was asked about marriage and divorce. On his way to explaining his view of both he makes this observation, drawing on parts of Genesis 1-2:
“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Matthew 19:4-5)
The reference to being “made male and female” comes from the opening chapter of the Bible, where we’re told:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)
In the Bible’s account of creation, human beings are made in the image of God, and as male and female. The pairing of male and female will come to take on growing significance as the Bible unfolds, pointing to the eventual union of heaven and earth through Jesus Christ.
Jesus reiterates this creation design. Being made male and female wasn’t just a feature of humanity only in the period of creation before sin entered the world and distorted every aspect of life. Jesus says God has created us male and female not just in the beginning, but from the beginning. Whatever else sin has ruined, this gender binary still exists and undergirds our physicality. Jesus reaffirms it for today.
But just a few verses later he also affirms the way our fallenness can affect our bodies, recognizing that “there are eunuchs who have been so from birth” (Matthew 19:12). A eunuch was a man whose genitals had been removed, usually in order to pursue a particular vocation where his chastity needed to be beyond question (see Acts 8 with the Ethiopian eunuch) and where his work would bring him into intimate contact with the ruling family. But, as Jesus points out, some are born that way too. In other words, our physical experience of being biologically male or female might not be entirely straightforward. Being created male and female doesn’t mean everything is always physically uncomplicated. But at the same time the existence of eunuchs (and other kinds of physical complexity) doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as being made male and female. Jesus upholds both the creational pattern of being made male and female and of the reality of physical complexity in our world today.
Jesus upholds both the creational pattern of being made male and female and of the reality of physical complexity in our world today.
3. We are not promised full physical healing in this life
The Apostle Paul outlines both the joys we have of being in Christ in this life and what we must await in the life to come:
For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans 8:22-23)
Creation (the physical world around us) is not all that it is meant to be, and so it groans, waiting for all things to be put right. Paul says the same is true of us, especially when it comes to our bodies. We too groan in this life. For all that we can enjoy in this world, life is marked by groaning — groaning at the pain of a world that’s not right, and yearning for a life free of injustice and suffering. We wait, Paul says for our adoption. He has told us just a few verses earlier: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:16). But we do not experience the fullness of our adoption into God’s family. Part of that, we see in the verses above, is waiting for the “redemption of our bodies.” In this life they remain not-fully-redeemed. We will not experience freedom from all the physical consequences of this fallen world until the age to come.
The significance of this to friends wrestling with gender identity is clear: the treatments and surgeries promoted by a secular culture will never be a work-around for the groaning we face in this life, or a way to find the full healing we are only promised in the next. The evidence all points in the opposite direction: attempts on our part to “fix” our bodies so that they fit our internal sense of gender identity often causes greater challenges to physical and mental health.
We will not experience freedom from all the physical consequences of this fallen world until the age to come.
But alongside the sobering realization that some of these bodily struggles may be lifelong is the stabilizing truth that this is the case for all of us, regardless of our affliction. If the disappointing news is that someone with gender dysphoria might continue to groan for the rest of his or her life, the good news is that they do not groan on their own. We all do, together. However varied our individual struggles, we have in common that we all deal with the effects of fallenness in our bodies and minds.
4. We have in Jesus a sympathetic savior
The Letter to the Hebrews explains why a relationship with Jesus brings unique comfort in our sufferings:
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:15-16)
We might think that Jesus would be the person least able to understand our suffering — he is the perfect, sinless Son of God, so very different to us. But in fact he is more able to understand human suffering than any of us are. Through his life on earth he entered fully into the ravages of this world. He was tempted “in every respect.” This does not mean he must have experienced every single form of temptation our imaginations can think of, but that his experience of suffering was so comprehensive that there is no species of pain he is unfamiliar with and doesn’t know more about than we do. C. S. Lewis makes this clear in his book Mere Christianity (Chapter 11):
“A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. … You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. … We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means.”
As the passage in Hebrews shows us, this makes Jesus a wonderful savior to draw near to. In him we find ample ongoing mercy and grace. His capacity to fully understand us and to love us completely far outweighs our need. And we must respond to those who struggle with understanding and compassion, realizing that we ourselves are broken people who have received God’s mercy and compassion. Since Jesus understands our temptations and struggles, we, his people, should extend that same understanding and compassion to the people we know.
…his experience of suffering was so comprehensive that there is no species of pain he is unfamiliar with and doesn’t know more about than we do.
This month we’re highlighting a new book by Sam Allberry — One with My Lord. In it, he unpacks what it means to be “in Christ,” and how we can experience deep and abiding union with Jesus. This book isn’t just a theological exploration; it’s also deeply practical as it shows us how this union can reshape how we pray, how we persevere in trials, and how we live with purpose and joy. This month, when you make a gift to Gospel in Life, we’ll send you a copy of One with My Lord as our thanks for your gift. Request your copy here.
