The Spiritual Care of Sisters in the Transgender Age - CBMW

The author of this article makes some important points, ones which had sort of been swirling in my own mind but are well stated here. The whole article is worth the read, but her call for pastors and elders to protect the women of their flock really hit home with me.

the matter of how the church should respond to the questions the transgender movement is putting before us must include the specific harm being done to women. If brothers, husbands, and pastors join the culture in erasing women or minimizing what women are, even with the aim of showing hospitality to the lost, they are failing to fulfill their God-given role of protectors and leaders.
For example, in addressing what pronouns Christians should use when speaking to a transgender person, pastor and former Southern Baptist Convention president J.D. Greear framed the question as one of erring on the side of truth or kindness as it applies to the transgender individual.[16]
“Some people on one side are going to say, ‘Hey, we got to tell the truth. And the truth is this person is male or female. So I would be lying if I called somebody who is female and identified as male,’” he said on his podcast, Ask Me Anything. He contrasted that with another view: “There are others who would say, ‘Look, as a courtesy, you should refer to a transgender person by their preferred pronoun as sort of a ‘generosity of spirit’ kind of approach. You see evidence in the Bible of that.”

In outlining the battlefront this way, Greear, as a pastor and an influential leader in the largest protestant denomination in the U.S., considered only the impact such an exchange would have on the transgender individual and the degree to which his choice of words might draw this person to the church. What he did not consider is the impact his pronoun use might have on a girl or young woman (whose feminine identity might very well already be in a fragile state) should she overhear it, or hear of it from a third party, or who certainly might hear his podcast answer.[17]

I do not want my tender seven- and twelve-year-old daughters to hear anything from their pastors, elders, or ministry leaders that might bolster our pagan culture’s message that their precious womanhood, given to them by God, can be sacrificed for the sake of some “greater” good. They are already daily hearing that what makes them uniquely feminine can be trampled and bartered away on a social engineering whim.
They are young girls. They are the weaker vessels who demand careful, sensitive consideration both by virtue of their age and by virtue of their sexual identity, as highlighted in 1 Peter 3:7.
If the men of the church join in contributing to this plague on their womanhood, they will have failed in their protector roles as both men and stronger brothers.

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