#38: Gender Pt. 3: Where the Gospel Meets Gender Dysphoria

#38: Gender Pt. 3: Where the Gospel Meets Gender Dysphoria

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

RACHEL SZABO: Mark Yarhouse is a professor of psychology at Wheaton College. When he was in graduate school, he became interested in researching issues of sexuality — in particular from a Christian worldview.

MARK YARHOUSE: There just seemed like there was such a need.

RACHEL SZABO: So this actually led Mark to also become a licensed clinical psychologist. So he meets with clients, but he also speaks at conferences, helping Christians navigate issues of sexuality. But there was one moment in particular at a conference where everything shifted.

MARK YARHOUSE: But I was doing trainings for a youth ministry staff around the country, and I would, y’know, do these, like, three-hour pre-conference, four-hour pre-conference, y’know, sessions on gay and lesbian experiences.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so he’s with a room full of youth leaders, and like he always does, he leaves time at the end for a Q&A session. But this time —

MARK YARHOUSE: But the Q&A was all about transgender and gender identity questions.

RACHEL SZABO: So typically, the questions were always about sexual identity — ‘What should I do if a student identifies as gay or lesbian?’ This time though, no one was asking that. They were asking about gender identity, y’know — ‘What do I do if a student is one gender but wants to be the other one? What do I do if a student asks me to use different pronouns when addressing them? What do I do if I have a student who gets hormone injections?’ And this was all very out of the ordinary, and Mark took notice.

MARK YARHOUSE: And so I thought, ‘Oh, these youth ministers are signaling where the culture’s going.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and I guess Mark was right because in 2011 the estimated percentage of the U.S. population that identified as transgender was just 0.3%. But five years later in 2015, that number doubled to 0.6% — that’s 1.4 million people.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and when it comes to youth in particular, 0.7% of teens ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender. Here’s the thing too — is that conference that he’s talking about was before the year 2015 and people were asking about it then.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so I mean just imagine today. Those percentages might seem small, but the general trajectory of gender identity issues — it is going up and up. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and this is something that Mark sees the church as wildly unprepared for. 

MARK YARHOUSE: I think this is gonna really become a topic that the church has not prepared to respond to.

—————————————–

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. Every episode we hear stories of social action and Christian community.

JESSE EUBANKS: Today’s episode is where the gospel meets gender dysphoria. So this is the third and last episode in our gender series. So if you’re jumping in now, I do wanna encourage you — go back and listen to the other two. 

RACHEL SZABO: Right, because in those we looked at manhood and we looked at womanhood. But now we’re gonna look at — what if your body says you’re one gender, but your brain says you’re the other?

JESSE EUBANKS: We’ll hear from both men and women as we explore how Christians are responding to the modern gender revolution.

RACHEL SZABO: What’s it like to live with gender dysphoria? What if you have a loved one with gender dysphoria? And what do we as Christians have to offer in an ever-fluid society?

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

—————————————–

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so when it comes to the topic of gender identity, Christians are actually not silent on this issue. For example, here’s a clip from Refinery 29.

REFINERY 29 AUDIO CLIP: When I imagine a trans child coming to understand, ‘I think I might be a girl in this boy body,’ I’m like, ‘Thank you, God, that the child is becoming aware of who they really are.’ And our job as a culture, as a society, as a church, is to make safe spaces for people to be. God creates out of love. God creates love out of love.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so their approach is to be affirming, like, ‘you do you, anything’s acceptable.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean if you think about the balance of giving grace and truth, like these folks are all grace — grace, grace, grace. Then you have Christians on the other side that are, like, so concerned that people are being, like, way too gracious that they overcorrect and go into, like, their version of hyper-truth — for example, like this clip from Pulpit and Pen.

PULPIT AND PEN AUDIO CLIP: Pronoun hospitality and to call transgender quote unquote ‘people’ — I can’t say that without scare quotes because no one in the history of the world has ever transitioned their gender — we should use preferred pronouns for our quote unquote ‘transgender’ friends — to hell with that, literally. That idea should go.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, yeah, sadly this is what I typically think of when I think about the broader Christian response to issues of gender.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, it’s like there’s something about, like, when we go all grace or we go all quote unquote ‘truth’ — like it’s not really grace anymore, and it’s not really truth anymore. We have to have both.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and really if you look at the broader culture, like, these are the two options — either be all about defending that God created two distinct genders, or be all about telling people that they can be whoever and whatever they want. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well thankfully, those aren’t our only two options because God offers us a better way.

So in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul spends time addressing love and relationships, but then he talks more broadly about the whole of life in general. And he writes this — ‘For now we see in a mirror dimly.’

RACHEL SZABO: Right, and he’s talking about the fact that there’s an incompleteness to life right now.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah. We don’t have the full picture, our understanding is limited, there’s questions and confusion. And honestly I think that that’s a good analogy for folks struggling with gender dysphoria. They literally look in the mirror and feel like what they’re seeing is distorted from who they really are supposed to be. There aren’t fast and easy answers to this.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, but we prefer fast and easy answers, which is why some folks just want, like, a Bible verse that they can attach to this issue — like I’m thinking about in Deuteronomy where God commands that a man shouldn’t wear a woman’s clothes and women shouldn’t wear men’s clothes.

JESSE EUBANKS: Well sure, but that law is part of a sort of grab-bag section of laws, and, y’know, likely it was addressing certain pagan rituals at the time. There’s no indication that it has to do with how someone views their gender.

RACHEL SZABO: Or with verses that talk about eunuchs. Y’know, I’ve heard some Christians claim that eunuchs were a third gender in that society, so therefore breaking out of binary genders is acceptable.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, but I would argue that eunuchs were still men. I mean had their testicles removed as a sign of submission or loyalty to those that they served, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t still male or that they wanted to live as females. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah okay, so if we’re gonna talk about gender dysphoria, we need to understand that, like, this is a complex issue — one that probably isn’t gonna have a simplistic, one Bible verse response. So let’s explore that complexity by hearing a firsthand account of what it’s like living with gender dysphoria.

FRANCIS: So I’m Francis. I was assigned female at birth. I present rather androgynously.

RACHEL SZABO: So this is Francis — and Francis is not her real name — but she was born a female, meaning she has a female body. And growing up she acted a lot like a tomboy, which is not shocking. A lot of girls act tomboyish and, like, we know they’re still girls. 

FRANCIS: Like I always knew that I was a girl, but it was like, ‘that doesn’t mean anything,’ you know?

RACHEL SZABO: It didn’t mean anything until she hit puberty.

FRANCIS: Like I hit puberty and I started to become, like, really, really, just genuinely, like, uncomfortable with myself.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so as a female, when you hit puberty, we know that some things happen to your body, and one of those is that you start your period — which honestly is unpleasant no matter who you are, but it caused particular distress for Francis.

FRANCIS: I have no desire to, like, reproduce ever. Anything to do with that is an uncomfortable — and, like, I don’t know.

RACHEL SZABO: I do wanna make a distinction here, like this isn’t the typical reaction to a young girl getting her period. You know, usually it’s like hard, it’s not an exciting moment, but like for Francis, she was devastated any time she had it. Francis didn’t ever want to be pregnant or have children, so getting her period bothered her because it was a symbol that she could now have children, which is something she didn’t want. And also another thing that happens at puberty is that girls develop their breasts, and Francis hated this.

FRANCIS: I guess the most uncomfortable thing is like, once I realized that, like, I had to wear a bra, it was like, ‘Wow, I don’t feel at home in my own chest.’ I remember crying to my mom once, like, ‘Mom, I just wanna have — I wanna get breast cancer so that I don’t have to have breasts’ — that intense of, like, ‘this doesn’t feel like my own body,’ you know?

JESSE EUBANKS: Like I’m not female, but I get that feeling that she’s describing in terms of like not feeling at home in your body going through puberty. I can’t think of a single kid going through puberty out there that’s like, ‘I feel great in my body right now.’ Every teenager and young adult that’s going through those changes feels like something is really wrong and does not feel at home in their own body.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, I mean even for adults, I can’t think of anyone who would say, ‘I feel completely at home in my body.’

JESSE EUBANKS: So was Francis experiencing what’s just common for kids her age, or was it something different?

RACHEL SZABO: Well, most cases of gender dysphoria in children will resolve after puberty. Y’know, once their body stops changing so much, they’ll settle into who they are — but that was not the case for Francis. So one of the things that Francis told me was that she grew up in a Christian household and one that she described as ‘sheltered,’ meaning that she didn’t really have any categories or language for the ways that she felt about her body — that is, until she got to high school.

FRANCIS: In high school, I became a little bit more involved with, um, other people who were LGBTQ. I made a friend who was, um, transgender, who identified as a man. 

RACHEL SZABO: And even though Francis is being exposed to these new ideas, she still didn’t really see herself as being a part of this community. 

FRANCIS: I just didn’t think about it in terms of me.

RACHEL SZABO: Now Francis went to a small Christian high school, and she actually became concerned about the way some of her friends were being treated there — especially her friend who was transgender.

FRANCIS: I remember one moment where I heard my favorite English teacher pull aside my principal at the time, and he was like, ‘Hey, can I talk with you?’ And then I, like, overheard them, like, whispering. And he was like, ‘Can trans people even be saved?’ And I was like, ‘Excuse me?’

RACHEL SZABO: In fact, she told me that this friend of hers eventually got removed from the school. She didn’t go into the details as to why, but Francis decided she needed to speak up on this issue. And to do that, she wrote a senior thesis paper.

FRANCIS: Let me see if I can pull up the title. Give me a second. I’m so sorry. This is what the title was. It was ‘The Proper Response of the Church Regarding Gender Dysphoric Individuals and the Transgender Revolution.’

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, I don’t know about you, but when I was in high school, I was not thinking about this stuff. I would never have written a paper about that. I was too busy, like, being goofy making home movies and, like, watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, y’know? 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, yeah. In my scenario, y’know, I went to this public school. We were one of the first public schools in the country to have transgender restrooms. Y’know, whatever the frontier of new cultural revolution was, my school wanted to be at the cusp all the time, and so these were conversations that I grew up around 25 years ago, but we were rare. Now, these are common conversations.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, I think it just goes to show that, like, the landscape for kids growing up is so different now.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yes, the world has changed. 

RACHEL SZABO: And so it was in doing this research and writing this paper that Francis actually started to connect personally with some of the language that she was coming across. 

FRANCIS: It was through doing this research that I was like, ‘There’s words for my experience.’

RACHEL SZABO: So words like non-binary or transgender or gender-fluid.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so I understand that she feels a disconnect with her body and I understand dysphoria to mean that you wanna be the opposite of what your body is. 

RACHEL SZABO: Well dysphoria is the distress caused by your physical gender not matching what you feel like psychologically. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so does Francis wanna be male? And what causes that sort of disconnect in some people? 

RACHEL SZABO: Well, that’s a complicated question. So let’s get scientific for a minute.

MARK YARHOUSE: One of the more popular theories among people who work in this space is related to what’s called brain sex theory.

RACHEL SZABO: Coming up — a look inside the mind of gender dysphoria. We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

RACHEL SZABO: And I’m Rachel Szabo. Today’s episode is where the gospel meets gender dysphoria.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so Rach, you’ve been telling me the story of Francis. She was born female but feels really uncomfortable in her body. But if feeling uncomfortable in your body is what gender dysphoria is, don’t we all just have gender dysphoria?

RACHEL SZABO: Well no. So what I kept realizing as I was researching for this episode is that gender dysphoria is actually really hard to define or describe, and there’s two reasons for that. And one of those reasons is we just don’t know what causes it or where it comes from.

MARK YARHOUSE: I mean there’s different theories for what, what might be going on for people.

RACHEL SZABO: So do you remember Mark Yarhouse from the beginning of the episode?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yep, psychology professor, kept getting questions about gender during his Q&A.

RACHEL SZABO: Yep. And so remember, he’s also a licensed clinical psychologist, so he spends a lot of time with folks who are experiencing gender dysphoria — most of his time actually.

MARK YARHOUSE: I’m really almost exclusively seeing people with gender identity.

RACHEL SZABO: And he says that when it comes to finding a cause for it, the research is still very new. So there are some theories, but nothing concrete. But the most popular theory is called the brain sex theory.

MARK YARHOUSE: Where during fetal development, depending on whether there’s exposure to testosterone, a fetus could then differentiate in terms of its genitalia, differentiate in the male direction. And then later in fetal development, differentiate where the brain would sort of map in the direction of male.

RACHEL SZABO: So basically this theory is suggesting that our brain develops its sense of sex and gender separate from our body and that most of the time this works out just fine, but sometimes it could happen where certain hormones come into play and at just the right time the brain develops as one sex or gender while the body then develops as the other. 

MARK YARHOUSE: One thought is — is it possible that in rare instances that they just don’t map in the same direction for whatever reason?

RACHEL SZABO: But again, this theory — it’s just that. It’s a theory. The reality is we don’t know what causes gender dysphoria.

MARK YARHOUSE: Some people find it, the research, more compelling than other people. I’m not against this idea. I just don’t think there’s sufficient research right now to support it. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean I guess I hear that, and intellectually like I get what it’s saying — the body was heading in this direction, the brain was supposed to go the same direction but something happened and it took it off in a different one. But I don’t know — I guess until I hear more research, I’m just gonna count myself as a skeptic on that theory.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and I think that’s the way it is with all the theories right now — is it’s kind of like there’s some ideas out there but there’s not enough data yet to have any concrete decision of, ‘this is what’s causing it.’ 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so the first problem is that the science isn’t really developed yet. What’s the second problem?

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, the other problem is that this is dealing with realities within the brain. And we know from our episode on dementia, our episode on mental health, the brain is complex and mysterious. I mean I think about trying to explain depression to someone who’s never experienced it, and like it’s challenging. And gender dysphoria is the same way. So I asked Mark how his own clients have described it.

MARK YARHOUSE: I know one person said it was like puzzle pieces that don’t fit together. If you’ve ever tried to put a jigsaw puzzle together, you can’t fit a piece that obviously does not fit but you sit there thinking, ‘you know, I’m gonna make this piece fit.’ You try to force that in there, it just doesn’t work. One person said it was like dissonance in music where there’s a tonal combination that is seeking resolution but it just never resolves.

RACHEL SZABO: He told me that one person likened it to like an old time radio that has a constant hissing noise in the background.

MARK YARHOUSE: It’s a sound that they can ignore if they put effort into it so that they can sort of hear the broadcast, but it can’t be extinguished without pulling the plug. 

RACHEL SZABO: And actually Francis gave me a similar analogy in describing how she feels inside her body.

FRANCIS: Even now, I look at the mirror, and I’m like, ‘Who is that? It doesn’t look like me.’ Like I got into the wrong car, you know? Like I’m driving stick, but I don’t know how to drive stick.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay Jesse, so you asked if Francis wants to be a man. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, yeah. I’m, I’m really trying to understand this.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so the answer to that would be somewhere between no and maybe and I’m not sure. So here’s what’s going on — Francis is a female, but she’s having all sorts of difficulty with the parts of her body that are distinctly female. And on top of that, she’s also having a difficult time with the cultural expressions of femininity within her circles.

FRANCIS: A practical example would be in my own church upbringing. The women’s ministry was always — you talk about Ruth or you talk about Esther, you eat little cakes and, uh, like salads, you know, you kind of have a make-up night or you do your nails or you talk about your future husbands. And none of those are bad. Those are really genuine expressions of femininity, but, like (laughs), it’s really gendered.

RACHEL SZABO: But Francis also knows that she’s not a man, like she doesn’t have a man’s body and she doesn’t necessarily want to be a man. So, like, she doesn’t feel at home in either category. And honestly, this is something that Francis is still trying to work through. 

FRANCIS: The wording that like really clicked with me in terms of gender identity was non-binary, which is like to be outside of the realm of male or female. And I think being a Christian in that experience — I’m not saying that I necessarily identify as non-binary, but that it’s just the best word to explain that experience.

JESSE EUBANKS: Y’know, I heard somebody speak this last year about gender dysphoria, and one of the points that they made was the more restrictive and precise that gender roles are within a culture, the higher dysphoria goes up if you don’t fit that model. Like if I don’t match exactly what manhood looks like in this culture and womanhood looks like in this culture, then my feelings of dysphoria within my body are just gonna increase. And I feel like a lot of what Francis is explaining here is that, like ‘This is what womanhood looks like in my culture. I don’t fit that model of womanhood,’ and it’s intensifying her feelings of dysphoria within her own body.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and I think the church could really step in and help here, but I think in a lot of ways we fail to because in a lot of ways our response to the gender revolution is to be even more rigid about gender roles and gender identity. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I just think that there are times where we just get way too prescriptive. 

RACHEL SZABO: So in answer to your original question, we don’t know where gender dysphoria comes from, but it is a reality in our society. And so the next question is — what do we do with it? You know, how should we handle it or respond to it?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and this is where many of us as Christians start to have a problem because society has all kinds of answers to that question. 

LUKE GIPPERICH: In private, I would, you know, just wear female clothes.

JESSE EUBANKS: So this is Luke Gipperich. He served a summer with Love Thy Neighborhood. And similar to Francis, Luke often felt out of place with his gender.

LUKE GIPPERICH: I am into ballet and nature and art and yoga. There were just some social things where people would like ask me, like, ‘Are you gay?’ That would make me feel like, ‘Ah man, why do I have to worry about this? Why can’t I just be myself?’ So it was kind of this sense of, like, ‘I would make more sense if, as a person, if I was a girl.’

JESSE EUBANKS: At the time, Luke was just entering college and he was also a new Christian and he had no idea how to navigate this. So he experimented. 

LUKE GIPPERICH: In private, I would, you know, just wear female clothes, and that would be just like a fantasy to try and imagine — ‘Okay, what would I look like if I was a girl? Like how would I appear?’

JESSE EUBANKS: And here’s the thing — because Luke was now a Christian, he knew that God had created him with intentionality. But it felt like a lose-lose situation.

LUKE GIPPERICH: I knew that it wasn’t, wasn’t right, and I knew that he created me male. And it was still hard because, like, I just felt a real sense of loss, like, ‘Man, I would be more understood or happier if I was a girl.’

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, like, I can hear the tension and the wrestling as he’s describing that.

JESSE EUBANKS: I heard somebody talking about when we begin to question, like, core, basic, foundational principles to life, it really causes us a lot of distress. So if I suddenly have an option on my gender — am I male or am I a female? — that’s just gonna cause me a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, a lot of wishing that things were different. We’re not building the foundation of who we are, like we’ve gone down into bedrock, like we’re destroying the foundation of who we are when we begin to ask questions that God has already answered.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, so what you’re saying is — in the past, the question of ‘What gender am I?’ wasn’t even a question. But now that that is suddenly on the table, people are having all kinds of distress over it because they’re trying to figure it out. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, exactly. And along with gender dysphoria, y’know, there can also be questions of sexual identity as well.

LUKE GIPPERICH: Part of the gender dysphoria is wanting to be desired physically and like in a feminine way. It’s kinda backwards, I guess. But I have struggled with same-sex attraction. I still do. And that was definitely a product of trying to imagine what it’s like to be a girl and trying to like step into that head space. It’s — yeah. It kind of goes all over the place.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and hearing Luke describe this, I’m just seeing that there’s like so many layers to this issue.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, it’s complicated. Y’know, but here’s the thing — like, Luke knows how complicated and complex all these issues are and so he’s actually decided to lean forward and to lean in on this and so he’s done a lot of work. He’s gone to counseling, he’s sought out mentors, he has been seeking God’s face in this. He ultimately made the decision that he was not gonna feed his fantasies of living as a woman, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a challenge. 

LUKE GIPPERICH: That’s the strongest temptation, where I wanna imagine what — y’know, if I were just to wear like running leggings and I wouldn’t wear basketball shorts or anything over them and just try to look as feminine as I could. Like I still have that fantasy come into my mind.

JESSE EUBANKS: And I think this, is, like, I listen to Luke, and part of what strikes me is like — gender dysphoria, the temptations that come with it, like it’s not all that different than temptations any of us face.

RACHEL SZABO: It’s a unique set of challenges, but it’s not so unique that no one else is gonna be able to understand. We all can understand temptation. We all face temptation to varying degrees and with different things. Okay so, so far we’ve heard from folks personally dealing with gender dysphoria, but there’s another angle to this that I also want to look at. And that is — what if it isn’t you who’s dealing with gender dysphoria, but it’s someone that you love? What is it like to walk with another person through this experience? 

BARRY CLOVER: It was a multi-layered, very — hmm — it’s a nest and a web that I, I would say I still haven’t completely untangled.  

RACHEL SZABO: So this is Barry Clover. And when his daughter Allison was eight years old, he and his wife got divorced, and they shared custody of Allison. 

BARRY CLOVER: And so it was one of those situations where we got a lot closer through that. I mean, she was naturally closer to her mom, but she and I got a lot closer. I would say by the time she was going into high school, we were, we were very close.

RACHEL SZABO: Which meant a lot to Barry because at the time Allison was his only child and, y’know, he loved her and he loved seeing the person that she was becoming.

BARRY CLOVER: It’s not exactly bubbly, but a very spunky, sort of sly, humorous disposition toward life, tended to be very upbeat in general about just sort of everything, tended to be a person of encouragement wherever she went, was very artistic from the get-go, very, uh, creatively oriented.

RACHEL SZABO: In fact, as she got to spend more and more time with Barry, she got to go to church with him. And actually while she was in high school, one of Barry’s lifelong dreams came true — he got to baptize his daughter.

BARRY CLOVER: Getting to baptize my daughter was like a pinnacle, dream-come-true moment.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and I mean like what Christian parent doesn’t wanna see their child come to faith and be baptized? That’s a glorious moment.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, like it’s such an exciting time in the life of a parent.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and on top of that around that same time, Barry actually met someone, he fell in love again, he got remarried. Life was beautiful. But then — things started falling apart.

BARRY CLOVER: I guess I got married at some point in her freshman or sophomore year. There’s some interplay between me getting married and attaching my life to this other life and the, the complicated dynamics of that and the increasing influence of the other household.

RACHEL SZABO: The other household meaning when Allison would go stay with her mom.

BARRY CLOVER: A household that was by this time pretty hostile to the gospel and the gospel worldview and going to a school that in my opinion — it’s a very strong academic school, but the school culture not only encourages kids to try on identities that are, y’know, outside of what we would consider the traditional Judeo-Christian ethic, but actually encourages and even forces upon it. Like in other words, when questions are arose in her own mind and in her own heart, the answers were provided for her as these were the only answers and this is what this means about you.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I just think though, like — what kid doesn’t question their identity as they’re in high school and in college? That’s part of becoming an adult. It’s figuring out who you are. 

RACHEL SZABO: Right, trying on different identities, trying out different things, seeing what works and what doesn’t. But for Barry, who he knew Allison to be was slowly slipping away.

BARRY CLOVER: The first stage of this was she got out of a bad relationship with a boyfriend that had been kind of a middle school, early high school relationship. And then the next phase of it was that she believed — and this would have been the first year of my marriage — she believed that she was bisexual. That was, that was the way she was trending or oriented, and so she experimented a little bit with having a girlfriend. But at some point around junior, senior year, that morphed into — we started to hear the conversation about gender dysphoria. 

RACHEL SZABO: And just because you aren’t the one experiencing the dysphoria doesn’t make navigating it any easier.

BARRY CLOVER: And, you know, we never pushed back when she said she didn’t wanna go to church. We didn’t push back on that. We just encouraged her to ask questions and think and those kind of things. You know, at some point you’re pulled between — you know, I wanna listen, I wanna be unconditionally loving, but then at some point you feel like you need to speak some truth because it seemed like it just got crazier and crazier. 

RACHEL SZABO: So one of the first things Allison decided to do was actually change her name — to Brian.

BARRY CLOVER: Which was devastating to me because her original given name was such that we had the same middle name ‘cause our middle names are both kind of androgynous and it connects actually back to my dad who has the same middle name and we had the same initials. And, and I get it, you know, I get that the original name didn’t fit, you know, being a boy, but just obliterated the whole name structure and even dropped my last name and dropped the middle name. And it was — that part was crushing to me. 

JESSE EUBANKS: I mean I can’t even imagine. Crushing because not only is his child saying, ‘I no longer wanna be your daughter,’ but also like, ‘I don’t really wanna be your child period. Y’know, I don’t wanna be associated with you by name.’

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and of course along with the name change came the request to be addressed as ‘he’ and ‘him’ instead of ‘she’ and ‘her.’

BARRY CLOVER: It was like a litmus test, you know, for him about whether you cared about him or not. For a long time I avoided any kind of pronouns whatsoever, um, but I did call him by his chosen name and that took a lot of prayer and just, you know, at some point I just did it.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, can we pause here on the pronoun thing for just a second?

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, I mean this is a big issue for a lot of folks. So I’m curious, you know, like for you, how do you navigate the preferred pronoun issue?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so I do it imperfectly. I do it stumbling, for sure. Here’s the two tensions that I’m sitting between. On the one hand, if I know somebody and they request that I refer to them with a particular pronoun, I will do it. And I will do it because I wanna preserve the relationship. Like to me, the relationship is bigger than the particular issue. But, on the other hand, I don’t think it’s healthy for us as a culture — both within the church, as a nation, like as a world — I don’t think it’s healthy to adapt all of our pronoun language to people’s preferences when those preferences are not coming from a healthy place in the first place.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, I get how that could be unhelpful. I think about — I have depression, and if I am in a depressive episode, I will say things like, ‘just leave me alone,’ when really that’s not what I want and that’s not what I mean.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and the last thing that would be helpful to you would be for all of us to leave you alone.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, that would be terrible. I’ll just spiral further down.

JESSE EUBANKS: You think in that moment that’s what you need and that’s what you’re requesting, but the worst thing that we can do is to actually give you that.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, but I’m just saying that — it’s like a gut reaction out of a very unhealthy mental space.

JESSE EUBANKS: Right. I am concerned that people are saying, ‘Hey, refer to me as X, Y, or Z,’ but it’s coming from a part of them that’s very confused. So those are the tensions I sit between. So on the one hand, I don’t think it’s good for us as a society and us as the church to accommodate on this issue across the board. But on the other hand, if somebody comes to me personally — I love them, I’m gonna accommodate because I wanna preserve the relationship. And that’s the tension that I’m sitting between. I don’t do it perfectly. I am stumbling my way through this.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and I mean that’s what Barry was doing. You know, his child asked to be referred by certain pronouns, and in order to preserve the relationship, he’s accommodating.

BARRY CLOVER: I think every parent in this world has to prayerfully work it out with fear and trembling how they do it. For me, trying to call him a name that he didn’t want was gonna be an object to me demonstrating God’s love, whether or not I thought it was morally right.

JESSE EUBANKS: So what Barry’s getting at is the same tension I feel. Every time that I refer to this person by a pronoun that they don’t prefer, they can’t hear anything else that I say. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and so after wrestling through this tension of what to do with the whole name change and pronoun thing, then he was informed that his child was going to start undergoing hormone treatment.

BARRY CLOVER: I remember just unprompted in a Zoom call when he was a college, him taking off his shirt to show me what, you know, wasn’t there anymore, and what’s happened physically since then has been really dramatic, like really, really dramatic. 

RACHEL SZABO: So Barry’s child had their breasts removed. From taking the hormones, they have more muscle mass. They now have less of an hourglass figure and more of like a boxy figure. They have a full beard, and they’ve gotten tattoos all over their body. And if you ran into this person on the street, there would be no indication that this person was ever a female. They look like a man. And in addition to shedding a female identity, they’ve renounced their faith.

BARRY CLOVER: I very much had to mourn my daughter, like I in a sense had, have, have, had to grieve my daughter because biologically, physiologically, that person doesn’t exist anymore. And there’s still obviously some core components, and I guess if he were sitting here today, you know, there’d be some, some semantic dispute over, ‘Well, this person that we have now is who he’s been all along.’ Um, you know, I don’t think that lines up with my view of, of how God created us, but the most helpful thing and most difficult thing for me has been, you know, I’ve had to take that eighth grader who played the cello and had green hair and was this quirky, fun girl and I’ve had to mourn the loss of her.

And, uh, I remember the question that I never got an answer to. You know, I, I tried to read and engage and be, and be curious and all those things that we say you’re supposed to do, but I remember saying, ‘Okay. So there’s no doubt that, um, the gender dysphoria’s like a real thing, like I am not denying your experience, your feelings, your struggle. I haven’t even — you know, there’s no way for me to know the torture of that and how awful that must be and obviously there’ve been some years of your life when I was oblivious to that and I’m sorry. So but if we’re gonna identify this as gender dysphoria and gender dysphoria is that there is a disconnect between what your psychological sense of who you are and what your body’s sense of who you are is, why at 17 years old would we not exhaust — and I’m not talking about treating it as a condition or a disease, or, you know, any of those things of, you know, that people have done — but why would we not exhaust every option in terms of understanding yourself psychologically before we started permanently changing your body?’ And I never got a good answer on that. I, I, I never did. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So often, we hear these two different arguments. We hear the world claim that the church is way too strict on their ideas of manhood and womanhood, it’s way too narrow. The church claims that society is like no-holds-barred, anything you wanna be, that there are no restrictions. And I gotta be honest — I think that both sides are right in their claim. I think that the world is correct that the church does define it too narrowly, and I think that the church is correct in that the world defines it too broadly. When we come to this story of Barry and his child, I think part of what we’re seeing is the fallout of these failures. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and so I think the question is — y’know, Lord, what do we do? What is God’s response to all of this? Stay with us.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. Jesse Eubanks.

RACHEL SZABO: Rachel Szabo. Today — where the gospel meets gender dysphoria.

JESSE EUBANKS: So we’ve heard from people experiencing gender dysphoria. We’ve heard from a parent whose child has gender dysphoria. But what do we hear from God about all of this?

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, that’s a great question, and actually one that Barry was about to get an answer to. So in light of his child’s transition from living as a female to living as a male, y’know, of course, Barry spent hours wrestling with God about that.

BARRY CLOVER: And I was pissed at God for a long time.

RACHEL SZABO: And, y’know, one of the ways that this routinely showed up was whenever there was a baptism at his church because it made him think about when he baptized his daughter.

BARRY CLOVER: Like I’d always dreamed of baptizing her at an evening service at my church and that’s what I did and it was just this incredible moment and incredible story. And so for it to just come completely unraveled in the worst imaginable way, it felt like — it felt like God was playing a cruel joke on me. It felt a little Lucy and Charlie Brown-ish — not a little, a lot. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, you know, like there’s Charlie Brown and Lucy is like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna let you kick the ball,’ and Charlie Brown’s like, ‘No, you’re gonna pull it away.’

RACHEL SZABO: But Lucy’s like, ‘No, I promise, I won’t do it this time.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, and then Charlie Brown’s like, ‘Okay,’ so he runs and gives all of his heart to kicking that ball.

RACHEL SZABO: And she pulls it away.

JESSE EUBANKS: There he is, lying flat on his back again.

BARRY CLOVER: And it was hard now. It was really hard for me to watch other friends of mine baptize their kids because I — it just brought out this wicked cynicism inside of me.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, I mean Barry was in a place where he felt hopeless, like he was confused, he was angry, he was sad, he was bitter. Honestly, he hated watching baptisms because it only stirred up all these emotions and all this wrestling that he had been going through for so long. But ironically, it was during a baptism that actually God told him something that he needed to hear.

BARRY CLOVER: I do remember one moment. Um, it was ironically at a, uh, at a friend’s son’s baptism. This friend’s son even since has just had an awful story. Like, I think it’s a different kind of story, but it’s the same, it’s the same degree of nightmare that I went through and even worse that this kid gets baptized. And so they read his testimony like our church does and, you know, it’s, it’s a baptism so I’m, I’m kinda hunkered up anyway. I’m, I’m emotionally on edge ‘cause I really love this friend and I really love his kid and I’ve watched the kid grow up, but, you know, I’ve got all this same cynicism. And the kid as part of his testimony has read the verse that I’ve heard a million times, which is —

RACHEL SZABO: So the verse that this kid had as part of his testimony was actually in Romans 8, where it talks about how there’s nothing that can separate us from the love of God.

BARRY CLOVER: Not life or death or — and this list is going on. And I felt very clearly — I felt the Lord say, ‘not sex change.’ And, um, it just, it wiped me out, and I’m tearing up just thinking about it now, the fact that, um, this falls, um, this does not fall outside of the categories of things that God’s love can overwhelm and the fact that I’m seeing this circumstance as awful and as unheard of, as it might’ve been even to the New Testament writers, as being within the, within the grip of God’s love, well within his ability to make it right. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Like I listen to Barry’s story, and I hear Luke’s story, I hear Francis’s story. And there’s just so much suffering. Like, to have dysphoria is to suffer. And I think that suffering in many ways takes us to this place where we’re like on a razor’s edge, like we could go one direction or another with our suffering. On one side, there’s a choice of, ‘My suffering is so bad that it entitles me to do whatever I want to overcome my suffering,’ like ‘I can take any action that I want. I am going to become the ruler of my world because it’s owed to me because I’ve suffered so much.’ I feel like on the other side though is the choice to trust and the choice to trust God. It doesn’t take away our pain, it doesn’t mean that magically, like, all of my suffering will disappear, but it does mean that my suffering is not without purpose. My suffering can lead to something good. God can redeem my suffering. God will hold my suffering. Am I going to lean into my suffering in such a way that my suffering now becomes the justification for me to do what I want, or am I going to give my suffering to God and allow him to do whatever he wants with it trusting that it’s going to be good and it’s gonna work out okay in the end?

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, and the reality is that Barry is still suffering as he navigates his relationship with his child, but he’s learning to bring his burdens before God. And some things are slowly getting better. You know, some of the hurt and the pain between Barry and his child — it is healing, even though there is still a long way to go.

BARRY CLOVER: I would say it’s, it’s loving, It’s respectful. I don’t know if it’s super intimate, but it is, um, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. I think we’ve gotten through some challenging conversations, and I think we’re both working at it. 

RACHEL SZABO: But ultimately, holding fast to God and knowing that God is holding fast to him, Barry knows he’ll be able to endure to the end.

BARRY CLOVER: It’s been a winding path and sometimes it feels like you’re hanging on by a shred of tree bark, but somehow, some way, there’s always been some fragment of God’s faithfulness that I’ve been able to cling to.

RACHEL SZABO: Y’know, I asked Barry what his advice would be to someone in a similar situation as his, and his encouragement was this.

BARRY CLOVER: Getting as many conversations clearly and fully on the table as you can and paying attention to what they’re being told in all kinds of different ways.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean modern parenting requires us now — we’ve gotta pay attention to all these different influences coming at our kids. Our kids are being raised by a spectrum of media on their screens beyond what many of us have ever experienced before. Their school system, their church environment, the books they read — the truth is, like, parenting can never happen on autopilot. We just have to be super proactive, and fostering an environment at home where kids can bring us any question and we can talk about it. 

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, like fostering that space for conversation to happen, which can be hard and it can be risky. But it can also be very healing. In fact, it was healing for Francis. So Francis also came and served with Love Thy Neighborhood for a summer, and while she was here she was skeptical about being completely vulnerable about her gender dysphoria.

FRANCIS: I don’t feel comfortable talking most of the time to people within the church. In the past sometimes I’ll just say like, ‘Oh, I experienced gender dysphoria,’ but never like go into details.

RACHEL SZABO: Okay, so one of the things that our interns do at Love Thy Neighborhood is something called Gathered every other Friday.

JESSE EUBANKS: Right, so we gather together and we have a meal together, a time of worship together, and then we have a variety of guest speakers come in and talk about a bunch of different issues.

RACHEL SZABO: Yeah, so one of those Gathereds while Francis was here was a discussion and a teaching on sexuality and gender, and Francis was nervous about that because her experience so far from Christians had been simplistic responses or having Bible verses thrown at her.

FRANCIS: I actually ended up opening up the night before, and I was like, ‘Hey, this is my experience. I’m terrified.’ And they were like, ‘Hey, we love you. We’re here for you. Tell us your story.’ I was like, ‘What? You guys are just gonna, like, be there and, like, listen?’ It was amazing. Yeah, it was really healing.

RACHEL SZABO: The next day during the session, naturally there were some things that were hard for Francis to hear.

FRANCIS: I like walked out of the session and cried. Three of the year-long LTN interns came up to me. One guy ended up being like, ‘Hey, can I give you a hug? Like I know it’s COVID, but can I just give you a hug and let you know that you’re loved?’ And I was like, ‘Yes.’ And that was the best hug I’ve ever received. He didn’t even know, like, this was my experience. They just, like, saw me crying and put two and two together.

RACHEL SZABO: In fact, after that, most of the interns ended up going home and talking through what it looks like to love people struggling with their gender in a way that shows both grace and truth. Not just throwing Bible verses at people, but also not just letting people think that God doesn’t care about the way they live — because he does. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and knowing that God cares is something that has really helped Luke in his own gender dysphoria.

LUKE GIPPERICH: No one has experienced greater dysphoria than the son of God being treated as a sinner on a cross. Something that’s been really encouraging to think about is, like, God gave up his, his body to be close to me. And he laid that down. He laid down his, his life, and that’s so cool. Like the God of the universe wanted me, y’know, so bad that he died and he was resurrected and now he’s praying for me and he’s with me. And what I realized is my, like, liberation as a person is not found in more femininity, but it’s being just close to God and having connection with him.

JESSE EUBANKS: So what does all this mean? I guess I just wanna say this. If you’re struggling with your gender — you don’t feel like you’re man enough or woman enough or you don’t feel like a man or feel like a woman, you look at the broader culture and you see that you’re being invited to maybe try a different gender, but you look at the church culture and you see that you don’t really fit their ideas either — I just wanna encourage you — there is more than enough room for you in your biological gender. We look at the Scriptures and we see such a vast array of expression for both men and women, where it’s not nearly as narrowly defined as so often the church makes it, but it’s also not nebulous and undefined in the way that secular culture makes it. Don’t make the mistake of embracing either one of those because God has made you fearfully and wonderfully made, you are loved, and the world needs you — as a man, as a woman, and who you’re being formed into.

RACHEL SZABO: And if someone you know is struggling with gender dysphoria, our encouragement would be this. Step into conversations. Go with them on their journey. Don’t just offer simplistic answers, but also don’t just affirm everything that they tell you because it may not be helpful to them. Show them grace, show them compassion, but show them truth and balance both of those things.

JESSE EUBANKS: When Paul was writing to the Corinthians, he described life as looking through a mirror dimly. He meant that, in this life, we’re never gonna have a full picture of everything that’s going on or exactly who we are or sometimes who exactly we’re meant to be or the story that we’re going to write. So many things remain shrouded in mystery, but we see enough to know that they’re pointing somewhere. There’s just enough revealed that we can know something about God and about our future. Paul goes on to remind us that it’s not always going to be this way. One day God is going to reveal our true selves. Paul went on to say — ‘For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.’ While you so often might feel like a mystery to yourself or to the people around you, while often you might feel like you don’t understand yourself and you definitely don’t feel like people around you don’t understand you, the good news is this — God has always, since before you were born, known you and understood you, and nothing will ever change that. In a world of constant change, let’s hold fast to the God who has promised that everything he does — even down to our gender — is ultimately for our good.

Okay, so we’re at the end of our gender series. We explored manhood. We explored womanhood. We explored gender dysphoria. What big takeaways did you have from this?

RACHEL SZABO: Honestly, I love that these episodes have fostered a lot of conversation with people that I know. They’ve just listened to the episodes and they’ve been like, ‘Hey, I wanna talk to you about that’ or ‘Hey, what did you think about this part?’ And I’ve really, really enjoyed just the opening up to have dialogue with other people about these things. What about you? You know, what takeaways did you have?

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I think a couple of different things. First, I’m really struck by the sovereignty of God. God intentionally made man and woman and it’s good, and I am encouraged by being reminded that God made man and woman and that that’s a good thing. I’m also honestly reminded that God’s manhood and womanhood is just better than the culture’s idea of manhood and womanhood. It’s richer, it’s more beautiful, it’s stronger, it’s more eternal, like there’s just so much goodness to it. I also gotta say this — I’m also really struck by how narrowly the church often defines manhood and womanhood and I think that it’s a disservice and I think that it is aggravating the general culture even further to turn away from God because we just have these really, really shallow, narrow concepts of manhood and womanhood. They don’t contain the breadth that God does. So I think I got to the end of this whole thing and just realized, like, gender’s tough. It seems like it would be such a simple question — ‘Oh, what is a man and what is a woman?’ But it’s not that simple, and at the same time it’s also not as complex as we make it sometimes. There’s a bit of a mystery to it. Final thing — what do you hope people got out of this series?

RACHEL SZABO: Honestly when it comes to talking about gender — everything else now in our society, like it just feels so polarized. If you’re on this camp and you’re like, ‘I need to affirm everything,’ and you’re on the other camp and you’re like, ‘I need to uphold God’s truth,’ and like you can’t ever have a conversation with each other, like you’re always talking past each other or just shooting fire at one another. I’m hoping that this will show folks that God’s way really is better. God’s design of gender — it’s incredible, it’s so beautiful, and I think we need to learn both as a church and as a culture how to step into that.

—————————————–

JESSE EUBANKS: For even more resources on gender and gender dysphoria or to hear past episodes of this podcast, visit lovethyneighborhood.org/LTNpodcast.

—————————————–

JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode — Mark Yarhouse, Francis Raider, Luke Gipperich, and Barry Clover. 

RACHEL SZABO: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks.

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is Rachel Szabo, who is also our media director, producer, and the wearer of the Minish Cap.

RACHEL SZABO: Our media assistant and audio engineer is Anna Tran. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX.

RACHEL SZABO: Apply for your social justice internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or for a year. Grow in your faith and life skills. Learn more at lovethyneighborhood.org.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, ‘Go, and do likewise.’