Okay To Change A Child’s Sex But Not His Gender? -- By: Denny R. Burk

Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 19:1 (Spring 2014)
Article: Okay To Change A Child’s Sex But Not His Gender?
Author: Denny R. Burk


Okay To Change A Child’s Sex But Not His Gender?

Denny Burk

Editor, Journal for Biblical Manhood & Womanhood
Professor of Biblical Studies
Boyce College and Southern Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky

In a 2013 post at TouchstoneMag.com, James Kushiner asks an insightful question that exposes the moral confusion of our day.1 In essence he asks why it should be legal to change a child’s sex but not his gender.

The question is provoked by a bill that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed into law last year. The law prohibits any attempt to change a child’s “gender expression.” That means that if a parent has a young boy who likes to put on dresses and wear make-up, New Jersey law prohibits licensed counselors from helping that boy. Counselors must approve and support whatever gender that child chooses regardless of the child’s sex. This law reveals the rising social stigma in our culture against anyone who attempts to alter a child’s gender identity.

But what about altering a child’s sex? While there is a growing stigma attached to altering gender identity, there is a growing acceptance of surgical procedures that “alter” a child’s biological sex. Last year, The New Yorker reported on a suburban teenage girl who wished to embrace a male gender identity.2 Her parents allowed her to begin testosterone therapy when she was fourteen, and just before her seventeenth birthday they allowed her to get a double mastectomy. Now she is living out a male identity, although she says she still prefers to date boys.

Kushiner puts a fine point on the issue:

So if a professional can’t talk to minor about sexual orientation (because it’s fixed and messing with it is harmful?), then why was a professional doctor allowed to alter something as fixed as a biological body of a minor?3

Here’s the fundamental moral inconsistency that the sexual revolutionaries have given us. It is not okay to change a child’s mind, but it is okay to mutilate his body. Gender and sex ought to be in harmony, but surgical manipulation must be preferred over mental alteration. Why allow the one and not the other?

This inconsistency testifies to a much deeper spiritual rot. It exposes what has always been at the heart of the sexual revolution. The Creator’s purposes for male and female (Gen 1:27; Matt 19:4)

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