Thanks to Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner and many others, we’re all familiar with the concept of being transgender. But what about being transabled or transracial or transspecies or transage? Are these all valid and real? Or are all of them — including being transgender — based primarily on mental or emotional disorders?

The question of being “transage” — referring to someone who feels he or she is a child trapped in an adult’s body — was recently in the news with this shocking headline: “TRANS-AGE: Pedophile Charged With Abusing 3 Girls Says He’s A 9-Year-Old Trapped In Man’s Body.”

Putting aside the inexcusable nature of this man’s alleged crimes, he’s hardly the first to make this claim. Consider the story of a married man with 7 children who now lives as a 6-year-old girl with his new adoptive “parents.”

Then there are those who identify as “transabled.” This headline explains: “Becoming disabled by choice, not chance: ‘Transabled’ people feel like impostors in their fully working bodies.”

Yes, people like this are tormented by their healthy bodies, feeling the compulsion to be crippled or without a hand or blind. Some have even frozen a foot until it had to be amputated, sawed off their legs (literally) or blinded themselves, all in a desire to find inner peace and wholeness. And once the gory job is done, they are thrilled with their radical choice.

Then there are those who identity as transracial. Wikipedia defines this as individuals “who claim to have a racial identity that differs from their birth race,” like Rachel Dolezal.

And then there are those who identify as transspecies, like the young woman who lives her life as a cat.

A story by Daniel Greenfield on Frontpage Magazine dating back to 2013 addressed this growing phenomenon. But, as Greenfield noted, the transgender community was not too happy with this.

He wrote,

Like most newly minted civil rights groups, Trannies are intolerant of Transpecies Americans accusing them of only pretending to think that they’re cats and playing the old, “How dare you compare your pain to my pain and your imaginary identity to my imaginary identity” game.

Where is the Test?

And herein lies the problem. There is no more a test to prove that someone is (or is not) transgender than there’s a test to prove that someone is (or is not) transabled, transracial, transage or transspecies. Where is the test? When are detailed neurological studies required before someone has sex-change surgery? When are chromosomal tests required before a child is put on puberty blockers or given hormones?

I’ve read transgender blog posts about people identifying as transspecies. On the one hand, the transgender community wants to be compassionate, recognizing the validity of what others perceive as reality. At the same time, not a few of them said, “But there’s a big difference, since some of us really do have male brains in female bodies, but no human being has a leopard’s brain or a wolf’s brain.”

But that raises the question: Where’s the test? How do we differentiate the case of someone who identifies as transabled? What’s the difference between a mind map telling someone that their left hand shouldn’t be there, and someone who believes she’s a woman trapped in a man’s body?

Insanity as Identity

Greenfield had this to say:

Insanity. It’s not just a mental illness. It’s also an identity. Men in dresses claim that gender is in the mind, not in the body. If you think you’re a woman, then you are a woman. What used to be a minor form of eccentric insanity has now become educational policy in schools.

But why stop at gender when you can also do species? There are people who believe that their true identity is that of an animal. And who is to say that species isn’t in the mind, just like gender is in the mind?

This isn’t just a thought-experiment or satire. It’s reality.

Species dysphoria is the equivalent of Gender dysphoria. Mentally ill persons with gender dysphoria are fashionably diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder. There is as of yet no Species Identity Disorder, but that is no doubt coming.

And, he notes, like those who identify as transgender, “Transpecies Americans create special pronouns for themselves and insist that refusing to pretend that they’re cats or wolves is a hate crime.”

Love Doesn’t Do What’s Easy

Do I write this to mock those who identify as transabled or transgender? Quite the contrary.

I write this to ask what makes transgender identity different from these other, deeply perceived identities, some of which have been documented to produce deep personal pain.

And if we can agree that it is far from ideal to mutilate healthy body parts to accommodate someone who identifies as transabled, then it is far from ideal to do the same for someone who identifies as transgender.

And if we can agree that it is far from loving to affirm someone’s false sense of reality — like Rachel Dolezal — than we can agree to continue to work towards finding positive cures for transgenderism rather than affirming Bruce as Caitlyn.

It’s easy to affirm, but love doesn’t always do what’s easy. This is a call for sanity as much as a call for love.

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This article was originally posted at Stream.org.

Through their foolishness, selfishness, and arrogance, “progressives” are responsible for the harm being done to children, teens, the family, the church, the First Amendment, and what’s left of American culture.

Through our ignorance, selfishness, cowardice, and passivity (if not apathy), we Christians are complicit in this harm.

Tragic teen victim of perverse Leftist ideology

The tragic story of a teenage boy—a senior in high school—who just two months ago underwent a grotesque amputation of his genitalia, illustrates the egregious and obscene nature of the evil that too many Christians have facilitated.

Caden Boone, who has changed his name to “Katherine,” underwent what the New York Times stupidly calls an “operation that had changed her, in the most intimate part of her body, from a biological male into a female.”

Any scientist with the courage to speak truth in a public square dominated by anti-science ideologues would explain that no human can change from a biological male into a female.

It’s excruciating to say this, but charlatan doctors are changing teenage boys, not into girls, but into de facto eunuchs.

According to the Times, Caden Boone never demonstrated the usual childhood signs of gender dysphoria:

Kat Boone did not fit the stereotype of a girl trapped in a boy’s body.

As a child, she dressed in jeans and shirts, like all the other boys, and her best friend was a boy. She liked to play with cars and slash bad guys in the Legend of Zelda video games. She still shuns dresses, preferring skinny jeans and band T-shirts.

But as a freshman in high school in Cazenovia, N.Y., she became depressed and withdrawn. “I knew that the changes going on with puberty were not me,” Kat said. “I started to really hate my life, myself. I was uncomfortable with my body, my voice, and I just felt like I was really a girl.”

When she discovered the transgender world on the Internet, she had a flash of recognition. “I was reading through some symptoms, not really symptoms, but some of the attributes of it did click,”

Boone, whose father moved out when he was in fifth grade and who had never demonstrated discomfort with his sex, became depressed during his freshman year in high school and had his penis amputated before he graduated three years later.

The Times reporter acknowledges that “there are no proven biological markers for what is known as gender dysphoria.”

Tangled Leftist web

The Left is really getting tied up in intellectual knots as their doctrinaire assumptions about race, homosexuality, biological sex, “gender,” and “identity” come home to roost. In their lowered consciousness, “progressives” are doing what roosting chickens do: excrete excrement. Unfortunately, they’re also tracking their doo-doo all over the lives of young people.

We’ve been told for decades that race is an immutable biological reality, but now we’re told race is a social construct. We’ve also been told ad nauseum told that homosexuality is analogous to race, but if race is a social construct, then what about homosexuality?

We’ve been told that the binary categories of male and female are arbitrary and socially constructed, shaped by societal conventions and expectations. But then why do so many “transwomen” insist that their desire to dress like caricatures of 1950’s pin-up girls is evidence of their “female brains”?

And if there exist no substantive and real differences between men and women, why do homosexuals claim they’re attracted only to those of their same sex?

Who’s being compelled to lie?

Syndicated columnist Clarence Page, who both is and “identifies” as black, compares Bruce Jenner’s gynophilia to the “negrophilia” of Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who identifies as black:

Dolezal…says she wants to look the way she feels inside. That’s her right, as long as she’s honest about it. Jenner made news by “living his truth,” as many in the transgender community say. Dolezal lived a lie.

What about less famous “transpeople” who are hormone-doping, lopping off body parts, stitching on other body parts, changing birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and falsely claiming to be the opposite sex? Do they have an obligation to tell everyone what Jenner because of his fame will never have to tell (i.e., that he is in reality a man)? Does the obligation not to tell a Dolezal-like whopper require all “transpeople” to fess up to their real sex? Are men who are passing as women living a lie? “LGBT activists claim that “transpeople” are not living a lie, because they are living the truth of their “gender identity.” But there’s also the pesky phenomenon of biological sex. Many believe that subjective desire is subordinate in importance to objective reality.

And what about the freedom of others–you know, “cisgenders” who remain anchored to reality–who want to live the way they feel and believe?  What about people who believe and feel strongly that objective biological sex is real and meaningful and should be affirmed? What about people who believe and feel strongly that pretending that a gender dysphoric boy is a girl harms him deeply and possibly irreparably?

And what about teachers who believe and feel strongly that lying is wrong and yet are being required by the government to lie by being required to refer to gender dysphoric boys as “she” and “her”? What about teachers whose identity includes a commitment to truth-telling?

Connection between love and truth

“Progressives” talk endlessly about “identity,” squishing their definition into whatever shape suits their libidinous appetite for morally untethered sexuality. My generation (referred to by a waggish millennial pastor friend of mine as the “worst generation”) advocated free love. We’ve all been duped. The costs are incalculable, and in order to know which acts (including speech “acts”) are loving requires first a knowledge of truth.

So, for example, if homoeroticism is neither ontologically nor morally equivalent to heterosexual activity, then affirming it as such is not loving.

If homoerotic desire and activity are not ontologically equivalent to race, then affirming them as equivalent is either foolish ignorance or evil.

If homoerotic activity is, in reality, immoral, it is feckless and unloving to assert that it is moral.

If our biochemistry can contribute to powerful desires to engage in activities that are immoral, then telling children that because biochemistry may contribute to homoerotic attraction, homoerotic activity is inherently moral is a foolish and dangerous statement.

If biological sex (i.e., being male or female) is an immutable, profoundly meaningful, and objectively good ontological reality, proclaiming it mutable or subordinate to disordered desire is at best ignorant, at worst evil.

If love sometimes requires that humans tell their friends or family members that they ought not act on a powerful, persistent desire, then it is deeply dishonest to assert that society must affirm homoerotic activity and relationships simply because homoerotic desire is powerful and persistent.

Identity according to “progressives”

The Left created and exploits a deformed conceptualization of identity because it serves their lust for sexual autonomy.

Identity may signify the aggregate of all personal phenomena. These phenomena can be roughly and simplistically divided into categories:

1.  Morally neutral, unchosen phenomena (e.g., nation of origin; skin, eye, and hair color; height; I.Q.; number of siblings; food tastes)
2. Unchosen feelings, some of which impel us toward wrong behavior and some of which impel us toward right behavior (e.g., anger, covetousness, compassion, polyamory/”consensual non-monogamy,” gender dysphoria; heterosexual attraction; homoerotic attraction; “genetic sexual attraction,” “minor attraction”)
3. Unchosen experiences (e.g., music or sports that our parents required, sickness, accidents, childhood molestation)
4. Freely chosen phenomena (e.g., values, beliefs, actions).

Alternatively, identity can refer to aggregate of unchosen feelings and freely chosen values and beliefs that individuals affirm as good and upon which they think it’s morally legitimate to act.

“Progressives” seek to confuse people by demanding that society treat all categories as ontologically identical, which in turn serves their social and political ends. In their twisted world, if it’s wicked to judge a particular eye color as wrong or inferior, then it’s wicked to judge someone’s freely chosen actions (well, primarily actions related to sexuality) as wrong.

Conversely, in this topsy-pervy world, if one ought to treat eye color as morally neutral, then one has an obligation to treat homoerotic activity and cross-dressing as morally neutral.

Of course, “progressives” don’t apply that principle consistently. They don’t argue that if society has an obligation to treat eye or skin color as morally neutral, then society has an obligation to treat theologically orthodox Christian beliefs/identity as morally neutral.

Christian identity

Anyone who claims to find their identity in Christ has an obligation to expose the unfruitful deeds of darkness and to try to protect children. Most Christians—including our religious leaders—have failed and continue to fail.

We have failed because of our own selfish desire to live outside God’s stipulations for sexuality, marriage, and divorce.

We have failed because of our own intellectual, moral, and spiritual sloth.

We have failed because of our cowardly refusal to suffer for Christ and His Kingdom.

In the current cacophonous din borne in damning darkness, our children are hearing that turning Caden Boone into a eunuch is a sign of love.  And still we say nothing.

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