"What the Transgender Debate Means for the Church" by Russell Moore

The transgender debate is not going away. We need to think through it well so we are prepared to stand for God's truth with gracious confidence. We need to prepare our hearts to sacrificially welcome and love wisely when the wreckage of sexual brokenness comes knocking at our door.

Russell Moore responded with this post the day after the White House rescinded President Obama's executive order regarding transgenderism in public schools. Here are some excerpts (emphasis added), but I encourage you to go and read the whole thing.

...the cultural conversation on gender identity issues requires more than good policy. It demands a gospel-centered response from the church. 

Ultimately, the transgender question is about more than just sex. It’s about what it means to be human. Poet Wendell Berry responded to techno-utopian scientism with the observation that civilization must decide whether we see persons as creatures or as machines. If we are creatures, he argued, then we have purpose and meaning, but also limits. If we see ourselves, and the world around us, as a machine, then we believe the Faustian myth of our own limitless power to recreate ourselves. ...

The Sexual Revolution has always whispered promises of this kind of godlike self-autonomy. ... If human sexuality exists solely for our self-actualization and satisfaction, then it makes no sense to impose restrictions based on something as seemingly arbitrary as gender. 

So how should we as Christians respond? 

First of all, we should never mock or belittle those suffering gender identity disorders. ... They feel alienated from their identities as men or women and are seeking a solution to that in self-display or in surgery or in pumping their bodies with the other sex’s hormones. In a fallen universe, all of us are alienated, in some way, from who we were designed to be.

...this also means that we will love and be patient with those who feel alienated from their created identities. We must recognize that some in our churches will face a long road of learning what it means to live as God created them to be, as male or female. That sort of long, slow, plodding and sometimes painful obedience is part of what Jesus said would be true of every believer: the bearing of a cross. ...

Second, we must bear witness to the goodness of what it means to live as creatures, not as self-defining gods and goddesses. God created us as human, and within humanity as male and female (Gen. 1:27). We are all sinners, so we chafe against having ourselves defined by a Creator, and not by ourselves or our ideologies. ...

If Christians see ourselves as people who are “losing” a culture rather than people who have been sent on a mission to a culture, we will be outraged and hopeless instead of compassionate and convictional. If we do not love our mission field, we will have nothing to say to it. 

We Christians believe that all of us are sinners, and that none of us are freaks. We conclude that all of us are called to repentance, and part of what repentance means is to receive the gender with which God created us, even when that’s difficult. We must affirm that God loves all persons, and that the gospel is good news for repentant prodigal sons and daughters, including for those who have trouble figuring out which is which.