Sometimes those who seek justice for a persecuted group imitate their enemies. Lenin did that when finishing the overthrow of the Tsar. Unfortunately, this is what is occurring for the Transgendered and those seeking to change genders.
Such as those from other groups in the LGBT community, the Transgendered have been sorely marginalized and abused. And there is no excuse for that. That marginalization and abuse is often the result of what has been taught in the name of Christ. Many of my fellow Christians wish to just marginalize the everyone in the LGBT community so that society teaches what the conservative Church teaches about sexual orientation and gender identity. That desire to marginalize the LGBT community is wrong and immoral.
One of the reasons why many of my fellow religiously conservative Christians believe in their efforts to marginalize the Transgendered community is that they equate one's biological sex status from birth with gender so that the biological sex status one is born with is the only factor one uses to determine one's gender identity.
Those who are or are seeking to be Transgendered rightfully disagree with how my fellow religiously conservative Christians think about one's biological sex status from birth and gender for society. Why would I say that my fellow Christians are wrong here? It comes from reading about how Native Americans approached gender identity. Some tribes recognized up to five different genders and their different gender identification groups did not always neatly follow the LGBT model of thinking. For example, men who more identified as women and women who more identified as men would work side by side and doing the work of those whose gender they most identified with. And this gender reassignment implied nothing about sexual orientation. What we should note is that Native Americans recognized that gender identity can be determined by other factors besides the biological sex status one is born with. Our failure to consider that reality is a cause for the attempts by some to marginalize the Transgendered.
So what did these Native American tribes do differently from both my fellow religiously conservative Christians and LGBT community? What the latter two groups have in common is this equation between gender identity and one's biological sex status. For many of my fellow religiously conservative Christians, they equate one's biological sexual status with one's gender identity so that the former overrides the latter. But for those who are or are seeking to be transgendered, they too equate one's biological sex status with gender identity only in their case, they work to have their gender identity override the biological sex status they were born with.
The overriding of either biological sex status one was born with or one's gender identity is quite simply a denial of reality. Though I cannot relate to those who suffer from gender dysphoria, it is wrong for me to deny the reality of their gender identity. I can say what the Scriptures say about gender identification, but I must never deny the reality they live with.
So perhaps we need to restructure how we think about gender identity so that we try to neither deny the reality of the biological sex status each person is born with nor the reality of one's gender identity. Realize that this different approach is not the approach that should be taken in the Church; it should be taken in society only. The difference is because the Church should be ruled by the Scriptures while society should seek to practice democracy.
So when it comes to bathrooms, sports, and what other spheres that gender identity touches, we need to divide groups by gender rather than by just the biological sex status one was born with. Society needs to recognize both the biological sex status one was born with and gender identity and classify people by gender with the caveat that we recognize that there are more than two genders. In doing so, we avoid denying some undeniable realities and perhaps we will do more to recognize the rights of all involved, both the rights of those who are or are seeking to be transgendered and those who are cisgender.
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