Some conservative Christians step away from gender wars
Andrew and Debbie James are evangelical Christians. Born in England, the couple moved to Denver years ago and raised their children there. Debbie James had a profound religious conversion experience early in parenthood, and their large nondenominational church quickly became the focal point of their lives.
“We always joked that we had this perfect little scenario,” she said. “We had our boy, then we had our girl, and they were two years apart, and they were just perfect.”
When the couple’s older child was 19, living at home as a college student, James got a call from the pharmacy informing her that her child’s prescription for estradiol, or estrogen, was ready. In a panic, she searched the teenager’s room, confronting her that evening.
It went badly. They initially refused to use their daughter’s chosen name, Lilia. Then a pastor at the church encouraged them to kick their daughter out of their home.
“This must be biblical advice,” Debbie James recalled thinking. “This must be what we’re supposed to do.”
Many progressive and mainline Christian congregations have moved to affirm transgender and nonbinary members. But for many conservative Christians, the rise of transgender identities in both visibility and in sheer numbers, particularly among young people, has been a profoundly destabilizing shift. Almost 90% of white evangelicals believe gender is determined by sex at birth, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with 60% of the population as a whole.
Austen Hartke realized he was transgender in seminary, where he was studying the Hebrew Bible; he came out as soon as he graduated. It was 2014, the same year that Laverne Cox was on the cover of Time magazine, and it felt to Hartke that the culture around him was steadily improving, that awareness and acceptance would go hand in hand, including in conservative spaces.
That is not what happened. If trans people in conservative churches encountered clumsiness and ignorance around issues like pronouns back then, he said, now they face outright hostility.
“If you’re afraid of change, that’s what trans people now represent,” he said.
Some Christians have fought against expanding gender norms with vociferous opposition to everything from drag shows to hormone treatments. In churches and Christian schools, transgender people have been mocked, kicked out and denied Communion. Transgender young people from conservative Christian families have shared stories of being banished from homes and relationships. In many ways, conservative Christians have become the face of the American anti-trans movement.
But in the quieter spaces of church sanctuaries, counseling offices and living rooms, there are earnest searches for understanding. Churches are hosting panel discussions and film screenings, training their youth leaders, rewriting their statements of faith and rethinking how they label bathrooms and arrange single-sex Bible studies. Even those that continue to draw a hard line against homosexuality are sorting through new questions raised by gender identity.
In the most intimate cases, Christians are steering through agonizing, unfamiliar conflicts between their families and their God – or, as some put it, between love and truth.
It is a search that echoes uncomfortable conversations in secular realms as Americans of all political and ideological persuasions grapple with changes to deeply ingrained notions of masculinity and femininity.
And in a landscape in which furious rhetoric blazes through statehouses and across social media, some are staking out a kind of middle ground. It is one that takes seriously the moral and theological concerns shared by many Christians and refuses to set them aside. But it also guides them to accept the reality of gender dysphoria, or distress over one’s sex, and to remain open to a spectrum of outcomes.
Julia Sadusky, a psychologist in Colorado, is one of relatively few expert voices who has stepped into that fraught territory between anti-trans fear and zeal on the right, and what some see as a progressive orthodoxy on the left that leaves little space for parental doubts. Her
degrees are from conservative Catholic and evangelical universities, and these days, she spends most of her time speaking with conservative Christians in intimate settings. In her private practice in a suburb of Denver, she sees bewildered and sometimes angry clients whose children have told them they are transgender or nonbinary. She also addresses audiences of churchgoers attempting to process tectonic cultural shifts around them.
The theological foundation of Christian opposition to the concept of transgender identities announces itself in the first chapter of Genesis. “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them,” the passage reads. “Male and female he created them.”
Christian advocates for transgender people point out that the Bible depicts a surprising range of gender diversity without apparent judgment. Jacob, a patriarch of the nation of Israel, is described as a “smooth” young man who stays in the family’s tent and is favored by God over his more traditionally masculine brother, the hunter Esau. Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew that some men are born eunuchs.
But in the New Testament, several passages lay out distinct roles for men and women. Women are to submit to their husbands; men are to lead their families. Although they are debated
by scholars and ordinary Christians, these texts have profoundly shaped the family structures, career paths and spiritual lives of billions of people.
For some Christians, then, the rise of transgender identities poses a blunt danger, potentially undermining family stability, definitions of truth and authority structures they have built their lives around.
Mark Yarhouse, a clinical psychologist who heads the Sexual and Gender Identity Institute at evangelical Wheaton College, has identified three broad frameworks through which Christians tend to see gender identity: On one end of the spectrum is the traditional conservative view that asserts that male and female are Godordained categories to which people must conform. On the other is a celebratory embrace of new identities. In the middle is a view that diversions between gender identity and biological sex are an unfortunate departure from the norm but not a moral failure.
Finding a foothold for compromise within such a stark landscape can feel impossible, and even the notion of “compromise” is offensive to many. That is why many Christians with nontraditional gender identities end up leaving their conservative churches.
Over the course of Sadusky’s decadelong career, she has seen rapid shifts in the way her clients view their own gender identity. She now sees fewer people who report long-standing distress and more who say a version of, “It’s not distressing; it’s who I am, and I want to make these modifications,” she said.
Most people, including conservatives, she said, are fairly comfortable with the idea of an adult who was raised male, say, and began to understand herself as female early in childhood with little relief over many years. Those people might have differing opinions about the proper responses to that kind of distress, but they are not as threatened by its existence as a phenomenon experienced by a small minority of individuals.
The larger threat to many conservatives, she said – and one she would like to challenge – is the notion that responding compassionately to such distress means disregarding all beliefs about differences between men and women.
In the end, Andrew and Debbie James defied their pastor’s advice to kick their daughter out of their house.
But Lilia moved out anyway, frustrated by her restrictions in the home. Her parents began reading, including books by Yarhouse and by David Gushee, a Christian ethicist who has argued for rethinking traditional Christian approaches to inclusion. They prayed. And they participated in a support group through Embracing the Journey, a network of small groups intended to “build bridges” among LGBTQ people, their families and the church.
Lilia James is now 25 and lives in Wisconsin. She has a strong relationship with her parents. She got engaged in June before a trip to Colorado with her girlfriend, and they have contemplated getting married at the same courthouse where her parents married.
Like many conservative Christian families with children with gender distress, the Jameses eventually left their church. They remain strongly committed to their faith but do not consider themselves as having a “church home.” Their worries now are about the political climate hostile to their daughter, and the fact that both their children have walked away from Christianity.
For so long, “we were good little soldiers,” Debbie James said. Now “we live in the gray.”