Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with Doctor Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics and other miscellaneous items. I'm your host, Joshua Guillotine, and this is another edition of the director's Bag.
Mary Weller, you have been tasked with talking about transgenderism again, and this coming fall we have an upcoming symposium. So this Truth Exchange podcast is a preliminary symposium edition where we discuss the upcoming event with our speaker giving a glimpse into the theme of the symposium as well as the subject of their talk. I'm your host, Joshua Guelo, and with me is Doctor Jeffrey J. Ventrella. And all of our listeners who are not watching, you will see. Mary Weller is also with us, and Mary is the project manager as well as she's the author for a number of our little booklets. And she is the reason why I get late phone calls from people who are angry about the things that she's written.
Be sure to join us this 30th to the 31 August in Pasadena, California at Providence Christian College, where we are going to explore where you'll be equipped and challenged to take Christ's lordship to the streets where everyday life is lived. Every square inch of creation is Christ. So let's live like it, and let's do it together. Doctor Ventrella has prefaced this event with the quote by CS Lewis that there is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan. I mentioned in the last one that we did with, with Doctor Jones. Abraham Kuyper has also said, there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign overall, does not cry mine. So that certainly has to deal with the issue of the issue of sexuality, transgenderism.
This talk that you're going to be doing, Mary, it's not a hit panic mode button lecture. It's a session that's going to address the how of interacting with confused young people with grace and truth, and particularly addressing the trans issue of the how to tutorial masterclass. It'll be addressing sexuality and sexual choices on the retail level. Mary, for those who are not familiar with some of your work on the trans issue, could you kind of give our listeners, our viewers, that backstory? How did you become so deeply involved and so passionate about this issue? You went from the issue of yoga and now the issue of transgenderism. Tell us a little bit about that story.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Well, I have to start this out by thanking you for taking all the threats that come in first over yoga, which we thought was extreme, but ended up just being a boot camp for you. Joshua, for all the mail that you were going to get for me, I got involved in the issue of transgenderism simply by kind of starting to hear things that were going on in the headlines. I think it was about 2018 that I really started paying attention to and kind of bringing up in meetings some of the worldview issues that I was seeing as I was hearing about the rapid rise, specifically of transgender identity amongst teenage girls.
Quickly after that, Abigail Schreier came out with a book called Irreversible damage, which was an excellent look at sort of the lay of the land as we had it in 2019 and then in 2020, when Covid hit, there was a lot of information that started to come out about what was happening in our schools and the fact that children were not just being exposed to the idea of transgenderism, but sort of coached in the idea that taking on these alternate identities, considering whether or not you could be a boy trapped in a girl's body or a girl trapped in a boy's body, was being presented to children, it was something that they were being asked to consider.
And around that time was the first time that truth exchange then asked me to give a presentation about how the gospel and our gender intersected. And I think that that was the name of the first talk. I didn't go back to look at it, but that was the name of the first talk that I did for truth exchange, which was gender and the gospel. Really looking at who we are as image bearers created in God's image, male and female, complete persons, whole persons, so body and soul. There's a strange gnostic separation that happens within transgenderism or transgender ideology, where people are asked to consider that they have a body and then they have an internal self, and the two don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. Around that time, the conversation got very personal, and I shared this. In that first talk that I did, that the day I was wrapping, writing that talk and was getting ready to head over to do the first recording of that talk about gender and the gospel, I started getting a series of text messages from one of my children. We have four kids who, at the time, were in a charter school that's classically based, and one of my children had been asked by a teacher to begin using alternate pronouns for a friend of hers, and she was panicked because as I had been researching and kind of talking within the family about the work that I was doing, she had been educated unintentionally on my part, but she had been educated about what the transgender medicalization process actually was going to mean for this friend. So in the eyes of the teacher, it was very much, hey, we don't want to bully. We want to be kind to these children who have gender confusion. And so this teacher had pulled aside some of the kindest students in this particular class, one of whom was one of my kids, and asked, would my child start honoring the new name and the new pronouns of this child as she was going into medicalization? And that really triggered something for my child because she was aware that this was not just a matter of just being nice, but that this person that she was very concerned about was actually stepping into a path immediately with chest binders and with cross sex hormone therapy at 16 years old, that was going to damage her body.
So now it was no longer, gosh, if we ever run across this, how do we lovingly handle this person? How do we lovingly discuss what's going on in this person's life?
It was no longer a hypothetical. This was a person who was going to be coming to my home and that I wanted to love. Well, it wasn't just a headline. It wasn't just a theoretical being out there that we didn't know and need to interact with. And after that, I'll say that all four of my kids have friends who have identified as some variation on the quote unquote, gender spectrum. And so this has been a very day to day, real life conversation about how do we love, how do we protect, how do we come alongside as people realize that they've made horrible mistakes about their identities and their bodies?
What do we do?
And this has come up again, actually, within the last couple of weeks, this has come up again in our family, where there is a child who's a friend, who's dearly, dearly loved, who really thinks that perhaps she's in the wrong body, and what does that actually mean? Why do people make these assumptions and these suggestions about children at younger and younger ages, and how do we handle that as christians? On the other side of that, too? We have an oncoming wave of people, I believe, coming into the church in two sets. We have families and friends who have had their communities ripped apart because of transgenderism.
They're seeking to love people that they love in truth.
You know, the Bible tells us that part of love is rejoicing in the truth, right? So there's a strange separation that christians make, too. Well, I want to be loving and they feel that somehow the truth is not loving. And so they have to honor alternate pronouns. Should we be doing that? So there's that category of people who are dealing with communities that are of, and then there's another category, and that is people who went down this path and who are now coming into our churches. Women with changed voices and ruined bodies, men who've had a surgical operation, who have been sterilized because of the hormone treatments that they went on, and how do we love them as men and women created in the image of holy God and help them to live lives that honor God and themselves, who God has created them to be? So that's a long intro, but that's where I'm coming.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: Okay, so, Mary, so let's, let's back up. And Jeff, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this too. For, just for some of our listeners, they maybe have heard the conversation or have engaged with, and I can't help but think maybe this also, and I was talking with, with one of my boys about this, this issue of trans.
And this kind of argument came up and I said, wait, you're my son. You can't think that way. And which is to say is that, well, if we stop legislatively, trans people or people who are struggling with some sort of dysphoria, they're going to be unhappy or it could lead to suicide. And shouldn't we as christians want to open up the gateway for those people to secure happiness?
And. Because isn't it just, this would be sound crass, but isn't it just flesh that they're cutting off?
[00:10:55] Speaker C: Let me, I'm going to jump in there for a minute, because as Mary outlined, you know, truth exchange exists to inform the public, to equip the church and to protect the future. And gender ideology has the intersection of all three of those mission areas. And this is why it's so important to do it. Now, with respect to informing the public, one of the common justifications that's out there is would you rather have your son present as a girl or be dead by suicide? It's the idea that if you don't do this transition, the child will commit suicide. The fact of the matter is that's just not true. And the public needs to understand that. The statistics certainly support the idea of not putting people through this mutilation type of surgery. It's malformation, it's mutilation, it's sterileization. And that can never be the solution to someone who's confused and has some issues with which to deal with. So I think that informing the public is just, let's get the actual facts, not the propaganda out there, and then equipping the church, how to love people, how to bring them to your dinner table, which Mary can talk about, the hospitality component to it. And then this is a very clear way to protect the future, not just inoculating your own children, but reaching out and showing how the gospel affirms humanity. And humanity consists of an integrated human person. Humans don't have bodies. They are embodied creatures. So it's not simply flesh that's being dealt with there. It's the very essence of what it means to be embodied creature.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And Jeff, if I can just key in on one thing that you mentioned, you are right that, you know, there's this line. Would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter? You know, this is something I was listening just this morning to an interview with a young woman named Precia Mosley, who is a detransitioner.
And she was talking to her interviewer about the fact that when she went in for that first gender appointment, so she had already gotten caught up in gender ideology, but when she went into a medical appointment with her parents with a gender, quote, unquote, gender therapist, the therapist did say to her parents right in front of her, well, if we don't do this, she'll probably commit suicide. Suicide. And Precia referred to the fact that that concretized the idea in her head that this was a life saving thing that she had to do. Never mind that she had an eating disorder, never mind that there was sexual assault in her past. Never mind that there was all sorts of comorbid issues going on underneath. Gender got keyed in on. And suicide was the issue that was placed before her parents. But what we know and what is starting to become more and more proven is that the highest rates of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts is actually after medical transition. And so if we walk back then from so medicalization to the furthest degree, we need to walk all the way back to the first steps of this, which is social transition and actually education. Right? So first there's miseducation, there's proper education. But social transition is being proven to be something that concretizes gender confusion for children. So if a child presents with gender confusion and they are treated with watchful waiting, which means we are not going to use a new name and pronouns, we're going to see what happens. We're going to walk through you and through this with you and talk to you about confusion that you're feeling, then those children, conservatively, about 85% of the time, by the time they've gone through puberty, they grow out of this gender confusion. But children who are treated with social transition or quote unquote, affirmative care, they, almost 100% of the time go on to medicalization.
Once you get a child onto puberty blockers, that's been called a pause button, and that's being questioned all over the medical community now, because what they see is almost 100% of the time, and in some studies, a complete 100% of the time, children who socially transitioned and then went on to puberty blockers then go on to cross sex hormones. Already you have all sorts of medical issues that are gonna happen as a result of those treatments, but you're moving them further along the path that then eventually does reach higher suicide rates. So that presentation of would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?
Is an absolute lie. And so, Joshua, going back to the conversation that you had with your son, who was concerned about suicide rates, concerned about the fact that if he doesn't honor someone's false sense of identity with the way that he uses language, he's actually being told that that's protective when it's actually destructive in the long run. And I think that that's something really important for people to understand.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Is there too much emphasis? And I know some people have raised this over the past number of years, emphasis on empathy. And the argument goes like this. Well, do you want to feel bad? Do you want to be miserable? Well, no. Well, then would you want somebody else to feel bad and be completely miserable that they're not in the right body? And so there's obviously, there's an error there when they say the wrong body, but overemphasis of this empathy, and so therefore, it's now their mission to do what needs to be done to ensure somebody else is not sad or down and out. How many generations here need have been programmed, not just with, under the whole empathy thing, a wrong understanding of the body, which Jeff mentioned, and very helpfully in his one dicta about embodied.
So we have a bad understanding of the body, of its tell us the function. And there's an eschatological issue problem there. We have a bad understanding of sexuality and its connection to worship. Peter Jones has talked about that for years.
And this goes back, and Peter would point, it probably goes back to the sixties. There's. It seems like there has, there's a lot of unprogramming that has to take place specifically with our generation and onward. Jeff has said this. You may not want the culture wars, but the culture wars want you. So there's no getting out of this.
[00:17:50] Speaker C: There's absolutely. There's hope. The tomb is empty. That is an indisputed fact. And that fact tells us that there is now restoration in the making, the recreation of all of creation, as Paul says in Romans eight, has begun. And we work that out as a mustard seed in the kingdom of God, growing large as a bit of leaven that leavens the whole loaf. And we see the unstoppable progress against the defensive weapons of the gates of hell. Those gates shall not prevail. So there's all kinds of hope here, but there's also hope that's on the metascale. But Ameri can tell you just some of her interactions on a one on one type of basis. People are being one, they are being changed, and they are being effectively pointed by the power of the gospel to the risen christ.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: I agree, and I think, too, there's hope in the fact that goddess God did not speak reality into existence and then take off and hope everything goes well. There is, throughout all of reality, the intentional, loving, and perfect design of our creator that is working itself out. The reason that's hopeful is that we, as male and females, we are thoroughly male and female with good intent behind it. And I think that's one of the things that we need to recognize, even in the damage that's being done by this gender affirmative care, which is such a misnomer. I hate using it. I use it only because it's, you know, what we use as a society right now. And I hope that that changes. I think it's starting to change to describe this, but we are seeking to change creation by the power of first our words and then our medicine. And I know that this is something that I drum on and on about, but we do not have creative power as image bearers. We cannot alter reality as image bearers, no matter how hard we try, because we are not creator. And there's great hope in that.
I think there's great hope in the conversations that we're having as a result of this. And I hear this within the church. And I hear it outside of the church. I certainly have had these conversations with. With my kids about the fact that I think we have this sort of idolatrous misunderstanding of what love is supposed to look like, too. I think that christians have been told that if we are loving, then people will love us back. And scripture does not say that sometimes, I mean, all of us know, those of us who have had toddlers, sometimes the most loving thing that you can do for your children will result in their temporal sense of misery because they have nothing that they were asking for. Right? Right is rooted in truth. Truth stands beyond the sway of our emotions. And so I think I've been convicted by this so often. I want to be nice, I want to be kind in my presentation of the truth. And in my mind, that means that people will still like me when I am done being truthful.
And that's not the case. No matter how loving I am in the presentation of the truth, there are people who will be offended by that. And I have to look at the idol of self, the idol of popularity, the idol of wanting to be liked and say, sometimes that may not be right. Now the end result of this. This person, you know, that I'm encouraging one of my children to speak lovingly and truthfully to, as they refuse to use alternate name and pronouns, may not walk away from that conversation, even if my child handles it perfectly, liking my child any longer, and there's going to be a social consequence of that act. And that does not have anything to do with whether or not they've actually been loving in what they've done. And I think Laura Perry, who is another, actually Laura Perry Smoltz now, because she's married, but who lived as a trans identified man, so a female who was presenting as a man in culture and who had extensive surgery and took testosterone, she thought that her parents hated her. She thought that her parents, quote, didn't want her to exist because they would not use her male name and pronouns. But after the Lord dealt with her, after nine years of presenting this way, and she came to faith in Christ, and she looked around and surveyed the landscape for the people that she could trust and who would love her. In truth, it was the people that she had accused of hatred who had, in fact, been loving her that entire time. And they were the points of light that she could go back to so that she could be restored and she could be loved and she could be helped, as she then had to encounter, and continues to encounter the physical ramifications of the decisions that she had made that happened in the church. And it's because they were strong enough to love her at personal cost, to love her the way that the Bible says to love. In truth, that is what brought her back and saved her in the end.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: You know, that's a very important point. Again, as we look to inform the public, one of the narratives that the lgbt agenda folks never want to be mentioned is that there are detransitioners, just as there are homosexuals who have then embraced a creational view of sexuality. Similarly, they don't want that story told either. But to inform the public, rightly, part of what we need to do is to actually talk about these d transitioners, because it's a redemptive story. It's not only a creational story, but it's redemptive. And I think at truth exchange we have a full orbed message. You know, we understand in Matthew ten that there's an irreducible offense to the gospel. So be it, as long as people aren't offended by our manner or by being pugnacious or, you know, irritable or something like that. We do want the fruit of the spirit. We do want to be gentle and kind. We want to be respectful in all that we do. But by the same token, that doesn't shave one nub off the gospel, which is the gospel of the truth. And so as we do those things, we'll find that in this symposium, and I hope everyone comes because you will be equipped as we begin to pop these myths that are out there. And in fact, all of our topics really cross sections with what we're doing because we're dealing with real life and that we have a real God who is giving us abundant life, and he's helping us to steer that very clearly.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: And I'm so encouraged to hear that, Jeff, just your description of what's going to be happening at the symposium, because I haven't written my extraordinarily long puritan title for you yet, Joshua. But the point are that as Christiane on the streets, we love by protecting, so protecting those who may be vulnerable to the lies and the misinformation that's out there about gender ideology with truth, caring for those who have been harmed by the ideology, caring for them in truth. So both the families and communities, again, that have been damaged, and then the people who personally have been damaged by this, and then educating so that when we're in the culture, we can educate about not just the physical truths of who we are as gendered, sexed beings created in the image of a holy God, not just the physical aspects of that, but then the underlying hope and beauty that we have because God has given us a mission. So we can talk to people in the culture about what we actually believe as christians and help them to see that there is a purpose and a beauty behind our design as female and male. That I am seeing open up conversations about the gospel, about our creator and redeemer that I've never been able to have before until I got into this topic. So education within the culture which we long for and pray will lead people to the ultimate truth, which is salvation in Christ.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: Yep. Well, be sure to join us August 30 to the 31st in Pasadena, California. For every square inch taking Christ's lordship to the streets. You can register at www.truthexchange.com, and we look forward to seeing you all there. Thank you, Mary and Jeff, for being on the program again.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: Thank you, Joshua.
[00:26:53] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: This concludes the recording of the director's bag. For more resources from Truth exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on X as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the director's bag. I'm your host, Joshua Gulo, and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.
