Pose is a TV drama series about New York City’s ball culture, an LGBTQ subculture in the African American and Latino communities throughout the 1980s and 1990s. One of the characters is Pray Tell (a gay Black man). He cries, “Ronald Reagan will not say the word AIDS. Health insurance will not cover any treatments. The world wants us dead.”
“The world wants us dead” may seem like an exaggeration today, but the feeling was real as the HIV-AIDS crisis was discovered and misunderstood and gay men were left to die.
Today, the same could be said by transgender people: “The world wants us dead.”
“The world wants us dead.”
Modern-day treatment of transgender people has a built-in systemic relationship to violence. In that vein, the growing wave of state legislatures denying health care to transgender youth should offend every Christian sensibility.
For example, Oklahoma lawmakers recently banned gender transition surgeries and other drug and hormone treatments. Five families of transgender youth sued the state in federal court, arguing the ban discriminates based on sex and transgender status.
Last month, in its defense, the state filed sworn statements from multiple Oklahomans and doctors who oppose gender-affirming health care, including some who say they “detransitioned” after believing their treatments were harmful and against God’s will.
These formerly transgender persons gave testimony to members of the legislature. This is the same genre of testimonial once offered at evangelical revival services when notorious sinners recounted a life of wickedness, repented of those sins and became Christians.
This is still the work of evangelicalism; only now it is in a perverted form.
Oklahoma is not an outlier. Twenty states have passed laws or policies banning gender-affirming care. Eight states are considering such laws or policies. This includes every Southern state except Virginia. Today, 31% of transgender youth live in states that have passed bans on gender-affirming care.
The truth about ‘detransitioning’
To hear the state of Oklahoma tell it, scores of transgender people are ruing the day they made such a woke decision and long to go back to the way they were. But that’s not true at all.
“It’s sometimes suggested that lots of trans people later regret their transition. In fact, almost none of them do.”
The actual “detransition” rate is 3% — and even that depends on how you define it.
The public information group GenderGP notes: “The number of people who do not continue with transition varies depending on where in the world they live and is subject to a number of factors, including societal acceptance of transgender people and access to health care.”
And this: “It’s sometimes suggested that lots of trans people later regret their transition. In fact, almost none of them do.”
The vast majority of transgender people who live into their true identities find the change to be lifesaving. Academic research has found 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide. And suicidal ideation is highest among transgender youth — the very group now targeted by the lies of conservative evangelicals.
By comparison, nearly 10 times as many people leave the Christian faith as “detransition” from transgender identity. Yet conservatives keep hauling out these handful of stories as evidence of a huge trend. The logical fallacy is enormous and perverse.
A perverse evangelicalism
This conservative movement spearheaded by evangelical Christians is perverse in a structural and uncommon sense, and as such this betrays a compulsive need to enforce their will on the public in a coercive and legalistic way.
The lethal combination of religious zeal and legal actions that go against basic human rights increases perversion. The ascent of a spiteful, hateful, angry, fearful scripted list of demands in the evangelical mind also brings about even more perversion.
“The lethal combination of religious zeal and legal actions that go against basic human rights increases perversion.”
More precisely, 80% of Americans say they favor laws that would protect LGBTQ people against discrimination in employment, public accommodations and housing. Conservative evangelicals oppose such protections.
According to Gallup, 70% of Americans support same-sex marriage. Conservative evangelicals oppose such marriages.
A 2011 Faith Matters survey found even 65% of Southern Baptists are supportive of female clergy. Conservative evangelicals — and the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention — oppose female clergy.
Pew found sizable majorities (73%) of Americans believe abortion should be legal if a woman’s health is at stake. Conservative evangelicals oppose abortion even to the point of forcing women to carry dead fetuses to term.
Thus, evangelicals are convinced only legal coercion can deliver them the nation they claim they want but which most Americans do not want.
Now, conservative politicians are willing to use children to scare parents about the influence of transgender students even though less than 2% of the population is transgender. They are increasingly using the American religious icon of athletic competition as a means of depriving transgender youth of all rights, including the right to participate in sports.
Conversion by coercion
More specifically, the perversion results from evangelicals abandoning a traditional attempt to preach the good news to the whole world and now attempting to convince state legislatures to enforce an evangelical lifestyle on an unwilling world. This is perversion understood as a structured disavowal of consensus reality at the core of a political movement that pretends it is Christian.
What’s going on is evangelicals are “detransitioning.” No longer content to think of conversion as a complete turnabout in central values, evangelicals are determined to enforce their values on the general population. They sell these values as “historic Christianity,” the “truth of the Bible,” and the “will of God.” Whether the public is converted or dramatically changed no longer matters.
Evangelicals, in other words, have abandoned their own history and reversed the message of conversion for a message of coercion. They are returning to the law by abandoning grace.
“They are returning to the law by abandoning grace.”
Evangelicals are not trying to win people to Jesus; they are trolling for votes. Once the legislator is convinced of the exigency, the evangelist leads the individual to repentance and the acceptance of the “true” need for anti-transgender laws. The act of decision, then, is not a walking down the aisle to confess Jesus, but a voting “yes” for denying transgender people health care.
How does this conversion by coercion strategy work?
A feeling of fear and paranoia must be developed. A scapegoat has to be selected, and it has to be the weakest member of the family. Consequently, transgender people became the scapegoat for an entire movement tired of losing.
Evangelicals should be roundly and rightly condemned for resorting to tricks: frightening and manipulating people; espousing hateful values as established biblical and Christian faith; proclaiming cultural ideals contrary to the American vision of equality; preaching hatred but calling it love; and making empty promises.
The lack of empathy
One characteristic sticks out in the perverted evangelical movement: no empathy. In fact, the lack of empathy stuns.
A people obsessed with laws — laws that take away equality, care, protection and empowerment — cannot be trusted to show empathy.
Sen. Chuck Schumer said: “Their attacks on trans people and the transgender community are just mean, mean and show a complete lack of understanding, a complete lack of empathy. Their despicable comments just make my blood boil with anger.”
Gender-nonconforming people deserve compassionate attention in all their complexity.
Most Americans will opt to reject the coldness of a perverted evangelicalism and vote for empathy for all. Empathy leads to recognizing that young people have immense challenges in understanding human sexuality, especially considering how limited evangelical education is in the area.
Empathy would protect LGBTQ students from government overreach and religious persecution.
Empathy is the basis for the fair and equal treatment of all human beings. This is a concept lost on those who are still convinced that “all men are created equal” applies only to white men.
Evangelicals are offended by being accused of a lack of empathy. They insist they do not hate LGBTQ people. They offer a Gnostic empathy that concerns itself with the salvation of the “soul,” that claims to love the sinner and hate the sin.
This perverted empathy believes the gay person has to become heterosexual and the trans person has to detransition. A conversion is required. The message is: “We love you if you change.” Or, “We welcome you, but you have to become one of us.”
That’s why the rare stories of people identifying as transgender and then going back are so celebrated: They fit the vision of the world conservative evangelicals must have to sleep at night.
Meanwhile, they pay no heed to the vast numbers of people who are “detransitioning” from the church and Christian faith because of the twisted faith being taught in the churchhouse and statehouse.
The numbers are staggering as people walk away from churches that are too angry, too harsh, too uncaring toward others.
Rodney Kennedy
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 10 books, including his latest, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy.
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