‘Back to the Future' day has passed with lots of discussion not just about how well the film predicted
2015, but also about the changes we can look forward to in another 25 years’
time. While much was made of the technological changes the biggest surprises
for Marty, fast forwarding from the 1980’s, would surely have been the social
ones. For without doubt the biggest single cultural change has been the new (First)
world order regarding sexuality. In just two decades homosexuality has moved
from the margins of society to having mainstream cultural recognition and
indeed celebration. The move to legal civil partnerships and then to same-sex
marriage has been remarkable – for it to have happened in such a small space of
time is really quite astonishing.
It is a reminder that
culturally anything really is possible and that the societal norms of 2040 may
be staggeringly removed from those we assume at the present time. So are there
any clues as to where we might be heading next? I suspect that one good
indicator of forthcoming cultural change would be to see what movie and
television projects are currently being pitched to media companies. After all
the current slew of programmes and films generating debate and shaping popular
thinking must have started life, in some cases, several years ago.
Transgender the new frontier
What is clear is that with
homosexuality firmly established in the mainstream the new frontier for culture
re-shapers is now gender itself. Recent months have seen a succession of
stories and programmes in the media concerning transgender. BBC 5-Live interviewed
an 11 year old girl starting high school as a boy,
Louis Theroux has been looking at transgender kids,
Channel 4 have a series of documentaries running on the subject,
a new transgender sitcom ‘Boy meets Girl’ has been commissioned by BBC2, transgender is now an ‘East Enders’ storyline,
and Hollywood A-lister Eddie Redmayne starred in this year’s release ‘The Danish Girl’, the story of an early pioneer of transgender surgery.
The approach to the issue
is the same in all these presentations – to be supportive, to show the bravery
of those involved (which many of them undoubtedly are), to render churlish and
ignorant any voices of opposition, to win the sympathy of the viewer and to
make it mainstream. It is no surprise then that ‘transphobia’ is becoming the latest addition to popular vocabulary or that, as Germaine Greer has shown, it’s the latest flashpoint in the debate over free speech.
The New Me
Transgender feelings aren’t a new phenomenon but the advance of modern surgery and hormone
treatments have made it possible to turn such desires into a reality (of
sorts). However, lying behind the medical issue is a much deeper philosophical
issue concerning the nature of humanness itself. It is the notion that
sexuality and in this case physicality are ‘plastic’ aspects of personhood.
That is, ‘I’ am not to be defined by my gender when it comes either to
relationships or who ‘I’ actually am. So my physicality is arbitrary – just a
random imposition of biology which may or may not suit me and, like a set of
clothes that I may find hideous, ought to be changeable.
So on current trends it is
entirely feasible that by 2040 many children will routinely dress and attend
school in a gender different from their biology. Gender based language and
pronouns may be phased out in public life. Names may increasingly be unisex as
giving a child a ‘gender specific’ name will be frowned upon or seen as
constraining them. Switching gender identity between certain situations or
phases of life might become commonplace.
Responding to a Cultural Tsunami
For Bible-believing
Christians this is another wave of the tsunami of cultural change experienced over
recent decades. More and more churches are having to adjust to and work out how
to interact with transgender situations. But how should we respond? A question that
might, understandably, fill us with a sense of dread and/or weariness. After
all we look back at the campaigns against Civil Partnerships and Same Sex
Marriage and see how they were swept aside. Like the boy crying ‘wolf’ we feel
our protestations have worn thin in the ears of those around us – especially
as, for the time being at least, society has not collapsed into chaos despite having
ignored us.
Well there are various
ways we could go. One would be to demand legislation to prohibit people from
making transgender changes, at the very least to lobby against any moves to
accommodate transgender people in mainstream society. The two-fold problem with
this approach is in trying to impose a Christian worldview on a non-Christian
society. Secondly, and precisely
because of the first reason, it just won’t ‘wash’ with a fragmented neo-pagan
society of competing interests.
We could of course do
nothing, say nothing and just resign ourselves to further inexorable moral
confusion. That, however, would be an abdication of our responsibility to be
‘salt and light’ in the world, to seek the lost, and to hold out the 'word of
life' in a floundering and confused generation. So how do we stand for
Biblical truth without presenting ourselves as being oppressive towards transgender
people or anyone else?
Let me suggest we firstly have
to recognise that there are those around us who genuinely struggle with their
gender. For such their gender is an issue of confusion and sometimes real pain
and unhappiness. We have to accept that science and the government have given
such people the option to radically alter their physicality and to live in an
outwardly changed gender. However, that people have those options should not be
our first point of concern.
There is an alternative
Rather than a ‘slam it and
ban it’ approach we need to lovingly but also boldly make the case that there is another
way someone can go in such situations. As Christians we want to say that there
is an alternative to fear and self-loathing, to injections in
the stomach, drastic surgery, relationship trauma, family distress, ongoing physical
and mental health problems and many of the other not untypical consequences of
pursuing gender change.
That alternative, of
course, is the Gospel. The Gospel that reveals the God who made each person –
who made them male and who made them female. The God who didn’t make a mistake when
He did that. The Gospel that explains that we live in a fallen world and because
of that there is no aspect of our humanness that isn’t messed up to a greater
or lesser degree. The Gospel that shows that God is nonetheless committed to
recovering this world and restoring men and women to being what He intended
them to be – good and glorious, happy in their own skins and able to enjoy Him
for ever. The Gospel that doesn’t oppress anyone, but offers men and women a
way to find their true and most satisfying identity in Jesus Christ whether
in 1989, 2015 or 2040.
