Thinking Out Loud with Alan Shlemon - Are Transgender People Fixing God’s Mistakes?

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

Alan responds to a tweet that suggests that transgender people are fixing God’s mistakes.

Are transgender people fixing God's mistakes by changing their body to match how they feel inside? Well, that's what I want to talk to you about on this January 2022 episode of my podcast, Thinking Out Loud with Alan Schliemann. God is not perfect. In fact, according to a tweet by this transgender ally, sometimes God makes mistakes that we can fix. And so I want you to see actually, or listen to what she actually wrote in her tweet,

the entirety of her tweet. She said this. God made you a brunette, yet you are now a blonde. God gave you bad vision, yet you fixed it with glasses. God gave you crooked teeth, yet you straightened them with braces. Trans people change the outside to match the inside just like you do. Sit down, Jesus said to. Okay, so that's her whole tweet.

And so allegedly, on this view, God could have given you the wrong body. And fixing that mistake is just like getting glasses or braces. Now, this thinking is, I would say, mistaken for a number of reasons. I'm just going to mention four of them, all right? So here's the first mistake. This particular challenge or claim presumes God makes mistakes, right? But think about this. Not everything that exists was intentionally made that way by our creator, right? Genesis explains that God made all things good. Now, what scripture also teaches is that though, is that creation became tainted by sin and God's perfect design was broken. And so this is why, for example, babies are sometimes born with missing

limbs, or sometimes they have impaired immune systems that don't function correctly, or sometimes babies are born with Down syndrome. That's not God's intent, however. Humanity is the one who sinned and corrupted creation along with it. And so birth defects, whether they're anatomical or physiological in nature, are not God's fault, but are ultimately the result of mankind's sin. So that's the first mistake, okay, with this particular claim about the transgender impulse. Here's a second mistake. That tweet wrongly compares the transgender desire to change one's body to repairing a damaged organ, right? Now, think about this for a moment. Every body part is designed to function a certain way,

okay? Every body part has a teleology, a way that it's meant to operate, right? So for example, eyes are meant to see and teeth are meant to grind food. And so getting glasses or getting LASIK surgery, for example, is meant to restore the eyes to their original purpose, which is to see clearly. So I remember, for example, many years ago, my son, he was born with a droopy eyelid that impaired his ability to see. And so what a doctor did was he performed a surgery and lifted his eyelid so that it wouldn't obscure his vision, and therefore his eye could function properly. Now notice, this was not an attempt to, as a transgender person would say,

change the outside to match the inside, right? It had nothing to do with that. It was simply a surgery to correct an eyelid deformity and to restore an organ to its original design. Now, transgender ideation is not concerned with correcting a malfunctioning organ, right? Or to restore that organ to its original design. Rather, the transgender person wants to oftentimes alter normally functioning body systems, like through hormones, or sometimes even amputate healthy and fully functioning sex organs.

or sometimes even amputate healthy and fully functioning sex organs. So that's the second mistake. Third mistake is that this tweet wrongly presumes that one's internal perception is accurate. So think about this for a moment. The tweet claims that transgender people merely want to change their body to match how they feel inside. But why assume a person's thinking about their body is always correct? There's many conditions where a person's internal state does not match their body and it's their perception, not their body, that's mistaken. So, for example, some people wrongly perceive their body to be fat even when they are thin. And so what you have here is a mismatch between their mind and their body.

But notice it's their mind, it's their inside that's mistaken. So why automatically presume that the internal perception of someone who identifies as transgender is correct? It's possible that they should alter their mind to match their body and not vice versa. And the fourth problem with this tweet is that it begs the question. Now, this is perhaps the most serious problem with this tweet. And begging the question, or sometimes it's referred to question. Now, this is perhaps the most serious problem with this tweet. And begging the question, or sometimes it's referred to as circular reasoning, this is a logical error in which you presume something is true

instead of proving it to be true. And in this case, the conclusion the author wants you to believe is that it's normal for a transgender person to change their body to match their inside, right? But what evidence does she provide for such a claim? Well, none, right? She offers some illustrations, like correcting vision with glasses

or bad teeth with braces, to describe what she means. That's all she does is just give these illustrations. But I want you to understand that illustrations are not arguments. Illustrations don't prove anything. All the illustrations do is they illustrate. In other words, they make an idea more clear by describing it in a different way. And her claim is that altering your sex organs to make them match how you feel inside is similar to wearing glasses or getting braces, which I would argue is an incredibly dubious claim.

Okay. But even if wearing glasses was analogous to amputating a healthy sex organ, which I don't grant, all the author has done is provide an illustration to attempt to more clearly describe what she is talking about. But whether it's right to cosmetically alter your body and or your sex organs to match how you feel is precisely what needs to be proven. This tweet, however, simply assumes that claim is true and then provides poor analogies to illustrate it. And so the author does nothing to provide a reason why such a claim is true in then provides poor analogies to illustrate it. And so the author does nothing to provide a reason why such a claim is true in the first place. That to me is the biggest problem with this tweet. And so these four missteps in thinking are evidence that people are not thinking clearly about important matters, right? No one denies that some people experience what they

perceive as a mismatch between their body and their mind. Neither does anyone deny that such a person is experiencing a very, very serious condition. In fact, Christians recognize that these people are valuable image bearers of God who need our love, who need our compassion, and who need our care. But where we diverge from our secular thinking friends, some of whom, by the way, claim to be Christian, is their belief that God erred with their body and that their inside experience is inerrant, and that the solution lies with hormone treatment or some sort of radical cosmetic alterations. The only hope for transgender individuals, I believe, and indeed

everyone, is not for an external change, but an internal change. And it's not about a transformation of their body, but rather it's about a transformation of their soul. That is what is greatly needed, and only the great physician can accomplish that. Well, that's all I have for you today. If you enjoy these short podcast topics that I talk about here, be sure to rate or review my podcast on iTunes or wherever you are listening to this podcast. And thank you for listening.

I look forward to talking to you next time.