Feeling a bit disconnected in your walk with Christ?
Well, Pastor Greg Laurie has a great new book called What Every Growing Christian Needs to Know that'll help. Let's say you're feeling lethargic and tired. You know, if you have a diet of social media and you don't take time for the Word of God, this is going to have a damaging effect.
So this is just one of the things we talk about in this new book called What Every Growing Christian Needs to Know. Available at harvest.org. Speaking of lifestyles, the whole trend movement has gained such momentum.
Some have described it, and I think accurately so, as a social contagion. Yes. Where, you know. Platforms like TikTok, others, you know, that this message is being promoted, and suddenly some young person says, You know, I'm a man trapped in a woman's body or a woman trapped in a man's body. And then they find people in the medical community.
And all these people are supposed to be trustworthy, but they're literally encouraging these kids to get these life-altering surgeries. And then I think what's even worse, or at least equally as bad, we have parents. In a form of virtue signaling, I think, encouraging their kids. I mean, you see these Hollywood celebrities. I saw one the other day.
She said, Oh, two of my kids are trans. Give me a break. What is going on in these homes? Why is this? this kind of thinking spreading so rapidly.
Well, as we document in the book, there's been like a 4,000 to 6,000% increase in young girls claiming to be boys over the past decade or so, Greg. And as Abigail Schreier pointed out in her landmark book in 2020 called Irreversible Damage. How the transgender craze is seducing our daughters. She pointed out this is almost completely driven by social media. It's a social contagion.
There's nothing new in the water, there's nothing new biology-wise. It's a social contagion. And as you said, some of it is virtue signaling. And when you continue to affirm people that this is a good thing to do, many of them decide to go do it. And now you've got people who are D-transitioners, like our mutual friend Chloe Cole, who's saying, I was lied to when I was 15.
My breasts were cut off when I was 15. And now she's, you know, 20 and she's suing her doctors because she couldn't give informed consent when she was 15. It's madness. And by the way, in the book, in the War and Reality book, we point out how illogical this is. Because on one hand, you'll hear people who are going down this road, Greg, or behind this ideology, they will say things like, There's an infinite number of genders, and gender is fluid.
To which we respond, transgenderism wouldn't even be conceptual. Conceptually possible unless the genders were fixed. Why? Because if I'm a man and I think I'm a woman, I have to have some idea what a man is and some idea what a woman is to know that I have a mismatch between my biology and my psychology. If men didn't exist and women didn't exist, there'd be no way to know I had gender dysphoria.
Secondly, if I try and take the impossible step of trying to change my gender, which is impossible to do, but if I try it anyway, again, I'd have to have some idea what a man is and some idea what a woman is to try and make the transition.
So it's completely self-contradictory. And it goes against from the Garden of Eden. Where God says, I made male and female. Yes. And it's good, right?
Yet people are trying to say that they can actually change that biological reality. It's impossible. You can't change your biology. You can change your mind, but you can't change your biology.
So if there's a mismatch between your biology and your mind, your mind needs to change, not your biology. Very good.
So let's just say there's a young woman or a young man who thinks, oh, wow, I'm a woman trapped in a man's body, vice versa. What would you see to them right now?
Well, we have a whole list of questions in the book, The War on Reality, to help people. It's very practical.
So, say you're. Teenager comes to you and says, Mom, Dad, I'm trans. You don't want to freak out. You don't want to say, What are you crazy? No, no, no, that's not.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. First thing you want to ask, first thing you want to say to them is, thank you for telling me, honey. Can I just ask you a few questions? When you say you're trans, what do you mean by that? See if they can explain it.
And what happened that made you feel this way? Because Walt Heyer, who was a man who tried to live as a woman for eight years and then got saved and came back to biological reality. He runs the ministry. And he has interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of people. And he says this: whenever I ask that question, what happened that made you feel this way?
100% of the time. These young people point to an event. They're all sexual abuse. Yeah. Yeah.
Often. It's sexual abuse. Or something they saw on the internet that made them go, oh, wow. Oh, wow. Yeah.
Also, a question like this. Um, when did you start feeling this way? And should you always follow your feelings? And do feelings ever change? Because you know, honey, last month you were not trans.
Now you're saying you are. Do you think your feelings may change again? And if you look at the data, they do change. 96% of people that have this, by the time they're 26, they've grown out of it completely. About 80%, by the time they're 18, they've grown out of it completely.
And what we say to people is: it's normal to feel odd when you're going through puberty because you are making a transition from a child to an adult. Very true.
So it's normal to feel odd.
So we have to tell young people: hey, this is normal. If you're feeling discontent, this is completely normal. The solution is not surgery. In fact, those that get the surgery, they have an initial honeymoon period where they feel better. But the longest study ever done.
A 10-year longitudinal study where they track the same people for 10 years. 10 years after the surgery, there's an absolute explosion in suicide for these people. See, that's the opposite of what they say. They'll say, no, you need to let them get the surgery, otherwise, they'll commit suicide. And you're seeing the opposite as the case.
The opposite. By the way. Think about this too. If somebody is threatening suicide because they can't get so-called. transitionary Uh, care of some kind.
They call it gender-affirming care, which is a euphemism, obviously. They have other issues. Yeah. Right. They have a mental health issue.
Anyone who is. who is contemplating suicide. They have a mental health issue. They have a spiritual issue. They need counseling.
They don't need a scalpel. You don't fix a mental health problem. in most cases with surgery. You fix it with prayer, counseling, sometimes medication. But you don't fix it with surgery.
And The people that that especially do this to children. In fact, The clinics over in the UK have closed, Greg. Yes. You know why they've closed? Because the lawsuits are coming out now, and these people know they're not going to be able to pay the fines from the lawsuits.
And so they're closing down. They're saying, no, this isn't the right thing to do. And it's financially going to be draining. Although here in the U.S., there are still some people trying to do this. They're making a lot of money on it, but once the lawsuits begin, it may close it down completely, thankfully, especially for children.
Hey, everybody, thanks for listening to my podcast. Before you go, I wanted to let you know about the important work we're doing here at Harvest. You know, we've had the same goal these last 50 years, which is simply this. We want to know God and we want to make him known. And we do that in a lot of ways.
Documentary films, animation, radio, television, large-scale evangelistic events, and more. If you want to be a part of what we're doing to fulfill the great commission, you can support us with whatever you can give at harvest.org slash donate. Again, that's harvest.org slash donate. And thanks so much.
