The kids who are gender non-conforming, the ones who don't quite fit and who know they don't, and who are feeling gender distress because of it, they are being targeted. That's professor, author, and speaker Nancy Piercy sharing her perspective that devaluing the body has wreaked havoc in our culture. This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly and thanks for joining us. I'm John Fuller and this episode is once again going to address some mature themes and so probably not advisable for younger listeners.
That's always a good warning, John. We had a fascinating discussion with Nancy last time about the hidden philosophy that has caused so much heartache and confusion in our culture today and we talked about how separating from our bodies, kind of that understanding that the soul and the spirit are over here and the body, well that's up for grabs. And it plays out in different ways in the culture and Nancy did a beautiful job describing that when it comes to the transgendered issue, the homosexual issue, and even the hookup culture that I can separate my emotions from my body and the experience of my body.
All destructive things that aren't what God intends for us being made in His image, male and female. And today we're going to continue that discussion, go a little deeper. If you missed the discussion last time, go to the website or get the app and you can listen to the full content of that discussion.
And again, we'll pick up today and go a little deeper. Nancy Piercy, as I said, is back with us. She's a professor of apologetics and a scholar in residence at Houston Christian University. She's written a number of great books and the one that forms the foundation for our discussion today is called Love Thy Body, Answering Hard Questions About Life and Sexuality. Get a copy of the book from us here, call 800-AFAMILY or stop by our website.
The link is in the show notes. Nancy, welcome back. Always good to have you.
Thank you. Good to be here. I so admire your work over the years. You know, we haven't had you here often, but I watch and I read what you put out in articles and of course the books that you've written, your association with a wonderful mutual friend, the late Chuck Colson, who was such a deep thinker. I remember having lunch with Chuck Colson.
It was so good. And he was talking about the classic literature as he always did, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. And you know, I was tracking with him. I'd read some of those, but he looked at me and said, you're just like a regular guy, aren't you? I said, yes, I am.
He goes, stay that way. But I am always intrigued because I think it's so important for us to understand as best as we can a biblical context for the world around us. In fact, we're partnering with the Colson Center on a new documentary film called Truth Rising.
It's coming out in September and this is exactly the kind of thing the film addresses, a biblical worldview and its impact on the culture. Because understanding God's truth about our bodies, our sexuality, the creation, the fall and redemption and sharing it with our neighbors is how we fix what's broken in the world. You don't have to be an intellectual.
I would put you in that class along with Chuck Colson. But this is for everybody to understand. And it's so wonderful when we have great, deep Christian thinkers who can observe what's happening and give it some context for the rest of us in the church. So I'm very grateful to you for that. Thank you.
Well, thank you. It's good to have you here in that context. Let me ask you as the author, let's go right to that, this concept that we talked about last time. Just refresh the thesis, if you will, that what you see is a separation of those contexts of how God created us, the body over here, spirit and soul over here, and how that is wreaking havoc, as John said, through the culture today and how the LGBT movement is using it, how the abortion rights movement has been using this to kind of separate the body from the rest of God's creation. Do you know, I think I'll start with a quote from a book, I think it was the first book to come out on an academic level defending transgenderism. And of course, like you said, I have to read those guys, because what the academics say is what filters down to ordinary people. They tend to be trendsetters. Yes. Yeah.
It will filter down. Plato said, philosophers should rule the world, and they do about 200 years after they die. Yeah, that's really true. And so that's why it's good to know secular worldviews, because our children are picking up secular worldviews. Whether they're in public school or in Christian school or homeschool, they are picking up, they're absorbing secular ideas.
And so we need to train them in how to have a critical grid. But here was an academic Princeton University professor writing a book defending transgenderism. And to my surprise, she first started by acknowledging that transgenderism involves inner division, inner conflict, self-estrangement, self-alienation, because your gender is separate from your biology. But then she said, that doesn't matter. And here's why. She said, because what, this is a direct quote, what the body tells us is nothing. It has no meaning at all.
Wow. So that's the heart of what's being taught all the way down to first graders today. Well, think of the juxtaposition of that with Paul saying, God's nature is clearly in front of you. I mean, I would suggest Paul is saying the opposite.
He's saying the opposite. That by observing nature, you see God. And it's evident to observation that living things are structured for a purpose. The eyes are for seeing, ears are for hearing, wings are for flying, fins are for swimming.
In fact, the development of the entire organism is driven by an inbuilt plan or blueprint, DNA. And so science is on our side when we say our bodies do have a purpose. We are meant to take our identity from our body. We are meant to live in tune with our biological identity and that the sticking point, you know, that we, the thing that we can critique the non-Christian worldview on is that all of these secular worldviews deny the body, denigrate the body. They have a low view of the body. And if your body is meaningless, that's a big part of who you are. No wonder young people are becoming more and more depressed. They're being told that their body is not, you know, has no higher purpose or dignity.
Yeah. And again, one of the things we want to do here, focus is to equip the listeners to be able to have these discussions with people. The secularists, the atheists, the non-God oriented folks have just been so aggressive getting out there. And the church generally has just somehow like confused courtesy and kindness with tolerance. And we just kind of back up and we don't confront that. And you don't have to be mean spirited to confront these things. Confronting something means speak the truth to it and hopefully be equipped. So that's, that's why we're talking with you about these concepts. Well, it's a lot easier to tell people the Christian worldview, if you can say it in a positive way, you know, if you can say, well, we're, the Christian ethic is based on honoring your body, living in tune with your body.
You know, let me give you... That sounds so positive. One of my favorite quotes was from a young woman who lived as a lesbian for many years and then became a Christian. And today she's married to a man, you have to say that, married to a man and has two kids.
And she said, the turning point came when I came to trust that God had made me female for a reason. And I wanted to, this is a direct quote, I wanted to honor my body by living in accord with the creator's design. Right.
Okay. That's the positive language. That's how we present it to our kids and to our secular neighbors.
And really from a Christian perspective, that's an honest person. Let's move to the NPR interview because this gets back to the book content. We're finally back on track, but NPR, you had an exchange with them. They were going, they did an interview with you until they asked a question. You gave an answer that they, it felt like they couldn't handle, but what, what was that exchange about?
Yeah, so it was an NPR program in San Francisco, which I thought could be challenging anyway. But it was a pre-interview where the producer kind of fills you out and he asked me about my views on abortion. And he himself commented that most people think abortion is okay until the fetus becomes a person. And I said, well, that's, there's a lot of philosophical baggage in that phrase because you're assuming that the body, you know, the fetus can be biologically human, but not a person. I said, that's a very fragmented view of the human being, very fractured view that you could somehow divide the person and the body. I said the pro-life view is holistic because what we're saying is the body participates in the dignity and value of the whole person. And he didn't have an answer.
I mean, there's silence. So then I continued, I said the pro-choice view is exclusive. It says some people don't measure up.
They don't make the cut. They don't qualify for the status of personhood. I said the pro-life view is inclusive. You know, as long as you remember the human race, you're in, you count, you have the full dignity of, philosophers put it this way, you're part of the moral community, meaning the people who we have a moral commitment to. Isn't that the contradiction for those people that believe they're the all-inclusive people yet they're not. And how, I mean, that's difficult. How do you peel those blinders off to say you're thinking you're inclusive, but you're actually exclusive. I was using liberal buzzwords, you know, like holistic and inclusive. By the way, the end of that story is a few days later, I got a phone call saying, well, we've decided to cancel that program. Yeah, there's a little manipulation.
We don't want somebody who has a deep thought on this from the other side. You tell a story also in the book of Martin Pistorius. What was significant about his story and how did that undergird this dignity concept? He had an unusual case where it's called locked in syndrome and that's where your brain can be perfectly alert and alive, but you can't move your body. And so he had a coma and then his brain came alive, but he couldn't move his body. And so people thought he was a vegetable. His parents were advised to just put him away in an institution and forget about him, but his father refused.
His father got him up every day and bathed him and fed him and took him to a daycare center for disabled people. And then his mother, even in a moment of frustration in his presence actually said, I wish you would just die. And he heard it. They didn't know his brain was completely alive and active. He just couldn't communicate. He just couldn't communicate. It's locked down syndrome. Anyway, it was finally a very sensitive therapist noticed that he was making very, very slight eye movements and so on.
So she had him tested into their very, to their shock. His brain was completely normal and he has since recovered and has a job and is married and is living an almost normal life. But the point is, what if people had said, oh look, he has no normal functioning.
He's not a person. This is where abortion and euthanasia are related. Abortion says you're not a person until you have a certain level of cognitive functioning. Euthanasia says if you lose a certain level of cognitive functioning, a certain level of mental ability, you are no longer a person. And this is what bioethicists actually argue there. They were once a person, but now they are only a body as one bioethicist put it. And at that point your treatment can be withheld. Your food and water can be discontinued.
Your organs can be harvested. These things are all interlocked and that's what we need to understand as Christians and they are philosophically connected by those that oppose a Christian view. And legally, you know, people say, well, why don't you just let people believe whatever they want to believe? Well, when the laws are changed, it affects everyone. So Roe v. Wade, the court essentially said some humans are not persons, you know, and who decides then? Well, ultimately whoever has the most power, you know, the state decides. Marriage, people used to think that marriage is a pre-political right.
It's natural that men and women come together and form families. But you know what the reasoning was in the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, the Obergefell decision, it argued that we need to acknowledge the personhood of same-sex people. And that means giving them, that means not paying attention to the biological connection, you know, like sex. Discard the body. Yeah, discard the body, the biological correspondence. So it reinforced that issue.
And that it's just a matter of emotional connection. And then the Bostock decision was transgender decision 2020. Again, the court basically said your personhood is what you choose. If you choose that you're a woman, if you choose you're a man, then legally that's what we recognize. We do not recognize. Your body is no longer legally recognized. Wow.
They don't care. And then the final one was parenthood. Parenthood, I think is the most influential and that is a Pavon decision in 2017, I think. I don't remember exactly.
It's in the book. There was a decision about same-sex parents. So in same-sex couples, at least one parent is not biologically related to the child.
Right. And so that person's name did not go on the birth certificate until the Supreme Court decision where they said, well, as long as you're legally married, then you qualify as a parent. So now you're not a parent because you're biologically related to your child.
You're a parent if the state says you are. So essentially the state has redefined parenthood apart from biology. Yeah. Wow. These are big, big things.
All of these legal decisions, rest on separating, saying the body, biology doesn't matter. Yeah. Nancy, again, these things are also interlinked.
I want to move to the biggest issue of the culture right now, it seems, is this issue of transgenderedism. And you have a story in the book with Brandon who had this issue of gender dysphoria. Describe his story and what you caught out of that. Yeah. I love to tell his story because it gives parents some sense of practically, you know, what do we do? So Brandon was a young boy who clearly had gender dysphoria from a very young age.
And it exists. And that was the more traditional form of it. Back when it was called transsexualism, it was almost purely male and it was usually very young.
And so he was the classic case. Before he was even walking, when he was still crawling, his babysitter said to his mother, he's too good to be a boy, by which she meant he was sweet, gentle, compliant, and the things we normally associate with girls. And when he was in preschool, when his mother picked him up invariably, he was playing with the little girls and not the little boys.
Already in elementary school, he was coming to his parents weeping and saying, I don't fit anywhere. You know, the boys like sports and video games, girls like emotions and relationships. And he said, I like what girls like. I'm interested in the things girls are. God should have made me a girl.
And this is very painful. By the time he was in his early teens, he was looking on the internet for a sex reassignment surgery. So what did his parents do? First of all, they made sure he knew that they loved him just the way he was. They did not try to change him.
I have a friend who is a former homosexual. And he said, when I was young, I liked music and art. And my father was baffled and kept trying to toughen me up by pushing me into sports and other more traditionally masculine activities. But Brandon's parents didn't do that. They said it's perfectly okay to be a gentle, sensitive, emotional boy. It does not mean you're really a girl. What his parents' favorite line, which they said over and over again, was it's not you that's wrong.
It's the stereotypes that are wrong. They took him through the gifts of the Spirit. Prophecy and teaching are not masculine, as we might expect, when mercy and service are not feminine. The text says that the Holy Spirit distributes them to individuals as he wills. And the fruit of the Spirit is not divided into pink boxes and blue boxes either.
Brandon had a difficult time. 80 to 90%, depending on the study, of kids with gender dysphoria outgrow it in puberty with the rush of hormones. You need to say that.
I mean, I've used that stat. 80% of gender dysphoric pre-teen and teens will come to the correct gender assignment by the time they're 18, 19 years old. Except they're natal sex.
Yeah, they're natal sex. I mean, that's a big statement because that's where the politics of this gets really messy. Because now you're recruiting these kids that would have normally grown out of their gender dysphoria. 80%. And we're trapping them in. Recognizing that 10 to 20% might have a truly lifelong issue.
But man, do you want to trap 80% of the kids for 20% of the issue? Well, Brandon did not change. He was a tougher case. But he went into about his mid-20s.
And then he finally concluded that, here's how he put it. He said, surgery would not give me what I want. It would not make me a girl. There's a very famous TED Talk by cardiologists and the famous line from it is, every cell has a sex. Every cell has a DNA that's either masculine or feminine.
XX, XY. Basically you cannot change every cell in your body. Although the way Brandon put it was a person is not a computer disk that you can erase and start over again.
Yeah. You know, Nancy, so much, and I've been thinking about this and writing about it myself, but so much of what we're talking about seems to be spiritual warfare toward women, specifically. And when you look at transgenderism, particularly, I'm thinking of that court case in California recently where a biological male who claimed to be a female was moved from a male prison to a female prison. And this person was in prison originally for sexual assault. And so when they moved him to a female prison, he was sexually abusing his prison cellmate, a woman. And she was complaining to the guards that they needed to help her to get her to safety because she was being sexually abused.
And they said, if you're not careful, we're going to slap hate crimes on top of your other crimes. Think of this poor woman, you know, who is serving her time, whatever she did, I don't even know. But this fact that they were putting her in harm's way, the emotional trauma of that, and that really, to me, illustrates this war against women, particularly in this area of gender dysphoria. So I guess the question is, how does abolishing biological sex harm women, even in your illustrations, and then ultimately all of us when it comes to universal human rights? Yes, well, fortunately, some feminists have picked up on this issue, because they recognize that if you cannot define what a woman is, then you cannot give them legal protection. You cannot legally protect a category of people if you cannot define that category. And that's what they're tripping on.
It's getting nonsensical. And you know, unfortunately, a lot of feminists do go along with the transgender. If you call something right, they'll say, oh, we're for it. But there are sometimes called gender critical feminists who are pointing out that the law is essentially being changed in such a way that you cannot defend women's rights. I'm actually in a group, it's called Hands Across the Aisle, and we have a public presence, but we also have a private presence so that we can talk to each other. And it's a group of conservative Christian women, and very radical, liberal, socialist, many of them lesbian women.
And we're coming together behind the scenes and writing sample legislation, writing op-ed pieces, and working together on this trans issue, because they recognize that women's rights are at stake. You know, they've been called TERFs. Have you heard that term? T-E-R-F. Tell me what it is. Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, T-E-R-F. It's meant as a slur. Trans exclusionary, right? Yeah.
Okay. But yet these are the feminists who have recognized that they've been fighting for women's rights all their lives, and now they can't even say the word woman. Well, and that's kind of the pretzel I'm talking about. Is this a spiritual observation that kind of the logic of those that aren't coming from a God-created perspective? Is it starting to fall in on itself? Are we seeing the implosion of worldly secular views that are beginning to make no sense because of the infighting between the L, the G, the T, the B?
I mean, you know, there's this division now created in the philosophy. Well, the cool thing is that now we have the growing numbers of detransitioners, and this is great because they can tell us they've been there and back. And many of them say, I had emotional, psychological issues that were not dealt with.
I was fast-tracked into transitioning and they are now coming back. They're suing the clinics. And as you know, about 25 states now have actually passed laws against medical interventions, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for minors, 25 states. Well, and in part because Europe has recognized that it does more harm than good. And I certainly applaud Europe for looking at the data, right? Let's give them a hand clap for looking at it and saying, okay, we're going to stop intervening. Yeah, and it's partly because they allowed it earlier. So they've seen it for a longer time.
Correct. And now they're coming to that same conclusion in the US, which again now kind of works against science. Sweden had the longest study and they found that young people who transitioned did not do better, that their suicide rates were actually higher.
But detransitioners, let me give you one story. So there's a girl who, I've had her interview, she had transitioned to a boy identity at age 11, has lived as a trans boy for three years, and then at age 14 reclaimed her identity as a girl. And here's what she said. The turning point came when I realized, direct quote, it's not conversion therapy to learn to love your body. And I thought even the secular people are seeing this, because this was on a very secular liberal website. And even secular people are beginning to say that, you'll see them calling it, transgender ideology is body hatred, or they'll say transgender ideology is biology denial.
Here's the ad application. If you're dealing with these children in your family, in your church, in your classroom, they are very emotionally fragile kids. And so they do need to be treated with gentleness and care. And frankly, I think that as Christians, another practical rule is, we need to be going out of our way to find these kids because they are being targeted. The kids who are gender nonconforming, the ones who don't quite fit and who know they don't and who are feeling gender distress because of it, they are being targeted.
I have a niece who was homeschooled until about fifth grade. And then when she went to public school, the kid said, you're gay, you're lesbian. She said, no, I'm not.
Yes, you are. In other words, she was a little bit more masculine in her presentation. And so, well, she wasn't from a Christian family, so she finally decided maybe they were right. And now she's a lesbian. But she was targeted by her classmates. Right. Recruited.
Recruited. And another niece, by the way, my brother's daughter, same thing. She was 11 years old. And she said, the kids are constantly asking each other, are you gay? Are you trans?
Because it's cool now. Nobody wants to be a boring old heterosexual. There are schools where at least 50% are non-binary. Non-binary is the safest one.
There's nothing to defend. So that's the most common non-binary. This is the culture we're living in. And Nancy, you've done a great job. We are at the end, but you've done a great job pulling this together, this thought that the body is consequential in our understanding of God's creation of us. And it's connected to every part, body, soul, and spirit. And the Lord intends for us, particularly as believers, to love thy body and understand the creation of the body and what it's meant for.
And to the best of our ability, to be able to speak that message to a world that is kind of disoriented now to this concept of your body being made in His image, male and female. And so I'm so grateful to you for re-enlightening us and talking about these core themes, your experiences as a professor. Thank you for being with us. Oh, thank you. It's been a joy.
So good. And I hope this is intriguing enough and thoughtful enough that you want a copy of the book. And if you order that through Focus, not the big retailers, all the proceeds go right back into helping families.
We don't pay those shareholders. Those dollars will go right back into helping families thrive in Christ. And so help us be part of the ministry, make a gift of any amount or make a monthly gift and a commitment that way. That's how Gene and I support the ministry. If you do that, we'll send you a copy of Nancy's book as our way of saying thank you for being part of the ministry.
Yeah. Donate generously as you can today and request that book when you call 800, the letter A in the word family, 800-232-6459. We'll have further details and links to additional articles that really relate to this topic at the website. And you'll find those links at focusonthefamily.com slash broadcast. Thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Your marriage can be redeemed, even if the fights seem constant, even if there's been an affair, even if you haven't felt close in years. No matter how deep the wounds are, you can take a step toward healing them with a hope restored marriage intensive. Our biblically based counseling will help you find the root of your problems and face challenges together. We'll talk with you, pray with you and help you find out which program will work best. Call us at 1-866-875-2915.
