This is not an article about grammar, which I assumed most are delighted to hear. But it is on something more complex. It is about gender specific pronouns, their use and how that relates to the pursuit of truth.
Last week, on a physician assistant (my profession) professional online forum, I posted a link to a Fox News headline where a physician assistant was fired in Michigan when she would not agree to follow the hospital policy of using a patient’s preferred pronoun, even if that pronoun is inconsistent with their congenital sexual morphology, or refer patients for transgender therapies. She stated her reason was because she was a Christian (evangelical, I assume). Now to give Ms Kloosterman all due fairness, I am sure the situation was more complex than a simple brush over of the facts in the media. She was fired and the exact reasons are not clear, but she also reports a hostile response to her initial concerns. But putting all that complexity aside, I just wanted to focus on the issue of using patients’ desired pronouns. I left that post to “soak” (think crab pot) for a few days and went back to see the discussion and to comment.
I was not surprised that evangelical Christians came to this Michigan PA’s defense, but the argument that the main Christian supporter used, did surprise me a bit. She said that the reason she would not use the preferred pronoun, if it is inconsistent with the patient’s sexual anatomy at birth (I’m not sure how you would know this in many cases), is because she is one of the few people (and I think she included all evangelicals in this “few”) who still believe in absolute truth.
I had not posted any opinion on that forum up to that point, but I knew that I was not in favor of the Michigan PA’s viewpoint in the story or the supporting evangelicals. So, to have someone with an opposing opinion to mine, stake out that the difference between her and people like me was the belief in absolute truth, was like a poke in the eye. Actually, it was like a poke in both eyes, Three Stooges type.
The one theme that has been behind much of my writing and thinking since 1990 is the quest for absolute truth. I am speaking of the classical Greek idea of truth, that which is consistent with reality. This quest, for me at least, transcends religion and into a unifying field of knowledge of all of reality, including fields such as science (and thus my series of articles on an old earth). I don’t like lies. I don’t like it when I lie. I don’t like it when religious people or politicians lie. My mantra has been, if God exist, he lives in reality. The better we see reality, the better we can see God. The more we are delusional about reality, the foggier God becomes. But it is not just about God.
I do admit, along with the commenter on that forum, that we live in an age when truth has become relative. We all see it in politics. Stolen elections with no evidence? Claim that vaccines are dangerous with no evidence of that? With the invent of social media’s soundbites, perception is more important than reality, so lies do work.
On the conservative side of Christianity, the relativity of truth has come with the merging of Christian ideas with conservative political and American nationalistic ideas. While on the surface, American white evangelicals see a harmony between the two, these do ideologies make strange bedfellows. I could share a thousand data points to prove my point, but one example is that the main agenda of the conservative political movement (and virtually all political movements) is the lust for power. So, when you have two philosophies with opposing fundamental ideas, conservative political seeking power, while Jesus said, his kingdom is not of this world, then to merge them, you have to sacrifice the aspiration for absolute truth. The pioneers who first mix these opposing viewpoints in the same pot may not see the consequences of the loss of truth, but it will haunt their philosophical descendants. For with the loss of absolute truth, eventually comes the loss of meaning and ethics, and we are seeing that already.
On the liberal side of Christianity, some would call “new age Christianity” there is a merging of two opposites, orthodox Christianity, and eastern religions, most notable, Buddhism. As I’ve said many times, I can respect, philosophically, a Christian and a Buddhist, but I have no respect for the blenders, because it makes no sense. Again, I could list a thousand data point of incompatibilities, but I will look at one simple one, and that is in metaphysics.
Christianity’s concept of reality (along with all the major monotheistic religions and with much of science) is that reality is real, time is real and linear, history is real and is also linear. But the basis of Buddhism is that reality is an illusion as is time and history. This has major ramifications in how you approach life.
The major tenet of Buddhism is that strife comes from desire. To escape desire, one attempts to transcend this illusion of reality. For one practical example, meditation exist in both Christianity and Buddhism, however, they have profoundly different goals. For the Buddhist, they meditate to transcend the world around them, such as the single word or mantra. Sometimes it is the focusing on the irrational as the classical sound of one hand clapping. On the other hand, Christian meditation has traditionally been rational. You sit and meditation on a question, “How can I be a better husband?” Or you might meditate on the nature of God, but not with the intention of removing yourself from reality, but to close in on it. Muslims often meditate on the adjectival names of God in the same way.
My point in this, just like on the conservative side, to merge two opposing viewpoints, there has to be the sacrifice of objective truth. And like with the conservative Christian counterparts, eventually you must pay the piper, with the total abandonment of morals and meaning. The pioneers into this blended religion still talk of issues such as justice and cruelty, but eventually they must go silent. You cannot have a basis of seeking justice or opposing cruelty where there is no truth. In contrast, I will mention that the atheist believes in absolute truth of reality, but in a cosmos without a basis for morality or meaning, beyond an illogical existential approach. But I will stop here and go back to my main point about pronouns.
Looking at Pronouns from the Viewpoint of Truth
The argument that the evangelicals make, beyond the banner “Believing in Absolute Truth” is that God created humans as man and woman and then said that creation is good (see: (Gen. 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). Therefore, if someone was born with male genitalia but feels like they are a woman (gender dysphoria) or vice versa, they are in sin because they are rejecting God’s design. So, if they have a penis but prefer to be called “her” or “they,” then that is likewise sin. Other conservative Christians (or so I assume) then moved into the issue as a mental health problem, that if you have a penis, but want to function as a woman, or vice versa, you are “delusional.” Delusional is another name for being inconsistent with absolute truth. Then for the medical provider to use the pronoun that the patient prefers is enabling that delusion. Regarding that point, it is not “delusional” to feel feminine while in a male body. However, it would be delusional to think you have a penis when you don’t, but that’s not their assertion.
Side-Bar Digression, Religious Mining for Law
I believe that I am entitled to be critical of the evangelical movement because I squandered almost half my life there, ending in 1990. But I observed, even while I was an evangelical, that our impetus for Biblical studies, was mining the Bible for law and quotable knowledge to impress our peers. I suspect that other religions do this. I know that Islam does. So, we read scripture to see where we need to obey laws better and to show us where other, outsiders, disobey these same laws (and fuel for the cultural wars). We told ourselves that we did this because we love God so much that we just want to obey him. But I think something more sinister was at work. None of us are as good (morally) as we think, however, our value is far greater than we can Imagine.
None of us are as good (morally) as we think, however, our value is far greater than we can Imagine.
J. Michael Jones
I’ve said before that when we boil everything down, the MO of all our behavior as self-worth. People only put a bullet in their heads when they calculate they are worthless. So, by having a litany of rules that we obey, which we have convinced ourselves are from the Bible, we evangelicals calculated a higher self-worth, at least in God’s eyes. Moreover, when we created a greater chasm between ourselves and those who do not obey this litany of rules, we had a greater sense of self-worth via juxtapositioning.
This psychological predisposition renders us vulnerable to seeing laws in the Bible where none exist. I will use the number one evangelical moral issue as an example, which of is abortion. Gay marriage a close second. The Bible doesn’t mention outright abortion, while it does allude to miscarriage in a few places. It is a big leap to assume that a single-cell zygote is fully human, and you will not find any such claim in the Bible. You could make the case, even from old Hebrew writings, that the zygote and later fetus is valuable, but not fully human. Yet, the evangelical makes this huge assumption that it is fully human because then they can apply all the Biblical laws regarding murder. The Bible is clear that murder is bad. I will close this thought with a statement that I’ve made before here, the problem with women who use abortion as a form of birth control do not see the intrinsic value in a fetus as an emerging human being. The problem with the anti-abortionists, is that they don’t see the intrinsic value in a woman who is in crisis.
Looking at Real Absolute Truth
Now back to our story. In the case of gender identity, the evangelical makes a huge leap that the way God created us (the way we were born) was of his perfect design and any conflict with that is sin. This idea gets psychological traction because it separates those bad people who don’t like the sexual identity they were born with from us good people who do. Therefore, in this process of law mining, we start with a simple statement about creation and make huge assumptions that it is sin to not like the gender we were born with. To claim to be fully one gender in the body of the opposite is the paramount sin in that thinking.
If you agree with the statement that it is sin to feel incompatible with the gender state you were born in, then, for the sake of logic, you must then apply that idea to all genetic features. This logic is the beginning of real absolute truth. It is equally sin to dye your hair a different color, if you dye it blond as a young woman, or dye-out the gray as an older man. It is also sin to fight alopecia. Don’t even mention Botox or fillers. Don’t get me started on breast augmentation, coolsculpting, or liposuction. It is also sin to fight more ominous states of birth such as crippling birth defects. Goodbye Shriners, you are doing the work of the devil with those kids! You can even extrapolate that it is even sin for people like me to fight cancer or other diseases if they have even an inkling of genetic predisposition to that disease state. That’s the way God made us … or is it?
It is also an essential doctrine of Christianity that the cosmos is no longer perfect. In many ways we are square pegs in round holes and on many levels. Why is the Christian surprised when there is a misalignment between gender identity and external genital anatomy? Why do they use that misalignment as grounds for hating a whole class of people?
For the sake of time, I will not diverge across the entire spectrum of the non-genderization of pronouns. Subscribers of those views have different motivations, even those who are completely content with their birth sex. I will even admit that you will find those few individuals who were just bored in life and to create attention and meaning they decided to pursue becoming the opposite sex. If those people exist, I suspect they are the rare minority. In the same way, I suspect that there are atheists who, just for the fun of it, are pretending to be evangelicals, but again, that must be rare. Personally, I don’t see the “fun” in fundamentalism.
I will mention one more area in this pronoun dispute, and that is the ones we use for God. I will only say, if I were to ever write another non-fiction book (may God forbid) it would have a cover of a grandmother from the 1950s and a little girl sitting beside her and the title would be, No Suzie, God Does Not Have a Dick.
The more typical person with gender dysphoria gives a compelling testimony about when they were a very young child, being so distraught with their gender anatomy that they were suicidal. The Christian is the first person to assert that the personal testimony is a valuable and an evidential tool for finding truth. There is something there, a misalignment that goes far beyond “liberal helicopter parents who plant ideas of sex change in their children,” as I heard one evangelical on TV say.
Looking at the issue of pronouns, I want to wander back to a more practical application as I finish this up. Nowhere does the Bible say it is a sin to not like your gender, to use pronouns that are not in agreement with what lives in your pants. It is this process of law-mining that a conclusion is made, a messy form of Biblical exogenesis.
If I were still in practice, would I use the preferred pronoun for a patient, if I knew that pronoun was incongruent with their genitalia? Hell yeah! I would because I love and respected my patients. If a patient told me to call them “Rainbow Trout,” and that would not be so unusual as I had several patients who were native American, I would call them such. I would not make it an issue of my righteousness, to be praised by my Christian subculture or to be made a hero of the culture wars on Fox News. I don’t mean to imply that’s what this PA in Michigan is doing, but it would be what I would be doing back in my evangelical days if I were in her shoes.
What is the cause of gender dysphoria? That is a complex question, and no one knows for sure. This is too long already to discuss the research here. But I’ve heard the testimonies of many of these people, including those who were going through sex reassignment therapy and surgery and I am convinced it has an organic basis.
In closing, I want to say that I do not write these articles in order to persuade someone of a different opinion to follow mine. I certainly don’t write and post these things to argue with anyone. Religious and political beliefs are deeply held with deep emotional ties. However, I do write to defend those who share my views, but may not have the time to put their defense into thoughtful words and to stir thinking. If you have evidence that I have overlooked, such as a Bible verse that actually says, “Thy shall not be called by a gender pronoun that is different than your genitalia,” share that in comments. I will reconsider my positions bases on the evidence, because I believe in absolute truth.
Mike
J. Michael Jones
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