As a professor of psychology at Regent University and author of several books on sexual identity aimed at evangelical audiences, Mark Yarhouse has a long career explaining sexual minorities to an unfriendly crowd. In his latest, Understanding Gender Dysphoria, he does the same for a subset of the transgender community: those who are experiencing significant distress because their biological (or assigned) sex doesn’t match up with their felt gender identity. This is called gender dysphoria.
Yarhouse discusses three ways through which people, particularly Christians, seek to understand transgender issues: an integrity, disability, or diversity lens. (Presumably, he tried to make this alliterative but couldn’t get the first word to fit — a failure any preacher would be familiar with.)
His description of Christian approaches to transgender issues is helpful, though his clinical focus can limit his understanding of what corporate action should look like.
An integrity framework, according to Yarhouse, sees the distinction of male and female as being a necessary (even, bizarrely, ontological) part of what it means to be human. To those who ascribe to the integrity framework, anything that violates these categories is a violation of God’s plan and should be condemned.
A similar tack is taken by the disability framework, though it has an origin story behind the distress that people with gender dysphoria experience — those who ascribe to the disability framework blame gender dysphoria on original sin. Thus, people who experience this distress deserve our care rather than our condemnation. They didn’t make a choice to be gender variant — rather, we need to help them through the trauma.
A diversity framework celebrates a diversity of gender expression, either by seeing gender as socially constructed or by claiming a transgender identity as one that is worthwhile in itself. This tends to be the stance of the LGBT-affirming church, which can provide an identity and home for people who feel isolated and alone.
Yarhouse proposes an integrated framework of these three as the most humane and ethical approach. This would recognize the importance of physical sexuality and the trauma of gender incongruence but also provides the kind of support that people need from a community. Yarhouse suggests this would look different on a case-by-case basis, as one provides pastoral care — what people need to avoid trauma differs.
Transgender people, especially in the church, have a history of being an object of culture war fights, so humanizing personal struggle is important. This is especially true for Understanding Gender Dysphoria’saudience of evangelical seminarians. We should encourage anything such as this that improves pastoral care for sexual minorities within the evangelical church, especially for those of our friends who are not affirming.
Yet I don’t imagine Yarhouse will make many people happy in Understanding Gender Dysphoria — the LGBTQ activist, the secular counselor, and the evangelical pastor will all be uncomfortable at one time or another. He is at a tricky intersection between faith and psychiatry, but one where he needs to be to help conservative Christians attempt to negotiate difficult issues of identity.
I’m excited that the evangelical world is paying attention to these issues (Christianity Today even devoted a cover story to these questions), but there is much more that needs to be done to determine what humane pastoral care looks like for people with gender dysphoria.
This care does not need to be only on an individual level, on which Yarhouse’s experience in counseling causes him to focus. It should also come in the form of organizing for a safer community. A good start, even for my friends who aren’t affirming, would be working with trans groups on issues that ought to break all of our hearts.
As Elliott Fukui, an organizer for Audre Lorde Project (a group organizing gender-variant people of color), said in a recent statement, “We need to continue organizing to find solutions to get our people safe housing, comprehensive health care, an end to police profiling, meaningful living wage employment, and safety in our streets from all forms of violence.”
Since trans people suffer from hate violence, police brutality, and a lack of health care at huge rates compared with cisgender people, we must work together for peace and a healthy community.
A community in which people aren’t killed or abused because of their identity needs to come before any theological or ethical conversations that we might have about gender.
Understanding Gender Dysphoria: Navigating Transgender Issues in a Changing Culture is out now, available at Amazon.
Greg Williams works in digital communications at an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. He tweets @gwilliamsster and blogs at fourthconfession.
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