The Origin of Gender Theory Which Fractures Personhood

Today we begin our February series entitled Reconstructing Manhood and Womanhood in a Culture Where They are Broken. As we sift through the culture’s various views of gender and sexuality, we find views that seem more fair, more inclusive, more enlightened, just flat out superior to old-fashioned ideas of gender that pretty much confined women to the kitchen and bedroom. Modern views of gender seem deliciously superior to obsolete, stereotypical, confining views of the roles for women and men. However, I am reminded of an old illustration about something that looks delicious but is lethal. There is a tasty variety of Asian mushroom called the “paddy straw.” However, to the casual observer a mushroom, called the “death cap” is so similar that it is equally mouth-watering. But eating the “death cap” mushroom can be fatal. Similarly, gender theory looks so fair, so egalitarian, so appetizing to a generation that wants to be free from outdated thinking, that it is being swallowed by many of today’s Christians, causing them great destruction and even, sometimes, a fatal loss of belief in Christianity itself. This episode seeks to give a clear description of gender theory so that we can better recognize it, refute it with science, logic, and common sense—and teach our children and grandchildren to do the same.

As we begin a series, on broken masculinity and femininity, or any subject for that matter, it is worth remembering what Paul wrote to the Ephesian Christians,

This I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are DARKENED IN THEIR UNDERSTANDING, alienated from the life of God because of the IGNORANCE that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and HAVE GIVEN THEMSELVES UP TO SENSUALITY, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. (Eph 4:17-19).

Notice the phrase, no longer. Whenever Christians have a discussion about the moral brokenness in our culture, we begin with the finger pointing to ourselves. We have been shown incredible mercy by a holy God and must therefore be full of mercy towards others. Moreover, the Master we seek to emulate, had so many notorious sinners as friends that he was known as the friend of tax collector cheats and sinners. As Jesus reached towards the sexually broken woman at the well of Samaria, we must reach towards those in the LGBTQ life to affirm their worth as those made in the image of God and defend them from the abuse of others.

But Jesus’ compassion led him usually to do more than accept and befriend the sexually broken. He usually went on to confront them with the truth. “Go call your husband,” he said to the Samaritan woman. “Go and sin no more,” he said to the woman caught in adultery. “Whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery” he said to men who were so astonished they wondered if it was worth ever getting married. Jesus was full of compassion; but he did not pull his punches, he hit squarely in the face. Tolerating destructive behavior is not love. We need to help the rising generation understand, as Paul spelled out above, that there is a clear link between sexual brokenness and being darkened in one's understanding. Nowhere do we see that more clearly than in the Gender Theory movement. Compassion for those enslaved to sexual brokenness in our culture does not mean remaining silent about the destructive worldviews taking captive so many naïve people, including Christian sons and daughters today. This episode takes a hard, factual look at the ideology most responsible for shaping the rising generation’s attitudes towards gender and sexuality in the 21st century.

SOME TENETS OF GENDER THEORY

• If you point out differences in males and females you are a sexist.
• At birth, the assignment of your gender was arbitrary (perhaps based on white patriarchy that labeled half the population “females” the group that would not own land).
• Your gender identity is 100% whatever you decide to make it and is not related to your biological characteristics (despite the scientific facts).
• Rejecting your biological gender (called gender identity disorder until gender theory ideologues got the term changed), is now called gender dysphoria. This makes the cause of the disorder not you—but the society that causes your confusion because it does not affirm your chosen gender identity.
• An adolescent girl’s self-diagnosis, while going through puberty, that the cause of her problems is that she is actually a boy in a girl’s body must be accepted. But in no other field of medicine is a child’s self-diagnosis accepted automatically as medically correct! No doctor treating a teen girl with anorexia would accept the teen’s delusion as the correct diagnosis--namely that at 98 pounds, she is fat and must go on a starvation diet. An anorexic child, like a transgender child is deluded about her body.
• Affirming Care, mandated by the Biden Administration, requires medical professionals to affirm a child’s wish to take puberty blockers, cross gender hormones, and perhaps have gender-change surgery; otherwise, she will commit suicide. When parents question whether their daughter is capable of making such a life-altering decision, gender theory advocates say, “Would you rather have a living transgender kid or a dead daughter?”
• Transgender rights mean that the rest of society must affirm transgender people’s wishes to be called by pronouns that do not match their biological identity, allow biological boys into girl’s locker rooms, and permit biological males to enter biological girl’s competitions. Those who resist are branded transphobes.
• Transgender people’s discomfort with having to conform to the rest of the world, which is binary, is proclaimed as a violation of their rights.
• Transgender theory in Western culture is superior to all other cultures, all the major religions of the world, and the 4000 year history of human thought which all agreed that gender is binary.
• The intersex condition, formerly called Hermaphroditism (the experience of being born with parts of both male and female reproductive systems), proves that gender is fluid and not binary.
• Parents must ignore all the scientific research showing the impact of testosterone and estrogen in shaping male and female behavior. Instead, they must be “gender neutral” in how they raise their child.

THE ORIGIN OF GENDER THEORY

A. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935 Prussia). He is widely considered to be the Grandfather of the LGBTQ movement.[1] He was a homosexual physician, who shortly after medical school began exploring gay subcultures. In the 1920’s he was considered the world’s most prominent sexologist. He founded the first ever gay and trans rights organization called the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. He argued in one court case, “Homosexuality was part of the plan of nature and creation just like normal love.”[2] He founded the World League for Sexual Reform. Among the purposes of the league: “liberation of the marital relationship from church domination,” “application of the knowledge of Eugenics towards improvement of the race through birth selection,” to free sex from being “complicated by any sense of guilt.”[3] Following in his footsteps was a second primary leader:

B. Harry Benjamin. (1895-1986, Germany). He was an endocrinologist and close colleague of Magnus Hirschfeld. Though born in Germany, he relocated to NYC in the 1920’s and began offering hormone therapies to cross-dressers and others who desired to live differently from the sex into which they were born. He stated “Sex is never one hundred percent ‘male’ or ‘female.’[4] He wrote the medical textbook, The Transsexual Phenomenon, in which he argues that there are a spectrum of conditions requiring different treatments that ranged from hormone replacement therapy to surgical intervention. Harry Benjamin had paved the way for the second most influential of all gender theory advocates:

C. Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956. NJ). Dubbed the Father of the Sexual Revolution, he was a homosexual who hated his Methodist upbringing that “repressed” his desires.[5] He began his career as a professor of zoology whose expertise was in wasps. His career as America’s foremost sexologist began when asked to chair a committee to design a course on sexuality and marriage at Indiana University. Kinsey electrified the assembled students by announcing at the outset that there were “only three types of sexual ABNORMALITY: abstinence, celibacy, and delayed marriage.” [6] In other words normal humans are having sex all the time.

In 1948, Kinsey published, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and in 1953, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Standing beside researchers in white coats and armed with statistical charts, Kinsey sent this message (summarized by Dr. Mariam Grossman) “Almost everyone in the country, male and female is living a life of sexual experimentation, freedom, multiple, partners, different sexes (not just heterosexual sex), different activities, children, babies…and he claimed he had research to prove it.”[7] But years later, researcher, Judith Reisman completely debunked Kinsey’s research, proving that the subjects of his research were NOT everyday Americans, but convicted sex offenders whom he visited in jails, as well as prostitutes. HIS RESEARCH WAS ALL A FRAUD.[8]

More alarming than his fraud was Alfred Kinsey’s research team’s sexual abuse of children in the name of research. One table of Kinsey’s research listed infants as young as two months old up to boys the age of fourteen noting how many “orgasms” these young boys were “observed to have had.”[9] Kinsey held that so-called intergenerational sex—a polite euphemism for child rape—poses no serious harm to children.[10] Even the New York Times reported, “Kinsey had had affairs with men, encouraged open marriages among his staff, stimulated himself with urethral insertion and ropes, and filmed sex in his attic.”[11] Kinsey’s fraudulent “scientific” research achieved his goal—convincing everyday Americans that homosexuality, adultery, and bisexuality are normal. The above three men laid the foundation, but the first sexologist to use the word gender as distinct from one’s biological sex, and the one universally recognized as the Father of Gender Theory[12] was:

D. John Money  (1921-2006) New Zealand). His field was psychology. He was raised in a home with an extremely abusive father, which seems linked to his own rejection of masculinity, saying “I suffered the guilt of being male. I wore the mark of man’s vile sexuality.” He was one of the core researchers at Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research and part of Harry Benjamin’s research team on transsexualism, as well. He wrote his dissertation at Harvard, “Hermaphroditism: An Inquiry into the Nature of a Human Paradox.” Money came up with the theory that each of us is born a hermaphrodite, psychologically. Nature means nothing so far as sexual identity. Money was not a medical doctor, or even a biologist. His theory of behavior was divorced from biology. His team argued, “the sense of being a man or a woman resulted not from hormones, gonads, chromosomes, or physical variables but from the sex to which it was assigned.” Money and his team chose the word “gender” as something psychologically distinguishable from biological sex. Money unmoored gender and gender roles from any attachment to physical reality or biology, paving the wave for transgender ideologues to argue, GENDER IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT.

Money was part of a surgical team that conducted the first headline-grabbing sex change surgery at Johns Hopkins. But he made his fame through the case of a pair of identical twins, Bruce and Brian Reimer. When they were to be circumcised the machine accidentally burned off Bruce Reimer’s penis. Their parents found out about John Money’s claim that gender identity was totally about NURTURE not NATURE. So, John Money’s gender altering surgical team removed Bruce’s testicles, constructed a sort of vagina, and started him on estrogen treatments. His parents renamed him Brenda and did not tell him about the surgery. John Money met regularly with the Reimer twins and reported on the way the treatments were going. For 9 years John Money lied to the public that this case was a complete success. However, only a year after the Reimer family stopped meeting with Money, a documentary team investigating what happened with “Brenda” discovered that Money’s reports were completely fabricated. Bruce was not at all happy as a girl. He was stealing his brother’s trucks to play with and would pee standing up. When “Brenda” was finally told the truth and old enough to speak for himself, he began testosterone treatments to undue the estrogen shots forced on him. He had the breasts unnaturally imposed on him removed. He changed his name not back to Bruce, but to David. “He picked that name, he said, because it symbolized that what he went through all those years was like David fighting Goliath. Every day fighting who he felt he was.”[13]

Sadly, history shows that the harm done to Bruce and Brian Reimer by the Father of Transgender Theory, John Money went way beyond engendering the psychological trauma of a boy being told he is a girl for his first twelve years of life. Phil Gaetano, writing for the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences discovered that John Money, during his private meetings with the Reimer twins was sexually abusing them, the lurid details of which are not fitting for this podcast to mention. Perhaps this should not surprise us since in his book, The Adam Principle, John Money sought to justify pedophilia by distinguishing between “pedophilic sadism” and “affectional pedophilia.” Brian Reimer, who suffered this sexual abuse with his brother, died of an overdose of antidepressants at age 36. Bruce/Brenda/David married and adopted his wife’s three children from a prior marriage. But at age 38 he committed suicide.

TAKE AWAYS FROM THIS HISTORY LESSON

1. Gender theory is the brainchild of very sexually broken people who had an agenda—the overthrow of sexual norms that would deem their personal sexual activity wrong—Magnus Hirschfeld was a gay activist. The two most influential, Alfred Kinsey and John Money, were pedophiles who would be charged in a court of law today as pedophiles.
2. Gender theory is based upon assertions not facts. There is no legitimate scientific data to back them up. Alfred Kinsey’s so called “normal sexual behavior” was actually research done on sexual abusers. John Money’s theory that “gender identity” was unrelated to biological factors, was popularized by a PSYCHOLOGIST—who had ZERO expertise as a scientist.
3. Gender theory is scientifically outdated. John Money’s theory that gender identity comes 100% from NURTURE would have been laughed at if he set it forth in 2020 or even 2000. In the fifty years since John Money proposed this theory enormous strides have been made in the biochemistry of the brain showing how the presence of testosterone in the male baby’s brains changes the way it develops. Similar progress has been made in the field of endocrinology, showing the differences in the levels of testosterone and estrogen in males and females and their impact on behavior. NIH’s Human Genome Project has confirmed what we already knew. Every one of the 30 trillion cells in the normal female body is marked XX and the male body XY.
4. Gender theory advocates lie about their research. Alfred Kinsey falsified his research subjects. John Money falsified his research about the Reimer twins. Current gender theory advocates are lying about the research that proves that affirming care must be administered or kids questioning their biological gender will commit suicide. Those who want to change their gender come from a group that has numerous comorbidities--a group that already has a very high suicide rate. There is no evidence that gender blockers, cross gender hormone treatments, or sex altering surgery decrease this number. 
5. Disorders of the reproductive system (formerly called hermaphroditism and now called intersex) do not prove the existence of more than two genders any more than disorders of the heart or lungs prove there are two types of hearts and lungs. This rare birth disorder occurs in one birth per 10,000. That means that in my state, Maryland, statistically in 2022 there would have been 7 children born with sexual abnormalities and 68,493 births of girls and boys with male and female genitalia. No rational person could look at that data and conclude that biology teaches more than two genders.

In contrast to this fractured understanding of gender and sexuality is God's magnificent design, the glory of which we need to teach our children and grandchildren! 

THE GLORY OF GOD’s DESIGN

The EQALITY of EVE with ADAM

• Woman shares equally in the dignity of being made in God’s image.
• Woman shares equally the calling to vocation—to use her gifts to exercise dominion over creation.
• Adam is put in the garden to spend his labor to bring out the potential of everything in the garden including, especially, Eve and her gifts.
• Adam is put in the garden to protect Eve—in fact the common grace understanding of manhood around the world is that men die to protect their wives and kids. When we are tempted to think that Eve being created Adam’s partner makes her inferior to Adam, it is worth remembering the reason that every member of the Secret Service will take a bullet for the president—because the president’s life is more important than his own. If anything, God's design of gender roles therefore shows that the woman's life is more important than the man's.

CELEBRATING THE DIFFERENCES of ADAM and EVE

(God is sending us a consistent message that he wants us to see!)

Adam is 1) made from the ground, 2) given a name that means ground, 3) called to work the ground, and 4) when he sins, what is cursed is the ground. Eve's identity is completely different. She is 1) made from the man, 2) given the name woman (ISHA) because she was taken out of the man (ISH), 3) called to partner with the man, and 4) when she sins, what is cursed is her relationship with the man and their kids. Clearly, in Genesis 2 God wants us to see how different God created man and woman to be.

This is just an intro to the rest of the month, but I want to close with a view of gender that was NOT shaped by the social media as ours has been. This is the view of a man named Matthew Henry. He wrote, “The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.”