I recently came across a post on Facebook by a South African church leader declaring that a cross-dressing man identified as Mark Bryan would be welcome in HIS church. His church is called Future Church Now. He positions his church as throughly accepting of persons with forms of gender dysphoria as opposed to 'other churches' that do not. So far so good. Considering Christ's injunctions to love one another, I have no argument with that. The church should already be practising such inclusion as Christ commanded. I fail to see the point of this declaration if not to only virtue signal. It's his assertions in support of the claims that I disagree with.
This leader claims that there are no gender specific jobs, "being purely cultural constructs, and not based in Scripture, God’s will or universal truth."
Biology (which he as a christian would affirm is the creation of God) shows that there are differences in career choices that are innate to gender expression. The more open and liberal a society is the more distinctly those preferences are expressed. It is therefore most certainly innate and determined by chromosomes. There are obviously exceptions. But when left to free choice, men and women are interested in different things and prefer to choose different careers. So job descriptions might not be imposed by scripture, but it definitely seems to be God's will or part of his plan for humans to flourish.
He argues further that "But right now in history, people are losing their minds about gender identity and expression. It’s related to transgender people, and related to the scientific evidence that humanity is not divided into two simple gender boxes, called “men” and “women”. Just like everything else about human beings, gender expression exists on a beautiful spectrum."
The church leader goes on to argue that human sexuality is analogous to gene expression. (This could suggest that he believes sexual preference to be innate and deterministic.)
The actual truth of the matter is self-evident in the vast mass of individuals who do not suffer from any form of biological gender non-conformity.
The 'beautiful spectrum' the church leader posits is purely in the minds of individuals who may or may not be truly suffering from a form of gender dysphoria. Because of the subjective nature of the claims it seems impossible to ascertain. The 'beautiful spectrum' is not even represented in the small overlap of the 1% of biologically transgender and inter-sexed people as shown in the graphic above. These 'elective transgender' individuals find it necessary to be militant, belligerent and intolerant. They are therefore most certainly visible and can be observed as a spectrum, but they do not represent or speak for the real concerns and acceptance of naturally occurring transgendered people.
Sex and gender are most accurately determined by an inspection at birth. Historically this has proved very accurate with few exceptions. If a doctor were to inspect a newborns genitals and declare the sex of a child, they would be correct 99% of the time. Those genitals in time would produce gametes - sperm or eggs - which is the truest confirmation of gender.
It is simply nonsense.
In this day and age it's hardly surprising that there would be religious leaders who would align themselves and their flocks with the Social Justice narrative. I can recall activist christians that go as far back as 1966. Jay Vigeveno's "Jesus the Revolutionary" is a book which suggests Jesus was a socialist. The emergent trend toward Social Justice has been shown to be an expression of cultural marxism which uses Post Modern argumentation as motivation for it's claims. It's therefore no surprise that ideas that supplant biological facts & data with 'personal truth' and 'lived experience' would now be emerging in more progressive churches.
It's sad that in a time of such gender confusion the church is not providing clear answers and direction. What they don't realise is that constantly trying to reposition themselves in attempts to remain relevant suggests that religious institutions such as 'Future Church Now' have nothing of transcendent value to add to society. It is an indictment on the church that philosophers and scientists have more to contribute to the transcendent truths of existence from their respective fields.
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