Sexuality and Gender Issues

Discerning What Is Best
With Dr Rex Rogers

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Details: Written by Rex M. Rogers; Published: 05 August 2021

“Sophisticated ignorance” is a phrase I use to describe how highly educated intellectuals can be “ever learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

The American Medical Association recommending sex be removed from birth certificates is an example.

This is another major American professional health organization that has succumbed to the demanding moral superiority of gender ideology. This is about politics, not about medicine or health or science or patient well-being.

The AMA is afraid of being singled out, bullied online, or canceled, so it goes with the cultural flow rather than the hard evidence of biology, this at the risk of the human beings medical professionals are supposed to represent.

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Details: Written by Rex M. Rogers; Published: 08 July 2021

Transgenderism has taken American culture by storm and is almost at a point of no turning back.

Long before Bruce “Call me Caitlyn” Jenner became the poster person for transgender lifestyle, the movement was pushing forward in education, entertainment, media, and of all things, sports.

Indeed, author Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020) notes that “Today transgenderism marches under the banner of civil rights, the promise to breach the next cultural frontier, to shatter one more basis of human division.” And “Virtually everything that transgender activists hope to achieve in the broader culture has already been achieved on the college campus…The universities revile privilege and facilitate emancipation from it, too.”

I have not written about LGB concerns since 2010. At the time, I remember saying to my wife that, this is it, I don’t want to delve into this topic and I’ve said what I believe and think I need to say. Fast forward to 2021, and now it’s LGBTQ++ with transgenderism riding a cultural movement demanding acceptance in the form of You must change your moral views or be silenced, You must change your educational institution or corporate policies or be bullied as “anti-trans,” and the Church and Christian faith, as well as freedom of speech and religion, cannot be cited as reasons one may oppose transgender morality.

So I felt compelled to write again. This piece, “Transgenderism’s Cultural Juggerrnaut,” discusses transgenderism as a condition and as a movement. It’s not about sex. It’s about identity that rejects Christian doctrines, and it’s about power.

Christians need to know how to respond, to speak the truth in love, for only truth sets people free.

Details: Written by Rex M. Rogers; Published: 07 July 2021

“When did sexual orientation become a fixed truth but sexual difference merely a psychological choice, changeable at the beckon of the surgeon’s knife?”

It’s a good question, logical, objective, rational, common sense, and therefore in what passes for public discourse today, rejected as ipso facto discriminatory and hateful.

Meanwhile, American culture is caught up in battles over what constitutes an appropriate “inclusive” or “non-offensive” gender identity vocabulary.

This list evolves almost daily, but if you don’t keep up and misuse a term, you could find yourself in trouble at your job or bullied online.

One LGBTQ website states:

“Never refer to a person as “it” or “he-she”. These are offensive slurs used against trans and gender non-conforming individuals.”

“You can’t always know what someone’s pronouns are by looking at them. Asking and correctly using someone’s pronouns is one of the most basic ways to show your respect for their gender identity.

When someone is referred to with the wrong pronoun, it can make them feel disrespected, invalidated, dismissed, alienated, or dysphoric (often all of the above).

It is a privilege to not have to worry about which pronoun someone is going to use for you based on how they perceive your gender. If you have this privilege, yet fail to respect someone else’s gender identity, it is not only disrespectful and hurtful, but also oppressive.”

Examples of gender identity vocabulary include, they/them/theirs instead of he or she, ze/hir/hir/hirself or zie or xe or zir/zirself, transgender kids, endless genders, homosuperiority, gender assigned at birth, Birthing person, chest-feeding, nursing fathers, gender-expansive youth, gender-confirmation surgery rather than sex change surgery, person with a cervix, people with a penis, male-appearing genitalia, people who menstruate, transphobe, anti-trans, cisheteropatriarchy, anti-indigeneity, just to name a few.

So, it is offensive to refer to someone in a manner that reflects biological reality.

In New York City people can be fined up to quarter million dollars for “misgendering” someone by using pronouns other than the ones they prefer. In Oct 2017, the Governor of California signed law that would send healthcare workers to jail for failing to use a person’s chosen pronouns.

Gender identity activists know that to win the battle for vocabulary is to win the war. If they can claim “inclusiveness,” victimhood, discrimination, or some other perceived oppression, they can leverage their views to accomplish their goals.

“The Left wins because it seizes language...I have noticed, news anchors now talk about ‘gender assigned at birth,’ as if that’s something different from one’s biological sex. There may be 57 genders, but there are only two biological sexes.

Don’t surrender the language. Reclaim the language. It’s the first step to recovering our civilization.”

“The war on pronouns, an assault upon the language by which we recognize a world in common, follows of necessity. What we are dealing with is nothing less than a war on reality itself. And everyone has just been pressed into service.”

If media, politicians, celebrities, academia, and corporations buy-in, and begin using the words gender identity activists invent, the battle is more than half-over. Indeed, it may already be lost.

The persons who define the words determine the outcome of the debate.

Consider for example, the fact that states reviewing or that have enacted laws preserving fair competition and protecting girls and women in sports are now regularly called “anti-trans” in media reports. Not “pro-girls” or “pro-women” but “anti-trans.” Similar battles are occurring on university campuses and in public education at all levels where school personnel are being forced to use the pronouns selected by students who self-proclaim as any number of sexual identities.

“In actuality, it is disrespectful to both you and the transgender person to use the anti-science pronoun. It demeans your knowledge of reality and perpetuates lies harmful to you and the transgender person, as well as to the rest of society…

One should not have to abandon one’s morals and sanity to appease gender activists, those who have been brainwashed by such ideology, and those struggling with gender dysphoria. Being manipulated into telling what you know to be a lie is not good for anyone…

It is harmful to perpetuate false gender theories. The person using a false pronoun violates the truth and obfuscates our culture’s understanding of biology. Since truth and goodness are intertwined, bowing to transgender ideology threatens both…

Manipulating words erodes our language and therefore thinking. Graham Hillard, an English professor at Trevecca Nazarene University, made this argument in National Review a few years ago. ‘What is at stake, however, is the irreplaceable right to say of one thing, ‘true,’ and of another, ‘false’ — to define the basic realities from which our politics proceed,’ Hillard wrote. ‘A man is a man. A woman is a woman. Let us not pretend otherwise.’”

Capitulating on common sense, rational, science-based vocabulary only yields confusion, chaos, anxiety, and personal and social emptiness.

“Inclusive pronouns” do not show God’s love; they betray the God of Truth and Love.

Christians must always love their neighbors as themselves. We must always speak the truth only in love, but we must speak the truth.

To use gender identity vocabulary may seem like a conciliatory act, a matter of respect for the other individual, but this is a false positive. Actually, we are only perpetuating lies and division, the very tools Satan wants us to use to destroy our witness.

There are innumerable ways to demonstrate love and compassion. Lying is not one of them.

Details: Written by Rex M. Rogers; Published: 06 July 2021

During my time as a university president, a group called Soulforce began showing up uninvited on Christian college and university campuses. Bankrolled by wealthy advocates, Soulforce was comprised of gay and lesbian young people along with others who supported their cause.

Responses to Soulforce varied, but on our campus where they forced their way into classrooms and chapel, we simply said, “No thank you.” We did not verbally malign them to their face or in press coverage and did not criticize other institutions that engaged the group.

The university experienced overwhelming support for its response, but of course I also received letters from people who disagreed, which almost every time tracked not to theology but love for a friend or family member who had declared themselves gay or lesbian. People changed their views about the morality of homosexuality in part because a friend or family member came out.

I felt for the students, who I thought were being used by big donor gay and lesbian advocates, and I felt for the family members who loved their youth, did not understand their LGB choice, and who often changed their moral views based on that love. Sadly, this approach is a moral, intellectual, social, practical and personal dead-end.

Today people are changing their understanding of their gender, which is to say they believe gender is fluid, malleable, mutable, that they can change their identity to a new gender category that does not align with their biological birth sex. They now believe they become a gender of their own choosing, notwithstanding the witness of their eyes and their heart.

Gender Fluidity and Divine Design is my recent attempt to make sense of the gender confusion flooding our airwaves and online feeds, and more importantly, to do so based upon a Christian worldview.

Details: Written by Rex M. Rogers; Published: 31 March 2021

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For a while now, I’ve been saying sexual progressivism and Christian belief are on collision course, that sexual progressivism is the point of the spear for social justice or woke ideology demanding its views of morality be embraced, no exceptions for religious conscience allowed.

Christian colleges and universities stand at the nexus of this movement, and they are in trouble. It’s happening.

Details: Written by Rex M. Rogers; Published: 04 March 2021

For some time now, I’ve been saying that sexual progressivism (abortion, LGBTQ+, SOGI=sexual orientation and gender identities) is the point of the spear for the radical Left’s onslaught on American culture.

In the name of tolerance, diversity, and inclusion—or negatively stated, attacking those who disagree as bigots, racists, or haters—the radical Left is conducting a full-on, worldview-based, ideological attempt to rewrite America’s moral consensus and identity.

The sexual progressivism of the radical Left overlaps with equally pernicious movements like “woke” race and gender wars and ugly efforts to cancel anyone who disagrees.

Advocates of sexual progressivism know their demands cannot mutually exist with biblical morality, so Christian teachings about sexuality and the family are now targets for suppression. In this way, both freedom of religion and freedom of speech in the First Amendment are threatened. Pastors in some European countries, Canada have been charged with hate speech for preaching biblical moral views of homosexuality. This could happen in the U.S.

The radical Left’s politics, as almost daily propounded, show up in Hasbro declaring Mr. Potato Head henceforth gender neutral, several of Dr. Seuss works deemed racist, the Cartoon Network running public service announcements telling children to “see color” when they look at people, public school districts and universities adopting policies and curricula demanding gender neutrality and gender-neutral pronouns, Coca Cola instructing employees to “try to be less white,” or celebrities and some corporations falling all over themselves virtue signaling their woke bonafides asserting their support for the latest amoral radical Left orthodoxy.

The radical Left keeps moving its goal posts, for it is never satisfied, in large part because each cultural victory is a matter of power and a step toward its utopian vision. However, another sad consequence of all this is that sexual progressivism’s results or its reality is not a happy place. The people caught up in this movement, who are not simply activists but participants in this false sexual worldview, find an endgame of sadness, suffering, self-harm, destruction of life and relationships, and all too often, suicide. Sexual progressivism that rejects God’s design for the human being yields nothing but darkness. They need our compassion and the Light of the Gospel.

In none of this am I supporting the denial of any American citizen his or her civil liberties and established civil rights. Nor am I in any way advocating any kind of personal animosity, much less harm. But I do disagree with the moral choices referenced here. This is what I'm talking about, ideas and values. For the individuals involved, God says to Love our neighbors as ourself.

Finally, there is much about this that is sad and frightening, including that these irrational arguments suck the air out of public discussions that should be taking place about genuine issues re sexuality and race in America.