The Spiritual Reality Behind the Transgender Movement

There is a war of the worlds going on in the shadows of our everyday awareness—an unseen battle between the Creator God  with His army of heavenly beings and Satan with his fallen angels and demonic hosts.

Though already lost, Satan continues to battle in order to enlarge his dark kingdom before its inevitable implosion.

Nowhere is this battle more pronounced today than in the rise of the transgender movement. It is the front lines in Satan’s scheme to deface and destroy the image of God that is stamped into our personhood, sexuality, marriages, children and families.

The problem is, most transgender people are unaware of the forces that drive them in unhealthy directions.

Forces of Confusion

There exists today a convergence of six entities that collude with one another to promote dangerous and damaging lifestyles and identities—such as homosexual and transgendered—as being natural and healthy alternatives to what they dismissively refer to as an antiquated “male-female binary,” or the idea that there are only two genders.

1. the Wealthy and powerful LGBT movement—which for most of its history distanced itself from transgender people—but who now see it as a cause that can be harnessed to increase their wealth, power and influence. The Human Rights Campaign alone—sometimes referred to as “Big Gay”—brings in approximately $40 million each year, pays out more than $11 million in salaries and spends more than a quarter of a million dollars every year on lobbying Congress. This is the same movement that once embraced pedophile and pederast groups like NAMBLA, allowing them to march in their “Gay Pride Parades” until several decades ago when it became politically inconvenient to do so. They have since focused on reducing the age of consent for sex acts with minors and changing the language of “child abuse” to “man-boy love”, as more publicly acceptable ways for achieving the same goal.
2. Wealthy and powerful professional guilds, such as the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, who ceased using science as the foundation for their mental health diagnoses when they began caving to pressure from homosexual activists 45 years ago. It began in 1973, when gay activists began attacking the meetings of the APA committee that decides what disorders appear in their official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

   The attacks continued until committee members, three of whom were secretly homosexual, relented and removed homosexuality from the list of mental disorders. The decision was not based on any science or new studies. It was based on fear and intimidation. In a poll several years later, 1979, the vast majority of APA members disagreed with the decision but were ignored. Today you can lose your license if you disagree with the decision—a threat that forces therapists to keep their mouths shut.

   For example, when Pure Passion Media attempted to interview therapists for its new documentary, TranZformed: Finding Peace with Your God-Given Gender, only one could be found (the late Dr. Joseph Nicolosi) to go on camera to talk about the dangers of promoting transgenderism.

3. The media. Ephesians 2:2 tells us that Satan is the “prince of the power of the air”. Almost all of TV—including PBS—film and theater, much of radio—including NPR— as well as most newspapers and magazines have thrown themselves wholesale into promoting this great deception. This is partly because the media is riddled with LGBT people who pull strings from within but is also a result of the agenda laid out by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen in their book, After the Ball, which was a manifesto for how to manipulate the culture so that it becomes pro-gay and pro-trans. Their scheme has worked so well that any reporter who dares to report on the actual science related to such issues will be vilified and almost certainly fired for daring to be politically incorrect.
4. Public organizations like government, education, the AMA, public schools, colleges and libraries and so on, which have likewise been pressured and deceived into promoting sexually immoral agendas. Today, you have gay and trans activists welcomed into elementary schools to teach children how to perform the most perverted of sexual acts, how to transition to the opposite sex, and worse. One recent trans activist actually encouraged a group of very young children to become drag queens while he danced around the room in his makeup, wig and glittery dress.
5. The false church, a conglomeration of mainline denominations that have been taken over by non-believing liberals and gay/trans activists in order to provide religious cover for the doctrines of demons that they promulgate. Although they do not themselves believe in the authority of Scripture, they invent twisted versions of it in order to sow theological confusion among those who turn to them for divine guidance.

   As Kirk and Madsen proposed in their gay manifesto: “Use talk to muddy the moral waters. … raise theological objections about conservative interpretations of biblical teachings. … undermine the moral authority of [conservative churches] by portraying them as antiquated backwaters, badly out of step with the times. … set science and public opinion against institutional religion”.

   But take heed, as the Apostle Paul warned in Acts 20:29-30: “For I know that after my departure, dreadful wolves will enter among you, not sparing the flock. Even from among you men will arise speaking perverse things, to draw the disciples away after them.”

6. Deceived public that continues to vote the deceivers into office, whether in government, on school boards, professional associations or elsewhere. As a result, those parents who have children who present as homosexual or transgender and who naturally turn to the world’s experts for guidance are deceived into accepting and encouraging the world’s fallen agenda. They want to do the right thing for their child and naively assume that cultural experts know what they are talking about, but it turns into the blind leading the blind.

Pedophilia and pederasty are the next frontier on the activist agenda. Already they have succeeded in having the wording in the APAs DSM changed so that pedophilia is now considered a disorder only if it causes distress to the perpetrator.

This same kind of semantic sleight of hand has been used to rename “gender identity disorder” as “gender dysphoria”—again playing on the idea that it is disordered only if it causes distress to the transgendered person.

The different aspects of transgenderism call for different kinds of Christian responses.

We must distinguish a cultural response from a pastoral response. Both are necessary and they are obviously interrelated, but we mustn’t allow one to drive the other.

On the one hand, if we let the culture wars define our pastoral response, then that response will fail to engage with people on a personal level and will lack compassion.

On the other hand, if we let our cultural response be defined by our pastoral experiences, we run the risk of being too passive and accommodating of what is a destructive movement (which will lead to more pastoral problems).

Since the biblical view is that there are only two sexes, male and female, and biological sex is the primary indicator of ontological sex, any treatment for gender dysphoria should proceed on the assumption that a person’s biological sex (rather than their gender identity) defines whether they are truly male or female. Consequently, treatments should seek to bring a person’s psychology in line with their physiology rather than the reverse.

The sexual revolution and the LGBT movement don’t merely invite God’s judgment—they are themselves a manifestation of God’s judgment (Rom. 1:18-32).

A Way of Transformation for the TG Person

This assumes you are working with someone who has repented of sin, believed in and surrendered their life to the lordship of Jesus Christ.

1. Address any childhood sexual abuse or other trauma that may have confused the child’s sense of identity, being and/or sexuality.

2. Correct gender-based misinformation by parents, significant others and/or the culture (as well as any other lies of the enemy that they may have believed).

• Parents or other family members may have wanted their child to be the opposite sex and either communicated that to him/her outright or more subtly in the ways they gave or withheld affirmation and acceptance when he/she acted like a boy/girl.
• Pray for inner healing for any father-wounds and mother-wounds. Teach them how to be intimate with God the Father as a replacement for a male-hating mother or a female hating father.
• Deal with any “sins of the father” that may have been passed down (Ex. 20:5-6; 34:7; Lev. 26:39; Num. 14:18; Deut. 7:9; Ezek 18:14-20) / generational curses; anger at God, roots of bitterness and rejection, inner vows, unforgiveness or occultic activity.
• Pray for any peer humiliation that they experienced, (especially related to a rejection of gender), to be reversed by the acceptance of Christ and His Body, the church.
• Pray to renounce the rejection of their biological sex and/or the self-hatred that it induced.
• Pray with them to accept their biological gender.
• Repent of any use of pornography and masturbation and the core sin behind such behaviors—idolatry.
• Pray for revelation of and deliverance from any hidden demonic strongholds.
• Pray for any yet-undiscovered biological contributors (for example, hormones, brain chemistry and so on) to be healed.
• Pray for being washed (Eph. 5:26; 1 Cor. 6:11) and having the mind renewed (Rom. 12:2) with the Word of God.

3. Overturn any contributing cultural factors

• If they grew up lonely and unaffirmed, yet were accepted and celebrated by the trans community (not having understood that their acceptance had more to do with their youth and beauty than anything else), pray that they learn to receive that needed acceptance and affirmation from God instead of man.
• Help them to separate themselves from damaging relationships, (friends, music, media and so forth) and to turn their attention to God’s Word and serving Him.
• Help them find a church, ministry and other teaching resources that can guide them in the lifelong process of transformation. {eoa}

Dr. David Kyle Foster is the producer/director of Pure Passion TV and the documentaries, Such Were Some of You (www.SuchWereSomeOfYou.org), How Do You Like Me Now? When a Child, Parent, Spouse or Sibling Says They’re Gay (www.HowDoYouLikeMeNow.org) and TranZformed: Finding Peace with Your God-Given Gender (www.TranZformed.org). He is also the author of Love Hunger (Chosen), Sexual Healing (Regal) and Transformed Into His Image: Hidden Steps on the Journey to Christlikeness (Laurus Books).