The Truth About President Trump’s Transgender Action

Donald Trump, acting through the attorney general and the secretary of education, has rescinded a horribly misguided Obama-era directive on transgender bathrooms. 

Obama’s directive financially punished schools which did not allow boys to go into the girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms and shower rooms anytime they wanted. It would be hard to imagine a presidential directive that could be more obscene, grotesque and dangerous. 

It was published under the guise that it would provide “protections” for transgendered individuals by allowing them to use whatever bathroom they wished regardless of whose privacy they might be invading. And now that President Trump has rescinded this misbegotten decree, he is being accused of stripping “protections” from transgendered students. Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said darkly that President Trump’s act represented a “thoughtless, cruel and sad rollback of transgender rights.” 

But it’s just the reverse. The president is not removing protections; he is restoring them. He is returning to the states the right to reinstate safeguards for the sexual integrity, modesty and privacy of the girls and young women under their charge. They will no longer have to fear who’s in the next stall or who will sidle up to them in the shower. 

Transgenderism, or as it used to be known, transvestism, is a mental disorder. Until just recently, it was universally regarded by psychiatrists and psychologists as a form of mental illness which called for treatment. It was not something to be celebrated and protected and promoted at all costs. 

Transvestites, or transgenders if you prefer, are seriously confused about their God-given sexual identity. God has created just two genders, or sexes: male and female. There are two and only two, not three, or five (LGBTQ), or 58 (as Facebook wants us to believe). The Scriptures are quite unambiguous about this. “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27, emphasis mine).

No rational society that cares about the mental health of its citizens, especially its youngest ones, should ever regard a mental disorder as something which ought to be celebrated or treated as normal or desirable. Rather, this condition, now euphemistically described as “gender dysphoria,” should arouse in us a compassion that moves us to help those afflicted with it to adjust to reality. 

If you have a family member who thinks aliens are talking to him through his radio, accepting his version of reality doesn’t help him. It does not help him to regard this imagined form of communication as just as normal and healthy as a chat with family members over dinner. It does not help him to punish those who try to help him face the reality that aliens are not in fact talking to him at all. 

But this is what we have done with transvestism. We are now being told we must accept this condition as normal and even celebrate it as part of the rich diversity of the human sexual spectrum. No, no and no. 

Why must we refuse to indulge this gross distortion of human sexuality? We must if we care about people, because research indicates that 41 percent of transgenders try to kill themselves and 30 percent succeed. No compassionate, caring society would ever choose to normalize a lifestyle that leads predictably to suicidal ideation. That’s not compassion, that’s cruelty. 

A rational culture will root its public policy in truth and scientific fact, not in science fiction. Every human being (with an infinitesimally small number of exceptions) is either a male or female according to the DNA found in every single cell of their bodies. It’s scientific fantasy of the “Mars Attacks” variety to believe otherwise. 

Now to be sure we do not want any student to be bullied. We do not want Christian students to be pushed around, harassed and physically intimidated on campus and we do not want that for transgendered students either. Each student is a human being made in the image of God and is entitled to courteous treatment. 

But what all this all means is that our effort as a truly compassionate society must be to help afflicted individuals escape the prison house of their own distorted view of themselves and help them adjust their sexual identity to biological reality rather than the other way around. 

It’s one thing to have mentally disordered people in a society. But it’s a special form of crazy to force everybody under threat of punishment to accept such a distorted view of sexuality as normal. 

A return to sexual sanity in America is long overdue, and President Trump, by rescinding the transgender bathroom directive, has taken the first step in that journey. Good for him.

Bryan Fischer is host of the two-hour weekday Focal Point program on American Family Radio.

This article was originally published at AFA.net. Used with permission.