Brandon Showalter – A Biblical Worldview of Gender & Sexuality (Part 3/3)

Episode 105: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

The guest on this episode is Brandon Showalter, a journalist with the Christian Post. The discussion focused on the biblical perspective on gender and sexuality, as explored in the co-authored ebook Exposing the Gender Lie. Key points include: the biblical view that male and female identities are integral to our design and created by God, not just social constructs; how the transgender ideology promotes a harmful Gnostic-like separation of the body and spirit; and how the gospel offers the true healing and redemption needed to understand our identity in Christ rather than our sexuality.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. You can join us on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, wherever you get your podcast. I understand there are 14 different places now. If you like the show, please take a moment to review it on your favorite channel to let people know about these interviews showing that our worldview changes everything.

My return guest today is a journalist and podcaster with the Christian Post, Brandon Showalter. He reports on topics of theological interest in the church and also practical interest in society. Our topic today is transgender ideology, and we’re going to do a little turnabout here today because Brandon’s mostly going to be interviewing me about whether the Bible has anything important to say about gender and sexuality. I think you can probably guess that it does.

Please do take a moment to check out our ebook, Exposing the Gender Lie, that you can get at summit.org/protect. Welcome to the show. Brandon Showalter, welcome back to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast.

Brandon Showalter (01:07):
Thank you. Good to be here again.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:08):
We have recorded three episodes specific to the issue of the transgender industry, talking about a new ebook that you and I co-authored together. You’re an investigative journalist for the Christian Post. I’m president of Summit Ministries. So Christian Post, Summit Ministries, together have produced this ebook called Exposing the Gender Lie, which is available at no charge. So anybody can just go to summit.org/protect and get a copy of that ebook.

Well, in the first two episodes of this trilogy, we talked about the medical scandal and that this is a big deal right now. This isn’t just the fascination of a handful of people trying to make something out of nothing. This is actually a huge issue that’s changing people’s understanding of how we see reality itself. And the second issue, we talked about the capture of institutions with transgender ideology, but this is the one where we actually get to talk about the hope of the gospel and a biblical perspective of understanding the issues of gender and sexuality.

(02:13):
And the other ones. We both kind of made comments and I asked some questions of you because your investigative journalism has produced a lot of the research on this. And now we kind of turn the tables a little bit because this is something that I focused on. Chapter five of the ebook is on what is a biblical view? Is there a biblical view of this issue that goes beyond just quoting a Bible verse here or there? So that’s what we get to talk about, man, and I’ve got three pages of notes right here in front of me. I don’t know what questions you’re going to ask. You’re a journalist. I have no idea what you’re going to say next, but let’s dive into it.

Brandon Showalter (02:45):
Well, I think it’s so important that we not only do the deep dive and draw from my journalistic work on this harrowing subject, but that we also offer an antidote that is rooted in the gospel. And I wouldn’t want to have been a part of a project that didn’t offer and extend the hope of the gospel.

And I’m so glad that we’ve done this in our ebook, Exposing the Gender Lie. So the first question that I would ask Jeff is for those who say, what’s the big deal? This is just a few number of people, these are psychiatrically troubled people. Can’t we just be kind? Why is this such a big theological issue and why must Christians understand this? Yes, from the things that we’ve discussed in the previous two podcast episodes about the medical scandal and the institutional capture, but why does this matter theologically?

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:36):
Well, we should have compassion for people who struggle with their identity in the same sense that we would have compassion for people who struggle with an addiction. An addict might choose their drug at first, but then the drug chooses them and all kinds of horrible things happen as a result in their lives. Things that if they were in their right mind thinking about if they wouldn’t want to have happened. So that’s very tricky. It’s difficult.

Christians in history have had a good track record of being the ones who, for example, addiction groups. There are 130,000 of them in the United States. Virtually all of them are in churches. So this is where Christians can move forward if they choose to. But why is this a theological issue? Because in Genesis chapter one, the very first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Scripture says God made them in his image, in his likeness, male and female, he made them.

(04:41):
And you look at those two terms there, those terms are theological terms. They are, they’re both. They both mean male and female. They also mean masculine and feminine, that there is a spiritual aspect as well as a physical aspect of sexuality. That the man is the zāḵār, the woman is the nᵊqēḇâ. And even when you look at Genesis chapter two, where God created the man, Adam means out of the ground. Iššâ for the woman means opposite of man. Okay?

So there’s this sense in which male and female not only describe their mammalian features that we’re dimorphic, but it describes something about God’s nature and character, that it was important to him to create people in his image as different from one another, but in a way that allowed them to harmonize.

Jesus reinforced this. He said, have you not read that God created the male and female that our bodies are important? This is all throughout scripture and a lot of Christians have gotten this wrong in the past and they’ve been rebuked in church history promoting something like gnosticism, which says that the spirit is important, but the body is not. That is a heresy.

You know, Irenaeus wrote about this. It’s not like this is anything new, this has been talked about for 1500 years or more, but the idea is that our bodies matter. Our bodies are part of our, what Paul talks about when he talks about our redemption and our being able to bear spiritual fruit. Scripture indicates to us that our physical bodies get resurrected. Our body is not incidental to who we are. It’s integral to who we are.

Brandon Showalter (06:36):
That’s absolutely right. Well that is, I think that’s so important and I want you to elaborate a little bit more on that because as our friend Nancy Pearcy has written so eloquently in her book, Love Thy Body, which I recommend that everybody, in addition to getting Exposing the Gender Lie from us, go check out her book because it’s so brilliant and I wouldn’t dream of trying to encapsulate every, there’s just so much gold in that book where she talks about the human body is not a cosmic accident, it’s not an afterthought. It’s made with great care.

God, our bodies themselves declare the gospel. They convey a moral message that we as human beings made in God’s image are obligated to respect. But you said a word there that I think it’s important to hone in on. Gnosticism, NT Wright, the Great Anglican Scholar, said as much in an op-ed in, I think it was the Times of London a few years ago where transgenderism, it’s not new. What is new is the institutional capture and the medicalization and the big pharma sponsorship of all of this. But explain why transgenderism, gender identity, ideology, whatever you want to call it, is actually neo gnosticism on steroids literally.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:46):
Well, the transgender ideology starts with the assumption that sex and gender are two different things. That sex is biology, your gender is your self-perception. So what you believe about yourself in your mind is what is real about you untethered from your biological state.

Now, gnosticism, this is an ancient heresy. This goes back thousands of years and it started with the idea that, well, the way we explained that things were bad on earth is that the earth was created by a bad God, a demiurge. And the good God is off of the earth. The good God is completely spiritual, not physical. So what happens with our bodies is not relevant to what is most important. That’s gnosticism.

So Nancy Pearcy addressed this in her book, Love Your Body, I think, is that the title? Love Thy Body. More recently, Branson Parlor has addressed this in his book Everybody’s Story, and of course then we need to mention for our Catholic friends, probably the epic work on this was John Paul II when he wrote his Theology of the Body, and we cite that in this ebook and Exposing the Gender Lie and show you where you can go to get that and read it.

(09:14):
It’s our view that evangelicals and Catholics can come together on this issue and many others, but on this issue for sure, because we recognize that both our bodies and spirits work together in harmony with one another and our bodies are important.

Brandon Showalter (09:31):
Amen. I’m an evangelical who is a graduate of the Catholic University of America, so I just want to just ring that out. Another resource that I would highly recommend would be my professor John Grobowski’s book, Unraveling Gender: The Battle Over Sexual Difference. So you’re not going to just hear that you should get our ebook. You’re going to hear from the panoply of great folks who have done good thinking on what we’re saying. We’re just bringing some of the best thinkers together in a very distilled form for all of you to read.

I mean, there’s just so much work that has been done. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. It’s truly beautiful, and he writes extensively in several other cyclicals about how the body becomes instrumentalized in an occasion for self-will. I’m paraphrasing, but this is our bodies matter. They matter so much and the redemption of the body, it’s right there.

(10:20):
It’s what the gospel is all about. Our bodies are being redeemed, so we have to take this seriously. The other question, one of them that I have is that you said that sex and gender, this whole heretical teaching that has cropped its head up over the centuries within the church, but also in cultures more broadly, is that this difference between sex and gender, and I know what you mean by that and would concur, but gender norms that vary by culture, they are not the same thing as sex.

And so sometimes when I hear feminist critics of this gender ideology, they would say, well, sex and gender are very different things and the way they mean it, that’s actually correct, that gender norms that are somehow expected to be, this is what men do and this is what women do that is different from the material embodiment of our sext existences.

(11:17):
Those things are different. Speak a little bit more on how what we present in exposing the gender lie is not necessarily trying to reinforce gender norms that may have worked well from a previous era due to the division of labor in a pre or post-industrial economy.

We’re not saying as co-authors, here’s how men and women have to act because this is just God’s way and deriving extra biblical things that really aren’t there in the text. Yes, it means something profound to be male and female in God’s image and that we don’t want to flatten the sexes as somehow the same. We’re not saying that the sameness, that’s not what we’re going after, but distinguish sexual embodiment from gender norms that vary culture by culture.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:05):
It’s extremely important. If you take away nothing else from this time, just remember this, it’s important to interpret culture based on the gospel rather than interpret the gospel based on the culture. So we start in Genesis and we talk about this. This is chapter five of the ebook. It’s actually the longest chapter because there’s so much to say about it. We start there in Genesis, we point out the fact that the Bible does not ignore the body, which we’ve already discussed, that in Genesis we don’t see stereotypes emerging. What we see is a harmonization emerging between male and female.

So, for example, when God creates man, Adam, from the ground, then he is to name the animals, and then scripture says, and God saw that there was not found for him a helper suitable. That term “helper suitable” has created a lot of division in the church, and people divide into camps egalitarian versus complementarian. That term “helper suitable” is an interesting one. The word suitable there means “opposite of” or “in the face of,” and then the word helper there, ēzer, which is very famous, Hebrew word, is the word that is used to describe God’s help of his people throughout scripture.

So woman, in this instance, this is not a passage that says women are inferior to men. That’s a misinterpretation of the passage. It’s actually a passage that says that it was God’s intention that male and female harmonized together.

(13:48):
For a greater purpose. Now, you think about this for a moment. Imagine two pitches of a roof. There’s a lot of wood, a lot of shingles on this side right here. If nothing held it up, it would fall. It would fall down. So with this side, but somehow when they lean against one another, they create a strength. And here in Colorado you can pile two feet of snow on top of that. It’s very heavy and the roof will stay strong because of that creative tension, if you will, that holds it together. So that’s really I think the message of scripture.

And then of course, marriage flows out of this. The Apostle Paul talks about this difference between male and female and coming together in marriage as a great mystery because it symbolizes Christ in the church that Christ sacrificially protects and sanctifies the church. That church honors Christ by being unified together and bringing blessing to the nations. This is God’s design. This model is broken by sin, but the model remains, and the lesson is super clear. Even before we get to what some biblical aspects of male and female are, that your sexuality is not just about you, it’s about everything.

Brandon Showalter (15:02):
Right? And we do a great disservice when we do reduce it to our own self-centered inclinations because really the gospel, it is not just about us. I think sometimes in a hyper individualized, hyper individualistic culture, it’s all about me. No, it’s not. The gospel message stands in direct contradiction to that very selfish, self-centered view of human relationships and how we are made and how to relate.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:33):
In Exposing the Gender Lie, we spend some time talking about how all of this comes together, and I think it’s really interesting to me that the sexual revolution changed even how Christians view sexuality.

Brandon Showalter (15:49):
Oh, yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:49):
The sexual revolution said your primary identity is in your sexuality. If you are not able to be sexually active and have your sexual needs met, then you will be unhealthy, unhappy, and mean. But the biblical idea, the biblical idea is yes, your sexuality is part of your design. God designed sex, and he designed it to be valuable and protected inside the context of man, woman marriage. That’s the clear teaching of scripture.

I know a lot of Christians think we should dispense with that or change it somehow, but that’s quite clear all throughout scripture. What the sexual revolution has said, however, is that your primary identity is in your sexuality. The Christian is saying your primary identity is in Christ.

Brandon Showalter (16:41):
Amen. Yeah. Well, let’s go deeper on that too, because I think this is so huge. We make the point in the book that some of this I think is so difficult for people to disentangle because in this post sexual revolution, well, it’s actually never ended. It’s still going on. It’s just morphed into other more horrifying dimensions here. But the battle seems to be between Christians who oppose this stuff.

This is certainly how legacy media frames it versus these people. This is just who they are. We hear that phrase all the time, and we hear gays and lesbians say, this is just who I am. It’s just part of who I am. And we come along and say, well, we have a very different, it doesn’t help that Christians participate in the sexual revolution. Make no mistake about it.

But we actually say something very profound and distinct about human identity that it’s not located in our feelings. But unlike, and I would totally agree with you, very much a believer in historic biblical sexual ethics with regard to marriage and all of that. I’m on the same page with you absolutely there. But unlike where if someone says, I’m gay or I’m lesbian, you know what they mean.

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:56):
Right.

Brandon Showalter (17:56):
You say, that means that they’re exclusively same sex attracted. Usually there’s dispute, whereas with this gender dogma, that is all the rage. Now, if someone says, I’m trans, that might mean that I have gender dysphoria. I’ve been diagnosed, I’m battling this. Or it means I think of myself as queer. I’m gender nonconforming. You don’t really know what it means.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:20):
Nobody’s quite sure what it means.

Brandon Showalter (18:21):
Yeah, nobody’s quite sure. And that feeds into what we’ve discussed in previous podcasts about the warping and the hijacking of language and the institutional captures. That’s the death of meaning. We really don’t know what people mean when they say, so, why is that so theologically important? And when we conceptualize who we are, if this is a battle between Christians who just want their standards adhered to in society, versus this is just who I am, that’s not a battle that anybody can afford to lose if who you are is at stake. Why does this matter to human identity?

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:59):
Well, there’s so much to it here, and of course in our ebook, exposing the Gender lie, we’re mostly focused on the harms that have been caused to minors, to children, to teenagers and young adults in this process. So I can share with you how I share it with them, that in Scripture, you find the meaning behind the biology.

So as the Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sachs, who was a very well-respected Jewish leader in Britain, put it, science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. And in Scripture, you see God putting together the meaning. So we have male and female, and as we talked about previously, if you are one or the other, even people who are called intersex, by the way, which is a group of people that they completely reject transgender ideology, but they have for one reason or another, maybe their secondary sex characteristics were not clear, but everyone is genetic anomalies.

Brandon Showalter (20:04):
Genetic anomalies, right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:06):
Yeah. Everybody is identifiably male or female, your chromosomes and the nucleus of every single cell of your body, except for your cells of reproductions we’ve already talked about in episodes one and two.

Brandon Showalter (20:16):
And even those, those, I’ll just interject here. Even those people where they iex with, some people don’t like that term, but you’re correct. Even those people who have what they call disorders of sexual development, these highly unusual and rare chromosomal configurations are always only ever male or female.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:33):
Right? Yes. That, yeah, that’s not, sometimes that’s used as an argument. Well, intersexual people exist, therefore you’re wrong. This is not a correct understanding. So the biblical understanding of male and female harmonizes with the biological understanding of male and female.

But you mentioned something earlier that we need to go back to. A lot of people think that this is an issue because they wholeheartedly buy into, even if they, on the face of it, are trying to reject sex stereotypes. So when you see a drag show performance, they put a clip on television, these are men, and they are not dressed the way women normally dress because they would get no attention, actually, misogynistically making a clownish way of making fun of women. Nobody would come to their show if they stood up dressed like normal dress garish, right? Yeah. They have to be shocking in order to try to get the attention.

Brandon Showalter (21:40):
I don’t know a single woman who dresses like that. Not one.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:43):
Right? No, no, of course not. And to say that that is what it means to be a woman is to really hurt a woman’s heart. It is to diminish the design that God gave to women to be unique and to harmonize together with men, to protect, to create a blessing, and also to build a better society. So there’s so much to it. We don’t want to give into stereotypes, which sometimes have caused young women who are very athletic, for instance, are now told, well, maybe you’re actually a boy because boys are involved in athletics. Well, that’s a stereotype.

Brandon Showalter (22:25):
Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:27):
Or a boy who plays the violin is told, well, so you’re not playing football right now. Maybe you’re actually a girl. And all the confusion comes about because the stereotypes are being reified or enshrined, and then, oh, we enshrined that. Then we knock it down. Therefore, we’re superior because we are above, we’re trans. We’re above those stereotypes.

(22:56):
So I think what we need to do, Brandon, is talk briefly about the biblical aspects of manhood and womanhood. And I had had some teaching in this earlier in my life from a mentor who actually used some materials written by Father Bill Mauser and Barbara Mauser about, we’ll call the five aspects of man, five aspects of woman. We’re not talking about that particularly, but that was just sort of an influence on me.

And it got me thinking that the way men and women were designed by God as male and female to harmonize together actually affects who we are toward creation, toward each other, toward common threats and toward our community. Those are the four things that we focused on in the book. So we need to be very careful about these social stereotypes which can differ from country to country, and which in many ways, if you just remove the stereotypes, you would not have the transgender ideology anymore. It has to react to something that sets up as the absolute.

Brandon Showalter (24:02):
And it is, it’s the cruelest irony of it too, because, and I can almost hear feminists too, if they’re watching this, there’s cheering in the background saying it’s the most regressive set of sex stereotypes just turned on its head. Everything that they have fought against this, to use your word, it just reinforces a lot of those same things just with a postmodern twist, if you will.

But yes, go ahead then. Let’s talk about some of those five aspects of, what does it really, because the phrase biblical manhood and biblical womanhood get tossed around and different people mean different things by that. But let’s just engage this for what it is. What would you say are some of these essential aspects of what it means to be man and woman, biblically speaking as the mausers? Go for it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:45):
Yes. So I’m using the word harmonize, that male and female were designed by God to harmonize together. So that’s sort of my basic understanding. We are not designed as individuals to be totally complete and separate and autonomous unto ourselves. We’re designed in this way. Scripture calls it the body of Christ. But in terms of male and female, it seems like there are four different things, and the way I approach this, I’m trying to not get entangled into this.

People who are theologically inclined would know about this battle. Other people just don’t care. But the battle between complementarian and an egalitarian, right? That’s the big thing. But if we think of male and female harmonizing, first of all, think about how we harmonize toward creation. I already mentioned this. The word Adam in Hebrew means out of the ground, the word isha means opposite of man. So the male and the female, their names were man and woman. A woman was designed to work alongside of man representing God’s interests.

(25:56):
Because God’s interests were of being fruitful, multiplying, filling the earth and subduing it. So in other words, they’re to take this garden, they’re to take this garden and use that garden as a model to turn the earth into a garden. And they couldn’t do it alone. They had to work together in order to be able to do it.

But when you look at the biology, you realize, oh, you know the studies of differences between boys and girls, the studies of differences between men and women in the workplace. There are thousands now, I should actually say tens of thousands of studies that have verified that there are knowable clear differences, that a young woman who is a tomboy has much more in common with a young woman who is very feminine than she does with any boy.

Because the idea is not that gender is kind of somehow a position on a dial with extreme masculinity on one end and extreme femininity on the other, but that they’re actually two spectra. There’s a male spectrum. You might have extreme masculinity and not so masculine, and then extreme femininity not so, but they’re two separate ones. So it’s not, well, we’re all, as human beings, on this one dial. So if you just play the violin a little bit too much, guy, you might actually be a girl. Okay? That is completely absurd and offensive to God’s creation.

(27:20):
So toward creation, you can even see this in the, so take for example, something simple like our eyes. Okay, the eyes, incredible aspect of our design. Well, there are two kinds of cells in your eyes, rods and cones. Girls have more cones, a preponderance of cones. Cones are the cells in your eyes that focus on color and texture. Boys have a preponderance of rods which focus on location, direction, and speed, that there’s a different, even what we see of the world is different, being male or female. So that’s the idea of toward creation.

But then toward each other is another aspect of this as well. Our productivity. There have been tons of studies on productivity, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds about the differences between males and females. In productivity, both men and women can be productive, but they are productive for different reasons and in different ways that males have been found to value in the workplace.

For example, pay benefits, power, authority, status. Women tend to value friends, relationships, recognition, communication, collaboration, family, home, both productive, but in different ways. It is important to understand that these differences really matter. So what we’re talking about is bringing out the meaning of what has been understood from biology to be the difference that these differences are meaningful. So we can talk about more. Toward common threats, I think is a really important one.

(28:53):
A lot of men wonder, why do men gravitate toward rough sports? How is it, why is it that men seem to be more involved in risk-taking? Why is it that men seem to have a higher tolerance for pain? Why is it that men seem to engage in risk-taking for the sake of risk taking, not for the pursuit of any relational reward, because God designed men to be warriors, defenders, and protectors who would stand for truth and fight against evil. Can women do that? Certainly they do.

But even if you look at the way children play, and I know there’s been a huge emphasis, create gender neutral toys so that you can eliminate sex stereotypes. But every time boys prefer toys that involve action and project power, girls prefer toys that facilitate conversation, facilitate relationship, and allow communication. These are real differences, right? So it almost doesn’t even matter. Little boy says it’s going to play with his sister’s Barbie dolls or whatever. It doesn’t matter. He’s going to play with them differently because he’s a boy than a girl would, because God designed them to be different.

Brandon Showalter (30:08):
Or if a girl plays with a Tonka truck. Yeah, same difference.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:11):
Right? So the studies on this are super clear. They have been done for decades now. It’s not like there’s a big question in the literature when you’re talking to a trans ideologist, you’re actually talking to someone who’s trying to ignore this overwhelming evidence that biologically leading to the social situation, boys and girls are different and they’re intended to be different. And that is on purpose that you were not born in the wrong body. That is a message, some propaganda that is being given to you.

And then finally toward the community, which is just about wisdom. Scripture talks a lot about wisdom. Proverbs is a book written by a father, two sons, and it talks about wisdom. When would you be wise? Your wisdom would not be secret. It would not be private. It would not just be inside your head that a person is considered to be wise in the city gates, that’s the scriptural term.

They literally had a seat right there. People would come ask for judgments. If the judgment was wise, everybody would know. If the judgment was foolish, everybody would know. Wisdom is seen as a romantic pursuit, really. But men and women both are wise, but they are wise differently.

Brandon Showalter (31:29):
This is good.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:31):
On studies of wisdom, and there actually are a bunch of studies on this. Men score higher on cognitive related items and emotional regulation. Women score higher on compassion items and self-reflection. Not that one or the other is bad. It’s that they’re different in order to harmonize. That’s the thing I’d really like for us to get to. We got to move beyond the stereotypes. Stereotypes move from the outside in; your design moves from the inside out.

Brandon Showalter (32:03):
So give some advice, because I think it is quite something as a journalist to be on the front lines of this observing young people who are, what you might call gender nonconforming, who get swept up into what are actually very rigid stereotypes that the trans ideologues are pushing. I’m an artistic guy, myself, a musician. I didn’t really identify with sort of where I grew up in the countryside of Virginia. So it was not an environment where there were a whole lot of people like me.

(32:34):
So how would you advise churches who, they see the gender insanity, they don’t like it. They want to sort of move into overcorrection and sort of return to some sort of more rigid form of gender stereotypes because they think that’s going to correct the problem. And just to explain why I’m asking this question.

We interviewed Kathy Koch and John Hannigan. John Hannigan is in a group called Celebrate Kids. They’re a great group and she’s told us that she’s met, she’s seen churches where they’re doing exactly that very thing, whereas they emphasize, we want you to be, we want kids who are creative, who sort of maybe they don’t exactly fit with traditional gender stereotypes or whatever to be who God made them to be.

And that may look a little different, and it’s not denying sexual difference or the things that tend to arise out of these studies that you mentioned, but speak a little bit more on that because I think we risk the overcorrection thing that could really be as harmful if we don’t respond redemptively, and we really try to stress that in exposing the gender lie that okay. No, what we’re not saying is that you sort of revert back to how gender norms may have served a usefulness of certain times in decades gone by, but speak to the danger of overcorrecting it as something that is as rigid as the trans stuff now.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:03):
Well, if you look at just men’s and women’s retreats, you sort of noticed this. The men’s retreats have to have some paramilitary aspect to them in order to be considered men’s retreats, right?

Brandon Showalter (34:19):
Chili feeds, yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:20):
You’re going to be a carnivore, you’re going to be carrying a gun, you’re going to be shooting at things, but you’re going to be smoking cigars or whatever it is, which is all of that stuff. Guys bond together, men bond together differently than women bond together. No question about that.

But I would go back and just ask, what would it look like to have a retreat where men of all different interests have the opportunity to express that and be involved? I remember I did an event not that long ago where there was a guy who was a beautiful visual artist and he was not, he’s not matching these stereotypes of the man on the stage, but I had him on the stage with me making a painting while I was speaking.

Brandon Showalter (35:15):
Wow, love that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:17):
And it was powerful because it allowed people to see the flowering of the ideas in print at the hand of this person who was a genius.

Brandon Showalter (35:28):
Love it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:29):
When he wasn’t a big muscle guy. Look how strong I am, and here’s what all of that, listen, yesterday I was visiting with a firefighter. I mean, he is the big masculine guy, okay?

Brandon Showalter (35:46):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:47):
He has an incredibly tender heart. And his heart, really what he’d really like to do. He’s a firefighter, he’s been a police officer, big tough dude. What he really wanted to do, and he was in tears as he was sharing his ideas, he wanted to write a book about his love letters to his teachers. I love what you did to change my life. You sent this or that and it changed me.

So we can’t just allow the enshrinement of those stereotypes to allow men to sort of retreat into. We get together, we don’t express our feelings, we just shoot stuff or women getting together saying, well, if we’re together, we have to disclose everything or whatever. That’s not really what we’re talking about here.

What we’re talking about is we know that you are part of our telos, okay? Aristotle talked about this idea of our telos. What is it that we were made for? And our telos as human beings and our telos as male or female, all matter. But then we have a tell loss of what individually God made us to be that is different from anybody else on the planet.

(37:02):
And that must not be ignored at the expense of the other things. So you want to be asking questions like, what are the kinds of things that return energy to you and make you feel more alive? And how can you do that in a way that brings blessing and flourishing to other people? When we do that, we have that kind of outward focus and we understand that we’re all doing this together. This inward mulling things over that can end up being destructive to ourselves, sort of fades into the background a little bit. We push out and we focus on being givers rather than just takers.

Brandon Showalter (37:37):
Yeah, I love that. And I think just to sort of bring it down, to reduce it to a more simplistic example here, is that when you actually step back and you look at whatever gender stereotype has become a culture, it’s become sort of the stereotype that it is. It’s become reinforced or entrenched in any given culture and you actually step back and you examine it and it’s like, well, really, why are you associating that with maleness or femaleness? The most easiest one that I think of is, how in the world did we assign genders to colors?

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:14):
Like blue or pink.

Brandon Showalter (38:15):
Why blue or pink? Do we do the same with green and orange or red and yellow? No, but somehow pink and blue, and that makes the point about the, because what is the trans flag? It’s a pink and blue flag and it reinforces what’s already there.

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:32):
That’s right. It enshrines the very stereotypes that it pretends to reject.

Brandon Showalter (38:36):
Right? And so it is truly regressive. To close this out, if you could give some final thoughts as to, we believe as Christians, as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, that his healing grace, the name of Jesus, Yeshua, it means God saves. It means God heals. He has the antidote. The gospel is the antidote for what ails us, the pain over this area of male and female, the gender wars, and we’ve got a culture that’s at war, and that’s not hyperbolic. It’s true.

We are coming to blows over this. Families are fracturing over this, the battle of the sexes. This is a brutal, brutal fight. Speak to how the Lord Jesus Christ is the healing balm that we need. Why do we believe that the gospel can bring the salve that we all crave for this bitterness that ails us?

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:32):
The ancient Greeks had this term that they used to describe the obviousness of reality stuff that’s just clear. It’s obvious everybody sees it unless they’re deceiving themselves, and that word for the obviousness of reality was logos. It is the word that’s translated “word” in English in John 1:1. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were created through him and apart from him, not one thing was created that was created in him was life, and that life was the light of men. That light shines in the darkness, and yet the darkness did not overcome it.

The hope of the gospel is right there in John chapter one at the very beginning where we realized that the obviousness of reality isn’t just a logical proposition, it’s not just a mathematical formula. It’s a person. It’s Jesus.

(40:25):
And when we say that Jesus is the Savior, we recognize we have this design sort of that we’ve been given by God and we talked about that it’s different for male and female, but either males or females can abuse or abandon that design, and that’s what scripture calls sin, the words for sin. There are a lot of them in scripture, but they all kind of are encompassed by this one idea departing from the way there is a way that leads to life and we tend to, as human beings in our society, we tend to depart from it.

So what Jesus is offering is a rescue back on the way. He said, I am the way and the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father, but through me. That’s John 14, six. So the hope of the gospel here is that by accepting that offer of redemption, that we cannot only allow Jesus to guide us back onto the way, but we can have our primary identity as children of God, brothers of Jesus, followers of Jesus.

(41:33):
Our primary identity is in Jesus rather than in our sexuality or our income or our athletic ability or our cleverness or anything else. And then when we start with that, then true creativity begins to grow. If you look at the history of art, it was Jesus’ followers who believed that Jesus is the truth who changed everything in the world of music and the visual arts and architecture and everything else.

The same is true in medicine. It was Jesus’ followers who brought healing to people. It was Jesus’ followers who inspired in history people to view every human as having dignity, even if they weren’t wanted by their own family. It was in history that it was Jesus’ followers who opened up a political system that allows everyday people to have a voice and a justice system that is just as just for those who are not privileged, as those who are.

(42:32):
All of those innovations came about because of people who were following Jesus, and I talk about that in my book. Truth changes everything, but the key point that relates to our discussion here is there is healing in Jesus. Now, that is not to say, Brandon, that people should not have some therapy. If you’re dealing with gender dysphoria, it’s very likely, as we’ve mentioned already, that there are other comorbidities, anxiety, other kinds of mental health issues, often adverse childhood experiences. ACEs is what people in the therapy world call them that there’s childhood trauma, so we need help to get all of that resolved.

No one is an island. No one just says, all I have to do is read my Bible and I don’t need anybody else. I don’t need healthy living. I don’t need a good night’s sleep. I don’t need a break from social media. I could just do whatever I want as long as I’m also reading my Bible. That’s not the point, because what Jesus is offering is to reunite us with reality itself in a way that shows that we can be a blessing. We can bring flourishing to others.

Brandon Showalter (43:41):
That’s so good. Well, I’m going to say that I know that Summit Ministries is going to have a link to our ebook where you can get it as a journalist with the Christian Post. Go to christian post.com. We will be promoting this as well. If you’re listening to this and you’re in the Dallas area, on March 23rd, I’m going to be hosting an event called Unmasking Gender Ideology: Confronting Transgenderism and Protecting Children. We’ll have a rockstar panel, Jeff, you’re going to be there. We’ll be there. We’re going to be there and we’ll be presenting from our ebook, but where can people, in addition to Christianpost.com, find our ebook, Jeff?

Dr. Jeff Myers (44:17):
Well, you want to be looking at christianpost.com because this is really excellent journalism, giving a biblical perspective on so many issues, but you can easily get this ebook, which is called Exposing the Gender Lie by to summit.org/protect. It’s available there as a free download. Send your friends there as well. This is an opportunity we really do have as believers in Jesus to have a positive outcome and a time when a lot of people are being confused and harmed by the very culture that’s supposed to protect them.

Brandon Showalter (44:54):
And we need to be courageous. Just really need to, this is something that demands that we speak with the kind of prophetic power that our demands. This is so important and well. With that, we’ll wrap this up, but thank you everybody for listening, and Jeff, I’ll see you soon and everybody go check out our ebook. It’s very much worth your while.

Dr. Jeff Myers (45:16):
Thanks, Brandon. Thank you to my guest today, Brandon Showalter, for joining me on the show. Jesus promises that the truth will set us free. There’s a lot we need to be set free from and a lot we need to be set free for, so may we continue to learn and embody the truth found in Jesus. It has the power to change everything.

You can find a link to our book that Summit Ministries and Christian Post worked on together, Brandon Showalter and I, Exposing the Gender Lie: How to Protect Children and Teens from the Transgender Industry’s False Ideology. You can find it in the show notes or you could just skip to summit.org/protect. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next week.

Listeners, I want you to know that our podcast is on Edifi, which is a truly powerful app that brings together thousands of the best Christian podcasts in one place for your listening enjoyment. You can download it at edifi.app. Be sure to share the show if you have enjoyed listening to it and leave a review if you would, on the site where you download the show that helps more people know about the Dr. Jeff Show, and I’ll look forward to seeing you next week.