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Starting Again

I was born in the sixties.  But I am not a child of the 60’s.  My family was lower-middle class, and by the standards of the time, traditional in most every way.  Dad was a minister.  If he or mom had lived into their 90’s they would not have imagined the social changes we have witnessed in the last 20 years.  It would be too easy to say the sexual revolution of the 60’s caused all this change, as some conservatives maintain.  But the roots of this change go back much further than the swinging 60’s.  

So I’m embarking with some misgivings on a survey of cultural history.  There are deep intellectual and cultural traditions that have shaped our everyday lives.  We’ve come to a point in the Western world where the statement “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” is comprehensible to many public leaders, at least in public.  That phrase would be completely incomprehensible to my parent’s generation, in public or private, not to mention every preceding generation.  It is still incomprehensible to many, if not most people today. But if you express your bewilderment in public, say at many workplaces in the Western world, increasingly the odds are you will be regarded as stupid, immoral or worse.  You may be reprimanded for your irrational “phobia.”  You might even have your career derailed.  If you broadcast your view on a public forum, say Twitter, expect the Twitterati to pounce with the ferocity of a caged unfed Tiger.  In certain parts of the world you may even be charged with a hate-crime for your expressed incredulity at the latest massive cultural shift.  (See the following posts, here & here.)

As a 60’s poet might say, “The times they are a changin.”

The tectonic cultural shift in the last 20 years is quite breathtaking.  Regardless of what you think about gay marriage, we have gone from year 2000 where the majority of Americans were opposed to gay marriage to today where normalization of Transgenderism is fast approaching.

A long and winding road brought us to this point.  I want to offer a thoughtful and hopefully generous exposition, from a Classic Christian point of view, of how we got here.  As I go, I’ll be documenting some disturbing current events. (Read my next post). I hope that even those who disagree with Classic Christianity will find here a fair and readable assessment of our state of affairs. (post continues page 2)

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The Ground Is Shifting: The BMA Drops Its Opposition to the Cass Review

BMA Now Says Cass Review ‘Robust’

For years, critics of the Cass Review have pointed to opposition from the British Medical Association as proof that the review had already been “debunked” or rejected by serious medicine.

That talking point just took a major hit.

According to reporting in The Guardian, the BMA has now dropped its opposition to the Cass Review after conducting its own examination of the evidence.

That is no small development.

For several years, the review led by Hilary Cass has occupied the center of the international debate over pediatric gender medicine. Commissioned by England’s National Health Service, the Cass Review examined the scientific evidence behind puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and the broader “gender-affirming” treatment model being used on minors.

Its conclusions were deeply concerning.

The review found that:

  • the evidence base for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in children was weak,
  • many studies cited in support of these interventions were of low quality,
  • long-term outcome data were insufficient,
  • and many children presenting with gender distress also suffered from significant psychological comorbidities requiring more comprehensive assessment.

In response, the UK sharply restricted the use of puberty blockers for minors outside formal clinical research settings.

That alone should have forced a serious and sober public conversation.

Instead, much of the response from activists and ideological allies was not scientific engagement, but moral denunciation.

Doctors, therapists, journalists, parents, and researchers who raised concerns about pediatric transition medicine were frequently branded “transphobic,” accused of hatred, or treated as though they were participating in some kind of moral panic. Public pressure campaigns attempted to frame the debate as already settled:

“The science is settled.”

But the science was not settled.

And increasingly, institutions are being forced to admit it.

The significance of the BMA’s shift is not merely political. It reflects something deeper: the growing inability to sustain the claim that meaningful scientific disagreement never existed.

The Cass Review did not deny that gender-distressed children are suffering. Quite the opposite. It acknowledged profound distress and vulnerability among these young people. But it also recognized that many of them were dealing with overlapping conditions and influences — autism spectrum disorders, depression, anxiety, trauma histories, social contagion dynamics, family dysfunction, and other mental health struggles.

For years, the debate was framed emotionally:

“Do you support transgender youth, or not?”

But that framing obscured the real question:

“What treatment model genuinely helps vulnerable children in the long term?”

That is the question serious medicine must answer.

Not ideological slogans.
Not online intimidation campaigns.
Not institutional fear.

Evidence.

A Deeper Truth

One of the deeper issues underneath this entire debate is philosophical — even theological. Modern gender ideology often treats the body itself as secondary to the inner self, reducing biological sex to something psychologically negotiable rather than something meaningful and given.  

The Cass Review did not address theology. But in practice, it forced medicine back toward reality:

Bodies matter.
Puberty matters.
Development matters.
Biology matters.

The tragedy is that this debate should have happened years earlier.

Instead, legitimate scientific concerns were too often suppressed by institutional fear, activist pressure, and ideological conformity. Many clinicians stayed silent. Some lost jobs or reputations for speaking carefully and cautiously. Parents who hesitated were sometimes treated as obstacles rather than protectors.

Meanwhile, vulnerable children were placed on pathways involving irreversible physical changes whose long-term consequences remain poorly understood.

The ground is shifting now.

Slowly.
Unevenly.
Quietly in some places.

But it is shifting.

And perhaps one of the lessons of this entire controversy is that medicine becomes dangerous when it confuses compassion with unquestioning affirmation — or when political ideology is allowed to outrun scientific evidence.

Children deserve better than slogans.
They deserve truth, compassion, humility, and genuine care.

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Grace & Truth

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On Bodies, Truth, and the Direction of the Church

I wanted to alert you guys to this article I came across from First Things—“The Word Became Flesh and Picked Up a Hammer.” It’s well worth your time, not just for what it says explicitly, but for what it reveals about a deeper issue in our culture… and, increasingly, in parts of the Church.

A new Catholic trade college in Steubenville seeks to restore the unity of intellectual and manual formation, challenging the modern divide between “head” and “hands.” Rooted in the Incarnation, it teaches that the body and its work are essential to human dignity and Christian life. Students study the liberal arts while gaining practical skills in trades like carpentry and plumbing, even helping build their own campus. The college meets real economic needs, brings hope to a struggling region, and forms graduates who serve others. It offers a compelling model of education where faith, work, and community are meaningfully integrated.

Here’s the link if you want to read the whole thing:
https://firstthings.com/the-word-became-flesh-and-picked-up-a-hammer/

One passage in particular really struck me, and I want to quote it in full because it gets at something profoundly Christian that we’ve been in danger of losing:

“The divorce between the head and the hands has been terrible for people. It is analogous to the divorce between body and soul. As Christians, we find this divorce out of place in a religion where bodies are essential to worship and where God Himself became flesh. In education, we often talk about the “liberal arts,” unconsciously segregating the “servile arts” to other people—the servants. This is a modern mistake (and dare I also say an ancient one). But the medieval Christian educational tradition talked rather about the “manual arts,” which paired harmoniously with the more speculative arts. After all, God wedded the head with the hands in one body.”

That line—“God wedded the head with the hands in one body”—is doing a lot of theological work.

At the center of Christianity is not an idea, or a feeling, or even a moral framework. It is the Incarnation. God took on a real, physical, human body. Not as a temporary costume, but as something essential to who He is in His saving work. That means the body is not incidental to our identity—it is integral to it.

And this is where some churches are going off the rails today.

When I see churches affirming transgender ideology—sometimes quite enthusiastically—I can’t help but feel that we’re witnessing a different version of that same “divorce” the article talks about. Only now it’s not just head vs. hands, but self vs. body. The inner sense of identity is elevated, while the physical body is treated as negotiable, malleable, even irrelevant.

But that’s not a Christian anthropology.

Historically, the Church has insisted on the unity of body and soul. Not because it’s convenient, but because it flows directly from the Incarnation and ultimately from creation itself: “male and female He created them.” The body is not an obstacle to the “real you.” It is you—part of the gift God has given.

To be clear, I’m not talking about a lack of compassion. There are real people experiencing real distress, and they deserve care, patience, and love. But compassion untethered from truth doesn’t actually help people. In fact, it can do real harm.

In that sense, some churches—perhaps with the best of intentions—are adopting a framework that is much closer to a kind of modern Gnosticism than to historic Christianity. The idea that the “true self” is something internal, and the body is just a shell that can be reshaped to match it… that’s not new. It’s just been repackaged in modern, therapeutic language.

And this ties into a broader concern I’ve had, which I’ve written about before: when the Church starts absorbing the assumptions of the surrounding culture rather than challenging them, it slowly loses its ability to speak truthfully about reality.

Companion Posts

The Promise of Disembodiment? A Big Lie!
When Bodies Don’t Matter: The Gnostic Temptation of Our Age

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I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.