Cutting Off is the New Coming Out, and Parents are the Invisible Casualties
In 2014, Susan Stryker, an MTF transgender Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Arizona, published an essay entitled “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.”* In it, Stryker declares, “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster.” Stryker, identifies with the monster in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, whose war against his maker leaves a trail of carnage and death. Stryker seeks to detonate his “rage and revenge” against “the naturalized heterosexual order,” against “traditional family values,” and against the “hegemonic oppression” of God’s creation by sabotaging the distinctions between male and female. In his essay, he links three strategies for the LGBTQ+ movement to demolish the created order: 1 - Normalizing Visibility, 2 - Queer Public Performance, and 3 - Rage.
1 - Normalizing Visibility:
An early slogan of the LGBTQ movement was “If I Can’t See it, I Can’t Be it,” which necessitated the rite of passage of “coming out of the closet.” Coming out did two things: it normalized the gay experience (consenting adults just want what everyone else has!), and it re-normed the norm (nothing deviant here–we are just like any other minority group seeking civil rights; to protect us, you need to move the center to the left). Because coming out was meant to make homosexuality look wholesome, it did not aim at cutting off family relations. A supportive family of origin–as well as a supportive liberal mainline protestant church–was always welcome, and each helped advance the normalization of homosexuality.
2 - Queer Public Performance:
The Coming Out movement produced organizations like PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, which bills itself as the largest civil rights art project in history). Coming Out required a message (“sexual minorities” seeking civil rights) and a stage. The queer public performance worked–media representations, along with political activism, replaced sodomy laws with “marriage equality” in one generation.
Where was the church at this time (1988-2014)?
The Coming Out/Queer Public Performance Era gave Big Tent Evangelism a sense that dialogue could create common ground, and common ground could be missional. This pre-Obergefell world, what Aaron Renn calls a “neutral world,”* promoted the idea that homosexuality was more disability than sin. This mantra, with the help of evangelical naivete, morphed into a church-sponsored Gay Rights movement called ‘Side B Gay Christianity’, and it was as subtle as a serpent.* It shifted the meaning of homosexuality from God’s definition (found in Scripture) to man’s definition (found in personal feelings). Vocabulary changed from sodomy to same-sex attraction, from sin to suffering, and from repentance to acceptance. Instead of mortifying sin, “strugglers” were now asked to “steward” and “navigate” their same-sex attraction. Instead of calling for repentance, the church was called to accept and affirm.
3 - Transgender Rage:
2015 was a watershed moment. Legalizing gay marriage in all fifty states and redefining the legal definition of harm by judicial fiat, LGBTQ+ became morally celebrated in the USA. The laws of the land now deny the foundation of the created order–the stable and distinct difference between male and female. Parachurch ministries eagerly jumped on board, chiding the church for its homophobia and redefining LGBTQ+ as a people-group, like the Ninevites or Gentiles.* The Side B Gay Christian parachurch organization, Living Out, provided a church audit, endorsed by the late PCA minister, Tim Keller, to guide churches into their homosexual normalization.* After Obergefell, Sexual Orientation, a man-made category of personhood, replaced the image-bearing of a holy God as our universal anthropology, and this put the gospel on a collision course with the laws of the land.
Not only does the law celebrate transgender rage, but so too does the United States government. Indeed, the White House fuels transgender rage. It honors March 31st as Transgender Day of Visibility, a national holiday founded in 2010. In 2023, this celebration came days after a transgender shooter opened fire in a Christian school, killing six people, and in the shooter's manifesto she demonstrated that transgender visibility demands the blood of Christians.* Only the victory won through Christ’s blood will heal transgender rage. Do not minimize the spiritual darkness: in 2024, Transgender Day of Visibility was celebrated by the White House on Easter Sunday.
Parents: The Invisible Casualties of the LGBTQ+ Movement
LGBTQ+ movement has shifted its rite of passage from “coming out” to “cutting off”–cutting off of parents, of history, of reality, and sometimes even body parts. And that level of violence can only be sustained by rage. All of the made-up identities of LGBTQ+ celebrate such a cutting off. I regularly hear sad stories of adult children cutting off their Christian parents and claiming they have been “traumatized” by the biblical teaching of their youth. It’s awful for parents when their daughter, who thinks she is lesbian, does this.
But the rage and violence deepens as we plummet into transgender madness. Miriam Grossman, M.D., addresses this in her book Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide out of the Madness (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2023).* When a child–adult or minor–comes out as “trans,” the strong arm of the law steps in, and parents who do not comply with “transgender identity” will be cut off by the state. And this is legal, thanks to the 2020 Bostock Supreme Court decision and the Biden Administration’s 2021 anti-bullying federal program required in all government schools. These redefine “bullying” as any common sense approach to transgender identity, such as biblical counseling. When a parent is cut off from a child under the new regime of transgender religion, the loss and helplessness experienced by parents is primal.
The following scenario is not uncommon: A parent whose child, under the cloud of mental illness or social activism, claims transgenderism needs healing and help. But the satanic invention of an evil age claims that transgenderism is just fine, and all a person who is maniacally obsessed with destroying and mutilating his body needs is a sticker and a parade. The parent is an invisible victim, as their child no longer has the same personality, name, voice, or physical recognition. The parent loses their bond and their shared interests. Memories are rewritten, photos destroyed, trust is broken, and the parent watches helplessly as the child’s emotional stability and physical vigor are destroyed.
Where is the church in all this? Are they bravely coming to the aid of parents desperately trying to save their children from this social contagion?
Far too often, no. Big Eva is either hiding in the bunker of pietism and pretending it doesn’t know the time of day or working overtime to be a soft presence here in Sodom. Take, for example, Preston Sprinkle, whose heretical Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender offers “webinars” to help us “ humanize our dialogue about the transgender experience.* Big Eva’s response is both stupid and sinister. The whole transgender movement needs to shut down, and the captives need to be liberated–which is something offered freely by the gospel of Jesus Christ (Isaiah 61:1-3).
While Big Eva wrings its hands and humanizes the transgender experience, real Christians are stepping into the fray of politics and law. We are testifying before the legislature about transgenderism’s junk science, defending parental rights at trans-crazed public schools, and we are bringing the light of the gospel into the darkness of this day. We play the long game because we know the law is our tutor and thus shapes culture. Our current laws tell lies about what it means to be human, and we need to change them. We want to overturn Obergefell and Bostock. We are Christians–the real kind, saved by the blood of Christ who, like Paul, know we are chief of all sinners. Saved by Christ–who made our dead bones live–we “say among the heathen that the Lord reigns” (Psalm 96:10). Sometimes, the heathen spits on us in return, but since we are playing the long game, we don’t expect the world to love us. But we do expect our lives to pose a joyful challenge to this fallen world. Because “the Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion,” we trust that we will indeed “rule thou in the midst of thine enemies” (Psalm 110:2). Of this promise, John Calvin writes,
“Doubtless our condition in this world will include many hardships, but God’s will is that Christ’s kingdom should be encompassed with many enemies, his design being to keep us in a state of constant warfare. Therefore it becomes us to exercise patience and meekness, and, assured of God’s aid, boldly to consider the rage of the whole world as nothing.”*
Ponder that. The “rage of the whole world [is] nothing”. The transgender rage of your trans-crazed public school is nothing. The rage of the reigning idol of Pride Month is nothing. The rage of your beloved child who has cut you off for now is nothing. We are kept in a state of constant spiritual warfare in our state of grace, where we must war against our sins and our nations’ sins and refuse to bow our knees to the idol of our day.
Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), speaks for transgender mutilating “doctors” everywhere when he says, “I … disturbed with profane fingers the tremendous secrets of the human frame.”* Dr. Frankenstein successfully “pursued nature to her hiding places,”* and the creature that emerges says this about his mangled and mutilated existence: “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.”* It shocks the senses to see the word “abortion” used in this context in the early 19th century, but it is exactly the right word. The LGBTQ+ movement is a culture of rage that ends in death. The sin of both homosexuality and transgenderism is the war against the male/female pattern and the life-giving purpose of God’s creation.
Dr. Frankenstein foolishly tried to make dead bones live, but only Christ can do that.
*Footnotes in order
- Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein About the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” 2014. University of Pennsylvania Archives. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Stryker_My_Words.pdf
- See Aaron M. Renn, Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2024.
- See M.D. Perkins, Dangerous Affirmation: The Threat of ‘Gay Christianity,’ Tupelo, MS: American Family Association, 2022.
- For the most egregious example of this, please see the Side B Gay sexuality curriculum required by the parachurch ministry, Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ). Podcaster Jon Harris, from Conversations that Matter, has assembled a 30 minute montage of this atrocity.
- Living Out. org, Church Audit for LGBTQ+ inclusivity, January 12, 2021. https://www.livingout.org/resources/articles/65/how-biblically-inclusive-is-your-church-the-living-out-church-audit
- Matt Walsh, “The Truth About the Covenant School Shootung is Finally Coming Out. And It’s Exactly What we Thought,” Daily Wire, June 7, 2024. https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-truth-about-the-covenant-school-shooting-is-finally-coming-out-and-its-exactly-what-we-thought
- See especially the chart entitled, “Primary Loss: The Child You Know,” from page 153.
- Preston Sprinkle, The Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender, Webinar, “Humanizing Dialogue in the Trans Conversation,” with special guest, atheist Julia Malott, a biolical man. https://www.centerforfaith.com/programs/leadership-forums/webinar-humanizing-dialogue-in-the-trans-conversation. October 23, 2023
- Joel Beeke, 365 Days with Calvin. Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, Day One Publications, 2008: Entry from 19 March
- Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus. 1818. Ed. James Rieger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982:50
- Ibid., 49
- Ibid., 219