Many people treat gender identity conflicts and sexual orientation as if they are the same.
If a sexual orientation is something you are born with and is thus immutable (a claim I would contest as a Christian), then gender identity must work the same way. It’s something you’re born with and can’t be changed. If therefore a child embraces a gender identity at odds with his/her biological sex, then it would be harmful and wrong to try and change that gender identity to align with the child’s biological sex. It would be harmful and wrong in the same way that trying to change sexual orientation is harmful and wrong.
Because trying to change a child’s mind is harmful and wrong, the best way to deal with gender identity conflicts in children is to try and change the body. And so more and more, hormone suppression and cross-dressing are prescribed to young children who experience gender identity conflicts. The cross-dressing establishes them socially in their preferred gender. Hormone suppression prepares their bodies for gender reassignment surgery at a later point—because again, changing the body is less harmful than trying to change the mind. At least that’s how the politically correct orthodoxy has developed.
This way of thinking is very common but has many problems from a Christian perspective. To begin with, to say that same-sex attraction cannot be changed contradicts studies that have shown orientation to be more fluid than some people think. More importantly, denying it can change flies in the face of core Christian teaching that grace can transform even the most intractable of sins (2 Cor. 3:18).
But even if we grant that people tend to experience same-sex attraction as a more fixed, stable reality, it does not follow that gender identity conflicts work the same way. In fact, the data indicate that these conflicts are very fluid. And that most children grow out of them with no intervention at all.
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