The effects of dissolving the gender binary on women

The following is A transcript of my presentation at the International Federation of Therapeutic and Counseling Choice (IFTCC) Annual Conference in Hungary (Oct. 16, 2021) “Working Meaningfully with Women with Unwanted SSA”

Hello, thank you for this tremendous honor to speak today.

Before going too far I want to tell a little about me and CHANGED.

I questioned my sexuality and identity all throughout my teenage years and eventually came out in my early 20s after a brief, failed opposite sex marriage. At 30 I entered a presbyterian seminary openly gay and became part of the gay affirming church movement.

But, I was diagnosed with bipolar type one when I was in my early 20s.

I underwent psychiatric care partnered with regular therapy through several psychological counselors for over 10 years—Beginning with outpatient care, then week long hospitalizations to deal with suicidality or med adjustment, and culminating with a 30 day inpatient hospitalization that nearly cost me my masters degree in theology.

I want to express here among you that modern psychological care that does not offer exploration of potential causes of sexual identity or orientation with an aim for alignment with one’s biological sex can be harmful. This is not commonly expressed when discussing sexual orientation and I rarely speak of this.

I believe that dismissal of sexual orientation as a factor in my declining mental health added to my increasing distress and suicidality. I regret that mainstream psychiatry and therapy were more harmful to me than beneficial. In the course of time spent in therapy, depression worsened and cycles of highs and lows became debilitating. It was not until my faith journey led me to the extravagant and safe love of God that I began to question the impacts of sexual desire and my sexual identity. I ultimately discovered multiple unaddressed traumas.

Over time the effects and manifestations of bipolar disorder type one began to be resolved. Although I had been at points benefitted by using an array of anti-anxiety, sleeping medications, antipsychotic medications, anti-depressants and mood stabilizing drugs like lithium that varied in their consistent benefit. Today I no longer have any symptoms of bipolar type one, take no medication and have not had a manic episode in nearly 20 years.

I want to explain that my experience within the gay community did not seem at the time destructive to me during the years that I was undergoing intense psychotherapy. I did not have “unwanted” same-sex desires and my religious faith at the time did not contradict my understanding of my identity. However, my mental health was dramatically declining to the point of suicide. I would never at the time have pointed to my sexual orientation as a factor in my distress.

It was not until I finished my degree and began pastoral ministry that an unexplainable religious experience challenged my understanding of God and His accessibility. It caused a radical reevaluation of what I believed about scripture and God himself. Culminating in revelation of God’s beauty and invitation to me for greater meaning and purpose through his life and love.

Ultimately I experienced a crisis internally as I recognized my value of lesbianism over and above my acceptance of womanhood. An existential crisis that exposed my great dependence on lesbian identity for self-worth.

For this reason I rejected lesbianism as a hindrance to my maturing faith. And the more deeply I embraced my understanding of God‘s love and presence in my life partnered with greater self-understanding, the symptoms of bipolar disorder began to dissipate. And, my attraction to women also declined. I married a man, we’ve been married 16 years now. I no longer experience SSA.

Today, I am a licensed pastor at Bethel Church in Redding, CA.

About 6 years ago a friend connected me to Ken Williams, who is also a pastor at Bethel—as one with a shared background with LGBTQ. We began to chat over coffee and then together with another good friend, we met weekly for over a year processing together our faith journeys and God’s impact on our sexual identity. In the end we realized we had something to offer others.

So in 2017 we began a ministry at Bethel called Equipped to Love, aimed at walking with individuals, but also supporting pastors and families as they navigated LGBTQ. But, only a year later a bill was introduced in California that threatened our work. It was a consumer fraud bill that essentially said, “Since we know sexual orientation cannot change, any paid resource or service should be considered fraud and made illegal in the state.” Ken and I began speaking up and ended up testifying at most of the committee hearings in the state capitol on this bill.

Early on we realized no one believed us. So, driving home from Sacramento we decided to publish a book of stories—the kind of resource that would have been banned in California. We quickly called about 30 of our friends and published in 6 weeks the first version of a book we called provocatively Changed to make our point. We handed it out to legislators and then staged a rally in which we all shared our 2-3 minute stories. That 2.5 hours of live streamed testimonies sparked something and now we have formed a growing network, probably the largest in the US that is outspoken on public policy issues.

And so Changed is a network of people who have left LGBTQ behind. Many of my responsibilities these days rest with educating and informing Christian leaders and addressing public policy issues.

But, as a pastor at Bethel Church and instructor at Bethel’s ministry school, I also spend much time meeting with women who are seeking wholeness.

Now, as I was grappling over what to share with you today I felt that some of the “psychological” factors I might speak about, such as the need to address trauma or attachment issues, well, many of you are psychologists and my degree is in theology, so, I thought better of that approach.

Instead, I wanted to offer you two important factors that typical emotional care might not address, but that are nevertheless important in any conversation today on unwanted sexual desires: first, the significance of the LGBTQ narrative for the individual who experiences same-sex sexual attraction, and then second, the impact of the west’s advancing dissolution of the gender binary.

So, first, the LGBTQ narrative.

You may not realize that the “born gay” narrative is one of the most meaningful and protected factors for a person who comes out as gay or lesbian. Anyone who has offered care to an LGBTQ-identifying person, for example in suggesting that orientation might change, has probably witnessed reluctance to let go of gay identity and even recoil at the thought. I want to propose that one’s personal investment in the identity is partially connected to the narrative it offers. Though a great deal of weight must be placed on “belonging” and how the gay community can bring real comfort to people who have felt outcast or rejected because of their orientation; I feel that the narrative of the LGBTQ experience is by far more important to individuals because it offers meaning as well as vindication and redemption from any sense of failure or brokenness.

With this in mind, I want to look at the childhood experiences of many of the women I have met.

It goes something like this... For a period of time you are exploring your sexuality and trying to understand what you are experiencing. You grapple with what you are feeling, how you are expressing your sexuality, who you are attracted to and even why you don’t seem to measure up among other girls. And then you try to understand what these things mean. Why are you the way you are? You begin comparing yourself to other girls to understand what you are going through. And you gauge attraction based largely on affinity or emotional connection—not only sexual feelings. As you question, if your perception of the lesbian or bisexual narrative can in any way explain, you ignite a query. You begin looking at your past and realize that as a child you only played with same sex peers and you loved them. Your most intimate childhood friends were only girls. You might have been molested, but you don’t consider that pertinent. Perhaps you preferred football to dolls, or you liked mud rather than makeup. If these observations correlate with what you understand gay to mean, then you will begin to re-evaluate your past and you will find experiences and desires that support your query. You begin to believe that your playground friendships were sexual relationships. In a sense, you force your way into the LGBTQ narrative because it seems to offer understanding.

You probably notice the vacuum here. In this narrative there is no appreciation for the many potential factors that might underly her feelings and the development of sexual attraction. No, these possibilities remain a mystery. There is a great deal of acceptance of the LGBTQ narrative today, but very little out there to offer a counterweight. “Why am I the way I am?” becomes a painful question when there are no answers and your experience demands expression.

“Born this way” releases the individual from the need for any further self-discovery. In its unique way it redeems the individual and her closest relationships from any shame or responsibility in the development of the attraction. It assuages the personal fear that there is something indeed broken in need of repair and in its way brings a kind of convoluted healing that allows one to move on without addressing underlying pain or confusion. And we now know, it even allows for the development of a dynamic social pressure that can adequately suppress the underlying confusion and self-deception.

I want you to notice there are several ready-made narratives that are shaping lives today that manipulate the truth. One powerful narrative yielding fruit today with devastating results is the pressure to commit suicide when affirmation is unfelt. I propose that children are being led to take that path because it is the narrative offered when parents do not affirm. I’m not saying suicidal feelings are not real, I’m suggesting that it offers vision. Another is the so-called “conversion therapy” accusation. Same-sex attracted people are being led to re-evaluate counseling experiences and religious convictions based upon new narratives being propagated.

I want to propose that one of the most important initiatives we may engage is the vocalization of a counter narrative that offers a more reasonable and even logical story line. It is one that exposes the complexity, rather than the oversimplification, of childhood sexual and identity formation.

As I have worked with women in the self-discovery process, a great deal of transformation occurs while unpacking the effects of childhood perceptions, traumas, sexual abuse, broken families, damaged parent-child relationships and childhood bullying. The new, actually the original, narrative for her life begins to unfold. The mysteries of LGBTQ identity and the many ways it has reshaped her self-perception begin to be exposed.

The effect is a sense of belonging among other women, really among other humans. For I believe the LGBTQ label is dehumanizing. No longer outcast for some genetic mutation or other mysterious biological factor, the woman discovers that her life has been shaped by thoughts, actions, relationships, pressures etc. that can be observed —that can even be redeemed. Understanding some of the why’s behind emotional dependencies or even sexual lust can begin to establish a self-love that seeks healthy outlets to remedy.

This is one reason why stories, testimonies of those who have experienced restoration in their sexual or gender identity, are absolutely vital to our cultural moment. They have the power to flip the narrative—To cast vision for an alternative and more sustainable experience of wholeness. In the very least, they offer an invitation for greater self-discovery and the potential dismissal of the “born gay” narrative.

Now, a secondary pressure felt among women addressing unwanted same-sex sexual desire is conflict over the nature of femininity. For all of us who have questioned our sexuality, trying to understand femininity is not a new pursuit; however, the confused tension we are seeing with the advent of the transgender movement IS novel. The redefinition of gender is creating a semantic and existential crisis that impacts the women I support.

I’ve been watching an interesting trend as the LGBTQ movement, specifically Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal, are using language that unites the feminist movement with the LGBTQ. Lately I’m seeing the HRC publish articles highlighting the necessity of the Equality Act for all women. This noticeable union, pushing against trans-exclusionary feminism, is unifying on the language of gender equality. And with that, there is an interesting perversion of femininity happening in our culture by the LGBTQ, namely the drag and transgender movements.

The drag movement is not necessarily transgender and we are seeing its influence in high levels of pop-culture. As Pro basketball player Russell Westbrook of the LA Lakers dons his new fashion statement, conflict over how one represents masculinity as well as the overt misogyny in such choices have been exposed in the furor. (note former NBA player Kwame Brown’s response to Westbrook.)

I’m noticing this trend, the grotesque reinterpretations of femininity that are happening in culture—and the crisis they seem to be causing—and I’ve begun to wonder where true femininity lies. I want to suggest that beginning in the 20th century in western culture femininity began to be redefined in order to establish “equality” among the sexes.

As women took on new roles in society, they often shed traditional feminine convention in favor of gender-bending personas. And, the greater the furor over women in leading roles of power, the greater this push back, causing a kind of heightened awareness of the need to assume typically male roles. Think, female firefighters, Navy seals, or police force. Not too long ago, that is, within my lifetime, women who ascended into positions of public authority (Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton etc) suffered against accusations of feminine weakness. That is, motherhood, nurture and compassion were suppressed factors in their public persona.

We have correlated authority and power, such as civic leadership, with masculinity for so long that we find it difficult to distinguish between them—to the extent that women have mimicked what I would call stereotypical masculinity at great personal expense. This is evident particularly in the acceptance of the pro-choice movement. That is, the notion that pregnancy and child rearing are a disadvantage in the race for achievement. In other words, pregnancy is an unfair hindrance to personal fulfillment and self-actualization.

And so, right now we are seeing culture grapple with power structures, how they should be defined and who may enter them. But, if masculinity is declining, so is femininity. The transgender movement reflects at least a century of this dominant/submissive struggle that is blurring the lines of gender altogether.

This trend falls into alignment with what I’ve been calling the “virtualization” of our identities. Our physicality is being divorced from our identity and a strange dualism has emerged in which our mystical personhood (our mind, will and emotions) has inordinate value.

Fourth Wave feminists uphold that there is no meaningful difference between men and women, dismissing centuries of traditional woman’s wisdom that interpreted the female body and its chemistry as an essential and beautifully mystical part of her identity. A great triumph of the feminist movement was the redefinition of “the weaker sex,” which historically correlated a woman’s physical strength to her intellectual ability. All of us women here have benefited from this divorce of meaning. And yet, this emerging dualism is shattering our generation.

For the women I work with daily, male and female do often seem interchangeable because of cultural notions of gender. They commonly reject conventional femininity. And so there is a vital need to redeem one’s physicality and better understand that our bodies reveal truth we must grasp. Our chromosomes in trillions of nucleated cells in our bodies reveal one’s biological sex. Though I might don male attire, or perhaps do my own mechanical work, or cultivate a dominating demeanor, or simply be the primary financial provider in my family, I can never experience masculinity. None of these behaviors reveal a biological truth about me. At best I can only mimic what I perceive masculinity to be. Ultimately these reveal a greater detachment, a virtualization if you will, portraying a self-constructed persona.

Femininity is not merely a social construct, but is the result of a physical reality including the body and its chemistry. One is not merely a soul in a clay pot or a mind with an appendage. No, one’s personality and capability, though socially impacted, are directly tied to a physical reality— one’s hormonal chemistry, organs, and even the cells, nerves, and composition of the intestines inform emotional and mental well being. The human body and the personality it creates is an incredible miracle. Christian faith points to the incarnation to draw a whole body meaning to our identity. Who I am, including my mind, cannot be divorced from my physical body.

I often ask, what is femininity? Typical answers include, “a woman is more nurturing or compassionate than a man.” But, in the end, a woman must discover that her feminine identity is essentially anchored in its biological complement to masculinity. Femininity can only really be understood (both personally and culturally) when matched with its masculine complement. It is most obviously understood in its physical difference to masculinity, not in behavior, personality, or cultural role. Though our understanding of personal identity is shaped by those around us—my parents, family, peers, community etc, the essence of sexuality is best understood in the context of male and female together and the physical potential of that union. Resolution of same-sex sexual attraction reveals this profound truth.

Our cultural moment demands that we continue to press into paths of restoration with a view to articulate the profound significance and potential of right relationship between men and women not only for sexual health, but redemption of human identity.