On August 22, 1965, Ron and Janet Reimer welcomed their twin boys into the world, Bruce and Brian. Six months later, both boys were diagnosed with phimosis, which is when the foreskin of the penis cannot retract and obstructs urination. On April 27, 1966, Bruce underwent circumcision to remove the foreskin. Rather than using a scalpel, the physician attempted cauterization. The procedure failed, leaving Bruce’s penis severed damaged and unfunctional. Brian was not circumcised, and his phimosis healed naturally.

In their distress, Ron and Janet consulted an increasingly well-known psychologist and sexologist named John Money. Money believed that gender roles and identity were social constructs and ought to be distinguished from biological sex. Bruce and Brian were too intriguing of an experiment for Money to pass up. Since Bruce no longer had a functional penis, Money suggested that he should be raised as girl; Bruce’s identical twin, Brian, would provide the ideal control.

The Reimer’s followed Money’s treatment plan. Bruce’s testicles and penis were removed, and a vaginal canal was constructed in their place. His name was changed to Brenda, and from then on, he was raised as a girl. Although he took doses of estrogen all throughout his childhood, Reimer was not told that he was born male.

At the age of 15, Reimer’s father told him the truth. Reimer later claimed to have always felt like a boy and quickly assumed a male identity, changing his name to David. He began testosterone therapy and by 21 had his breasts removed and a penis reconstruction surgery. He married a single mother of three in September of 1990, and though they were married for 14 years, their marriage was often strained. At the age of 38, Reimer committed suicide two days after his wife told him that she wanted a divorce.

QUESTION 6

After establishing the goodness and purpose of God’s design in forming humanity as two sexes, male and female, we now move into how that design is being rejected today.

But aren’t we able to make a distinction between biological sex and gender in search of our identity?

No. God established a natural order in the creation of male and female, that is good for us as image bearers of God. To introduce gender as a new category of personhood, separate from the biological category of sex, in pursuit of a different sexual identity, is unnatural to the creation order, and harmful to the purpose for which God made us.

In reading through this catechism for the first time, we might be tempted to be disappointed that Gordon does not tackle transgenderism by name, but we shouldn’t be. This question is one of my favorites throughout the whole document. Here Gordon does not get lost in the many weeds that mark the transgender debate; rather, he strikes directly at the source. Should we even be distinguishing between sex and gender at all?

The answer is no. God’s design of both male and female to display His image and likeness is good. Anything else only seeks to pervert and corrupt that design. And that is precisely the effect of introducing gender in the discussion of our identity. I began with the story of Bruce/David Reimer because the physician who oversaw his gender transition, John Money, is responsible for introducing the notion of a gender identity being separate from biological sex.

Despite the Reimers’ eventual hatred of Money (Bruce/David even threatened to kill himself at 13 if his parents took him back to Money), Money deemed the experiment to be a tremendous success, and it was widely used to medical and scientific community to defend and justify Money’s idea that gender is fluid and wholly shaped by one’s environment.

Later Reimer revealed that their sessions with Money were filled with abuse. Money forced the twins to inspect one another’s genitals and act out a variety of sexual positions, sometimes in front of Money alone and sometimes before several of his colleagues. If they refused, Money would become enraged. Unfortunately, it is not surprising that Brian Reimer suffered from depression and schizophrenia throughout his life until he died of an overdose on anti-depression medication two years before the suicide of David.

I don’t bring up the account of Reimer and Money to make an ad hominem attack on the transgender ideology, and transgender advocates have certainly attempted to divorce themselves from Money. Instead, I am simply noting the pedophilic and abusive roots from which it has grown. In contrast to the loving design of a good Creator, the father of gender fluidity is wicked and deviant. This is crucial because healthy roots produce healthy fruits, whereas unhealthy roots produce unhealthy fruits.

Gordon is right to emphasize here that the deviation from God’s order of creation is ultimately harmful to us. Nevertheless, the concept of defining our own gender is so appealing because we are all expressive individualists. Owen Strachan writes:

In this framework, transgenderism makes perfect sense. We understand the cultural push normalize it as part and parcel of a much bigger worldview. Transgenderism does not emerge in a vacuum; it serves as one part of a system that begins without God but with a hard-to-identify “spark” of divinized force moving through the universe. Sensualism is spiritualism. Transgenderism seems not merely one small part of this new realm; transgenderism, one could argue, is actually the apotheosis of the whole worldview, for what is clearly distinguished in anatomy becomes one.

Reenchanting Humanity, 202.

This blurring of the clear biological distinctions between male and female is fundamentally pagan and Satanic. Thinking back again to Genesis 1, although the world was first without form and void, God created through division and distinction. He divided light from darkness, waters from waters, and land from waters. Furthermore, on a larger level Genesis 1 gives us three large distinctions: between Creator and creation, between man and animals, and between male and female. Interestingly, they are introduced in that order, from greatest difference to smallest.

Indeed, because only God is infinite, He is able to bring unity through distinctions as a display of His might. He makes us in His likeness and gives us glory within the created order without any diminishing of His own glory. In fact, in the new creation, He adopts us as members of His own household, making us into “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). But again, because He is holy and completely apart from the created order, our glory is never a threat to His. However great the finite becomes, it never even scratches the surface of the infinite.

Satan, on the hand, first fell by denying the Creator-creature distinction, and he has worked on blurring all divinely instituted distinctions ever since. Indeed, though he promises power and individuality to those who follow his lie, he inevitably blends and consumes. We see a glimpse of this with the demonic host, who always speak together as a unit and are very often identified under Satan himself.

Indeed, these are the only two worldviews available to believe. Peter Jones calls it them Oneism and Twoism. We could also call them Christianity and Paganism. Regardless of whatever we call them, those are the two fundamental choices before all people: worship the Creator or worship anything else, which would by nature be a part of creation itself.

The new “complete cosmology” is applied to everyone. At its heart, it makes man a god, joins opposites, rejects the moral order of good and evil, and dismisses the objective reality of created human nature. Its present effect is to erode the old humanity of the (admittedly imperfect) Christian civilization, which is indeed coming apart. The new humanity, trusted to save us, is base on the Lie. To this seductive falsehood our modern culture is being given over for tis inevitable undoing, both present and future.

“And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them [over] to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done… [for them] there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who des evil (Rom. 1:28; 2:8-9).

Already the reassuring stick figures of men and women on separate bathroom doors in public spaces like airports are being replaced by “gender open” signs.

The Other Worldview, 81.

The point of all of this that the introduction of gender as a separate category from sex is not harmless but is the promotion of a satanic and destructive worldview.

QUESTION 7

The next question addresses one of the most common rebuttals to the sexual binary:

But aren’t some people born sexually indeterminate?

A small percentage of people are indeed born sexually indeterminate, but such are, by definition, anomalies, and in medicine anomalies never negate objective categories of personhood. We may not use the existence of anomalies to change or redefine the creational order that God has established as good.

Gordon concise answer here is excellent and worth committing to memory. Because all of creation has been cursed by the effects of sin, some people are born with genital deformities that make it difficult to determine their sex. I say difficult because we are male or female at a chromosomal level. Our genitals reflect our sex; they do not determine it. Sadly, that reflection is occasionally broken. But, as Gordon says, those are anomalies and do not negate the reality of only two sexes.

We may use a number of analogies. A person may be born without legs, but that does not change the reality that humans have two legs.

QUESTION 8

Does God permit us to change our sex?

Certainly not. To reverse how God created us as male and female, due to fallen, unchosen thoughts and self-perceptions would be an act of rebellion, and a gross distortion of God’s creative handiwork in specifically forming us for his own glory. Further, in the new Jerusalem, any genital mutilation, or confusion over sexual orientation identity, will be restored in our new resurrection bodies. Therefore, we should not change our sex since God promises to glorify our bodies, in everlasting happiness, as he created us male and female, in the final resurrection.

I love how Gordon phrases this question and its answer. Although we may expect a denial that it is even possible to change one’s sex, Gordon again goes deeper to the heart of the matter. He does not get bogged down with whether a sex change is actually possible; instead, he simply argues that even if it were it would be an act of rebellion against God and gross distortion of His creative handiwork. Indeed, the very claim that we can change our sex or determine our own gender identity is an act of prideful idolatry, in which we are making ourselves into our own creators. We rob God of the glory due to Him, and in attempting to establish our own glory, actually do ourselves harm.

We should also note that Gordon does not deny the painful reality of fallen, unchosen thoughts and self-perceptions. Like those born with sexual anomalies, those who feel as though they were born in the wrong body do not disprove the sexual binary of male and female; instead, they only show the depths of how broken our world is.

Let me close with two final thoughts.

First, we should prepare ourselves and especially our children for the decades ahead because we have no idea how all these wicked ideas will play over the next several years. Even if the transgender ideology was stopped dead in its tracks tomorrow, we will still be facing long-term consequences. Not even taking into account those who have actually begun to go through a ‘gender transition,’ we do not yet know the effects of an entire generation of children being raised to believe that gender is a matter of individual preference. This is why I am such a proponent of catechizing ourselves and our children into the truths of Scripture. While the world is discipling children into a world of sand, let us give our children the firm rock of God’s Word.

Second, we should, both individually and corporately, be thinking through how we will love and apply the gospel to those whose minds and bodies are left in ruins by the transgender ideology. I wrote an article on this back in 2022, and we will discuss it more fully in the final question of this catechism. Nevertheless, it worth reminding ourselves here that those who identify as transgender are not the enemy. If anything, they are primary victims of the whole satanic scheme. No, “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).