How should we address people struggling with transgenderism?

Despite the number of people who identify as transgender, being incredibly small, like fractions of a percentage point in the United States, the issue of transgenderism and gender identity is in the news. Every single day, there is some story in a prominent publication about gender identity. It's influencing all of us in direct and indirect ways. This could be from bathrooms, to religious liberty implications, to the pronouns we're supposed to use at work or at school. So, even though they're a small number of people involved, the impact is disproportionately large. I actually don't think there has been an impact this large on a social scale from such a small percentage of people. I could be wrong about that. That's not really that important of a point, but it is something at least to take note of.

Today, I want to talk about what transgenderism is, briefly, and how we, as Christians, should respond and think about responding with truth and compassion. Firstly, transgenderism is a psychological type of state or issue where someone identifies and feels like they are a different gender than (some people would say) what they were assigned at birth and others would say then their biology would dictate. Basically there's some mismatch between what you are said to be, gender wise, and what you actually feel like you are, gender wise.

Now, psychology has kind of gone through and is going through somewhat of a metamorphosis, a change over the last several decades. It used to be that something was a disorder if it was out of order, if it did not match its function or how it was believed to be designed to function. So on that view, transgenderism would be a problem because you felt like you were something that didn't match your biology. Now, what we've seen is a transition, and this isn't all over the place but it's definitely there, to where something is seen to be a disorder in psychology, if it causes you a problem. If you are biologically a male and you identify as a woman, and this doesn't cause you any problems, psychologically, there's not a problem there today, in how modern thought would look at it.

This comes along with a view where truth is relative. We define what is true. Now, harkening back to what used to be, if you said you were a woman and you were biologically a male, well this is a problem because you are living out of concert with your biology. Your mental self doesn't match your physical self. That's just a brief comment on how this has changed and is changing over the years.

There's a parallel condition where people actually feel like a certain limb doesn't fit on their body. So, they might think this arm, my right arm is not actually a part of me and they want to cut it off. Psychologically, this is a problem still, but aren't they kind of saying the same thing? Their mental self doesn't identify with a part of their physical self?

I think there are some inconsistencies, even in how the modern medical and psychological establishments are handling this type of condition today.

So, in broad strokes, transgenderism is where you feel like you were a different gender than either you were assigned at birth or than matches your biology. Now, I do want to be clear, I reject the idea that gender is something that's assigned. It is something we describe, so we look at a person's physical anatomy and based on that anatomy, we say you're a man or you're a woman. You're male or female. It's not assigned, it's described. But nonetheless, this is the way how some other people are talking about it. How should we respond?

Well, the first thing to realize is that most of us do not know what it's like to…