DALLAS, Texas — An expert panel at a Christian conference – held days before a self-described transgender individual killed six at a Christian school in Nashville – explored what participants presented as the harmful effects of transgender ideology on human relationships and American society.
"Unmasking Gender Ideology: Protecting Children, Confronting Transgenderism" was hosted by the Christian Post and convened at First Baptist Dallas last Thursday with approximately 170 in attendance.
Brandon Showalter, a journalist who hosts the podcast "Generation Indoctrination" that covers the impact of transgender ideology on children, moderated the conference. The event delved into various aspects of transgenderism's influence on areas such as medicine, politics, law, education, religion and women in the prison system.
‘A long time coming’
"It's shaping language, it's shaping law, it's shaping health care, it's shaping our relationships," said Mary Rice Hasson, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. She opened the conference by noting how quickly transgender ideology has become a widespread global phenomenon since she began looking into the subject years ago.
She observed that the ideology has gone from something mentioned in an International Bill of Gender Rights that "fizzled" when it was chartered in 1996 to official government policy in less than 30 years. She attributed the velocity of its spread to the left capturing major cultural institutions amid a general decline in religion that leaves many "still looking for meaning" without an answer.
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"Fast-forward to today," she said. "Here we have those very same beliefs that are now Biden administration policy. And make no mistake, this is a belief system; it's a belief about who we are as human beings."
Hasson went on to note that anti-discrimination law based on biological sex is buckling beneath the inclusion of "gender identity" among its protections, which she said is a "completely subjective" feeling that must be "declared" because it can't be tested or proved.
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"When you make that a legal category, what you're doing is you're ensuring that women in particular are going to lose all those rights that we got with laws protecting against sex discrimination," she said. "So, it's a danger to women."
"But it's also conditioning because this is pushed through the education system. It's conditioning people to believe something that is fundamentally incompatible with Christian beliefs. So, this was kind of a long time coming, but it is having a profound impact," she added.
‘Junk science’
Amie Ichikawa, who spent half a decade in a California state prison as an inmate and now leads the Woman II Woman prison advocacy group, said another way the ideology is harming women is through legislation such as California Senate Bill 132. Such laws allow biological men into women's prisons, which she said can change the incarceration dynamic in dangerous ways.
She offered the story of a serial rapist extradited from Texas who reportedly declared himself to be a woman after mutilating himself so that he could be housed in a California women's prison before SB132 was passed.
"He brought the male politics from the prison with him," Ichikawa said, claiming the inmate demanded racial segregation. "And women don't politick the same as men. We are not separated by race or by gang affiliation or by crime level."
She noted that since SB132 went into effect in 2021, biological males who have not undergone transgender treatment are being allowed into California's women's prisons. Women who communicate with her from the inside suggest the culture of such facilities has become unrecognizable since she was incarcerated, and that some female inmates are punished for speaking up about it.
Another panelist, Jennifer Lahl, founder and president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, said transgender ideology has caused a seismic shift in the medical profession.
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"Medicine – like academics, like the media, like the cultural elites – has been captured," she said, adding that the relationship between doctor and patient has increasingly become one of "health care provider" and "customer."
Lahl, who served 20 years in pediatric critical-care nursing, said that medicine has "lost its way" in history before but that she remains hopeful for a course correction thanks to "whistleblowers, lawsuits and the mass collective voices."
Dr. Andre Van Mol, a board-certified family physician, echoed Lahl by saying, "The problem is the ideological capture [of] the medical organizations, legislators, media as a whole and not just the academic world." He claimed much of transgender medical intervention for children is based on "junk science."
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"There are decades of literature showing overwhelming probability in a gender-dysphoric minor of underlying health problems, of adverse childhood experiences, bad family dynamics and a way over-representation of autism spectrum dysphoria – and that these all predate the gender dysphoria," Van Mol said.
"There's always a more honest answer to gender dysphoria or confusion in a minor than chemical sterilization and mutilation," he added. "What they need is to address those underlying issues."
‘Attack on the very idea of truth itself’
"We realized we can't be silent on the issue of gender ideology because it is an attack on the very idea of truth itself," said Jeff Myers, Ph.D., who serves as president of Summit Ministries, a Christian apologetics and worldview nonprofit. He recently co-authored with Showalter a free e-book titled "Exposing The Gender Lie."
Acknowledging that transgender ideology seems to have bubbled up rapidly in the culture within recent years, Myers traced its philosophical roots to the idea that "there is no objective knowable reality," which he said forms the basis of the postmodernism that has been simmering in academia for decades.
"Reality doesn't exist, and we describe it with words," Myers described such a worldview. "The words are the reality if there is no reality outside of the words that we use; however we use words makes reality, it doesn't reveal reality. So, instead of saying people should seek ‘the truth,’ now people say you should speak ‘your truth.’"
Language breaks down when words become subjective, Myers warned, and words such as "male" and "female" are not only stripped of their meaning but even the definitions of "liberty" and "justice" become relative and subject to power.
"So, it's no longer the case that people just have their own reality," he said. "It's now the case that they have their own reality, and if they can gain political power – because the word ‘justice’ doesn't mean anything anymore – then they can insist that everyone else acknowledge their reality or be punished. That's the situation in which we find ourselves."
Paraphrasing Voltaire, Murray added, "If you can get people to believe absurdities, you can get them to commit atrocities."
