Okay, a kid asked me about Bruce Jenner who now calls himself “Caitlyn Jenner”. He saw him/her at the Espy Awards last night. The kid said that he was confused and scared by what he saw. He said, they kept calling “him” a “her” and wanted to know why he didn’t want to be a man anymore. So he wanted to know if what he saw last night was a man or a woman. I could only say what was in my heart. I could only answer based on my limited knowledge of God and limited knowledge of man. All I have is what I have learned at each educational level over the years, from elementary school to graduate school. Also, my answers are always shaped by what my mama taught me when I was growing up.
He didn’t know what the term transgender even meant. So I shared the clinical definition to him. I said:
“Transgender” is a term used to describe people whose gender identity differs from the sex the doctor marked on their birth certificate.”
I felt as a pastor I needed to answer him biblically. I needed to explain to him that evolution is not the way we became men and women. I explained ot him that I believe in creationism and that I believe that God made us. As believers we shouldn’t be afraid to offend folk by expressing our beliefs. Christians believe that God is the divine architect of man. We believe that God made man. Gen. 1:26-27. We also believe that God is perfect. God does not make mistakes. So then I felt confident in saying to him that when God made man, he didn’t make a mistake. He didn’t put a man in a woman’s body or a woman in a man’s body by mistake.
The bible explains that God actually took the “woman” out of man and made a “woman.” He made them seperate and He made them different for many reasons. One of the reasons is procreation so that we can have more men and more women.
1 Tim 2:13-14
13 For God made Adam first, and afterward he made Eve.
So, I responded to him by saying that I know you’re confused. I am confused as well. Many other people in the world are as well. Most at the Espy’s last night were confused and speechless. I use to be a big Bruce Jenner fan when he was a record setting decathlete as a “man”, (the way God made him.) I can say with conviction that I believe God didn’t make Bruce Jenner a woman. Here is what we saw last night, (Bruce Jenner made “HIMSELF” a woman.)
We live in a country where you can mutilate yourself to make yourself look like something that you’re not. When you do it creates all kinds of problems for those who love you and even those who don’t have a clue about who you are or who you were. It creates problems for kids that have been taught that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, in school, by parents and in church.
In conclusion, I believe that not only is this young man confused and I’m confused and many others who watched last night were confused, I personally believe that Bruce Jenner is confused as well. (So are his “10” children confused). And so my answer is solely based on how I was raised, what my mama taught me and what I believe that the bible teaches. My answer is simple. Bruce Jenner is a man who thinks he is a woman. This is not something that we should endorse, embrace or encourage men and women who were born men and women to pursue.
We shouldn’t hate the person. We shouldn’t bash the “few” in the world who have participated in gender reassignment. We should preach the truth that God is the divine architect of man and he does not make a mistake. I don’t know what happens to make a man or a woman not accept the way God made them. What I do know is that we live in a fallen world and we are going to see worse than this before the Lord returns. So lets speak the truth in love. Lets teach our children that the gender that God assigned to them at birth is the gender in which he intends for us to live throughout our lives.
So, anybody can call themselves whatever they like but the truth is always authenticated by reality. The reality is, Bruce Jenner was born a man and Caitlyn Jenner is a man who thinks he is a woman.
—Bishop Vaughn McLaughlin