Jemimah’s Reviews > The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory > Status Update

More quotes:


"Gender dysphoria needs to be acknowledged and treated as a psychological illness.......To reclassify disorder as order forecloses the possibility of recovery. I think of my own battles with anxiety, depression, self-harm. I don’t want someone telling me those things are normal and good. I want to be healed. I think of Jesus in the Gospels, healing people from all kinds of maladies. They cry out to him, reach for him, call upon him, potently aware of their need for healing. We should not resist the language of pathology here. What we must resist is the stigma, the othering, of those who struggle with mental illness. We should normalize the experience of this struggle, but not the illness itself."

"The affirmation model, while often motivated by good will, is ultimately unethical. It is dependent upon a diminished, dualistic model of personhood. The goodness, wholeness, and givenness of the body is discarded. The body is seen merely as an inert object, upon which an idealized sense of self is projected."

"The affirmation model is self-denial masquerading as self-acceptance."

"What would it look like to gently question a patient’s assumptions about sex stereotypes rather than reinforce them? To encourage a healthy exploration of one’s distinctive personhood—to give a girl freedom to live out her girl-ness, and a boy his boy-ness, in a unique and unrepeatable way?"

"This brings us to the third thread, the recurrent presence of the outcast in Scripture and Christian history: the eunuch, the leper—the person who doesn’t fit in and is, too often, exiled. This aspect of Addy’s experience exemplifies one approach Christians can take in response to those within the gender paradigm—this is the way of ostracism, separation, a holy “us” opposed to an ousted “them”. But this, I would argue, is an approach that prizes truth to the exclusion of love, and is thus a counterfeit truth."

"The Christians in Addy’s hometown show one possible response to those who identify as LGBT+. But Addy’s roommate shows us a different, more Christlike way—the way of accompaniment rather than rejection; the way of love, rather than the way of fear."

"In other words, true accompaniment has a telos, a destination; it is ordered toward the highest love. While it should begin with affirmation of an individual’s worth, it cannot end there. We must journey toward the source of that worth, wherein lies our peace."

"Both narrow-minded traditionalists and postmodern genderists fall prey to the same error: defining manhood and womanhood by stereotypical caricatures and policing those stereotypes, assessing how well individuals conform, or fail to conform, to a fantasized ideal."