John Stonestreet – Family Council

Lessons from the Rise and Faltering of Transgenderism: Guest Column

Jul 9, 2025John StonestreetTransgenderLGBT, Transgender

Many “inevitable” social movements turned out not to be so inevitable. The most notable recent example is transgenderism. In the latest development of this fast-moving story, earlier this month the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law that prohibited so-called “transgender care” for minors, including hormone therapy and sex-reassignment procedures.

Predictably, the American Psychological Association threw a fit about the ruling, scolding the court for disregarding “decades of psychological research and clinical consensus,” and jeopardizing “the health and wellbeing of transgender youth.” Aside from further eroding their public credibility, the APA statement ignores the obvious fact that any consensus around transgender “care” and identity is collapsing. It’s not 2016 anymore. First, there was the Cass Report, which questioned key claims of transgender medicalization. Then there was the closing of Britain’s only gender clinic. Also in recent days, L.A. Children’s Hospital announced it would close its center for transgender youth, one of the largest and oldest clinics of its kind and a hub for “gender reassignment” surgeries on children for years.

Public opinion has shifted as well. Earlier this year, Pew Research reported that about two-thirds of adults now support policies requiring trans athletes to compete on teams that match their biology. Most adults also support outlawing gender identity curriculum in elementary schools. Compared to just three years ago, more Americans now support laws that require people to use the bathroom corresponding to their sex and favor banning transgender surgery on minors. And just last week, the University of Pennsylvania signed an agreement with the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education about men competing in women’s sports. Penn will now strip Lia (born William) Thomas of his swimming wins against women, reinstate the integrity of women’s athletic teams and spaces, and apologize to the women whose rightful athletic “records, titles, or similar recognitions” were stolen by a male athlete.

Now somewhat on the other side of this cultural confusion, there are two crucial lessons to be learned about how culture changes, and how to fight future battles. First is how unpredictable and fragile supposedly “inevitable” cultural progress is. A few short years ago, corporations, government, higher education, entertainment, science, and medical establishments were being aligned in support of the idea that boys can become girls, and vice versa. But then a few courageous athletes, artists, filmmakers, de-transitioners, and a handful of public figures like J.K Rowling and Jordan Peterson spoke out. Unfortunately, many Christians and high-profile pastors were unwilling to do the same.

And yet, remarkably, it was enough to start the resistance. The momentum of the trans movement has now slowed and faltered. Though Irreversible Damage was inflicted on too many individuals, especially children, the mutilation of bodies and poisoning of minds turned out to be not inevitable, culturally. This should embolden us all to be willing to break the “spiral of silence” sooner and to stand courageously against false ideas in the future. After all, the worst ideas flourish when people are convinced that resistance is futile.

The second lesson to learn is how quickly social contagions spread. How an observably absurd and unscientific idea like transgenderism took over the West should humble us all and highlight the danger of losing a high and shared view of the human person. Until we can agree broadly on what it means to be human, what sex is for, what male and female mean, what marriage is, and why there are givens to our embodied nature, we remain susceptible to other absurd and dangerous notions.

And so, we should ask, even as this particularly bad idea is in retreat, what “inevitable” bad idea might take its place? How can we as Christians be better prepared and willing to respond?

As neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, a likely (but tentative) guess is that we will encounter new and dangerous forms of transhumanism. Just as transgenderism began with the belief that the body is merely a vehicle for the “authentic self,” so will visions of biological enhancement, AI relationships, new forms of “designer baby” eugenics, and attempts at immortality. And anyone who believes that there are created givens to the human person and moral boundaries that limit the expression of our “true selves” will be castigated and accused of hate, bigotry, and anti-science. Christians who understand that humans are made in the image of God must speak early and often, and especially clearly, no matter the cost.

Thank God that trans ideology, though far from defeated, is faltering. However, short of a cultural revolution in which our createdness is embraced and the myth of self-creation rejected, the West will continue to be vulnerable to the next bad idea that claims to be inevitable.

Free Only to Agree: The Limits of Freedom

Jul 2, 2025John StonestreetFree SpeechFree Speech, LGBT, Religious Freedom, Transgender

Many western countries are putting the right of conscience and speech to the test.

In March, Chris Elston, known as “Billboard Chris,” was detained in Australia for protesting the harm done to children in service of radical gender ideology. He was detained again in Belgium in June, this time along with Lois McLatchie Miller, a senior legal communications officer for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International. The two were simply standing in a public space, offering to talk to anyone interested about the realities of transgender treatment, wearing billboards that stated, “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers” and “Children are never born in the wrong body.” Though they called the cops to ask for protection from harassment, they were told to remove the signs or face arrest. After being detained and strip searched, they were released without charge.

Thought and speech has not always been treated this way. Because the West was deeply influenced by Christian consensus, citizens enjoyed the liberty, to various degrees, to challenge dominant paradigms and ideologies. That liberty is, based on what we’ve seen in Belgium and Britain and other nations, on shaky ground, from both state and institutional pressures. In some places, praying to yourself is considered unruly protest.

Just recently, Lila Rose of LiveAction shared the story of Naomi Best, a therapy student at Santa Clara University, an ostensibly Roman Catholic school in California. As part of the coursework, the university insisted that therapy students view extreme pornography and share their own sexual history. When she asked for the same exemption regularly given to Muslim students, they refused. When she described what happened in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Best was kicked out of the program. As she pointed out,

If we don’t have a set of therapists with diverse worldviews, and with tolerance for people with diverse worldviews, we will alienate people who need psychological care, and we will cause more harm than good.

Totalitarian states such as East Germany and Soviet Russia guaranteed citizens the freedom of worship but would levy fierce and often violent penalties for spreading religion outside church walls. In those countries, freedom of conscience was only the freedom to believe in one’s heart and head and maybe, one’s house of worship. Worldview diversity was never something allowed to enter the public square.

The First Amendment guaranteed more. In just 45 words, it protects conscience rights that are public. Thus, nonsensical campus chants that “speech is violence” or “silence is violence” are, in law, separated from actual violence. The founders wanted a country in which citizens could think and worship as they believed but could also assemble together and take those beliefs out into the world. Both Belgium and Britain, which is currently debating whether saying things that offend Islam should be illegal, could use something like that, written down into law, about now.

Of course, all freedoms have limits. In the United States, that limit is not one’s own head or heart but real harm done to another. Certainly, that must be constantly clarified and adjudicated, but it’s a far better arrangement than a limit based on how someone else might feel.

The First Amendment is a bulwark against speech police and one of the Founding Fathers’ greatest legacies. It’s a structured freedom that is part of the inheritance of the Christian view of humanity, recognized as both sacred and sinful. It’s a legacy that will not last if people are not willing to express their deeply held beliefs and defend the right to do so.

Ecclesiastes on X: Guest Column

Jun 27, 2025John StonestreetLifeBible

Why we’re not satisfied, even if we should be.

A few weeks ago, a self-described fitness enthusiast described life today this way:

Work a desk job

Grind 9–6 Lift weights to feel something

Marry someone beautiful enough

Move to suburbs

Get a dog

Have 2 kids

Drive an American SUV to Costco on weekends

Buy a house you’ll never finish paying off

Call it happiness

Is this the dream? or just a life we were sold?

The responses were varied. Many responded that, objectively speaking, the world—especially the Western part of it—is better off than it has ever been. One scientist noted that people used to live to an average age of 35, half of all kids died in childhood, even minor infections often led to death, and starving was a common human experience.

As my colleague Shane Morris observed, visit almost any old graveyard and it will be full of tombstones with only one year inscribed for both birth and death. Though miscarriages are still tragically common, deaths in infancy are increasingly rare. Only less than a century ago, nearly everyone would have had one or more siblings die in childhood. Today, our biggest health problems are from obesity, not starvation. Modern medicine, dentistry, technology, indoor plumbing, and all kinds of other things prevent and protect us from the diseases, calamities, and accidents that proved fatal in previous generations.

On the other hand, a different doom and gloom, the kind reflected in the X post above, still resonates with many. In fact, it sounds a bit like a work of poetry written almost 3,000 years ago by a man of wealth and power who learned that “having it all” isn’t all it is cracked up to be. His words are often quoted, perhaps most famously by the Byrds in their song, “Turn, Turn, Turn” and The Dave Matthews Band in “Tripping Billies.”

Ecclesiastes is easily the most depressing book in Holy Scripture. The bulk of the text is a meditation on how meaningless life is and then you die. The first chapter immediately declares that life is pointless.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,

vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

What does man gain by all the toil

at which he toils under the sun?

…  I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.

“The Preacher” has tried a life of wisdom, a life of pleasure, and a life of wealth. None was satisfying. Everyone dies. All seems pointless. Everything we attempt to live for or build our lives around turns to dust. Within just a few generations, no one will remember our names.

With language stark and hopeless, the Preacher sounds like someone who has lost faith in God. However, the words describe life without God. The things he listed—money, pleasure, wisdom—none are bad. They’re blessings given by God for our use and joy. But none will bring us the peace, meaning, or fulfillment for which we long.

Much later, in his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo would describe why. “[Y]ou have made us for Yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.” When people complain this world is broken and unfulfilling, they miss that God’s good gifts are instead meant to point to the Giver of the gifts. They cannot fulfill the human heart because the hole in it is God-sized, not stuff-sized. We were made for bigger things. We were made for God.