Transgender Student: Heartfelt Thoughts From a Youth Pastor
A Letter to a Transgender Student
Dear friend,
I’m so thankful I know you. It’s an honor that you’d share this struggle with me. I know it wasn’t easy, nor does sharing resolve everything. As you shared, I realized how deeply I desire to be truly known. God designed us for this—to know Him and be known by Him. God not only made us for Himself. He also made us for community—to know others and be known by them.
My heart groans with yours to be truly known as God intended from the beginning. But my heart also groans because I know the church hasn’t always felt like a place you could talk about your struggle with identifying as a transgender teenager.
As a result, you have felt disconnected and not truly known yourself. Along the way, the actions and words of Christians have disappointed, hurt and isolated you. I grieve over the pain and loneliness you have experienced.
Dear Transgender Student: I Love You
First, I want you to know I’m here for you and I love you. I’ll admit I haven’t always been careful in speaking about transgender issues. I have too easily settled for a shallow understanding of the issues. Please forgive me if I’ve ever done this in our conversations. I want you to know that your willingness to share has driven me to learn more and seek God’s wisdom.
I can’t pretend to know all the answers. Nor do I share any of this from a position of moral superiority. As you shared what it’s like to feel transgender, I heard you saying things just don’t seem as they should be. That you were born one way but feel the exact opposite. That your gender expression seems disconnected from your physical body.
You might wonder: Did God make a mistake? Why do I feel this way? Does God want me to embrace these feelings? No one should dismiss your questions. They need to be patiently and prayerfully answered. I cannot do that fully in a letter. But I hope we can continue getting together to talk through these things.
Dear Transgender Student: God Holds a Better Promise
In the meantime, I want to share a few things with you. Our world promotes a story of expressive individualism. Self-expression and self-identification are its supreme virtues. But God tells a different story. He tells a better story and holds out a better promise.
In the Bible, we find that God made us in His image. So we are of inestimable value. God made us like Him and for Him. He made us both male and female. God made us with this intended distinction, not as interchangeable pieces. He made us male and female to complement one another and to fulfill His purpose in and through us. God calls this design very good! But why doesn’t it feel this way? In short, the answer is sin.
Since our first parents’ sinful rebellion, we are broken people. We live according to broken desires in a broken world. And this brokenness is just as true of our relationships with God and others as it is of our relationship with ourselves.
However, I want to make something especially clear. Your feeling as if your gender doesn’t align with your biological sex is not sin. It is evidence that we live in a sin-stained world. Sin would be rejecting your God-given sex and gender in favor of your own feelings. Struggling with your gender identity while trying to live in obedience to God is different from embracing a transgender identity.
Dear Transgender Student: Choose God’s Design
By embracing an identity as a transgender teen, you’d be choosing to define yourself by and act on your feelings rather than God’s design. We do this same thing when we act on desires of lust, same-sex attraction, anger or lying. Regardless of how we sin, we are always rejecting God’s design and trusting in ourselves to be our own god, to determine what is right and wrong, and to define ourselves according to our own liking rather than according to His image.
But God doesn’t leave us in our sin and brokenness. He sent Jesus Christ to bear in His body on the cross the judgment we deserve for our sin. Jesus not only bore the weight of our sin but defeated death and rose from the grave. He now offers new life to all who turn from their sin and trust Him. Jesus forgives, cleanses and restores. He gives us His Spirit to transform our desires and actions. Our Savior adopts us into His family. There we enjoy fellowship alongside other equally broken but restored brothers and sisters in Christ.
The life Jesus offers us is good because He Himself is good. He provides soul-satisfying rest and life-giving peace even as we walk through trials and suffering. When we come to Jesus, He doesn’t always take away our struggles or remove our circumstances. But He does give us Himself in the midst of them.
Dear Transgender Student: This Doesn’t Need to Define You
Through your struggle with gender identity, I long that you come to rest in your identity in Christ. Feeling as if your gender doesn’t match your biological sex doesn’t cut you off from God. Rather, it provides an opportunity to trust Him through the struggle and to testify of His goodness in our broken world.
I can’t pretend to know that deep struggle of wrestling with gender identity. And I don’t know the pull to identify as a transgender teen. I feel the deep sorrow, confusion and doubt you’ve faced on this journey. As you shared, I saw and heard this. And I can’t promise it disappears the moment you embrace Christ and choose to align yourself according to His design for your life. Nor does it mean this struggle invalidates your faith in Christ.
Your struggle with gender identity may describe how you feel right now. But it doesn’t have to define who you are. Jesus calls us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Him. This will mean submitting your gender to Him and choosing to see yourself according to how He made you.
Dear Transgender Student: I’m Here for You
This is a tough path. Yet along the tough path of following Christ is the good life—the life of knowing Him and being known by Him. It’s a life of belonging to Him and His church and of finding yourself by losing yourself. And at the end of this path is the certain hope that God will restore our broken bodies and desires.
Between now and then, God intends for us to live out our identity in Christ in community with His people and before a watching world. In community with other believers, we bear one another’s burdens, welcome one another into our everyday lives, weep and rejoice together. We remind one another of God’s promise. And we point one another to Christ through whatever struggles or trials we face.
You don’t have to do this alone. Let’s walk through this together so we can testify that God’s grace is sufficient and His plan is good.
This letter to a transgender student is part of the series “Letters to Students.” Letter to a Gay Student ~ Letter to an Indecisive Student