What are the sociological effects for women from trans ideology? How do we think biblically given our confused cultural moment about sex, gender, and identity? And what does all this mean for those who want to reach and disciple Gen Z? Sean and Scott address these questions and more with Katie McCoy, author of To Be a Woman.

Katie McCoy holds a PhD in Systematic Theology from Southwestern Seminary (TX), where she served on faculty for five years. Katie's research includes the patterns of justice for women in Old Testament laws as well as the intersection of theology, gender, and women's studies. She is the author of To Be a Woman: The Confusion Over Female Identity and How Christians Can Respond, as well as co-author of Humanity, part of the Theology for the People of God series.



Episode Transcript

Sean McDowell: [upbeat music] What are the sociological effects for women from trans ideology? How do we think biblically, given our confused cultural moment about sex, gender, and identity? And what does all this mean for those of us who want to reach and disciple Gen Z? These are some of the questions we are going to explore today with our guest, Katie McCoy, author of To Be a Woman. I'm your host, Sean McDowell.

Scott Rae: I'm your co-host, Scott Rae.

Sean McDowell: This is the Think Biblically podcast, brought to you by Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Katie, you sent me your paper that you presented at Evangelical Theological Society, and I think it's fantastic, and you connected some dots for me on these issues. And I've been studying this for a while, so I can't wait for our listeners to hear this. But let me start with an illustration. You jump right into your paper, and you talk about something called a social theory known as the spiral of silence. What is it? What kind of historical injustices can be attributed to it, and how does it relate to the transgender movement?

Katie McCoy: Yeah, Sean and Scott, so great to be with you. So the spiral of silence is a theory that was developed by a German political scientist named Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, and she was really trying to explain the inexplicable and, you know, coming out just about a generation after World War II, the Holocaust, the great human atrocities that occurred there. And she noted that because humanity, we are social beings, that so often we-- we would call it self-censorship, but we often temper what we would say, if not quiet completely our opinions, if we find that those opinions do not fit with what is accepted by the majority. So the spiral is that not only do people be quiet about opinions that they think would isolate them, but as a result, then the majority opinion believes that they're the only one, they're the only show in town, they're the only valid opinion that exists. And so it's kind of this self-fulfilling, vicious cycle, and it's from that that you can see some of the greatest atrocities in human history, whether it's political extremism... And I think that same thing is happening in our culture today related to gender ideology.

Scott Rae: So, Katie, we wanna talk a little bit about the sexual revolution and how we got-- historically, and how we got to where we are today. But how would you describe where we are in this particular cultural moment when it comes to sexual identity and, gen- and gender?

Katie McCoy: Yeah, sexual identity, gender orientation today is really viewed as, kind of a DIY project. You can construct it however you want- ... According to your emotions. You can envision who you want to be, and you can quite literally carve and surgically alter your body to fit that. And so much of these ideas, of course, Carl Truman chronicled the philosophical history of them, in Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, but we can really anchor a lot of this in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. And what I would argue is that the trans movement that we're seeing is not a departure from the sexual revolution. In so many ways, it's its fulfillment. It's a feature, not a bug, of the same ideology that said that who you are physically should have no bearing on who you are as a person, who you are socially, relationally, and who you are in society. So all of these things fit together in the cultural moment where we find ourselves.

Scott Rae: Now, that's, that's a really interesting observation because one of the things we've noticed is that the L and the G-

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm

Scott Rae: ... Folks-

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm

Scott Rae: -have a lot more conflicts with the T folks-

Katie McCoy: Oh, yes

Scott Rae: ... In that, than is, I think, than is public knowledge. But to see that as a, as just an outworking, where it's all on the same continuum, I think is really helpful. So how do you explain some of the conflicts that we see between the gay/lesbian component and the trans component?

Katie McCoy: Yeah, at the core of both is this implicit belief that my body doesn't actually have any authority over what I do with my sexuality. That's at the core of both, and that one's feelings are the better and more true guide. What happened as the, T came into view of the LGBT movement, is that people began to say that not only does one's sexuality not have to be guided by one's body, but one's gender, one's sense of who they are- ... Is not guided by one's body either. And really, what I think we're seeing the conflict between those two communities, where there is conflict, and of course, you think of people like J.K. Rowling, Barry Weiss, people who are secularists, feminists. Really, it's just, demonstrating the incoherence, the implicit incoherence of a view of humanity that dissects the body from the self and separates the body from, essentially its own telos or its own purpose.

Sean McDowell: I was reading with my undergrads at Biola-- I was having them read a section from The Sexual Revolution by William Reich. So 1930s, he is a materialist-

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm

Sean McDowell: ... One of the key proponents of critical theory.

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm.

Sean McDowell: And I point out to them, I said, "Probably when most of you hear the term sexual revolution, you view it negatively, like this is bad." He titles his book that 'cause he's like, "This is the [chuckles] revolution we need." So before we get to some of our criticism, if you were going to frame the sexual revolution positively, what's in the hearts and the minds of the people who have been pushing this, which we see now extended most naturally in trans ideology? How do they view it?

Katie McCoy: ... Sean, they view it as the gospel. They view it as the proclamation and good news of freedom and liberty and fulfillment, and this is why when you bring up William Reich, he is one of- or Wilhelm. Is it Wilhelm, William? I don't know.

Scott Rae: I think it's Wilhelm. Yeah.

Katie McCoy: There you go. When you bring up Reich, he was, I think people even called him, like, a sexual evangelist. He was a proponent of making society in the image of the sexually liberated person, to the point that, he wanted to liberate children from the cultural and moral constraints of their parents that were imposed upon them, and he saw the way to do that as the public school system. Kind of puts some things about, you know- ... Book ban arguments in, uh-

Scott Rae: Mm-hmm

Katie McCoy: ... Context. And so what so many people who are proponents of the sexual revolution were preaching is in order to have a truly fulfilled humanity, we have to be liberated from the social and moral constraints that we inherited. And so much of it wasn't just liberating, in terms of sexual license. It was trying to liberate people from this idea of where did these moral ideas come from? And here again, when you separate the body, created self, from a creator, the only thing you're left with is power dynamics. The only thing that you're left to explain the world with are dynamics of power, not any type of transcendent, coherent, objective truth, and if there's no transcendent, coherent, objective truth, there's no authority to define what we should do with our sexuality.

Scott Rae: So, Katie, you know, our friend Jennifer Morse with the Ruth Institute-

Katie McCoy: Oh, love her

Scott Rae: ... Has made, has made some of the same arguments, that what started out as freedom and what was promised to be freedom and liberation has actually turned out to be just the opposite of that.

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: How did we get from the proclaim- as you described it, the, quote, "gospel proclamation of freedom"-

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm

Scott Rae: ... And liberation to I think what a lot of people are seeing now as women actually being enslaved-

Katie McCoy: Yes

Scott Rae: ... To their passions and their desires?

Katie McCoy: Yes.

Scott Rae: So how did we get to that place? What hap- what happened to the promise of freedom?

Katie McCoy: It, it really... I think if we were going to think biblically, as we want to do on this podcast-

Scott Rae: [laughs] Good job. Well, well- [laughs]

Katie McCoy: I think, yeah. I think it goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, and if it sounds like we're all broken records when we talk about Genesis 1 through 3, it's because we are, and we need to be. So what you have in the Garden of Eden is this rebuffing of one's identity as a creature, as one who has received an identity from the Creator, and instead to try to define the limits of our own existence, to try to determine the boundaries of our lives. And any time we do that, in any area of our lives, but especially in the area of sexuality and its devastating effects, which God wants to protect us from, which is why He gives us His law, His ways, but any time we do that, it is going to lead to our enslavement, and this is where our biblically informed worldview really does have very simple answers. Simple doesn't mean simplistic, but quite simply, as Romans 6, 7, and 8 tell us, when you sin, you are a slave to sin. When we reject the Creator's design and also reject our identity as His creation, nothing is going to line up as we want it to.

Scott Rae: So my question is, given that that's true, why didn't more people see this coming in the, in the '60s and '70 with the advent of the sexual revolution? Why didn't we foresee the damage that this would do to women and to relationships?

Katie McCoy: That's a great question. I think much of what the sexual revolution and then concurrently second-wave feminism was identifying might have been, on the second-wave feminism side, might have been some valid claims. Women felt unfulfilled. Okay, that's a valid... That, that can be a valid observation. Women feel unfulfilled being out of the workforce. But their solution to that was to try to approach all of the world through a critical theory lens, framing the problem of society as a gender conflict and not primarily a personal or spiritual issue. Now, I don't therefore want to say, you know, women... It's not even about women working outside the home, because that wasn't even the real goal. The real goal was what they would call overthrowing the patriarchy, so framing the problem of the human condition in terms of power dynamics. Again, you take God out of the equation, all you have is power. So the reason we didn't see it coming is I think people were trying to deal with some of the very genuine, angst, anxieties of humanity, and they were trying to deal with it exclusively in social terms and looked at it as, "What's the problem? Well, the problem must be the authorities we are living under."

Scott Rae: I w- I wonder, Katie, if there's another extension of the sexual revolution that we're seeing manifest today, and that's... I'm interested, what do you make of the trend toward polyamory today?

Katie McCoy: Oh, yes.

Scott Rae: Is, is that a, is that a... I mean, is that just another outworking of this, or is it, or is there something different that's motivating that?

Katie McCoy: ... It's essentially the same thing. I'm so glad you brought that up, Scott, because polyamory is, the same thing, the same line of logic as trans identity, that my body has no bearing on- ... What I do with my sexuality. And instead, it's applied emotionally, not so much, like, biologically, but more emotionally. So, you know, if my feelings are my guide for who I am, in my gender identity, then why shouldn't my feelings be my guide for who I am relationally? And so you see the same logic applied. And yes, polyamory is, you hear some of the arguments in favor of it, and it's this idea of, "I need to get my emotional needs met. I need to have all the fulfillment that I ca- I..." It is the cult of I. And so whether we're talking about, gender ideology, polyamory, really any departure from God's design, and it has the same ingredients.

Sean McDowell: At the heart of your argument is that this trans movement is not an aberration from the sexual revolution, but kind of the natural outflowing of it. Now, earlier, Scott mentioned, and he drew out that there's this tension between, like, the L and the G and the trans. So, like, the idea of being gay or lesbian implies that there's something to being a man or a woman, which the transgender shifts a little bit. So they seem to be in tension with one another, and yet you're saying that they all kind of flow from this same sexual revolution that's taking place. Explain that and connect those dots for us, if you will.

Katie McCoy: Yeah, some of the same ideas that created the second-wave feminist movement created the trans movement as well, and what I'm arguing is that really the trans movement is just feminism on steroids. We were kind of always going here. Because if the body has no bearing on identity, and if we truly can make our identity according to our emotion, then why shouldn't a person have liberty to say that I'm actually born in the wrong body? So if everything is a social construct, if the idea of gender is just a socially imposed pattern to preserve the power of the powerful, if it all goes back to, paternalistic capitalism, like Simone de Beauvoir claimed, then really everything is just a breaking apart of those patterns so that we can be free from the imposition placed on us by society. So it's all the same, and I draw out several different, examples of how it's the same, but really, it's, it's almost two parallel tracks. We, we really were... It's, it's, it's not, as you said, an aberration. I think it's an overflow of the same ideas.

Sean McDowell: A couple things you point out in your paper I think really clarify this in a way that were kinda aha moments for me. You said, "So second-wave feminism, sex was decoupled from relationships, specifically marriage. The trans movement also decouples sex from relationships, specifically one's relationship to society and even to oneself." You said, "Second-wave feminism was enabled by medical innovations, i.e., the pill, which is able to separate sex from procreation. The trans movement has also been enabled by medical innovation," of course, cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, surgery, et cetera. Down on the top of the next page, you said, "Second-wave feminism aimed to make women autonomous from men. The trans movement aims to make individuals autonomous from their own bodies. Second-wave feminism advocated consent as the only factor to determine whether an act was moral. The trans movement advocates consent as the only factor to determine whether a belief is true." I think that captures it really well and draws those connections as well as I've heard it said. Maybe if we could take a step back, though, it'd help us with this. What is... Like, in terms of thinking biblically, what is the worldview behind this in terms of not only we gotta answer what a woman is, but what it means to be human behind the sexual revolution, and how does that maybe contrast with a biblical view of what it means to be human?

Katie McCoy: I'm so glad you asked that question because I find myself kind of stopping at the precipice of that question. What is the worldview driving all of this? And, and I don't know, maybe the starting point is, what are people after? What are people- ... Looking for from that? Are they looking for a sense of inner cohesion? Are they looking for a sense of making sense of why they're on Earth? And so, the worldview behind it that I can tell is this pursuit of fulfillment, the pursuit of happiness- ... The pursuit of self-understanding, and I think we see that all throughout our culture. I mean, you know, Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, which color are you? I mean, we're just, we're all trying to make sense of ourselves- ... In some way. And then, a another kind of correlative observation with that was, struck by how we live in the pursuit of the true, authentic self. You hear that all in, the LGBT mindset, "I wanna be my true, authentic self." If you've ever spent any time talking to women, what are some of the things that they struggle with? They struggle with talking about being vulnerable and authentic. I thought, "Isn't that so curious?" We have a culture that is sort of fighting against itself. It says on the one hand, "I'm going to be my true, authentic self," but then also, "I struggle to be authentic." Why might that be? Could it be that the more we are aiming at something, the more it eludes us? And so I think the worldview behind it-... Fully, is that I can understand myself from within myself, as opposed to a biblical worldview that says I can only understand myself by looking outside of myself. And if we could really narrow it down to a contrast, I think that's it.

Scott Rae: Yeah, that seems like a, that seems like a self-defeating worldview.

Katie McCoy: It is.

Scott Rae: And I know it sounds a bit counterintuitive- -that I find myself by looking outside myself-

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm

Scott Rae: ... As opposed to looking within. But I think the scripture is really clear that, you know, whoever, you know, take, you know, take up your cross, whoever denies himself-

Katie McCoy: Yes. Yes

Scott Rae: ... You know, what does this, what does it, what does it gain a person to give up, you know, to gain the world- ... And give up their soul?

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: That, I mean, Jesus seems to be pretty clear about that.

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: And yet I'm... I just wonder why has that not gotten traction, in some of these communities where you would, you would think they might look at some other option besides looking inside?

Sean McDowell: And by the way, before you answer that, I just read the most recent Barna study on Gen Z. And the top thing that they're seeking after in life is happiness. 65%, more than financial security, more than a job, more than fame, they're seeking for happiness, and yet, at the same time, the report is like depression and loneliness [chuckles] and all these things.

Katie McCoy: There it is again.

Sean McDowell: And is there a tie between those two?

Katie McCoy: Yeah. So Scott, your question about how come people haven't la- how come that hasn't gotten traction, I mean, quite simply, who enjoys dying to themselves? It's not fun, right? Taking up our cross is not fun. It is more fulfilling in the moment to be able to the extent that you think you can, define yourself, live for yourself, live for your own self-fulfillment. I think we are seeing, a bit of a tide turning in the most fascinating way of atheists recognizing the social good brought by Christianity. And so with that- ... Comes the opportunity to say the things that you like about a Christianized society come from the Christian teaching to the individual. You can't have the benefits of Christianity en masse in society without the individual conversion. But then, Sean, what you brought up is so right. There it is again, the more you pursue happiness, the less you find it, and we've heard that before, right? Like, we've heard this pattern. And so part of it is just human nature, and it reminds me of what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness." And it was Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in his magnificent book on the Sermon on the Mount, who said, "It's not blessed are those who hunger and thirst for blessedness. You hunger- ... And thirst for righteousness, and the blessedness follows." And that really is, in so many ways, the paradox of the Christian life.

Scott Rae: Now, I wonder if this... I mean, you make- it's a good observation, that, you know, in the moment, the self-fulfillment looks really attractive.

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: But in retrospect, it seems to me that the kind of self-sacrifice and, you know, t- you know, f- putting, you know, putting others first, looking outside yourself, all that, in retrospect, comes back to be a source of tremendous joy- ... And satisfaction when you look back on it. But in the moment, it's hi- it's hard, it's hard to weigh those costs and benefits in a way, I think, that moves you in the right direction.

Katie McCoy: Oh, I think about my grandfather's generation, the Greatest Generation, that, you know, defeated Hitler, and it just wasn't even a question that they would-

Scott Rae: That, yeah, that's right

Katie McCoy: ... Serve their country. You know, it wasn't even a question that they would be willing to give their lives to their country, and they were 18, 19, 20?

Scott Rae: Mm-hmm.

Katie McCoy: They were kids, and it came from an overflow, a paradigm, a worldview of how they saw their life and the purpose of it.

Sean McDowell: There's a line at the beginning of your article where you're talking about some of the theories behind the sexual revolution. You said, "Individuals have attempted to find wholeness by dividing themselves from their bodies at epidemic levels."

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm.

Sean McDowell: I highlighted that, and I just stopped, and I paused, and I thought, "You're right." The deepest human yearning is to find wholeness in our relationships and our identity. In fact, that's what an integer is. It's a whole number. If someone is body and soul, whole would have a sense of aligning those together. To, to, so to solve a God-given desire he's put in our hearts, we're actually doing the opposite- ... That divides us. I think that's so well said. Now, with that said, this is the... One of the other most interesting things in your article, you said the trans movement has been led primarily by men-

Katie McCoy: Yes

Sean McDowell: ... Whether it's Caitlyn Jenner, Leah Thomas, Rachel Levine, and so on. Why is that the case [chuckles] that men would be pushing this rather than biological women?

Katie McCoy: Okay, so this is a theory that I've been testing out, and, like, where better to test out a theory than with a bunch of scholars, and, it could be very quickly shot down?

Sean McDowell: Men with two men, by the way. [laughing]

Katie McCoy: Right, right. Yeah, that's it. That's it.

Scott Rae: I don't, I don't think she was referring to us as the scholars. [laughing]

Sean McDowell: [laughing]

Katie McCoy: [laughing] No, y'all are part of it, for sure.

Scott Rae: She was referring to the ETS conference, I think.

Katie McCoy: [laughing]

Sean McDowell: Fair enough.

Katie McCoy: Oh!

Sean McDowell: Which is mostly men, but I digress.

Scott Rae: That's it.

Katie McCoy: So what's so fascinating to me, and I've been thinking about this, is it's like the entire movement is telling on itself. Because when you look at from a macro-level perspective... Let's start with young women. Why do young women get drawn into a trans identity? It is overwhelmingly- ... Relational. It is social contagion. It's a friend, a peer. And Lisa Littman found this, like, to the point that if a girl's friend becomes transgender, it's, like, within- it's exponentially more likely that she will too within about a year. Coping mechanism, which is, y- somebody is looking for an outlet to express some type of emotional distress, so there's that emotional element as well. And then social media. What is social media? But essentially, they're trying to connect. They're trying to relationally connect with people on a, on a screen.

Sean McDowell: Mm-hmm.

Katie McCoy: And so that is on the women's end. So effectively-... What has driven female trans identity is relationships. Look at from the men's perspective, now, I don't talk about this in the paper, but it's really impossible, to talk about this honestly and not talk about pornography. So specifically autogynephilia-

Sean McDowell: Yep.

Katie McCoy: And, uh-

Sean McDowell: Mm-hmm

Katie McCoy: ... The influence of that transgender pornography, it's, it's horrific, and it's, it's evil. And it's quite dark, but setting that aside, you look at the drivers of public policy on this issue, and they're almost all men. They're almost all trans-identifying biological men, and so you don't hear women trying to get into men's bathrooms or locker rooms, and I don't think that's just because of, you know, like in women's sports, you know, the kind of, the kind of reductive argument is, "Oh, well, he wants to win as a woman as opposed to lose as a, as a male." I think it's even deeper than that. I think what we're seeing is men are leading society even in the denial that they're men. And, and so essentially, it's like natural law, once again, is telling on itself. The God-given design of the dynamics between men and women are telling on themselves, and it's that even in the desire to escape these fundamental truths, those truths come out even in the distortion of those facts of who we are as men and women, male and female.

Sean McDowell: So this raises the question back to whether women are really liberated or not. I was talking with my 12-year-old at breakfast. I don't remember how this came up. We were going through the Gospel of John, and I think... Oh, we were traveling in an airport somewhere in the Northwest, and we walked in the bathroom, and for the first time, it's like, "Wait a minute, there's girls, and there's guys in here," even though they're separate stalls in these airports, and my son is, like, jarred by this. So we're talking about it. I said, "Well, what do you think?" And he goes, he goes, "I don't like it, but I can't imagine how a woman would feel." Like, a 12-year-old boy [chuckles] picked up on that. Are women more liberated now or not?

Katie McCoy: Well, you rai- you're raising him right. Yes, eh, they're not. They're not more liberated. In fact, even looking at it from the perspective of these kind of full-circle headlines that we see, that, you know, women have now been so liberated by the sexual revolution that men can say that they're women, and women have no power to stop them, and that is one of the great ironies, and yet again, you separate, identity from being, something that we receive from our Creator, and it really is just all, something that we reduce to social and power dynamic terms. And so women are not more liberated than they were 60 years ago. They may have, you know, perhaps more opportunities. I don't know that that is something we can attribute to feminism. In fact, I would say no. But they're also more unhappy than they were. You know, here we are, two generations after the sexual revolution, and, women my age, kind of older millennials, are, you know, looking at getting their eggs frozen because they don't know if they'll ever be able to have children. They're getting sperm donors if they wanna be mothers before they can't carry children safely anymore. [chuckles] And so... And, and they're looking around, going, "Where are the men?" Well, one of the byproducts in all of this so-called gender revolution is total confusion of relationships. One of the, one of the most fascinating looks at that, you take a look at, hookup culture and how it has affected both women and men. They don't want it. Both men and women actually want to be, stable, partnered, married life, when you really get down to it, but they've not been shown how to do that. They certainly don't know how to do it from our hookup culture, and the sexual revolution has just left everybody, really searching in its wake, and then as a result, looking to identity politics to replace those relational ties, which is a whole other can of worms. But, the short answer to your question is no, we are not, we are not better off.

Scott Rae: Yeah, I wanna go back to one of the things you said a few minutes ago, how the, sort of the impact of separating the body from identity has sort of come back, you know, come back to bite us in the rear end- ... On that. One of the statements you make that, in your paper, struck me, you said this: "Men and women implicitly demonstrate the differences between male and female- ... And their effects on society, even as they attempt to deny-

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm

Scott Rae: ... The differences."

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm.

Scott Rae: So help us connect those dots a little bit more clearly.

Katie McCoy: Yeah, one of the most fascinating things, when I was writing, To Be a Woman, was the biological differences between male and female, and it's not the obvious in reproduction. It is the neurological differences that begin at the eighth week in utero. And some of those differences, especially for baby girls, they are wired for language, for empathy, for emotional attunement. Within 24 hours, a baby girl is more responsive to the cries of other babies, wants to stare at the face- ... Of her caregiver, her parent, and these are things that are different between baby boys and baby girls way before society can socialize them- ... To take on certain gendered expressions. Debra Soh-... Is a very secular, sex researcher, and she made this case that not only are there only two biological sexes, there are actually only two genders, and people will gravitate towards the gender that corresponds to their biology, even if those expressions of gender might differ from culture to culture. So let's say we go to, some remote village in Africa. They're still going to live in accordance with two different genders, and the expression of those genders, will be driven by the two biological sexes. So you can, you can have different patterns, but it's still two. And so one of the things that, Debra Soh mentioned is just how incoherent it is to believe that there actually are this multiplicity of biological sexes, multiplicity of genders, and, gender identities.

Sean McDowell: I probably should ask you one question right now and wrap it up, but I have two. So give me your, give me your quick take on this one.

Katie McCoy: Okay.

Sean McDowell: I'm curious how big of a deal you think this is culturally speaking, because there's a whole lot of people who say drag queen hour, it's story hour, whatever, is a diversion. There's hardly any trans athletes really competing in sports. This is just kind of a diversion from, say, conservatives or Christians from other bigger issues. 'Cause in your paper, you have, like, I think Marxism, fascism, [chuckles] and then you tie this into that. So you think it's a big deal? Why is this such a big deal culturally in terms of how you see it?

Katie McCoy: Yeah, I'm always a bit perplexed when people will say, "Oh, it's only a few. This is happening only in a handful of times." I'm like, "Well, so how many, how many women do need to feel uncomfortable being forced to change in a locker room-

Sean McDowell: It's fair

Katie McCoy: ... With a, with a man? How many do-- how many young women do need to get hit in the face with a volleyball and get their eye socket knocked out? So how often does this need to happen before women are taken seriously? So the truth is, it's massive, and the reason it's massive is not just because it's focused on gender, it's the ideas driving it and behind it. So we are already seeing... There was a case, I believe it was in Canada, where a man got a perfectly healthy arm amputated- ... Because he believed that, his arm did not really belong there. It was body dysmorphia. And so as just barbaric as that sounds, it's completely consistent. It's completely consistent. So we are not far from 50-year-old men being able to say that they are 16-year-old girls and having access to, those spaces. We're not far from things like ecosexuality, identifying as a plant. As, of course, there's furries, identifying as an animal. And all of this stuff sounds just out of a people-- you're just... People are out of their minds. But really, it is completely consistent. These are the same ideas just being applied not to gender or sexuality, but to other aspects of who we are. So, it's, it's going to take not a pull towards conservatism. That's gonna be a result. That's gonna be the overflow or the side effect. What it's going to take, what this is going to take is a counterformative vision of humanity that is cohesive and fully integrated and, our identity grounded in receiving our creatureliness from our Creator.

Sean McDowell: I love that. I think you're right at the heart of it, and it is personal. My, my daughter is coming next year to play Biol- Bi- play volleyball at Biola. This is, like, her dream, what she loves, what she trains for. In her sophomore year in CIF quarterfinals, we played against a team that had the best individual I have ever seen. This player dominated us. We didn't know at the time, but discovered later it was a biological male, and without that, we not only win that game, we would have won the entire CIF 'cause we were better than every other team. They were the only team- ... That took a set from them, and this player was a male. And I, and I look at that, I'm like, "That's so unfair to every girl on our team. That's unfair to the other girls who should have gotten playing time."

Katie McCoy: Mm-hmm.

Sean McDowell: "That's unfair on so many different levels and not right." So it is personal to many people, and that's my daughter's dreams and her love [chuckles] and just what she pours her heart into.

Katie McCoy: Yeah. Yeah. Why doesn't she matter as much as someone who identifies as a, as a woman? Like, how come she doesn't matter as much? Yeah.

Sean McDowell: That's, that's exactly right. So she's a Gen Z-er. What, what would your final thoughts be for those of us who are parents, maybe teachers, mentors, coaches, working with Gen Z, seeing this ideology so deeply rooted in this generation? Although, by the way, with a recent Barna study, there's influence with this, but there was hope in terms of, like, more than 50% of Gen Z are saying that preserving the gender binary is good for society, and a majority saying, a significant majority, that athletes should play in the sport of their biological sex. So we're seeing some positive trends, but this ideology is deeply rooted, and it's personal for them as well. What encouragement would you give for those of us who work with Gen Z-ers?

Katie McCoy: Yeah, it w- it was very hopeful to see that. One thing that study also mentioned, though, was kind of a reticence to push back on beliefs that they disagreed with.

Sean McDowell: That's right.

Katie McCoy: And, so for instance, I think it was like, you know, it's kind of wrong to proselytize. You know, hold your beliefs, but don't push them on anybody else. And so I think the opportunity we have is not only to present the truth of the beautiful vision of our created humanity, but that the way God created us is the way we are best made to live. That it's, it's not only good, it is for our good, it is for human flourishing- ... It is for our full integration, and, that when we are holding to a biblically shaped worldview of our humanity, it is actually something very loving, and that we shouldn't be ashamed of it, and that for the good of those we love, our friends, our family members- ... Who are caught up in all of these ideas, we are, expressing that love and care when we present to them who God created them to be, and not compromise on that as well.

Sean McDowell: I think that's really the root of it, that the convictions are only so deep. We know what the Bible says, we kind of believe this, but we don't know why, and that's not gonna take a young person very far at all. So we've got to go deeper and explain, here's why you flourish when you live out God's design. Here's why Scripture teaches what it teaches. Then a kid gets empowered to really live this out. So great stuff, Katie. I wanna recommend your book as highly as I can, To Be a Woman. It's excellent, it's timely, it's understandable, and it's just right in the lane of what our viewers will appreciate and value on this topic. So thanks for taking out some time to hang out with us.

Katie McCoy: Hey, thanks for having me.

Sean McDowell: This has been an episode of the podcast Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture. [upbeat music] We would love for you to join us in one of our programs in theology, philosophy, apologetics, marriage, and family, online and distance, some of the top-rated programs in the country and beyond. To submit comments or ask questions, please email us at thinkbiblically@biola.edu. Please consider giving us a rating on your podcast app. Each rating helps spread the word, and if you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend. We appreciate you listening, and in the meantime, remember to think biblically about everything. [upbeat music]