Trans pronouns part of larger effort to separate language from reality: CP panelist
DALLAS — “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire’s famous quote is centuries old, but for Jeff Myers, author and president of Summit Ministries, it’s a warning that is as timely as ever when it comes to the debate over transgenderism.
Speaking at last month’s panel discussion on "Unmasking Gender Ideology: Protecting Children, Confronting Transgenderism" at First Baptist Dallas, Myers said he sees the issue as the “breakdown of language as a way of understanding reality.”
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Myers compared the path toward human atrocities committed in Nazi Germany and against the Hutu in Rwanda and ongoing efforts to curtail speech as related to the trans movement.
“In those cases, the very first thing that happened is the people in charge dehumanized the vulnerable, stopped calling them human,” he said. “You dehumanize them, and then you can destroy them.”
That same strategy, said Myers, is being used against those who refuse to conform their speech to trans ideology.
“You'll find that the very people who insist you use language in a particular way, that you use their chosen pronouns, you refer to them using the language that they insist on, if you don't do it, you will be called all kinds of names — evil, bigoted, transphobic and so forth,” he added.
Get your free book, 'Exposing the Gender Lie,' here
Myers also disagreed with the suggestion that the debate over trans identity and language is simply partisan politics.
"This is not a left versus right issue,” he said. “The vast majority of Americans, Republican, Independent, Democrat, believe that what is happening through transgenderism is wrong."
He pointed to a recent poll that found only 9% of Americans believe gender transition procedures on young children are acceptable.
"Yet somehow the nine percent control the agenda for everyone else," he said
So how can the Church respond in a way that’s both truthful and helpful?
Myers, who co-authored a recent e-book with CP, Exposing The Gender Lie, said Christians must first acknowledge the urgency of the issue and the threat it poses.
“We realized we can't be silent on the issue of gender ideology because it is an attack on the very idea of truth itself,” said Myers.
He said he’s “very concerned” about transgenderism and pointed to the some 6,500 catalogued biological differences between males and females.
“The idea that you can be a boy and become a girl is a lie, it is a lie about biology and it is a lie about personhood,” he said.
Myers pointed to the teaching of the postmodern view that words are reality — a teaching that stretches back nearly three decades when university students were being taught that no objective reality exists, only “knowable perceptions.”
“So instead of saying people should seek the truth, now people say you should ‘speak your truth,” he explained. “So if words have no relation to reality, then words like ‘male’ and ‘female’ don’t matter anymore.”
That application, said Myers, underpins the entire ideology of transgenderism, which “twists language” to threaten the livelihoods of those whose very job is to communicate facts and data.
“You’re a journalist, you’ll get fired if you don’t do this,” he said. “If you refer to biological men who identify as women as transgender women, you must use that terminology.
“If you’re in the corporate world and don’t do it, you’ll be fired.”
Ian M. Giatti is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ian.giatti@christianpost.com.
