Audio only:
In this episode, Trent sits down with Jason Evert to discuss his new book on transgender ideology.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Joining me today is the OG Chastity speaker, Jason Evert, himself but he’s written a new book called Male, Female, Other?: A Catholic Guide to Understanding Gender. I’m really excited that he wrote this book because there’s not a lot of resources on this topic, even though many people are talking about it. It’s in the news all the time.
I remember back in 2015, I told my wife, Laura, “Maybe I should write a book on the transgender stuff,” and she said, “Ah, that’s never going to catch on,” and, well, look where we are today. My wife is right about a lot of things but she will admit she was wrong about that one. But I’m really excited for this book to be something that’s practical, to equip people to engage others on this issue in an intellectual way but also in a compassionate way so that we can speak the truth and we can do so in love to others. So without further ado, Jason, welcome to the podcast.
Jason Evert:
Trent, thanks for having me on.
Trent Horn:
So what were you seeking to do with this particular book? Because a lot of people talk about it. Like I said, there weren’t a lot of books on this subject. There was the one by Ryan Anderson with the cheeky title, When Harry Became Sally. What were you hoping to add to the public discussion with this particular book?
Jason Evert:
Yeah. Well, Ryan’s book is terrific. I mean, extremely sharp, awesome guy, terrific gift to the church but what I started to notice is my travels to the schools, I get to a school and the principal like, “Yeah. We’ve got six kids in the elementary school that identify as trans or non-binary,” and these things are happening in the classroom. And then, the teacher asked the principal, “What’s our policy?” and the principal’s like, “Oh, we don’t have a policy. Let’s ask the pastor.” Pastor’s like, “Well, I didn’t go to seminary to learn about non-binary, trans. I don’t know. Let’s ask the bishop.” Bishop’s like, “Well, I don’t know. Does another archdiocese have a policy? We can use it.”
They’re just scrambling for answers and I think as a church, we’ve done a decent job of giving an intellectual response to this topic of treating it like an ideology and this is why it’s not in line with Catholic anthropology but it’s almost like we’re treating it solely as an ideology while sometimes overlooking the individuals who didn’t choose to wrestle with this issue. A lot of people think, “Oh, that’s those left wing trans people.” It’s like, “Wait a minute. There’s young people, the old people wrestling with gender dysphoria perhaps in our pews on Sunday mass,” and you might not realize like, “Hey.” They’re wondering, “Okay. Is there room in the church for me to navigate the questions I have with this lack of congruence I feel with my body and my identity?” I’m meeting these teens, meeting these parents, wrestling with this question, “My kid wants me to use their preferred pronoun. My daughter wants top surgery. What do we do?”
I met one dad and his son wanted to have bottom surgery and I talked to the boy, talked to the dad, and the dad said, “You know what?” Later he said, “I think I’m just going to let the kid have it. That way when he regrets it, that can be his punishment,” and I’m like, “Oh, boy.” We need something to give these parents. We need something to give the children, the young people, the teenagers wrestling with gender dysphoria, that will actually unite charity with clarity.
Like you said in the intro, it isn’t just about truth but how do we deliver that with love? And so, the intention behind the book was to give them the intellectual ammo that a college kid could stand before their gender studies professor and go toe to toe with them with the data on intersex conditions and this and that. But something you could also hand somebody that’s wrestling with this or a parent of, “How do I pastorally accompany this kid without compromising the truth or risk them committing suicide?” And so, something that could set the pastoral tone while giving them the intellectual answers by what the church teaches.
Trent Horn:
Do you think a lot of times we have a problem amongst Catholics where we’ll look at an issue, we’ll only understand it as the arguments for and against it and we just treat those who hold that view as just, “Oh, they’re the opposition, the opponents. There’s these crazy people on cable news,” and then we’re caught speechless when it’s someone at our school or in our church who is not an ideologue, it’s just someone who is genuinely struggling and we put them in a box and suddenly, we’re not really equipped to talk about it?
Jason Evert:
Yeah, no. I think that’s exactly what happens. We inadvertently get impacted by this drive-by media of just these talking heads bickering back and forth just to increase their ratings. It’s like, “Well, wait a minute. That’s not the approach.” I remember reading of a guy, the University of Essex over in England came out on their gender website saying that there’s an infinite number of genders and some guy is like, “Okay. I’ve had enough.” And so, he sends them an email and said, “Hey, can you send me the list you got there, the infinite number of genders?” So they emailed them a list of 23 and he said, “Really? If there’s an infinite number, you could at least give me 500,” and they emailed them back and they said, “Well, some of these genders are unknown or unrecognized,” and he’s like, “Well, how can you count them if they’re unknown?”
He actually used a Freedom of Information Act to try to get them to cough up all these genders and emailed them and he said, “You know what? Might I suggest, the reason you can’t furnish me the list of an infinite number of genders is one, it would take you forever to write the list. Secondly, even if you did write the list, the entire universe could not contain it even if you used really tiny thought,” and that was the end of their discussion.
Did he win the debate? Hands down, he did. Who’s better off though for this? Nobody. So it’s like on one side, you had a guy looking at all the logical inconsistencies but he probably doesn’t know a single person by name that experiences gender dysphoria. Then, you had the people like the Trans Alliance, whatever, on campus that don’t really spend a lot of time intellectually thinking this through but are spending a lot of time with the people going through this. It’s like, “Okay. What if charity and clarity could meet and have a beer? What would that look like for us to actually enter into these people’s lives instead of belittling them, listen to their stories, and gradually, with love, try to lead them to the truth?”
Trent Horn:
So walk us through that then. The book, I’ll reference, a few parts here and there but it covers 18 gender theory claims to help people to understand some more of the terms here like gender is a social construct, sex is assigned at birth. So it seems like you start with a lot of definitions, helping people to understand the issue. And then, the second half of the book is a lot more application, surgeries, bathrooms, regret people might have, how educators should engage the issue.
Yeah. I guess… Well, maybe we should start with the bigger picture and then my follow-up will be, “What do you do when you sit down with someone?” Because I guess that’s important, right? When you sit down with someone, if you are totally confused about things like sex assigned at birth or gender identity, you’re more likely to have a tense or difficult conversation with someone. So I feel like maybe what your book helps people to do is, “Okay. Let’s just break down these terms so we understand it,” and then when you talk to someone you can say, “Yeah. I’m familiar with that term but maybe you use it differently.” You’re in a better place to have a good conversation. So maybe we can talk about those terms a little, give people a little crash course like gender identities, sex assigned at birth, like sex and gender because even people on the other side, they’re ambiguous how they use the terms as well.
Jason Evert:
Oh. Yeah, no. That’s the key is that we can very easily be talking past each other where we’re thinking, “By gender, they mean sex,” and so they’re trying to change their sex. And then, we dig into the ammo showing, “Well, wait a minute. Look at this. Every cell of the human body is sex. You can’t change your sex,” and then you start pointing out male and female biological differences that are immutable and we’re thinking, “Okay. I’m really scoring a lot of debate points here,” and in their brain, you could go all day long. It’s like, “Look, I don’t care if they’ve found 6,500 sex specific genes. If my arteries are male and female, my bone structures male or female. I’m not saying that I’m changing my sex. What I’m saying is that I’m shaping my body in such a way with hormones or surgeries or whatever, so that it’s more in conformity with my internal sense of self.”
And so, here we are shooting off all these arguments that have no weight to them because we think that they mean that sex is equal to gender but that’s not what they mean at all. That’s why it gets so confusing because gender could mean so many different things. It could mean the grammar and language, it could mean biological sex, it could mean social roles, it could be your sense of gender identity, this transgender belief that you have intellectually. And so, first step when you sit down, we got to listen. It’s not like, “Let me just give you the best argument,” like, “I want to understand where you’re coming from.”
I remember one evangelical pastor, he said, “Look, if someone in your parish church comes up to you and identifies as trans, here’s what you do.” He said, “You say, “Look, I feel like I’m meeting you in Chapter 8 of your life but I haven’t had the opportunity to learn about Chapters 1 through 7 but I’d really like to. Could we do coffee sometime?” That’s what you do and then you sit and you listen because you want them to walk away from that conversation, not convinced, “Oh, wow. I am convinced of Catholic anthropology.” You want them to walk away being like, “That person really listened to me. They’ve really heard me out. I feel heard by that person,” and that’s going to make them want to come to listen again, that you’re doing some reflective listening and, “Wow, that must have been really difficult,” and, “I’m sorry if sometimes you felt that Christians look at you like you’re invisible or you don’t exist. That must be really hard,” so you’re doing reflexive listening, you’re wanting to build a relationship with this person.”
And then, in time, we can deliver them the truth as that relationship deepens and we’ve got our sense, this is very sensitive territory here. I find to all of them, it’s almost like treating a burn victim in some respects. You just touch, it’s like, “Ah!” It’s like, “Okay. Well, all right, maybe that was an overreaction of sensitivity but instead of faulting them for that, maybe I just need to be a little more gentle in how I nuance and approach this tough issue.”
Trent Horn:
So when you have a conversation with someone then, does that mean you might ask them a question like, “Do you identify as, let’s say it’s a biological female who is a transgender man, so a biological female identifies…” Though this could be hard so maybe you should ask a question like, “Do you identify as a man or male?” Do people make that difference in sex versus gender like being they might say something like, “I am a woman but I identify as male.” Is that what you’re getting at where they might say, “Yeah. I’m not changing my sex, I’m just saying my gender identity’s different.”
Jason Evert:
Yeah, and everybody’s different. What I find in these conversations, some people might concede, “I’m not female but I am a man,” or, “I am biologically female but identify as a man,” so making distinctions between man and male and woman and female. From a lot of people’s brains, it starts slowing down like a video game glitching when we’re trying to understand this stuff. It’s like, “Wait, wait, wait. What does that mean?” and you’ll find people that identify as non-binary but not trans and some people that identify both as non-binary and trans.
I remember watching a Facebook video. It was a community video of people in the trans community who have lost loved ones over the years in the trans community through murder, through suicide, you name it. They had an hour long discussion internally of what that’s been like and one of the guys in the video, halfway through, is like, “I don’t know about you guys but,” he said, “I’m really confused by all these new terms of trans-masculine and engender neutre and gender fluid and this and that.” He’s like, “I don’t even know what half of these terms mean and I’m trans,” and they all started laughing and nodding their heads that even they were mystified by how fast the language was shifting within culture and they themselves couldn’t keep up with it.
And so, I think, yeah, it would go a long way to listen, understand what those terms mean as that individual understands them to mean, and then we can make sure we’re at least speaking the same language here. I mean, if you love somebody, you fall in love with someone and they’re from Poland or whatever, you’d probably want to surprise them and learn a little Polish. And so in the same respect, if we do care about these people, we’re going to learn the language, not for the sake of making it our first language but to be able to have a more intimate, real conversation.
Trent Horn:
What do you think are some gentle but insightful ways that if you’re talking with someone who is transgender or is confused about their sexual or gender identity, what are some paths you think we should walk them down to help them to reconsider the mistaken worldview that they have? Where do you at least start the conversation going?
Jason Evert:
Yeah. I think a lot of times they assume that the church’s position is to tell them not to listen to that dysphoria that they’re feeling, “Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. It’s wrong.” I would propose an opposite approach to that of reverent curiosity to listen to the dysphoria and what I mean by that, there is an evangelical author named Jay Stringer who came out with a book on breaking free from pornography. His proposal is that we’re going about this all wrong. We’re treating it like these unwanted desires and behaviors and fetishes, that’s the problem. He said, “I don’t really think that’s the problem.” He said, “I think it’s the roadmap to the person’s healing because it’s crying out for a legitimate unmet need and if you simply try to white knuckle and shame it, it’s just going to keep sprouting up because it’s just repressed stuff.”
And so, I think a similar thing could be done here. I met a young man in Dallas and he identified as trans and we started talking, “Tell me about your family,” long, pleasant conversation and he said, “Oh. Well, my family’s, I have two older sisters and two younger sisters,” and he said, “You know what? It’s like they can do no wrong. It’s like my parents love them, they dote over them, they’re affectionate to them but me? It’s like I can never do enough. I’m on the swim team. I got straight A’s. I’m in mixed martial arts and it’s like I’m still the black sheep of the family. Nothing I do is ever…” He was just really venting and almost tearing up and I just said to him, I said, “Do you think that if you were born female, that you would’ve been loved the way your sisters are loved?” and he said, “I know I would’ve been,” and to me it’s like, “Here we are. You’re not aching to be female. You’re aching to be loved but that’s the means by which you meet that unmet desire.”
And so, I think we want to help them to listen like, “What’s going on here? Is it an insecurity? Is it a trauma? Is it an addiction?” and that’s why we can’t take a cookie cutter approach to this thing because it’s as unique as the human person. That’s why this relational approach is so important because sometimes, there’s real trauma underneath there and sometimes, gender dysphoria is a dissociative response to handle that trauma because that was inflicted into my female body but if I had been male when that thing had happened, it never would’ve happened to me. As a male, I feel strong. I feel safe. It’s like, “Okay. Let’s go down to these places and see what’s going on there.” So I think that’s our job, is with reverent curiosity to help them listen to what some of the roots of these things might be.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I’ve noticed that as well, that it seems like 10, 20 years ago when there were cases of gender dysphoria, they usually involved young boys identifying as girls. Whereas now, the explosion is in teen girls identifying as male or as boys but that may be related not so much as a desire to be masculine but to some kind of trauma in relation to being feminine. Is that something you’ve noticed?
Jason Evert:
Yeah. What you said is absolutely true. Not only a skyrocketing of the cases of gender dysphoria but an inversion of the sex ratio where it used to be young boys and middle-aged men. Men, it was a different issue, something called autogynophelia for many of them. But what we saw now is this massive skyrocketing of rapid onset gender dysphoria of these adolescent girls, a lot of them have autism. In fact, 42% of girls who identify as trans meet the criterion for an autism diagnosis and that’s a staggering percentage when only 1% of the population is autistic. 42%, what’s going on there?
Well, autistic individuals often have very overly rigid thinking patterns. They tend to be a little bit socially awkward. They tend to communicate online more easily and with less anxiety than in person. And so, we’ve got these young girls perhaps going through that. Often, they’re not dating. They’re not holding a boy’s hand. They’re spending an exorbitant amount of time in private, on screens, on Twitter, on Instagram, on Tumblr, reading and watching these trans influencers and before you know it, one of their friends says, “I’m trans and I’m non-binary.” Before you know it, pop, pop, pop, pop, you’ve got six, seven of them in this social circle in this public school setting.
And so, a lot of these girls, it’s not that, like you said, they want to be a boy, it’s just that they don’t want to be a girl. I mean, the social pressure to be a girl today of the Barbie doll of you got to be sexy but innocent and you’ve got to be assertive but submissive and you’ve got to be successful but domestic. All these impossible polar opposites to balance at the same time, count me out. Abigail Schreyer said, “They’re fleeing womanhood like a house on fire without a particular destination in mind.” That’s why so few of them get bottom surgery. They don’t necessarily want to look like a guy. They just know, “I’m done being a woman.”
Trent Horn:
Well, just as a quick aside, this is something that I’ve noticed that I feel awful for teen girls today. I mean, you do chastity talks, you’re at high schools all the time, I’m sure you have experience with this, but back in my day, I feel like for both of us, we have a real back in my day, I’m sure now you can’t use Saved by the Bell references in your talks anymore.
Jason Evert:
It’s a little expired. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
It’s done and over. But back when you could do that, back, let’s say even 20 years ago before social media, I feel like a lot of the pressure on women, teen girls for looks is like, “Oh, well, here’s this actress or this model in People Magazine or Glamour or something like that in this movie.” But now for girls, you log on, all of your friends are on Instagram and just use makeup and filters and get likes from your other friends. So it’s like the pressure to look a certain… It’s not just some Hollywood actress, it’s like everywhere you look, women you know are held to… You see your friends that seemingly achieve these impossible standards and you’re like, “I can’t,” and I feel so bad for the situation that they’re in right now. It’s unparalleled.
Jason Evert:
Yeah. It’s impossible. I listened to one psychologist and he said, “If you look at the typical anxiety level of today’s American teenager,” he said, “it’s the same anxiety level as the teenager in the 1950s that was admitted to a mental hospital for anxiety disorders.”
Trent Horn:
Wow.
Jason Evert:
That’s the average of today’s teen and to the extent of time they spend on Instagram, “How many likes that I have? That person not liked me. What’s that person gossiping about me?” To that extent, they’re anxious. I mean, they go to bed at night and the screen goes on and they start scrolling through every other girl’s perfect hair and perfect boyfriend and perfect body and then they just go to bed every night just feeling less than. I mean, the toll of this after years and years is understandable why there’s 41,000 girls right now on gofundme.com trying to raise monies for people to pay for their double mastectomies, 41,000 of them.
Trent Horn:
Wow.
Jason Evert:
This is the fruit to me of that.
Trent Horn:
So let’s talk a little bit about particular circumstances people might find themselves in. Let’s say you’re a parent or you know a parent and they have a child who identifies as transgender. I feel like the establishment who defends transgender ideology will try to guilt them by saying, “If you don’t support them, they’ll commit suicide.” A phrase they like to use, let’s say you have a son who says that he’s a transgender woman to say, “Look, would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?” and it’s this awful emotional blackmail but parents want to do what’s best for their kids. So what should people do in these situations?
Jason Evert:
Yeah. I mean, the suicide narrative is an extremely powerful tool used by that side and I think a lot of them have good intentions of, “Look, the suicidality rate is very high.” Well, the reason for that isn’t because all these transphobic bigots that hate your kid, it’s because 90% of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable mental health disorder but surgeries and hormones are not the way to treat psychological illnesses. That’s why after they go through the surgery, within about 10 years, the suicide rate climbs 19 times higher than the general population. If you isolate out the female to male transition-ers, the suicide rate is more than 40 times higher. I mean, when you put the girls on puberty blockers, they become more likely to self harm. And so, I understand them wanting to take the moral high ground of like, “We’re saving all these kids’ lives.”
But no, I know of one woman in Los Angeles, her daughter ran away because she understood, “If I can get my mom to lose custody, then the state has to pay for my hormones and surgery,” and the mother lost custody and was begging the people like, “Please, my daughter has mental health issues. She has anxiety. She has this, that, that. Please don’t put her on these hormones. This will make things worse.” She went on the hormones. Sure enough, the mom gets this horrible feeling in her gut and starts calling and looking for the daughter and they found the daughter’s body on train tracks in Los Angeles. She’d committed suicide and this mother was devastated. She said, “Look, if you lose your husband, you’re called a widow-“
Trent Horn:
Widow.
Jason Evert:
“If you lose your parents, you’re an orphan but there isn’t even a word for losing your child. It’s nameless because the suffering… It’s hard to breathe.” And so. These folks taking this moral high ground of like, no, “If you have gender dysphoria, there’s one pathway to resolution and that is transition. If you are not onboard with our one lane highway on this, then you’re a transphobic bigot and your kid’s going to end up committing suicide.” Powerful narrative but the data shows that it’s not the case.
More than 80% of the time when a kid experience a gender dysphoria, they will naturally come to identify with their biological sex. But if you put that kid on puberty blockers, almost 100% of the time, they go on to cross-sex hormones which sterilizes them going from one to the other. And then usually, that’s not enough and then they want one surgery before another. But 10 years later, they realize, they look down at their body and it’s like, “Oh my goodness. What did I do?” More importantly, “What did you adults let me do?” and that’s when the lawsuits now are starting to flood in.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I think it’s important for us then to make a distinction between people who struggle with gender dysphoria and the advocates who, some of them are well-meaning, that want to help and others, I feel like are taking advantage of the situation. It does make me angry because it’s insidious that they’re the advocates, their position, they make it unfalsifiable that if they offer advice and a teen does well, “Well, it’s only because of their pro-transgender advice. But if the teen doesn’t do well, well, it’s because we live in a transphobic culture,” so it’s heads I win, tales you lose.
They’re always in the right. There’s no observation that could ever show what they’re offering is harmful and I think that we have to be able to show that graciously with the data. Let’s jump to another issue you have in here about the use of pronouns because I think then, moving from parents, I think another common place where you’ll encounter this is if you were an employee, a teacher, a volunteer in a parish, a priest, and you have someone who identifies as transgender, one of the first things that comes up is, “Well, do I use the name you’re using? Do I use these pronouns?” What have you found to be a helpful approach to this immediate, “Okay. We’re going to try to have to have a conversation here. This is where it can be a minefield in of itself.” What have you found to be helpful there?
Jason Evert:
Yeah. In one sense, there are some times in which we need to take it on a case by case basis because some people psychologically are literally so fragile that if you don’t use their name… I mean, they could be very suicidal and they’ll take this like, “You hate me and you’re shaming you and me. You’re deadnaming me,” and it could incinerate any bridge between you and them because like, “Nope. You’re Robert. You are Robert. I’m not calling you Sally. I’m calling you Robert.”
We could exacerbate the dysphoria by being so insistent instead of at least taking a middle ground of, “Okay. Maybe we can come up with an agreed nickname,” or maybe we just avoid the issue as much as possible that instead of insisting you’re he and you want she, maybe we just try to avoid the pronouns for a while. E Eventually it’s going to come to a bit of a head and what I recommend saying, if you’ve got a friend or colleague or whatever that, “No, I want this pronoun.”
I would say something like this, “Look, you know that I love you and you know that I would never want to hurt you and I understand that this is very important to you, but I also feel like that if I were to use that word in reference to you, I would feel like I’m lying to you and not being honest with you. I understand that the use of that word for you resonates more deeply with the sense of identity that you feel but I feel like I would be disingenuous by using that. I know we don’t see the eye to eye on this but I’m not going to reject you because your belief system may be different than mine and I’m really hoping that you don’t reject me because my beliefs are different than yours because I think the world’s a really big place with lots of different beliefs but we can still stand to learn a lot from each other.”
And so, that way, you’re putting the opportunity of rejection in their hands instead of saying, “I’m rejecting you.” It’s like, “I won’t reject you although we don’t see eye to eye. Because if I disagree with you, it doesn’t mean I hate you. It means I love you and respect you enough to share my beliefs with you hoping you’ll…” Sometimes it works. I mean, I know of one woman and her nephew is transitioning, her niece, and the aunt was like, “Now you know. I’m not onboard of all this stuff and so I’m not comfortable using that name. Is that all right with you?” and he is like, “Well, because you’re auntie, I’ll let it slide.” And so, they had a relationship there that allowed a little bit of give and take there that she wasn’t going to beat him over the head and he was realizing, “Okay. You’re my aunt. I’ve known for the last 12 years, you really love me,” and so I’ll let it slide.
And so, I think we’ve got to invest in the relationship instead of insisting, “This is what you will be called,” and there’s some cases where I think it would be objectively wrong to use their birth name and a case like that would be, for example, you had a coworker and everybody thought he was female but you found out that, “Oh, that’s a biological male,” and then you start, “Hey, Bob. How are you doing, Bob?” That person might be like, “Wait a minute. I don’t want all my coworkers to know that I used to be male.” It’d be a very clear lack of charity to do that. And so, I think in those cases, “Hey, build a relationship,” and when that person, if and when they want to come out with that information, that’s their business. Your job is just to love that person and know that if Jesus Christ were here, he’d be going to dinner with these folks. He’d be playing cards with them like he’d be entering into their life instead of treating them like they have leprosy.
Trent Horn:
Right. I think some people might have a thought about that. Well, how could that be wrong for me to say, “It’s true so what’s the big deal?” Well, we have to remember that as Catholics, there’s calumny and detraction. And so, to understand the difference between them, the L in calumny stands for a lie and the T and detraction stands for the truth. So calumny, we know you tell a lie about somebody, that hurts them. Yeah, don’t do that but you could tell a truth about someone that hurts them.
If somebody does something really embarrassing like, “I didn’t lie.” Like, “Yeah, but they don’t even know about that,” that would be the sin of detraction. And so, if somebody is struggling with gender dysphoria and they haven’t fully revealed this like the case that you’ve given, then this might seem like, “Okay. This isn’t an opportunity. I don’t have the right to reveal this particular struggle that they’re undergoing so I’m going to refrain from that,” and maybe you use a mental reservation or something else like that but I understand… For me, when I look at this… What’s funny… The church doesn’t have a definitive teaching on this so everybody has to make their own judgment call. My thoughts are I’m more inclined to use new names because people have all kinds of names like names can be-
Jason Evert:
Apple.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Yeah. Though there’s-
Jason Evert:
For Hollywood kids, yeah.
Trent Horn:
There are names that can be non-binary.
Jason Evert:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
There’s, Pat, Terry. There’s names that could be whatever. Pronouns, I have a little bit of a harder time with and when I try to meet common ground with people like sometimes I’ll try to just use the singular they to avoid other things. But I think you’re right that as long as our goal is to move the conversation forward and so, as long as we are not servicing a false ideology merely because we want to acquiesce to it, you have to learn to pick and choose these battles. It’s like when I talk about the issue of abortion with people and they say, “Don’t call it a baby, that’s triggering to me.” “Okay, fine. I’m not going to say baby. I’ll say fetus because that’s true also. Let’s have our conversation.” And so, I think maybe you’re right that when we… I guess as you’ve learned in writing this book and talking to people, there really is a tightrope walk between truth and charity on this issue, isn’t there?
Jason Evert:
Yeah. There is. And so, like I said, it’s a case by case basis and it’s hard but we got to realize, this is more of a marathon than a sprint. I think we want these silver bullet approaches but this is one that requires a different approach of walking with these individuals. There’s an idea that well, you either accept this person or you are abandoning them. You either affirm them or reject them. It’s like, “Well, no, no, no, no, no. How about accompaniment? How about walking with this person in truth and love?” and there’s going to be some tension but I think if you speak the truth of them, it’s going to stir up some resentment right now. But I think if you don’t speak the truth to them when the time is appropriate, they’re going to resent you so much more 10 years from now, 15 years, or in eternity when it’s like, “You knew all along, this was not the path that would lead to human flourishing and you just patted me along because you just didn’t want to ruffle any feathers.”
There’s very few people often in their lives that will challenge them in some of these thinking patterns in a very loving way because they could often hop online and find a community of support or go to some alliance club on campus where people will tell you whatever the heck you want to hear but I don’t know about you, but in my life, I’d rather have just a couple solid people that’ll shoot straight with me even if I don’t want to hear it than surrounding myself with hoards of people who just tell me whatever I want to hear. That’s not authentic friendship, it’s simply false compassion. Because when you love somebody, you just can’t lie to them. And so, I would try to think in terms of the resentment, try to think 10 years down the road, not simply 10 minutes after the conversation.
Trent Horn:
Last question or issue that I want to bring up is when we talk to people who especially identify as transgender or very sympathetic to it, how helpful do you think it is to bring up the issue of gender non-conformity? Because I feel like a lot of times, somebody may feel like, “Well, even though I’m a biological male, I identify as female,” or, “I’m a woman,” and I would ask, “Why?” and I think a lot of times it’s just because, in either case, people reject a very rigid understanding of masculinity or a rigid understanding of femininity because yeah, I guess a question I’ve always had for those who defend this ideology, what is the real difference between a transgender woman who would be a biological man who identifies as a woman and a gender non-conforming man which would be a man who just acts like a woman?
If you looked at both of them with a surveillance camera, in many cases, they might both wear dresses, both enjoy feminine things but what is the real difference here? Is it the case that maybe you think like, “Well, I am a woman. Well, what does that mean?” or does that just mean there are certain feminine things that you enjoy that just are not as stereotypical?
Jason Evert:
Yeah. And so, a good question to ask is, “Can you give me a definition or an explanation of gender that doesn’t rely upon gender stereotypes?” and it’s like they really have to think that through because yeah, as a result of these overly rigid gender stereotypes of our culture, if you’re a real man, you’re going to be drinking beer and shooting deer, watching NASCAR but what if I’m not into all that stuff? Is the answer that I need to change my identity or to identify as something else or change my body? No.
If you really think about it, these overly rigid gender stereotypes try to get people to conform their personality to match their body. Otherwise, your body is this, your personality should be that. That’s not healthy. But then, gender theory does the opposite. It tries to get people to get their body to match their personality, meaning your personality is this, we need to change your body to match that.
And so, to me, neither approach is healthy. What we’ve got to do is realize that… I remember one feminist said, “A woman is a person with a female body and any personality, not a person with a female personality and any body,” which gets us to the root that the body is you. The body’s not meaningless, it is meaningful. And so, we can… It’s real. It’s reliable. Gender theory says, “Look, if you feel lack of congruence here, the problem’s not your mind, the problem is your body.” The body doesn’t reveal reality. Feelings reveal reality. So to be true to yourself, you follow down the feelings path. And so, I think what we’ve got to do is instead of changing the body, maybe we need to ease up a little bit on these overly rigid gender stereotypes. I had lunch with a nun last year and she was a nun, a doctor, a surgeon, and a colonel in the United States Army and I’m like-
Trent Horn:
Oh, wow.
Jason Evert:
“You just did not want to be an astronaut because you’re lazy or you just want to hog all the vocations yourself?”
Trent Horn:
Excuse me, Sister, Doctor, Colonel Maria, I have a question.
Jason Evert:
Exactly. It’s like… But she wasn’t doing those things instead of motherhood, she was mothering through these things, proving that womanhood isn’t some little box you have to fit into. It’s a firm foundation upon which you can stand revealed through your body that you can bloom into whoever God created you. There’s room to be a tomboy but there isn’t anymore. You could be a tomboy 15 years ago but the category didn’t even exist anymore because gender stereotypes become too rigid.
Trent Horn:
That’s what’s so weird to me is that if a conservative, or let’s say someone who does not believe in transgender ideology, sees a boy playing with dolls like, “Stop that. That’s a girly thing.” People will say, “Stop imposing your values on them. You’re so narrow-minded,” but if a gender theorist sees that, they’ll say, “Oh. Well, that’s revealing his inner gender identity as female.” And so, it’s like one side is allowed to use gender stereotypes but the other is criticized for it. Maybe both sides should just give it up.
Jason Evert:
Yeah. Hopefully, that’s where this will lead us to a fuller understanding of what it means to be male and female in the image and likeness of God. I mean, you look at the communion of saints. I mean, they were so radically human and unique or some were just the pinnacle of femininity and other people are Joan of Arc or whatever.
Trent Horn:
I was about to say, Therese of Lisieux and St. Joan of Arc are both godly women but it’s a big tent to fill out that particular gender role.
Jason Evert:
Yeah. And so, I think we need to allow our boys, if they’re into theater and poetry and dance and art to show up to their plays and cheer for them like they scored the state touchdown in the championship. We need to realize that these things have become so rigid that they’re causing people to question their own humanity, that if these body parts even belong. This is a difficult road for these individuals. Some people, “No, no. It’s not just I like guy things. I am a guy. It is deep in me.” And so, just saying, “Oh. Well, you just like feminine things or guy things.” Sometimes, it just goes a lot-
Trent Horn:
It’s deeper.
Jason Evert:
Deeper than that. And so, that’s why it’s important that we really listen to everybody’s story because it’s all too easy to hear a couple anecdotes and then apply that to everybody but that’s the importance of listening in these conversations.
Trent Horn:
Real fast. So on supporting our sons if they want to be in theater, I feel like my life is going to end up being the reverse of the ’80s dad who is the big football star who’s mad his kid is in drama. The only letter on a letterman’s jacket I ever got was for the drama club and academic decathlon. And so, I feel like I’m going to… My sitcom life would be I dropped my son off where I think it’s theater practice and then he tells me, “Dad, I quit theater three months ago. I’m the captain of the football team,” and I’m like, “How could you betray me like this? Don’t you know how musical theater runs in our family?” and so-
Jason Evert:
Yeah. I’ll say, the most masculine man I’ve ever met in my life was deeply into theater and poetry and art and it’s Pope John Paul II. He just had the pleasure of living in a culture that didn’t define men who were in the theater and poetry and art as being unmasculine. There was room in that culture to express your masculinity in those ways.
Trent Horn:
If you think you cannot be a masculine man and engage in musical theater, I have two words for you, Hugh Jackman. So I would say, that is a manly, manly man who musical theater does not diminish his masculinity. The book is called Male, Female, Other?: A Catholic Guide to Understanding Gender by Jason Evert. Where can people get a copy of it?
Jason Evert:
Just go to chastity.com and also at chastity.com/gender. It’s a page where we house a lot of resources for families or individuals, schools, churches, wondering about policies, parents looking for support networks. You could get the book there. So just chastity.com to find the book or chastity.com/gender for a ton of resources if you or a loved one is wrestling with this issue.
Trent Horn:
All righty. Thank you so much, Jason, and people can go to chastity.com as well if they would like to book you to speak at their school or their church, for example?
Jason Evert:
Absolutely. We’re doing… An incredible amount of inquiries are coming in right now for universities and churches, “Can you come talk to our community about this gender thing?” And so, we’re doing those every single week now and so we’re happy to come to any parish, church conference, or school.
Trent Horn:
Oh, wow. Very good. Thank you so much. Male, Female, Other?, go to chastity.com or chastity.com/gender to get your copy. Thank you guys for listening and I hope you all have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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