How to Talk to Your Daughter about Gender

Dannah Gresh: Okay, before we get into the content, I wanted to kind of have a disclaimer . . . and introduce my wonderful friends to you.

The disclaimer is this: we’re going to dive into some content about how to talk to your daughter about gender. But how to talk to your daughter about anything that terrifies you is all about getting her into God’s Word.

If she understands what the truth of God’s Word says about anything, then when these topics come up, she’s going to have a sense of what is true and what’s not, and she’s going to come to you when she hears something that’s not true. So, we really want you to get your daughters into God’s Word!

In fact, hopefully you’ve seen in your tote bags, we have a True Girl subscription. Over the pandemic we were like, “How do we take a True Girl touring ministry, which no longer can tour and survive through whatever this is?” 

And we felt like that was a great time for us to test out something we’ve been wanting to do, which is writing devotions for your daughter, so she can learn the habit of getting to the Word of God. When I was eight years old, my mom handed me a Children’s Daily Bread. She handed it to me with the expectation that I was a Christian, so I should read the Word of God.

And I think, when we did surveys for Lies Girls Believe, about seventy percent of the moms said either their daughter wasn’t having devos or they didn’t know if their daughter was having devos. And these were moms with daughters ages seven to twelve fully capable of being in the Word of God. 

So teach them that habit early! To that end, we now have a subscription program I’m so excited and proud of! You can learn more about that at our booth, or if you go to MyTrueGirl.com/subscription. This is what we’re shipping right now, it’s a box on peer pressure. 

I know that doesn’t look like it’s about peer pressure, but it has a mother/daughter date in it that helps you talk about peer pressure, thirty days of devos on peer pressure, and then thirty days of devos on another topic, and Bible verses on peer pressure.

One mom who just got hers said to us, “Listen, I was really struggling with how to talk to my daughter about this topic. There are some friends that when they were littler, one was a fine friend, but now as values are shifting and changing in the tween years, it’s not a good friendship. I’m like, how do you take this friendship that she’s had for years and discuss this with her biblically? And then I was just saying, ‘Lord, give me the tools,’ and the box showed up!” 

So that’s what we do: we keep our finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the hearts of seven-to twelve-year-olds and then we go to God’s Word, and then we put God’s Word into your hands so you can dig into God’s Word with her through the box tools. So, I hope you’ll consider that.

If you’re not using another resource to get your daughter into God’s Word, she needs to develop the habit now! The habits we have by our thirteenth or fourteenth birthday, research tells us, are generally the habits that we have throughout the rest of our lives. So don’t wait ’til she’s older; she’s ready now to be in God’s Word!

Alright, I want to introduce you to these lovely friends of mine. This is Janet Mylin over here on the right. She has been with True Girl, which once was Secret Keeper Girl, for almost as long as I have. She helped us develop some of our earliest curriculum and some of our earliest tools, and now she’s back with us.

She’s also the author of a great book for moms. It’s a short little read. I’ve read it twice. It is such an inspiration! It’s called Arrows Make Terrible Crowns, and it’s based on Psalms 127:4, “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth.” Children are arrows, they’re not crowns, and we have that backwards sometimes as moms.

Shani McKenzie is a newer friend of mine, and the Lord brought her to me through prayer. She has a couple of decades of experience working with teen and tween girls in the intercity of the Washington, D.C. area.

She was a curriculum writer for the Marines, and I recruited her to come write curriculum for Jesus and True Girls! So she’s new, just in the last year. They’re the other two lead teachers on True Girl as we’ve grown. So I’m excited to share the platform with them today! 

Shani McKenzie: We have a few goals, ladies; we want you all to be equipped, okay? So, our goal for the next hour: we are going to discuss the state of gender in our country and how this affects our daughters. A lot of the things we discuss today will pertain to boys as well, but most of it is going to be unique to our girls.

We’re going to provide you with practical steps to address gender with your child, because we’re going to need those steps. We don’t want to just hear about it. We need to know how to apply. 

And then, we’re going to help equip you with spiritual truth, because that is what you will need to combat all the lies that our daughters are facing today. So that’s a brief synopsis of what we’re going to do.

Janet Mylin: Yes, and just to let you know now, we feel like God is leading us to take this to different churches and places and groups, so if at the end of this you’re like, “I’d like to bring this to my church or my group,” just email us info@MyTrueGirl.com or through the website or through social media, and we can see if that’s going to be a good match for you.

I want to tell you something. I think you come to a workshop like this and you’re, “Do I really belong here?” I want to tell you who belongs here: women who have never had a discussion like this with their daughter but want to be prepared, grandmas who see their granddaughters struggling, but the mom doesn’t seem to have a problem with it, teachers and mentors who believe in God’s truth, women who are currently wrestling with the idea of gender for their own lives, moms with kids who come home from school or camps confused, agitated, and with questions about what their friends are doing.

Some of you have deep honest connections with your daughters, and some of you are praying your daughter will tell you something—anything—about how she’s feeling. And some of you right now are in the thick of it. The pain you feel is unbearable as you watch your daughter beginning to slide down a seemingly impossible hole toward losing herself entirely. 

We recognize you’re all from different places. There is no blanket answer to each of these situations and concerns; this topic is complex. But I want you to know that if you are a woman who is choosing to believe in the power of God and His ability to redeem anything and anyone, you belong here. 

The body of Christ is a family. That woman beside you, she’s your sister. As we talk about our daughters, we all belong here together—sisters in Christ coming together to seek the Lord on how to help our girls.

I would encourage you as we go over different topics and scenarios, remember, what may be shocking to you may be an everyday normal experience for a woman within earshot of you. Let’s pray. 

Lord God, we submit ourselves to Your authority and Your love and Your truths. We really want to just do the right thing here. We want our daughters to thrive! We want our daughters to thrive in who You created them to be. So, we just open our hearts and our minds. God, I pray that everyone who comes in here with a tangled up ball of string in their thoughts would leave with that string being in a straighter line than it was before. We ask for Your clarity, Lord. In the name of Jesus, amen.

Janet: We’re going to talk about the state of gender. We heard a little bit about this—how many of you came to the preconference? I’m curious, so we heard some of these things a little bit before. And we don’t want to just like drive through all the bad feelings of all of this. But there are some things you just need to know, some different terminology that will be helpful as we go into this. 

Shani: So we’re going to define some key terms for you today. This is important because when we were researching these terms, what we found was there was a lack of clarity from resource to resource. So, we’re going to provide you with the best of what we were able to determine from some of the things we were looking at. 

We’ve really done our best to at least generally give you some accurate definitions of these terms, and the ones we’re going to specifically talk about during this breakout session. So, here are some of the terms that your daughter is likely to hear at some point, and you might have heard as well.

Gender fluidity: this is relating to a person whose gender identity or expression is not fixed, and it shifts over time or depending on circumstances. So for example, today you might be feeling a little more masculine, but tomorrow you might be feeling more feminine. And this becomes even more confusing if the person is non-binary.

Janet: So “non-binary” is our next term. This is used to refer to an individual who does not subscribe to a two-gender system of male and female. So in 2016, the New York City Human Rights Commission released a list of thirty-one—thirty-one!—terms of gender expression, such as: androgynous, gender queer, non-binary, pan-gender, bi-gender, gender fluid, third sex, two spirit, and so on and so on. And to be non-binary is trendy. We have influencers and celebrities who are claiming they’re non-binary.

Demi Lovato is one of them maybe you’ve heard of recently. She came out and said she’s non-binary in 2021. She wanted to go with the pronouns, “they/them.” That’s like a non-binary mindset. But then a little bit later, August this year, she came out again and said, “I’m feeling more feminine. I’d like to by ‘she/her’ now.”

There are mixed feelings about this. Some people are, “This is confusing!” Some people are applauding, just as we see.

Shani: The next term is “gender dysphoria,” and you’re actually going to hear that a few times during the rest of this workshop. It’s the sense that one’s biological sex and psychological gender don’t match. So let me tell you something about gender dysphoria: it is real. 

So whether someone is experiencing gender confusion based on physiological issues—like being born with nondescript organs, or where there’s a part of a psychological struggle (like gender dysphoria is), the point is, people are struggling. And we have to remember that, and we have to deal with these things with compassion. 

About one-tenth of a percent of people actually experience gender dysphoria. It is a painful psychological condition. But about seventy percent of those people eventually get over it. That’s what we don’t hear about.

So, we must also have the conviction to help people avoid the deeper pain of pursuing things like sex changes or identity changes. It’s impacting our girls differently. Until about 2012, gender dysphoria was largely a male issue, but there has been a huge uptick in recent years amongst our girls.

A responsible sociologist would ask, Why is something that needs medical or psychological attention, why is that changing so dramatically? Those who have intellectual integrity are claiming that it is like a group mentality or a social contagion or peer pressure. That’s the issue that we’re facing.

Janet: Transgender: this denotes a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their biological sex at birth. These are individuals who have and are experiencing gender dysphoria and are beginning to take control of how they are perceived in the world. 

So a man may begin to dress like a woman and change his name. In extreme cases they would take drastic measures, like Laura Perry Smalts talked about, where they’re changing their hormones in their bodies through surgery. So, yeah, these are just a few terms; there are many, as you know. But this maybe is a good foundation moving forward for us here today. 

Shani: So the intro, though it might be simplistic to the gender conversation our children have to face, we want to encourage you as a parent to keep learning about it! As a parent, you can be confident of three things, and I’m going to go through these really quickly.

One, the gender conversation is often manipulative. In her book, Mama Bear Apologetics, Hillary Morgan Ferrer addresses the concept of “linguistic theft.” This is when people purposefully hijack words and change definitions. Does that sound familiar at all? 

Our culture is redefining words so people can get their way and avoid reality. Take the word “tolerance,” for example. It used to mean to live peaceably with people of different beliefs. Implied in that is that there is some type of dislike or disagreement in order for you to have to live peaceably.

But now, it means that all beliefs must be treated as equally legitimate. Tolerance has been relegated to a neutral word that prohibits people from having strong convictions about anything. But here’s the truth: linguistic theft makes our word king, instead of God’s Word. And our culture has waged a war on words, and essentially a war on God.

The book. . .they call it “repackaging idolatry.” So no one is bowing down to idols in their closets anymore, right? But we have plenty of people who are bowing down to the “Jesus” of their own design.

And then we’re dealing with “hyperbolic threats” as part of this manipulation, as well. And this is, as parents, we’re fearing our children will harm or kill themselves if we don’t allow them to transition. And this could be something they’ve heard, it could be something their child has even said.

But the research actually reveals that there is very little, if any, relief from psychological symptoms of depression and suicidal tendencies after an individual transitions. So, even if a child is coming and saying, “Hey, in order for me to have a better mental state, I need to do this surgery. I need to change into a different gender.” Research shows that that’s actually not the truth.

And as a matter of fact, the puberty blockers as well as the hormone therapy that accompany those transitions can actually do more harm mentally and emotionally, as well as creating life-altering side effects, like infertility. 

The second thing you need to know is, the gender conversation eliminates parental rights. I need you to really hear this! Some schools are not informing parents when their children are struggling.

In our county, the Bellefonte area school district has a “pronoun change form” that parents do not even have to see. Some doctors and psychologists treat students without parental notification, and you might have even already experienced this.

Think about this: when our child is physically sick, even if we look up the symptoms on Web MD (which I’ve done, don’t judge me, I’ve done it) and we try to self-diagnose, the doctor isn’t just going to take our word for it, right? This is what’s happening with the transgender phenomenon.

Tweens and teens are saying they have gender dysphoria, and psychologists and mental health professionals are in essence allowing them to self-diagnose, for various reasons. But they’re encouraging children who can’t even get a piercing without parental permission to decide they need to change their biological sex. We really need to let that set in.

The third thing is, the gender conversation is not logical! For example, though advocates of the LGBTQ community seek to erase gender stereotypes, they actually end up reinforcing them. 

So let’s ask a few logical questions: Why does Bruce Jenner need a dress or high heels or makeup? If gender is fluid, why would you use hormones or surgery to alter something that may change back? Because it’s not logical. Logic is not going to be the solution. We need a deeper source to quell the confusion.

Dannah: And we know that deeper source is the Word of God, so I want to share with you three truths that your daughter needs to know, and I want to share with you the stage of development at which it is most critical that you share these three truths with her. 

I want to start by saying: I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the story of Ruth Graham, who was at a dinner sitting next to someone from Scotland Yard in Great Britain. She was so interested, because he was in charge of counterfeits.

And she said, “You must really study all the counterfeits you see.” 

And he said, “No, actually, I try never to see them. I study only the genuine thing so that when a counterfeit appears, I know it immediately!”

You do not need to introduce your daughter to all the counterfeits to have a logical conversation with her. They will be introduced to her; you have to be prepared for it. You have to be informed and intelligent so that you are a bit of an expert. 

Everyone—including her best friends, who know absolutely nothing—are going to tell you that they are experts. So you need to know that, but you don’t necessarily need to introduce those things to her in order to bolster her faith and understanding about God’s good design for womanhood so that she’s prepared to walk in truth.

So here are the three things that you need to know. Well, before I tell them to you, I do want to say, the word “gender” itself is a counterfeit. It’s not a word that we find in Scriptures; it’s not a word that’s a biblical term. It’s a counterfeit. It’s a word that was coined in the 1960s by a psychologist called John Money.

He really wanted to erase gender and have gender fluidity be valid. Now, there’s some legitimacy to that. We have some stereotypes about what is female and what is male that are completely non-biblical, and our society has really embraced them. So that’s really hard, say, for a girl who loves hunting with her dad or a boy who grows up to become the best florist in the city. 

So there are some things that we can say, “Oh, yeah, there is some legitimacy in his concern, that we should remove some of the stigma of females doing things that are stereotypically male and vice versa.”

But he went too far, and he coined this term. And then in 1965 a baby was born. I want you to understand, I’m going to say some things that aren’t that comfortable for everybody, but I want you to understand where all of this came from.

This little baby had a circumcision that was botched; it didn’t go well at all. And John Money told his parents not to worry, gender identity is completely malleable, because this was his theory. And he said, “What we could do is remove your son’s penis entirely. We’ll declare him female. We’ll reconstruct things, and he will never know!”

And the case was widely publicized as irrefutable evidence that nurture or choice is more important than nature or biology. John Money really put this narrative out there in the world. Well, it later emerged that John Money wasn’t being completely forthright with how that story unfolded.

David was a deeply unhappy child. As a girl, he never felt like he fit in. He wanted boys’ clothes, he wanted boys’ toys, he wanted guns and cars. He grew so depressed that by the age of fourteen, his parents told him what had actually happened.

He transitioned to be what he was actually designed and created by God to be—a boy. He became very happy, eventually married a woman, and was content in his life. The gender experiment that started all of this was a complete facade.

There’s a Scripture that tells us that we can learn from those who we can trust, right?

(I think it’s 1 or 2 Timothy.) You can’t trust something that comes out of a lie that big. It’s not to be trusted.

As we try to stand up against the burgeoning power of that lie, that the world is receiving as truth and fact, there are three things that we need to plant into our children. The first thing is this: the primary purpose of your body is to glorify God. 

You know this verse: 1 Corinthians 6:20, “You were bought with a price so glorify God in your body.” This is our primary purpose for existing. The Westminster Confession says, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” And man’s one chief end—glorifying God and enjoying Him—is a joy to do and live according to God’s Word.

We have to surrender to that. We have to say, “Yes, Lord,” to that. We have to submit to that. But when we do, we begin to enter into the adventure of the purpose God created us for. And glorifying God is not some mystical, out-there, hard-to-understand thing. We glorify Him in our bodies! The way I live and breathe and dress and eat and talk, those things point to and honor God . . . or not. This body was created to glorify God. 

The second thing your child needs to know: if the purpose is to glorify God, the primary practice, then, must be to look like Him. Because glorifying Him means making Him known.

We do that best in the defined roles of maleness and femaleness. These are very basic things. We find this Genesis 1:26 and 27, when God said, “Let us make man in our image . . . in the image of God he created [them]; male and female he created them.”

Now think about this for just a moment: there are so many things about us that are God-like. We have emotions in a way that animals do not. We experience them in a way that animals do not. We experience connection in a way that animals do not. We have language proficiency; animals do not.

We have figured things out, like how to defy gravity; animals have not. 

We are unique, and we are created in God’s image. There are so many things He could have put here, but in Genesis 1:26 and 27, when He first tells us we were created in His image, what is the one thing He says? “Maleness and femaleness.”

Somehow that points to who God is, and we look like Him best when we embrace those two things. Now, I think the obvious thing is that God is a social being. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit . . . three distinct personalities, and yet they are One. 

And when man and woman are united, the Word of God tells us we become one, just like God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are One. The word “echad” is a Hebrew word used to describe God, the Trinity, in the Shema. Deuteronomy 6:4 says, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” That is echad.

And it’s used to also describe the oneness of a woman and a man coming together in marriage. He will be united to his wife and the two will become, it says in Genesis 2:24, echad. We look like God when we embrace our maleness and our femaleness, and that’s why it matters so much!

Third, our bodies therefore have to be a living sacrifice to God, Romans 12:1–2 (NKJV): “I [beg] you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. . .”

It’s only reasonable, in light of everything He’s done for us, that we would then say, “Yes, I was created to glorify You. I do that best in the distinctiveness of maleness and femaleness according to what Your Word says about my design. . .”

There will be times when I will be tempted not to live like that, and that is when I sacrifice my body. I sacrifice my heart, I sacrifice my desires because I want to be a living sacrifice for God! We could go into each of these, we could take a whole hour to go into each of these. They are very basic things.

But the point is this, your child needs to hear these very basic things. They may seem very familiar to you—maybe they’re not, maybe you’re hearing them for the first time and you need to really dive into them—and it would have been helpful if I’d dissected them.

My invitation to you is that you would dissect them, that you would dive into God’s Word, that you would find out what He says about it. But let me show you the three stages of development where I really think it’s really important to share these three truths.

For the preschool and elementary years, it’s great to be a girl! Celebrate it! Celebrate it harder and longer and louder than you see the counterfeit being celebrated. Celebrate it in your home, and celebrate it in a biblical way. 

If your daughter doesn’t like pink, celebrate it with blue. If your daughter doesn’t like princess dresses, celebrate it with soccer shorts. Celebrate it in a way that doesn’t put the stereotypes in an idolatrous position, but that it does put God’s mandates for distinct maleness and femaleness in its rightful position.

I have two granddaughters—three-year-old twins—and they are obsessed right now. They’ll see somebody they haven’t seen, and they’ll be like, “She’s a girl!” Like, they’ll walk right up to somebody in a restaurant, “He’s a boy!”

They’re figuring it out. They’re asking themselves, “How do I define these things?” And there have been a few instances where they’ve seen someone who is nondescript. Their hearts are troubled and their little faces don’t know how to express what they’re thinking and seeing. Our children are being exposed even when they’re being carefully sheltered.

You can pull your child aside and say, “You seem confused about that. Tell me what’s happening.” 

[Child responds in quiet voice:] “I don’t know if they’re a boy or girl.” 

[Mom:] “That’s because they’re a little confused about it. I think that person might be a girl, and they have forgotten that it’s great to be a girl! But it’s okay that you’re confused about that, because I’m confused about that, too.” 

So when you’re not in celebration mode and you’re in question mode, go ahead and acknowledge it! But during those early preschool, elementary years you need to talk to them about how great it is to be a girl.

During the tween years, that’s when you start to talk about what it means to glorify God. They can’t really understand it a whole lot before then. One of the things I really like to do during the tween years with my True Girls is, I encourage moms to take a moon walk.

You look at a lunar calendar, you find a night that is a beautiful, beautiful night. “It’s going to be a full moon, it’s going to be magnificent!,” you say “Hey, you and I are going on a moon walk! We’re going to pop some popcorn . . .” (Maybe this time of year in the fall you make some caramel corn.) It’s just a mom/daughter date, and you go on that walk.

Your daughter has learned in science how the moon works, right? She knows that that moon doesn’t have any light of its own. It’s glorifying the sun . . .right? The light of the sun is being illuminated by the cold, dark stone of the moon. 

That’s what God created us to do, He created you and I to illuminate Him, glorify Him, make Him seen and known. That’s what it means to glorify Him. Tell your daughter that and then say, “You know, it’s really interesting? As I look in the Word of God, in Genesis 1:26 and 27, He tells me we do that best as males and females.”

“Do you remember how I’ve been telling you it’s great to be a girl? This is why! We glorify God when we live according to His design.” 

And then it’s in the teen years when they’re like, “I don’t know, I’m confused! It’s popular to be bi. It’s popular to be this . . .”

That’s when you say, “Hey, let me sit you down. Do you remember how I’ve told you all these years it’s great to be a girl? And do you remember, I told you your purpose in life is to glorify God? Well, now I am telling you, there will be times when your will is going to come up against God’s will and that’s when you live like a sacrifice! That’s when you lay your life, your heart, your desires down and you live like a sacrifice to God. Why? Because He’s worthy of it!” Now, of course, what I’m telling you, these are very simplified conversations, right? I realize that.

I’m not getting into the minutiae and the hard stuff, but I want you to have the basics, because sometimes we skip over these basics, and we go right to the hard conversation. We don’t have anything for the foundation. We don’t have a foundation for it to stand on.

I want you to have that foundation, and these are three practical truths that you can introduce to your children at three practical stages.

Shani: Thank you. Are you guys getting some good information? Alright! So now, what do we do with this information? Let’s talk about how we can learn from what we’re talking about, to have conversations with our daughters. How do we learn from our daughters, and how do we speak to our daughters about this topic?

We want them to be well-equipped, because a lot of our girls are having these conversations daily. Whether we like it or not, it’s around them. Whether they’re in Christian school or public school, it doesn’t matter. 

So here are four simple ways to nurture those conversations with your daughter. Check in, check in, check in. We have to check in with our children. This shouldn’t be like a one-and-done thing. So whatever works.

If you have to have a mom/daughter date; if you have to just grab her, just go for a drive . . . whatever you guys do. Take that time to check in, see where she is. 

Ask them about how they feel, what they believe. What are their friend groups saying? This is important! Remember that group contagion/peer pressure thing we were talking about earlier? Yeah. So, when I checked in with my daughter recently, I learned that in middle school her friends were teasing her because she’s not LGBTQ+. So now, this is the thing, this is the norm. 

But what it did, it opened up a door for a very hard but very good conversation. And we were able to talk about friendship and peer pressure and what I call “the whitened glovey” method. You’re dropping that white glove in the mud. Does the mud get all “white and glov-ey?” No, that doesn’t usually happen, right? 

But sometimes we might lose people in our lives that we thought were friends. We have to have that conversation with our children. We want to acknowledge with our girls that we hear their feelings and we understand that it’s hard.

But we want to be able to take their temperature and realize that the Holy Spirit is the thermostat. Their feelings are their temperature, but the Holy Spirit is the thermostat. So that’s one. 

Two, we want to listen without interruption. This is important, Moms! I know, sometimes you gotta sit on your hands, you gotta do something. Sometimes after the conversation you’ve gotta go in your room and scream a little bit! But this gives you the opportunity to really hear what might be going on in your daughter’s heart, and it allows us to get to the root.

What does she believe about her body? What is she believing about herself, or what are others telling her to believe? And if your child’s not a big talker, she can journal, she can send you messages. Some kids are better sending emails or things like that. Do what works.

Listening to my daughter Karyce helped me hear her frustration. She is an empath. She’s very compassionate. She is that person, and I love it about her! But what it tends to do is create dilemmas for her. When she has friends who are going through gender confusion, her compassion really wants to let them know that they’re loved and she wants to side with them.

But then she also struggles, because she knows the truth of God’s Word. So now, how does she temper that balance? We have to address that very real pain her friend is going through but still be able to be compassionate and true to God’s Word.

Three, speak the truth in love. The verse I shared with Karyce was Isaiah 5:20, which says, “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness and who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (NJKV).

Sometimes you’ll find that your child has grown deep roots where you’ve planted truth, but they may need help expressing compassion along with conviction. So you might have the opposite issue. It might not be a child who’s very compassionate; you might have someone who, she’s speaking the truth, but there might not be any love with that. 

So, “You were right, but were you kind?” We have to address that. And then moms, for us, even if we’re right, we’re speaking the truth, are we being compassionate ourselves? Or in like Karyce’s case, you can show compassion without compromising God’s truth.

We have to be clear that tolerance and acceptance do not equal unconditional love. The sentiment in today’s society is that if unconditional love is not given in the form of tolerance or acceptance, then you need to seek that out from persons who will accept you.

It’s almost like a gang mentality. You know, gang members are a “family,” they’re a community. But just like gangs require physical abuse to become part of the gang, the enemy’s MO is to take elements of truth and twist them to eventually harm you. 

And that is exactly what is happening now with the desire for our children to be part of a community, part of a family, right? So tell her what God’s Word says, give her 2 Timothy 3:2–5: 

For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, proud, demeaning, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, without love for what is good, traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to the form of godliness but denying its power. Avoid [those] people. (vv. 2–5 CSB)

We’ve heard that Scripture a few times this weekend. God will give them healthy community, let’s remind her of that: “God will provide healthy community for you.” And lastly, stick with it, moms. Stick with it. This will probably be an ongoing conversation. Don’t grow weary in well-doing.

We have a saying in the office: “Swords up, shields locked, eyes open.” There is a spiritual battle going on for our children, and we are the first line of defense. So on many days, that ongoing conversation will just be you and the Lord—continual prayer, crying out some days—but He has promised victory! And some days that’s all we’ll have to stand on.

Janet: I want to tell you, the handouts that you have on your seats there, there’s a place to take notes. Although probably most of you have journals, because that’s who we are, we have journals. On the other side are some Scripture prayers: prayers to pray for you and prayers to pray for your daughter.

Have you ever been in that situation where you’re like, “I don’t even know how to pray about this!” Not that we always need words, but Scripture is always the right thing to pray. So please use them. 

Let’s take a deep breath. It’s going to be okay. I was sitting at the dining room table with my friend Melanie (not her real name). The day before, her young family of five was in a horrific car accident that claimed the life of her beloved husband.

The atmosphere of that room was thick with grief. Melanie couldn’t even stand by herself. She occasionally would just get up and just vomit, out of grief. She would come alive every time one of her little ones came into the room—she has three little ones. She would come right back in, right with them, then back into grief.

We were having all these discussions about the service, the funeral, and all the things that have to happen. She could barely lift her own hands. At one point she looked at her friend and she said, “Can you play that song?” 

The song “Yet Not I But Through Christ in Me” was played through an iPhone while we all wept and Melanie laid her head on the table, sobbing with her hands out like this. 

Then there’s my friend, Lisa (also not her real name). Tremendous lies have been exposed within her marriage, just lie after lie after lie after lie. She had every right to leave, but she chose listening—listening for the Lord’s direction. Asking Him, “What do You want me to do?”

And when God revealed to Lisa what she should do, she did it. She resolved to obey God no matter what all of her instincts and advisors told her to do. Ladies, as followers of Jesus, we fight differently! We have different weapons than the world has. 

Melanie knew it. She knew it that night when everything within her wanted to give into the greatest grief of her life. She knew she had to somehow lean into Christ. She had to fight differently if she and her three young children stood a chance of thriving.

Lisa knew it. The world was telling her to use the weapons of retaliation, control, and power. But she knew the Lord had put the weapons of silence, listening, and obedience in her hands. A familiar Scripture (possibly familiar) from 2 Corinthians 10:3–4:

For although we live in the flesh, we do not wage war according to the flesh . . . (v. 3 CSB) 

Who said it yesterday? I think it was Dr. Julie Slattery: “The LGBTQ community is not our enemy. The Enemy is our enemy.”

. . . since the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but are powerful through God for the demolition of strongholds. We demolish arguments and every proud thing that is raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ. (vv. 4–5)

We have different weapons! And we have a tremendous advantage. We can intimately know the One who created our girls, and we can depend on His perfect love for them. He will not lead us astray when we ask for His direction in parenting our girls, no matter what they’re going through. No matter what they’re going through!

My husband gave a message at our church years ago that people still kind of talk about. It’s just one of those things that just keep . . . like how you’re going to be talking about “the holy girl walk” for a long time after this. This was like that. (And then the moon walk! We’re all about walking!) 

But my husband talked about this idea of “the nudge.” The nudge is what my friend Melanie felt when she asked her friend to play that song in the midst of her trauma. The nudge is what my friend Lisa leaned into when she decided to stop and listen to God’s heart for her marriage. 

One of the greatest weapons we have as we fight for our daughters is obedience. We need to obey the Word of God and the nudges of the Holy Spirit. There’s this little two-verse story in the Bible that’s one of my favorites. You know, if you’ve been reading the Bible and then you’re like, “What? Where did this verse come from?!” Just as if you’ve never seen it before! It was one of those moments. 

This is the story: Jesus is speaking to a crowd, and there’s this woman in the crowd who knows some things, alright? “As he said these things, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed!’” (see Luke 11:27–28).

And she’s like, “This is all about your mom! She’s obviously the reason You’re great! And the reason she’s great is because of You!”

But this is what He says back to her, “‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!’” (v. 28). He was like, “This isn’t about my mom, not about her being blessed because she had me. My mom was obedient. I’m obedient.”

I have three kids: Lucy is twenty-one, Eve is sixteen, Jack is fifteen. Eve is adopted from China; we adopted her when she was nine. And Jack and Eve, the way it worked out, are actually both in the same grade, so they’re both in tenth grade right now. 

They were in middle school at the time, at what I call our “local hippy school.” (That’s just what it was known as. It was like just a small alternative program out of the local public school.) They were coming home from school almost daily in middle school feeling agitated. They were confused.

I could see them come through the door, and they just had pain on their faces, and all the confusion everywhere, because someone else was saying every day in middle school that they wanted to be known by a different name—a different name, a different gender. 

I remember my son, Jack, who is my verbal processor. I remember him saying, “Mom, it’s so confusing!” 

He was like, “Uhh! It’s so confusing! I don’t know what to call anybody because I’m going to offend them, because they change it the next day! It’s so confusing!” 

I was like, “Yeah!” I was just like, “Well, Honey, confusion breeds confusion, we know that. I don’t know what to tell you.” I just didn’t know what to do!

Because this was a whole new world! Like we’ve talked about at one point, that the lies aren’t different, but they’re getting louder . . . and they’re celebrated. So it’s hard to know what to do. I didn’t know how to respond. I knew they needed something,but I didn’t know what.

So I paused, and I felt the nudge to tell them something. And so I told them . . . We were sitting in the kitchen. It wasn’t like you know, this moment, “Let me tell you something, children, sit at my feet . . .” We were just in the kitchen. They were eating something, probably, because they’re teenagers.

This is what I said: “Jack and Eve, just because you think someone of the same gender is attractive, it doesn’t mean you’re gay?” And Jack’s like, “Do you think other women are attractive?”

I said, “Yeah, of course I do!” And I listed like five. I’m like, “Yeah, like so and so, they’re beautiful!” And they were just like, their mouths dropped open. And Jack, my verbal processor again, was like, “Well, there are some guys who are just really handsome!”

And I’m like, “Yeah, I know. I’ve seen ’em, too! I married one of ’em, hey!” (laughter) But they didn’t know. They had been told a message of, “If you think someone of the same gender is attractive, that must mean that you are attracted to them.” 

And so to hear their mom say that was different. They were like, “Oh!” And they know I’m deeply committed to my husband. I’m totally into him! So for them to hear that, “Oh, yeah, I think Dannah is really attractive. She’s one of my great friends, and she’s beautiful.” Or whoever, whoever, whoever . . . and to know that I’m not attractedto them. I’m totally into my husband. They’re like, “Oh! I’m normal!” 

It’s really important to obey those nudges, and nudges can be different for different people. And this may be a hard thing to hear, but it may be that the way that God tells you to talk to your daughter about gender, or how to handle conversation, and it may be different from how He tells someone else to do it.

It’s possible that God calls moms to handle things in different ways based on who their kid is and their circumstances, and we have to be okay with that. We have to be okay with that. You have to be really strong in that. We have to support each other in that, too, and stop throwing stones around. That’s not helping anything. Right?

It takes a lot of courage to obey the nudge, as moms. 1 Thessalonians 5:4–5 says that we don’t wander around frantically as those who are in darkness. We are children of the light. I found it’s really difficult to be both frantic and obedient at the same time. 

And, look, I have to be honest. I look around at the world sometimes, and I’m wanting to feel frantic! It’s just freaking me out a little bit! Is anyone just a little freaked out every now and then? Yeah! That’s why we’re here, right? It’s hard not to be frantic, but “frantic” isn’t a weapon. It’s a distraction from what God is actually doing!

A lot of times when I look at what’s going on around me, and at different circumstances, I feel like it’s almost like a magic show in some ways. What the magician does is, he does something really flashy over here. There’s like something on fire, or there’s a rabbit turning into a cow, and you’re so distracted by that that you miss entirely what’s actually happening over there! 

And that’s a problem, because we need to have different eyes when we’re looking at our kids. It would be easy to get distracted by all the things the enemy is doing and totally miss what God is doing in our kids’ lives! Or totally miss what the Devil is actually doing, you know, the subversive stuff that we don’t see. 

So it requires some wisdom and some discernment, but we can’t be frantic. We have to ask the Lord, “Help me not be distracted by what the Devil’s doing. Show me what You’re doing so I can partner with You, with my child.”

So here’s what I’d ask you to do, the three questions that you can ask God: 

Number one, “What do You see when You look at my daughter?” What do You see? I had my friend present this idea to me. I asked the Lord about my daughter Eve, who’s adopted. She has just had some things that come along with that, that are a little more difficult to deal with than my other two . . . deeper waters.

And this is what He said about her, “Tell Eve that she’s a seed, not a stone, that there’s life in her.” Ask God, “What do you see when you look at my daughter?” 

Number two, ask Him, “What does my daughter need today?”

And I want to just say, maybe the nudge is a new concept to you, but if you ask the Lord how to minister to your daughter, He will show you in one way or another. That can come in a lot of different ways.

But ask Him, “What does my daughter need today?” Maybe instead of looking at the whole grand scheme of what trajectory she might be on, just today, what does she need? Maybe she just needs you to go on a moon walk with her. Or maybe she just needs some ice cream—she needs to go down to the DQ and get one of those Blizzards. Maybe that’s all she needs, but He knows what she needs. He knows, and He’ll guide you in that. 

And number three, I would ask, “How can I help my daughter absorb more of Your truth into her life?” Some of your daughters may be very averse to Scripture and truth right now, and I get that.

But we are amazing people, we moms, and we can do it! You know, where we just subtly put something up on the wall or on the fridge or just a Post-it note on the dashboard of the car. Or just music, whatever. If she’s like craving new Christian music, then just find it for her. Ask God, “How can I help my daughter absorb more truth into her life?”

We’re going to wrap up. But let’s pray. There are so many things we could talk about. Like she said, we could do a whole weekend just on this topic. And like I said, if you’re into this and you want to bring a message similar, let us know. 

We can expand it a little bit and bring it to your group. It’s a big topic, but we can obey the Lord. He loves our girls. I want to declare over you: Heaven rules over your motherhood. 

This is a Scripture my husband and I pray over our family: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (Rom. 15:13).