Bonus Episode, with Katie McCoy

After the live program ended, the Grounded crew kept the cameras rolling! Tune in for a bonus conversation with guest Katie McCoy. She shares how you can help younger women in your life who are struggling with transgender ideology. 

Connect with Katie 

Instagram: @blondeorthodoxy 

Twitter: @blondeorthodoxy 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blondeorthodoxy

Website: https://www.blondeorthodoxy.com/ 

Episode Notes

• “Is New Age Theology Creeping into the Church?” episode: https://www.youtube.com/live/QrRjP4JShbI?feature=share
• Katie McCoy’s website: https://www.blondeorthodoxy.com/
• To Be a Woman book by Katie McCoy: https://amzn.to/43FXF1H
• “Sexual Purity” chapel message by Dannah Gresh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQfl1gkZnYo
• It’s Great to Be a Girl book by Dannah Gresh: https://www.reviveourhearts.com/store/product/its-great-to-be-a-girl/
• True Girl subscription box: https://mytruegirl.com/subscription/
• “When Your Adult Child Identifies as Transgender: 3 Moms’ Stories” blog post by Katie Laitkep: https://www.reviveourhearts.com/blog/when-your-adult-child-identifies-as-transgender-3/
• “When Your Adult Child Identifies as Transgender: Part 2” blog post by Katie Laitkep: https://www.reviveourhearts.com/blog/when-your-adult-child-identifies-as-transgender-pa/

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Dannah: Okay, Katie, when we were broadcasting live, you had my brain firing on all cylinders. You said that we are going to be in ten, fifteen, twenty years, really living in this epidemic of people who are de-transitioning because they tried so hard to feel more comfortable in their skin and fix something inside of them by changing the outside of their bodies? Could we talk? I have a couple questions. Could we talk about that? 

Dr. Katie: Absolutely. 

Dannah: Okay. So first of all, we want to rescue as many of them as we can from that experience. So, we've got to figure out how to talk to today's high school and college age students that are in the middle of all of this conversation. Do you see that girls are more impacted than boys in this area right now? 

Dr. Katie: That's what the data is bearing out. It's very disproportionate, more so among natal females, so biological girls, than it is among natal males. Sociologists have been scratching their heads to try to understand why that is. And much of it is socially influenced. You might have heard this phrase: “social contagion.”

It's the idea that behaviors, attitudes, feelings, they sort of catch on and spread to other people. But what these researchers are also finding is that for many of these young women, gender dysphoria, that feeling that one's body and gender are misaligned, a lot of times it's either a coping mechanism, or it's kind of a symptom of something else. 

When these young people get the help that they need, for whatever that something else is—and it may be something that they've never even talked about—when that happens, a lot of times the gender dysphoria sort of works itself out, or they recognize that they were fixating on that as a way to try to express distress or pain over something else that was going on in a different area of life.

Dannah: Yeah, none of us feel like we fit in our skin in middle school in high school. 

Dr. Katie: Oh goodness, right. 

Dannah: Okay, so it wouldn't take much to be like, well, maybe this is the problem. I think it was until about 2012 transgenderism was predominantly only a male problem. It was very uncommon for it to be a female problem. 

And now we're seeing that it disproportionately affects high school girls and college aged girls. So those sociologists, those researchers were getting really intellectually honest and saying, “Why is there suddenly this big uptick?” 

What do you think is the most important thing that we can communicate to those girls when they're in that period of confusion? What do we need to do to help them, first of all and foremost understand their pain point, and then maybe understand their gender? 

Dr. Katie: One of the best things to do from all the research I found is to keep asking critical questions, having that young girl engaged intellectually: How long have you felt this way? What makes you say this? What makes you feel this way? 

And a lot of times what comes out is perhaps they just feel like they don't fit in with the way it seems like other girls in their class do. So you may have a girl who just doesn't call herself a girly girl. Affirm that God made her as an individual. What it means to be a woman is to be a female created in the image of God. 

That doesn't mean you need to fit in with certain cultural expectations of liking certain colors or clothes, be who God made you to be. As we align with who God made us to be, we're going to fulfill what it means to be a woman. And so, asking those critical questions is really helpful. 

There was a Christian family out in California. In California school policies are really pushing this onto children. But they're their daughter who came from a very theologically solid, spiritually mature home, suddenly said that she didn't believe she was a girl and her family removed her from that environment. They pulled her out of the school and re-centered on family relationships, helping build those family ties, asking her critical questions. She eventually realigned her perception with the body that God gave her. 

But one of the things that kind of triggered that self-perception, confusion, was she saw other girls in her class that were her age, dress in a very sexually provocative way. And she didn't identify with that, and that was a good thing. 

Dannah: Right. 

Dr. Katie: But by not wanting to dress the way that her peers did, it gave opportunity for for just that one little lie, that one little confusion just sort of grow and sprout. And so, many of these things might begin with very small lies, small misperceptions. 

And then the other thing we can't fail to mention, Dannah, is, I've lost count of how many young girls identify as non-binary or transgender. It's a form of psychological survival. There could be abuse, there could be bullying, there could be sexual harassment. 

Dannah: Sometimes in a form of psychological, yes. 

Dr. Katie: We don't want to say automatically that there's abuse. But there are many cases where it's some type of traumatic experience that they have and are trying to make sense of. “Perhaps if I were a boy, this wouldn't have happened to me.” And so, we don't immediately need to go there, but just to be aware that there could be something that is similar to an eating disorder or another form of self-harm, which is what a lot of these treatments are.

Dannah: One of the things I hear you saying is how important it is to affirm the child in the way that they are female. If your daughter likes dressing like a tomboy, if your daughter likes hunting with her dad, or if your daughter likes driving trucks, that isn't what the Bible says makes us distinctively female or male, so we don't have to be afraid of that. We don't have to be fearful about it. We can affirm the unique kind of girl that she is. Is that important to do you think?

Dr. Katie: Precisely it is very important to separate what the Bible says and what culture says.

Dannah: Yes, because we add the culture, and the Church says the girl wearing pink, and all kinds of expectations that are very, very extra biblical. We have to be very careful about that and have a really intellectually honest conversation. 

Any other thoughts about the important things that we should be telling those girls as they struggle?

Let me say this: I was just thinking of the Atlantic, which is not a bastion of conservative writing by any means. They featured an article about a girl they called Claire. This was not a Christian family. This wasn't written from a Christian perspective. But she was really having some gender dysphoria and wanted to transition. And they said, “You can dress any way you want. But until you fill this journal, with all the thoughts about everything that's discouraging you, you can't do anything significant to transition yourself.” 

And by the time that non-Christian girl and non-Christian family got through that journal, she had figured out, as you said a moment ago, what was really bothering her. It had nothing to do with being male or female, and she was able to resolve it. 

So, I think a lot of times, if we can just be patient, some of that dysphoria and discontent about ourselves works itself out. But that is not what generally is prescribed. Usually, in just a few visits, someone will start to get the medical care that they need to begin to transition. So would you prescribe patients?

Dr. Katie: Oh, absolutely. And also, to recognize that especially if the child hasn't gone through puberty yet, about a decade or two ago they practiced something called watchful waiting. These were secular psychologists and therapists. Watchful waiting just said, “Let's not make any decisions, certainly no decisions that would have lasting effects.” 

The conservative estimate was about 80% of children grew out of it once they hit puberty. And that really is just the goodness of God's created design that once the body hits a point of maturity, hormones and changes take over and inform our sense of self and also how we relate to other people as a man or a woman. Keep in mind gender perception is very relationally formed. 

And so, the family relationships are a vital part. This is why we see people when they want to transition, they want to be what's called passing or passable because they're looking for that confirmation from someone else to confirm the identity that they want to be their preferred gender. 

And so, this is also why speaking of the very young, why children seeing perhaps a man with a beard in a dress (there was something like that recently that was circulating) it's confusing, because these are relationally formed concepts. You're introducing children to things that are saying, “Well, why would a man be wearing a dress?” It just introduces them to confusion. 

And then always to keep in mind, and I'm not a mother. The way I say it is, “I'm not a mother, and so I'm able to go down the rabbit hole for these moms who are raising little ones and do all the research and try to present it in a way that connects.”

But for the younger, that age-appropriate way . . .It’s so wonderful that you wrote a book on this to address this very thing. The more that we can present to children in an age-appropriate way the true design, they're going to have their ears tuned, so to speak, to the counterfeits, to just recognize,”That's not what I learned.” 

Dannah: That’s right. 

Dr. Katie: That's not what my parents taught me or my Sunday school or church taught. It's the same thing of how that proverbial analogy of how people learn to recognize counterfeit money. They study the original so much so that they can immediately recognize even the smallest detail that goes against what the real thing is.

Dannah: What a good reminder for us to dive into the Bible and be so familiar with the original design that when a counterfeit shows up, it smells like one.

Dr. Katie: Precisely, precisely.

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