Social Media and Transgender, Is There a Connection? By Pastor Kevin

As someone who is parenting teens and has worked with them for the past ten years, social media and transgender are two topics that have gotten my attention. I can't say I'm an expert on either...but you can if you want to;)

In all seriousness, let me bring something to your attention for our collective consideration. This is, at best, a theory with a title that kinda sounds like it is the next episode of Nightline. I am not speaking authoritatively here as I would if I was trying to tell you that Jesus is Lord. Not even close. However, in bringing this observation to you it may help the church with some helpful insights on the effect of technology and the effect of our cultural movement towards sexual confusion. In other words, I am going to suggest that technology shapes us in certain ways that makes sexual confusion more plausible and it all equals the erosion of what it means to be a human being. Let me flesh this out for you:

Social Media Has Created A Whole New World

Let's face it. Parents were not raised with Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat or MySpace or Linked In or WhatsAp or Instagram. Truly, they were not. But our kids are. My point with this is that parents who were introduced to the online world after they were 20 (estimating here) have the ability to separate their online world from their real world like oil separates from water. In their thinking, these are two distinct worlds that have obvious differences. 

What we need to realize is that young people, especially those who are growing up on a smartphone, have a harder time making that distinction. For them, life has only existed with the lines blurred between the physical world and the non-physical online world. For instance, just notice how human experiences now center around creating something they can portray via social media. My point is that it isn't even necessary to actually have a certain experience as long as it is perceived by others to be real when it is presented online. Now a non-physical online reality blurs the lines of what is physically real. 

I see it all the time. Typically younger people taking a bunch of pictures of being out in nature make it look they had an adventurous day. In actuality, all they did was take a bunch of pictures in adventurous looking places. It almost doesn't matter that they are truly adventurous but that they are perceived as such. The physical world now blends with the online world to create this new world (not a third world) that never existed before social media. This new world consists of fabricated physical experience. What matters isn't so much that it really happened a certain way but that it is perceived that it did by the online world. Hence, the blurring between the physical and non physical in the creation of a whole new, online world. 

Social Media Is A Non-Physical World

Make no mistake. The online world is a new world. People live there. They find approval there and gain identity there. They learn and interact and have friendships in this world. However, it is a non-physical world that only tells half the story. People tend to pose highlights and they exclude lowlights. The one who presents themselves can do so with tons of discrimination, allowing them to create something, whether it be an identity or a perception that may not exist in the physical world. In this sense, social media leads us to think there is no boundaries to what can be physically created or experienced. There is a sense of transcendence about it in this way.

How Does Transgender Fit Into This?

Those who genuinely struggle with "gender dysphoria" represent about 1 percent of the population. That will grow because young people are being encouraged to explore whether or not their gender matches their sex. In other words, what the transgender movement has done is to separate sex (biological, physical reality of male or female) from gender, which is a non-physical ideology that exists in one's mind. 

My suggestion is that this generation is less tied to physical reality and have an easier time separating physical anatomy (sex) from the natural expression of this physical reality (gender). Until recently, this separation has been unthinkable. I do not think that the Bible separates sex from gender but the wisdom of our age certainly does. This is a terrible mistake that spells loads and loads of confusion. The way the online world allows someone to manipulate data and create an identity of their choosing seems to relate to the way an individual can ignore their sex (physical) and create their gender (non-physical) identity of their choosing. Put another way, it doesn't matter that someone is really adventurous or not because the non-physical, online world of perception almost trumps what is real. In the same way, what one thinks and portrays themselves to be (gender) trumps what is plainly true in the physical world (sex). 

To put it even more simply, the way social media allows people to create a new identity that isn't tied to physical reality is paving the way for a generation of people to disconnect their biological sex from something they want to believe about themselves (gender). As I mentioned above, this also erodes what it means to be a human being who exists in a real world and is responsive to an almighty God. 

May this help us to wisely consider the world, or worlds, we are raising our children in. 

In Christ,

Pastor Kevin