Gender

There is no question that gender issues are complex, especially in today’s culture. However, healthcare professionals are committed to caring for all patients with dignity and respect. Protecting the freedom of healthcare professionals to exercise medical judgment and conscience convictions is essential to providing the best and safest care for patients, especially when it comes to gender issues.

“Transgender” individuals refer to their “gender” as a sexual identity that may be male or female, something in between, or neither. This self-identification differs from, and takes priority over, their biological sex as recognized in their chromosomal DNA and innate physical sexual characteristics. The naming of gender as a category set apart from sex is an idea foreign to the holistic view of the person as understood within Christianity. Christians affirm the biblical understanding of humankind as having been created male and female, with the two sexes having equal dignity and a complementary relationship to each other.

At the heart of disagreement over transgenderism is a difference in worldviews. If the human body is nothing more than the product of mindless, random, purposeless physical forces, then one may do with it what one wishes, even to demand medical and surgical cooperation in projects to alter, amputate or reconstruct normal tissue to conform to the patient’s revised psychological sense of identity. If, on the other hand, our bodies are an inseparable aspect of our true selves and are a good gift from God, who has designed the sexes to be wonderfully paired, and who has a purpose for humanity, then respecting the gift of given sexual identity and the ensuing moral obligations to our neighbors is the surest path to human flourishing.

We believe healthcare professionals should not be forced to violate their conscientious commitment to their patients’ health and welfare by being required to accept and participate in harmful gender-transition interventions, especially on the young and vulnerable. We affirm the obligation of Christian healthcare professionals caring for patients struggling with gender identity to do so with sensitivity and compassion, consistent with the humility and love that Jesus modeled and commanded us to show all people.