“Children should not be turned into pawns of culture war experimentation…

“There are good reasons to put boys and girls in different bathrooms and locker rooms and sometimes sports teams, reasons that don’t impugn the dignity of people but uphold it… Every human being knows that there are important, and necessary, differences between men and women. Without such recognition, women are harmed and men are coarsened…

“If anything, there’s much more of a case to be made that one can feel to be a different age than one’s doctor’s exam or birth certificate would show…It’s something else entirely if chronological self-identity is mandated for military service or the drinking age or the age of consent. People and neighborhoods and nations and cultures cannot live this way…

“Christian[s]…that seek to be faithful to the gospel must teach…that our maleness and femaleness points us to an even deeper reality, to the unity and complementarity of Christ and the church. A rejection of the goodness of those creational realities then is a revolt against God’s lordship, and against the picture of the gospel that God had embedded in the creation…

“All of us are called to repentance, and part of what repentance means is to receive the gender with which God created us, even when that’s difficult. We must affirm that God loves all persons, and that the gospel is good news for repentant prodigal sons and daughters, including for those who have trouble figuring out which is which.”

— Dr. Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention

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