FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

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Gender Identity

Guest:                         Dennis and Barbara Rainey

From the series:       The Art of Parenting: Identity (Day 3 of 3)

Bob: Men and women are created by God with equal value and equal worth but, as Barbara Rainey points out, there are some things women can do that men will never be able to do.

Barbara: Only women are designed by God to conceive and bear children and that sets them apart from men. They’re life-givers, but they’re also nurturers. Women are prone to nurturing life in other people or in other things. It’s not that men don’t do that—there are a lot of men who are pastors who nurture life in their congregation—but it’s a unique calling in a woman’s life to be made to give life and to nurture that life after it’s born.

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, January 30th. Our host is Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. As parents, we have to help our children understand that when God created them as either boys or girls, He had more than just biological function in mind. That’s controversial, but we’re going to talk about it today.

1:00

Stay with us.

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us.

If you were sitting down with a group of parents today and you were saying. “One of the issues you’re going to have to address as you raise your kids is the issue of their identity.” I think what we’re going to talk about today is where they would go immediately because, in our culture the issue of gender identity—sexual identity—that’s right at the heart of how we think about ourselves in this new century.

Dennis: And you better know how to help your child address the issue—not after it happens—but before it happens. Barbara Rainey—my wife of 46 years—It’s been all great sweetheart—

Barbara: Really.

Dennis: Every year better than the previous one.

Barbara: Yes, they are getting better.

Dennis: You hear that announced here on the radio, didn’t you? [Laughter]

Barbara: Yes.

Dennis: You wrote about it in your book, Letters to My Daughters.

Barbara: I know I did.

Dennis: I told you that you should have made me look better in there, but you didn’t.

Barbara: I didn’t.

2:00

Dennis: We’re talking about another new book we’ve written called The Art of Parenting.We’re covering one of the four major areas that the book is built around. We believe that parenting Biblically has four Biblical components: One—teaching your child how to relate to God and to one another. It’s the great commandment: Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor.

Number two—the second component—is that of character. That’s choosing right and not wrong. It’s the book of Proverbs—living a wise life and not a foolish one.

Third area we’re talking about today and have been all this week so far, is the area of identity—and today we’re going to talk about sexual identity.

The last component of parenting is one we’ll talk about here in a few weeks, which is teaching you child how to have a sense of mission and purpose—to be about what God has for him or her all their lives.

3:00

But I want to come back to this idea of sexual identity and I want to read a story by Jackie Hill Perry. She is a spoken word artist.

Bob: She’s going to be a guest on FamilyLife Today coming up in a few weeks.

Dennis: That’s right. She told a story that is a present tense story about her own struggle growing up around her own sexual identity. Rather than tell it, I want to read her words.

She says, “I understand how it feels to be in love with a woman—to want nothing more that to be with her forever—feeling as if the universe has played a cruel joke on your heart by allowing you to fall into the hands of a creature that looks just like you.” She goes on, “At the age of seventeen I finally made the decision to pursue these desires. I enjoyed these relationships and loved these women a lot, and it came to the point that I was willing to forsake all, including my soul to enjoy their love on earth.”

4:00

“At the age of 19, my superficial reality was shaken up by a deeper love, one from the outside—one that I’d heard of before, but never experienced. My eyes were opened and I began to believe everything God says in His Word. I began to believe that what He says about sin, death and hell were completely true.” She concludes with this, “God put this impression on my heart. He said, ‘Jackie, you have to believe that My Word is true even if it contradicts how you feel.’”

“Wow!” she writes, “This is right. Either I trust in His Word or I trust my own feelings. Either I look to Him for the pleasure my soul craves or I search for it in lesser things.

5:00

Either I walk in obedience to what He says or I reject His truth as if it were a lie.”

Bob, I think she nails it because I think we have a generation that is living life according to their feelings. They really don’t know what they believe and what they’re committed to from the Scriptures. This is why parents have to listen up. You all need to take your assignment about educating, training and equipping your sons and daughters to know how to navigate one of the most treacherous subjects they’re ever going to face on the planet—the issue of sexual identity.

It all begins at birth. It’s not long thereafter, that’s when sex education begins.

Bob: I’m thinking—back a generation ago—when we were talking about helping boys understand what it means to be a boy and girls understand what it means to be a girl.

6:00

Back decades ago, it was a very different conversation than the one parents are dealing with today. In part, Barbara, because there were some gender stereotyping going on back then that was not healthy—where we said, “This is how boys should act or think, and this is how girls should act and think.”

We got a little too compartmentalized and a little too boxy and put some artificial, arbitrary markers around those things. But today, we are q...