The Biden administration last week assured Americans who claim to be transgender that they, surgical deformities and all, are “made in the image of God.” Of course, every person walking this earth is a creation of God, made after the likeness of the Creator, who loves each soul and longs that they may return to His righteous and loving care. But it’s equally apparent that the cult of transgenderism seeks not to celebrate that sacred image but to distort and blaspheme it.
By its very nature, transgenderism tells a confused person that his bodily creation was a mistake and the inventions of man are necessary to counteract the “deficiencies” of God. In defiance of the divine proclamation that “male and female He created them,” the alphabet sexual ideology that’s infected American institutions finds countless ways to reject the naturally created order of an orderly God. Rather than respect individuals as embodied vessels housing precious souls, transgender ideology encourages so-called doctors to hack and drug the bodies of even young children into physically deformed shells of their former selves. Just listen to these heartbreaking stories:
@cisnowflake this is KC Miller on Twitter. Really sad story #lgbt #detransitioning #trans ♬ original sound – Cisnowflake
These young women speak for the untold number of vulnerable people whose confusion was exploited by sick ideologues, with literally crippling results. They are the lucky ones — many of those victims won’t survive to tell their stories.
Mankind’s sinful desire to fashion himself into God is nothing new, although the transgender movement offers an unusual and vivid visualization of man’s ill-fated attempt to overpower his maker. In its reckless attempt to spurn what God has created and called “good,” the transgender craze calls that divine image not only insufficient but detestable. Discontent with God, its proponents seek to place themselves upon His throne.
In doing so, they partake in man’s oldest sin.
In Genesis 3, the devil tempts Eve to reject God’s commandment in Eden, promising her, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” That desire to “be like God” — not in the reverent way that disciples are called to “be imitators of God, as beloved children,” but in an ill-fated, idolatrous attempt to supplant the will and sovereignty of God with one’s own — has hardened the hearts of humanity ever since.
Indeed, while most of us will never physically defame the image of God, we are all guilty at times of appointing our own wills and desire for control above that of our Creator. Rather than wonder at the goodness of the God who made us in His image, we too often try to make ourselves into our own, shoddy divinities. Like any other kind of idolatry, those attempts end poorly.
Every culture has committed such sins in one form or another, from the Israelites’ golden calf in the shadow of Sinai to Western man’s post-Enlightenment attempts to achieve a godless, humanist utopia. Like theirs, ours finds countless ways to reject God. We foolishly play at the divine by appointing ourselves the executioners of the innocents, from unborn children to people who have simply lost hope. In denigrating the institutions of marriage and family, we mock His intended designs for our lives and, in so doing, hurt ourselves.
Not only are our sinful actions, but even the attitudes that direct them, are a foolhardy attempt to remake ourselves into little gods. If our secular culture has a defining maxim, it’s that self-realization and self-love are the greatest goods and that repression of or offense against anyone’s self-deity is the greatest evil. From abortion to school shootings, that sick self-worship produces deadly results.
Neither by mutilating our bodies with transgender pseudoscience nor by building our lives as tributes to our own glory can we make ourselves more divine. To the contrary, those and any other attempts to subvert God’s righteous purposes for our lives are acts of rebellion, tearing a rift between ourselves and our Creator that reflects man’s original rebellion in Eden. Man is created in God’s image, but man’s very attempt to make himself into God has stained that likeness. It is a stain we are unable to cleanse.
As we remember at Easter, only the atoning sacrifice of Christ — who is the perfect “image of the invisible God” — can redeem us from that revolt. The grace of God extended to us by the crucifixion is boundless, able to reach both the prideful churchgoer and the soul whose mutilated body bears the very scars of mocking the image of God. Only by accepting that grace, and following Christ’s example by putting to death our old selves, may we be made right with God.
By His grace, we may “put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator.”
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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