Why Christians Shouldn't Exercise "Pronoun Hospitality"

As a young adult, I promised myself I would never take a public stand on LGBT related issues. While I personally believe in the biblical definition of marriage, I had seen with my own two eyes how viciously so much of the church had navigated issues related to homosexuality.

I had seen the signs reading “God hates fa*s” and the t-shirts reading “Homosexuality is a sin.” I scratched my head and thought it curious that I never seemed to see any shirts reading “Pride is a sin” or “Gluttony is a sin.” It seemed to me like an awful lot of people liked to invest an awful lot of energy into condemning sins with which they themselves never had to struggle. Most of the gay people I knew were kind, many of them deeply wounded by life’s relentless blows. They didn’t need my rage; they needed what we all need, to be treated with basic human dignity, even in disagreement.

The point is that I did not like what I saw. I wanted nothing to do with it, and to a certain extent, I believe the church at large may still have some repenting to do when it comes to the way we engage people in these communities.

So I was really, really surprised to find myself on the frontlines of the great transgender debate. I had met a handful of trans identified individuals, and while I found them to be troubled and confused , they had never caused me any personal grief; it was mostly their proposed policy positions I resisted. I would later learn just how insidious and devastating their ideology truly was, and I warred against the corresponding cult dogma as I watched it wreak havoc in the lives of people I cared about.

But when I turned to the church for help in the fight against female erasure and child mutilation, I was dismayed to discover they had largely gone silent. I genuinely believe a lot of them had also identified how badly the gay marriage debate was handled in church communities, so they did what people often do— they overcorrected.

But the overcorrection isn’t helping people; it’s hurting them.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard well-intended Christians tell me I just need to be nicer to trans identified people as though telling them the unadulterated truth is some sort of act of hostility instead of a God-given mandate that can save them from themselves.

There are a number of well-intended influential Christians working overtime to build bridges to people in these communities. Perhaps one of the most prominent is a man named Preston Sprinkle. I genuinely believe that Preston is motivated by the compassion of Jesus, and while I fully appreciate his heart and his desire to model love to hurting people, I find myself enthusiastically at odds with him on an issue that, to many, might seem trivial and inconsequential—the use of preferred pronouns.

In Preston’s words, “Using the pronouns a person identifies with should be a matter of common courtesy, not a legal demand.” To paraphrase, he believes that preferred pronoun use is just a way to meet people where they’re at in hopes of helping them see that Christians can be loving and welcoming rather than hateful and judgmental.

Christian psychologist Mark Yarhouse echoes this sentiment by saying, “It is an act of respect, even if we disagree, to let the person determine what they want to be called.”

I can understand why this might feel like a reasonable position to take. What’s the big deal? It’s just a pronoun, right? Wrong! As a Christian, I don’t think it’s a biblically defensible one, and I think the implications are a lot more dramatic than many may ever realize. Here are just a few of the reasons I don’t think “pronoun hospitality” is compatible with obedience to Christ:

1. Jesus never indulged a delusion in order to show people love. He never told lies in order to win people over. In fact, He did the opposite. He spoke boldly to the roots of broken identity, named cognitive distortions and maladaptive behaviors, and told the people suffering under their weight to “Go and sin no more.” When Jesus encounters the adulterous woman, we don’t see Him rolling out a welcome mat to make her comfortable in the behaviors that are destroying her soul. We see Him calling her out of the destructive lifestyle and into life abundant. He does not waste time pussyfooting around the diagnosis of her sin problem.
   
   And sure, sanctification is a process. We can’t expect Rome in a day. Sometimes it will take months or years for people to shed the chains that bind them, and we aren’t going to win anyone over by marching up to them and shouting, “Shove your pronouns where the sun don’t shine!” We should obviously be gracious and patient, and we should pray for wisdom as we engage them. But the fact of the matter is that a choice to use wrong sex pronouns is a choice to tell lies. We cannot help people discover their true identities while validating their false ones.
   

2. Preferred pronouns are weapons in a war against God’s truth. When you use them, you are choosing to participate in a worldview that is incompatible with the faith you profess.
   
   There’s a reason God gave us stories like the one about Daniel in the lion’s den or about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. In both these cases, the powers-that-be demanded compliance with an ideology that was hostile to the faith. When you call a man “she,” you are doing the same thing. You are agreeing with the devil’s lies and saying that God makes mistakes, that it’s possible to change sex, that the creation knows better than the Creator how we should function. You are allowing people who hate God to dictate to you what you are allowed to think and say. You’re handing over your authority in Christ to a group of people who are actively championing (however unwittingly) egregious harm. You are forfeiting your obligation to stand against the schemes of the enemy.
   
   No matter how you dice it, it’s a form of idolatry. It’s a declaration that you value your safety or your job or your reputation or your comfort more than you value alignment with God’s truth. It’s fearing man more than you fear God. No one in the world should be bolder than Christians. Either we trust the Lord to defend us and provide for us, or we don’t. The Bible tells us to “be set apart from the world.” It tells us to put on the full armor and stand. What on earth are we doing running scared of a culture war we should be dominating?
   

3. Failure to resist in the small things leads to global catastrophe in the bigger picture. This is so much bigger than your isolated situation and relationships. Anyone who’s ever read Orwell knows exactly how this works. When I first fell down the transgender rabbit hole, literally no one even knew what the concept meant. It wasn’t a thing yet, and the broader discussion was limited to bathroom access and a few disgruntled people saying, “I just want to pee in peace.” That was 2015.
   
   Now look where we are. There’s been a full-scale takeover of women’s sports and prisons and shelters. Title IX has been butchered to protect men in dresses instead of women. In the UK there’s been a 4000 percent increase in the number of children wanting to change sex. Countless children have been rendered permanently sterile via puberty blockers and cross sex hormones. Hundreds of teenage girls are lining up for elective double mastectomies.

   
   It never had to get this far, and it never would have if more people had summoned the moral courage to resist. But they didn’t. They begrudgingly added pronouns to their email signature lines. They learned to gaslight themselves into using she/her pronouns on demand when the 50-year-old fetishist in the office required it.

   
   I’ve realized over time that the average person is safely sequestered from the horrifying reality of what “gender affirming care” really does to people, but I promise you it’s Satan’s idea, not God’s. And maybe if Joe Schmo had a little more exposure to the brutal realities of the gender cult, then maybe, just maybe he would take the gateway drug of pronouns a little more seriously.
   
   Just listen to the voices of the many detransitioners who are coming out of the woodwork to ask why no one cared enough to defend them from themselves. We should hear their voices: voices of young men whose urine is black from HRT induced kidney failure. Voices of young women who, despite their return to female identity, will always grow a five o'clock shadow and speak like pubescent 13-year-old boys. Voices of young men who will never know what it's like to experience sexual climax because their genitals and corresponding nerves were severed before they could experience it. Voices of young women whose longing to become mothers will never see fruition since the people tasked with their care during their emotionally unstable times convinced them that elective hysterectomies would make them happy.

   
   NONE of this would be happening if the world’s Christians would collectively summon enough moral courage to stand up and say, “No. Not on our watch. This is a path that leads to death, and we aren’t going to facilitate the journey by playing along with it or adopting the language of the cult we oppose.. We will not move a single step in that direction. We will not bend the knee.”

A lot of people seem to have adopted this mistaken belief that if you’re nice enough in your opposition to the gender brigade, if you tiptoe around pronouns, and use redundant terms like “biological males” when you really mean “men,” then you’ll somehow fly under the radar and dodge the bullets of the thought police. And they think, “Well maybe if I’m just nice enough, these people will feel the love of Jesus on me, and I’ll never have to risk saying something controversial because the Holy Spirit will do that work for me, and I’ll get to escape the crucible with my virtue signal card still in tact.”

You won’t. Make peace with that reality. Sometimes you have to speak. If you won’t, who will? Mother Teresa herself would be deemed a Nazi at the first hint of dissent with the genderists. That’s the nature of cults. As Christians, I think sometimes there’s a tendency to cling to verses that make us feel warm and fuzzy at the exclusion of the tougher pills to swallow—like the verses about how some people are going to hate us for doing the right thing, the verses about how Jesus came “not to bring peace, but a sword,” and the verses about how sometimes our faithfulness to Christ will be experienced as “an aroma of death to those who are perishing.”

Our desire to feel loving cannot supersede our responsibility to truly love well. The world has convinced too many of us that truth is bigotry, real love is hate, silence is golden, and if it feels good it is good. There’s nothing wrong with transgender ideology, right? After all, God loves everyone, doesn’t He?

But true love isn’t defined by the world; it’s defined by the One who laid down His life to redeem the world. And the Jesus model doesn’t always feel warm and fuzzy. Sometimes it’s unspeakably lonely and wildly unpopular. You don’t have to go out of your way to be a jerk about pronouns. In fact, you shouldn’t be a jerk. And the good news is that when you’re speaking directly to a person with gender confusion, you generally don’t have to use pronouns at all. Just use their name—whichever one they give you. Names are superficial. They can be changed. Sex cannot. But if forced, under duress, to participate in a lie, respectfully decline. Tell them it violates your convictions. Refuse to be bullied into playing make believe with people at the expense of your conscience and their greater good.

Be brave. Rescue others from the fire. Tell the truth without mincing words.

Refuse to be “hospitable” to lies.

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