A Pastoral Approach to the Question of Transgender Pronouns

As followers of Jesus, we seek to pattern ourselves after His example. And in all things, He exemplified grace and truth. Not grace or truth, but grace and truth. How, exactly, do we work this out in practice? And how, precisely, does this apply to the issue of transgender pronouns?

A recent teaching by Southern Baptist leader J. D. Greear underscored some of the challenges facing Christians today when confronted with the question of speaking to trans-identified individuals.

On the one hand, Pastor Greear clearly emphasizes the aspect of truth. He references solid conservative Christian books addressing transgender issues written by Ryan T. Anderson and Andrew Walker. And he states plainly that genetics determines your gender and that, “All told, when it comes to genetic sex, at the DNA level, there really is just male and female.”

Then, after addressing the question of “ambiguous genitalia and the ‘intersexual’,” Pastor Greear gets to the pronoun question, emphasizing grace. He quotes the comments of Walker from his book God and the Transgender Debate, then notes that “there is a spectrum of generosity of spirit vs. telling truth.” (See here for Walker’s article from 2017.)

In other words, if I address a biological male as “she,” I am not telling the truth. But, Pastor Greear believes, I am