[Gary Petty] The January 2017 edition of the National Geographic magazine caused great controversy. The cover is of a young – boy? Girl? – a boy who wants to be a girl, and it looks like a girl. If you saw it, you would think it was a girl. But it’s actually a little boy dressed up that way because he identifies and feels that he is a girl. I found it particularly disturbing. It’s not too many years ago that that would have been looked on as pornographic. And yet here it was on the cover of National Geographic magazine – which was discussed throughout in the magazine, this transgender movement and what it means. One of the points that was brought out is that transgenders feel very strongly – emotionally, they work it through mentally – that they are really of the opposite sex.

This presents a sort of real interesting problem when it comes human emotions, and how unhealthy our emotions can be, and can we trust our emotions? When we look at the Scripture, it says, God says, He made them male and female. Male and female is part of our identity. And that’s really what we’re talking about here. What is our identity? It actually transcends being male or female – being the children of God.

A number of years ago, they found a little boy – he was four years old – who was raised by his grandparents, who basically put him in a dog kennel with the dogs. And he had spent much of his childhood of these four years that he had been alive inside a dog kennel. And when the authorities came in, he acted like a dog. He crawled around on all fours, he did not really talk, he barked, he panted, he ate his food out of a bowl and lapped up his water. He thought – he felt – he was a dog. Now, we know that it would take away from his humanity to keep him a dog. He wasn’t a dog. He was a human being. And this is the same thing we need to think about when we talk about this transgender movement.

We understand the damaged emotions that cause people to feel a certain way, but is that what God, their Creator, made them? He made us male, He made us female for very specific reasons, so that we can learn to be His children. God forever wants us to be children in His family – both sons and daughters. And we are very – all of us are very special, unique creations of God. And that needs to be part of this discussion.

That’s BT Daily. Join us next time.