Dear Friend,
 
When it comes to gender-confusion in the culture, it often feels like the ground is moving beneath our feet. As Christians, we face a culture that is in full-scale rebellion against God’s beautiful, distinct design of male and female. The evidence of this is all around us, but perhaps it is nowhere clearer than the increasing number of stories about gender-confused children who are being encouraged to ignore their biological sex in order to embrace a “transgender” identity.
 
Journalist Abigail Shrier has recently written a stimulating book titled Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. In this book, she chronicles the alarming rise of adolescent girls identifying as male:
 
"Gender dysphoria—formerly known as 'gender identity disorder'—is characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex. It typically begins in early childhood—ages two to four—though it may grow more severe in adolescence. But in most cases—nearly 70 percent —childhood gender dysphoria resolves. Historically, it afflicted a tiny sliver of the population (roughly .01 percent) and almost exclusively boys. Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all. In the last decade that has changed, and dramatically. The Western world has seen a sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as 'transgender.' For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identifying [as transgender]—they constitute the majority."
 
Young girls who experience depression and anxiety are finding that there is strength and affirmation in becoming transgender. As a result, more young girls than ever are identifying as transgender. They are also taking steps to transition physically at younger and younger ages. And parents are often facilitating this.
 
Why? Because the entire medical establishment is not being driven by science or common-sense wisdom when it comes to dealing with gender-confused children. It is horrific, but it is a reminder of how high the stakes are in our current cultural moment. Real harm is happening to real children, and hardly anyone seems to notice. Instead, many people who should know better are becoming complicit.
 
Christians have a particular responsibility to be ready to bear witness to what is good and right and true and to what promotes the good of our neighbors. If we don’t, who else will speak truth into these kinds of situations? Who will be salt and light for people who are being carried away by a destructive error?
 
And yet, many Christians still fail to understand the issues, much less how the Bible applies to the difficult questions we are facing today.
 
Over the last thirty years, churches have found themselves facing questions about manhood and womanhood that were barely imagined when CBMW was founded. Western culture has embarked upon a total revision of sexual and gender norms. It has evicted the union of one man and one woman from the definition of marriage. With the transgender challenge, it has thrown into question what a man and a woman even are.
 
These issues haven’t abated during the COVID-19 pandemic. If anything, the pandemic has only heightened the anxieties of troubled children, making them even more vulnerable to being shoehorned into transgender identities.
 
That is why CBMW has sought to meet this challenge, and there is evidence that our work is bearing fruit. In 2017, CBMW led a coalition of evangelical leaders and scholars to approve the Nashville Statement—an evangelical confession defining the Bible’s teaching about homosexuality and transgenderism. Since then, a stream of schools, colleges, universities, churches, and other Christian organizations have adopted the Nashville Statement as a confessional standard.
 
While the biblical vision of the Nashville Statement is growing in its reach and influence, we still have a long way to go. And we need your help in this. First of all, we need your prayers. We want to be faithful stewards of the opportunities God gives to us, and we want to bear faithful witness in the face of opposition (and there is much of it). Second, we need your financial support. As you make your year-end plans for giving, would you consider making a contribution to the ministry of CBMW? Would you also prayerfully consider becoming a regular monthly partner of CBMW?
 
Thank you for your prayers and support. May the Lord’s richest blessings be on you and your family this Christmas.
 
Sincerely,

Denny Burk
President, CBMW