“There probably has been something of an increase in the transgender phenomenon since the media began covering it,” says Dr. Warren Throckmorton, Ph.D., director of college counseling and associate professor of psychology at Grove City College.
Throckmorton has seen close to 4,000 clients since he began counseling in 1980 and approximately 1 to 2 percent of his caseload involves people with “significant gender concerns” – a number that he estimates is about the same as the general population. Throckmorton has been actively involved in the movement to debunk media and cultural myths that surround gender issues since 1997, when the American Association of Mental Health Counselors unsuccessfully tried to ban reorientation therapy, or counseling that is based upon the belief that homosexuality is not inborn.
“In the 80s, although there were a lot of politics involved in the gay/lesbian issue, it wasn’t an issue in counseling,” he says. “People would come in and say that they didn’t want to be gay, and the counselor would begin to work on all of their issues. Part of the problem today is that if kids who have same-sex attraction come in, counselors assume that they are hard-wired that way. It’s like a curse and the counselor focuses on it so much that it becomes a part of their identity and their daily psychology, so it seems huge to them.”
Randy Thomas is a counselor with Exodus International, the world’s largest Christian referral and information ministry for homosexual issues. Thomas has been ministering to the homosexual and transgendered communities for almost a decade, and is also concerned about the way that culture exacerbates the problem of gender-related struggles.
“We live in a society that is doing everything it can to obliterate God-given gender roles to begin with,” Thomas says, citing the recently-created term of ‘metrosexual’ and the secular feminist movement. “We also have a very sexually permissive and abusive society that sometimes creates environments which cause people to not want to identify with their own gender. Mysandry [fear and/or hatred of men] and mysogyny [fear and/or hatred of women] are rampant and even celebrated.”
The second barrier that often prevents healing is the perception, Leach says, that God can or will do nothing to help.
Leach, who struggled for decades with G.I.D. before finding healing, understands those feelings very well.
“It’s so confusing because we feel like we’ve done all the prayer needed and God’s only consistent answer has been silence,” he says. “‘Please take these feelings away from me, Lord God,’ we pray. Silence. The feelings persist. Silence. Actions follow. Silence. Guilt and shame trail behind. Silence. The cycle is revisited again and again until the final conclusion seems quite apparent. Silence thus equates to, ‘God’s will is for me to be a member of the opposite sex.’”
Yet, ironically, all agree that only God can repair the emotional damage sustained over the years, whether through cross-dressing, sexual sin or faulty thinking. It is all idolatry, they say, that must be dealt with at the foot of the Cross.
“If the owner of a Honda Accord wanted to understand [his car,] he wouldn’t go to Toyota for the owner’s manual,” Thomas says. “For a person seeking to find their true gender identity … the first step is to find out who they are in our Creator’s eyes.”
Leach agrees.
“You must come to terms with your God-given uniqueness and personality,” he says. “Shame-based thinking must be uprooted and dealt a death-blow. All the painful events of your past must be uncovered beneath the Godly oversight of a professional therapist who knows how to minister emotional healing prayer for you. You will need to understand that your transgender thoughts, feelings are your chosen method of escaping your present reality. You are running away from that which brings you pain.”
