Understanding Gender Dysphoria Quotes

“Heather Looy, in offering some tentative considerations about the image of God in her discussion of intersexuality, offers that it is possible that the “genderfulness” of God [may have been] deliberately separated into female and male by God in the creation of humankind as a way of structuring into creation a basic need for us to be in relationship, so that it is in community, not individually, that we most fully reflect God’s image and are most fully equipped for the tasks to which we are called.31”
― Mark A. Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria: Navigating Transgender Issues in a Changing Culture

“Rather than select one lens to look at gender dysphoria, we can look through all three, identify the strengths of each framework and apply it to how we approach the topic and the person who is navigating this terrain. What we have then is what I refer to as an integrated framework that draws on the best of each existing framework.”
― Mark A. Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria: Navigating Transgender Issues in a Changing Culture

“We usually think of disorder as a word reserved for more extreme conditions or experiences, such as significant depression or anxiety that keeps us from going to work or being present to our kids. We think of disorder perhaps in medical conditions, such as cancer or heart disease. But all of it is disordered. Even the healthiest of us is still living in a fallen world as a fallen person.”
― Mark A. Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria: Navigating Transgender Issues in a Changing Culture

“The great paradox here is that the Tree of Death and Suffering is the Tree of Life. This central paradox in Christianity allows us to love our own brokenness precisely because it is through that brokenness that we image the broken body of our God—and the highest expression of divine love. That God in some sense wills it to be so seems evident in Gethsemane: Christ prays “Not my will, but thine be done,” and when God’s will is done it involves the scourge and the nails. It’s also always struck me as particularly fitting and beautiful that when Christ is resurrected His body is not returned to a state of perfection, as the body of Adam in Eden, but rather it still bears the marks of His suffering and death—and indeed that it is precisely through these marks that He is known by Thomas.66”
― Mark A. Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria: Navigating Transgender Issues in a Changing Culture