Sure, they’re young earth creationists. That’s ridiculous enough, a view that is in complete denial of all of the evidence, and it makes them a fringe group that, if they didn’t have so much political influence, could be safely ignored. Just the fact that they reject the entirety of science ought to make them pariahs.

By the way, my latest reading is Martin Rudwick’s Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters , a very good book on the history of science, and I have to quote a paragraph from the introduction, in which he argues against the simplistic claim that it’s just Science vs. Religion.

…I try to show how an emerging sense of the Earth’s deep history was related to earlier conceptions of a much briefer kind of history in far more interesting and important ways than this tired stereotype allows. The surprising revival of “young Earth” ideas by some modern religious fundamentalists, and the even more surprising political power of such ideas in certain parts of the world, should not distract us from tracing the main story. I deal briefly with the modern creationists at the very end of this book, but in such a way that I hope it will be clear that they are a bizarre sideshow, not the climax of the narrative.

Even as a bizarre sideshow, though, their beliefs have social and political repercussions, and unfortunately, belief in creationism has a host of correlated consequences.

One of those consequences is the possession of a set of rigid sexual mores that defy biological reality. Another of the horrible, nonsensical ideas that AiG promotes is that gender is fixed and unchangeable, ordained by God, and so transgender people are freakish abominations who should not be accommodated in any way.

This attitude comes right from the top. Ken Ham loves to cite the Bible to “prove” that there are only males and females.

Now gender distinction for humans is so important that in the very first chapter of the Bible, which is foundational to the whole Bible, God emphasizes this gender distinction: So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Genesis 1:27) Jesus, the Son of God, our Creator, as the God-man, made this emphatic statement: But from the beginning of the creation, God “made them male and female. (Mark 10:6) And again in Matthew 19:4, Jesus, in explaining the meaning of marriage, emphasized the following: Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female . . . ? (Matthew 19:4) And I love how He stated, “have you not read…?” I believe we could paraphrase this verse as, “Haven’t you people read the book of Genesis, that when I created humans, that I made them male and female?” (Matthew 19:4)

That is so familiar — it’s also how they justify creationism. It’s right there in the very first page of the Bible! How can you believe the rest if you don’t literally accept every word? The first book of the Bible says that the Earth was created in six days six thousand years ago, and it also says that sex is binary, and if you deny either of those things, why, you must hate Jesus.

This is not a one-time deal, either; it’s something of a growing theme at AiG. Here’s Ham in a different essay.

And God not only made the earth and everything in it, He also created gender. Gender is not a social construct that society can arbitrarily define or that can be changed based on our feelings. Gender—male and female—was created by God at the beginning (Genesis 1:27), and this distinction was reaffirmed by Jesus in the New Testament (Matthew 19:4–5). Although gender (like everything else) is marred by sin because of the Fall, we need to respect the distinction that God created and not seek to redefine it according to our fallible human wisdom and desires.

And again.

Really, what laws like this come down to is a rejection of the biblical distinction between males and females. Of course, we at Answers in Genesis acknowledge that this is a complex issue, but Scripture is clear that in the beginning, God created mankind as male and female (Genesis 1:27). There is nothing in Scripture to indicate that God created some as anatomically male but who identify as female or vice versa. (We do recognize that, because of sin’s effects on the world, there are physical variations and aberrations that do cause legitimate difficulty for a very small number of people, such as hermaphroditism.

So he’s willing to accept that transgender individuals exist, but they are a consequence of Original Sin and represent aberrations.

And now they have a post up by Owen Strachan, Transgender Identity—Wishing Away God’s Design. How do you like that? If you aren’t the perfect cis-het person, you are defying God.

And here we go again, with the literalists’ favorite quote:

Genesis 1:27 says God made them “male and female.” No matter how hard some people try, they can’t wish away this fundamental physical reality—and that’s a good thing.

The irony…the fundamental physical reality here is that sex is non-binary and more complex and fluid than bible-thumpers can imagine, and the only people trying to wish away reality are the kooks at conservative think-tanks.

If I wanted to be mean…oh, wait I’m always happy to be mean!…I’d point out that this is another irreconcilable conflict between their religion and reality, and that it ought to be regarded as an indictment of their damned stupid “worldview”.

Jessica Sideways has a most excellent rebuttal of Strachan’s idiocy, though, so I’ll stop there and let her take it away. I am amused at the fact that Strachan wobbles between two sources to justify his argument: the Bible and…Pinocchio? Two works of fiction to prop up his transphobic bigotry? I’m not impressed.