Steve Hickey

When it comes to moral outrage in South Dakota, my name would likely appear on a short list of instigators. However, I’m also happy to make noise when our moral outrage is quite selective and misdirected. At present our state’s biggest issue is that we have third-world living conditions within our borders, unemployment, lingering racism and injustice in the courts. It is not okay Native kids are killing themselves and that a few states attorneys count coup with how many natives they can put on the hill. Where is the moral indignation and South Dakota neighbourliness? Additionally, our state leaders are enabling an unregulated poverty industry to flourish and exploit our poor and elderly out of millions each year via intentionally-crafted, high-interest debt-traps. Yet, the moral outrage again this legislative session is focused on transgender issues.

In wrestling with the transgender bathroom and High School Athletic Association transgender policy debate last legislative session I came across a very helpful framework for understanding gender dysphoria. The source is Dr. Mark A. Yarhouse, a licensed clinical psychologist and professor at Wheaton College who wrote a book called Understanding Gender Dysphoria published by InterVarsity Press. Yarhouse is also a mental health chair at Regents University which like Wheaton is also an evangelical Christian school. His specialty and his other books are on sexuality and specifically, gender dysphoria.

Yarhouse summaries the issue today using three frameworks. The first is an integrity framework which is the basis for the type of bills we are seeing in Pierre this session from pro-family values Republicans. The integrity framework says God made us male and female and any deviation from that is a perversion and sin.

Yarhouse writes next of a disability framework which identifies gender incongruence as a reflection of the fallen world in which the condition is a disability, a nonmoral reality to be addressed like any other disability; with empathy, compassion, and accommodation. Until recently, the DSM-5 classified transgenderism as gender identity disorder, a clinical cause of significant stress and impairment. Today the psychological community doesn’t dare call it a disorder.

Finally Yarhouse speaks of the diversity framework which deconstructs gender and sex altogether and celebrates and encourages any expression of diversity. In Pierre these days, we have the clash of the integrity framework fighters with the diversity framework fighters.

My appeal to the Governor and my former legislative colleagues is to frame any future statewide conversation and policy through this middle lens of the disability framework. This is a path forward that will not please either side. When I voted against the transgender bills last year people close to me and people important to me said my votes were very disappointing and very concerning. The gay and transgender people I’ve spoken to about these issues resent and even deeply reject the classification of disability.

Even so, cutting through the political correctness and the impasse of intolerance toward each others vantage point, the reality is no young boy is choosing to feel like a girl and the subsequent misery of self-loathing and profound shame present an impossible dilemma which ends all too often in bullying and suicide. The debate is ongoing how to help one find a measure of sanity in who they are but my experience is that like anyone with a disability, the transgender people I know simply want to blend in and not be seen as different or less.

As the father of a daughter it has been a compelling concern that my daughter’s right to privacy in a bathroom be a consideration. But then I remember she grew up with two brothers and knows how to lock a door. From what I’m told, women’s restrooms today have individual stalls with locking doors. Also I’m aware that transgendered people generally despise and hide their birth genitalia and therefore aren’t the people we need to worry about forcing their genitalia on others. While traveling recently the airport cleaning lady mopped around a few of us lined up at the urinal and it dawned on me we can relax a bit about cross-gender bathroom use. My wife and I taught our kids to treat everyone the same and look past race and disability. We taught them to befriend people who were on the margins; fat, awkward, tom boys or tom girls.

The only passage in the Bible that speaks of crossdressing is Deuteronomy 22:5 and it is generally considered by Biblical scholars as a prohibition forbidding the Israelites from participating in Canaanite religious rituals of swapping sex roles and temple prostitution. It is a stretch to suggest the verse is God’s view on gender dysphoria. Appealing to 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 about effeminate men ignores that gender dysphoria was not an issue in the context of the letter.

So, WWJD? He’d probably have some scandalous friendships today with transgendered people and say things to the rest of us like; What makes you think someone else’s brokenness is a bigger deal to God than your own? Then maybe he’d join my gay friend Steve Hildebrand and myself in challenging the financial sins of the loan sharks like Chuck Brennan and Rod Aycox.

MY VOICE

Steve Hickey is a former South Dakota state legislator and pastored for 21 years in Sioux Falls before resigning last year for health reasons and to do post graduate work at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He maintains his residency in South Dakota and is the co-chair of South Dakotans for Responsible Lending, which recently put the 36 percent rate cap for payday lenders on the November 2016 ballot. My Voice columns should be 500 to 700 words. Submissions should include a portrait-type photograph of the author. Authors also should include their full name, age, occupation and relevant organizational memberships.

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