Why friendships are essential to culture
The welcome breaking of the 'woke fever' might come at a cost I am not willing to bear
I write code for a living. And among human beings, the living have a code.
TL;DR - The number of people who remain hardened in their hostility toward the LGBT community has steadily declined. The number of us that have at least started to draw our own pictures of the LGBT community - based on our own experiences - has been slowly growing. These trends aren’t about politics. They are about people like Gina and people like me and people like the many other deep, meaningful friendships I now enjoy in the queer community. Unfortunately this trend can be aborted by politics, and that is a tragedy I cannot silently watch happen.
A woman’s reproductive system produces eggs, each of which has an 'X' chromosome. A man’s reproductive system produces a sperm. But here it’s not so simple. The sperm can carry an 'X' or a 'Y'. If the sperm donates (we men are just so wonderfully philanthropic, now, aren’t we?) an 'X' we have a zygote with an 'XX' pattern - a girl! If our sperm donates the ‘Y’, the zygote has the 'XY' pattern - a boy!
This is genetics, folks. Wouldn’t it be nice if human experience were so neat, nice, and tidy?
But it isn’t.
Pictures that are drawn for us, but not by us
Please forgive me as I introduce myself. I am a human being. Then I am the child of parents who I would describe as conventionally Christian. I was raised in a Roman Catholic home I would describe as politically Liberal - in the sense that the Catholic social tradition demands the faithful attend to the concerns of the widow and orphan. But that same tradition demands respect for life and recoils at the idea of abortion as a response to the inconvenient consequences of human sexuality. I went on to complete the formal education of a Protestant chaplain. I know all of the typical conservative Christian arguments about human sexuality.
Beyond these labels - which I think are important and meaningful - my parents were what political historians might call “Reagan Democrats.” I heard the following long before Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his supporters were saying it: My parents did not leave the Democratic party, the Democrats left my parents. I graduated from high school in 1985. I missed the opportunity to vote for Ronald Reagan’s re-election by a couple weeks.
From these origins I have identified with typical conservative Christian Republican politics. This intersection of culture and politics drew for me a picture of what I will simplify as the “queer” community. And it was a dark picture - and got only darker with the advent of social media. It was a picture that bore more resemblance to the violence of ancient pagan temple ritual than to the lives of my neighbors. I was ignorant of that difference, for I knew nothing of the lives of those neighbors.
Until friendship.
Pictures that are drawn by us, not for us
Gina and I share just about everything in common. She is an aeronautical engineer for a major airline. I am a software engineer turned cybersecurity business owner. We both live and breathe ones and zeroes. Gina is a championship competitive shooter, an expert firearms instructor, and a Second Amendment advocate. We share basic conservative political beliefs. And Gina is transgender.
A conservative talk radio host in our town made a comment about transgender people - much like what we hear right now. Gina was listening, and handled it in the way Gina handles everything. She emailed the host, and with her typical kindness and professionalism asked him if he would have coffee with her and just allow her to tell her story. He agreed. Then she called me. She knew I came from the same tradition, but she also trusted me as a friend to join her for emotional support.
Listening to her story changed everything. She was born with severe genital ambiguity - out of the womb the doctors did not quite know what to think. They do not do this anymore (and rightly so), but back then they performed male sex assignment surgery right after birth. Her mother was given tiny testosterone pills to give when feeding her baby.
It might have sounded odd, but I introduced myself above as a human being for a reason. Because there she was, my friend Gina, a human being - who has never lived in a body with a “normal” endocrine system. But on a more fundamental, important level, she is a “normal” human being who remembers dreaming as a girl as early as seven or eight years old. In her dreams she was a girl and the world was perfect. And then she wakes up and sees the body of a boy in the mirror.
Her story really bothered me. But it wasn’t that there was something wrong with it. I was bothered because with the formal education of a Protestant chaplain, I was shocked that there were people around me with stories like this and I had not been exposed to it in school.
Our pictures are only as honest as we are free to think and ask questions
Gina and I have talked a lot about this since. I treasure her friendship because I am free to think through these things as makes sense to me. I can ask her pretty much anything and even if gets into private areas, she is open, honest, and kind with her answers. On a couple occasions the pastor of our church asked me to stand in for him on a Sunday morning, and if I was going to tackle topics related to human sexuality, I would invite Gina to join us. I knew how I intended to be heard, but I wanted someone who could give me honest feedback on how I might actually be heard by someone in the LGBT community.
From this I have learned to take care and accept responsibility for the fact that what I will say next will not land well in the ears of some of my friends. Human sexuality runs to the core of how we see ourselves as human beings. I certainly do not want someone to come along and suppose to explain me to me. I imagine my friends are no different. It would be as ridiculous as me - a white male - explaining to a Black woman what being a Black woman in America is like.
But I also know I can trust my friends in the LGBT community to understand that this explanation is not for them. It is for the people I grew up with in church. It addresses the current public policy controversies surrounding the Trump administration ordering the Executive branch to recognize only two genders.
Gender, sexuality, genetic, biology, and psychology
To continue with computers as an analogy: I write source code. But the computer does not run my source code; it runs what is called “machine code.” There is technology called a “compiler” between my source code and the computer’s machine code. I can write perfect source code. But if the compiler is corrupted, the computer is not going to operate as I expect it.
Conversations about sex and gender in our conservative Christian circles often include assertions like “God does not make mistakes.” I might look at my source code for a simple program and say the same thing: I made no mistakes in the source code. But if the compiler is corrupted, it doesn't matter.
If we take this analogy into human sexuality, our chromosome pattern is our source code. On this level, the insistence that there are only to genders - male and female - is correct. But it is only at this level - genetics - that this is true. We know enough about fetal development to know that the zygote - right at the point of fertilization - starts out as female by default. If the sperm has donated an 'X', the mother’s endocrine system manages the balance of estrogen and testosterone such that the fetus continues to develop the body and mind (biology and psychology) of a girl. If the sperm donates the 'Y', the mother’s endocrine system has to recalibrate that balance such that the fetus differentiates into the body and mind of a boy. This differentiation actually continues after birth and the baby’s endocrine system takes over.
The human endocrine system is the compiler. The genes are the source code and the biology of the human body - including the mind and human psychology - is the machine code. The question is whether the “compiler” has been corrupted by chemicals in the food supply and environment.
It is a risky question…
There are numerous studies which document apparent relationships between chemicals and the disruption of animal and human endocrine systems.1 A particularly famous one2 gained attention when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mentioned it during his campaign for president. His comments were in the context of discussions about gender dysphoria and were met with derision and controversy, which is unfortunate but understandable. At best, and at a deeply personal level, this will sound like me (“hopelessly hetero-cis-normie” as I like to say to the amusement of my gay friends) trying to explain my transgender friends to my transgender friends. At worst it sounds like I am saying my transgender friends are something other than “normal.”
This is bad. And at first look it seems there is no way around it.
In this study, frogs and their larvae were subject to exposure to the ubiquitous (at least in the U.S.) herbicide atrazine at levels otherwise considered by the U.S. EPA to be safe. The study “...hypothesize[s] that atrazine induces aromatase and promotes the conversion of testosterone to estrogen.” At the most extreme, genetically male frogs were transformed into “hermaphrodites” - organisms with both male and female reproductive organs and confirmed the apparent corruption of the testosterone/estrogen balance.
Two things need to be noted. The study was done on frogs and correlation (which is compelling) does not mean causation. But beyond being honest with the data, there is something much more important to me: Being honest with myself as a professing Christian. I shared Gina’s story with a friend I grew up with church and he responded with a statistic - that these kinds of births are rare. This is rather typical. When we do this - respond to a story with a statistic - we reveal something ugly about ourselves: We care more about defending our preconceived notions than we do about the person in front of us.
…with a compelling answer
Again: Gina is a fellow human being as am I; neither of us are a statistic. And if I do not want my story dismissed by a statistic, I should not treat others as I would not want to be treated. This idea is about as basic as it gets and is a thread running through all known religions.
But in our Judeo/Christian (and, yes, Islamic) tradition we have something even more fundamental. We are created in the image of God. Oceans of ink have been spilt in the West over this, only for it to probably be very simple. If I want to know what God is like, I do not carve a statue for my fireplace mantle.
I make friends. That is where He has created His image to be seen by me - in my neighbor. And that means it is in me that He has created His image to be seen by my neighbor.
There is nothing special about this in the pews on Sunday morning in church, or Sabbath at the synagogue. There is something special when it happens between people whose lived experiences are so different.
It’s still a hard topic to discuss, even for the best of friends. But there is a way to overcome what will never be easy. We are both “normal” when we are both able to see the image of God in each other.
Until friendship
It was because of Gina that I began to seek out friendships in the LGBT community. Whether it be hobbies like music or other common interests, I have learned to appreciate the nature of the divide between us. I have no idea what it must be like for Gina to have lived her whole life at emotional and psychological war with her own body. I have no idea what it is like to be sexually attracted to men rather than women.
There is nothing by way of shared human experience that would naturally draw me into friendships with people in the LGBT community. But to give into that is to accept defeat. We Christians like to talk about spiritual victory, not defeat. But what does that look like? I got a glimpse when Gina called me asking to join her at that conversation for emotional support. There must be a way to build these relationships. But it isn’t going to come to me; I have to go to it. I have to seek out these friendships by finding people who love doing the same things I love doing (like singing).
There is a “vibe shift” in society right now. Honestly, it is a relief to see that merit and qualifications are going to return to their proper place in our society. But I am scared. I am scared because I fear a setback in the good that I have seen. The number of people who remain hardened in their hostility toward the LGBT community has steadily declined. The number of us that have at least started to draw our own pictures of the LGBT community - based on our own experiences - has been slowly growing. These trends aren’t about politics. They are about people like Gina and people like me and people like the many other deep, meaningful friendships I now enjoy in the queer community.
Unfortunately this trend can be aborted by politics, and that is a tragedy I cannot silently watch happen.
To the people who grew up like me, my point is this: Our neighbors in the LGBT community are not statistics - they are human beings. Many of them - especially those who feel at war with their own bodies - fight on through a soul-crushing loneliness and isolation. What if we have not even begun to talk about where the “sin” is in all of this? What if our sin is in how we have allowed ourselves to be poisoned to the point that a woman’s body is no longer able to calibrate the hormones needed for normal fetal development? What if the baby is born with his or her own endocrine system corrupted by further exposure to disruptive chemicals in the food supply? And if this - even if only partly - explains the chasm between us and the LGBT community... Please... tell me... Why do we condemn what we barely understand?
To my fast-growing group of friends in the LGBT community, my message is simple: You are loved for who you are right now. Period. Your friendships have made me a better man, a better neighbor, and a better Christian.
P.S. I don't know if it is possible, but somehow I hope a link to this post lands in the email of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. If it does, I’ll just finish with this. The LGBT community looks nothing like what we see on social media. That picture is false, and drawn only to stoke fear and anger. We might agree that the process of gender transition is physically incompatible with combat readiness. I just hope we can also agree that public policy should arise from thoughtful, informed nuance characterized by compassion - not from cheap caricatures.
I prompted ChatGPT as follows: “Create an annotated bibliography of research into endocrine disrupting chemicals in the food supply and in the environment.” Here is a sample of the response:
LeBlanc, G. A. (2010). Endocrine Toxicology. In this comprehensive text, Gerald A. LeBlanc explores the mechanisms by which environmental contaminants disrupt endocrine systems in both humans and wildlife. The book delves into various classes of EDCs, their sources, and their toxicological effects, providing a foundational understanding of how these chemicals interfere with hormonal regulation.
Pesticide Action Network UK. (2024). Imported Foods Found with Residues of 48 Pesticides Not Approved for UK Use.
This analysis by the Pesticide Action Network UK reveals that imported foods contain residues of 48 pesticides not approved for use by British farmers, including substances linked to cancer and endocrine disruption. The report raises concerns about the potential health risks associated with consuming imported produce treated with hazardous pesticides, emphasizing the need for stricter import regulations to protect public health.
Tyrone B. Hayes, et. al. “Hermaphroditic, demasculinized frogs after exposure to the herbicide atrazine at low ecologically relevant doses.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Vol. 99, No. 8. April 2002.