To the editor: There are three essential concerns regarding the current gender controversy.

Freedom of speech. Compassion toward others. Objective reality.

With regard to number one, we should remember as a society that no one ever needed a First Amendment so that people would feel free to say nice things. People don’t wait for permission to make agreeable remarks. They do not generally hold back expressing thoughts that are comforting, encouraging, supportive. I have observed that most folks see themselves as sympathetic toward others who are troubled or persecuted unfairly. Surely, such things span across political divides.

The genius of our First Amendment is that it frees us to speak out on matters when we believe some of the facts are being left out of a popular narrative. When we believe a subject has been treated unfairly, especially by media. The First Amendment exists so that citizens can say things that challenge the status quo. The First Amendment allows speech that is contrary, disagreeable, disturbing, even seditious. It allows the individual to do the job of the journalist, i.e., speak truth to power, in a time when professional journalists are conspicuously absent from any daring dissent in the marketplace of ideas.

So-called “cancel culture” has had the effect of pressing certain opinions into a corner. It was only a matter of time that such speech would break out. And so it has. And so when it comes out unnuanced, or lacking sympathy it is not surprising. To some of us, it is refreshing.

With regard to compassion, it has yet to be shown to my satisfaction that support for gender dysphoria is the compassionate course. A psychologist or counselor would hardly take that path with an anorexia patient, an emaciated person who “identifies” as fat. To challenge her view of self offers her a fighting chance to overcome her dysphoria. To agree with her self-identification is certain death to the patient.

And finally, with regard to objective, reality, i.e., readily observable truth, silence becomes acquiescence to falsehood. We could enlist the role of educators in this regard. Perhaps the
public school biology departments should study the matter and tell us just how many genders there are among human beings. Our children’s science teachers should publish, for all of us to see, their expert findings on such an important and controversial subject as the biological vagaries that we _ and they _ have, until recently, presumed to be limited to male and female.

Dan Casieri, Pastor
Lakeville Christian Fellowship