transcript

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[00:04] It's Tuesday, April 21st, 2026. I'm Albert Mohler, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. As you're looking at big changes in society, when we look at big issues that all of a sudden explode into public consciousness, one of the things we need to note is that when a very significant issue arises, something that has been working its way through the culture, unworking it back to the culture, also takes a great deal of time. Another way of looking at it is that when you have a major shift in terms of the moral landscape, you have issue after issue, policy after policy, institution after institution that is affected. Now, we're going to get to the prisons today, and it's on the transgender issue. So yesterday's edition of The New York Times had a major report with a headline, trans women in prisons could face moves soon. Mattathias Schwartz is the reporter, and this is a big story because I think a lot of Americans thought that what's being discussed here had already happened. So let's just remind ourselves how the transgender ideology worked its way through our culture and did so at least for some time rather surreptitiously. People really weren't paying a lot of attention. So while the LGBTQ movement was in formation, it originally was the homosexual rights movement. It then became the gay rights movement. It then became the gay and lesbian rights movement. Eventually, you had the initial show up. When it comes to bisexual as in LGBTQ, that's never been a significant portion of the population. And politically, it's just basically there because they want to put every aberrant category together. It's the T that really was the game changer. And that's because the fundamental reality is that gender is really, really clear when it comes to, say, gay male activity or female homosexual activity. In either event, it only makes sense if you know who is a man and who is a woman, which many of the gay rights activists have been very keen to point out. But having bought into the idea that there is no fixed morality, there are no objective moral truths that we have to simply find and obey, no, if all morality is socially constructed, then just about anything else can be socially constructed, too. Gender, it has been argued, is socially constructed. You have blue for boys and pink for girls. That just goes to show that it's all just a matter of social negotiation, socially constructed morality. Well, let's just pause there for a moment. It is true that there is no metaphysical law in the universe that says blue means boy and pink means girl. But in every culture, you have cultural shorthand. And the blue and the pink is simply one form of cultural shorthand. And by the way, it generally has worked. But no one has made the argument that the essence of being a boy is blue, or the essence of being a girl is pink. It's the objective biological reality, which is the thing. But to the social constructivists on the ideological left, everything is socially constructed. Nothing is objectively true. Now, thanks be to God, that ridiculous logic has not gotten a hold of the populace at large, which is why on the T in LGBTQ, there has been so much pushback. And that's because you're not just talking about the color blue or the color pink. You're not just talking about who wears what. You're talking about who is whom. That's a very different thing. Now, we talk about how there has been a significant hesitation on the part of the culture on the T. That wasn't apparent at first. LGBTQ appeared to be moving forward with gaining momentum. And Christians should note that even as the T has become an issue of public controversy, there has been the moral cost of seeing L and G and B become far less controversial at the very same time. But when the transgender issue clearly was about to explode, the biggest issue was immediately what policies are going to be affected. And these policies are unavoidable. Who's going to use which bathroom? Who is going to be admitted to which locker room? Who is going to be playing on which team? All this becomes immediately a matter of something that demands policy. And so many of those policies were changed. You saw groups such as the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, and you also had collegiate and interscholastic athletics trying to move into some mode of accepting transgender identity. Except of course, it doesn't work. And that's why you've had such a brushback, pressback, blow up on these issues. So, just consider, for example, the fact that when Donald Trump was elected to a second term as president of the United States in 2024, he put this at the very top of the agenda. Even on the day of his inauguration and even in his inaugural address for his second term, President Trump said that for his administration and thus for the United States government, male would be the human with the small reproductive cell and female would be the human with the large reproductive cell. That was in the footnotes, by the way. Just as a way of saying, there are only two biological genders, male and female. They are fixed categories. But even as there would be immediate policy effect, judges in some district courts at the federal level put it on hold. And so when it came to prisons, for example, according to President Trump's executive order going all the way back to his first week in office, the prisons were to stop putting biological males in female prison spaces. But as I said, a federal district court had put that on hold. Just in the matter of the last several days, the US. Circuit Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, that's the DC. Circuit, has basically sent that back. And so listen to this, quote, In a 27-page ruling, a three-judge panel for the US. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found there was insufficient evidence to support the claim that these transfers would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. End quote. So it does tell you a whole lot about how the arguments are being made here. The advocates for putting biological males claiming to be transgender women in women's prisons is that putting them in male prisons would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. You recognize that language from the US. Constitution. Let's just say they gave it the good college try. And at least at this point, they had a federal district judge who bought the argument. When it got to the DC. Court of Appeals, they didn't exactly slam it back, but they did send it back and say, you're going to have to come up with better arguments than this. And so that was an immediate win for the Trump administration, and I would say an immediate win for moral sanity. But it's also a reminder that this battle is not over. Not to mention the war, not even this battle is over. But it is a huge issue, isn't it? I mean, you would just think common sense would dictate that you wouldn't put a biological male, regardless of any other consideration, you wouldn't put a biological male in restricted female spaces, particularly when these are involuntary female spaces. We're not talking here about a woman's soccer club, we're talking about a woman's prison. We're also talking about what is inevitably a clash of claims of constitutional rights. If these biological men claiming to be transgender women could argue that being put in a men's prison would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, you can see that on the other side, the women in the women's prison, the actual biological women in the women's prison could say that putting biological men in their spaces also constituted cruel and unusual punishment. I just want to point out a basic Christian worldview perspective. And that Christian theological and biblical understanding comes down to this. Creation order works. Any tampering with creation order creates a distortion field that will create damage. Any rejection or reversal of creation order leads inevitably to dissolution and disaster. Now, of course, secular authorities are not concerned about creation order. And that's because they've been told they're not supposed to be concerned about creation order. And yet, you know, creation order keeps showing its head over and over again. Creation order just explodes in the Olympic swimming pool when it comes to women's swimming, when it comes to other forms of women's competition. It's going to explode if you try to deny creation order there. Creation order is going to show itself in a very clear and urgent way if you put a teenage male into a high school girl's restroom. That's just not going to work. And you could just go after example, following example. And you understand that if you ignore creation order, you're in big trouble. If you defy creation order, you're in far deeper trouble. And if you deny and defy creation order at the same time, you are just buying into catastrophic disaster. All right. Changing to the next issue or the next dimension of this question, National Public Radio recently ran a news story. Here's the headline. Even in blue states, hospitals drop gender-affirming care for youth. Now, when it comes to National Public Radio, it's almost legendary that we're talking about a very liberal news source. We're talking about a news source that has a very elite audience. They basically identify themselves with the public, but it's really not so much about public consumption as it is about public money, that is, taxpayer money, at least historically, when it comes to something like NPR. But we just need to pause for a moment, look at that headline. Even in blue states, okay, hospitals drop gender-affirming care. So the use of the term gender-affirming care tells you they are loading this article. And the loading starts with the headline. And then, of course, for youth. Okay, Karen Brown's the reporter in this story. Listen to how it begins. It begins with a young person named Bug. Quote, when Bug got home from school one winter afternoon in late 2024, okay, this child's mother was on the couch watching 30 Rock reruns. Bug sat down next to her. And then the child had an announcement to make. Listen to this. Quote, Bug, who was assigned female at birth, told his mother he was a boy and would be using he-him pronouns. End quote. So I read that just as it was broadcast at National Public Radio. I wanted you to hear that introduction in order to see how National Public Radio's report is really tilted very much to affirm so-called gender-affirming care for youth. And in this case, we're talking about a biological girl assigned female at birth who is now identifying as a boy. This child's mother identified only as J. We're told that this mother was quite affirming. And the mother wanted to allow the child to move forward in terms of whatever therapy or hormonal treatments or whatever might be necessary. Also, the full spectrum, which of course, eventually would include presumably surgery. And they moved to a state where they thought it would be safely available. They moved to a blue state. But now that they're in this blue state, guess what? The national policies are beginning to clamp down so much that you have hospitals, medical centers, even in blue states, saying we're not gonna do this anymore. And I want to point that you have the blame here put on the government, in particular, the Trump administration. And sometimes it could be also governments in red states, that is to say more conservative states. And you have these medical centers that are beginning to back out of all of these treatments for children and teenagers when it comes to transgender and non-binary ideologies. And they are blaming the political authorities for these actions. And that's really clear in this article. National Public Radio clearly thinks it is a catastrophe that conservative political pressure, in some case at the state level, but now in all 50 states, through the federal level, thanks to the Trump administration, you have these medical centers and hospitals, medical professionals and facilities backing out of performing these gender-affirming, that's just the term they use, let's just say transgender procedures. I want to point to the fact that there's a whole lot more here going on than National Public Radio acknowledges. Just to summarize, this particular example, which is used as the illustration in the NPR report, this mother and her children moved from Texas, which after all is a rather red state, they moved to Massachusetts, a safely blue state, and this child had been about to start taking testosterone at Bay State Hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts, when the hospital abruptly stopped prescribing gender-affirming medications. This mother told National Public Radio that she moved her children out of Texas because, quote, I could see the way things were going, end quote. They moved to Massachusetts because it was safely blue, but now it's the medical center in Massachusetts that responding to the federal authorities is backing out of the so-called gender-affirming care for teenagers. So they moved from Texas to Massachusetts, thinking they were moving from red to blue, and now even in blue state America. The medical center is backing out of these procedures for minors. Okay, this is presented basically as a matter of political pressure. I want to point, as I say, to something that is also very much at play here, and you're not going to see much attention drawn to it, and that is that when it comes to medical care, medical practice, when it comes particularly to children and adolescents, to minors, and then these transgender procedures, there is a growing concern on the part of medical centers and medical practitioners who have been involved in these things that the liability against them could be mounting. And so you can see this right now most graphically if you cross the Atlantic and look at Britain, where you see that the shutdown of the Tavistock Center there, and the release of the CAS report basically saying that these treatments not only are not helping teenagers and young people but may actually be harming them, you use the word harm and you put that in the context of medicine and you are looking at massive legal liability, which is to say, I am going to make the argument right out loud that an awful lot of what is going on here is the blaming of the Trump administration and its policies for backing out of these treatments when it comes to minors, but I can tell you there is a lot more going on here and many inside the medical establishment will acknowledge it without hesitation. One final word on this story, you think about differences between red and blue America and there can be very big differences, tax policy, all kinds of things related to laws at the state level. But you know what, it's really hard to believe that we could go on for any time as a country with red states and blue states differing on the matter of human biology. That's hard to imagine as sustainable over time. So it is going to be very interesting to see what happens. Right now, it's the blue states who are having to get in line behind the red states on many of these policies. As I say, they're blaming pressure from the federal government, but I do think we need to recognize that the threat of litigation is, if anything, probably a larger issue. It certainly might get the attention a great deal faster. When it comes to the federal government also, you are looking at financial pressures and accrediting and licensing issues. Most of that's at the state and local level, but still there are standards at the national level. All of this comes together. A reminder to Christians of how deeply embedded moral judgments are throughout the entirety of our civilization. To change those moral judgments, policies are going to have to change and change quickly. You move towards the full acceptance and celebration of the transgender identity, and then all of a sudden you see a problem. This is going to lead to the reconsideration of policies all over the place. At least for Christians, we ought to understand what's going on and why. Two more quick takes on this issue. Very interesting report coming out of The Telegraph. That's a major newspaper in London. Here's the headline from The Telegraph. It says, quote, guard women's right to single sex spaces. Kimmy Badenoch, who is the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, they're out of power right now. They're in a minority position. The Labour Party, far more liberal under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is in power. But you do have the minority leader, that is to say the Conservative Party leader, here very clearly calling for the government to acknowledge and obey a Supreme Court ruling on the definition of woman in Britain. So in Britain, the Supreme Court there has basically made a ruling, as if this would make sense in any previous generation of human existence, had to make a ruling concerning the fact that women are biologically defined, male also being biologically defined. But the controversial spaces are women's spaces, not men's spaces. Which is to say, it's not really a problem that girls are trying to get in the boys' room, it's boys trying to get in the girls' room. Biological males in female spaces. And so, the Labour government, which is, after all, the very Liberal Party there in Britain, the party of the left might be the better way to state it. The Liberal Party has been dragging its feet on getting with the program. It is interesting they're being called out for it. It is going to be an important battle on both sides of the Atlantic. I said, one more story, this is coming from Finland. Again, now we're looking at the European context, this report in the Wall Street Journal, the headline Finland's Lessons on Transgender Children. The bottom line here is that the lessons learned in Finland are pretty similar to the lessons learned in the United Kingdom. And so the numbers, however, are just really devastating. Listen to this, the report coming from the Wall Street Journal, nearly 10% of those who undertook feminizing gender reassignment had severe mental disorders before treatment, but 60.7% afterward the study finds. And so we're told that these treatments are good for children, but those numbers are devastating. Before taking the, quote, feminizing gender reassignment treatments, you had 10% of the patients who indicated mental disorders. After the treatments, 60.7%. That's a six-fold increase the wrong way. Quote, for masculinizing gender reassignment, this means taking a female body trying to argue that it's male and do whatever is necessary, quote, it was 21.16% of patients before and 54.5% after. Again, those numbers are devastating. In the case of the females undertaking, quote, masculinizing gender reassignment, you know, the numbers are pretty high to begin with, but they were more than doubled on the other side. The story then says, quote, severe mental disorders persisted for many of the patients initially referred for gender distress, but mental health worsened the most for those who treated it with gender reassignment. End quote. So, in other words, what the medical authorities have been complicit in arguing was the best standard of care turns out to multiply the mental distress reported even by the young people who've undertaken these treatments. The Christian worldview would tell us that's what you should expect if you try to subvert creation order. And even in a world where you would think the numbers would at least get some attention, if the morality doesn't, you have people on the left who are simply shrugging off these numbers. And that just points to a deep intellectual dishonesty that's also at work here. And this intellectual dishonesty is a sign of the reign of ideology over reason. That's another pattern we need to see. When ideology triumphs over reason, we're looking at a huge problem. And one that, by the way, won't be corrected by reasonable argument because they're more committed to the ideology than to rationality. All right, one final matter for today. Every once in a while, as Christians, we need to acknowledge that there are some very urgent moral questions that can't be so clearly or easily answered as we might like. So when it comes to the Christian worldview, we understand that beginning with the authority of Scripture, there is so much in Scripture that is absolutely clear and absolutely undeniable. It's a simple matter of right and wrong and an understanding of how to affirm the right and how to avoid the wrong. But when it comes to some other questions, things can get rather difficult in a fallen world. You had Pope Leo XIV, who just recently went to Africa, and one of the issues that arose during the papal visit had to do with how to handle the question of polygamy. Now, let's be very clear. The Scripture makes abundantly clear that monogamy, the union of a man or a woman, is God's plan from the beginning. That's exactly the argument that Jesus used when he was confronted by the lawyer asking about marriage. Jesus said, do you not know that from the beginning, this was the Creator's intention? But we're looking at a very interesting pastoral question. So let's just acknowledge that there are Christian authorities in some places of the world, Christian ministers, Christian churches, that have been confronted with an interesting pastoral and urgent moral question. You have a man, for example, who has several wives, who comes to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Following the traditions of his culture, he's had plural wives, multiple wives. Let's just, for the sake of argument, say he has three or four wives, okay? He then comes to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and he turns to the pastor, he turns to the church and says, what do I do now? Okay, so what's the answer? Well, let's just think about a few biblical principles here. The first principle is, Scripture is clear that the plan for marriage is one man and one woman for a lifetime. Also in Scripture, the second affirmation, all forms of sex outside of marriage are condemned categorically, period. Number three, Scripture does not explicitly condemn polygamy, though it does indicate that it leads to disaster and dishonor. So it's really clear by the time you get to the New Testament, and by the way, the Roman Empire had largely ended the practice of polygamy. You are looking at the fact that the early Christian church in the main really didn't have to face this question. It's more in the age, the modern age of missions. This has become a bigger issue. And when you have Christian churches sending missionaries, and you have now indigenous Christian churches in these countries, there are Anglican archbishops in places in Africa that have to deal with this kind of question routinely. And it became an issue of controversy when Pope Leo went to Africa, because the Roman Catholic Church had just released very recently a statement entitled One Flesh, and that One Flesh was presenting the argument for monogamy that was dated 2025. And so the Roman Catholic Church is in an unusual position, a pastoral quandary, when it comes to polygamy. Let's say again, a polygamous man comes forward and says, what do I do now? The Roman Catholic Church doesn't itself have a really clear answer. And it's a difficult question to answer. So there are basically four positions. The Christian Church, Christians of various stripes, have come up with four different arguments about how to address the question of polygamy. You have a man who has multiple wives, and through those wives, he has many children. The first position is that the man should put aside every wife other than his first wife. OK, that's clear. And yet, at the same time, it creates a huge problem, because then you have these other wives and their children who are basically rendered illegitimate. But their marriage was considered legitimate when they married. And these children actually have a mother and a father who were married to one another. So this is a huge problem. It's a huge problem not so much for the first wife as for the other wives and their children. That doesn't seem to be righteous or just. The second position is that the man should maintain all under his household, take care of them, so he feeds them and he clothes them, he provides for them. But he only has marital relations with the first wife. But that again creates a caste system among these wives. And even though this wife was first in a traditional polygamist, polyandrous society, the man and the other women also entered into a legitimate marital bond. So that doesn't seem to be exactly right either. The third position is one of the positions affirmed by the Roman Catholic Church, and that is that the man with multiple wives who comes to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is to be limited to the status of a catechumenate, which means he is a believer who is not yet accepted into the full fellowship of the Church. Okay, that again, let's just say even from a Protestant perspective, doesn't appear to really solve the problem at all. In the Catholic understanding, that means this man doesn't receive the sacraments. Well, from a Protestant perspective, that's focusing on the wrong question. The question should be, how should all believers move into the greatest degree of obedience to the command of God? And how do we honor marriage rightly, just saying that someone who comes to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ can only be treated as kind of a proto-believer? That doesn't sound right either. The fourth position is that a man who comes to faith in Christ and has multiple wives, that he is to be faithful to all of them as wives. He is to treat them as wives because he entered into the marital covenant with them as wives. He is to acknowledge their children as his children. He is to care for them impartially and fully, and it is to be a matter of his faithfulness as judged by the Church that he maintains all of his vows. He should never have entered into these vows, comes this Christian argument, but since he has entered into them, he must fulfill them. And so he becomes a picture of one. And by the way, you think about the New Testament, think about the Apostle Paul saying that the pastor is to be the husband of one wife. Okay, well, at least in the most graphic sense, that means that this man would not serve as an elder or a pastor in the Church, but as a sign of the ongoing nature of sin and unbelief showing up even in the structures of a man's life before he comes to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. He is to maintain all of his vows. He isn't going to serve as an elder of the Church. He isn't going to serve as a pastor of the Church. Nonetheless, he can be a full member of the Church. And like every member of the Church, every man of the Church, he is expected to fulfill his earthly obligations and fulfill them until he dies. I just thought you might be interested in this kind of moral conversation among Christians because there really are some questions that require a lot of thinking. Now, my point in doing this is also to underline the fact that on most issues, no such thinking in this kind of categories is even necessary. We have most of our life covered very clearly by the thou shalt and the thou shalt nots. But it's also true that in the experience of the Christian church, in the experience of even just a local congregation, there are some situations that arise in which there is no specific case law, so to speak. So, what do you do under that circumstance? You reason as we are taught in scripture, you reason from the scriptures. And you seek to be led prayerfully by the Holy Spirit to come to the rightful conclusion. But the rightful conclusion is going to be maximally just and maximally righteous even, or you might say especially, in a fallen world as a testimony to the power of the gospel. Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. I'm speaking to you from Raleigh, North Carolina, and I'll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.