Mike Penner Becomes Christine Daniels

Mike Penner, sports writer for the L.A. Times, announced here that he will leave on vacation and return in a few weeks as Christine Daniels.

As I read this article, my initial response was to feel sorry for a guy who has been constantly afflicted with the "white noise" of really being a woman for over 40 years, and then have people tell him his brain was "wired female" even though they admit transsexualism is "a complicated and widely misunderstood medical condition."

A couple months ago I posted on a story about a 14 year old boy named Tim who became Kim. At that time I wrote:

"What makes a man male? His parts or his nature? In other words, just because his parts changed, does that mean he's no longer male?

If a man lost his "equipment" from cancer, would he no longer be male? What if he lost it, and wore dresses and makeup?

If a woman lost all of her "equipment" in an accident and wore men's clothing and talked with a deep voice, would she cease being female? I don't think so.

What did people do who thought like Tim before sex-change operations? They fought the thoughts in their mind with reality, or gave into them and were miserable.

My point: Just because you think or feel something, doesn't make it true no matter how strong the thought or feeling is. So much for self-control. If I feel it, it must be true?

The reality is Kim is Tim, and just because Tim took hormones to change his body's appearance, and just because he wears women's clothing, doesn't make him Kim. In fact, nothing can make Tim Kim."

I know that will not be persuasive for many of you. In fact, most of the comments I read on the L.A. Times website argued along the lines of "if it makes you happy it must be right and good and true."

Now, there is a lot of courage that goes into this decision. I don't want to minimize that, or the suffering he's gone through. And, I don't want to be like the Christians who posted Romans 1 and a call to repentance in the comments either.

Rather than punting to the sovereignty of God (which is true, and his operation is a prideful spurning of His sovereignty) to explain Mr. Penner's condition, I think more can be said about this.

What he's experiencing is certainly an effect of the Fall. If there was no sin, we would never think of our "software" conflicting with our "hardware."

Homosexuality is certainly a sin, but this article says nothing about his attraction to men. Should we just assume that's going on? I don't know.

Also, the article does not mention a wife or kids, who would trump any considerations of a sex change.

And, regardless of his operation, Mr. Penner is still loved by God and made in His image and in need of the gospel. He has been told the false gospel that his problem is not sin, but a prolonged difficulty with emotions that he can be "saved" from by mean of an operation.

However, I'll leave with these words from Ed Welch's, When People are Big and God is Small, which help me begin to understand what's going on in his mind:

"If you exalt the individual and make emotions the path to truth, then whatever you feel most strongly will be considered both good and necessary for growth. ... That is why the unpardonable sin in today's culture is to either 'deny' or suppress your emotions. Emotions point to needs, and to deny your needs is to deny something God-given and God-like." [But] "just because I feel a 'need'...doesn't mean that this desire is really a 'God-given need,' a 'legitimate need,' or a 'primal need.' Perhaps what I am calling 'need' is really disappointment or grief, or perhaps it is my demandingness and lust" (pgs. 87, 89).

I hope that as these episodes multiply, more and more Christians will write books and articles on gender, transsexuality, and what makes a man a man and not a woman from philosophical, theological and counseling angles.