After four years of radical gender ideology being pushed to the forefront of American life, changes are coming—with lightning speed.
Since President Donald Trump took office Jan. 20, he has taken swift action to reverse many Biden administration policies that not only advocated for “gender affirming care” but actively sought to punish anyone who believed that such actions actually harm individuals rather than help them.
It began with Trump’s inauguration address, which proclaimed: “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.” In short order, the president issued executive orders and actions to protect children from “chemical and surgical mutilation,” to end “radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” and to keep men out of women’s sports and intimate spaces.
Although judges have blocked some of the measures, federal agencies immediately began to take actions, such as removing preferred pronouns from employees’ online profiles and allowing only male and female gender options on passport applications.
At the same time, more than 30 pieces of legislation have been introduced in Congress to potentially codify these and other measures in federal law.
The general public is changing its thinking, too—polls have found a significant shift since 2022 in opinions about radical gender ideology. According to the Pew Research Center, 56% of Americans now say it should be illegal to perform transgender procedures on minors, up from 46% in 2022. And a large majority—66%—oppose males competing in women’s sports.
Christians have welcomed the changes, knowing that humans—male and female—are made in the image of God, and it is sinful to despise what He has created for His glory.
“We’re certainly seeming to see things trend in the right direction—in favor of common sense,” said Hal Frampton, senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has represented a number of Christians who have been targeted by the left for adhering to Biblical teaching about sex and gender. “We’re very gratified that we got a decision in March from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding Idaho’s law that protects the sex designation of intimate spaces so that boys can’t go into girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms and showers.”
But these trends don’t change the fact that many people still believe that they can actually become the opposite sex. And regardless of federal policies, LGBTQ activists are doubling down, challenging state laws that prohibit so-called gender transition drugs or that prevent males from competing in women’s sports or violating the integrity of women’s intimate spaces.
“It really is frightening,” Frampton said, “the extent to which gender ideology over the past several years has extended its tendrils into nearly every facet of American life, to the point where we’ve seen Christian families unable to participate in foster and adoption systems because they won’t say in advance that they will transition a child. We’ve seen schools across the country engage in secret transitions where they’re essentially socially transitioning a child without telling the family, in many cases actively hiding it from the family.
“It is going to be a long, hard slog to get gender ideology out of American life,” Frampton said.
Walt Heyer has been on that slog for nearly 20 years. He travels the world with the message that the truth of Jesus Christ can set people free from the lies of gender ideology.
In the early 1980s, Heyer underwent hormone therapy and “sex-change” genital surgery; he lived as a woman for eight years. But before long, he realized that those procedures had only made things worse.
“I learned the truth,” he says on his website, SexChangeRegret.com. “Hormones and surgery may alter appearances, but nothing changes the immutable fact of your sex.”
Over several agonizing years, Heyer returned to living as a male. But he found real freedom only when, broken and repentant, he surrendered his life to Jesus Christ in 1992.
Heyer, who has served as a senior fellow with the Family Research Council since 2023, has communicated with thousands of people who identified as transgender. He focuses on one key issue: what caused the person to not like who they are. Many, he finds, have been abused or suffered other trauma.
Heyer helps them identify where their pain came from so they can deal with it, and then—through the Holy Spirit, Biblical teaching and the love of Jesus Christ—he helps them embrace how God designed them.
But he doesn’t coddle people. Although he will say someone identifies as transgender, he will not say they are transgender. “When a Christian uses that word, it suggests that the LGBT advocates were successful in changing someone’s gender,” he said. “That’s factually not correct. In all of world history, no one has ever changed their gender.
“Until we as Christians begin using language that honors and glorifies Jesus Christ and doesn’t cause people to stumble, we’re going to be at a disadvantage.”
Frampton has also seen the effects of language in cases ADF has taken on in which the government compels someone to use a person’s so-called preferred pronouns.
“We often get the question, why are we fighting about pronouns?” Frampton said. “The answer is because it makes you tell a lie. When you’re forced to call a man ‘she’ or a woman ‘he,’ it forces you to lie. And the government should not be in the business of forcing people to say anything they don’t agree with, much less forcing them to lie.”
Heyer sees some people eventually reject the gender lies and embrace the truth. “Having a relationship with Jesus Christ is absolutely the ultimate goal, so I’m thrilled with that,” he said.
But his long, hard slog continues. “I’m still wanting to stop the madness of anybody having to go through this,” he says.
