At their annual convention earlier this month, Southern Baptists passed a resolution opposing the administration’s efforts to “validate transgender identity as morally praiseworthy.” Some 5000 people attended this meeting of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Attending members, called messengers, affirmed what the resolution describes as “God’s good design that gender identity is determined by one’s biological sex and not by one’s self-perception.” The latest push to elevate  transgenderism as some sort of civil right has resulted in a ruling by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services allowing Medicare to pay for so-called gender reassignment surgery. Plus, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has stated he is “open” to lifting the ban on transgender military service including taxpayer-funded sex change operations for those serving.

Paul Mc Hugh served as chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital. In an op ed in the Wall Street Journal, he argues that “policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or to the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment, and prevention.”

It may not be politically correct to say so, but this discomfort with and desire to change one’s God-given gender is a mental disorder.   Dr. McHugh writes that “the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken — it does not correspond with physical reality” and it “can lead to grim psychological outcomes.”    Studies following  transgendered people after sex reassignment surgery show most patients are satisfied with the immediate results. But things often degenerate from there. A long-term Swedish study revealed that, beginning about 10 years after gender reassignment surgery mental difficulties ensue. Transgendered people who have had this surgery are twenty times more likely to die from suicide than the non-transgendered.

Paul McHugh says: People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or visa versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women.” Transgender surgery solves nothing. In fact, says Dr. McHugh, it collaborates with and promotes a mental disorder.

The Southern Baptists’ resolution states the denomination’s opposition to gender reassignment surgery and cross sex hormone therapies. The SBC’s statement affirms the creation of “two distinct and complementary sexes.”

Gender confusion has always been with us. Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic tracked children who reported such confusion and found that 70 to 80 percent of them lost those feelings. There are strategies and therapies for those whose transgendered feelings persist. But, increasingly, our culture frowns on parental or professional attempts to encourage young people away from these proclivities.

God made each of us a man or a woman. The Bible says both the man and the woman are created in God’s image — “male and female He created them.”

You can’t reassign someone’s gender. Sex change is biologically impossible. It promotes mental disorder. This is not a civil rights issue. It’s a sin issue.