Words make thought possible—for good and bad. For the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, I’m John Stonestreet with The Point.

Over at Public Discourse, Andrew Walker recently made an interesting suggestion: Christian should, whenever possible, avoid using the term “transgender.”

Our worldview can accept the reality of gender dysphoria—that there are those who experience feelings of confusion about their gender. But we can’t accept that people can “trans-ition”—literally move from one gender to the other, which Walker rightly calls a “metaphysical impossibility.”

The very word “transgender” implies that our self is distinct and separable from our bodies. By using it, we implicitly accept that distinction.

And the new phenomenon of transgender “birthdays”—honoring the date someone “transitioned”—is, according to Walker, a kind of gnostic “pseudo-resurrection.”

All of this, then, is just not compatible with the Christian worldview and it’s “divinely-orchestrated binaries” like heaven and earth, day and night, male and female.

God created the world with words. But “transgender” is a word trying to re-create reality.