It’s a new fad but an old heresy. For the Colson Center, I’m John Stonestreet with The Point.

Encouraging children to switch genders is a new fad, but it takes its cues from an ancient heresy called Gnosticism.

That point was made brilliantly by New Testament scholar N. T. Wright’s letter to the editor of the Times of London. I’ll quote it at length:

“The confusion about gender identity,” he writes, “is a modern, and now internet-fuelled, form of the ancient philosophy of Gnosticism. The Gnostic, one who ‘knows,’ has discovered the secret of ‘who I really am’, behind the deceptive outward appearance … This involves denying the goodness, or even the ultimate reality, of the natural world.”

Absolutely. And as I’ve said over and over: Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims. Denying the created order and biological realities qualify as bad ideas.

N. T. Wright continues: “Nature . . . tends to strike back, with the likely victims in this case being vulnerable and impressionable youngsters who, as confused adults, will pay the price for their elders’ fashionable fantasies.”

So sad, and yet so true.