Pronouns, Gender, and the War on the Body

We come into the world through the body.
We learn through the body.
We encounter others, culture, and even God through the body.

This is the starting point of any serious Christian anthropology, articulated most clearly in Theology of the Body: the human person is not a soul inside a body, nor a mind using a body, but a unified being—body and soul together—through which meaning is revealed.

The body is not accidental to who we are.
It is sacramental.

And yet, for several decades now, Western society has been moving in the opposite direction.

From the Body as Gift to the Body as Problem

Modern gender theory did not begin with malice. In many ways, it began as an attempt to address real suffering—especially the harm caused by narrow and rigid constructions of masculinity and femininity.

An artistic boy who doesn’t fit a macho ideal.
A sensitive man who feels “less than.”
A woman whose temperament doesn’t align with cultural stereotypes.

These narrow norms do wound people. They produce shame, confusion, and interior conflict. And in that sense, the project of loosening stereotypes was necessary.

But somewhere along the way, the corrective overshot its mark.

Gender became detached from sex.
Identity became detached from the body.
Meaning became detached from givenness.

What began as a critique of stereotypes became a theory that the body itself is negotiable—that sex is merely raw material onto which the self projects meaning.

And when the mind and will are treated as more “real” than the body, the body inevitably pays the price.

When Affirmation Becomes Violence

We are now at a point in our culture where affirming the inner sense of self can justify irreversible harm to the body—chemical suppression, surgical removal of healthy organs, and the permanent alteration of fertility and sexual function.

This is not merely symbolic. It is physical.

The body keeps the score.
Even when the mind insists otherwise.

This is why the debate over pronouns has been so charged. It isn’t really about politeness. It’s about what reality is allowed to say back to us.

When Jordan Peterson rose to prominence by resisting compelled speech, his argument wasn’t rooted in cruelty. It was rooted in the concern that language, once forcibly severed from biological reality, becomes a tool of coercion rather than communion.

And yet, this is where things get complicated—and where Christians must tread carefully.

Names, Pronouns, and Human Dignity

Personally, I have no problem referring to someone by the name they choose. Names are symbols. They are relational gestures. Scripture itself shows God renaming people at pivotal moments of transformation.

Language can be an act of hospitality.

But hospitality becomes something else when language is demanded as ontological compliance, and when dissent is framed as violence—while actual violence against the body is reframed as liberation.

That inversion should trouble us.

Not because we lack compassion—but because we believe the body matters too much to be sacrificed in the name of self-definition.

Enter AI: The Final Accelerator

This is where artificial intelligence enters the story—not as the origin, but as the confirmation of this worldview.

As AI systems and humanoid robots become more relational, responsive, and personalized, we will naturally begin to refer to them as “he,” “she,” or “they.” Not because they are persons, but because they feel relational.

Language follows relationship.

But once machines receive personal pronouns, the cultural message is subtle but powerful:

• Personhood no longer requires embodiment

• Identity no longer requires givenness

• Nature no longer carries authority

In a world of customizable avatars, gendered robots, and cybernetic augmentation, biological sex begins to look like an outdated constraint. Why accept limits when technology promises transcendence?

This is the same logic—now scaled up.

Control Versus Surrender

At the heart of all this is a spiritual choice:

Do we assert control over reality to make it conform to desire,
or do we yield to reality and allow desire to be transformed?

Christianity has always chosen the second path.

Not because it is easy.
But because it is healing.

The body is not an enemy to overcome.
It is a teacher to listen to.

And yet, not everyone shares this belief. So we should expect—especially in an AI-saturated, bio-technological future—more interventions, more modifications, more justifications for treating the body as a platform rather than a gift.

A Face That Changes the Argument

Let me end somewhere different.

I’ve worked clinically with many transgender individuals—some early in their journey, some post-surgery, some deeply conflicted, some fiercely defended. And one story has never left me.

I was running a year-long discipleship group for men in recovery at the Dream Center in Los Angeles. One man in the group had lived as a prostitute, struggled with severe addiction, and had undergone top surgery. He presented as very effeminate and was often marginalized—sometimes subtly, sometimes cruelly—by the Christian men around him.

But I saw him differently.

This man had encountered Christ in the middle of profound brokenness. He was genuinely searching—not for ideology, but for what it meant to be a beloved son.

He chose chastity.
He chose sobriety.
He chose the long, humiliating work of healing.

He was also HIV positive.

One day, after a ministry event filled with prayer—nothing flashy, nothing coercive—he came into group holding medical paperwork. Tests had been run again.

The virus was gone.

Completely.

In front of all the men who had judged him, God had spoken—not with an argument, but with mercy.

That moment reframed everything for me.

The Last Word Is Not Control

God is not scandalized by human confusion.
He is not repulsed by broken bodies.
He does not withhold Himself until we get anthropology right.

But He does heal us as whole persons—body and soul together.

The danger of our moment is not that we will love people too much.
It’s that we will forget what love is ordered toward.

AI, gender theory, and bodily modification all converge on the same question:

Are we beings who receive ourselves as gift—
or beings who must redesign ourselves to be free?

Christianity answers not with coercion, but with a wounded, risen body.

And that body still tells the truth.