Rob Smith is a pastor and theologian who lectures in systematic theology and ethics at Sydney Missionary and Bible College in Australia. Rob, last time you said gender dysphoria is real. It's the experience of real felt distress, which some people have when their psychological or emotional gender identity or sense of gender doesn't match up with their biological or birth sex.

Of course, many Christians are agnostics here. I mean, we need to be informed so we can be careful in what we embrace and in what we deny. So are there any common precipitating causes behind gender dysphoria? That's again a very important question and in some ways, I guess, an obvious question to ask.

And I have to make clear, I'm not a medical doctor nor a psychologist. I'm a pastor and a theologian, but I am talking with doctors and psychologists and sexologists and others about these issues, trying to come to grips as they are with this question of causation. And here's the perhaps disappointing answer to the question.

Nobody really seems to know. I mean, there are various theories out there, and in some cases, it may be easier to determine what the causes are for this particular person or that particular person. But in general, it's something of a mystery. Now having said that, I guess the general answers or at least ways of trying to think through an answer are simple enough.

Is it nature? Is it nurture? Or is it some combination of the two? Is it determined by our heredity and biology or is it determined by our environment and experience or is it some interaction? And certainly, there have been people who've tried to, I guess, discover some sort of biological cause or nature component.

And there are different theories that you can perhaps, anyone can read about if they are researching on this, prenatal hormone theories, for example, or brain difference theories. But the bottom line is none of these theories are, well, certainly not clearly supported by the evidence to date. So that's not to say that there can't be some sort of biological contribution to these things.

But it's certainly not clear and it's certainly not determinative. So that suggests, I think, that the cause lies more obviously in the realm of, again, nurture or environment. But of course, there's often an interaction between these two things, between nature and nurture as most psychologists now recognize that you can't really separate out sort of heredity and environment.

One person's written biology interacts with both cultural context and personal choice. And so, it's the old chicken and egg. These things impact one another. But I think, again, I think it's fairly clear that the major contributors have got to mind the area of environment. Well, what here, and again, this is where I think it becomes very case specific.

I guess for all children born into this world, there is a process of social labeling and differential treatment that goes on as people react to, it's a boy, it's a girl, and therefore dress them a certain way, give them certain gifts, and just interact on the basis of that.

But of course, children can pick up mixed signals and develop confused perceptions of gender roles and can make assumptions. If they like a certain thing, does that mean I'm not like the other girls or not like the other boys? And then there can be issues of gender envy or even gender idolization, I think, would be a way of talking about it.

And so, all of those things can go on for a person. And then there's also some other, what do you call them, medical psychological conditions, like for example, Asperger's syndrome. There's a very high correlation between girls with Asperger's syndrome and their experience of gender dysphoria, which sort of makes sense.

If one of the, I guess, features of Asperger's syndrome is difficulty connecting with your sort of social context and reading social cues and interacting straightforwardly, then it sort of makes sense you might then also be confused about who you are and where you fit into the matrix of things.

So again, I wish I had simpler answers, but I think that's sort of the best perhaps we can say at this point. >>Corey: No, not simple at all. That point alone, I think, is really good for Christians to hear, though. It's complex. And so, I think it forces the question then of how deep is our biological gender coded into us individually?

Can we say our souls are engendered? Does the biological me reveal the true me? How would you go about explaining that? >>John: Yeah, well, now we're moving into the realm of theology and philosophy. And again, it probably won't surprise you that it's a contested field here, and there are different thoughts and different answers that people will give.

My view is that as human beings, God has given us a distinct body and soul, but they exist in what some theologians like to call psychosomatic unity. And so there's an integration there or an interaction there. Again, some philosophers talk about this as dualistic interactionism. So that it's therefore not possible to sort of have a body of one kind and a soul of another.

The two are knit together. Psalm 139, "You knit me together in my mother's womb." Not just knit my body together. The two are given by God. Now, again, one of the interesting questions within that is, okay, well, does, as it were, our biology determine our personality, or does it simply reveal the person that God has made?

Well, I don't know that we really have to answer that question, because the end point is the same. There's a congruence. We have sex bodies, and we are gendered persons, and our sex both reveals and in large measure determines our gender. So that's certainly my view. Again, if you trace back the sort of history of Christian discussion on this, you've got people like Thomas Aquinas, I think, who thinks that souls are sexless or genderless, and it's only bodies that have gender, and others who therefore speculate that in the eschaton, we'll all be sort of asexual and that sort of thing.

My reading of Scripture is, no, no, the resurrection of the body is, whilst it'll be a transformed version of this body, it will be a version of this body. And therefore, we should expect that we will be sexed and gendered in the world to come, even though, as Jesus says, that there will be no continuance of marriage and other things.

So again, some of those things we'll have to wait and see, of course, when we watch this space thing. But the simple answer, I guess, to the question is, yeah, no, I think our bodies and souls are designed by God to speak to one another. We have male or female sex, and masculine or feminine, and gender as a consequence.

Yeah, that's helpful, and it honors Scripture as well. Thank you, Rob. Rob will be with us all week, and next up is the question, "Why is transgender such a big deal for us Christians? Why are we talking about it on this podcast? Why not let people do with their bodies whatever they want to do?

They're not hurting anyone else." We hear that all the time, and it's the next question I have for tomorrow. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with guest Rob Smith from Sydney, Australia. For more details about the podcast, to subscribe to the audio feed, or to send us a question of your own, go to our online home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.

I'm your host, Tony Ranke. I'll see you tomorrow. Desiring God's Plan for the World. Ask Pastor John. Join us.