Bruce Jenner comes out as a transgender conservative Republican

[Luis Gonzalez]

Twitter went from loving Bruce's "courage" to hating him within seconds of his admission.

From what I've seen, Conservatives are more accepting of Transgenders than Liberals are of Transgenders.  Amazing!

This is incredible.

I don't "know" Jenner per se, but he makes the second transgender Christian conservative Republican that I know.

Transgender Candidate Receives 22% in GOP House Primary
Donna Milo places third on Florida's 20th district

As Senate and gubernatorial races dominated political headlines Tuesday night, here's a result that was easy to overlook: transgender candidate Donna Milo received 22 percent of the vote in her Republican primary for Florida's 20th congressional district.

Milo placed third in a three-way race, finishing behind winner Karen Harrington (40 percent) and runner-up Robert Lowry (38 percent). Milo received over 4,100 votes out of more than 18,400 cast.

The district, which surrounds Ft. Lauderdale, is strongly Democratic. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a deputy Democratic whip, currently represents it.

I worked that campaign.

[Carling]

This is incredible.

I don't "know" Jenner per se, but he makes the second transgender Christian conservative Republican that I know.

I worked that campaign.

I do want to add by that "conservatives," I meant "RINOs" such as you and I are labeled by the far right in our party.  Social conservatives are likely embarrassed and mad at Jenner for saying he's a conservative Christian.  I hope they realize what a wonderful opportunity this is for the GOP to reach out to young voters here.  A PAC ad needs to be made, targeting large swing-state campuses such as Columbus, Ann Arbor, Bloomington, and State College, pointing out the reaction to Jenner by the left before and after he said he is a Republican. 

[Carling]

Another thought:

How do Matthew 7:1 and Luke 6:37 fit into social conservatives judging others?  Isn't that God's judgement, ultimately? 

[raml]

By judging do you mean we are judging when we don't agree with their lifestyle. I am not judging when I find myself not agreeing with it due to my Christian beliefs. God agrees with us just fine thank you. He expects us to love the sinner not the sin on that we read the bible and go from there. I don't agree with the lifestyle due to God doesn't make mistakes. I think it is wrong and God does expect me to discern who I pick as friends and Bruce Jenner would not be one I would pick but I doubt Bruce cares about that. We have to live by what our Bible which I consider the word of God when deciding how to live or not live or who we choose to support. Otherwise God was a liar which I know he isn't and the world whether they like it or not someday will also know this but it will be to late. People these days don't like to admit there is sin or that hell exists they like to live guilt free but that won't work in the end.

[jmyrlefuller]

Another thought:

How do Matthew 7:1 and Luke 6:37 fit into social conservatives judging others?  Isn't that God's judgement, ultimately?

It depends. Honestly, I don't really care what Bruce Jenner decides to do with his body. He's 65 flipping years old. But I have no interest in it, and as a Christian, my biggest concern is the agenda getting into the church. We are called to call out our own for sexual sins, even in the New Testament (see 1 Corinthians 5, which is eerily similar to Leviticus 18), but not so far as stoning them to death.

Outside of the church, what they do is their own business.

[jmyrlefuller]

Of course, I also believe homosexuality is inborn, not acquired.  And even within that paradigm there are unknown variables.

I would suspect that it's a combination of the two: there may be tendencies (and most studies have pointed to developmental, as opposed to genetic, causes for those), but actions and experiences also shape how we respond to them.

[DCPatriot]

I wonder if that TV reality show deal will be honored.    

Thought, that may have been the motive for a 65 year old man to transgender...an income stream other than social security checks.

[Bigun]

I do want to add by that "conservatives," I meant "RINOs" such as you and I are labeled by the far right in our party.  Social conservatives are likely embarrassed and mad at Jenner for saying he's a conservative Christian.  I hope they realize what a wonderful opportunity this is for the GOP to reach out to young voters here.  A PAC ad needs to be made, targeting large swing-state campuses such as Columbus, Ann Arbor, Bloomington, and State College, pointing out the reaction to Jenner by the left before and after he said he is a Republican.

I'm a social conservative who is neither embarrassed or mad at Jenner for saying anything! I WILL pray for him!
 

[DCPatriot]

In an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer which aired Friday night, former track and field Olympian Bruce Jenner acknowledged for the first time that he was a transgender American.

Was the interview conducted 'live'?   I thought we 'decided' here the other day that nothing is live...it's all taped.

And yet, it was kept secret and not revealed until the airing.....

[aligncare]

It's a mistake to align the realities of genetic variance to left or right politics.  One has nothing to do with the other; other than to highlight the ignorance within both political camps swirling around this biological/medical phenomenon.

For the individual going through this, politics has nothing at all to do with it.  To derive some sort of meaning from Jenner's politics is personally irrelevant to the problem he is having with his sexual identity.

[DCPatriot]

I would suspect that it's a combination of the two: there may be tendencies (and most studies have pointed to developmental, as opposed to genetic, causes for those), but actions and experiences also shape how we respond to them.

And most 'studies' say the earth is burning up.   And studies once claimed that wine, butter, caffeine and marijuana were deadly.

And just what is 'developmental'?  Are they taking about parenting concepts?  The fact that an isolated experience by a toddler wasn't handled properly by the mother?

Bullsh*t.

It's entirely developmental alright.   In the womb.

[Bigun]

In an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer which aired Friday night, former track and field Olympian Bruce Jenner acknowledged for the first time that he was a transgender American.

Was the interview conducted 'live'?   I thought we 'decided' here the other day that nothing is live...it's all taped.

And yet, it was kept secret and not revealed until the airing.....

Even a "live" interview these days is tape delayed in some measure. Usually between ten and twenty seconds. That is done to stop inadvertent cursing by either the host or the guest from actually getting out on the air. That is the kind of thing the guy operating the board is trained to listen for anyway.

[ABX]

Aren't the Kardashians the spawn of him? I think all of this is a publicity strunt.

[musiclady]

Twitter went from loving Bruce's "courage" to hating him within seconds of his admission.

From what I've seen, Conservatives are more accepting of Transgenders than Liberals are of Transgenders.  Amazing!

Conservatives are pretty much more accepting of everyone than liberals are.

Somehow, when you live your life and fill it with hatred and division, you're a miserable and angry person.

That's the very definition of being liberal.

As for Jenner, I feel very sorry for him.  He's mixed up, and he does need our prayer.

There are clearly some who are biologically mixed at birth, but I'm still of the opinion (since there is no science to back either argument), that something traumatic happened to most homo and transsexuals in their childhood, and that none of them were 'born' that way.  There just aren't many examples of healthy heterosexual homes with involved fathers and mothers where this happens.  There's usually (always?) something missing with kids who aren't attracted to the opposite sex.

I know there are those here who disagree with that, but there's no actual science to back either of us up.  Just observation.....

[EC]

Aren't the Kardashians the spawn of him? I think all of this is a publicity strunt.

The Kardashians - no. He is their Dad in the active sense, not the biological sense. The Jenner girls are his.

[mountaineer]

A helpful summary:


9 Things You Should Know About Transgenderism
Joe Carter
Gospel Coalition
Jun 17, 2014 

Transgenderism has been a frequently discussed topic over the past few weeks. On May 30, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review board ruled that Medicare can pay for the “reassignment” surgery sought by the transgendered. A few days later Time magazine's cover story on the “transgender tipping point” declared the social movement is “poised to challenge deeply held cultural beliefs.” And last week the Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant denomination, overwhelmingly passed a resolution titled “On Transgender Identity.” Since the topic will be coming up for some time to come, here are nine things you should know about transgenderism.

1. Transgenderism is an umbrella term for the state or condition of identifying or expressing a gender identity that does not match a person's physical/genetic sex. Transgender is independent of sexual orientation, and those who self-identify as transgender may consider themselves to be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, or asexual. Approximately 700,000 individuals in the U.S. identify as transgender.

 2. Transgenderism differs from intersex, a variation in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that do not allow an individual to be distinctly identified as male or female. Intersex is a physical condition while transgender is a psychological condition. The vast majority of people with intersex conditions identify as male or female rather than transgender or transsexual. (The term “hermaphrodite” is now considered outdated, inaccurate, and offensive as a reference to people who are intersex.)

 3. The terms transgender, transsexual, and transvestite are not synonymous. Transsexual is a narrower term used to refer to people who identify as the opposite of their birth gender designation, regardless of whether they have undergone or intend to undergo hormone replacement therapy and/or sex reassignment surgery. A transvestite is a person who cross-dresses, or dresses in clothes of the opposite sex, though they may not identify with, or want to be the opposite gender. All transexuals are transgender, but transvestites do not necessarily fall into either of the other categories.

 4. The LGBTQIA community considers gender to be a trait that exists along a continuum. Transgenders can thus be bigender (move between feminine and masculine gender-typed behavior depending on context), trigender (shifting between male, female, and a third gender), pangender (all genders at once), genderqueer (a catchall for people who consider themselves any of the subsets of transgender, such as genderless, pangender, etc.).

 5. The term cisgender is used to refer to individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity. Cisgender is often used within the LGBTQIA community to refer to people who are not transgender.

 6. In the 1960s Johns Hopkins University became the first American medical center to offer “sex-reassignment surgery.” But they later stopped performing the procedure after a study on transgendered people in the 1970s. The study compared the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as “satisfied” by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn't have the surgery. As Dr. McHugh*, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, explains, “at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a “satisfied” but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.”

7. When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London's Portman Clinic, 70-80 percent of them spontaneously lost those feelings. Some 25 percent did have persisting feelings, notes Dr. McHugh, but what differentiates those individuals remains to be discerned. Despite such studies several states—including California, New Jersey and Massachusetts—have passed laws barring psychiatrists, even with parental permission, from striving to restore natural gender feelings to a transgender minor.

 8. A  2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery (191 male-to-females, 133 female-to-males) from 1973 to 2003. The overall rate of death was higher than expected, with suicide being the leading cause. Those who had the sex-change surgery were almost 20 times more likely to take their own lives than the non-transgender population. They were also more likely to seek in-house treatment for psychiatric conditions.

 9. At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered, says McHugh. “'Sex change' is biologically impossible,” he adds. “People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”

* See also this WSJ article Dr. Paul McHugh wrote, "Transgender Surgery Isn't the Solution"

[Luis Gonzalez]

It depends. Honestly, I don't really care what Bruce Jenner decides to do with his body. He's 65 flipping years old. But I have no interest in it, and as a Christian, my biggest concern is the agenda getting into the church. We are called to call out our own for sexual sins, even in the New Testament (see 1 Corinthians 5, which is eerily similar to Leviticus 18), but not so far as stoning them to death.

Outside of the church, what they do is their own business.

I have a question here, and I'm not being flippant.

I've been involved in many, many debates about religion and noticed one fairly consistent thing.

When Leviticus is brought into a debate one of things happen. If the book is used to point out how Christianity is violent and demands harsh punishments a la Islam for transgressions, Christians rebuke that by reminding us (correctly in my opinion) that Leviticus is part of the old law and that Jesus fulfilled it.

Other times, Christians will quote Leviticus in order to condemn homosexuality.

Why the apparent double standard.

P.S. Weird as this may seem, Jenner is NOT a homosexual.

[jmyrlefuller]

And most 'studies' say the earth is burning up.   And studies once claimed that wine, butter, caffeine and marijuana were deadly.

And just what is 'developmental'?  Are they taking about parenting concepts?  The fact that an isolated experience by a toddler wasn't handled properly by the mother?

Bullsh*t.

It's entirely developmental alright.   In the womb.

I'm talking about in utero, hormonal differences, etc. Theoretically such issues could be reversible, but there hasn't been any real research into that yet, nor do I suspect there is the political wherewithal to pursue it at this point.

[Luis Gonzalez]

It's a mistake to align the realities of genetic variance to left or right politics.  One has nothing to do with the other; other than to highlight the ignorance within both political camps swirling around this biological/medical phenomenon.

For the individual going through this, politics has nothing at all to do with it.  To derive some sort of meaning from Jenner's politics is personally irrelevant to the problem he is having with his sexual identity.

According to Jenner he's not having a problem, he's solving a problem he's had all his life.

[DCPatriot]

I'm talking about in utero, hormonal differences, etc. Theoretically such issues could be reversible, but there hasn't been any real research into that yet, nor do I suspect there is the political wherewithal to pursue it at this point.

Thanks for that clarification, J. Myrle!   

[jmyrlefuller]

I have a question here, and I'm not being flippant.

I've been involved in many, many debates about religion and noticed one fairly consistent thing.

When Leviticus is brought into a debate one of things happen. If the book is used to point out how Christianity is violent and demands harsh punishments a la Islam for transgressions, Christians rebuke that by reminding us (correctly in my opinion) that Leviticus is part of the old law and that Jesus fulfilled it.

Other times, Christians will quote Leviticus in order to condemn homosexuality.

Why the apparent double standard.

P.S. Weird as this may seem, Jenner is NOT a homosexual.

That's a good question, which is part of the reason I cited Paul and 1 Corinthians in conjunction with it.

The fulfillment of the Laws of Moses was a fairly complicated thing. On certain issues, such as eating non-kosher meat and performing works on the Sabbath, Jesus was very liberal. Yet, on the sexual sins, Jesus's stand is just as much against it, if not moreso, than the laws of Moses (see Matthew 5:28, for one example). Where he differs is punishment: he does not condone stoning as punishment, but offers a chance to repent (John 7:53-8:11). It's interesting here that Leviticus gives two options for the punishment of sexual sins: getting “cut off from his people” (in chapter 18) or death by stoning (chapter 20). It's the former that Paul suggests for the sexual sinner in Corinth; he tells the Corinthians to not even eat with the sinner. The Apostles also agree that sexual immorailty is to be forbidden in the church (Acts 15:19). To be cut off and thrown out of the church still allows for the sinner to turn away from his (or her) misdeeds and seek reconciliation. But the underlying sin is, throughout the Old and New Testament, still considered sin, just as it was in Leviticus. That isn't the case with a lot of other sins, which were expressly targeted at those who had made the covenant with the Jewish people.

So the double standard goes all the way back to Christ Himself.

[flowers]

Bravo Foxtrot Delta

Thanks I knew Foxtrot was in it some how.

[Free Vulcan]

How convenient, he's a transgender conservative Christian. Sounds like a contrived media agitation wedge.

[DCPatriot]

How convenient, he's a transgender conservative Christian. Sounds like a contrived media agitation wedge.

Geesh....what was I thinking?  You're probably right.

It explains Diane Sawyer's visible 'shock' at the statement.  It was probably known by ABC all the while.

[flowers]

I wish him well. I on the other hand don't think he is well. He thinks he is solving a problem?  What if it doesn't solve a thing for him mentally? Will he now date men?  Women?  I guess one has to watch the new TV show to find out?