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The topic of gender has quickly become one of the biggest conversations in society today. Author Rev. Dr. Andreades joins us to give a brief overview of his work in mentoring people with gender struggles, such as gender dysphoria, homosexual desires, body dysmorphia, and more.

This is part 1 of a series where we’ll discuss what a biblical and nuanced approach to helping people through gender struggles can look like. We hope to impart knowledge and encouragement as we explore this sensitive matter.

Want to explore the work of Rev. Dr. Andreades? You can see his writings at https://affirminggender.com/

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:
Welcome again to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we've got with us a very, very interesting author, friend, and someone who is dealing with a very difficult and sensitive topic. Sam, welcome.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Hi, Marlin. Thanks for having me. Great to see you again.

Marlin Detweiler:
Folks, Sam Andreas is a pastor ordained in the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America. He is currently the person who has founded and is running a ministry that deals with issues around gender concerns. Sam, before we get into the topic, tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, your education, and your pursuits. Maybe, kind of leading into what got you where you are. And that'll be a good launching point to talk about the ministry.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Sure. I grew up in an intact family. Not a Christian believing family, but I had three older sisters. And that's where my story of God trying to understand gender began, dealing with my sisters and the way they looked at me. But from there, I've been very blessed to have my own family.

I'm married to an extraordinary woman that enables me to do what I do. Her name is Mary Kay, and we've raised four children who are now married. All married. And I have one grandchild and one on the way. It's a happy time. So as far as education, I'm. I'm kind of overeducated.

I have an undergraduate degree, a B.S. in geology and geophysics. I have a master's degree and the undergraduate degree was at Yale.

An undergrad, a master's degree in computer science. That was at New York University. Also an MDiv in pastoral ministry from Reformed Theological Seminary. And I did my doctor of ministry at Covenant Theological Seminary out in Saint Louis, where my dissertation was on just this issue of gender in relationship.

Marlin Detweiler:
And as we sit here today recording, you're about to head into another educational pursuit.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Yeah, I just can't get away from it. But I've been blessed to be admitted to the University of Edinburgh, where I'll be studying with James Eglinton on Herman Burbank's conception and use of the analogy of human gendered relationship in his Trinitarian theology. So that's a big deal. A new phase for us.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, I am really excited to get involved in this topic with you. It is a topic of great significance in our culture, and I suspect throughout most of the world today on the issue of gender and how it we think about it biblically. You founded a ministry called Affirming Gender. Tell us how that came about.

I know a little bit about your story, so maybe start in New York City and take us to the present with how that came about.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Yeah. So when I began as a pastor over 20 years ago, it was pastoring a church in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. And right from the beginning there, Marlin, issues of gender were front and center that I was dealing with from really literally day one, whether it was guys who are struggling with same sex attraction and trying to follow Jesus or women who are struggling with what the Bible said about women or people who are struggling with their bodies and being reconciled to their own gender.

That was all there in a kind of microcosmic form, there in Greenwich Village.

Marlin Detweiler:
At this point when you got started, it was not by any means the national or international conversation that it was in Greenwich. Greenwich was kind of a birthing point for this conversation, wasn't it?

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
It certainly was, Greenwich Village and San Francisco, kind of two places where these ideas were growing and taking shape, and the culture was being formed. And I saw it coming, and I knew that this was going to be a wave. So I really tried to make myself useful to the Lord and be helpful to people. And that has taken me on the journey that I've been on.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. So now you go from Greenwich Village to a small church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then to a church closer to Philadelphia. But now the Ministry of Affirming Gender takes up all of your time. That’s not pursuing educational pursuits, correct?

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Yes. Well, the educational pursuits are part of it. Because my big thrusts I've been trying to do and help people to do is I really find that connecting people deeply to their theology, our Christian theology, is a tremendous aid in helping people disperse the confusion that they have and helping people to be reconciled to who God made them to be.

So that's in New York. We started a ministry called, and it was called something different at the time, but now it's called Higher Ground, and that's still going on. It was a ministry of discipleship for those who had unwanted same sex attraction but wanted to follow Christ, and so people have been a part of that ministry now for many years.

We've seen around a dozen marriages and a half a dozen babies from people who've been helped there. But the real goal of it is just to help people follow Christ. And that's what they're dealing with. And I'm happy to say it's still going on today for people. But when I came time to pursue my doctoral work, I said, I want to spend more time with these amazing people who have an added burden of discipleship that they're carrying.

And so that's what led to this dissertation, the Does She Matter Dissertation, where I interviewed men who had a gay or same sex attracted past but were now in marriages, stable marriages with Christian women and just talked to them, listened to them about what difference gender makes in relationship for them. And it was eye opening.

So that was just a wonderful privilege to be able to conduct a little research there. And that ended up culminating in the book In Gender, which came out in 2015.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. So to summarize here a little bit and to continue to pursue the conversation and getting into the meat of it, if I go to your website, which I can find by simply googling affirming gender, is it affirminggender.com? I don't remember.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Yes.

Marlin Detweiler:
https://affirminggender.com/

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
We want to say it that way instead of gender affirming because that'll take you to some other places.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, I can imagine. Thanks for the emphasis there. But there you talk about the purpose of your work, which you've covered nicely here, and it really helps us understand. It also notes the books that you've written, and one of them listed there is Does She Matter? The dissertation. Another book is Dating with Discernment, but the first one, I've only read two of these, the first one was Engendered, and the last one listed there is Across the Kitchen Table, which will really dominate our conversation.

For this episode, but talk to us first a little bit about what problems you were trying to solve, what goals you had in mind by writing the book Engendered.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Sure. Yeah. Well, just by the way, that dissertation you don't have to read, it's boring. I just put it up there because people were curious. I got a number of queries from people saying, you mentioned this study, in Engendered. Does She Matter? So what is it? Where can I get it? I was like, well, here, it's available online. If you really want to.

Marlin Detweiler:
If you can't sleep at night, this will be a good opportunity to figure out something to do with your time.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Yeah. It'll put you to sleep. But, you know, Engendered started a good conversation. Opened up ways for me to interact with larger groups. I did speaking engagements following that, and people started to meet people and counsel with them. This was all while I was pastoring as well.

And it just—I started to look at, you know, the more you kind of look at a problem, Marlin, you know this, the more you sort of start to see what the real problem is beneath the problem.

Marlin Detweiler:
And this is the very important thing when assessing how to work strategically to know what you should be dealing with.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Yes. Yeah. I think try to get to the root of things. So I saw what was happening in the church was being influenced by the culture. There is a real breakdown of gender in relationship. And gender is about relationship in the scriptures. So I was like, wow, the church really needs help, but they need giving of inter-gendered relationships. And I said what we really are going to need to help marriage by creating a vision for gender, because marriage is the most gender intense relationship that we enter into.

And if I looked at the books that were out there and, you know, they might have a chapter about gender safely placed near the end, it was all about communication skills and about children difficulties, and maybe one chapter about sexual relations. And, I mean, they're fine. They're good books, they're helpful books.

But I'm like, this is not what the Bible talks about when it talks about marriage and talks about gender. So I decided to take what was in Engendered and turn it into a dating book to help people build a good foundation while they're dating.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's the book Dating with Discernment. I've not read that either. I am married, almost 44 years. Dating is well in the rearview mirror.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Yeah. You don't have a cause for it. What was fortuitous for me and kind of providential was that I had two kids at that time and two kids who were married, two kids who were not but were starting to enter the dating waters. So I said, oh, this is perfect. I'll just write down what I want them to know.

And it was a great blessing to me that when they were dating, my two younger ones, Veronica, Enoch, they both read that book with their date. And now I couldn't be happier with the spouses that they have. The marriage is wonderful.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that's.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Well, that's a great testament. I felt like, okay, my life is complete.

That was the apex for me. But that book is a little longer. I kind of took my time, just tried to relax with the reader and say, look, this is the kind of thing that your marriage must be based on. And I got that from the scriptures, and I find it to be true that we have to be paying attention to each other as man and woman.

That is crucial to what makes a very successful and intimate and fruitful marriage. And so that's what that book is trying to do, is try to help the church for people who are dating get off to a good start.

Marlin Detweiler:
Very good. Then more recently you wrote the book, which doesn't tell the story of its content by its title, but it's called Across the Kitchen Table. What was that like writing it?

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Yeah, I got criticism on that title. Just because it doesn't have "trans" in the main title, it's in the subtitle—Talking About Trans with Your Teen—but it's not in the main title. And so, you know, people didn't like that, but.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, they'll get over it. You can title things how you want to. If somebody wants to know, they can look into it.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Well, the idea I was going for was, you know, let's calm down because this issue is causing a lot of estrangement in families, and people are just drawing battle lines. And there's a cultural war. I was like, let's just talk about this across the kitchen table. That's the idea. Yeah. And so the photograph there on the front cover is of a table with a coffee cup and some hands, and the idea is—it's actually me and my son, by the way, my wife took the picture—and the idea is, let's calm down and talk about this.

And the issue is the spiritual issues that are involved in someone who's dealing with gender dysphoria, or a friend who's gone trans or says, "I'm trapped in the wrong body." What is going on here from a spiritual standpoint, from a biblical standpoint? And let's just talk about it. And so it's an invitation to have a conversation and a way to help people who want to love the people in their lives who might be dealing with these issues to have a conversation about it and perhaps set them on a different course.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. We're focusing the conversation now to really discussing the initiatives that you took in writing this book to what is generally called transgender issues. But I don't want to take anything for granted here. Tell us what those issues are. What are the things that fall under the term transgender? Because I know it's not as simple as one.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Yeah, that's an astute question because transgender, transgenderism is a big "umbrella" of a term that many different experiences and ways of thinking. So I actually open the book with a flowchart to try to help us navigate the different things that it could mean. If you're sitting across from the table and someone says to you, "I'm gender fluid," or "I'm trans," or "I'm trapped in the wrong body"—like, what are they saying?

Things that it could be. And, you know, a psychologist who read the book said this is the most valuable part of the book, just to get those out there.

Marlin Detweiler:
It really—we do have to be careful to define our terms in ways that we know we're communicating on the same level, right?

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Right. So if you want to, we could go into those categories. But just to mention them: you could have someone who's just an activist who doesn't like people being bullied. You could have someone with autogynephilia. You could have a comorbidity—that is, another area that is an area of difficulty, a psychological or personality disorder that is masked by cross-gender desires.

You could have a desire in a teen to just want to be cool, and it's become fashionable in the neighborhood to go trans, so they don't want to miss out. Or you could have an actual gender dysphoria and a real alienation that person feels from their body, which can be very real. And—

Marlin Detweiler:
Well—I'm sorry. Let me just say, we can spend a lot of time on all these categories, but my experience tells me that there are probably only two or three, or just a few categories, that dominate the landscape in terms of actual occurrences. But there's a big difference in my thinking in terms of impact for a person between somebody—a man—who wears his wife's underwear or a man or woman who simply wears the other sex's clothes.

That's one category that's relatively simple. I'm searching for the right word to practice. That's a whole lot different.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
But it's a major category that's ignored in the media. Like, you don't hear about—

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. And that's what I want to hear from you. But there's a big difference in that and the category of somebody who says, "I'm a man, I want to have my body become a woman's body." So they're going to literally operate, remove certain parts, add other parts. They're going to try and change how they actually physically look.

That's a much more significant practice or impact. So anyway, where are the major—what are the major categories? And well, let's start there.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Well, yeah. Yeah. Those procedures—I have a name for that. I call them gender imitative procedures. Gender imitative hormones and surgeries, because that's reality. That's the reality of what's going on. People are trying to trick their body or make their body imitate the opposite gender. And yeah, so I've kind of listed the categories already.

I think you got to be aware, if you're dealing with a teen, it's a different ballpark. You're in a different game. So I'm not sure which you wanted to talk about.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, can you give us a little bit of a breakdown? I'm saying, 20% is this, 50% is that—kind of thing—in terms of what you believe or what you know about the marketplace? Where do the problems manifest themselves most?

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
That's—well, that's, yeah, that's a big question. As far as the breakdown of percentage, I cannot do that for you because the boxes keep changing. And it's very difficult to gather numbers on these. For example, if you're talking about an adult man you mentioned who wears women's underwear, a lot of what you're probably dealing with is a term—we call this autogynephilia.

And that's where someone experiences sexual arousal by putting on the clothing of the opposite gender. And it's almost always men. And that's this big category that's very deep. You're not going to hear about it in the media, but it's a big category. Well, and if people are adults and they're doing that, it's also a very shameful thing to talk about—especially if you're in the church. People don't want to talk about it.

It takes a lot to get someone to a place of recognizing it. They might be helped by talking about it. Yeah. But that's one big category. But if you think about a teen who is saying that and they haven't had a history of this, there's the term that's often used—rapid onset gender dysphoria—which, in my book, is not gender dysphoria at all.

It's just this need to fit in, to be with one's peers, which is visceral in teens. And that's something that is a matter of good parenting to try to address and developing relationship with your child. Well, but there are also these other two kind of major contributors—

When you're dealing with people—teens or children—that is, there could be another condition. Autism is one of them. And if you're at a gender clinic, for example, on the field, these other conditions are there, because you just see it in the field. You see this person has another problem as well.

And unfortunately, what happens in America now is that if somebody has these other conditions, they're not explored. Helping them with these other comorbidities is not explored. They're just kind of—it's just a "Well, you're trans," and you're put on this conveyor belt for these procedures. But there is also the actual gender dysphoria that is there, and it comes from early childhood trauma—almost always. Early, early childhood trauma. We call them ACEs—adverse childhood experiences that—

Marlin Detweiler:
Let me just ask a parenthetical question that I think is significant. There is an enormous part of the conversation that wants to say, "This is how I was born," not that it was a childhood experience that was traumatic. Are you saying that you don't believe that people are born to be transsexual? What are you saying about being born versus conditioned?

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Yes. That's the big decision about how you're going to look at these things. And the reason, by the way, that England recently reversed course—instead of gender affirming care of going through these procedures, they call it—they have stopped doing that because they're recognizing that when someone feels like they're in the wrong body, it's not a question of some identity that they have.

It's a question of a difficulty that they've encountered and a problem. And so they reversed course. And America has not, but other countries have kind of followed suit there. And that's because, you know, if you think about it, Marlin, if somebody hates their body—if somebody is alienated from their body—you would think that would be something that fueled that hatred.

Because I know the expression that you hear online and hear in the media is, "I'm trapped in the wrong body." But when people get very honest, what they come to understand is—actually, what you hear if you go to gender identity support groups or online transgender sites—what you'll hear over and over again is, when they get honest, is, "I hate my body."

"I can't stand my body." What is it that brought them to that point? That's what goes unexplored a lot of times, but is really the issue—something that has brought them to this alienation from their body. And that has to be addressed. It can be addressed. The good news is actually it can be addressed.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. One of the things—we've got a lot to cover, and we have a few minutes left. We did agree that we would do a second episode, and I look forward to doing that. But I want to ask a question here now. What role does money and the medical, the pharmaceutical industry, and the whole medical industry play in the narrative that we have been observing in recent years?

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Yeah. So I kind of go into this in the book just so people are aware that, you know, you have to understand trans is a big industry. It's over $2 billion industry that promises to more than double in the next eight years. It's a big cost. You know, if you're going to go on puberty blockers, they go for about $20,000 a year.

If you go then to testosterone treatments as an adult, it's hundreds of dollars per month. If you're going to do breast implants, double mastectomies, vaginoplasties—they start at $10,000. And if you want to do what's euphemistically called "ideoplasty," that's where you're trying to get something with a little better feeling down there, you're going to start at $20,000.

Marlin Detweiler:
How about—so to introduce.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Finances are playing a role in the kind of insistence that people have that this is the way that we have to go to treat people who have this trouble.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. So maybe to button up the question of money—the medical industry, in many respects, has much to gain by supporting medical procedures that go along with what is being desired by the person?

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Yeah. I mean, some people are very sincere and trying to help, and they're just following what their medical association says. And they're just kind of parroting—you've got kind of pedestrian therapists who are just kind of parroting what their association says. And so this is the recommended procedure. But somewhere along the line there, there are those who—and this is an industry, and this is business.

Yeah. So we have people with different motivations involved. I don't want to color everybody as just going after the dollar, but it's there.

Marlin Detweiler:
How does the whole category of women's sports and men playing in women's sports enter into all of this? That's another big industry. It's another big controversy. It has—it seems like the tide has turned a bit in recent months. But how does that relate?

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Actually, this—actually, last week, where UPenn came out and is taking the medal away from Leah Thomas. I actually did a chapter in the book kind of reimagining how that story should have gone—the swimmer who took the medal away from the girls—and how it would have looked, you know, if people had stepped up and been more biblical in their approach.

Marlin Detweiler:
Interesting. Well, we try to keep these episodes to about 30 minutes, and we are at the 30-minute mark. So what I want to do is bring closure here. And you made a statement—I want to make sure I'm quoting you accurately with regard to these issues. There was a statement that anyone can be cured. Is that a statement that you would support?

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Well, it's not a statement that I made, but it depends on kind of what you mean by cured. There's healing involved. And it's a process of people being kind of reconciled in their ideology and their conception of gender, their vision for gender. And that's a process that goes on. But that process is going on for people routinely.

When the Spirit is moving and they get the right help. So I would—yeah—I would not ever look at someone and say, "Oh, this is a hopeless case." If they don't come to a place of saying, "Wow, there's a different way to this than the way that I'm going," then there's not much hope for change.

But if they do come to that place—are willing to be open to say, "You know what, maybe—maybe my body is not a mistake. Maybe there's something else here that's going on"—if they come to that place, then oh, there's tremendous change and for healing to take place.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, I think that's a good place for us to stop. And we will pick it up right there in our next episode. Sam, thank you so much for being with us today.

Rev. Dr. Andreades:
Marlin, great to talk about this. Thank you.

Marlin Detweiler:
Folks, thank you for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox. We will continue this conversation with Sam Andreades in our next episode with him. Until then, we look forward to—well, we look forward to seeing you again next time.