Fr. Alex Goussetis: Welcome to Family Matters. My name is Fr. Alex Goussetis, and today I am speaking with Dr. Philip Mamalakis. Our topic is talking to our children about sexuality and gender issues. Dr. Philip Mamalakis, with his wife Georgia, have seven children and live in Boston, Massachusetts, where he is the assistant professor of pastoral care at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. Dr. Mamalakis teaches classes on pastoral care, marriage and family, grief, death and dying, and topics related to pastoral counseling. He has a master’s of divinity from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology and a PhD from Purdue University in child development and family studies, specializing in marriage and family therapy. Dr. Mamalakis is the author of Parenting Toward the Kingdom, published by Ancient Faith Publishing, a best-selling Orthodox parenting book. In addition to his teaching and his writing, he enjoys offering seminars and retreats throughout the United States and internationally on intimacy, relationships, marriage, parenting, and family life, as well as Orthodoxy and psychology. Welcome, Dr. Mamalakis.

Dr. Philip Mamalakis: Thank you, Fr. Alex. It’s great to be here.

Fr. Alex: In my conversations with parents around the country, I hear great concern and confusion regarding a new vocabulary: gender fluidity, binary identification, transgender pronouns, and many more terms. Parents are expressing anxiety as to what information is being taught at school, what kind of dialogue they need to have with their children, and what perspectives our Orthodox faith offers on these topics. Contemporary sexuality and gender issues are highly sensitive and politicized, making it even more challenging to share a civilized conversation. I’m thrilled to welcome Dr. Mamalakis to at least break the ice by offering wisdom and support to our parents and families. So let’s begin with really understanding the term “sexuality and gender issues” and what makes this such a challenging issue to talk about.

Dr. Mamalakis: So, thank you, Father, and I really appreciate you inviting me on on this particular topic, because it can be really confusing, and it can be really tough to talk about. I think to begin, I think as a mental health professional, teaching pastoral care at the seminary, and as a dad, I think our primary focus as a Church that we want to pass on to our kids is that we want to help pastors, parents, parishes, and peers to really learn how to respond to people who are struggling with what’s called gender dysphoria. “Gender dysphoria” is a technical term to describe someone who is struggling or who experiences their body as one sex, male or female, but their gender identity—their sense of what they feel like as a man or a woman—as different.

I think the place to start is to really recognize this is tough, because these people who experience this gender dysphoria, it’s very painful. It’s very personal and very painful for those people who are struggling with this. Imagine feeling like you don’t belong in your own body. Imagine every time you look at yourself in a mirror or you look at your body, you have this feeling that this body isn’t who you really are. And they wonder: Who can I talk to about this? Why do I feel like this? If I share this with someone, what will that person say? So it can be really confusing for the person struggling, and it’s painful. It’s hard to make sense of that struggle. It can feel very shameful, and oftentimes people who experience this feel a lot of guilt and self-loathing. So someone who experiences this can feel very trapped, and this type of struggle seems to be at the very core of our very being.

We all have struggles in figuring things out in life, what career we want when we grow up—but this one is really different, and there is real suffering and pain for people who find themselves in this. Besides these internal feelings, it’s easy to feel like you don’t fit in or belong. You might not feel welcome anywhere. You might feel misunderstood, isolated, and alone. Oftentimes people who have this experience really experience harassment and bullying because they don’t fit nicely into a community’s ideas about what a boy or girl should look like.

The second thing that really makes this a tough thing to talk about is that it’s complicated. It’s about what sex our bodies are, and which for a small percentage of people, it’s a little ambiguous what their sex is, but it’s also about how we understand gender: what it means to be a male or a female, things like how we dress, how we behave, our likes and dislikes. And gender isn’t so well-defined. Do boys play with trucks and girls play with dolls—is that what gender is? Are boys aggressive and girls more sensitive? Well, that might be true on average, but what does that mean for a girl who’s more aggressive, and boys who are more sensitive? In fact, there’s actually a wide diversity within males and females, about how we feel, what we think, what we like, and how we behave. In fact, social scientists might conclude that because there’s such a wide array of types of boys and types of girls that gender doesn’t really matter. That’s a conclusion; that’s an interpretation from the data. So we want to be clear as Orthodox the difference between the data, which show that, actually, there are a wide array of types of boys and there’s a wide array of types of girls, but that doesn’t mean that gender doesn’t matter.

And when we think about it, how do we learn how a boy is supposed to feel or behave, or how a girl is supposed to feel or behave? Well, these are culturally shaped, by our parents, by our families, the culture we grew up in. And you and I have had conversations about our dads kind of showed us what it means to be a man. When we grew up, we kind of reject some of those definitions and say, “Wait a minute. A dad, a male, is much more than some of the things that were taught.” And some families can have really negative attitudes toward female or toward male. There’s a percentage of kids that really don’t fall into those rigid categories of what a man and a woman is. And they might be told, “Boys don’t do that” or “Girls don’t do that.” And so these messages we receive about how men and women should be really can affect a child, particularly if those messages are negative or restrictive or don’t match a child’s lived experience. And that really can contribute to the sense that “I’m feeling that I am in the wrong body.” That can be really intense.

I really think that for you and [me], we kind of turn to the Church in many ways and say, “Listen, the Church isn’t so restrictive on what it means to be a man and what it means to be a girl.” I think that freed me up, and I imagine you, to say, “No, I’m going to be this type of man. I’m going to be this type of dad.” Because when we think about this as Orthodox Christians, how does this struggle of “What does it mean to be feeling like a man or a woman?”—how does that relate to how we understand our experience and the teaching about Christ, who took on our human nature? He lived in our midst as a male; he reached out to those who were suffering with kindness and compassion and tenderness. He offered his life on the cross, which was a powerful act of vulnerability, and then he rose from the dead with the same resurrected male body after three days, and then promised to send the Holy Spirit, who lives and breathes in the life of the Church today. And how do these feelings we might have relate to how Christ invites us to follow him as the Source of life, and really invite you and [me] and all of us to have this new life in him?

But really, the most difficult thing about talking about this—these types of issues and these struggles—is that the very language we use to describe these experiences, the way people talk about it—individuals, pastors, professionals, and Church leaders—is actually informed by what people believe: what they believe about what’s true and real about sex and gender and even the human person. And these different ways of looking at this are really at odds with each other.

Fr. Alex: To that point… You’ve described to this point gender dysphoria being a struggle, sense of confusion, and pain. And I think we also need to add the struggle that’s taking place in the civil context, but also in the faith context. So there’s really different layers of confusion and pain that you’re describing, not only internally with people who may be struggling with gender dysphoria, but with the context of civil life, church life, family life. So to that point…

Dr. Mamalakis: And then, Father, it’s a broader political country!

Fr. Alex: Exactly.

Dr. Mamalakis: So I want to highlight the work of a researcher, Dr. Mark Yarhouse, who’s a professor at Wheaton College, and he’s done extensive work and research on people who struggle with gender dysphoria, specifically within Christian communities. And his interest… He saw this like you just described: the political kind of context and also the church context, and in his work he just was a good researcher who just tried to observe and interview people and hear people’s stories. He identifies three different ways that people interpret or understand gender dysphoria.

He said the first way he called the “integrity lens.” In this interpretation or perspective, people believe that God created man and woman in Genesis 1 and 2, and it’s pretty clear you’re either a man or a woman, and any deviation from that is a sin. It’s a sin to say you’re a man in a woman’s body or a woman in a man’s body. So proponents of this particular perspective would say that to have this struggle is a sin and to change your gender is a sin; your body determines your gender and God created man and woman. Anything other than that is a choice to rebel against God. And we hear that narrative in some churches and we hear it in the political discourse.

The second interpretation he calls the “disability perspective.” With this approach, proponents of this view recognize that we live in a fallen world and that as fallen creation, while God created men and women, some of us have fallen bodies which may not fit specifically into one category or might be something like mixed. Not only are our bodies fallen, but our mind is fallen, our inner life, our feelings about gender are fallen. Proponents of this perspective say it’s much like having a bad heart or being born blind and death. This is a fallen condition. It’s not a moral issue, but rather about how, through the fall of mankind, some of us will experience this type of brokenness, and this fallen reality can be healed.

The third perspective that he described in the church he called the “diversity approach.” He said people who hold this perspective, they say we should celebrate these types of things, that God created some people as men in women’s bodies and that creation doesn’t just include males and females, but also God created people in between. And this diversity approach is one that’s popular in contemporary culture. And people who hold this approach say we should celebrate and affirm those people who want to switch their bodies to match their gender identity, and that our gender identity can be really fluid, much more than male and female, and they’re all part of God’s beautiful creation.

As you’ll notice, depending on which perspective you hold will inform how you understand what’s happening, and they’re not just different perspectives; there’s a lot of conflict and tension between these perspectives. So it’s easy to judge or condemn or attack someone who might be celebrating this diversity if you hold the integrity view, and if you hold the diversity view you might be tempted to judge and condemn those who hold that different view, the integrity view. So it seems like there’s very little middle ground or common ground in these different perspectives, which can lead to very strong reactions to people who don’t share your particular perspective.

And then this becomes political, and when it becomes political, then any honest and open exploration—which I think is what you’re inviting us today to kind of open up—when you lose that openness to the other person, it turns into a culture war, where one perspective is actually pushing against the other or trying to impose a perspective on each other. And that makes it really tough to teach our children about this, because it’s almost like a war going on on these topics. But from an Orthodox perspective, what I would suggest gets lost in these different perspectives and what gets lost in the culture war is that there’s a person, a teenager or a young adult or a middle-aged person, who’s really deeply suffering with this gender dysphoria, and often really struggling alone.

Fr. Alex: What would you say would be the Church’s position, either on these three categories or in general in our discussion of gender dysphoria? What would be a Church perspective that we might be able to look through that lens?

Dr. Mamalakis: That’s a great question, and, like you mentioned, that we can teach our children. We want to teach our children the Church’s perspective. So my understanding of the Church is that our position on this is that there’s a person who’s suffering, a person in pain, with all sorts of thoughts and feelings, and often suffering alone. And the Church’s position is: we want to ease that person’s suffering, ease their burden. Compared to the three perspectives that are really normative, I think our Church has a different response, and what the Church offers, specifically to someone who’s experiencing gender dysphoria, is not a perspective or a position, but a Person—Christ—and a path of new life in Christ.

Each person who’s struggling has a unique story, unique experiences in their life, unique experiences of family, with the Church, with sexuality, and with identity. And I think that the Church’s position is that that person deserves to be heard, to be known, and to be loved. And each of those three different perspectives, you could argue, have some value, and each of them are limited in some way. So the Church, as the starting point, needs to reach out and to get to know that person’s particular story and experience in relationship. And because each person is unique, out of respect for that person, I don’t think we can tell this person what they should do or what we think is right or wrong before we get to know them, before that person is heard and received and actually feels like he or she has a place in our community.

And that doesn’t mean that we agree with what that person believes, but we draw near in such a way that we affirm their struggle, not necessarily agreeing or condoning someone’s thoughts or their decisions, because the temptation is to share what we think, to tell someone they’re wrong, to tell upon them what we think rather than to draw close. And that’s something that the Church provides that oftentimes when you look online—someone struggling, they look online: you’re going to get people who are really pushing a particular perspective: This is what’s happening, this is why it’s happening, and here’s your solution. If you do this, you will be freed from your struggle.

Well, when Christ engaged with people, he just drew near. It didn’t matter what they had done, it didn’t matter what they believed, or even how they were perceived from the community—he drew close. He didn’t offer a position; he offered himself. And whether, if it was Joseph of Arimathea, a religious leader, or the Roman centurion, who was hated by the Jews but he had a need, or the man born blind from birth, or all the lepers. And many of these people came to Christ, but what about the Samaritan woman who had beliefs that were against what the Jewish people believed and a really sinful past, or Zacchaeus up in the tree, who was known to be a crook? Jesus simply approached them, and by approaching them, he revealed his love for someone, not his affirming of everything they believed or they did. So whether people were sick or healthy, Jewish or non-Jewish, faithful or non-faithful, rather than rejecting, correcting, condemning, or judging, Christ drew near. So this is the model of the Church, that we’re modeled after Christ. We welcome the person in our midst, because what we do is we continue that ministry of Christ who offered himself; we offer this community, which means before we can tell someone what’s wrong with them, who’s struggling to understand human person, we should inquire into who they are, what they’re struggling with, and what their experiences have been.

And that way, Father, it’s really beautiful, because we can address the loneliness and the isolation and the self-loathing that can come, and invite people into a relationship with a pastor, a spiritual father, and a community, because I know you as a pastor, you don’t need to be clear, you don’t need to understand everything to receive your love. No matter what they’re struggling with, you would receive them, and not as someone who has everything figured out or is better than they are, but as someone who’s equally on this path. So in the context of the Church and community, invite this person to find a spiritual guide with whom they can learn and grow. So we just focus on taking their pain and struggle seriously, taking their confusion and isolation seriously, and I really think we can do a better job speaking out against violence that [is] directed toward people who have adopted different perspectives or believe differently.

And, you know, you could say there’s a place for the Church to be involved in that public discourse about gender identity, and it’s good. We could debate some of those issues and different perspectives, but primarily, pastorally, as a Church, we’re focusing on that person who is struggling, and we offer a path, this path of new life in Christ, not a position. And we know that this path of life in Christ offers clarity, offers peace, and offers fullness of life in Christ. And the nice thing is, it’s the same path you and I are walking.

This ends Part 1 in my conversation with Dr. Mamalakis. Please look for Part 2 of this podcast for the remaining dialogue on this important topic.