An in-depth look at the anti-trans pastor that came to speak Friday

On Friday night, Concordia University’s Pastor Scott Stiegemeyer gave a talk on transgenderism. The upcoming lecture caused controversy around Pitt’s campus, as many LGBTQ individuals felt that Stiegemeyer’s beliefs were transphobic, and his visit here was a setback to the recent progress Pitt had been making towards gender-neutrality. Despite the pushback, Stiegemeyer’s invite was not cancelled.

Eric Andræ, the campus pastor for First Trinity Lutheran Church, made the opening remarks, during which he apologized because he felt that the title “Man or Woman? Transgender and Gender Identity” was not “sensitive” enough. Instead, Andræ said, he wanted Stiegemeyer’s lecture to be renamed “A Theological Approach to Sex and Gender.” Andræ did not make clear who picked the original “Man or Woman?” title, nor did he explain what the eponymous change was supposed to accomplish because, as the old saying goes, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”

Scott Stiegemeyer (photo courtesy of www.thecruxofthematter.net)

Scott Stiegemeyer’s talk was anodyne compared to the information on his “Higher Things” website. In fact, if you heard Stiegemeyer’s lecture and then read “Higher Things,” you would think the two had different authors. His lecture was the watered-down, pallid, Sweet’N Low version of the intense, impassioned ‘The devil is a deceiver‘ Scott Stiegemeyer that exists online.

In Friday’s presentation, Stiegemeyer essentially read from an academic paper. The crux of his argument rested in his belief that you could not place the spiritual above the physical – the body mattered, and “gender dysphoria,” a term that has replaced “gender identity disorder” in the DSM-5, is not a valid reason to make changes to it. Our bodies are “perfect as God made them” and “the material substance that is the human body is very good.” Operations that change the body are a “pulverization of the dignity of the human person,” and Stiegemeyer spent a lot of time discussing the case study of David Peter Reimer in support of this stance.

David Peter Reimer was born with male genitals, but lost his penis as the result of a botched circumcision (his twin brother, Brian, was not circumcised). Dr. John Money, a well-known Johns Hopkins psychologist, was in charge of treating the boy, and he convinced Reimer’s parents to have their son undergo sexual reassignment surgery. They acquiesced, and Reimer had a double-orchiectomy at 22 months, as well as hormone treatment and psychotherapy, all with the goal of turning him into a female. His name was even changed to Brenda.

David Reimer. Photo courtesy of CUNY’s Nicole Clemens.

Despite Dr. John Money’s enthusiastic proclamation that the gender switch was a success, it was not. Reimer was not female, and he did not want to be. His parents concealed the truth of his natal sex from him until he was fourteen years old. After learning that he was born male, Reimer assumed a gender identity that matched his birth sex. He got surgery to reverse the damage that had been done to him, and eventually married and became a stepfather to three children. He changed his name from Brenda to David.

Sadly, all did not end well for David Reimer. Overcome with the death of his twin brother, Brian, his (understandably) difficult relationship with his parents, his wife’s request for divorce, and his personal economic troubles, Reimer committed suicide at 38.

Scott Stiegemeyer attempted to use the Reimer example to prop up his theory that gender identity and sex are inextricable from one another, and deviation by the former from the latter ends in tragic situations such as Reimer’s. Dr. John Money, who had promoted the case as an example of why gender identity is a social construct that can be learned and unlearned, was portrayed by Stiegemeyer as an enterprising, misguided, “social justice” psychologist. Dr. John Money was the shining example of progressive, sophistical chicanery at its worst and young David the tragic consequence of this forced transgenderism.

Scott Stiegemeyer might have gotten away with this line of thinking were it not for the crucially important fact that Reimer’s story was one of genital mutilation and emotional manipulation, not of a trans individual coming to terms with the divergence between their natal sex and gender. While Reimer’s circumcision was done for medical reasons, it was performed improperly by an urologist who used cauterization. Dr. John Money was not simply “misguided.” Money was a perverted madman who sexually abused both Reimer and his twin brother during therapy. At thirteen, Reimer told his parents that he would commit suicide if he had to continue to see the Johns Hopkins psychologist. Dr. Money was a narcissistic maniac, so enthralled with himself that he would do anything, no matter how unethical, to prove his theories.

Dr. John Money has been hailed as a sexual libertarian by some and castigated as a cruel, deranged pseudo-scientist by others (photo from the Kinsey Institute)

Far from being the smoking gun of Stiegemeyer’s thesis, the David Reimer case study undermined it. Reimer’s feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, and rage at his inability to express his true gender identity—male—were not unlike those felt by trans people who are forced, whether by social pressure, coercion, or some other convention, to assume a genitally-congruent gender that they do not identify with. Reimer’s gender expression did not match the genitals he had—he had no penis, nor did he have any testicles—but removal of them did not make him express a female gender (Stiegemeyer, in his lecture, conveniently neglected to mention that Reimer underwent an orchiectomy).

Although his testes were removed, Reimer was still behaving like a male. Stiegemeyer thinks that gender and sex are the same thing, and, as Reimer’s body no longer had the sex characteristics of a male, he should not have behaved like one. By Stiegemeyer’s own logic, Reimer should have fit into the role of “Brenda” once he had no testicles. But that is not what happened. Even without a penis or testicles, even with his own body telling him he was female, Reimer was still a boy.

It seemed, ironically, like Dr. Money believed the same thing as Stiegemeyer- the body would determine the gender, and the material would guide the immaterial. But, tragically, it did not, and an innocent child’s life was ruined by this presumption.

Sex and gender are not the same thing. If someone has testes, that does not mean that they will identify as male. Sex is determined by the presence or absence of a Y-chromosome. Women have two X-chromosomes and men have one X- and one Y-chromosome. Scott Stiegemeyer seems to believe that a Y-chromosome or lack thereof decides the way that you should behave for the rest of your life. This is simply not plausible, and major medical institutions such as the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and more all make the distinction between sex and gender. Stiegemeyer’s refusal to do so is a rejection of science akin to a child covering his ears because he’s hearing something he doesn’t want to.

The Y-chromosome is the determinant of sex, but not of gender (Photo from USCB.edu)

In his lecture, Stiegemeyer said that being transgender is a “fallen condition” and a product of “disordered thinking.” When pressed during the Q&A session at the end, he claimed that he meant “disordered” in a theological sense, not a medical one. Once again, this was the Sweet’N Low version of his teachings, because on his ‘Higher Things” website, he calls transgenderism “sinful” and a “mental illness.” Perhaps he decided to tone it down because he realized that many in Friday’s audience were not going to like being told that they were mentally ill sinners. Whatever the reason, his website shows the true, harmful nature of his beliefs, not the doubled-down adaptation.

When asked during the Q&A session whether or not he believed that being transgender is a psychological disorder, Scott Stiegemeyer said, “I don’t know that I’m qualified to make [that] statement.” However, the non-artificial version of Scott Stiegemeyer was not so demure. He wrote on his website that transgender people are “corrupted,” and that corruption has led them to believe that they can switch genders. He says that changing your sex to match your gender is not something that trans people have the “liberty” to do, and “to do so is sin.” It was clear at Friday night’s presentation we were getting a very different Scott than the hell-hath-no-fury prototype that lets loose on the Internet.

Scott Stiegemeyer closed his speech with a call for “pastoral care” for “suffering sheep” that were “battling their demons.” He asked the church to be kinder and more compassionate. He regretted that religious people were often “not well-informed” about issues such as gender identity and unwelcoming towards the LGBTQ community. This rhetoric sounded nice, but those of us who were acquainted with the Scott Stiegemeyer that existed online, in theological dissertations, and on the radio in fire-and-brimstone form were unimpressed. (For the record, I don’t think he’s a bad person. I think he’s confused, anti-science, and transphobic).

I wonder where his transphobia stems from. I wonder why his insistence on heterosexual, cisgender expression is so militant and unwavering. I want to know what happened in Scott Stiegemeyer’s life to make him uncomfortable with the LGBTQ community, and so dedicated to tearing down the work that they have done. Once we remove the façade of benevolence and get past the fake, Sweet’N Low artificiality of empty platitudes that he and so many other religious leaders hide behind, I believe we will see the real Scott Stiegemeyer.