The Burge Report: The Latest Data on Transgender Young Adults and the Church

Welcome to the Rainer on Leadership Podcast, your online home for leadership lessons and advice for the local church.

We talk about practical solutions for pastors and church leaders.

Episodes are hosted by Tom Rainer, Sam Rainer, and Josh King.

Here we are, another birch report diving into what some might consider, what many might consider, consider a fairly controversial subject.

We're going to talk about the trends, gender, young, adult, demographic, and the church and kind of talk about what that may mean.

Ryan, are you excited about this episode?

I'm walking on egg shells at this very moment.

You're wondering what I'm going to say in America.

I'm just trying to make sure Sam doesn't say anything. It will get him canceled right now.

Which by whom? The right or the left?

Both.

Okay.

Yes.

That'd be a great book. I got canceled by both sides. The Sam Rainer story.

It really kind of is, but you're in that camp too. You and I are...

We do have some different perspectives, but one thing that we both value is the facts.

And that's where we're really going to stick on this. We certainly don't want to harm anybody, hurt anybody.

But there is data out there on this. You have written on this subject matter, and that's part of the reason that I put this episode together.

And I do think it's a meaningful discussion, so we'll get to that here in just a moment.

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All right, Ryan. Let me ask you this.

Why is... So we're talking about a very small segment of society, at least in American culture.

We'll just say that.

Because that's where the data is.

Why is it so controversial?

Why is this particular issue of transgenderism kind of a bit of a litmus test for people?

I think this is like the evolution of the culture war.

I think we've been finding the culture war for 50 years now.

Like, you can actually go back when I teach religion and politics.

I take my students on a journey of the culture war going back to the 1960s.

There's a textbook controversy in West Virginia.

It was a huge deal.

But there were people getting fire bombs, like school board members, houses.

We're getting fire bombed over what textbooks to teach in West Virginia schools.

And then Dave County, Miami-Dade County, passed a resolution saying you can't discriminate against people because they're gay.

In the 70s, and that got a huge backlash.

And the equal rights amendment would fill a shlaffly.

And then it evolves, right?

Then it becomes really about, you know, row versus weight and pro-life pro-choice.

The gay marriage debate becomes centered like in the 90s and the early 2000s.

And then Obergefell happens.

And gay marriage basically falls off the table.

It's like a culture war issue because the Supreme Court basically said, okay, let's just do it.

Like, let's just pull the bandaid off because states were doing it individually before Obergefell.

And then the Obergefell said, okay, let's just say, you know what, guess what?

Gay marriage is a law to land in all 50 states deal with it, move on with your life.

And I think what happened was some people thought, well, okay, that's off the table.

Abortion is always sort of a latent variable kind of hanging in the background of the discourse.

So what can we, what can we, we can fill the gap that same sex marriage as it avoided that gap.

And I think for, and there was that bathroom bill in North Carolina, maybe 10 years ago,

that sort of like kicked off like, man, people get real heated over the idea of like men using women's bathrooms

and women in sports and all these issues.

So I think it became a very salient political issue to drive a wedge that basically filled the void of the gay marriage debate

because it basically became a not.

And you actually, I think a lot of evangelical churches stopped talking about gay marriage after Obergefell

because it's like, okay, what's the point now?

Like, that we've moved on since then, we should just move on in the discourse to talk about something else.

Because now the majority of Americans accept same sex marriage, 65% of Americans accept same sex marriage among Democrats.

It's like 85% even among Republicans is around 50-50.

So, okay, let's find another issue that's divisive in a much more equally cleaving way.

You know, there will actually divide the electorate more 50-50.

And the trans issue is one where if you look at public opinion polling,

Americans are definitely not in favor of a lot of issues surrounding the trans debate.

For instance, gender transition therapies for minors is not a popular position.

Teachers using pronouns for kids in schools without parental consent,

you know, like calling a he, she, you know, changing without telling their parents, that is not popular either.

So I think a lot of Republicans saw that as being an issue there on the winning side on to use the phrase winning side.

And let's use that as like to drive home the point of like they're culturally different than us

on these moral issues. And honestly, Trump used a degrade effect in the 2024 election.

You're in that, that devastating Harris ad that we know where she says she's in favor of transgender inmates getting surgery in prison,

you know, paid for by the taxpayers.

And that devastating line at the end was, yeah, she's for they, them, and he's for you.

Like it's going to be like in the pantheon of great political messaging.

So I think it's still going to be an issue because the public so divided on it.

Even today and probably will be for 10 or 15, 20 years it feels like.

I think you fit the nail in the head. I really don't have much to add.

And I do remember that advertisement. And I remember thinking the same thing.

Wow, this is quite, quite devastating.

And we did talk in a previous episode about the Democrats having a religion problem,

just kind of the data behind that.

And I think that that's a bit of a backdrop to this as well.

That the platform for the Democratic Party moved far to the left of where people are on this issue in particular.

And Republicans did capitalize on it, particularly during the last election cycle.

So I'm not even going to add anything because I think you've just hit the nail on the head.

But let's talk about the meaningful decline of 18 to 22 year olds identifying as transgender since the pandemic of 2020.

And it's been on a pretty consistent downward trend.

I will show my cards. This is probably not going to surprise anybody.

While I have sympathies to anybody who has struggles here, like has a pastor myself.

I'm like, I've dealt with this in my own church. Let me just say that.

I don't want to give too much detail, but these are things that I do with as a pastor, with parents, with kids.

I want to be very sensitive to that because a lot of people struggle here.

At the same time, at the same time, I am firmly, I firmly believe that this was a social contagion as a product of everyone.

We've been being so stinking isolated because of the pandemic.

And I think way more people, particularly young people kind of gravitated towards this, just simply as a social contagion.

Now, am I right? Am I wrong? You are the facts guy.

And that's really what we're here to say is these are the facts that decline in people identifying as transgender, particularly young people.

It's way, way, way, way, way down. And just a matter of a few years.

Yeah.

What is going on?

Yeah. So the thing about surveys that are interesting is we don't start asking questions on surveys until it becomes like almost too late.

You know, like, we're like, whoa, wait a minute.

We start asking if people are gay or not.

You know, like, like, after like a lot of people were gay, we're like, wait a minute.

We should probably like assess how many gay people there are in America.

And the Trans thing was the same way.

Like, it wasn't asked on surveys until around 2020 or so.

And because that not that like there weren't people who identified as transgender before 2020.

It just wasn't one of those things that burbled up in the zeitgeist of like, we should assess this in a rigorous way.

And so in 2020, the cooperative election study, which is the study I use all the time, it's like in an election year, it has 60 to 65,000 respondents.

So humongous sample size used in social science all the time is, you know, like it's academically top tier, all those things.

They asked the trans question for the first time in 2020.

And what we found was among 18 to 22 year olds over 8% of them self identified as transgender, which is an insanely high number, by the way.

Like, just to like, how big is 8% that's 8% of America is actually atheists are only 6% of America.

Latter-day Saints are 1% of America.

Like, just to put that in perspective of like what 8% actually feels like it's 8% of 18 to 22 year olds, by the way.

If you look at the full sample, it's a lot smaller, it's hold on, I can give you the number.

It is 2.5% of all adults in 2020 said they were transgender.

But it felt like they were all over every bit of media and TV and social media.

It's all we could hear about when there were one in 40 Americans in 2020.

So we obsessed with small groups.

Yeah, well, I don't understand why there is a divisiveness to the subject matter.

And for a lot of people, it's just weird.

Like, you may say, well, people shouldn't feel that way.

But a lot of us do, which is like, I don't get this at all.

Social behavior. Let's be clear about that.

It's atypical behavior. Transgenderism is atypical.

Like statistically, that's not like a value judgment.

That's just a statistical judgment. Like they're an outlier.

They're one print, you know, like they're, they're a random, you know,

it's not a very big sample of Americans.

But among Gen Z is 8.5% of Gen Z said they were transgender in 2020.

Now, my thesis here, and again, this is just my speculation.

And if Ryan, if you have data to prove me wrong, please do.

But, you know, you and I grew up in the 90s, kind of came of age at that time.

If you were to pull our generation, the millennials in the 90s about this issue,

it would, it would have been almost, it wouldn't have been,

we wouldn't even know what you were talking about.

But if you would have said, how many of you are like emo,

it had been like 8%. You know, so I think part of this,

and this is just my speculation, is young people trying to figure out who they are,

acting out in some ways, sometimes that's healthy, sometimes it's not.

Acting out in some ways, trying to figure out who they are, then later realizing,

I don't want to be emo the rest of my life.

I don't, and in some ways, this, this is, it is an issue of identity, of course.

But there's not the permanence to it that I think a lot of people thought there would be.

It's just young people acting out in the way that there was hypersexuality in the 80s.

There was grunting goth in the 90s, and then there's transgenderism now.

I mean, I think that's part of it.

We don't do a lot of research on minors for health reasons, obviously.

They're very hard to research minors, particularly academically.

But that would be my speculation. Am I wrong on that?

I was just talking to a political scientist about this couple of days ago.

The data on trends, the social science data is completely almost nonexistent.

We don't have it.

And then from the health side, the biology side, the medical side,

if you go down the rabbit hole of that data, it's all over the place.

It's right with methodological difficulty.

Because the thing is like yourself.

That's Ryan's way of saying, it's not a good project.

No, the thing is, even the question of, should we allow minors to transition

is actually a fraught methodological question for a whole bunch of reasons?

I totally get you on that.

What do you want to do?

What's best practices?

When you go to a doctor, they do what they call best practices,

which is like from all the data we know, and all the size we know,

in your situation, here's the surgery you need.

Here's the medicine we give you.

Here's how we treat your condition, right?

In this world, there is no widely accepted set of, you know, best practices

for some 13-year-old who says, Dad, I think I was born in the wrong gender.

We don't have, there's not a clear pathway to what to do in that situation.

You know, there's the wait and see pathway.

And then there's the, no, we need to work on this right now pathway.

And the thing is, or there's my pathway, which is, no, you're a boy, you're a girl.

But I know I'm more on the conservative side of things.

I'm speaking from a medical perspective here, Sam, trying to say, like,

from a neutral position that we don't have a clear set of guidelines of like,

this is what A you should do, A, B, and C in this situation, right?

Maybe go talk to your pastor, right, about gender identity and, you know,

God's design and all those things.

That could be a potential way to do it.

I've had those discussions and I'm always kind and gracious and generous in those discussions.

Yes.

Well, you don't tell them that stop cosplaying as the other gender.

I don't use terms or language that could be viewed as an attack when I've got somebody in front of me

because my goal is not to attack them, but to help them.

So while I have my own biblical views, I'm here to defend what the Bible says at the same time

when somebody is in a place of struggle, I don't want to beat them up.

So I am very kind and gracious while also being truthful.

Speak the truth with love.

Yes. That sounds like toxic empathy to me, Sam.

I don't know.

Anyone that knows me and here's the thing, man.

When I take a spiritual gifts inventory, I score zero on mercy because zero.

I have never, I don't think I've ever scored a positive mark on the spiritual gift of mercy.

I am very much like, just tell you straight how it is.

That's my personality.

But I also know when that 13 or 14 or 15 year old is sitting in front of me with their parents,

it's a very sensitive moment and a very difficult moment for that young person, very memorable moment.

I don't want them to remember that I use some derogatory term to describe them in that moment.

So, correct.

While I will speak the truth, yes, it's always in love.

You know what the scripture says, Sam?

You should act justly and love mercy and walk humbly with your God according to the prophet Micah.

Which means you should do both an equal measure because mercy and justice are sort of

contrary opposed to each other, right?

Would you have to balance the scales out and how you treat people and how you navigate life?

And guess what?

Some people tend to lean on the side of mercy and some people tend to lean on the side of justice.

You know, the third command God gives us is to walk humbly, which is to understand that other people

have a different predilection toward the idea of justice and mercy.

And it's okay because we're all struggling to do the right thing in God's eyes.

Is that a good answer?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's good.

I agree.

But I think the transgender issue when it comes to the church is more mercy than justice.

Because, you know, it's not like the...

When you say, I want justice, that implies that there has been some sort of wrong that has heard.

Correct.

So if it's a 13-year-old that's sitting in front of me that's like, I'm just confused about who I am,

it went wrong to me.

Yeah.

I need to show mercy to them.

Now, if an adult person who identifies as transgender has somehow accosted my child,

you know, I don't care if you're transgender or straight or whatever.

Like, that is an issue of justice.

Correct.

But in most cases in the church, I would say this issue of transgenderism is more mercy,

it's like with your own people than it is justice.

Oh, I think it's a whole different story talking about yelling about trans people online,

versus actually sitting down with a 13-year-old who's struggling to make sense of their life

and their identity and who they are and what they are.

And for many of them, they think that...

Like, let's be clear about this.

Young people struggle with feeling like they don't fit in.

This is just a common occurrence among young people.

If you've read Catcher in the Rye, which you all should have by this point in your life, Sam.

Have you availed yourself?

I've read it multiple times.

Yeah.

And it's really a whole different story.

Holden, holden, holden.

My oldest son is named Holden in part because of Catcher in the Rye, right?

Implying I'm being held in a coffin.

Holden?

You're like that holding coffin.

JD Salinger is an interesting story, by the way, because after he wrote that book,

he wrote another book that didn't get so well received.

And he became a hermit for the rest of his life and lived in New Hampshire and never talked to anybody,

which is interesting, like, aside.

But I'm aware of that part of his story, yeah.

Yeah, but it's the story about alienation, right?

Isn't that really what Catcher is about?

It's about a guy who said, everyone's a phony, and I'm the only real person.

Like, we all had that feeling when we were kids, right?

It's like, we're trying to live the true Christian life.

And there's all these phonies and fakers out there trying to do the fake thing.

And I think it's really about the idea.

And I think a lot of what the trans discussion is about is up young people feeling like they don't fit in.

They don't belong.

They don't really have any friends.

They're isolated, which is a feeling that we've had for time immoriel, right?

About like not fitting in.

And now they get some people.

They got influenced online by some people said, oh, the, the reason you don't fit in is because you were actually born

with the wrong gender.

And if you change genders, then you will, that feeling of alienation will go away.

Whether that's true or not, I don't know.

But it makes sense from that perspective of that's why some people adopted that label

because it made them feel like they're part of something and they had friends.

So I think a lot of the answer here is what you and I've talked about before.

It's just social capital.

And yeah, being surrounded by people that care about you and can help you.

In the case of my church, you know, obviously we're probably going to have a different approach as a church with somebody who is young and struggling with this you.

This issue then say, I don't know the unitarian universalist church.

You know, we're probably going to have some different approaches there.

But what's similar in either those groups where they're conservative or liberal is you've got good people around you.

You've got people that care about you.

And I would say there also needs to be people who speak truth to you and not cater to the whims of every young person.

Whatever that whim may be.

And in this case, it's transgenderism.

I have some specific views about that.

I'm on the conservative side.

Let me just say that.

And I've tried to be as forthright while at the same time factual as I can on this episode.

You know, we're not going to use your pronouns in our church.

Like we're just not.

But at the same time, we're going to care about you.

And we love you.

And if your parents or members too, we're going to walk with the whole family through this issue.

We're certainly not going to denigrate insult and then kick you out.

You know, we're not in the shunning business.

So what would you say?

Let's connect this whole issue with the loss of social capital.

Yeah.

What do you say to that?

So the point I want to make about 2020 is like it was the most acute loss of social capital we've had.

Like in a one moment, you know what I mean?

Like not a gradual slide.

But like literally overnight, we all lost social capital, right?

We're all sort of unmoored and floating around in space.

And what's wild about that moment is we change the rules for basically everything in American life.

And like within the span of a week or two, you know what I mean?

Guess what?

You don't have to go to work anymore.

And guess what?

You can take all your classes online.

And guess what?

We can make accommodations through this.

And as an educator, a guy who was in the classroom, I remember I'm going to give you a weird like time capsule.

So EIU was going to go on spring break right as like COVID was happening, right?

And I remember looking at my students going, guys, I'm not sure you're going to come back after spring break.

And they all looked at me like I was crazy.

They didn't come back after spring break.

We shut the entire campus down.

And then all the rules of like how we educated people in college changed.

Like deadlines went right out the window.

It was just grace and flexibility for every single thing.

And I think what's wild about that is then we had to try to bring people back to normalcy.

Like in 2022 and 2023.

And guess what?

That process was actually more painful than the 2020 process of losing all that social capital.

So I think the problem is it's like we all realize that a lot of the things that we have in American life are just made up.

Like we made up the rules.

And if we don't like them, we can just change them if we want to, right?

And so I think that's that it created a plausibility structure that was much more malleable in 2020 compared to the year before or now.

And I think that's what allowed people to explore, you know, their gender identity in a way.

And plus they had more time to set around and think about things like gender identity because they weren't going to work and going to out and doing things like life things.

And so a lot of people like reevaluated things and that's where they landed because a lot of the discourse was around trans.

And if you look at the data among 18 to 22 year olds to share that said they were transgender was 8.6% in 19 and 2020 and in the 2024 data.

It had dropped to 3.2% among 18 to 22 year olds.

And for our listeners, that is an incredible drop from a you never see drops that fast like in democracy.

People who look at demography all day long, it does not happen that way.

You know, drops happen incrementally, glacially over a long period of time and to go from 8.5% to 3.5% in just a four year window.

Like you would never see atheists go from 8.5% to 3.5% or the other direction, 3.5% to 8.5%.

And they just kicked them all out of the country.

Well, it should because there are a bunch of commies and they should go live in China.

I'm joking people.

Okay. America belongs to everyone.

I believe in the song separation of church and state because I'm a Baptist by the way.

But that is where we will agree.

Yeah, that is where we will strongly agree.

If you're an atheist, you can be an American. Sure. Why not? I don't care.

The issue though is like, how did that go from 8.5% to 3.5% the only way that can happen statistically is.

A lot of people said yes to that question in 2020 said no to that question in 2024.

It's not generational replacement. It's not some other like methodological thing that's happening here.

It's just a whole bunch of young people deciding that they are not transgender anymore when they were back in I wish we could ask that question.

At any point in your life, what do you identify as transgender?

And are you currently transgender to see like what the gap is between those two things?

Because I think a lot of people and by a lot, I mean 5% right 5% of Gen Z.

Which by the way, it's not that many people on the grand scheme of things.

But in the discourse became like the the centerpiece of every discussion.

What's one in 20? I mean, it's one in 20. Yeah, I want it.

So Gen Z is like what 20% of America and this is 5% of 20% so you're talking about.

Yeah, like yeah, yeah, about one not that many.

But we talk about them all the time because we're obsessed with outliers in America.

So what I'm trying to tell you is the idea of transgenderism has peaked.

We're on the other side of that debate in America today.

And now only 3% of young people identify as transgender.

And if you break it down by like Republican versus Democrat, it's like no Republican young people are transgender.

And among Democrats, it's even dropped in half too.

Like it really is just falling out of favor with the general public and especially with Gen Z.

Something happened between 2020 and 2020 for where and by the way, when I put this result up.

This is fascinating because I love this.

That I get the response that I that that came to mind for a lot of people with social contagion.

Like we just talked about like a lot of people are convinced they were trans because their friends basically told them.

It's cool to be trans. We should all be trans.

They said, OK, I'm trans. That is what conservatives say.

Now, you know what the liberal response that data was, Sam, can you even guess what the liberal response that data was?

I don't know. I could guess, but I don't know.

This is why I love doing my job because like they show me things that I wouldn't have seen.

And the response that I got was well, because basically the American government made it illegal to be trans by 2024.

So obviously people wouldn't identify that way.

Um, wow, I think the conservative is actually might have a better argument on that one.

I get the argument is Biden was in the White House in 2024 when the survey was done.

Oh my goodness. Wow.

Wow, liberals, you got to come up with a better argument.

Like I wanted to bait. Like that's too easy of a debate.

I win that one all day long in social contagion.

But this is why I love about data though, right?

You can put a result up that you think like here's what explains it.

And then someone else will come in from the side door with a completely different.

And by the way, sometimes they're actually really plausible.

You're like, wait a minute.

How did I not see that?

Like that's my blind spot.

And that's why I love about this is like you can both look at the same piece of evidence and come to like honest to God different conclusions about how we got there from very like smart perspectives.

And that's what makes, that's what makes science great, I think.

And what we should really celebrate more is we can look at the same thing with different perspectives and both not be wrong.

Or you know, not one's not completely right and one's not completely wrong.

Fair enough. Hey, good discussion.

Kind discussion.

Thankfully, no derogatory terms were used.

And hopefully people.

That's not that's not derogatory.

We don't we don't like the communist come on now.

That's a whole nother discussion.

A whole nother discussion.

Maybe maybe for a future episode with the great doctor bird.

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