Tuesday, February 10, 2026

It's Tuesday, February 10, 2026.

I'm Albert Moller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian

world view.

Okay, a couple of quick observations.

Sometimes things happen all together, and that's just the way things happen sometimes,

and it's because of interconnection.

Sometimes it's just random development.

Sometimes know this really is a cluster event.

And right now on the trans issue, we have a cluster event or set of events to talk about.

The other observation is that when something like this is happening here in the United

States, it is almost assuredly happening somewhere else as well.

And sometimes the general truth is that what happens in the United States is most important

than what happens elsewhere, in other words, it affects other nations, but it works the

other way too.

And Christians need to understand that sometimes things that take place in other nations,

even in other courts and other political systems can eventually find their way here.

If an argument, if not necessarily quite yet in policy, all right, I want to talk about

that because of something that's going on in Brazil.

Headline coming out of Brazil, the Wall Street Journal, Brazil criminalizes transgender

dissent.

So one of the things we have to be aware of is the fact that when you have a giant moral

argument, which is, as Christians understand, it's even more basic than moral because

we're talking about an ontological argument.

It's an argument about reality.

Reality is in male and female, boy and girl.

When you get down to the debate on that kind of issue, you see a society begin to get polarized

almost immediately.

Now that's not to say that every one is connected at one of the polls.

It is to say that the polarities define the issue.

So let's just put it bluntly.

Now you have an LGBTQ plus activist community and that's one poll of that's one, that's

one magnetic force.

The other is historic biblical Christianity and common grace, creation order, common sense

that shows up with the vast majority of people saying we're not going along with that.

Even if you have lower resistance on the part of a secular culture to L and G and B, the

T, it's still a major stumbling bond.

Now if you think about iron filings, put two magnets and if you put two magnets, one on

the left and one on the right, then you're going to have iron filings move that way.

But if you have enough of them, they're going to be a lot in the middle.

The question is what happens to those in the middle, which way do they eventually go?

Because the arguments eventually are so clear that there really is nothing in the middle

in terms of an argument.

It's either for or against and that's where we are right now on the transgender issue.

The second thing to note is that when the left pushes this kind of revolution through

the law, they not only seek to ensure permission, they also want to ensure coercion.

That's what we have to see.

It is that when you have the left to make this kind of move, they say we're just arguing

for permission.

The next thing you know after permission, they're arguing for coercion.

What do I mean by that?

I mean, they're trying to say originally all we want to do is to make sure that transgender

persons, as they identify them, have the so-called right and access to whatever treatments

they demand, where it ends up is not just there, however, it is that anyone who disagrees

with this now has to be silent.

And that's exactly what we see in the background to this law in Brazil.

As reporter Mary Anastasia O'Grady of the Wall Street Journal tells us a woman who's

a feminist in Brazil is a feminist who doesn't believe that a male can be a female.

And she's in trouble right now because she posted on social media remarks made by a professor

emeritus at Sydney University, and that professor said, quote, a person who identifies as transgender

retains their birth, the NA, no surgery, synthetic hormones, or change of clothes will alter

this fact.

Now in this case, you also had the claim that historic feminism, as in Simone de Boevoir,

supports such a claim.

The Wall Street Journal then tells us, quote, for posting these opinions, this woman

has been charged by federal prosecutors with a crime of transphobia.

So let me repeat that, the crime of transphobia.

Her trial is scheduled for this week.

If found guilty, she could be fined and imprisoned for up to five years, even if acquitted, she

will face significant legal bills to defend her speech.

Within the journal reports, quote, the case shows how far Brazil has fallen from the modern

liberal democracy it aspired to become when it emerged in dictatorship in 1985.

Courts are no longer constrained by the constitution and the contrarian who questions the judiciary's

version of the truth, increasingly risks imprisonment, unquote.

Okay, so I think we all understand autocracy in terms of a single individual gaining control,

or autocracy as a small group of people gaining control.

I think most people think this is likely to come from an executive branch or from the

military, perhaps from the legislative branch, but in Brazil, it's coming from the judicial

branch.

It is judges who are establishing a claim that they basically can determine legislation,

they can order prosecutions, they can transform society according to their own dictates, free

from the constitution.

Again, the journal has it right when we are told, quote, courts are no longer constrained

by the constitution.

Okay, that is one of the worst case scenarios for constitutional government.

The constitution is to be the ruling authority.

Therefore, judges are to rule according to the constitution.

If judges and courts are freed from the obligation of accountability to the actual

text of the constitution, what you have is a revolution taking place.

Honestly, something like that was taking place in the United States in the period from

late 1950s until the correction that came mostly during the 1980s.

You had court cases handed down by the Supreme Court, and in particular, rulings on school

prayer and rulings on sexuality, rulings on abortion in particular, that frankly had

no constitutional basis whatsoever.

There was nothing in the constitution about such things.

Even then, we were talking in the United States about what was called the judicial usurpation

of politics, that is to say judges or courts usurping the political process.

In the United States, now, that is less of danger, but don't ever think it is a danger

we don't have to worry about.

Because the fact is that the left, which was gaining so much in the, especially the 1960s

and the 1970s, the left is determined to regain control of the courts, and this is exactly

now tied to presidential elections.

You elect a democratic president, he's going to appoint liberal justices and judges.

You elect a Republican president, he's going to appoint conservative, and that means textualists

or originalists or strict constructionist conservative judges, which means they are accountable

to the text.

But in Brazil, the big point is that the judges, the courts are really not accountable

to the constitution at all, and thus they're pushing through their own agendas and their

own revolutions, and the LGBTQ revolution is the latest to become the orthodoxy of these

judges.

They said, it begins with a demand for acceptance, and then it becomes a demand for coercion.

So now you have these courts going against a woman who is a feminist, much like others

who are referred to as exclusionary feminist, trans exclusionary feminist.

In other words, they believe that feminism is limited to, here's the radical thought,

females.

Okay.

Well, now you're looking at a criminal prosecution.

And as the journal rightly says, even if for some reason, perhaps under public, public

attention, you have this court back off on this case, the fact is this woman is already

obligated to spend a fortune in legal bills, and her reputation has already been, been

really trashed by this, this process.

Okay.

It's going to be very interesting to see where this goes.

I also want to go back to the crime, the crime of transphobia.

Okay.

Now that's really a mess, and the Wall Street Journal puts that in scare quotes, meaning

that is a term of art.

In other words, it's a specific term to which they're pointing.

And I think we understand what's going on there, and that is that what you had in terms

of the sexual revolution is a good number of people who claimed a therapeutic agenda.

And that is to say, we have psychiatric and psychological reasons for the wellness of

people.

We need to move in this direction.

And so you had a world turned upside down.

Now the person who say misperceives gender identity, that's not the diagnosis.

The diagnosis now is that if you are against that, you see a problem with that.

You're committed to creation order rather than the new gender ideologies, then you are

actually described as phobic.

You're having a phobic reaction to two persons, such as transsexuals, or homophobia was

a phobic reaction to homosexuality.

Let's be clear, as Christians, it's not based in a phobia.

It's based in biblical authority, it's based in a clear, objective moral declaration.

And but you do see how this works in society because you had campuses, you had media people,

Hollywood types, politicians, all talking about the problem of homophobia now, transphobia.

The problem isn't phobia.

The problem is, well, biology, especially when it comes to the transgender revolution.

I think it's going to be interesting to see where this goes.

I think even this woman's attorneys aren't making the strongest case.

According to the journal, one of the arguments they're making is that their client statements,

quote, are opinions expressed in an ongoing philosophical and scientific debate and don't

amount to hate speech and sightment to discrimination or violence, end quote.

But what we see there is that if all this is just entering into a debate that's not yet

settled, that means that one day, presumably it will be settled, and that could just create

a whole new problem.

In other words, if it's settled by the revolutionaries on their terms, you know, what this woman

is now facing will be faced by any gospel preacher in the United States of America, faced

by any employer or anyone, anyone just as a private citizen as this woman who posts dares

to post on social media or to declare in public, they're not going along with the LGBTQ

plus delusion.

And I'm afraid there'd be many people look at this and say, well, that's Brazil, that's

Brazil, but we dare not say that what happens in Brazil in this kind of case will stay in

Brazil.

Meanwhile, we need to come to a court case here in the United States.

And this is really big because this is the first time you have a so-called detransitioner

win in a case.

In this case, you're talking about a young woman who had sexual confusion, gender confusion,

went to medical authorities.

And when she was 16 years old, there was a double mastectomy and supposedly in response

to the fact she had declared herself to be not female, but male.

And now you have this woman who is saying that rather quickly, she regretted having

done this and felt like she and her mother had basically been pushed into this by encouraging

medical authorities.

And here you had a jury case in which it was found that indeed this young woman had

a cause and she was awarded $2 million.

It's not absolutely clear exactly what kind of precedent this sets in the law, but it

is clear that this is a huge precedent in the culture.

And so a clear signal sent, I want to tell you I've been watching this for days.

And I wanted to talk about it just the right time.

I didn't talk about it immediately when it happened because I thought another big part

of the story is how it is covered in the media.

And those are sometimes two very different things, both of them very revealing.

But okay, in the first case, you have the court decision.

The court's decision is not as sweeping as I think it should have been.

The award is not as large in this situation as I thought it should have been.

On the other hand, it is a precedent in the courts.

And in this case, we're talking about something that really is important.

It's also interesting to note that this jury is in New York state.

So that can't be incidental.

In other words, it should amplify our understanding of this to know that even in a state like New

York, you had a court and a jury that ruled in this direction.

Okay, here's the second thing.

Here's the second thing to think about here, the press coverage.

Number one, when this first happened, you had to be really looking at a very conservative

news site to know that anything had happened.

I was waiting to see when in the world is there going to be any mainstream media attention

to this?

Now, it did come.

And so I'll just point again to the New York Times as perhaps the most clear indication

of that mainstream media world.

And they ran a big story.

Hit line.

Woman wins a lawsuit over gender surgery as a minor is put on page a 20.

Okay, so that's 20 pages in from the first page.

But here it is.

And it covers the better part of the top half of a full page of the paper.

And but it's it's in the print edition dated February 5, 2028, okay?

So let's just say several days had passed before the New York Times ran that article.

It had run in a lot of other media sources, a lot of other media sources, particularly

on the conservative side before the New York Times ran the article.

Okay.

So it was February the fifth and that was the New York Times.

I think it's just important in putting the context to understand that was February the

fifth.

The next day, February the 6th, you can do the math.

The very next day on page a 22.

So it was a 20 the court decision.

Now the next day on a 22, so 22 pages in from the front page, here's the headline quote,

doctors group endorses restrictions on gender related surgery for minors.

In this case, it is a huge story.

It is the fact that the American Society of Plastic Surgeons has now taken an official

position saying that gender related surgeries and such treatments should be delayed surgeries

in particular until age 19, which is to say, again, you could put this so many different

ways.

In other words, if you're 18 or younger, you don't have access to these treatments according

to the standards of care approved by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, okay?

This is the kind of thing that has already happened in some other places.

The United Kingdom, Britain in particular, you had the report that was released known

as the CAS report, and you also had a report on a gender clinic known as Tavistock.

Both of them were devastating.

Both of them came to the conclusion that there is no sufficient evidence that these so-called

treatments and in particular, the surgeries are sufficiently helpful to overcome concerns

about potential harms, okay?

That's honest.

At least you can say that they're trying not to say something is right or wrong.

You understand that they're trying their best not to say this is right or this is wrong.

They're simply saying there is not enough evidence to believe that more good than harm

is done in this case, at least up to age 18.

In other words, they're not saying anything about 19 and above, and presumably they're far

more positive about that.

The point here is that this is one of the very first medical associations like this to

come out with this kind of statement.

It's also interesting that you have people making statements such as the fact that this

is not really that big a deal.

That's the public radio ran a statement by Kellyn Baker identified as a health researcher

at an LGBTQ think tank called the Movement Evasement Project.

This person told NPR, quote, that the ASPS position actually aligns with the current

standard of care for transgender youth.

This individual said, quote, there's really nothing new here.

The standard of care already does not recommend surgeries for minors as part of the routine

approach to this care.

Okay.

Couple of things there.

I don't believe for a minute that that organization or any other similar LGBTQ organization

has not been contending for these surgeries to be available to children and young people

because we've already seen this happen.

The other thing is when you have institutions, including medical centers that say they're

going to stop doing this or at the very least that tells you you can't stop doing something

unless you're doing it.

In the case of the young woman who just won the court decision, that's another indication.

In fact, this is happening and thus this statement by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons

does matter.

Just a day later, a statement of some clarification came from the American Medical Association

that is, you know, is an even larger group of medical doctors saying that the best

standard of care was to delay these treatments and in particular surgeries until a later

time.

It's just really interesting to see what's going on right now.

I also want to point out that I think one of the most morally clarifying developments

that's going to come out of this is going to be a wave of these so-called detransitioner

suits.

That's one of the ways you get people's attention.

One of the ways social ridiculousness is at least called to account.

In this case, with a horrible personal toll, you're talking about a young woman who

after all just want to lawsuit because medical authorities told this young woman and her

mother that the best standard of care was a double mastectomy for a teenage girl which

she now regrets and just imagine that regret and the weight of that regret.

That underlines the gravity of what's going to be involved when you confuse or deny creation

order.

Okay, I told you these things are coming together in a cluster and you'll notice those

two medical societies or associations they spoke with in 24 hours.

Those two big news stories broke in one major newspaper as separated by only 24 hours.

That's the way this is happening and separated only by about 24 hours is another development

and here's another headline for you.

California sues a children's hospital system to maintain transgender care.

So now you have Rob Bonta who is the attorney general California bringing legal action

and threat, but actual true action against a medical center when the medical center announced

in the light of these developments.

It is putting a pause on transgender treatments for children and teenagers and now you have

the attorney general California acting on behalf of the people of California threatening

this hospital system, this medical center with direct action if it does not restart those

programs.

And when you say a lot of these things aren't happening, oh, let's make clear that you

are not just talking about surgery here.

We're also talking in this case about hormone therapies and more comprehensive care, but

all of it serving the cause of the transgender revolution.

It is really interesting to see that the attorney general California says that because of legal

agreements, the medical center, which is in this case, children's hospital of Los Angeles

has to continue a program that had been known as the Center for Transgender Youth and

Development.

It was closed in July.

The Times tells us, quote, the clinic was among the nation's oldest and most prestigious

clinics focused on transgender young people and parents of trans children across the

state said the closure was a harbinger of what could come end quote.

Now let me just point out that in the world view conflict here, you can't get more basic

than this.

You can't get more basic than this because you're not just talking about, say, a taxation

proposal, you're not just talking about zoning laws.

You're talking about whether or not a medical center, a children's hospital, is to be

legally obligated to participate in what, well, medical authorities are saying should

not happen or in the larger context in which you have the Trump administration, I think

very helpfully through the levers of federal spending making very clear to these medical

centers and hospitals.

You can't have it both ways.

You can either have the funding or you can continue these programs.

And by the way, when you face that kind of choice, it's amazing how many people go with

the money.

And of course, when you have these big medical centers and hospitals extremely costly,

you can understand there's a big incentive there for them to go with the money.

It also points out, by the way, let me just say the importance of elections because had

Kamala Harris been elected president of the United States in 2024, you wouldn't be talking

about any of these headlines.

As a matter of fact, you might be talking about headlines in which you have coercion again.

And we know this because just look at Brazil.

This is the way this works.

Just look at the leftist energy in America's College of University campuses and in professional

associations.

That's just the way it works.

All right.

Well, we're talking about these things and other cluster events.

This one is dated February eight.

So just a couple of days after those other developments.

In this case, it is USA Today and the Des Moines Register reporting that the state of Iowa

quote, no longer counts non-binary students.

All right.

So this is due to legislation that has been adopted.

And the Iowa Department of Education is now no longer counting non-binary students in

terms of agenda identity.

Now as you can imagine, the numbers were relatively low, but you can also imagine that what's been

reported at least is that those numbers were growing.

Okay.

So the state of Iowa, because of this legislation, is now going to report the number of males

and females, the number of boys and girls in the school system.

It isn't going to have another category.

Okay.

One of the reasons for that, by the way, is that it's just right.

In other words, we should be talking about boys and girls and we should know what we're

talking about.

There's another aspect here.

That is that in terms of such things as applications for funding, in terms of all kinds of record

keeping, it becomes nearly impossible to know what in the world you're dealing with when

you have this third category, which is amorphous.

And frankly, you know, from year to year, you could look like you don't know who anyone

is, which actually is a part of the agenda long term of the revolutionaries.

And you see that, by the way, and some of the most radical people now saying, you know,

what a baby is born, you need not to say it's a boy or a girl, you need to say it looks

like a boy or it looks like a girl.

In one case, the language is that it's biologically presenting as a boy, biologically presenting

as a girl.

We'll find out, you know, the child will tell us later whether it's a boy or a girl.

Thankfully, at least the vast majority of parents, the vast majority of parents know

that is toxic nonsense.

Thankfully, the vast majority of medical centers thus far have not joined in this.

But there's another very interesting development.

And this one's reported in the free press.

And it is the fact that you have people, faculty and medical schools who are now in a situation

in which they are intimidated by students if they use expressions such as pregnant women.

Emily Yofi, who is writing for the free press, talks about one medical school professor

who had to come before the class and beg forgiveness for using the expression pregnant women.

The next line in the story quote, another doctor received so many online complaints from

students in real time while she was lecturing that when the class finished, she burst into

tears, her misdeed saying male and female end quote.

Some of this was reported all the way back in 2021 by Katie Herzog in a report also published

at the free press.

Then the common sense known as med schools are now denying biological sex.

And I have heard the same thing directly from medical students who told me that the

use of terms like male and female in the context of medical school, which is supposed to

be of all things based in anatomy and physiology and biology and claims to be both profession

and a science, it is now a matter of discipline in some cases.

If you use terms like male and female, all right, we'll be following these things with

you.

We will hope to hear what that court in Brazil determines in the first case we talked

about and we'll be following these other things as well.

Just a reminder, and I want to speak particularly here to pastors.

Pastors, your people are wondering about so much of this and they're vulnerable to all

kinds of arguments.

I hope you're really helping them to discern and to know on the basis of biblical truth

how to know and recognize that truth and to defend it, how to defend their own children

in this context.

Parents, I hope you're paying attention to this.

You need to know that as much as you think, in some cases, you have sheltered your children

from some of this conversation, the conversation is coming for your kids and I hope you're

really preparing them for that.

It is also interesting to know that it's constantly the truth that we are reminded by young

children that they are listening and they are hearing.

And at least in part these days, what it means when we are instructed to raise our children

in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, that means going all the way back to the first

chapter of the Bible and for crying out loud, getting that right.

Thanks for listening to the briefing.

For more information, go to my website at AlbertMohler.com.

You can follow me on exor on Twitter by going to x.com forward slash Albert Mohler.

For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to spts.edu or information on

Boyce College.

Just go to BoyceCollege.com.

I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.