Nothing is what it seems at the Trans Wellness Conference down at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Someone brushing past in the hall sports a beard on an angular chin, but also a handbag and heels. A lecturer refers to himself as “they” throughout his (or was it her?) talk on chest “binding.” The brochure says “Wellness,” but no one looks well here. All around are misshapen and untoned bodies; faces marked with dissipation; studied dress that is a couturial assault on the eyes. Scarcely one in the 700 looks appealing. 

It was bound to happen sooner or later. At the church where I help serve dinner for the downtown community once a month, I meet all kinds: street people, addicts, gays, and the occasional cross-dresser. This individual flaunted the figure and clothing of a teenage girl, with the facial hair and facial structure of a man. It wasn’t just the face, though; no one would have taken this person for anything but male, no matter the accoutrement.  

Daniel Darling is vice president for communications at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public affairs wing of the Southern Baptist Convention. He’s been a pastor in Chicago and Nashville and is the author of The Dignity Revolution. Here are edited segments of our Q&A.

She speaks with the fervor of a tent preacher, proclaiming a message that resonates with Christians, but the Bible isn’t her handbook. Gail Dines is a self-described radical feminist who wants pornography stopped.

Dines, of the Boston porn-fighting nonprofit Culture Reframed, is part of a growing secular movement to eliminate violent, degrading sexual images, especially on the internet. Feminists, medical professionals, and legislators are working together, sometimes alongside Christians, in a multipronged attack on porn.

Do Californians just want to have fun? Not if they’re members of the state legislature that late last month showed how liberalism, once a defender of free speech, is doubling down on suppression of dissent and viewpoint diversity.

It’s gay pride parade time again, so this is a good time to read Christopher Yuan’s Holy Sexuality and the Gospel (Multnomah, 2018). When I interviewed him five years ago (“From gay to joyous,” Feb. 8, 2014), he had recently put into perspective his years of homosexuality, illicit drug use, drug dealing, and coming to Christ in prison. His new book poses good questions about gays and identity: “How did ‘This is how I am’ become ‘This is who I am’?”

Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, signed a bill into law Wednesday that prohibits so-called “conversion therapy” for minors struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction.