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Luke’s Journal July 2026  |  Vol.31  No.2  |  Sexuality

Those of us who work with young people recognise the signs of confusion. Adolescents today are navigating questions of identity, sexuality, and selfhood in an environment that offers only one very particular set of answers — answers that, upon serious scrutiny, rest on weaker scientific foundations than their advocates typically acknowledge.

Walking alongside many young Australians through pastoral conversations,  I can’t help but grieve the devastating impact of the systematic misrepresentation of the scientific evidence.

Introduction

The dominant cultural narrative, amplified through educational institutions, health regulatory bodies, and the entertainment industry, tells young people that sexual identity is fixed,  biologically determined, and immutable; that any suggestion otherwise is harmful; and that the traditional Judeo-Christian sexual ethic is not merely wrong, but is dangerous. Each of these claims deserves scrutiny — because the best available evidence does not support them, and because the consequences of conflating ideological activism with settled science are damaging the young people I serve.

The Science the Narrative Ignores

Perhaps the most consequential empirical claim undergirding contemporary sexual ideology is that sexual orientation is fixed from birth and cannot change. This claim has been repeated so frequently, and with such institutional authority, that it has acquired the status of established fact. It is not.

The American Psychological Association’s own flagship reference work states plainly that both  male and female sexualities are ‘fluid across the life span.’¹ This is not a fringe finding. It represents the considered summary of the world’s largest psychological professional body — a body that has simultaneously been one of the most vocal opponents of therapies that acknowledge precisely this fluidity. The inconsistency is lost on most.

More striking still are longitudinal findings from the Add Health study (National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health), one of the largest datasets of its kind, which illustrate this fluidity and shed light on the general direction adolescent sexuality heads over time: towards heterosexuality.

In a secondary analysis of roughly 12,000 participants from Add Health who were tracked from Wave I (ages 12–19) to Wave III (ages 18–26) — a six-year span — the vast majority of adolescents who reported any same-sex romantic attraction at Wave I no longer did so at Wave III. Among males aged 12–17 reporting exclusive same-sex attraction at Wave I, for example, only 11% maintained exclusive same-sex attraction at Wave III, while 48% reported only opposite-sex attraction (Savin-Williams & Ream, 2007).²

“In short, most same-sex-attracted adolescents will trend towards heterosexuality as they get older.”

In short, most same-sex-attracted adolescents will trend towards heterosexuality as they get older. Despite the enormous magnitude of this finding, it has received almost no mainstream attention, probably because it disrupts a preferred narrative.

The implications of this for how we counsel, support, and care for adolescents are profound. If an adolescent reports same-sex attraction exclusively, the evidence suggests that they are overwhelmingly likely to change. The evidence-based approach would see the development of supportive structures that provide support for those who change and for those who don’t. Moreover, best practice would indicate that the patient ought to be at liberty to choose the goal or goals of their own therapy, should they ever receive therapy. Instead, current practice mandates LGBT affirmation (which can increasingly include medical intervention) and criminalises support for those who wish to move away from same-sex attraction. A therapist or pastor who supports an individual who freely chooses to leave LGBT identification for heterosexuality can be charged and face five years’ imprisonment.

The biological determinism argument — the ‘born that way’ claim — is similarly unsupported by the best genetic evidence. The largest-ever genome-wide association study of same-sex sexual behaviour found that genetic factors account for approximately 32% of the influence toward same-sex attraction.³ The researchers themselves explicitly concluded that genes ‘in no way’  determine sexual behaviour and that knowing someone’s genetic information allows prediction  of their sexual behaviour ‘just about as well as guessing with no genetic information at all.’ For context, 32% genetic heritability is virtually identical to the heritability of religious belief  (31%) — yet no reasonable person argues that religious faith is therefore fixed, immutable, and beyond any form of exploration or change.

These peer-reviewed, large-scale, quantitative studies rarely surface in popular discourse about sexuality — including the discourse delivered to our young people in classrooms. It seems that classrooms are no longer prioritising academic integrity when there are ideological imperatives at play. The rich irony is that religious education has been systematically eradicated from most public schools, on the basis that morality should not be mandated in public education.  Zoom to 2026: Neo-Marxist identity politics, Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory underpin public education at nearly every level, instilling not only a political ideology, but a new secular morality that has the support of government, the academy and even AHPRA.

The Finnish Study: Medical Transition Does Not Resolve Psychiatric Distress

Among the most important recent additions to this evidence base is a 2026 Finnish nationwide register study published in Acta Paediatrica by Ruuska and colleagues.⁴ This large-scale, population-representative with a three-decade follow-up period and a matched control group of over 16,000 individuals.

The findings are striking. Gender-referred adolescents (those under 23 who attended specialised gender identity services between 1996 and 2019) showed significantly higher rates of severe psychiatric morbidity than their matched controls both before referral (45.7% versus  15.0%) and at least two years after referral (61.7% versus 14.6%). In other words, not only did psychiatric need not diminish after gender-related services — it substantially increased.

The outcomes for those who actually underwent medical gender reassignment are particularly sobering. Among those who pursued feminising gender reassignment, the prevalence of specialist-level psychiatric treatment rose from 9.8% before their first gender service contact to 60.7% afterwards — an increase of more than sixfold. Among those who pursued masculinising gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity rose from 21.6% to 54.5%. After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity during follow-up, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls.

“…this pattern is inconsistent with minority stress theory, which would predict improving mental health outcomes as social acceptance of gender diversity increases.”

The secular trend data adds another layer of concern. Among those referred after 2010 — the period of rapid increase in referrals — the proportion with a history of psychiatric treatment before their gender service contact had doubled compared to the earlier cohort. Nearly half  (47.9%) of recently referred adolescents had already required specialist-level psychiatric treatment before they even contacted a gender service. The researchers note that this pattern is inconsistent with minority stress theory, which would predict improving mental health outcomes as social acceptance of gender diversity increases. Instead, the opposite is observed.

The clinical implications stated by the authors themselves are important to quote carefully:  psychiatric treatment needs ‘appear to increase’ subsequent to medical gender reassignment (GR); ‘in  some individuals, medical GR appears to be linked to deterioration in mental health’; and the  considerable psychiatric morbidity before referral ‘suggest that for some of these adolescents,  GD may be secondary to other mental health challenges.’

This study sits alongside the Cass Review, the Hisle-Gorman register study from the United  States, and multiple national health authority reviews from Finland, Sweden, Denmark and  Norway in forming a convergent international picture: the evidence base for medical transition in adolescents as a mental health intervention is, at best, extremely weak, and in some cases,  the data suggest net harm.

Institutional Capture and Viewpoint Discrimination

The suppression of inconvenient evidence is not happening by accident. It reflects what scholars have called the ideological capture of key institutions — the systematic privileging of one set of conclusions about sexuality and gender, regardless of what the data actually shows,  and the marginalisation of perspectives that depart from the approved framework.

Dr. Laura Haynes, a California-licensed psychologist with over 40 years of clinical experience,  prepared a comprehensive expert report on the UK’s Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on  Conversion Therapy — a document signed by major health professional bodies that effectively bans therapeutic conversations that might support a client’s desire to explore or reduce same sex attraction.⁵ Her analysis is meticulous and damning.

“Haynes documents that the MoU offers no original research references whatsoever to support its prohibitions.”

Haynes documents that the MoU offers no original research references whatsoever to support its prohibitions. She further documents that the APA’s 2009 Task Force Report — the foundational document cited by most Western conversion therapy bans — was built on research it simultaneously acknowledged failed to meet its own stated scientific standards. The APA Report found no research meeting robust scientific criteria that “change-allowing therapy,” contemporary therapy that allows individuals to willingly seek a change in their sexual orientation, causes harm. And yet the prohibition proceeded.

This is viewpoint discrimination. Clinical governance that protects therapy for those heading towards LGBT and criminalises therapy for those heading away from LGBT, even when the data suggest that adolescents change away from LGBT more frequently than towards. The MoU permits therapeutic conversations that encourage a client toward a gender identity different from their biological sex. It prohibits conversations that support a client who wishes to explore the reverse. The asymmetry is purely ideological. When one therapeutic direction is state-sanctioned, and the other is effectively criminalised, we have left the domain of evidence-based medicine and entered the domain of enforced orthodoxy.

“When one therapeutic direction is state-sanctioned, and the other is effectively criminalised…”

The consequences have been substantial. The Cass Review documented that under the MoU regime, mental health practitioners became afraid to assess gender dysphoric young people for co-occurring psychiatric conditions, for fear of being accused of conducting ‘conversion’ rather than affirmative therapy.⁶ The Finnish study is the latest confirmation of why this matters clinically: untreated psychiatric conditions in this population are not incidental — they are central, they predate gender referral in many cases, and they persist or worsen after medical intervention.

In Australia, the picture is analogous and, in some respects, more severe. We have no First Amendment equivalent. Victoria’s Change or Suppression Practices Prohibition Act (2022) extends to pastoral conversations, prayer, and parental counsel. Similar legislation operates in  Queensland, the ACT, New South Wales, and South Australia. By some estimates, approximately 85% of Australians now live under some form of these restrictions. A parent who gently and lovingly encourages a gender-questioning teenager to seek careful, unhurried assessment — without medical intervention — may, depending on how authorities interpret the law, face serious legal jeopardy.

Australia’s health regulator, AHPRA, recently moved to silence psychiatrist Dr Andrew Amos for publicly questioning the evidence base for childhood gender medicine. Not for harming patients but for asking questions. Such is the new scope of AHPRA to regulate the words, and by implication the thoughts, of a profession that grew through objectively thinking through emerging data. The suppression of legitimate clinical inquiry is not a feature of evidence-based medicine. It is its antithesis — and it is precisely the kind of inquiry that a study like Ruuska et al. (2026) vindicates.

The Courts Are Pushing Back

There are signs that the ideological overreach is beginning to encounter resistance — and not only from religious or conservative quarters.

On 31 March 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in Chiles v. Salazar by a vote of 8-1, including liberal justices Kagan and Sotomayor. The case concerned  Kaley Chiles, a licensed Christian counsellor in Colorado Springs whose state prohibited her from helping minor clients grow comfortable with their biological sex — even when that was precisely what those clients requested. Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, described  Colorado’s law as ‘viewpoint discrimination’ and invoked the spectre of ‘censorious governments throughout history’ to describe what the state had attempted. Eight justices found that a government cannot relabel speech as ‘conduct’ to escape constitutional scrutiny.

The decision does not directly bind Australian jurisdictions, but it does something equally important: it names, with the authority of the highest court in the Western world, precisely what these laws are. They are not health regulations. They are mechanisms for enforcing ideological conformity in clinical practice. The Finnish data gives that legal ruling a clinical dimension:  the ideology these laws enforce is one whose principal treatment modality — medical gender reassignment — now has register-based, nationally representative evidence that it does not resolve the psychiatric conditions it purports to address, and may worsen them.

“They are not health regulations. They are mechanisms for enforcing ideological conformity in clinical practice.”

In the United States more broadly, legal accountability is also emerging in the medical domain.  A lawsuit resulted in an award of approximately two million dollars against practitioners who pursued aggressive medical transition in a minor — a case signalling growing judicial willingness to scrutinise whether informed consent standards were genuinely met.⁷ Separately,  parents in Montgomery County, Maryland successfully asserted their right not to have their children compelled to engage with LGBT-affirming curriculum content without parental notification, with a settlement reportedly in the region of 1.5 million dollars.⁸

The International Olympic Committee, meanwhile, has revised its framework on transgender athlete participation in ways that prioritise the protection of biological female sport — a departure from a prior policy that many female athletes argued placed ideological commitments over athletic fairness and the physical safety of women.

Voices from Within the Advocacy Community

One of the most significant and underreported developments of recent years is the emergence of critical voices from within the LGBT advocacy community itself. Herndon Graddick, who served as president of GLAAD from 2012 to 2013 — the most prominent LGBT media advocacy organisation in the United States — has publicly stated that pushing medical transition for young people was a mistake. In a podcast series titled When LGB Met T,  Graddick said:

‘I think we need to correct what’s wrong first… Teenagers and kids should not be given the power to make these life-altering decisions that medicalisation causes… I just think that we  should completely stop doing anything that might harm children, even if it means we admit that  we got something really wrong, and my understanding is that we have.’

Graddick called for open conversation without the fear of being labelled transphobic. This is a remarkable statement because it validates every concern raised by religious or conservative voices and, moreover, demonstrates that the reckoning with the evidence is scientific and ethical, not simply a culture-war artefact. The Finnish study, published just months after  Graddick’s comments, provides the kind of longitudinal register-based evidence that explains why even former advocates are reaching these conclusions.

The Cass Review itself, widely acknowledged as the most thorough independent review of gender medicine for children ever undertaken, concluded that the evidence base for gender affirming medical interventions in minors is of ‘very poor certainty,’ that research in this area has been ‘remarkably weak,’ and that the push toward affirmative-only pathways represented a departure from the evidence-based norms that govern all other areas of paediatric medicine.⁶  These conclusions did not come from a right-wing think tank but from an NHS-commissioned independent review led by Dr Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of  Paediatrics and Child Health. The Finnish study’s finding that psychiatric morbidity increases markedly after medical gender reassignment, not decreases, is exactly consistent with what the  Cass Review warned the evidence showed — or rather, failed to show.

What This Means for Christian Youth Workers and Parents

I want to speak now to those who, like me, minister among young people from a position of orthodox Christian faith. The pressures are immense, and the legal environment is increasingly hostile. The cultural opposition to holding traditional views is staggering. And yet the responsibilities of love, truth, and care for the young people in our communities have not changed.

What the evidence demands — and what Christian ethics has always demanded — is that we treat young people as whole persons whose development is complex, whose identity questions deserve patient discussion. The Finnish study is a compassionate argument for exactly the kind of careful, exploratory, psychologically sophisticated care that the orthodox Christian tradition has always sought to offer: care that does not rush to medicalise distress, that takes underlying mental health seriously, and that does not treat a young person’s current self-report as an irrevocable identity requiring irreversible physical intervention.

This means being willing to say, with kindness and honesty, what the data shows: that adolescent sexual identity is often fluid; that the majority of gender-dysphoric children who are not socially transitioned will, by adulthood, be comfortable in their bodies; that the evidence for the safety and efficacy of medical transition in minors is weak; and that the psychiatric needs of gender-referred adolescents do not resolve after medical intervention, but in many cases worsen.

“It also means refusing to accept the false and ideologically weaponised dichotomy between ‘affirming’ and ‘harmful.”

It also means refusing to accept the false and ideologically weaponised dichotomy between ‘affirming’ and ‘harmful.’ The pastoral tradition of the Church — walking with people in their suffering, naming truth with gentleness, attending carefully to underlying distress — is not conversion therapy. It is an ancient expression of Christian care. The attempt to criminalise prayer, pastoral conversation, and parental guidance is an assault not only on religious liberty but on the basic common-sense understanding of what it means to support another human being through a period of genuine distress and confusion.

The Apostle Paul’s observation in 1 Corinthians 13 — that love ‘rejoices not in unrighteousness but in truth’ — is a description of what genuine care looks like. Real love for a young person means neither abandoning them to confusion nor telling them what they want to hear if it is not true. It means staying present, staying honest, and trusting that truth, properly received, is not a wound but a gift. It’s table-stakes that in Christian pastoral ministry, compassion, empathy and the highest regard for personal liberty and self-determination are upheld.

Conclusion: A Call for Honest Inquiry

The ideological capture of academic and health regulatory bodies in the domain of adolescent sexuality has not made young people safer or more flourishing. The Finnish national register study published in 2026 is the latest in a growing body of high-quality evidence demonstrating that medical gender reassignment in adolescents does not resolve psychiatric needs — and for some, is associated with its escalation. This finding, combined with the Cass Review’s conclusions, the longitudinal data on sexual fluidity, and the growing international legal and policy pushback, points to an urgent need for recalibration.

What is needed now is a return to honest, evidence-led inquiry; the restoration of genuine informed consent that includes the full picture of outcomes data; the protection of parental rights; the safeguarding of clinical freedom; the protection of client-directed, choice-allowing therapy and the recognition that traditional religious communities have legitimate perspectives that deserve the same respect accorded to any other community in a pluralistic democracy.

This is a call to academic honesty, clinical integrity, and the kind of love that sacrifices itself for the young person in front of us. For many young Australians, such truth-telling may be the difference between life and death.

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