Illinois, your attorney general is trying to defeat an Idaho law that would keep boys out of girls’ bathrooms.

In March of this year, Idaho’s governor signed into law a bill that forbids students from using the restroom or locker room designated for the opposite sex—biological sex, that is.

If this rule is broken, the law allows a student to sue his or her school for up to $5,000 each time he or she encounters a student of the opposite sex in the wrong restroom or changing room. While such a common-sense rule shouldn’t need any justification for those who live in the real world, the legislature made sure to put it in writing:

“Requiring students to share restrooms and changing facilities with members of the opposite biological sex generates potential embarrassment, shame, and psychological injury to students, as well as increasing the likelihood of sexual assault, molestation, rape, voyeurism, and exhibitionism“ (p. 1 of the bill).

Unsurprisingly, however, this law didn’t go far before being challenged in court. In October of this year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted an injunction, essentially putting the law on pause until it could be reviewed by judges. And as lawyers for both sides prepped for the upcoming case, attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia filed a brief at the end of November to weigh in on the issue.

These attorneys general submitted the brief to “describe their experiences” administering “trans”-gender-inclusive policies and to reassure the judges that allowing such students into bathrooms for the opposite sex is inclusive and does not harm other students (p. 2 of the brief). And Illinois’ attorney general, Kwame Raoul, put his name to the brief.

Let’s look at a notable point in this brief. It might surprise you to see what a simple sentence reveals about the hidden trap in transgender ideology.

 “Transgender youth experience levels of discrimination, violence, and harassment that exceed those experienced by their cisgender counterparts“ (p. 8 of the brief).

As a mentor of mine is eager to point out, transgender ideology is built around the idea that your sex (the biological characteristics of your body) and your gender identity (what your ‘inner sense’ identifies as) are two separable aspects of you and not inherently tied together. They might even conflict with each other, and that’s perfectly acceptable.

Furthermore, your body doesn’t teach you anything ultimate about who you are, and your inner sense divorced from your body is the “real you.” Therefore, if your inner sense about your gender conflicts with your body, then the “real you” overrides the physical body you live in, and you may choose to subject your body to all sorts of chemical and surgical treatments to get it to line up with the “real you.”

This is not how God created us.

From the beginning, God created man male and female, and this is a reality embedded in both the soul and the body of each human since then. Both your biological characteristics and your inner perception of who you are designed to be are undividable aspects of your identity. (If they do conflict, that is a result of the Fall, not a mark of God’s design.)

And thus, we can’t say that our body is merely a machine that we live in—one which does not reveal any truths about ourselves to ourselves—and which we are free to manipulate according to our inner wishes. That would be rejecting the fact that God created you physically as well as spiritually.

And because your body is a creation of God and an inseparable part of you, it does convey immutable facts about who you are. If your inner sense—as subjective and vulnerable to deception as it is—does not match up with God’s physical revelation to you about who you are, your inner sense is in the wrong.

So, because sex is an objective aspect of God’s objective created order, civilizations throughout all time and in all places of the world have referred to “male” and “female” as objective categories. But this changes with the advent of a new term—cisgender. According to Merriam-Webster, this refers to those “whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person was identified as having at birth.”

At first glance, there may seem to be nothing wrong with the term—after all, don’t advocates of “transgender” ideology seem to be carving out a space in their paradigm for those who have normal sexuality?

Well, no; —as a mentor of mine wisely observes, they aren’t “carving out an exception” to their paradigm—they’re forcing us into it. The term “cisgender” assumes the very premise that the transgender paradigm needs to force us to accept—that gender identity is something that merely can “correspond” to biological sex.

There’s no longer any inherent connection between the two. You may not have “transgender” inclinations. Great! You happen to “correspond.” But if your sexuality is merely a “correspondence” and not a unified truth revealed in your nature, then the next person’s sexuality might very well not have such a “correspondence”—and we can still say that is just as natural.

Saying “cisgender” does not mean “you have a normal sexuality.” Saying “male” or “female” has always meant that. “Cisgender” means “you exist within a paradigm that divorces physical sex from gender identity, and within this paradigm, you happen to have a sex and identity that match up.”

Referring to anyone as “cisgender” is a very subtle way of denying that the objective sexual order ever existed.

And, as we go back to the brief submitted by the attorneys general, we see this idea only reinforced by the word “counterpart.” The attorneys general have reduced God’s created reality of “sex” down to a man-made category, “cisgender,” which can be considered a “counterpart” to another man-made category—”transgender.” Instead of recognizing created nature and the sad aberrations from it, this new terminology recognizes two equally valid man-made categories.

Beware when the other side starts applying new terms to you so that you fit their new paradigm. By using their terms, you buy into their system. Around this time of year, many of us decide not to say “happy holidays,” because that erases the spiritual reality behind “merry Christmas.”

I think we should also refuse to use the term “cisgender,” because it erases the spiritual reality behind God’s created sexual order.