Demonic Plurality, Gender Confusion, and the Question Nobody Wants to Ask
Introduction
There are subjects one approaches academically, and there are subjects one approaches with the uncomfortable advantage of personal experience. For me, demonic confrontation belongs to the latter category. I have personally confronted what I understood to be demonic presence, and during that encounter I demanded a name,the response was that they were “Legion” and that they were “many.” I cannot reproduce this experience for a laboratory, or demand that a skeptical reader accept my interpretation merely because I experienced it. Nor do I need to. What I would like to focus on is how closely the language echoed an account recorded nearly two thousand years ago. When Jesus confronted the demoniac in Mark 5 and demanded a name, the answer was plurality: “My name is Legion: for we are many” (Mark 5:9). The Greek (onoma moi, “my name,” followed by polloi esmen, “we are many.”)
That memory is increasingly difficult for me to ignore while watching the West descend into profound confusion concerning whether a person is male or female. Among the more conspicuous linguistic features of modern gender ideology is the adoption by most of these individuals of plural-form they/them pronouns as markers of a nonbinary identity. While scripture does not directly teach that somebody using they/them pronouns is therefore possessed by demons. But Christians should not ignore patterns, avoid asking theological questions, or skip examining what our culture’s language reveals about its conception of humanity. Scripture repeatedly presents God as Creator, divider, namer, and establisher of order. Modern gender ideology increasingly asks man to detach identity from the created body and use it as subjective self-definition. The question before us is this: Why does biblical demonic imagery move toward fragmentation and plurality, while biblical creation moves toward distinction, coherence, and order, and what, if anything, should Christians learn from that contrast?
I. “My Name Is Legion: For We Are Many”
Mark 5 presents a disturbing encounter with the demonic. Jesus meets a man living among tombs, isolated from society, violent toward himself, extraordinarily difficult to restrain, and dominated by an unclean spirit. Christ asks: “What is thy name?” The response: “My name is Legion: for we are many” (Mark 5:9). One voice answers, yet that voice describes plurality. One human body stands before Christ, yet numerous demonic beings are subsequently distinguished from the man. Luke makes the point even more explicitly, explaining that the name Legion was used “because many devils were entered into him” (Luke 8:30). The term Legion evoked a Roman military formation, a multitude operating with collective purpose.
When I demanded a name from what I believed I was confronting, I encountered the same basic language: Legion; they were many. The thing that remains especially memorable is the collision between singular and plural identity. “My name” becomes “we are many.” The individual before Christ had not become biologically plural; rather, foreign spiritual personalities had imposed themselves upon him. And when Christ delivered him, Mark describes the restored man as sitting, clothed, and “in his right mind” (Mark 5:15). The narrative moves from domination and disorder toward restoration.
That biblical pattern does not give Christians permission to point at every gender-confused person and shout “Legion!” The Christian enemy is not the confused person: “we wrestle not against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12).
But compassion does not require intellectual blindness. Scripture gives Christians categories of creation and distortion, order and disorder, truth and deception. Genesis presents humanity as embodied creatures (“male and female created he them” – Genesis 1:27) whose identity begins with God’s creative act. The demonic repeatedly seeks to distort what God establishes.
So when a civilization begins teaching people that the sexed body need not define male or female identity, that internal perception may supersede created embodiment, and that even basic language must be reconstructed around those claims, Christians are should ask theological questions about the direction of the culture. The significant parallel with Legion is not a magical property hidden inside the English pronoun they, but the broader biblical contrast between an identity received from the Creator and an identity fractured or reconstructed apart from Him. That is a considerably more serious question than pronouns, and considerably harder to dismiss.
II. “Male and Female Created He Them”: Identity Begins with the Creator
Any Christian discussion of sex and identity must begin somewhere more authoritative than feelings, fashion, politics, or whichever terminology was added to the corporate HR manual last Tuesday. It must begin in Genesis. “So God created man in his own image…male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The Hebrew terms zakar and neqevah identify male and female respectively. Genesis 2 then develops the distinction bodily: woman is formed as woman and brought to man, establishing both differentiation and complementarity. Most importantly, Jesus appeals directly to this creation account when discussing marriage: “he which made them at the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4). Christ apparently missed the seminar explaining that Genesis had become an outdated “social construct.”
Biblical anthropology therefore begins with received identity. Before Adam determines anything about himself, God has created him. Before Eve defines herself, God has formed her. Their bodies are not incidental containers carrying some supposedly more authentic identity hidden inside. Christianity is profoundly embodied. God forms man from dust (Genesis 2:7); sexual union joins husband and wife as “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24); Christ assumes an actual human body; bodily resurrection stands at the center of Christian hope; and Paul consequently declares, “your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost” and “ye are not your own” (1 Corinthians 6:19). The Christian body is neither meaningless biological equipment nor raw material awaiting psychological reinterpretation.
That places Christianity on a collision course with any philosophy maintaining that subjective identity possesses authority to redefine the significance of the sexed body. This does not mean every person experiencing gender dysphoria is dishonest, malicious, or demonically possessed. There are those who are genuinely mentally deranged (not of a sound mind). Truth requires refusing to declare every proposed explanation of suffering correct.
Here the issue is deeper than whether English permits singular they. It does, and has for centuries in contexts where a person’s sex is unknown or unspecified. The theological dispute concerns something entirely different: Who possesses authority to define the human person? Christianity answers: the Creator. Modern expressive individualism increasingly answers: the self.
And that is where disorder begins. Once the internal self becomes sovereign, the body can be treated as negotiable evidence. Male and female cease being realities to receive and become identities to accept, reject, combine, or transcend. Christianity moves in the opposite direction. We do not discover freedom by escaping created reality but by rightly ordering ourselves within it. The first question of Christian identity is therefore “What did God make me?” Until that question is put back in the proper order, no quantity of newly minted terminology will resolve the confusion.
III. “They/Them”: When Grammar Becomes a Declaration of Identity
We need to dispose of one weak argument before making the stronger one. The word they has been used in English with singular reference for centuries. Chaucer employed forms of singular they, and writers including Shakespeare used similar constructions. Even the King James Bible contains constructions that function comparably when referring to an indefinite person. So the argument cannot always be, “They is grammatically plural; therefore anyone using it for one person is demonic.” That would be linguistically simplistic, and theologically embarrassing. When someone says, “Somebody left their umbrella,” nobody needs an exorcist. The sex of the unknown umbrella-owner simply has not been specified.
Contemporary identity-based they/them usage, however, makes a different claim. Here the pronoun is deliberately chosen because an individual no longer identifies exclusively as a man or woman. But language also communicates ideas, and Christians are perfectly entitled to examine those ideas. In this case, the significant development is the proposition about human identity that the pronoun can be employed to express: that one’s internal conception of self can take precedence over the male-female distinction embodied in biological sex.
In Mark 5, the unsettling feature is not so much that demons happened to use a plural pronoun. It is the strange movement between singular and plural: “My name is Legion: for we are many.” The biblical narrative depicts plurality because multiple spirits are present. Does modern nonbinary identity hint that multiple demons inhabit one body?
This concerns unity, identity, and authority. Biblical anthropology presents the human as an embodied whole whose created nature precedes his subjective interpretation of himself. Modern identity theory reverses that hierarchy: the internal declaration is authoritative, while the body must be linguistically (and sometimes medically) reinterpreted accordingly. The self increasingly has become both creature and creator.
Scripture warns repeatedly against exchanging created truth for self-authorized alternatives. “Every man did that which was right in his own eyes”. Christianity instead calls the believer to deny himself (Luke 9:23), bring thoughts into obedience to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5), and receive even his body as belonging to God (1 Corinthians 6:19–20).
So language can reveal theology. When language becomes a vehicle for declaring that subjective identity outranks created reality, Christians should examine what is being confessed rather than obediently pretending that only grammar is at stake. Legion’s “we are many” is an indicator that gender ideology is demonic. It provides a haunting biblical image of why Christians should take questions of identity, plurality, and spiritual disorder considerably more seriously than our culture does.
IV. Confusion Is Not a Christian Virtue
Christianity has never treated confusion as an enlightened destination. Paul writes, “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33). The broader biblical pattern is unmistakable. Creation begins with God imposing distinction and order: light from darkness, waters above from waters below, sea from dry land, and finally male and female. Throughout Scripture, God names, separates, defines, and establishes boundaries. Biblical order ultimately possesses a structure established by God rather than invented by us.
The rapid expansion of contemporary gender categories therefore deserves serious examination. Pew Research Center reported in 2025 that 5.6% of U.S. adults identified as transgender or nonbinary, rising to 9.1% among adults younger than thirty. (pewresearch.org) Such numbers establish that contemporary understandings of identity have shifted substantially, especially among younger generations. Christians should be investigating such a transformation while understanding the cause.
Scripture gives us spiritual discernment. Paul warns that Christian struggle ultimately extends beyond “flesh and blood” to spiritual powers (Ephesians 6:12), while John commands believers to “try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1). A Christian worldview necessarily asks whether ideas conform to God’s created order.
A confused person is not the enemy. A suffering person is not the enemy. Someone experiencing profound discomfort concerning his or her sex deserves compassion, patience, truth, and human dignity. But compassion does not require Christians to sanctify confusion. Jesus showed compassion toward people without pretending their belief, desire, or behavior was therefore good.
The West’s deeper crisis is consequently not pronouns. It is authority. Does reality correct our perception, or must reality be redefined until it affirms our perception? Christianity answers that creation possesses meaning because a Creator precedes us. “It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves” (Psalm 100:3). That sentence may be among the most radically countercultural declarations Christians can make today. We are creatures before we are self-interpreters. And when subjective identity contradicts created reality, Christianity commands us to bring the self back into alignment with the One who made it.
V. Compassion Without Capitulation
. Every person standing before us (male, female, confused, confident, rebellious, wounded, agreeable, obnoxious, or otherwise) is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Scripture commands Christians to speak “the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15), to demonstrate gentleness, and to remember that our ultimate struggle is “not against flesh and blood” (Ephesians 6:12). Consequently, the young person identifying as nonbinary is not your enemy. Neither is the coworker demanding they/them pronouns. And Christians should be bold in proclaiming the truth.
But Christian compassion has been badly redefined if it requires us to affirm every person’s interpretation of himself. Jesus loved people without surrendering truth to their self-perception. Christianity teaches that all of us possess desires, thoughts, impulses, and interpretations that must be corrected rather than celebrated. “If any man will come after me,” Christ says, “let him deny himself” (Luke 9:23). That command is devastating to the modern doctrine of expressive individualism because it places Christ there. Every Christian eventually discovers something within himself that must be denied, disciplined, reordered, or crucified.
When Christ encountered the man in Mark 5, He did something important: He distinguished the man from what tormented him. Jesus did not treat the afflicted man’s condition as his authentic identity. The demons were driven away; the man remained. Afterward he was found clothed and “in his right mind” (Mark 5:15). What if dysphoria is demonic possession, and Christians should confront those demons? Would that not illustrate a profoundly Christian principle: loving a person does not require affirming everything operating within that person’s experience as constitutive of who he truly is.
The church therefore needs a rebuke of cowardice.. We can pray, reason, teach, counsel, and love while continuing to confess that God created mankind male and female. The Christian response is hopeful: You are God’s creature. Your life has meaning because He made you. Your body is not meaningless. Your identity is not something you must manufacture from nothing. And the answer to confusion is reconciliation with the Creator who knew what He was doing when He made you.
Conclusion: We Are Not Our Own Creators
So, does identifying as they/them mean someone is possessed by demons? Perhaps. I have personally confronted what I understood to be demonic presence, demanded a name, and heard the language of plurality: Legion; they were many. Long before my experience, Mark recorded the same unsettling declaration: “My name is Legion: for we are many” (Mark 5:9). Scripture presents demonic influence in Mark 5 alongside domination, disorder, and a disturbing collision of singular and plural voices, while Christ’s intervention produces liberation and restoration. Genesis, meanwhile, presents human identity beginning not with autonomous self-definition but with divine creation: “male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The Christian should therefore resist cowardice. We should ask whether a civilization increasingly uncertain about something as fundamental as male and female is moving toward greater understanding of creation, or further confusion about it.
Ultimately, this article is about the ancient question beneath every rebellion against created order: Who gets to say what man is? Christianity’s answer is uncompromising. We did not create ourselves. We do not own ourselves. We do not possess sovereign authority to redefine ourselves according to every internal perception that demands recognition. “It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves” (Psalm 100:3). Christ does not call us to discover an identity immune from contradiction; He calls us to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him (Luke 9:23). That command applies to every one of us. So when Christians encounter gender confusion, our response should be confrontation of the underlying evil. Do not lie about creation merely because telling the truth is socially unacceptable. The Christian answer to a fractured conception of identity is restoration beneath the authority of the Creator. The demons in Mark said, “We are many.” Christians should be very careful about which voice teaches them how to understand humanity.