A Christian Defense of the Gender Identities of Transgender Persons

This post is a collected and edited piece defending the the legitimacy of transgender identities. While the title is, I think, still accurate and I stand by the contents, I want to clarity two things before presenting the essay. First, this is a revised, edited and expanded manuscript (the original series from which it was taken can still be found HERE), since writing the original series, I left Evangelicalism (I am now an Anabaptist) and I came out as a trans woman; second, this essay intentionally limits the arguments to those premises and hermeneutics which are (or at least were several years ago) taken to be acceptable and orthodox within Evangelical circles. I believe that the case for recognizing the gender identities of trans people is possible from within an Evangelical frame of mind and this essay sets out to do just that. As such please read the following as a series of arguments which I very much believe to be valid (I refuse to make arguments that I don’t think should be convincing) but which are not necessarily representative of the full range or nuance of my own current beliefs as an Anabaptist Christian regarding transness.

Introduction

As we begin to explore the question of trans identities it is important to keep a few things in mind:

1. There is a real orthopathic and theological problem involved in commenting on the “status” of any group of persons. As a rule, we are certainly not called on to comment on the overall salvation (in or out?) status of anyone.* Furthermore, the project runs the very real risk of treating trans persons as a riddle to be solved rather than as persons to be loved. I will do my best to avoid both, always acknowledging that it is before God that a person stands or falls and that both Truth and Love preclude treating persons as objects or problems to be solved.

2. Despite what many Christians of the internet seem to believe, there is no established or traditional position with regard to transgender persons.

3. There is, at best, only one Bible passage which address transgender questions directly and that one really only addresses crossdressing, a single question with only a tenuous relationship to transgender persons, as we will see.

4. The overall “question” about transgender people is so vague that it can be frustrating and difficult determine what people are often saying.

5. Even the crucial terms in the debate - “gender” and “sex” - are incredibly difficult to define as both ultimately arise out of gestalt impressions based on lists (cultural and biological respectively) which vary from one person to another.

6. Many of the Christians who have chosen to put their views on the internet have apparently failed to do adequate research which has resulted in confusing generalities and some really unfortunate misinformation. For example: If a Christian blogger posts that they “don’t believe in transsexuals” what are they actually claiming? Do they oppose gender recognition surgery? Hormone replacement therapy? The affirmation of transgender people in their self-perceived gender identities? The idea of a “gender spectrum”? That people who identify along third or non-gendered lines are making nonsense claims? Do they not believe that people experience gender dysphoria or that people do not have an internal sense of their own self? Are they claiming that it is sinful to disagree with society over one’s gender or that it is only sinful to act on that disagreement? The list of questions goes on.

 
In an attempt to clarify some of these ambiguities, let me start with some working definitions (not necessarily the best definitions but, I think, the most common) and then present a hypothetical situation to use as a starting point:

Sex: I will be using this term to refer to a person’s biological makeup as it is relevant to determining their overall designation by society. In western society it is generally determined at birth first by a person’s primary sex characteristics, then (if those are inconclusive) on the basis of their chromosomes (XX, XY, XXY etc..) or later by their hormone levels and attendant sensitivity to those hormone levels.

Gender: I will be using gender to refer to a person’s personal and social identity as it relates to their designation (by themselves or by others) as a man, a woman or some other gender or non-gender option.

So, imagine that you are the pastor of a church which has no explicit position regarding transgender persons, and that one of your parishioners, a 19 year old college student named Bob, comes to you and claims to be a trans woman. Over the course of the conversation you find out that Bob has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria by a licensed psychologist and plans to begin hormone replacement therapy within the next few weeks (Bob has been working with this psychologist for over a year now), and intends to begin living as a woman immediately. Bob hopes to eventually have a number of surgical procedures in relation to this decision, and would like for you to begin referring to her using she/her pronouns, calling her Wanda—she has just begun the process of having her name legally change—and is asking you to treat her like any other woman in your congregation. And before we go on, I should clarify that I am making this story as cut-and-dried as possible, many transgender people have far more complex stories than this.

Is there then a necessary (Biblically mandated) response to Wanda’s request? I intend to address that question over the course of this essay, looking first at the broad theological and philosophical questions, then examining the Biblical passage(s) relevant to the question, followed by a look at the longer term implications of my conclusions, and finally addressing potential objections and concerns.

Broad Theological and Philosophical Questions

In the scenario I suggested above, Wanda has both a claim and a request which raise three questions: Is Wanda’s claim meaningful (is it possible in principle that Wanda is correct in her claim)? Is Wanda’s claim true? And would the fulfillment of Wanda’s request be sinful?

It is clear to me that Wanda’s claim is meaningful. People broadly experience themselves as having a gender. Even cisgender¹ folk will usually express significand discomfort at the idea of being forced to present and be perceived in a way that doesn’t reflect their deeply held, gendered sense of self. As a matter of faith, I believe that at the death of my body, my self will persist in a non-corporeal form awaiting the resurrection of the body. To quote the Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, “Sex is between the ears before it is between the legs. We have sexual souls.” and “Rather, in every soul there is—to use Jungian terms—anima and animus, femaleness and maleness; just as in the body, one predominates but the other is also present. If the dominant sex of soul is not the same as that of the body, we have a sexual misfit, a candidate for a sex change operation of body or of soul, earthly or Heavenly. Perhaps Heaven supplies such changes just as it supplies all other needed forms of healing.”²

Now I suppose the claim that we humans have a gender (or as Kreeft puts it, “sexual soul”) which is ontically distinguishable from the sex of our bodies, is one that can be attacked on philosophical grounds. A strict materialist, for instance, would deny that we have souls at all³. But there is certainly no direct Biblical passage which would immediately contradict the claim. Consider for following propositions:

1. Persons are comprised of both soul and body

2. Souls are sexed (masculine and feminine are meaningful descriptions of souls)

3. Bodies are sexed

So far as I can tell these should not be problematic claims for even the most conservative Evangelical; after all the Bible uses gendered language when it speaks of the incorporeal dead⁴. Yet, if you agree with these three propositions⁵, it is not, in principle, problematic to claim that a person’s soul and body may not correspond. Certainly you will find nothing in the Bible to contradict the claim as possible.

So Wanda’s claim is meaningful, but is it true? I have shown that Wanda’s claim is possible and I maintain⁶ that the Bible does not forbid her conclusion. This means that as her pastor, we must decide whether or not to trust her account of her soul. Given that she is the only person (other than God) who is able to experience (and thus have direct knowledge of) her soul directly, she is the only person who can verify her own claims, the hypothetical⁷ pastor will probably feel a bit like Peter or Susan when they went to talk to the old Professor about Lucy’s claim that she had discovered another world in one of his wardrobes:

‘Logic!’ said the Professor half to himself. ‘Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.’

Just as with Lucy, either Wanda is telling lies, and does not actually experience herself as a woman, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. If the pastor’s experience with Wanda, suggests that she is not a liar, then simple Christian charity rules out that possibility. And ruling out that possibility brings us to familiar ground since many of the arguments Christians make against the recognition of transgender people in their perceived gender identities are based on a claim that transgender people are somehow deluded and insane. One sees many references to the fact that what is currently described in the psychological literature as “gender dysphoria” was previously categorized as “gender identity disorder”⁸.

But the claim that Wanda is insane is unsustainable. Transgender people do not behave in the ways that delusional people do. In general, people suffering from gender dysphoria exhibit exactly the symptoms psychologists would expect from people who are forced to play an alien role for an extended period of time while facing the threat of alienation from their communities. They do not exhibit the symptoms and behaviors associated with people who believe themselves to be Napoleon Bonaparte or a boiled egg. In short, transgender people do not act like crazy people, they act like incredibly stressed and oppressed sane people. The only “crazy” thing about trans persons is the fact that they claim a gender at odds with their physical sex but since that is specifically the claim we are investigating, it would be begging the question⁹ to take that as evidence of insanity or delusion.

Which means that the pastor is compelled by logic and charity, to conclude that Wanda is telling the truth, that she is a person with a woman’s soul whose body is masculine¹⁰.

With this established, the law of Christian liberty¹¹, together with the abundant evidence that Wanda will be psychologically harmed by a refusal to recognize and relate to her as a woman¹², suggests that the sinful choice would be for our hypothetical pastor to refuse Wanda’s request. If our pastor is a complementarian, refusal would be further problematized by the fact that it would effectively force Wanda to act against her “proper gender role”.

Exegesis

In this section I intend to address the Bible passages which directly pertain to the validity of the claims of transgender persons vis. their gender identities.

The Bible does not speak directly to the validity of the claims of transgender persons vis. their identities.

Well that was easy.

The closest I have been able to find is the prohibition in Deuteronomy 22 against a man wearing a women's clothing or a woman wearing a man's clothing. It is sandwiched between a command to help your neighbor if you see that his Ox has fallen down in the road and a prohibition against taking a mother bird along with eggs or young out of any nests you happen to find lying around.

Putting aside questions of Christian consistency in the implementation of Dueteronomical commands, the only way this passage would be relevant to Wanda would be if it were used to demand that she stop wearing any of her "Bob" clothing immediately  since Wanda's claim that she IS a woman would require her to avoid wearing any man clothes. I hope this point is clear; as I have demonstrated in the previous section, trans people are their identified gender for the purposes of Scriptural commands and Christian ethics. So from a Christian perspective, Wanda is not a man dressing as a woman, she is a woman who is finally able stop dressing as a man.

And that's about all I have. In researching this post I went and re-read the Southern Baptist Convention's recent Resolution on Transgender Identity and looked into the Scripture passages they use to support their wrong opinion. Their Scriptural support was decidedly sparse and when I examined the passages I found that they were essentially passages which could be used to support a gender complementarian theology but that they had nothing which actually directly supports a prohibition of recognizing the gender identities of transgender folks.

I will allow the brevity of this section to speak for itself and in the next section I will offer an analysis and refutation of the common arguments Christians make against the recognition of trans persons in their gender identities.

Refuting Common Arguments and the Oblique Passages

Introductory note: I have worked as hard as I know how to avoid creating a straw-man argument for the non-recognizing position. I have endeavored to present as fair (while still critical) a representation of those exegetical arguments I have been able to find as possible, but am conscious of the fact that those arguments are (in my understanding) remarkably weak. I should point out that non-affirming folk also make more general theological-anthropological and philosophical-anthropological arguments and that I have not addressed them in this post. I will do my best to address them in future posts. In the meantime the appendix at the end of this section provides a response to the most comprehensive list I have seen of Biblical texts used against trans people. I would encourage you to post any arguments I have missed in the comments box where I will make every attempt to respond to them in  a timely manner. 

From what I have seen, the arguments against recognizing a trans person's identity generally boil down primarily to Genesis 1 and 2 (the creation account) and occasionally utilize Psalm 139:13 (God having created David while David was still in utero) and usually Matthew 19:4 (where Jesus quotes Genesis 1 as support for an argument about marriage and divorce). That is certainly not a whole lot to go on but it pretty much sums up the passages the anti-trans-identity Christians routinely cite in defense of their position (if you are in this group and there is an important passage you think I am missing please bring it to my attention; I am drawing predominantly on the work of Albert Mohler and Denny Burke). The key texts here are:

So God created man in His own image; He created him in the image of God; He created them male and female. (Genesis 1:27)

and

For it was You who created my inward parts; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. (Psalm 139:13)

The argument that is then constructed from these passages and—in the case of the Genesis text—their surrounding context, is that since God created humanity dimorphically (male and female), it must be God's intention that humanity restrict itself to a gender binary as any attempt to embrace a third (or fourth or fifth) sex or gender category (the passage is generally taken to refer to both sex and gender after an attack on any possibility of distinction between the two categories is made without reference to Scripture) would constitute an attempt to move beyond God's plan for the species.

Now I realize that the argument so far, regardless of how good or bad it is, doesn't actually speak to our hypothetical Wanda's situation. Wanda, like many trans persons in America today, isn't particularly interested in identifying or being recognized as non-binary¹³; she identifies as, and would like to be recognized as, a woman. However I think it is worth stopping here for a second to point out that the non-recognizing crew are presently deriving their conclusions from a theology built on the perceived implications of a mere one to three passages.

Back to the argument: Having tried to establish that God's sexually dimorphic design for the species implies God's intention that sex and gender remain binary in human society, the argument then moves to assert that since God is the one designing humanity, and (per Psalm 139) individual human bodies, we need to read the morphology of our bodies at birth (including genitalia and chromosomal makeup) as prescriptive of our sex and gender identities (remember that the necessary congruence of sex and gender is stated but not defended on any particular Scriptural basis). The experience of gender dysphoria and the physical non-binary morphology of intersex people is explained as a result of creation's fall into a sinful and broken state. Thus, the reasoning goes, when there is an experienced incongruence of sex and gender (or of sex morphology to conform to a dimorphic pattern), the goal is to help the afflicted individual achieve restoration to the binary ideal.

In principle this ought to leave open the possibility that the tension could be relieved through hormone replacement therapy and sexual reassignment surgery thereby bringing the sex into alignment with the gender. However it is very important to folks who are thinking along these lines to insist that these actions would constitute an attack on healthy organs and bodily processes and that the only legitimate way of restoring the individual to the desired pre-fall state, is to take them through therapies (either religious or psychological) which will help them to re-orient their gender identities in order to bring them into congruence with their physiological sex. This is often supported by an appeal to a semi-Thomist "natural law" idea (pointing to reproduction as the healthy purpose of genitalia) while some theological accusations of the Gnostic heresy (which, among other things, denied the moral importance of the body to spiritual development) are occasionally deployed.

If all of this seems weak, I should point out that it is generally bolstered by a number of ancillary, but non-Scriptural arguments. Transgender people are generally compared to folks suffering from mental delusions in an attempt to account for the testimony of trans people. Thomistic natural law theory is not infrequently employed to make teleological arguments about the "proper" purpose of the body. Examples of mental illness are emphasized while examples of physical illness are generally downplayed (the mind is generally taken to be more fully subject to brokenness and the fall than the body is) and, in the worst cases, (certainly not all) emotional appeals to disgust, pity, and fear are combined with hand wringing over the advance of "liberal" thought and the advance of "secular society". But these arguments, strong or not, are not part of the exegetical conversation and so ought to be put aside for the purpose of this portion of the discussion.

What we are left with is then the argument that God created humanity as a sexually dimorphic species (male and female), that any deviation for a gender or sex binary must therefore be a result of human brokenness in the fall, and that restoration consists in changing the individual's mind to conform with their genitalia or in a supernatural relief of the individual's dysphoria. This argument is flawed in each major step.

First, while the Genesis and Matthew passages could be legitimately read as a confirmation that humanity began as a dimorphic species, there is nothing inherently prescriptive in those passages (I encourage the reader to go check them out). As Megan DeFranza points out in her excellent book Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God :

Reading the Genesis account in light of the larger Biblical narrative, we are able to affirm the goodness of sex difference as the fountainhead of human difference without requiring the male-female pattern to become the paradigmatic form of the other. (loc.4517-4545 Kindle Edition)

Essentially, the Genesis account doesn't set up male-female as the pattern to which the species must perpetually conform but the origin from which the diversity of humanity is derived. This is made especially clear when we notice that there are all sorts of wonderful creatures and species which do not fit into the Genesis categories. As DeFranza points out elsewhere, bats, amphibians, platypuses, sunsets, and fungi all arguably fall between various Genesis categories and yet they remain "good". At the very least, the claim that Adam and Eve ought to be seen as the paradigm for human sexed-ness and gendered-ness rather than as the fountainhead is a legitimate exegetical debate.

Furthermore, there is Biblical warrant to conclude that redemption from a fallen state is more likely to look like a progression towards something new than a return to what was before. In term of Biblical narrative: humanity is restored to a city, not a garden; marriage is not restored in the Kingdom, but replaced with something else, and eunuchs are not (apparently) healed to become procreative, but given "a name better than sons and daughters" [Isaiah 56:4-5]. In short there is no biblical warrant to assume that healing the brokenness of the fall must look like a return rather than a progression to something new. Nor is there Biblical warrant to conclude that being intersex or non-binary is in any way a form of brokenness or damage rather than part of the diversity that God has blessed as humanity has expanded beyond our first genetic patterns. Since the first humans humanity has been combining, re-combining, and changing our phenotypes in all sorts of wonderful ways. Think about the great variety of skin, hair, and eye colors; heights, muscle masses, and fat distribution patterns; facial and body shapes and physical abilities that have all proliferated over the course of our existence as a species, is it a blessing or a curse that there are more than two basic models of human appearance?

But even if the first points are granted, the third falls flat as an argument against recognizing Wanda as a woman. Even if humanity is necessarily reducible to a sex and gender binary such that any apparent deviation from dimorphic humanity must be credited to the brokenness of the fall, that does not imply that restoration must require changing a person's mind to conform to their body. It is just as possible, and arguably more likely given the existence of transgender Christians, that restoration to a gender binary would consist in conforming the body to the mind. This seems to be the position of Peter Kreeft who argues that gender dysphoria (he doesn't use that term) might be reasonably healed by a "sex change" either surgically on earth or supernaturally "in heaven [theological sic.]".

Dr. Peter Kreeft says “Trans Rights”

Ultimately the oblique exegetical argument seems to be almost as weak as the direct exegetical argument.

Positive Arguments

I'd like to begin by summarizing my argument to date. Using the hypothetical example of Wanda, an individual you (the hypothetical pastor) knew first as "Bob" who comes to you and announces that she (whom you originally knew as "he") is in fact transgender, has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and has decided to transition to a more female typical body. We have been asking whether you ought to affirm Wanda in her female gender identity. I have argued first that there is no logical reason that we ought to deny the possibility of Wanda's claim, and that we ought to trust her. I then took two posts to look at what the Bible has to say on the subject (one looking at directly applicable passages and one looking at passages which might infer a negative conclusion) and I concluded that the Bible does not condemn or disallow the possibility that Wanda is correct. So we have established that Wanda's claim is possible and that it is not contrary to the Bible. But now I want to take a look at whether the Bible might affirm Wanda's claim.

1. The fundamental role of Love

Jesus is very clear in teaching that the most basic principle from which all of God's commands are derived, is the dual command to love God and to love our neighbor [Matthew 22] (and since Jesus includes even "enemies" in this category we are talking about loving everyone). One basic aspect of love is that it seeks the good of its object [much of 1 Cor 13, Philippians 2:3, John 15:13, Romans 13:10, 1 John 3:17 etc...]. Of course most Christians are agreed on this. The difficulty comes in figuring out what it means to seek a particular person's good in a particular situation. So far I have tried to show that Wanda's claim is inherently possible and does not contradict any of the direct teachings of the Bible. This, provided we are interpreting correctly, can work as a short cut to letting us know when certain things are or are not good for us. Our next step in light of the lack of biblical proscriptions, is to turn to the best science and research we have to ask whether an affirmation of their gender identities is the best for transgender people. Here the evidence is clear and rapidly growing stronger. Transgender children who are accepted and affirmed in their gender identities are as healthy as cisgender children (in stark contrast to transgender children who are raised in non-affirming environments who face horribly elevated risks of suicide, depression, anxiety and other harmful effects). Identity affirming treatments like hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and sex reassignment surgery (SRS) are shown to effectively alleviate gender dysphoria when applied according to WPATH's (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) standards of care. So affirming Wanda's gender identity is likely to have a positive impact on her mental health and is not contrary to any teaching in scripture. It is therefore the loving thing to do.

2. We are not to impose heavy burdens on people

Jesus claims that His charge is "light" [Matthew 11:28-30]. In contrast to those who would kill, steal, and destroy, Jesus claims that He came so that we could have abundant life [John 10]. When we look at applying these principles to the situation of transgender people, the application is pretty straightforward. When trans people are not accepted in their communities and/or have the legitimacy of their gender identity claims rejected or denied; when transgender people are subjected to "reparative therapy" and forced to conform to the gender identity and role society has based on their body, the load is far to often, heavy beyond what they can bear. Common outcomes are depression, anxiety, and death. (Check out studies here, and here)

3. Our bodies will all be different one day

We only get a picture of one post-resurrection body in the Bible, Jesus' body. What is particularly relevant to this conversation is that Jesus' body after the resurrection is significantly different from His body prior to the resurrection. He is able to configure his form so that even close friends don't recognize Him [John20, Luke 24], enters a locked room without anyone realizing it and seems to be able to teleport (or something) [Luke 24, Mark 16]. In theological terms, Jesus' post-resurrection body has been glorified and is significantly different from His own body prior to the resurrection and from the bodies of Adam and Eve prior to the fall. For the great majority of Christians, it is an important doctrine that our bodies are going to be glorified as well as our souls, and from the few hints we have, that glorification seems to indicate a degree of plasticity in the body. Given the fact that the process which brings us (more or less depending on how reformed you are) closer to glorification (sanctification) is happening in the present, it is worth asking whether transgender folk who work to bring their bodies into closer alignment with their gender identity are finding a greater degree of wholeness which would read theologically as part of the sanctification of their bodies.

4. Christian Love is not epistemically arrogant

The second half of 1 Corinthians 13 (verses 8-12) is a reminder that we do not know everything and placed there, it should particularly remind us that we do not need to know everything in order to be loving. I think a lot of Christians feel somewhat paralyzed lately by a combination of the fact that the empirical evidence seems to pretty strongly suggest that transgender people will benefit most from having our gender identities affirmed, and the fact that many popular leaders of the evangelical movement are stating loudly that "transgenderism" is somehow sinful and that affirming transgender folks in their gender identities is tantamount to enabling a harmful delusion. I think it is really important to note that when Jesus [particularly in Matthew 23], Paul, James, and John speak about love they prefer the doing of actual, calculable good to others over the preservation of a theological speculation. I am inclined to think that evangelical America is so overwhelmed and with a fear of having the wrong theology that they are often prevented from doing the good that is there in front of them to do. Try bracketing the theological question "Is it sinful to affirm the gender identities of transgender people" for just a second and look at the question "Are transgender people better off when we affirm their gender identity?" Study after study show that they are (check some of them out here, here, here and here). So now bring those theological concerns back in, but bring them in together with the interpretive questions and exegetical complexities I have been raising throughout this series, and I think the picture might look a little different. If we begin by prioritizing love and admit to the complexity of interpreting the "relevant" passages of scripture, the clear call of the Bible is to do that which is best for transgender folk, without ruling out a full and encouraging affirmation of their gender identities.

When Jesus , Paul, James, and John speak about love they prefer the doing of actual, calculable good to others over the preservation of a theological speculation

In Conclusion

I hope (and on my good days, believe) that Christians of all stripes genuinely want to find the best, most effective way to love transgender people like Wanda. My reading of the current scientific, medical, and psychological data, and study of the relevant theology suggests that while (as my friend Michael Raburn is forever reminding the world) each person and situation is unique, we ought to be wide open to recognizing and affirming the gender identities of trans folk we meet. Before all else, we need to be for them. For their health, for their flourishing, for their dignity, and for their acceptance in our communities. Any conservative Christian will feel legitimately pressed to remind us that actions and attitudes which contradict any clear teachings of Scripture ought to be seen as non-loving for those involved since God has given us revelation in order for us to flourish (though flourishing often does not look like what many people might assume or what our cultures try to portray). As I believe I have shown though, a full affirmation of a transgender person's gender identity is clearly not in contradiction to any teachings of scripture and, while I would not presume to suggest that there is a one-size-fits-all response to any pastoral or relational questions, a welcoming, caring affirmation of their gender identity is very much on the table and, in my opinion, ought to be the default response of churches, pastors, and individual Christians.

Appendix: Responding to A Lot of Verses

After publishing the above essay as a series I got into a bit of a debate with a conservative college friend. It started as a conversation about whether or not the Bible has definitions for "male" and "female" but it inevitably got into the identities of trans people today. It got me musing and poking around and led to my writing this appendix. So far as I can tell it is the most comprehensive response I have ever written to verses which are used to deny the identities of trans folks, so I thought the back and forth might merit its own post. This is an unedited transcript of that conversation which took place in February of 2014

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Context: The conversation below references a hypothetical (but common enough) scenario which I proposed in Part 1 of my series. In the scenario, Wanda is a person who was assigned male at birth and who has recently come out as a trans woman after being diagnosed with gender dysphoria. In this scenario Wanda has approached her pastor asking that her gender identity be recognized in their church.

Update: For the two most commonly cited passages check out my extended response in the aforementioned post. One final passage which I frequently see referenced in this conversation is Romans 1. While I have written on Romans 1 in my Christian defense of LGB relationships series, I elected not to include it here because it has no bearing on gender identity, and is not really even referenced by non-affirming theologians. Instead it is brought up by people who are unclear on the distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity.

_________________________________________________________________

Wow Kris, thanks for the thorough and Biblically founded response. While I still disagree with you I hope you realize that with your list and attendant brief interpretation of each of the passages you cited, this blog post may now contain one of the most thoroughly defended (in terms of quantity of Scriptural references and attendant interpretation) defenses of your position in publication. Denny Burke may be close with the brief paper he submitted to the SBC when he got them to pass a position denouncing SRS, but I haven't been able to locate many others.

All of that said, I think my reaction to your list and exegesis can be distilled to a few points so I will group my responses where appropriate while responding to individual passages/interpretation where you are making distinct points. Before we get to a point-by-point response though, let me address your first objection, that “I have presented to you clearly from the Bible that God has given an objective method to determine Wanda's gender. It is quite simply that you have rejected this method.” It is not specifically your understanding of the Bible I am rejecting here - though I suspect we do have different methodological ideas about how it ought to be interpreted - rather I certainly do reject your conclusion that the Bible provides “an objective method to determine Wanda’s gender” that has been a large and unhidden part of my thesis from the get go. I believe that the Bible does not give warrant for a Christian to conclude that Wanda is wrong about her gender, nor do I believe that the Bible provides Christians with an objective method even for determining a particular person’s sex, much less the person’s gender. Let me remind you that this does not constitute a disagreement about the authority of the Bible but about your interpretation of what the Bible is and isn’t saying. The most obvious piece of evidence on this issue is the existence of those intersex persons who do not have unambiguously male or female genitalia. As the Bible does not give a rubric for determining the sex or gender of intersex persons, it cannot be true that the Bible provides some sort of universalizable method for the determination of particular genders. If you were to restrict yourself to the issue of Wanda, then the rubric “those born with typically male genitalia are, ipso facto, male in sex and gender and vice versa for female genitalia” might be able to apply but, as I will demonstrate below, I don’t think that rubric can be legitimately found in the Bible.

Kris: Genesis 1:27-28 "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth'... " In order to be fruitful and multiply, one must have the proper equipment. God does not separate sex gender in the beginning.

Genesis 7:3 "male and female, to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth." ... same.

My Response: The command to be fruitful and multiply is one given to humanity but not to individual persons. If it were given to individual persons then Jesus would have to be classified as a sinner since He did not procreate. Thus, and more directly to your point, humanity does contain plenty of the “proper equipment” but that does not require that any one person have said “equipment” so the passage cannot be taken to indicate more (on this subject) than that God treats the male-female dichotomy as the means by which humanity is able to carry out this commission but does not imply that each and every human must be categorized according to this taxonomy, participate directly in the commission (indeed the mutual interdependence of the Church is fairly basic in Paul), or identify their genitals with their gender. The fact that God does not explicitly separate sex and gender in the beginning is fundamentally irrelevant, there are all sorts of things God doesn’t do in the beginning which are perfectly fine things. The distinction between sex and gender would not have been relevant to the “be fruitful and multiply” commission so there is no reason to expect that God would have addressed in in this context.

Kris: Genesis 17:12 "He who is eight days old among you shall be circumcised. Every male throughout your generations" No separation of sex / gender. It would be illogical in light of this scripture.

Exodus 1:17 "But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live." It does not say "those who identify as male." No separation of sex / gender. It would be illogical in light of this scripture.

Leviticus 6:18 "Every male among the children of Aaron may eat of it, as decreed forever throughout your generations, from the LORD's food offerings." Not, "Every child of Aaron who identifies as a male." No separation of sex / gender. It would be illogical in light of this scripture.

Numbers 1:2-3 "Take a census of all the congregation of the people of Israel, by clans, by fathers' houses, according to the number of names, every male, head by head. 3 From twenty years old and upward" It does not say, "Count the ones who identify as male and identify as older than 20." No separation of sex / gender. It would be illogical in light of this scripture.

Numbers 26:62 "And those listed were 23,000, every male from a month old and upward." Same

My Response: Sure, sex and gender are not clearly distinguished in these passages, which makes sense given that the formal distinction is a fairly recent development, but I see no reason that they should be. What I think you are identifying here is the fact that there are commands and events in the Bible which are clearly sexed, gendered, or both. I cheerfully grant that (though I would point out in your Exodus example that the gendered command of which babies are to be killed is initiated by Pharaoh who is not representative of God’s view of things, particularly in this account). Then, if I am tracking your argument correctly, you want to suggest that such gendered and/or sexed language and commands in the Bible make no sense if we do not have access to a perfect, objective, and absolute method for determining a person’s gender or sex or both. It is this second point (which I must point out is an inference from the Biblical data not a direct data point itself) where I think you are wrong. In fact (and DeFranza has an excellent treatment of this so I recommend checking her book or some of her blog posts out for a scholarly, exegetical and historical treatment of this) OT Hebrews were actually critically aware of the fact that some passages contain gendered and/or sexed commands and were also aware that it is actually not always easy or possible to tell whether a those laws and commands do or don’t apply to a particular person. First it is clear that the commands work on the level of generalization (as nearly all laws do) so while the existence of unusual or non-typical cases does not invalidate generalized commands (as you seem to suggest they would) they do problematize attempts to demand a universalizable application of those generalized commands. Second, according to DeFranza, there is significant ancillary second temple Jewish evidence that ancient Hebrews worked to develop their own extra-biblical methods for determining which laws ought to apply to which people and in which ways.

So I would agree that folks with male-typical bodies were most likely treated as male in both sex and gender while folks with female-typical bodies were most likely treated as female in both sex and gender. That does not erase the possibility of a perfectly viable distinction between sex and gender, it only suggests that people were likely misgendered periodically due to a lack of awareness on the part of those applying the law. This might be problematic if it weren’t that humanity has a long history of misunderstanding ourselves and the universe and, for that reason, applying God’s law incorrectly. That God allows this is evident, why God allows this is profoundly difficult, touches on the problem of evil, and well beyond my scope. I think the Psalmnists, the author of Ecclesiastes, and Job are probably the place to start.

Kris: Deuteronomy 4:16 "beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female..." Makes no sense in your world.

My Response: This makes perfect sense to me. I am not clear what you think would baffle me. The passages says not to make carved images in the forms of any figure, male or female. While this is fairly clearly a command not to make idols and it provides an emphasis with reference to “male or female” which would have been the most common sort of idols of the day, the ancient near east also had a number of idols depicting intersex or hermpahroditic (including the eponymous Hermaphroditus). If you think the meaning of Deuteronomy 4:16 includes the prohibition of making such idols then it would be inconsistent to imply that the text reduces all gender and sex categories to the dimorphous pair.

Kris: Deuteronomy 22:5 "A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD your God." Even those women who ignore cultural norms are "an abomination." If Wanda dresses like a woman and is an abomination to God, how much more so if she changes her physical nature! No separation of sex / gender. It would be illogical in light of this scripture.

My Response: I have already dealt with this in Part 3. Ignoring questions about the application of OT law in the present, the relevance of this passage to Wanda’s situation depends on the answer to the larger question of Wanda’s gender. To use it as an evidence against the possibility that Wanda is a woman would be circular as Wanda would only be violating this verse if she is, in fact, a man. And since that conclusion is what is being contested, the applicability of the verse must be bracketed till the conclusion is settled.

Kris: !!!!!!!!!!!!! Deuteronomy 23:1 "No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the LORD.!!!!!!!!!!!!! MALE ORGAN... if you are male, you will have this organ. This says exactly the opposite of what you are arguing. Even when the organ is cut off, they are still male. No mate [sic] what Wanda does, he is still male. No separation of sex / gender. It would be illogical in light of this scripture.

My Response: I find your conclusions here somewhat odd. The passage doesn’t (unless I am missing some nuance of Hebrew) even imply that “if you are male you will have this organ”. In fact, since even XY foetal humans don’t have male genitals until around the second trimester, you would seem to be requiring (in a way this passage certainly doesn’t) the conclusion that XY babies are not actually male until they acquire a penis and testicles. And you seem to contradict yourself here first saying that having a penis makes you male, then saying that someone whose penis has been cut off is still male. If you, perhaps see an equivalence between calling the penis or testicles a “male organ” and calling all penis-having people “male” that equivalence is false. Again you would be missing the way language actually works. The penis is called the male organs because having that organ is typical of male bodies, though there are men who do not have penises for a number of reasons. Language makes these associations based on general convergence (penis are strongly correlated with maleness) but does not establish a causal or necessary condition. Think about how a person might have a southerner’s taste for tea, without actually being a southerner.

Now I supposed I could see this passage being used to support the conclusion that a male to female transsexual individual who had been through sex reassignment surgery is thereby “cut off from the presence of the Lord” but that would be to ignore Isaiah 63:3-5 which promises a glorification of Eunuchs without making them procreation-capable male or female persons (they get a reward “better than sons or daughters”) and Act 8:36-39 where we see the Isaiah promise completed as, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, Phillip baptizes the Ethiopian eunuch thereby establishing in the Biblical witness that the eunuch is a part of the church.

Kris: Judges 21:11 "This is what you shall do: every male and every woman that has lain with a male you shall devote to destruction." No separation of sex / gender. It would be illogical in light of this scripture.
…

Old Testament Etc. Etc. The OT simply does not have the category you speak of.

My Response: My response to these last OT passages from you can probably also be read back onto my thoughts about several of the other passages you have listed. You seem to want to treat the phrase “male and female” as though it were put in the text to indicate that God has limited human sex expression to the two categories, or that a given person cannot transition from one category to the other. But neither of these conclusions hold, as I have said above, that simply isn’t how language works and in bringing that conclusion into your interpretation you are shifting from exegesis of what is necessarily in the text to an eisegetical “discovery” of anthropological theory hidden in mundane phrases. Even today we use the phrase “men and women” as a stand in for, or emphasis of, “everybody”. In the specific passage above the lack of a sex/gender separation is entirely unsurprising. What function would it serve? Frankly none.

Speaking more specifically to the claim that the OT doesn’t appear to make a distinction between sex and gender, as I have said above, I think that is likely (though I am not a Hebrew scholar). But it is also irrelevant. The absence of a thing in scripture is not a denial of the validity of that thing and all of the verses you have quoted retain meaning without having to make the distinction (though their application might have varied if the distinction had been realized at the time).

Kris: 1 Kings 16:11 "When he began to reign, as soon as he had seated himself on his throne, he struck down all the house of Baasha. He did not leave him a single male of his relatives or his friends." I don't believe he asked each person with male genitalia if they identified as a female or not. No separation of sex / gender. It would be illogical in light of this scripture.

My Response: I don’t imagine that they did ask. But the bible here is simply recording what did happen not commenting on gender/sex differentiation or the viability of transitioning. I would read this passage as saying that he killed everyone he took to be male, and that he succeeded in killing all of the male bodied persons. Again that doesn’t actually prove anything vis. sex/gender distinctions or transgender people.

Kris: Mark 10:6-8 "But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.' 7 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, 8 and they shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one flesh." It is impossible for Wanda to function in any way as a female in the way Jesus is defining male and female above. Jesus is clearly defining male and female in relation to physical orientation. He does not separate the two.

My Response: No, Jesus is talking about how marriage works (as is evident from the context - a question about divorce and the permanence of marriage) and citing the fact that God created the diversity of the original marriage as evidence that in marriage, God brings two distinct and separate beings into an indissoluble one-flesh bond. Wanda is (in principle) just as able to become one flesh with another person as a sterile cisgender woman is. “Becoming one flesh” is (to the extent it is rooted in physical interaction at all - a dubious assumption given the fact that severely handicapped people who are incapable of sex will marry on occasion without the church calling the legitimacy of their marriage into question) rooted in intimacy not procreation. I’m not really sure what you mean by “physical orientation” so maybe you could clarify that if I am missing your point.

Kris: 1 Corinthians 7:13-14 "If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. 14 For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy." Wanda simply does not fit the definition of woman here in scripture.

My Response: What part of the definition of “woman” does Wanda not fit? Unless you see marriage and procreation as necessary for a person to be fully a woman (and Paul would probably take issue with that since he thinks it’s better for virgins not to marry). Wanda is just as much able to follow this passage as any other unmarried and sterile Christian woman.

Kris:Galatians 4:4 "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law," Could God have chosen a man who identified as a woman to bare the Christ? This seems like a nonsensical question, but so does the idea that Wanda claims he is a woman. I'm not saying Wanda has to bare children to be a woman. I'm saying the Bible doesn't speak of womanhood apart from physical nature.

1 Thessalonians 5:3 "While people are saying, "There is peace and security," then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape." Same point. The Bible does not speak of womanhood apart from physical nature.

My Response: Your use of these two passages to suggest that “The Bible does not speak of womanhood apart from physical nature” strikes me as deeply problematic. Would you then argue that women who have died prior to the resurrection are no longer women? Also the Bible speaks of Mary and Martha, of Deborah and Jael, of Rahab and Ruth, of Priscilla and Junia, all without any apparent reference to their “physical nature”. The Bible refers to each of them as women but gives us little no information about their “physical nature”. At most we know that Rahab and Ruth had children (though in both cases we find that out well after we are first introduced to them), in the cases of Mary, Martha, Deborah, Jael, Priscilla, and Junia all we know is that they were women, we know nothing of their physicality beyond that. In terms of womanhood as a category, we certainly have less teaching but what we have is not at all always physical. Certainly the fact that women are physical (in the sense that they have bodies) is true but so are all persons, that does not seem to be relevant to Wanda who is also (in our hypothetical) possessed of a physical body.

Kris: 1 Peter 3:7 "Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered." She is a woman, which is determined by the "vessel" she is in. This is in direct contrast to what you are saying. You are saying Wanda is a woman based on her thinking. This verse says the opposite.

My Response: I actually haven’t rendered an opinion as to whether it is an immaterial soul, or a particular brain morphology (or both or neither) which makes Wanda a woman. Any of these is possible, but I don’t think that it is just “based on her thinking” that Wanda is a woman. Remember that Wanda does not (at the time of the hypothetical meeting with the hypothetical pastor) think that she has a typically female body, she knows that her bodily shape and chemistry is typically male. So it is important to remember that Wanda is not delusional (thinking her body has an appearance contrary to what it actually has) you can go back and check on the links in Part 2 for evidence of this. I am not saying that Wanda is a woman based on her thinking, I am saying that based on Wanda’s experience of herself (remember the trilemma from Part 2) we have reason to believe that Wanda’s account of herself as a woman is accurate since it is reasonable to believe that our maleness and femaleness is more than mere physicality (again per the arguments I laid out in Part 2) and God and then Wanda are the only persons with privileged information about the state of those parts of Wanda. I am neither a gnostic (believing the body is irrelevant) or a materialist (believing that we have no immaterial part). Wanda’s core femininity may rest in her brain structures or in her soul but in either case we have warrant to believe that it is real.

Kris: All this to say, you have yet to prove from scripture that Wanda's disillusioned mindset is in line with the way the Bible speaks of gender and sex. If you really are claiming that the Bible is your ultimate authority, you have to speak of gender and sex in light of that authority. Your argument, as it stands, rejects the Bible's authority by rejecting its clearly defined categories.

My Response: As I have stated a number of times, I am not trying to prove the positive validity of transgender identities from scripture, I don’t think scripture speaks to that directly. But I also don’t have to to conclude that transgender identities may well be valid and ought to be treated as such unless such a treatment can be demonstrated to contradict God’s revelation. You are forcing a false dichotomy between A: Scripture positively says that transgender identities are valid; and B: Scripture positively condemns the possibility of transgender identities. And have been treating my (fully admitted) inability to demonstrate A and an implicit validation of B where, in fact, I am claiming C: Scripture neither positively affirms transgender identities, nor positively condemns transgender identities, because the Bible never speaks directly to transgender identities but instead provides us with principles (love of neighbor being first among all principles when it comes to human interaction, but also principles indicating a diversity of physical/sexual types within the kingdom just to name a few) by which we can and ought to conclude that God does indeed affirm transgender identities.

What you are calling “[the Bible’s] clearly defined categories” I see as “the categories Kris has wrongly derived from a misinterpretation of Scripture." You are conflating the meaning of Scripture with your understanding of the meaning of Scripture. I am not questioning the authority of the Bible, but I am very much questioning the authority of your interpretation of the Bible.

1. “cisgender” refers to people whose gender identity is congruent with the sex they were determined to have at birth. It is the counterpart term to transgender so generally if you aren’t trans (transgender) you are cis (cisgender). Also just as trans people are described as trans or transgender (not “transgendered”), a cis person is may be described as cis or cisgender (not “cisgendered”)

2. Both quotes are from the essay Sex in Heaven by Peter Kreeft. I would not, myself, claim that every soul has maleness and/or femaleness but that some gendered-ness (even if it is the absence of connection to any known or recognized gender) is a characteristic of souls. Also though please take a moment to notice that a conservative Catholic philosopher and theologian argued for the legitimacy of trans-ness—apparently without controversy—in 1990.

3. though they will often maintain that gender is a social construct which may or may not “fit” the psychological experience of a given individual.

4. Luke 9 and Luke 16 for instance.

5. If you disagree please speak up in comments!

6. It is foolish to try to prove a negative so if you have an argument that the Bible does forbid acceptance of Wanda’s claim, please draw my attention to it and I will respond.

7. but often enough very real

8. This is usually accompanied by extensive hand-wringing over the apparent "liberal capitulation" of the psychological community.

9. circular reasoning

10. There is a great rundown of the evidence for this over at Debunking Denialism

11. “All that is not forbidden is permitted”

12. Mental Health Outcomes in Transgender and Nonbinary Youths Receiving Gender-Affirming Care

13. Non-binary people are people who are not men or women but whose gender identity may be somewhere between or outside of the binaries or they may not have a sense of gendered-ness whatsoever. Some non-binary people do identify as trans since their gender identities do not correlate with the sex they were assigned at birth while others do not. For a great book on non-binary people and theory I recommend In Transit: Being Non-Binary in a World of Dichotomies by Dianna E. Anderson