The Sweetest Poisons (Part 7)

Preston Sprinkle's "Embodied" Chapter 6A: But What About the Eunuch? And Other Questions ...

This is the eighth installment in my series reviewing Preston Sprinkle's book Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, & What the Bible has to Say. Click HERE for the Intro to this series where I discuss my thematic concerns with the book and for an index for the full series.

I want to circle back to our discussion in Chapter 4. As you recall, the Bible presents biological sex as a significant aspect of human identity. Now, some agree with this claim but say that it tells only one side of the story, that it neglects other passages and themes that give a more nuanced perspective. Sure, the Bible has a high view of the body. But it also makes room for these who are “gender variant” or experience incongruence between their biological sex and their gender (identity or role). In these cases, their gender—not their sex—determines who they are. [scare quotes on gender variant in the original]

That is how Preston Sprinkle opens Chapter 6 and, importantly, this is the chapter in which the groundwork he has been laying starts to come together. In this Chapter Sprinkle promises to “wrestle with the biblical reasons why some Christians argue…that gender should supersede sex when there’s an incongruence” and that forces him to use the premises and definitions he set up in the first four chapters. I will respond to each of his summaries and responses but first I need to point out that in this paragraph Sprinkle seems to be assuming some sort of tension between having a high view of the body and affirming gender variance. There is no particular reason to think that such a tension would exist. A thing can be important (we can have a “high view” of it) without being the most important, and of course, those of us who have chosen to medically transition will tell you that medical transition itself flows from a high view of the body. If my body were unimportant I would not take steps to align it more closely with who I am.

GENESIS 1 ASSUMES NONBINARY ASPECTS OF CREATION

Right out of the gate I want to give Sprinkle credit for responding to this argument. In my time reading Christian apologetics about transness, sex, and gender this is probably the primary argument I see so Sprinkle was right to include it in the list of—let’s just call them “trans affirming arguments”—he chose to engage with. And while it is an important trans affirming argument, it is vitally also a negative argument. A negative argument is one that takes the form “X is not the case” rather than the form “X is the case”. The argument that Genesis 1 assumes non-binary aspects of creation is a direct rebuttal to the claim Sprinkle has already made in this book, that the use of “male and female” establishes a gender binary as the only legitimate manifestations of human sex and gender. So in this section, Sprinkle is responding to a response to an argument he has already made in the book; and now I am now responding to that.

Immediately we run into the problem created by Sprinkle’s structural choices for the book. Dr. Sprinkle ably lays out the basic pro-trans objection he wishes to counter “Some say that the binaries of Genesis 1 are polar ends of a spectrum, allowing for hybrids and variations in between”—a claim for which he cites a worthy list of theologians. He develops and explains the claim but then objects to it on the basis that he has already demonstrated back in Chapter 4 that “the phrase ‘male and female’ in Genesis 1:27 refers to biological sex, not gender roles or identities.” But if you will recall (if not, here is a link to my review of Chapter 4) the author he cites in favor of that position back in Chapter 4 was actually saying the opposite in the paper he cites and that he punted to Chapter 7 to account for the fact that intersex people necessarily complicate his claim. Here in Chapter 6 we still haven’t arrived at Chapter 7 but are now being asked to treat a claim as demonstrated based on an argument that Dr. Sprinkle has (at best) only partially made, has promised to make in a future chapter, and has mis-cited a source in defense of. The result is a claim here which appears to be far stronger than it in fact is. It is as though a committee had deadlocked in a meeting and came back the following week only to have the chair wave a hand and assert “but my dear friend we settled all that last week” before carrying on as though the proposal had achieved majority affirmation.

Going on, Dr. Sprinkle demonstrates apparent confusion regarding what is entailed in “variations in between” male and female, affirming that human physiology falls along a series of spectra (I think he means to be referencing the overlapping bell curves of human sex characteristics) but it isn’t really clear that he has trans men or women in mind so much as he is trying to argue that there are no sex categories of person between the designations male and female which might merit consideration for the assumed “variations in between” of Genesis 1:27. Of course he does seem to be overlooking intersex people entirely here and he does manage to assert that “[s]ome intersex persons might combine both biological categories of male and female but this doesn’t mean they constitute something other than male and female” because apparently “Variations within two categories, or even a blend of two categories, doesn’t mean more than two categories exist.” A strange claim to make since a) categories are something we come up with to describe reality as we find it and b) new categories are often developed to describe individuals who blend the essential traits of two previously identified categories.

He then makes an argument from silence (“whenever Scripture mentions sexed categories of humanity, it only names male and female”) by punting on eunuchs. Obviously an argument from silence (regardless of whether he has highlighted the term “humanity”) is a) a weak form of the argument and b) would also exempt the platypus from inclusion in the Genesis 1:27 narrative together with every other thing which both exists and falls between the Genesis binaries and doesn’t happen to be mentioned anywhere else in the text of the Bible. Then, in an uncharacteristically assertive mode, Preston concludes “Therefore, while Genesis 1 certainly assumes various hybrids or shades of ‘in-betweenness’ in many aspects of creation, male and female are still the only categories of embodied sex among humans.” Given that this conclusion rests on an as-yet undemonstrated argument in Chapter 7 and an embarrassingly weak argument from silence, Sprinkle’s decision to conclude this in such decided terms (something like “I am inclined to think” would have been more appropriate to the relative strength of his case) is simply not justified. To a cynical reader it might seem that Dr. Sprinkle is here attempting to obfuscate the weakness of his conclusion behind a chronologically convoluted argument and unjustifiably assertive rhetoric.

From here, rather than addressing the actual claims that trans men and trans women make about ourselves, Sprinkle launches in to an attack against non-binary gender identities. He recognizes that some theologians argue that the apparent human sex binary in Genesis 1:27 follows the same pattern as the other apparent binaries in Genesis 1 but implies that the spectrum-rather-than-mere-binary that would be implied here applies to gender rather than to sex. While he is using this to set up an attack on non-binary gender identities, Sprinkle rather confusingly chooses to quote Linda Tatro Herzer making a comment about trans men and trans women saying:

[T]he male or female gender binary classification system suggested by Genesis 1:27 is … inadequate to describe the reality of those born with the innate knowledge that their internal gender identity does not match their external genitals.

I went ahead and looked up the quote in Herzer’s The Bible and the Transgender Experience. It turns out that Sprinkle’s ellipses had cut out a reference to the fact that intersex people exist (which Herzer references as evidence of people who exist between the Genesis 1:27 binaries) and that just after the portion Sprinkle quotes, Herzer does go on to conclude that “the evidence that God creates genders beyond strictly male or female is as compelling as the beauty of our marshlands and shorelines”. Sprinkle objects on the grounds that “there’s no textual evidence that Genesis 1:27 is talking about a person’s internal sense of who they are (gender identity) or whether a male is masculine or a female is feminine (gender role) [emphasis mine]” and, sure, but there also isn’t any evidence to the contrary. Readings of Genesis 1 as referencing only reproductive capacity or as referencing the full gestalt of psychological, sociological, and physiological factors that combine in what can be meant by “gender” both work within the context of the first few chapters of Genesis. In effect, Sprinkle is saying “there is no textual evidence of this perfectly reasonable conclusion Herzer has presented”; again the rhetoric feels rather slippery.

But moving on Sprinkle finally arrives at what seems to be a big deal for him: the assertion that reading gender non-conformity as evidence of non-binary or merely non-cis (Preston has an unfortunate habit of equivocating between the two) gender identities in the Bible is problematic because it is rooted in reductive and narrow views of masculinity and femininity. Sprinkle’s subsequent mischaracterization of Herzer’s work is troubling. I will provide the whole of Sprinkle’s comments on the subject in block quotes and interject my own observations, reading of Herzer, and quotes to demonstrate. Sprinkle begins:

[Sprinkle]: In any case, Herzer goes on to apply her nonbinary argument to various biblical characters who don’t fit masculine and feminine stereotypes. Like Jacob, who “was definitely gender variant … given his preference for women’s work and for spending his days among the women of his tribe.”

Notice that Sprinkle uses the phrase “nonbinary argument” to characterize Herzer’s claims but that even in the brief quote he provides, Herzer restricted herself to “gender variant”. In fact her full quote is as follows

[Herzer]: Consequently, while we cannot conclusively determine the Patriarch Jacob’s gender identity or sexual orientation from the biblical accounts, I think it is accurate to say that, given his preference for women’s work and for spending his days among women of his tribe, he was definitely gender variant; Jacob did not conform to the cultural expectations of the men of his day.

Notice that “gender variant” is being used by Herzer to mean as little as “not conform[ing] to the cultural expectations of the men of his day” a far cry from Sprinkle’s characterization of her as making a “nonbinary argument”. As a reminder “non-binary” is a gender identity while “gender non-conforming” or “gender variant” are broad terms which can denote merely less stereotypical expressions of a person’s gender—binary or otherwise. But Sprinkle continues:

[Sprinkle]: Or Joseph, because he wore a “girly garment gladly”

Again Herzer does not go beyond arguing that Joseph was anything more than “gender nonconforming”.

[Sprinkle]: Or Deborah, who was “settling disputes, speaking on God’s behalf, leading an army”—things that “were all strictly men’s work".”

And again, Herzer does not actually go beyond describing Deborah as “gender variant” and “gender non-conforming”. Certainly the difference between the claims Herzer is making and the claim Sprinkle mischaracterizes her as making (that Jacob, Joseph, and Deborah were all non-binary) might seem a little bit “in the weeds” to someone who is only now learning about gender variance and trans theory, but I need to remind you that Sprinkle is presenting himself as an authority and scholar on this topic and that these distinctions are plain, important, and obvious to anyone who has done serious reading on the subject, much less interacted in a significant way with any variety of queer people.

Unfortunately, Sprinkle seems to have something of an agenda with his characterization of Herzer’s argument since he goes on to accuse Herzer for arguments she simply didn’t make. Again I will need to quote Sprinkle at length and then respond:

[Sprinkle]: I appreciate how Herzer shows that various biblical characters didn’t fit the masculine and feminine stereotypes of the day. But phrases like “women’s work” and “girly garment” end up affirming the very stereotypes that are so problematic in this conversation. Is there a thing called “women’s work”? If a female doesn’t particularly like “women’s work,” is she not a woman? When Joseph donned his colorful coat, was it because he was trans*? Or just a man with fabulous taste?

Genesis 1 is talking about biological sex—male and female—not what we have labeled gender identity or gender role. And it’s perfectly fine for males and females to resist cultural stereotypes as males and females.

This is such a radical misrepresentation of Herzer’s argument that I am not sure what to do with it. In the chapter Sprinkle is quoting from Herzer very clearly qualifies her designation of Jacob, Joseph, and Debora as gender non-conforming as being so relative to the gender expectations of their day and not “absolutely” as Sprinkle accuses her of doing. I have already quoted her on the subject of Jacob as not conforming “to the cultural expectations of the men of his day” perhaps it is worth also quoting her more fully on the subject of Deborah:

[Herzer]: Living when we do—during an era when Margaret Thatcher has been prime minister of England, three of the judges serving on the U.S. Supreme Court are women, and Hillary Clinton is running for president—we may read this story of Deborah and think nothing of it. However, given the realities of the patriarchal time and era during which Deborah served as a judge in Israel, this account is nothing short of a gender variant miracle story! [emphasis mine]

Herzer carefully situates her claims about gender non-conformity as relative to the gender expectations of historic and cultural moment in which the account takes place. Just as wearing a skirt would today be an act of gender non-conformity for someone assigned male at birth in 21st century America but would not in other countries and cultures where men routinely wear “non-bifurcated leggings” so too Deborah’s leadership was gender non-conforming in her own geographical, cultural, and historical context. For Sprinkle to not understand this very basic element of historical gender analysis betrays either an enormous gap in his scholarship or a vested interest in misunderstanding a fellow scholar in the interest of being able to perform some sort of pseudo-feminist high dudgeon.

What does seem to actually be at issue between Sprinkle and Herzer is the question of whether or not non-conformity to gendered expectations in a given culture and historical context can be read as suggesting (not proving—neither of them is claiming that) that the person might be non-binary or a trans man or woman. Speaking as a relatively masculine trans woman I very much appreciate that this sort of historical and textual inquiry is tricky. With that said it does seem eminently reasonable to see historical gender non-conformity as at least suggesting the possibility that the individual in question might not have been what we would call “cisgender”. Once can absolutely be cis and act in ways that push the boundaries of social expectations for your assigned gender; and also if someone does happen to be a trans woman, a trans man, or non-binary¹ then “pushing the boundaries of social expectations for their assigned gender” is precisely what we would expect to see.

JESUS’ ACCEPTANCE OF THE EUNUCH

When I first read this chapter I was encouraged to see that Dr. Sprinkle had chosen to “address” Jesus use of the eunuch in Matthew 19. Unfortunately his treatment of the subject is less than thorough and frequently simply incorrect. Sprinkle starts by quoting the relevant passage. His default translation is the NIV, which renders Matthew 19:12 as:

For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.

since the NIV is the default translation for the full book, it would be uncharitable to suggest that Sprinkle’s use of it in this instance is motivated. With that said, the NIV’s translation of the last category in this passage “those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” is a translation highly influenced by the translator’s theology. For context the term in question is εὐνούχισαν εὐνούχισαν (eunouchisan heautous) or basically “eunuch-ed themselves”. The NASB translates that same passage as “eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven”. In short, the NIV makes some significant interpretive assumptions about what all is entailed in making oneself a eunuch. To choose to live like a eunuch and to make yourself a eunuch are not at all necessarily the same thing and, as Dr. Megan DeFranza puts it in Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God:

Given the wider context, it is understandable why some modern translations have abandoned the language of the eunuch altogether, opting for dynamic equivalents such as those “incapable of marriage” or who have “renounced marriage.” In this context, the eunuch does represent the nonmarried. But we must ask why, if this was his intent, Jesus did not say what the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7: that the unmarried should follow his example (vv. 7-8) in order to avoid trouble (n.28), so that they may devote themselves entirely to the Lord (vv. 32-35), and for their own personal happiness (v. 40)?

Many early Christians did not interpret these passages this way. According to Eusebius, Origen, compelled by his desire to follow Jesus’ instructions perfectly, presented himself to a physician for castration.”

In the context of Sprinkle’s book, this matters significantly because Dr. Sprinkle is far too willing to gloss over the implications of a church and theology in which literal castration was on the table as a mode of spiritual growth—an observation which is necessarily striking to contemporary trans people who are often told that it would be necessarily sinful to choose a medical transition which might include sterility.

I want to highlight at this point that Dr. Sprinkle is very much aware of Dr. DeFranza’s work as he does cite her in this book and wrote a multi-part review of Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God when it was first released (here is a link) and is therefore reasonably read in the context of her arguments and research.

Sprinkle goes on to summarize his take on eunuchs in the Roman world during the 1st century, and does so more or less adequately with regard to the general Roman category² which was notably different from the Hebrew categories of eunuchs. Notably though he ends up focusing on infertility as the defining trait of a eunuch. In contrast, here is DeFranza’s more nuanced and fulsome discourse on eunuchs in the Roman world:

In many ways the ancient world was much more rigid in defining and protecting the borders between men and women than is the contemporary West. And yet, despite this great fear of gender blending, the ancients were more open to recognizing that their binary model of sex difference needed supplementation in order to address the full range of human bodies as they occur in the real world.

One such supplement was the concept of the eunuch. Much like the term “intersex,” “eunuch” was an umbrella concept—a world to cover a range of phenomena wherein humans did not measure up to the male ideal.

…

[T]he category of eunuch differed from the hermaphrodite or the barren woman in that it remained a term of “in-between-ness,”…

Within the androcentric economy of the ancient world, only the male genitals really mattered. Unlike eunuchs, some hermaphrodites were capable of begetting children—an act that (according to standards of the day) proved that they were more many than some eunuchs could ever be.

It is clear at any rate that there were ancient categories for infertile persons of any sex or gender beyond that of “eunuch” so it is rather strange that Dr. Sprinkle latches so firmly onto infertility as the defining characteristic of a eunuch rather than the castration or other difference from typical male-bodied-ness which would certainly have been more in line with the actual scholarship on the subject. My guess is that Preston is trying very hard at this point to preserve some sort of fundamental real sex binary (that “biblical male and female”-ness that he is so often harping on but has not yet justified) by shifting eunuch from a term designating an in-between-ness of sex to a term designating a particular sort of male. For all of that, he does concede (agreeing with DeFranza) that Jesus first category in Matthew 19 (those who were born eunuchs) “is similar to what we call intersex: someone born with some atypical feature in their sexual anatomy”. It is important to remember at this juncture that Sprinkle has already claimed that “Ninety-nine percent of people with an intersex condition are biologically male or female (and the other 1 percent are both). In other words, intersex does not mean ‘neither male nor female’” and is therefore not now granting that this category of eunuch constitutes an additional sex. Any proof of or evidence for this claim has yet to appear (Dr. Sprinkle assured us that we will find it in Chapter 7) so at this point he has asserted but not demonstrated the claim.

Sprinkle’s next move, having reduced the category of eunuch to particular instances of men, is to restate his theory that Jesus is challenging gender stereotypes here without challenging the gender binary. I will have something to say about that repeated move on his part at the end of this installment of my review so for now let us just note it. In this section he again references Linda Tatro Herzer and Austen Hartke as claiming that eunuchs represent gender variance and were recognized as such by Jesus and again accuses them (unjustly in my reading) of perpetuating gender stereotypes.

He summarizes his view near the end of this section in a single paragraph

We know nothing about first-century eunuchs’ internal sense of self (gender identity). But we do know that, just a few verses earlier, Jesus affirmed about all humanity “at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’” citing Genesis 1:27 (Matt. 19:4). Eunuchs were biologically male, and it seems likely that Jesus regarded them as part of the “male” category in God’s good creation even in others considered them to be unmasculine.

There is a lot I am going to have to say about this paragraph. First I want to remind the reader that Sprinkle has not yet adequately justified any of the assertions he strings together in the form (but without the function) of an argument here. While I would agree with him that we aren’t aware of first-century eunuchs’ internal sense of self, I have to remind the reader that this is an argument from silence and that psychological profiles were hardly a genre at the time. What we do know (and Dr. Sprinkle is well aware of) is that eunuchs in the ancient world were not seen as “complete” members of any gender or sex. Preston’s claim about Genesis 1:27 is again, one he has asserted but for which the only significant citation he has provided is one which in fact argues against the point he claims it justifies. Following that, it is not clear what Dr. Sprinkle means in saying that “Eunuchs were biologically male” since the majority of his definitions of “male” back in Chapter 2 are based on the presence of certain organs which Eunuchs definitionally lack; admittedly, Dr. Sprinkle doesn’t seem to be working with a consistent definition of “male” so in this passage he may be referencing chromosomes (though that too would be odd since Jesus’ first category of eunuchs may not have been XX or XY individuals and, besides, chromosomes were unknown in the 1st Century and can not have been an element in sex determination at the time) and the contents of footnote 16 would seem to support the idea that this is his thinking. In any case the assertion seems muddled. But then Sprinkle goes on to assert that “it seems likely that Jesus regarded them [eunuchs] as part of the ‘male’ category in God’s good creation”. I see no reason why that should seem at all likely to Preston and certainly it does not seem likely to me. In an attempt to understand Sprinkle’s claim I went back to his footnotes where I found that he is even less clear.

A Brief Exploration of Footnote 15

In footnote 15 Sprinkle recognizes that Lucian of Samasota and St. Augustine of Hippo both spoke of Eunuchs as something other than men or women and specifically grants here and in footnote 16 that “In any case, some ancient writers spoke of eunuchs as neither male nor female because they had their ‘manhood’ cut off.” It is interesting to me that, in the footnotes (which relatively few of his readers are likely to examine) he concedes more than in the main text. The only argument he advances against the granted fact that eunuchs were seen by ancient writers as neither male nor female is in his reflection on Augustine’s comments on the subject:

Similarly, Augustine said that a castrated eunuch was “a man” who “is so mutilated that he is neither changed into a woman nor remains a man” (City of God, 7.24). Notice that Augustine said it was a “man” who had been mutilated. When one considers a mutilated man no longer a man, this reflects cultural assumptions about manhood. These perspectives seem to assume rigid, cultural stereotypes of what it means to be a man or a woman—a problem today just as much as it was back then.

The major problem here is that Dr. Sprinkle can’t seem to make up his mind whether a given historical source is telling him about ancient categories or telling him about the reality of sex/gender and seems to want to have it both ways. It would be entirely reasonable for Dr. Sprinkle to simply say “and I think St. Augustine is wrong about that”—clearly Dr. Sprinkle disagrees with St. Augustine in exactly that way—but he cannot then claim that, merely because he thinks St. Augustine wrong, that the categories St. Augustine was using were somehow out of the norm for the ancient world. Dr. Sprinkle has produced no evidence to suggest that St. Augustine’s views on the subject were anything but representative. He seems to want to say that, despite saying they do not remain men, St. Augustine thought that they really were still men because he describes them as “men who do not remain men”. But of course any ordinary reading of “a man who does not remain a man” would conclude that this person isn’t a man anymore, though they started that way.

The closest Sprinkle gets to actually justifying the claim that Jesus saw eunuch’s as men appears in footnote 22 where Sprinkle first recognizes that others (he specifically cites Herzer again) would disagree with him but concludes “I find it really hard to believe that Jesus would have agreed with these cultural stereotypes”—I do notice him again granting the third sex category as a “cultural stereotype”—that since eunuchs were viewed as unmanly and feminine, they weren’t therefore male.” A statement which is itself deeply troubling since it rests on the rather chauvinist belief that to call someone “not male” is to insult them. If we are to use the presumption of Jesus goodness as the core of our hermeneutic for Matthew 19 (and I do think that is a fine approach) then is it not better to grant that Jesus recognizes the full dignity of women, eunuchs, and men than it is to assume that Jesus would have agreed with the “cultural stereotype” (apparently shared by Preston Sprinkle himself) that non-men are less worthy of dignity than men.

Ultimately all of the historical evidence Dr. Sprinkle has actually provided (primarily in footnotes) actually suggests the exact opposite of his conclusion. Far from giving us reason to say that it “seems likely that Jesus regarded them [eunuchs] as a part of the ‘male’ category”, the evidence Sprinkle has provided suggests that the categories Jesus was working with saw the eunuch as neither male nor female.

Before moving on to the next section I want to remind the reader that, through all of this, Dr. Sprinkle is still bracketing that first category of Eunuch in Matthew 19, dealing primarily with the second category of eunuch (those made eunuchs by others) and misunderstanding the third—a misunderstanding which DeFranza has remarked on saying “Over time Jesus’ language was tamed so that the eunuch came to represent nonmarried men: a partial but much less radical challenge to social structures and personal identity based on sex, gender, and sexuality.”

“NOR IS THERE MALE AND FEMALE”—GALATIANS 3:28

This section begins with a recitation of the relevant verse: “There is neither Jew not Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are al one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:28) [emphasis original]”. From there Sprinkle acknowledges that some people see this verse as evidence “that Paul downplayed sex difference and was seeking to move beyond the created order of Genesis 1-2” he doesn’t provide a citation there so I don’t know where he got his wording for the claim but it is rather more starkly put that I have generally encountered. Generally you won’t see people framing the meaning of Galatians 3:28 as “mov[ing] beyond the created order” so much as the denial of any significant spiritual differences or of the irrelevance “in Christ” of the gender schema.

In any case, Dr. Sprinkle provides two reasons for not accepting this take on the passage: first, that such a claim would be a giant bomb for Paul to drop “in passing” especially as it would conflict with Sprinkle’s understanding of Paul in other New Testament passages; second that “‘male and female’ should be understood in light of the other two preceding pairs: ‘neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free” and that those categories did continue to exist for Christians. My own reaction to both objections is primarily to wonder what it is that Dr. Sprinkle thinks those he disagrees with are saying. He does supply a few footnotes along the way (23-25) which almost indicate that he thinks they are claiming that all persons return to some sort of physical androgyny in Christ—a position which I can only describe as a straw man. It isn’t clear to me (I am not even sure it is clear to Dr. Sprinkle) what precisely he thinks it is that is preserved and what is done away with in Galatians 3:28.

NO MARRIAGE IN THE RESURRECTION—MATTHEW 22:30

This is rather a brief section and I don’t significantly disagree with much that Dr. Sprinkle says in it. Sprinkle cites Matthew 22:30 and Luke 20:35-26 on the claim that we “will neither marry nor be given in marriage” but will “be like the angels in heaven” and points out that the passage is about marriage and not about sexed-ness. He does reiterate his claim that there is evidence elsewhere in Scripture that our resurrected bodies will be sexed, a claim which is not so well established as he seems to indicate here (we covered that in my review of Chapter 4), and makes the rather startling claim that “Whenever angels appear in the Bible, they always appear as men.”—has he not read Ezekiel 1?. Still I don’t disagree with his conclusion that “It’s certainly not clear that when Jesus says ‘like the angels,’ he means ‘sexless’.

THE BIBLE IS TOO OUTDATED TO ADDRESS MODERN QUESTIONS ABOUT TRANS* IDENTITIES

Overall Dr. Sprinkle and I agree that the Bible has relevant things to say about trans identities (though clearly we have reached very different conclusions about what those things are). With that said, there are several passages in this section of the chapter that I find deeply concerning. First the section itself seems to be something of a straw man. While I am sure it would be possible to find a transgender Christian who thinks the Bible too outdated to address modern questions about trans identities, every trans Christian I know or have spoken with very much believes that the Bible has something to say about us. In my more cynical moments I worry that this section is only there to play into a certain unhelpful tendency among Evangelicals wherein all LGBTQIA+ affirming theologies are characterized as requiring a particular demythologizing 19th century continental European theological approach which is generally referred to by them as “theological liberalism”. So Dr. Sprinkle will be (hopefully) pleased to hear that the mainstream element of transgender and trans affirming Christians do think the Bible is relevant to the question of trans identities.

With that said I found it troubling when Sprinkle commented (discussing trans identities) that “It’s important to keep our fallibility in mind whenever we’re tempted to overturn a biblical truth because it seems to clash with some settled perspective in science” speaking as though it is a given that accepting trans identities requires that we “overturn a biblical truth” when in fact my own affirmation of transness does not violate, much less overturn, any biblical truths. Certainly I interpret various passages of the Bible differently than Preston Sprinkle seems to, but that is a difference in interpretation, not an overturning. He follows this with the equally troubling claim that:

Plus, it’s not as if the latest science has proven that gender identity overrules biological sex when there’s incongruence. One might say it’s the other way around: an appeal to science creates more problems than possibilities for the gender-affirming view.

which I take to mean that Preston has spent far too much time reading anti-trans memes on Twitter as the actual weight of scientific consensus at present very much supports recognition of the gender identities of trans people. Every major medical association has concluded, based on the evidence, that it is legitimate and healthy to recognized the gender identity of trans people and to provide us with transition related care; pulling from Serano’s near magisterial response to the objections raised against transgender youth (a source I will be citing and drawing from extensively in future posts), here are the statements:

• American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (2019)

• American Academy of Pediatrics (2018)

• American Medical Association (2022)

• American Psychiatric Association (2020)

• American Psychological Association (2021)

• Endocrine Society (2017)

• Pediatric Endocrine Society (2017)

• WPATH Standards of Care, version 8 (2022)

Notice that many of these were available prior to the publication of Embodied and that those which weren’t had already published similar statements at that time (these links are the most recent releases) so I am simply unsure how Preston justifies such a claim.

From there, Sprinkle goes on to outline an instance of people who “blurred male/female distinctions” in ancient Mesopotamia and the Galli who were more contemporaneous to the New Testament “who served the goddesses Astargatis and Cybele,” and who “were castrated men who dressed up as women and basically took on a feminine role in society.” This is something of an oversimplification but Sprinkle goes on to identify two non-cultic examples of transgender phenomena: One a fiction in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the other the Emperor Elagabalus. He suggests that there are other examples to be explored (the footnote to this claim cites only a singe example of poetry which Sprinkle allows to be weak). Collectively I have to say that the list Sprinkle provides is hardly sufficient to justify concluding that the Biblical authors or vast majority of it’s contemporary readers would have had anything like a contemporary understanding of transness in mind. In fact these examples (two cultic practices, a fictional story, and an emperor 200 years after the birth of Christ) are hardly enough to establish much of anything regarding the views of a 1st century commoner. While I agree with Preston that the Bible isn’t “too out of touch and outdated to speak into our topic with authority” I would argue that that is because the Bible gives us timeless principles which can be applied to specific circumstances rather than because (as I think Sprinkle is trying to imply) the authors of the Bible wrote passages specifically about trans-ness as such.

Conclusion to Part A

I am nearing my word limit and would like to spend adequate time and words addressing Dr. Sprinkle’s final section in this chapter “Should the Church Accept Trans* People” so I am going to defer that and several concluding reflections on this chapter as a whole for Part B of my Chapter 6 review.

1. There are also, of course, those who are gender fluid, those who are agender, and others who’s gender identities don’t fit neatly into cis categories.

2. Sprinkle’s top-line conclusion, that the term basically applied to castrated men is more or less in line with general scholarship on the subject though in calling them “castrated men” or, as Sprinkle would have it, “biological males who were infertile, most often as a result of some impairment in their sexual anatomy from birth or through castration” his focus on fertility rather than on capacity for penetrative sex is something of a distortion. And some of the sources he cites fall short of demonstrating what he uses them to support—particularly his citations of Xenophon and Cassius Dio in footnote 11 which give no indication of asexuality as that term is currently understood.