The Sweetest Poisons (Part 8)

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

This is going to be a relatively short entry in this series (Click Here for my response to the first 4/5ths of Chapter 6—given how long it has taken me to get back to this series the refresher might be helpful) as it covers only the last section of Chapter 6. I am hoping, however, that it will help me regain my momentum so that I can complete the series.

The Sweetest Poisons

Should The Church Accept Trans* People?

Dr. Sprinkle’s last section of Chapter 6 shifts from theological questions to a pastoral one. As with the book as a whole, there are elements of his answer to this question which are helpful and welcome while there are also areas of significant concern.

Dr. Sprinkle opens his response to the question with a quote from Justin Sabia-Tanis’ book Trans-Gender: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith:

Phillip’s ready acceptance of the eunuch as a candidate for baptism proclaims a message of inclusion for the gender variant … we see an affirmation in Scripture that neither the gender of the eunuch nor his gender variance is pivotal to his inclusion or exclusion in the community of faith…. He brings the particularity of his gender to his encounter with Philip and ultimately to his relationship with God … [who] does not ask us to put aside who we are in order to be a part of the community of faith. [Emphasis in Embodied]

Given the prominence of the story of the Ethiopian Eunuch in trans theology and in LGBTQIA+ theology generally, it is a little surprising that this quote is the only place it gets a mention in Embodied, especially given the fact that the chapter purports to deal with the theological questions raised by the presence of Eunuchs in Scripture. This passage, as Sabia-Tanis suggests, lends strong support to the idea that God does not treat gender variance or intersex conditions as justifying exclusion from the Body of Christ. Beyond that, I am also disappointed that Dr. Sprinkle elected not to address Isaiah 56:3-5

Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say,
    “The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.”
And let no eunuch complain,
    “I am only a dry tree.”

⁴ For this is what the Lord says:

“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
    who choose what pleases me
    and hold fast to my covenant—
⁵ to them I will give within my temple and its walls
    a memorial and a name
    better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
    that will endure forever.

This passage is frequently cited by intersex, gender variant¹, and trans Christians as support for an intersex and trans inclusive reading of Scripture. What is more concerning, in light of what we have already seen in this chapter, are the implications of several parts of his response to the Sabia-Tanis quote.

First though let me stop and commend Dr. Sprinkle for his clarity in this section that churches ought to be welcoming to gender variant people, including trans people. I have made no secret of the fact that I do not think Dr. Sprinkle’s welcome goes far enough and that I have significant and serious concerns with his approach to trans people generally. That does not diminish the truth that the treatment of trans and gender variant people that Sprinkle calls for here and throughout the book is vastly superior to much of what we see from most Evangelical Christians these days. In this section no less than in the book as a whole, Dr. Sprinkle insists on being nice to trans people.

So then what are my concerns? The first pops up in Sprinkle’s first sentence after the Sabia-Tanis quote. Sprinkle says:

Look, if a man [sic] who’s single, castrated, or has atypical features in his [sic] sexual anatomy (in other words, a eunuch) shows up at your church… [emphasis mine]

this, despite Sprinkle’s designation of the Eunuch as a man, is a significantly better definition of a Eunuch than the one Sprinkle used earlier in the chapter and in footnote 15. And that is a problem because using this definition of a Eunuch would itself undermine several of his claims about Eunuchs generally. Sprinkle then gives more evidence of knowing better here than he had earlier in the same chapter when he says:

Or if a woman who doesn’t fit feminine stereotypes (a gender variant) is not accepted at your church—or feels unwelcomed and out of place at your women’s retreat—then you church might be legalistically… [emphasis mine]

he demonstrates that he knows perfectly well how narrow the scope of the term “gender variant²” is able to be. Here, but not when mischaracterizing Linda Tatro-Herzer’s work, Preston seems to be perfectly cognizant of the fact that “gender variance” can refer to any degree of variation from cultural expectations for a person’s gender including variations in gender expression or the way they perform or decline to engage with cultural gender roles. A straight cisgender woman who works construction is gender variant in her gender role because we have cultural expectations that have masculinized that job; a gay man is gender variant in his sexuality because we have cultural expectations that only women will be attracted to men; a tomboy like me is gender variant because her gender expression and performance lean more masculine than our cultural expectations of women; a non-binary person is gender variant because their gender identity does fit within the culturally expected gender binary; a straight trans man is gender variant because the sex category he was assigned to at birth does not align with his gender identity in contravention of cultural expectations of sex-gender alignment. All of these examples fall within the range of the term “gender variant” and based on Sprinkle’s usage here (he does include an additional brief concession earlier in the chapter where he includes “gender variant people” as a phrase which is “ambiguous at best”) it is hard to find a way to extend an explanation beyond an embarrassing misunderstanding of her text or more dishonest intentional misrepresentation of her claims for Sprinkle to have treated Herzer’s The Bible and Transgender Experience the way he did.

After this, Dr. Sprinkle goes on to remind his reader that “[I]f a trans* person comes to your church they should be welcomed with open arms and accepted. Not just accepted but embraced, delighted in, listened to³, learned from, honored, loved, cared for, and shown heavenly kindness saturated with compassion” and he grants that the church “hasn’t done very well” on that front. If he could have managed to end the chapter there it would have done much to build trust with trans people but he wasn’t able to. He ends with a caveat that seems tailored, not to underlining the importance of welcoming trans people, but to preserving Dr. Sprinkle’s good standing among non-affirming Christians. He takes a paragraph to remind his reader that acceptance doesn’t have to mean accepting our claims about who we are—I do find myself wondering just what a “welcome” to Dr. Sprinkle’s church would look like if I were to visit—uses that to lead into a brief paragraph setting up the next chapters, and concludes with a sort of vague “all lives should be accepted but we need to question the ‘ethic of being human’” conclusion.

My concern with Dr. Sprinkle’s overall recommendation for welcome of trans people is that it is clear from his book as a whole that he does not believe that trans people should be affirmed in our gender identities and that while he will eventually allow for the possibility of treating us as sort of mentally unwell people who, for our own good, need to be treated as though we were the gender we claim to be—an offensively condescending approach that is nevertheless often preferable to outright hostility—he will also obstinately hold open the door for those who do not think “in good conscience” that they can play along with our “delusions”. In short my concern is that a church which took Dr. Sprinkle’s book to heart would end up perpetrating a terrible bait-and-switch against trans people. The unexpecting trans person would be met with welcome and inclusion only to find, once they were committed and invested in their church community, that there were hard limits to their participation in the church and that many or even all of the people they had taken to be friends and had invested their time and emotions in had in fact been only loving a false version of them—a mentally ill, deluded person whom they did not believe concerning one of the most basic aspects of their identity.

In the short term the welcome is much much nicer; in the long term I am genuinely not sure whether I wouldn’t prefer the up-front hostility warning me that this is not a place that will accept me for who I am.

1. At present the trans community is more inclined to use (and prefers) the term “gender expansive” than gender variant. I have chosen to use the latter here in order to remain consistent with Sprinkle’s usage in this section of his text.

2. I do need to mention that in this quote Sprinkle also commits a grammar mistake that is common (and often innocent) among cis people who are not familiar with LGBTQIA+ and gender language but which would almost never be made by someone accustomed to speaking with and about LGBTQIA+ people, namely referring to a gender variant person as “a gender variant”. For the sake of clarity and education, we do not refer to a gender variant person as “a gender variant” because “gender variant” is adjectival—it is a phrase which describes a subject or object. Saying “a gender variant” would be like saying “a moderately tall” it’s a fine phrase but it needs to be followed by a compatible subject like “person”, “woman”, or “man”. It’s just awkward bad grammar.
That “noun-ing” of an adjective or adjectival phrase is usually innocent but can occasionally be done in bad faith. We most often see this in the use of “transgender” as in “Bob is a transgender” or “Wanda is one of those transgenders you know”. I do not think that Preston made this grammatical error with bad intent but that leaves us with the concerning suspicion that, despite having written an entire book about trans people, he has so little experience of and with us that he fell into this sort of elementary error.

3. I cannot hold back from reporting that, as of this writing, Dr. Sprinkle has never, to my knowledge, interviewed or had extended conversation with a transgender Christian who holds to mainstream views about the legitimacy of trans people and identities and who believes that God affirms transgender people in our gender identities. I wish that he would take his own advice here.