Gender Identity

Gender and Sexuality: Gender Identity

In this third installment in the series on gender and sexuality, I’ll be talking about gender identity. There are an awful lot of Christian folks who view being transgender as sinful; in fact some churches like the Catholic Church (Versaldi 2019) and other Christian organizations (Focus on the Family Issue Analysts 2018) have put out official statements saying as much. Some of the more lazy non-affirming Christians (non-affirming is a label for Christians who are anti-LGBT, while Christians who accept LGBT folks are called affirming) may just pull out a “clobber passage” they think does the trick and call it a day, though largely this stance is based in the broader complementarian theological framework, which I discussed at length in the last post (don’t worry if you missed that one; I’ll have a refresher later in this post). In my view, not only is this wrong, it is quite against Christ’s teachings and an awful tragedy that has cost lives, both in the sense of people dying, such as Leelah Alcorn who died by suicide after being forced to undergo “Christian” conversion therapy and her parents’ using religously charged language against her (Mohney 2014), and in the sense that it is pushing people away from the church and a life in Christ. First, I’ll demolish the lame attempt at a clobber passage, then I’ll do a brief overview of the broader non-affirming theological outlook, followed by my own view, which is that God has created a wonderful, diverse creation, and that we should love, celebrate, welcome, and learn from everyone. A clobber passage 🙄️ You may see non-affirming folks point to Deuteronomy 22:5: A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this. Some interpret this to mean that anyone born male can’t wear women’s clothes, and vice versa, so that people doing this for various reasons (some of which may not have anything to do with gender identity) are sinning. Okay, so… there’s several problems with this; honestly, it’s almost tough to figure out where to start. I guess first I’ll go with the fact that there really isn’t a consensus on what that command even means anyway; some think it was part of a general scheme of separation in Jewish law, others that it had to do with differentiating from nearby religious practices involving cross-dressing, and others that it had to do with preventing deceptive intermingling for the purpose of heterosexual adultery (Tilsen 2014). Many common interpretations do not support a reading that gives a blanket prohibition on cross-dressing (and in fact, cross dressing is common in Purim celebrations) (Tilsen 2014). In fact, given some linguistic choices in this verse (in the original Hebrew), a blanket prohibition on cross dressing may be a quite tortured reading (Vedeler 2008). Moreover, even if Deuteronomy 22:5 should be read as a blanket prohibition on cross-dressing, it is of course not at all clear that this should have anything to do with trans folks. Trans women are women, so a prohibition on cross-dressing does not make a trans woman a sinner for wearing a dress (and an analogous argument applies for trans men and non-binary folks). It also, ya know… doesn’t speak at all to the broader context of trans folks’ lives… But finally, and most importantly from a Christian perspective, this command does not apply to Christians! If a conservative Christian were to tell me Deuteronomy 22:5 prohibited people from wearing clothing conforming to their gender identity, my first question would be, “Do you ‘Make tassels on the four corners of the cloak you wear?’” (Deuteronomy 22:12). “Do you make sure you ‘do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard?’” (Leviticus 19:27). Of course they don’t follow those rules! My next statement would be a (loving) rebuke: “Why do you scorn Christ’s fulfillment of the Law, and our freedom in Christ?” (See for example Romans 10:4 and Galatians 5:1-6). The broader non-affirming argument Of course, this isn’t the only argument non-affirming Christians use to avoid respecting folks’ gender identity. You may recall “complementarian” theology from my post on patriarchy… yeah, it’s rearing it’s ugly head again not only to subjugate women, but now also to deny the identity of anyone who isn’t cisgender. Okay, it goes like this: According to Genesis 1:27, “God created mankind in his own image… male and female he created them,” and God’s image is only truly reflected when men and women live their lives according to the gender roles God intended for them, such as men leading and women submitting, and in this case, people conforming to the gender they were assigned at birth. In other words, Genesis proves gender is binary, so you can’t be non-binary, and not only that, but Scripture says you can’t be trans otherwise either. Some sources (such as Assemblies of God 2017) go even further and claim Christ affirms this idea by quoting Genesis in His discussion of divorce. For example, in Mark 10:2-12, we see Some [asked Jesus], “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” “What did Moses command you?” he replied. They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.” “It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied. “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.” So for the complementarian, this passage has Jesus affirming a divine order in creation, where humans are born either male or female, must identify in that way, and marry a person of the opposite sex, and anything outside of that is sin and corruption of God’s creation from the Fall (see Assemblies of God 2017). (Don’t get hung up on the divorce aspect at this point; I’ll be discussing that in the sixth entry in this series anyway). So did God make us (cis) male and female (only)? OK, so first, even just from a genetic or physiological perspective only, we know there is a wide variety of departures from a simple XX/XY men/women gender binary. About 1% of humans do not fit those two categories; either their genitalia do not match their chromosomes, or they have extra X or Y chromosomes, they have ambiguous genitalia, etc. (Ainsworth 2018). So the strict complementarian’s only refuge is that these variations are the result of the Fall. But is that really the best way to think about the Genesis creation account(s)? I’ll go back to something I said in the first post in this series, starting with a bit longer quote from Genesis 1: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth… And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night”… And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas”… Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image”… So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number”… (Genesis 1:1-28) It says that God created land and sea (Genesis 1:9-10), but don’t we also see swamps and marshland? It says God created day and night (Genesis 1:4-5), but isn’t there also dusk and sunset and sunrise? There is a wide variety of beauty in God’s creation that isn’t captured in the contrasts listed in the creation account. Listing these opposing parts of creation doesn’t deny that God created all the things in between! So the most obvious conclusion is: the same is true for gender. God made cis men and cis women. God made people who are intersex. God made trans men and trans women, He made non-binary people. God created everyone, even down to their “innermost being,” and we are all “wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:13-14). Who are we to look down on the majesty of God’s creation?!? So… Christians should love & accept people no matter their gender identity?? Well… of course! I’ve mentioned before how Christ calls us to love others (Matthew 22:36-39), and even that love fulfills all of God’s commands (Romans 13:8-10). Does that mean we even have to love those people (inserting in whatever sort of people you have a personal problem with)? Yes! Over and over and over again, all through the New Testament, we are hit over the head with the idea that love and acceptance extends to all. In Mark 5:25-34, Jesus healed a woman “subject to bleeding,” such that she would have been considered unclean and an outcast; did He feel icky about it or get upset or speak rudely to her? Of course not. He said, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace…” In Acts 8:27-36, [Phillip] met an Ethiopian eunuch… and told him the good news about Jesus… As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?” Christ reaches out to the outcasts, the powerful, men, women; God’s love is for everyone. As Paul writes in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” So, tragically, some Christians have taken a misreading of Genesis so far that they’ve gone against the basic Christian principles of love and unity, and they need to cut it out. References Ainsworth, Claire. 2018. “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic.” Scientific American. October 22, 2018. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/?fbclid=IwAR1zBKEC1_4OhbNe5xacEdgOi-1YXaVTeS02J_fw2N6rGmzVEHP686irM8E. Assemblies of God. 2017. “Transgenderism, Transsexuality, and Gender Identity.” August 7, 2017. http://religiousinstitute.org/denom_statements/transgenderism-transsexuality-gender-identity/. Focus on the Family Issue Analysts. 2018. “Transgenderism – Our Position.” February 1, 2018. https://www.focusonthefamily.com/get-help/transgenderism-our-position/. Mohney, Gillian. 2014. “Leelah Alcorn: Transgender Teen’s Reported Suicide Note Makes Dramatic Appeal.” December 31, 2014. https://abcnews.go.com/US/leelah-alcorn-transgender-teens-reported-suicide-note-makes/story?id=27912326. Tilsen, Jon-Jay. 2014. “Cross Dressing and Deuteronomy 22:5.” July 8, 2014. http://www.beki.org/dvartorah/crossdressing/. Vedeler, Harold Torger. 2008. “Reconstructing Meaning in Deuteronomy 22:5: Gender, Society, and Transvestitism in Israel and the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Biblical Literature 127 (3): 459–76. Versaldi, Giuseppe Cardinal. 2019. “Male and Female He Created Them. For a Path of Dialogue on the Issue of Gender in Education.” Catholic Church. June 10, 2019. https://zenit.org/2019/06/10/new-vatican-document-provides-schools-with-guidance-on-gender-issues/.