You can believe the bible *and* trans people
The "biblical perspective [against] trans people" isn't actually in the bible
How did the Evangelical church end up so opposed to trans people?
The center of Christian faith is Jesus, and the center of Christ’s ethical teaching is that the church is called to radically love the people society marginalizes, excludes, and treats poorly. It’s hard to think of a group in American society that’s been more discriminated against than trans people: more than a quarter of young trans people have already attempted suicide — and it’s difficult to think of a group that’s done a larger share of the discriminating than the Evangelical church.
There are of course different levels of discrimination, and I hope most people reading this don’t intend to directly participate in explicit bigotry or outright violence. But I’ve learned from my trans friends that things like misgendering and refusing to learn a person’s pronouns (or, purely hypothetically, going on a tangent in a Tower of Babel sermon to discuss the trans threat to America’s Christian foundation) also really do hurt people.
When I talk to most of the Christians in my day-to-day life about this, I usually find a conflict between people’s consciences (desiring to love their neighbors with no strings attached) and what they believe the bible is asking them to do (“speak the truth in love”.) After all, if you’re going to believe in Christianity, you have to believe in the whole thing, right? Including the hard parts?
And yet the surprising truth is that none of this is actually in the bible to begin with. Trans people have to figure lots of stuff out in understanding their identities — is gender the same as biological sex? Can you change your gender? Are there only two genders? — none of which has a “biblical” answer, because the bible never even asks any of these questions, let alone tries to answer them.
If you don’t believe me, google “biblical perspective on transgender ideology” (or check out examples like here, here, or here). You’ll find a whole bunch of discussion of “what the bible says” with almost no serious references to the bible (or any sort of evidence at all!) The only biblical passage with any relevance at all that gets cited again and again is an out-of-context verse from Genesis 1:
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
which is used to support a “biblical worldview” with a full and strict gender binary.
This is a really big deal. If we’re in a world where we’re mistreating trans teenagers to so badly that 1 in 4 have tried to end their own lives, then surely that’s by far the most important “transgender issue” facing the church today. But more importantly, if some of the harm is coming from a “biblical worldview” that has nothing to do with the bible, then learning to be more accepting and affirming is an easy step our churches could take with potentially life-or-death consequences.
This was going to be one post, but it got too long so I’m splitting it across two or three. In the rest of this one, I’m going to argue that there is absolutely no way to interpret Genesis 1 as trying to teach a strict gender binary. This isn’t just “an interpretation I disagree with” — it’s a fundamentally incoherent one that falls apart as soon as you look at the chapter as a whole.
In the next (possibly two) post(s) I will make a full argument for why I think Christians ought to fully affirm trans people’s identities. I will concede, with the biblical authors, that for the majority of people the gender binary works pretty well. But to tell trans people God is fundamentally opposed to their identities, you need gender/sex to be *strictly* binary, with no exceptions.
But this isn’t true biologically. In biology, sex is not (strictly) binary. There are millions of intersex people who were born with bodies that do not fit into the standard “male” or “female” boxes. There are tens of millions more people whose box is more ambiguously defined than you’d think from high school science — possibly even including you!
Once we accept that sex and gender binaries are only approximate anyways, the arguments for enforcing them strictly stop making sense. If there are people whose bodies are neither male or female, we can’t use the “everybody is either male or female” argument against our non-binary neighbors. If we make exceptions for intersex people because their biology doesn’t fit our pattern, why not also make exceptions for trans people, whose biology also turns out not to fit the gender binary? We’ll see next time that it isn’t true, for example, that trans women have “male bodies” (the underlying biology is a lot more complicated than that.)
I don’t think we need to “abolish gender” or anything radical like that. But gender and biological sex are both rough categories that help us make sense of the world, not discrete and perfect categories that apply well to every single person. As Christ followers we always ought to err on the side of loving our neighbors, not enforcing standards that are ultimately just kind of arbitrary.
Part One: Genesis 1 does not exclude non-binary people
Before my church preached a sermon about how donating to our building fund could cure depression, the “Genesis 1 teaches the gender binary” sermon was easily the one that upset me the most — both because I thought the lesson it taught was so deeply harmful and because it treated the source material with such disrespect.
Let’s sketch out the argument before we look at why it doesn’t work. Once again, the key verse comes when God creates people:
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
The argument is that this is a strict binary in creation — God created exactly two genders, and so that’s how many genders there are, and so any deviation from this plan is a result of sin and brokenness entering the world.
If you’re not familiar with the passage, Genesis 1 is the first chapter of the bible, describing the creation of the world, and it is literally all about binaries. Here are a few I found on a cursory reading of the text:
Light and Dark
Night and Day
The Ocean and the Firmament
Evening and Morning
Water and Dry Land
Three days of producing space and three days of filling space
Fish and Birds
Men and Women
Now1, binaries like this are cool because they make for very interesting poetry — Genesis 1 as a whole, after all, is a gorgeous creation poem, and the author uses these binaries to stress God’s sense of order. This is not a world thrown together by haphazard chance — no, this is a God who creates by pattern and plan, pulling night from day, sky from sea, and land from water.
But you may notice that very few of these binaries are actually, well, binary.
We as Christians do not spend very much time interrogating icebergs or marshes, demanding to know whether they are “really” dry land or sea. We accept that marshes are kind of in-between and icebergs aren’t really either, because we know that God creating “the land and the seas” is shorthand for a whole lot of diverse stuff.
Similarly, we enjoy the dawn and the dusk and the twilight without demanding that they conform to the night/day binary, because nobody has ever read the part where God creates the day and the night as somehow implying that “day” and “night” are two complete categories that capture every single possibility of what could be2.
And yet when God creates “male” and “female”, we’re suddenly supposed to believe that “God created them male and female” means, in contrast to every single way language has been used thus far in the entire Bible so far, that the author is trying to make a grand statement that you can classify every single person immutably as either male or female at birth without ambiguity or change.
And somehow God, who apparently thought this was the bedrock of Christian theology, forgot to have anyone say anything even remotely resembling this for the entire rest of the Bible.
This is not an interpretation anybody could have found by mistake or by sincerely trying to decipher the meaning of the passage — it’s clearly the work of somebody with a preconceived opinion on trans people digging for something, anything to support their belief, who then went on to teach most of the American Evangelical church that “this is what the passage means.”
It isn’t.
Binaries are fun and make for nice poetry.
But the world is better because it has wetlands, sunsets, and my nonbinary friends.
This general critique of this misreading of Genesis 1 isn’t original to me, but I’ve heard it too many times to know who to cite it to originally.
It’s actually worse than this, because two of the binaries literally don’t exist. One of the binaries (waters below / waters above) depends on an idea of “the firmament” that we now know doesn’t exist — Ancient Hebrews believed the sky was a solid dome that there was essentially another ocean sitting on top of. Another one (three days of space / three days of filling) only works because the author changes the order in which events happen — notably, plants exist before the sun in Genesis 1.