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Wednesday, June 3, 2015

A Christian Defense of the Gender Identities of Transgender Persons - Part 3


This is the third in a series that began with this post. If you haven't read it yet you may want to go
back just to get the full picture.

My separate series in defense of LGB relationships begins HERE

My post in defense of Intersex persons is HERE

In this post 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.

However, even 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 post, 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 portion to speak for itself and in my next post I will offer an analysis and refutation of the common arguments Christians make against the recognition of trans persons in their gender identities.

In my next post in this series I will address the more oblique texts which bear on this subject.

P.S. I want to do my best to avoid making any straw man arguments in this debate so please do not hesitate to use the comments section to draw my attention to anything I have missed here.

Part 4 is HERE

3 comments:

  1. Ha! That was surprising. I was just settling in for a scriptural analysis, and wham. Of course, I think you're correct here, and like the way you made your point. However, the brevity of this post means you'll have less leniency if you take too long putting up part 4. ;)

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  2. I'm working on it but so far it has been difficult to get anybody to actually articulate even a constructed argument based on perceived implications from Genesis and places where the gospels quote Genesis. I have been pointed towards a few sources though and the research continues...

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  3. "That was easy"....my favorite line. I've heard Gen. 5:2, "Male and female created he them", cited by others (in thundering tones) in the "conversation". Of course there's always Quentin Crisp's famous retort, "male and female made he me". Cheers!

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