A Christian Defense of Intersex Persons

I frequently recommend Megan DeFranza's brilliant book Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God. It is a phenomenally good analysis of the subjects of sex and gender, and it provides a solid historical overview and a brilliant theological analysis and exegesis of the Bible's treatment of the topics. DeFranza's analysis includes, among other things, an few bits of exegesis—most notably her exploration of the Adam and the Eve in Genesis 1-3 as progenitors of human diversity rather than normative archetypes—and historical context—the six-seven different genders acknowledged by second-temple Rabbis—which I regularly include in my Christian defense of the gender identities of trans persons. While I very much stand by my usage of these arguments, I was convicted recently that in my use of DeFranza's book I have been guilty of a particularly damaging sin. Specifically I have been guilty of treating Intersex persons and the research which arose out of concern for topics and attitudes which have oppressed them as mere means (and not as ends in themselves) for the defense of other (most often transgender) people.

That is not to say that the Christian defense of trans people is in any way a bad thing; much to the contrary, I believe it a Christian's duty to defend the dignity and gender identities of our trans friends, family, and neighbors. But that duty does not grant any sort of licence to treat another population as mere means to that good end. The sin was not one of commission but one of omission. While using DeFranza's work to defend the identities of trans people, I did not use them to defend or really even specifically mention, the very real concerns of Intersex people. I hope to do correct that omission here.

For those who are not aware, Intersex people are people whose bodies do not fully conform to the more typical patterns which we (and most modern societies) use to assign people to one of two sexes (female or male). Numbers are hard to pin down because there are a lot of different ways that a person can be intersex and there are ongoing disagreements about what "counts" as an intersex condition so I have seen everything from 1 in 2000 to 2% (1 in 50) depending on who is counting and what degree of variation the counter allows for.

There are, so far as I know, two specific areas of concern wherein intersex people most frequently encounter, and are subject to, injustice. The first area of concern is simple recognition of their existence not as defective iterations of males or females, men or women, but as intersex persons who may be male, may be female, may be another sex, another gender, none, or both. That is to say the first area of concern has to do with recognizing the existence and dignity of intersex persons qua intersex. The second area of particular concern for intersex people has grown out of the intersection of the first area with technological development in the field of medicine. Because western society is generally uncomfortable with facts and events which complicate the categories we use to understand our world, it has become almost standard practice for doctors to surgically intervene when healthy intersex children are born and conduct surgeries on them in order to make their bodies conform to the more typical male or female pattern. Now, because sex is determined by more than just a person's genitals (some intersex people have fairly typically male external genitalia, some have typically female external genitalia, while some have external genitalia with is ambiguous) this is not a case of "correcting" a person's genitalia to conform to what they "really" are (what the person "really" is is an intersex person in any case). These surgeries which are often not at all medically necessary introduce all sorts of horrendous complications into the lives of these intersex people. The stories about this are heartbreaking and, rather than relate them myself I will encourage you to check out the documentary Intersex and Faith or to hop on Youtube and watch one of the many interviews and documentaries there. Intersex activists have made the claim that these surgeries, and the treatments which often accompany them, amount to genital mutilation and something like involuntary child abuse.

Now, working backwards through these two areas of concern, it strikes me that there is no reason why a Christian of almost any theological bent should not join in the efforts of intersex activists to end medically unnecessary surgeries on infants and children. The obvious alternative—recommended by many intersex activists—is to hold off on medically unnecessary surgical manipulation of a person's primary and secondary sex characteristics until they are old enough make an informed decision and let their own wishes be known.

I said just now that there is no reason that a Christian should not support ending these unnecessary surgeries and treatments. It would have been more accurate to say that there is no justification. There are, unfortunately, several reasons that some Christians do oppose these efforts; it is just that their reasons are not reasonable. The primary reason—I suspect—that a theologically conservative Christian might support the continued implementation of infant genital "modification" surgeries grows directly out of the first area of concern where intersex people encounter injustice: preservation of the "gender binary". Theologically conservative Christians are, despite a paucity of Biblical support for this view, often deeply wedded to the idea that sex is a binary category and that all people must be, in some real way, finally either female or male. While this commitment on their part does not logically demand that they support genital "modification" surgery in intersex infants since those intersex children may well grow up to identify with one or the other of the binary options, it does entail a profound discomfort with the ongoing ambiguity which is represented in a person whose body is not "clearly" male or female. Effectively, some theologically conservative Christians (as well as some Christians of other theological stripes) may be tempted to support genital modification surgeries on intersex infants in order to assuage their own emotional discomfort with the existence of those infants as intersex individuals. Thought they may provide other justifications (each of which should each be analyzed and responded to on its own merits, I am not supporting the use of bulverism here) it strikes me as rather likely that their motivation has to do with a desire to remain in comfortable denial about the fact that the taxonomy we have labeled "physical sex" is far more nuanced and complex than they want it to be and they are thus willing that these surgeries should be performed despite the negative consequences such "treatments" will have on the intersex children themselves. Once more, this is my hypothesis for why some theologically conservative Christians may support genital surgery on intersex infants despite the fact that there is no compelling Biblical or theological case that they ought to. There are other possibilities, but if I am at all correct in this then it is evident that Christian opposition to intersex people in the second area of concern derives primarily from Christian opposition to intersex people in the first area of concern: contemporary theologically conservative Christians, together with many other people in contemporary Western society, harbor a deep discomfort towards the existence of people who problematize their neat biological taxonomies.

Intersex people can become the scapegoats of people who fear uncertainty

The question (a philosophical one) which is at the heart of both the intersex non-affirming Christian's concern and the first area of concern for intersex folks may be summarized as follows: "Are female and male the only real or final sexes which can possibly be true of human beings?" Here there are some interpretive and theological arguments which are sometimes used to justify answering in the positive and denying that there are can be anything beyond male and female sexes. The first thing to note though, is that our current understanding of biology actually points towards a negative response, so that, despite what they will often claim, "modern science" actually counts against the case of the non-affirming Christians—their whole case must rest on a fideistic reliance on their theological argument. The process of determining a human person's sex on a biological level is a complex one which involves factors beyond that person's genotype (their "sex" chromosomes whether XX, XY, XXY, XYY, XO, or some other combination) and phenotype (the shape their body takes on) and, while most people sort fairly easily into one of two groups, intersex people are specifically those people who do not fit neatly into either. Factors like a person's genes, hormone levels, and genitalia are all more complex that a simple binary but in order for a person to be determined typically female or male each of them must point rather unambiguously in a single direction and that direction needs to correspond to the direction that each of the other's is pointing. If your genes point in a typically male direction (XY) and you hormone levels do as well (you have relatively high levels of androgens like testosterone) but your genetalia and eventual "secondary sex characteristics" point in a typically female direction, you are in a situation which a simplistic "male and female only" taxonomy of sex is unable to handle.

So the biological case is all in favor of recognizing that a binary taxonomy of sex is insufficient to describe the totality of people who actually exist in the world. But what is the theological argument which intersex non-affirming Christians cling to? It comes down to two claims: the first (which turns out to be false) is that the Bible only mentions two genders: "male" and "female"; while the second is that the Genesis account chronicles the creation of "man and woman" as "very good". As regards the first claim, Megan DeFranza has already established pretty conclusively that second temple Jewish thinkers had six or seven item list of possible sexes and that Jesus seems to be referencing people on this list when, in Matthew 19, he refers to a number of "types" of eunuch. So the claim that "male" and "female" are the only sexes which appear in the Bible is flat wrong.

The second claim is one I find especially objectionable just because it presents a premise "God declared 'very good' the creation of a man and a woman" as equivalent to the conclusion "Male and female are the only two sexes which God acknowledges as good". Has it never occurred to them that Genesis contains no explicit divine recommendation of ice cream sundaes or roller derby? Still it could be pressed that the declaration of the Adam (male/man) and the Eve (female/woman) as "very good" implies that it is "very good" for the total diversity of the human experience to be confined to those two sexes—but I don't see how such a claim could be sustained. As DeFranza has pointed out, the creation account in Genesis follows the pattern of things being created and declared good. Those things constitute several of the rough taxonomies with which we understand the world: night and day; dry land from sea; fish that swim, birds that fly, and animals that crawls along the ground etc... . In each case, the taxonomies Genesis uses are perfectly appropriate for suggesting "all of the stuff in the relevant category" but if picked apart and taken in the restrictive sense that the intersex non-affirming Christian wants to take the Adam and the Eve creation account, would contain gaping holes. The same argument which wants to pronounce sexes beyond "female" and "male" as "not good" must then turn around to similarly decry dawn and twilight (which are neither day nor night), marshes (which are neither dry ground nor sea), amphibians, penguins, and platypuses (which are not swimming fish, flying birds, or land-crawling mammals). Clearly the reading of Genesis which restricts "goodness" to those things which can be pedantically sorted into the categories explicitly described in the creation account is a poor reading of the text. DeFranza suggests that a far more robust reading of the Genesis account would be one which understands the categories used in that text to be representative of the total diversity which is associated with the list. Thus when God declares day and night good we are to understand that the whole 24 hour rhythm is a good creation of God; when God declares the land and the sea good we are to understand that all manner of terrain is a good creation of God; when God declares the various types of animal good we are to claim that the whole diversity of living beings is a good creation of God, and when God declares the Adam and the Eve "very good" we are to understand that the full diversity of human sex and gender is a very good creation of God.

But seriously, how could they not be good?

Now while I worked on correcting the sinful error I had made in omitting a recognition (and attendant defense) of intersex people from my work in defense of LGB relationships or of the gender identities of transgender people, I noticed that the sin I had committed or participated in has already had its effects compounded. I am not suggesting that my own small contribution to this much larger conversation has, on its own, had some sort of out sized effect on the spiritual and social well being of intersex persons, rather I notice that my own error is one which has frequently (though not universally) been matched by others who have engaged in this arena. Intersex people and the great variety of intersex conditions have been cited frequently by those of us who are affirming of trans identities as a fact (because the existence of Intersex persons is certainly a fact) which undermines the typically non-affirming claims that gender and sex are ontologically binary. And that argument is valid. The problem is that in presenting the argument, in using the existence of intersex people merely as a tool in our defense of LGBT folks without also recognizing and—where necessary—defending the dignity of intersex people themselves, without also including a full argument in defense of intersex individuals, we have associated intersex people with the rest of the LGBT community in the minds of people who are not predisposed to affirm the LGBT community and then failed to support them as persons themselves. In effect we have dragged intersex people into the battle and then abandoned them to the "mercy" of people who feel threatened. We need to face the fact that intersex people might have received a far more supportive and welcome response from theologically conservative Christians if they had not been associated in those Christians' minds with the rest of the LGBTQI community. It is never right to use a person as a means to any ends, even good ends, if you are not at the same time, treating that person as an end in themselves.

On a final note. I want to make two things clear:

1. I know that there is much more to be said about intersex people: that they are not "a product of the fall"; that, in their particularities, they can help those of us who are not intersex to better understand ourselves, our world, and God; that the intersex experience is far from homogenous—it is diverse and complex, and much more. 
2. I am almost certain to have got some things wrong here and I would appreciate any corrections or suggestions on my analysis or understanding of the facts.

Most of the information about intersex people in this piece comes from one of the following sources which I strongly encourage you to read to become more acquainted with intersex people, their awesomeness and their concerns:

• Intersex and Faith
• InterAct
• Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God
• National Geographic's Gender Revolution

5 Good Books Which Will Challenge Your Conservative Evangelicalism

In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere—"Bibles laid open, millions of surprises," as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

- C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Writing as someone who has traversed the bridge from Solidly Evangelical to, well, not (I identify as a Charismatic Anabaptist) I thought it might be fun annotating a list of books which, once read, are likely to ease a person's transition out of Evangelicalism (of the American and White variety) and into some other form of Christianity. As such, this isn't a list of books by the "New Atheists" but a list of books by authors who operate in and around the edges of Conservative American Evangelicalism and who are all dedicated Christians.

Of course there are millions of Evangelicals (and I am using the term to designate those culturally conservative Christians in America who self-identify as Evangelical and have, in recent history been associated with right-wing politics) who who have read and appreciated these books, they don't have any mysterious power to rip the evangelicalism out of someone. What they do, and do well, is fuzz the (mostly cultural) boundaries which have been set up around American white Evangelicalism. Not challenging any of the basic tenets of the faith (the authors are all robustly Nicene or, as Lewis would have said, "Mere" Christians) allowing alert and critical readers the realization that God is, indeed, moving powerfully out there. 

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

'Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it's ill talking of such questions.'

'Because they are too terrible, Sir?'

'No. Because all answers deceive. If ye put the question from within Time and are asking about possibilities, the answer is certain. The choice of ways is before you. Neither is closed. Any man may choose eternal death. Those who choose it will have it. But if ye are trying to leap on into eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to moral ears. Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. 

Nobody ever really warned me about C.S. Lewis back when I was an Evangelical. In fact, throughout my childhood and through college he remained something of a hero among Evangelicals of my stripe. Mere Christianity (having been instrumental in the conversion of so many Baby Boomers) was, and still is, revered as am Evangelical classic.

I, like many others, first encountered Lewis through The Chronicles of Narnia and later his Space Trilogy and The Screwtape Letters. I started to read his apologetic and theological works in college and moved on to his Literary theory while working on my masters. I remain an enormous fan. There are, to my mind, few authors of the 20th century who possess the lucidity of thought, keenness of intellect, and sheer creativity that Lewis demonstrates in so many of his works—academic or fictional.

Of course Lewis himself was an Anglican, not an Evangelical and his writing doesn't back down from that, so it shouldn't be surprising that reading and agreeing with Lewis will have the tendency of moving someone's "center" away from Evangelicalism and towards something more like "mere" Christianity. All the same, I don't know that there are any of his works which will prove more challenging to the Evangelicalism of a person, than The Great Divorce. The book is a fictional supposal in which Lewis goes on a bus ride to the outskirts of heaven where he encounters a series of individuals being given the opportunity to stay and flourish. The book is a masterwork of theological psychology as Lewis uses it to examine our reasons for resisting a Very Good God, the reasons a person might choose their own misery over infinite joy. Critical to our purposes here however, the conversations the fictional Lewis has with his "Master" George MacDonald, will do much to gently yet firmly undermine a good Evangelical's confidence in doctrines like eternal damnation. It isn't perfect (it contains a little too much of neo-Platonism to my mind) but it is both good and powerful.

The Sin of Certainty by Pete Enns

Correct thinking provides a sense of certainty. Without it, we fear that faith is on life support at best, dead and buried at worst. And who wants a dead or dying faith? So this fear of losing a handle on certainty leads to a preoccupation with correct thinking, making sure familiar beliefs are defended and supported at all costs. How strongly do we hold on to the old ways of thinking? Just recall those history courses where we read about Christians killing other Christians over all sorts of disagreements about doctrines few can even articulate today. Or perhaps just think of a skirmish you’ve had at church over a sermon, Sunday-school lesson, or which candidate to vote into public office. Preoccupation with correct thinking. That’s the deeper problem. It reduces the life of faith to sentry duty, a 24/7 task of pacing the ramparts and scanning the horizon to fend off incorrect thinking, in ourselves and others, too engrossed to come inside the halls and enjoy the banquet. 

This book is specifically targeted at one of the great fetishes of Evangelicalism: The conviction that certainty = faith and that the basic duty of  a good Christian is to police a particular set of propositions. I think the first attack God mounted on this stronghold in my life was through the Catholic Philosopher Peter Kreeft who once remarked on how bizarre (and un-biblical) it was to think that one had to pass a theology exam in order to get into heaven. Enns writes in a conversational, confessional style and his own commitment to God and his love of the Bible come through clearly. This book makes the list specifically because it is not the sort of book that an Evangelical who reads it will be able to dismiss as having been written by someone without a deep trust in God. Enns' life and reasoning work together to force the reader to take him seriously. Then, once he is taken seriously, the arguments cut winsomely and incisively right at the heart of the "salvation by correct-thoughts-alone" heresy.

The Myth of a Christian Nation by Greg Boyd

Consider these questions: Did Jesus ever suggest by word or example that we should aspire to acquire, let alone take over, the power of Caesar? Did Jesus spend any time and energy trying to improve, let alone dominate, the reigning government of his day? Did he ever work to pass laws against the sinners he hung out with and ministered to? Did he worry at all about ensuring that his rights and the religious rights of his followers were protected? Does any author in the New Testament remotely hint that engaging in this sort of activity has anything to do with the kingdom of God? The answer to all these questions is, of course, no.

What Lewis does to the Evangelical doctrine of hell, and Enns does to the salvation-by-correct-thoughts-alone doctrine, Boyd does to the civil religion endemic to so much of white Evangelicalism in America today. Like the previous two authors, Boyd is a committed Christian (and a Charismatic to boot). He takes the Bible seriously and Jesus even more so, he is committed to spreading the Gospel, and speaks, fluently, the language of Evangelicalism—he has even written a book of personal apologetics: Letters From a Skeptic: A Son Wrestles with his Father's Questions about Christianity.

Meanwhile, this book is an axe at the root of the tree of civil religion. In it, Boys works with both narrative and lucid argument to demonstrate that the Kingdom of God, as Jesus and Paul taught about it throughout the New Testament, is utterly different from governments as we understand them. He cuts right thought the false equation of "Good Christianity" with "Patriotism", carefully distinguishing this world's power over approach from Jesus' power under. 

The Civil War as Theological Crisis by Mark Noll

The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation; the nation that had taken to the Book was rescued not by the Book but by the force of arms.

It is worth stating up front that Noll is an Evangelical Christian with all of the Evangelical bona fides—a Wheaton College graduate, and later professor who has taught at Notre Dame and is currently at Regent—because this book will feel far more challenging to many Evangelicals than several of the previous ones. It doesn't so much challenge a particular belief of pillar of Evangelicalism as it does shake a basic conceit. When I was an Evangelical I held on hard to the belief that people who worked hard to interpret the Bible, so long a they worked at it in good faith, would arrive at the same, correct, conclusion. This book holds an almost painfully revealing mirror up to that conceit by examining the theological crisis among Evangelicals who lived up to and during the American civil war (yes there is some important historical difference between them and the Evangelicals of today). Noll's history is alarmingly reminiscent of the sorts of theological arguments Evangelicals are having today and most troublingly (to the Evangelical mind) it was the thinkers and pastors who were arguing for slavery—either as a necessary evil or as an outright good—who most clearly map onto the Evangelicals of today. They were the one's arguing for the "plain meaning of Scripture" they were the ones who accused their theological opponents of obfuscation-through-nuance. The Evangelical who reads this book will begin to find herself more and more nonplussed and eventually disturbed by the sort of arguments she sees her Evangelical compatriots making when they argue about the "hot button issues" facing the church today.

Sex Difference in Christian Theology by Megan DeFranza

We need to say, is Genesis giving us Adam and Eve as the ideal for all times and places? Or are we bringing those assumptions to the text? I think, too, about racial difference. If we're trying to get back to Adam and Eve, we'll lose racial difference. And yet we don't just have Genesis. We have a whole canon that ends with this glorious vision of every tribe and language and nation gathered before the throne and worshiping. We have racial difference, not in Eden, but in the new creation. I think we're trying to ask too much of Genesis 1, 2, and 3 to give us all of God's blueprint for a good creation and anything that doesn't fit there is a result of the fall. I think that's a false reading. I think it's the beginning of the story, but there's so much more that God has done in the scriptures and in creation that we need to consider.

Like Noll, Megan DeFranza checks all of the Evangelical boxes. She grew up in a conservative Evangelical context, managed a couple of masters (Theology and Biblical Languages) at Gordon-Conwell before getting he Ph.D. in Religious studies, and speaks fluent Evangelicalese. She understands her current calling to be bridge-building between conservatives and intersex people. And yet this book smashes headlong into nearly all of the basic Evangelical assumptions about the nature of sex and gender. Sex Difference in Christian Theology meticulously examines the current science on how bodies are formed and what contributes to the ways in which doctors and scientists assign gender and sex labels to individual persons, and in that light critically (using fully approved Evangelical exegetic techniques) examines the witness of the Bible concerning gender and sex. The result for an Evangelical who reads the book with an open, yet still critical, mind is likely to be the crumbling, not of the book, but of his own understanding of what the Bible does and does not actually have to say about the meaning of physical sex and about gender. Having been disarmed by her passion and care for Scripture, the Evangelical will soon be alarmed to discover just how many of his beliefs on this subject were little more than assumptions—and weak assumptions at that.

How about you?

Are there any books you would like to add to the list. Leave them in the comments section together with a brief explanation.

A Christian Defense of the Identities of Transgender Persons Part 5: Positive Arguments

This is Part 5 in a series that starts HERE.
My separate series in defense of LGB relationships starts HERE.
My post in defense of Intersex persons is HERE

Staying Positive (I have no idea who this guy is)

I'd like to begin by summarizing my argument to date. Using the hypothetical example of Wanda, an individual you (the hypothetical pastor) knew first as "Bob" - who comes to you and announces that she (whom you originally knew as "he") is in fact transgender, has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and has decided to transition to a more female typical body using hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and sex reassignment surgery (SRS) among other things - we have been asking whether you ought to affirm Wanda in her female gender identity. I have argued first that there is no logical reason that we ought to deny the possibility of Wanda's claim, and that we ought to trust her. I then took two posts to look at what the Bible has to say on the subject (one looking at directly applicable passages and one looking at passages which might infer a negative conclusion) and I concluded that the Bible does not condemn or disallow the possibility that Wanda is correct. So we have established that Wanda's claim is possible and that it is not contrary to the Bible. But now I want to take a look at whether the Bible might affirm Wanda's claim.

Parallel to my conclusions in Part 3, I don't think that there are any passages in the Bible which directly affirm Wanda's claim. While there were ancient cultures which understood the existence of transgender people to greater and lesser degrees (check out "two spirit people" in several Native American cultures, but there are examples from all over the world) they don't seem to get any attention in the Bible one way or the other. In the absence of direct passages, we move to looking at the indirect implications of Biblical teachings and here there is quite a bit to be found.

1. The fundamental role of Love

Jesus is very clear in teaching that the most basic principle from which all of God's commands are derived, is the dual command to love God and to love our neighbor [Matthew 22] (and since Jesus includes even "enemies" in this category we are talking about loving everyone). One basic aspect of love is that it seeks the good of its object [much of 1 Cor 13, Philippians 2:3, John 15:13, Romans 13:10, 1 John 3:17 etc...]. Of course most Christians are agreed on this. The difficulty comes in figuring out what it means to seek a particular person's good in a particular situation. So far, in parts 2,3, and 4 in this series I have tried to show that, since Wanda's claim is inherently possible and does not contradict any of the direct teachings of the Bible. This, provided we are interpreting correctly, can work as a short cut to letting us know when certain things are or are not good for us. Then, in light of the lack of biblical proscriptions, the responsible choice is to turn to the best science and research we have to ask whether an affirmation of their gender identities is the best for transgender people. Here the evidence is clear and rapidly growing stronger. Transgender children who are accepted and affirmed in their gender identities are as healthy as cisgender children (in stark contrast to transgender children who are raised in non-affirming environments who face horribly elevated risks of suicide, depression, anxiety and other harmful effects). Identity affirming treatments like hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and sex reassignment surgery (SRS) are shown to effectively alleviate gender dysphoria when applied according to WPATH's (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) standards of care. So affirming Wanda's gender identity is likely to have a positive impact on her mental health and is not contrary to any teaching in scripture. It is therefore the loving thing to do.

Are you asking someone to carry this when God isn't?

2. We are not to impose heavy burdens on people

In contrast to the burdens the Pharisees put on people [Matthew 23:4] Jesus claims that His charge is "light" [Matthew 11:28-30]. In contrast to those who would kill, steal, and destroy, Jesus claims that He came so that we could have abundant life [John 10]. When we look at applying these principles to the situation of transgender people, the application is pretty straight forward. When trans people are not accepted in their communities and/or have the legitimacy of their gender identity claims rejected or denied; when transgender people are subjected to "reparative therapy" and forced to conform to the gender identity and role society has based on their body, the load is far to often, heavy beyond what they can bear. Common outcomes are depression, anxiety, and death. (Check out studies here, and here)

3. Our bodies will all be different one day

Incogneto Jesus on the road to Emmaus

We only get a picture of one post-resurrection body in the Bible, Jesus' body. What is particularly relevant to this conversation is that Jesus' body after the resurrection is significantly different from His body prior to the resurrection. He is able to configure his form so that even close friends don't recognize Him [John20, Luke 24], enters a locked room without anyone realizing it and seems to be able to teleport (or something) [Luke 24, Mark 16]. In theological terms, Jesus' post-resurrection body has been glorified and is significantly different from His own body prior to the resurrection and from the bodies of Adam and Eve prior to the fall. For the great majority of Christians, it is an important doctrine that our bodies are going to be glorified as well as our souls, and from the few hints we have, that glorification seems to indicate a degree of plasticity in the body. Given the fact that the process which brings us (more or less depending on how reformed you are) closer to glorification (sanctification) is happening in the present, it is worth asking whether transgender folk who work to bring their bodies into closer alignment with their gender identity are finding a greater degree of wholeness which would read theologically as part of the sanctification of their bodies.

4. Christian Love is not epistemically arrogant

The second half of 1 Corinthians 13 (verses 8-12) is a reminder that we do not know everything and placed there, it should particularly remind us that we do not need to know everything in order to be loving. I think a lot of Christians feel somewhat paralyzed lately by a combination of the fact that the empirical evidence seems to pretty strongly suggest that transgender people will benefit most from having their gender identities affirmed, and the fact that many popular leaders of the evangelical movement are stating loudly that "transgenderism" is somehow sinful and that affirming transgender folks in their gender identities is paramount to enabling a harmful delusion. I think it is really important to note that when Jesus [particularly in Matthew 23], Paul, James,and John speak about love they prefer the doing of actual, calculable good to others over the preservation of a theological speculation. I am inclined to think that evangelical America is so overwhelmed and with a fear of having the wrong theology that we are often prevented from doing the good that is there in front of us to do. Try bracketing the theological question "Is it sinful to affirm the gender identities of transgender people" for just a second and look at the question "Are transgender people better off when we affirm their gender identity?" Study after study show that they are (check some of them out here, here, here and here). So now bring those theological concerns back in, but bring them in together with the interpretive questions and exegetical complexities I have been raising throughout this series, and I think the picture might look a little different. If we begin by prioritizing love and admit to the complexity of interpreting the "relevant" passages of scripture, the clear call of the Bible is to do that which is best for transgender folk, without ruling out a full and encouraging affirmation of their gender identities.

In Conclusion

This should be a safe and affirming place for trans people

I hope (and on my good days, believe) that Christians of all stripes genuinely want to find the best, most effective way to love transgender people like Wanda. My reading of the current scientific, medical, and psychological data, and study of the relevant theology suggests that while (as my friend Michael Raburn is forever reminding the world) each person and situation is unique, we ought to be wide open to recognizing and affirming the gender identities of trans folk we meet. Before all else, we need to be for them. For their health, for their flourishing, for their dignity, and for their acceptance in our communities. Any conservative Christian will feel legitimately pressed to remind us that actions and attitudes which contradict any clear teachings of Scripture ought to be seen as non-loving for those involved since God has given us revelation in order for us to flourish (though flourishing often does not look like what many people might assume or what our cultures try to portray). As I believe I have shown though, a full affirmation of a transgender persons's gender identity is clearly not in contradiction to any teachings of scripture and, while I would not presume to suggest that there is a one-size-fits-all response to any pastoral or relational questions, a welcoming, caring affirmation of their gender identity is very much on the table and, in my opinion, ought to be the default response of churches, pastors, and individual Christians.

CLICK HERE for my treatment, in dialogue form, of an enormous list of verses which are used to support an anti-trans position based on an assumed Biblical assertion of either a gender binary or of some sort of "intended design" argument.

Further Resources

I have mentioned a few of these before but if you are really interested in learning about transgender Christians and theology here are some tremendous resources:

• Austen Hartke runs the Transgender and Christian Youtube channel
• The Gay Christian Network has some good stuff.
• Although she doesn't address transgender folk directly, Megan DeFranza's book Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God (she gets extra kudos for the Oxford comma in her book title)
• If you are looking for a conservative resource the best I have found so far is by Mark Yarhouse in Understanding Gender Dysphoria: Navigating Transgender Issues in a Changing Culture I disagree with a number of his conclusions but he presents a more honest look at the facts on the ground than some other voices I could mention.  
• Allyson Robinson is a Transgender Baptist pastor. Check out her TED talk below:

A Christian Defense of the Identities of Transgender Persons Part 4

If seeing this image anywhere near the word "transgender"
freaks you out, you might want to reflect on what baggage
you are bringing to this conversation.

This is Part 4 in a series which starts HERE

My separate series in defense of LGB relationships starts HERE

My post in defense of Intersex persons is HERE

Introductory note: I have worked as hard as I know how to avoid creating a straw-man argument for the non-recognizing position. I have endeavored to present as fair (while still critical) a representation of those exegetical arguments I have been able to find, as possible, but am conscious of the fact that those arguments are (in my understanding) remarkably weak. I should point out that non-recognizing folk also make more general theological-anthropological and philosophical-anthropological arguments and that I have not addressed them in this post. I will do my best to address them in future posts. In the meantime if you know of stronger forms of the indirect exegetical argument I would encourage you to post them in the comments box where I will make every attempt to respond to them in  a timely manner. 

Here it is, the long delayed take on the oblique passages. Those parts of the Bible which are often thought to be relevant to the situation of transgender persons though they do not address transgender people directly. While I certainly have been working on a number of other things (did I mention I put a book out this summer?) I have also been doing my reading and my research so that I am now able to return to you, a more read and researched blogger.

What I have found is that the arguments against recognizing a transperson's identity generally boil down primarily to Genesis 1 and 2 (the creation account) and occasionally utilize Psalm 139:13 (God having created David while David was still in utero) and usually Matthew 19:4 (where Jesus quotes Genesis 1 as support for an argument about marriage and divorce). That is certainly not a whole lot to go on but it pretty much sums up the passages the anti-trans-identity Christians routinely cite in defense of their position (if you are in this group and there is an important passage you think I am missing please bring it to my attention, I am drawing predominantly on the work of Albert Mohler and Denny Burke). The key texts here are:

So God created man in His own image; He created him in the image of God; He created them male and female. (Genesis 1:27)

and

For it was You who created my inward parts; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. (Psalm 139:13)

The argument that is then constructed from these passages and - in the case of the Genesis text - their surrounding context, is that since God created humanity dimorphically (male and female), it must be God's intention that humanity restrict itself to a gender binary as any attempt to embrace a third (or fourth or fifth) sex or gender category (the passage is generally taken to refer to both sex and gender after an attack on any possibility of distinction between the two categories is made without reference to Scripture) would constitute an attempt to move beyond God's plan for the species.
Now I realize that the argument so far, regardless of how good or bad it is, doesn't actually speak to Wanda's situation (for an update on the extended illustration I am using for the series you are going to need to start at PART 1 - Short version: Wanda is a trans woman who was known as "Bob" for a while and would like to have her female gender recognized by her church). Wanda, like many trans persons in America today, isn't particularly interested in identifying or being recognized as a third gender, she identifies as, and would like to be related to as, a woman. However I think it is worth stopping here for a second to point out that the non-recognizing crew are presently deriving their conclusions from a philosophy which is built on the perceived implications of a mere one to three passages.

This break in the argument is brought to you by trans pride.

Back to the argument: Having established that God's sexually dimorphic design for the species implies God's intention that sex and gender remain binary in human society, the argument then moves to assert that since God is the one designing humanity, and (per Psalm 139) individual human bodies, we need to read the morphology of our bodies at birth (including genitalia and chromosomal makeup) as prescriptive of our sex and gender identities (remember that the necessary congruence of sex and gender is stated but not defended on any particular Scriptural basis). The experience of gender dysphoria and the physical non-binary morphology of intersex people is explained as a result of creation's fall into a sinful and broken state. Thus, the reasoning goes, when there is an experienced incongruence of sex and gender (or of sex morphology to conform to a dimorphic pattern), the goal is to help the afflicted individual achieve restoration to the binary ideal.

In principle this ought to leave open the possibility that the tension could be relieved through hormone replacement therapy and sexual reassignment surgery thereby bringing the sex into alignment with the gender. However it is very important to folks who are thinking along these lines to insist that these actions would constitute an attack on healthy organs and bodily processes and that the only legitimate way of restoring the individual to the desired pre-fall state, is to take them through therapies (either religious or psychological) which will help them to re-orient their gender identities in order to bring them into congruence with their physiological sex. This is often supported by an appeal to a semi-Thomist "natural law" idea (pointing to reproduction as the healthy purpose of genitalia) while some theological accusations of the Gnostic heresy (which, among other things, denied the moral importance of the body to spiritual development) are occasionally deployed.
If all of this seems weak, I should point out that it is generally bolstered by a number of ancillary, but non-Scriptural arguments. Transgender people are generally compared to folks suffering from mental delusions in an attempt to account for the testimony of trans people. Thomistic natural law theory is not infrequently employed to make teleological arguments about the "proper" purpose of the body. Examples of mental illness are emphasized while examples of physical illness are generally downplayed (the mind is generally taken to be more fully subject to brokenness and the fall than the body is) and, in the worst cases, (certainly not all) emotional appeals to disgust, pity, and fear are combined with hand wringing over the advance of "liberal" thought and the advance of "secular society". But these arguments, strong or not, are not part of the exegetical conversation and so ought to be put aside for the purpose of this portion of the discussion.

Fountainheads not Paradigms

What we are left with is then the argument that God created humanity as a sexually dimorphic species (male and female), that any deviation for a gender or sex binary must therefore be a result of human brokenness in the fall, and that restoration consists in changing the individual's mind to conform with their genitalia or in a supernatural relief of the individual's dysphoria. The problem then, is that this argument is flawed in each major step.

First, while the Genesis and Matthew passages could be legitimately read as a confirmation that humanity began as a dimorphic species, there is nothing inherently prescriptive in those passages (I encourage the reader to go check them out). As Megan DeFranza points out in her excellent book Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female, and Intersex in the Image of God :

Reading the Genesis account in light of the larger Biblical narrative, we are able to affirm the goodness of sex difference as the fountainhead of human difference without requiring the male-female pattern to become the paradigmatic form of the other. (loc.4517-4545 Kindle Edition)

Essentially, the Genesis account doesn't set up male-female as the pattern to which the species must perpetually conform but the origin from which the diversity of humanity is derived. This is made especially clear when we notice that there are all sorts of wonderful creatures and species which do not fit into the Genesis categories. As DeFranza points out elsewhere, bats, amphibians, platypoi, sunsets, and fungi all arguably fall between various Genesis categories and yet they remain "good". At the very least, the claim that Adam and Eve ought to be seen as the paradigm for human sexed-ness and gendered-ness rather than as the fountainhead is a legitimate exegetical debate.

Furthermore, there is Biblical warrant to conclude that redemption from a fallen state is more likely to look like a progression towards something new than a return to what was before. In term of Biblical narrative: humanity is restored to a city, not a garden; marriage is not restored in the Kingdom, but replaced with something else, and eunuchs are not (apparently) healed to become procreative, but given "a name better than sons and daughters" [Isaiah 56:4-5]. In short there is no biblical warrant to assume that healing the brokenness of the fall must look like a return rather than a progression to something new.

This is Allyson Robinson, a
transgender Baptist pastor.
She is confusing to
complimentarian theology

But even if the first points are granted, the third falls flat as an argument against recognizing Wanda as a woman. Even if humanity is necessarily reducible to a sex and gender binary such that any apparent deviation from dimorphic humanity must be credited to the brokenness of the fall, that does not imply that restoration must require changing a person's mind to conform to their body. It is just as possible, and arguably more likely given the existence of transgender Christians, that restoration to a gender binary would consist in conforming the body to the mind. This seems to be the position of Peter Kreeft who argues that gender dysphoria (he doesn't use that term) might be reasonably healed by a "sex change" either surgically on earth or supernaturally "in heaven [theological sic.]".

Ultimately the oblique exegetical argument seems to be almost as weak as the direct exegetical argument. In my next post in this series I intend to revisit the positive theological and exegetical arguments for recognizing Wanda in her own self-perceived gender identity before I go on to address some of the broader philosophical, social, and theological concerns which are being raised by those who would deny the legitimacy of Wanda's feminine gender identity.

P.S. If you are interested in cool ways you can show support for the transgender community, check out #illgowithyou they are pretty awesome.
Also for way more information that I have provided, you should head over to youtube and check out Austen Lionheart.

Part 5 is HERE