Understanding Transgender Identities

Four Views

Beilby, James K., Eddy, Paul Rhodes

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781493419869
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

One of the most pressing issues facing the evangelical church today involves dramatic shifts in our culture's perceptions regarding human sexuality. While homosexuality and same-sex marriage have been at the forefront, there is a new cultural awareness of sexual diversity and gender dysphoria. The transgender phenomenon has become a high-profile battleground issue in the culture wars. This book offers a full-scale dialogue on transgender identities from across the Christian theological spectrum. It brings together contributors with expertise and platforms in the study of transgender identities to articulate and defend differing perspectives on this contested topic. After an introductory chapter surveys key historical moments and current issues, four views are presented by Owen Strachan, MarkA. Yarhouse and Julia Sadusky, MeganK. DeFranza, and Justin Sabia-Tanis. The authors respond to one another's views in a respectful manner, modeling thoughtful dialogue around a controversial theological issue. The book helps readers understand the spectrum of views among Christians and enables Christian communities to establish a context where conversations can safely be held.

1
Transition or Transformation?

A Moral-Theological Exploration of Christianity and Gender Dysphoria

OWEN STRACHAN

The first thing—the very first thing—that must be said about individuals who experience gender dysphoria at any level is that they are fully, substantially, immovably human. Whether they embrace a transgender identity or not, whether they go through a surgical or pharmacological transition or not, whether they receive any vestige of biblical truth and Christian teaching or not, they are inexorably image-bearers made by God.

The individual who experiences gender dysphoria is not a different class of human than any other; such persons are not freaks, misfits, subhuman, superhuman, inhuman, irredeemable, hopeless. They are people. Men or women. Fashioned by God. Formed for his glory. As C. S. Lewis once wrote, capturing the heaven-tinged nature of the human race, “You have never talked to a mere mortal.”1

More than any other worldview, any other belief system, Christian theology champions the dignity of humanity, all humanity, every person, without exception. There is no one—friend or foe, loved one or mortal enemy—whom we class beneath us, whose dignity we deny, whose worth we play down. Before we dive into disagreements and debates, let us confess this freely and happily: there is no ennobler of the human person like biblical Christianity.2 Humankind continually drives downward, seeking the mud and the muck like a heaving beast, but the faith once for all delivered to the saints enchants this besotted race and lifts it into the skies, where it flies just a bit below Icarus. Christian preaching to sinners is, in one sense, little more than the pleading of one person to others to recover their humanity, to refire their existential imagination and dare them to leave the pagan wilderness for the city on the hill.3

This we must continually do, on one issue after another. That baby spinning and gleefully kicking in response to Mom’s laughter is not a clump of cells, but a baby, a child. The person with different skin color than yours is not an abstraction, a stereotype whose value you can flick aside, but a human being. Those women featured in horrifically compromising poses, unveiling themselves before hungry eyes, are not objects, but God-made image-bearers. At issue in each of these and many other instances of prejudice, objectification, and outright abuse is denial of humanity, full humanity.

The Christian does not merely shake his or her head at these wrongs. To the person objectified and the objectifier alike, we plead: you were made for more than this. You are more than this. In repentance and faith, you will find all the happiness and Godward fullness you can imagine, and more. The Christian preacher, known today as “intolerant” and a charter member of a “hate group,” is in point of fact the figure most poised to affirm the full humanity of every person, including those who hate him. So we gladly and unflinchingly say to the man or woman who experiences gender dysphoria: you are not your confusion. You are not “damaged goods.” You are the God-made one, and the gospel of divine grace is fitted for your deepest failings and strongest needs. As we will see, understanding the gospel—and specifically the significance of conversion—is at the heart of this conversation.4

We begin here, with this explanation of our common humanity, because no doctrine save the doctrine of God is more contested today. In fact, I would go so far as to say that anthropology has become the central question of the age.5 The liberal theologians of the prewar years affirmed the existence of God, albeit in terms more theistic—even deistic—than Christian; the philosophers of the postwar years seemed convinced that God was dead, or at least so shrouded in the mists of twentieth-century warfare and apocalyptic human suffering as to be inapproachable and past engaging.6 We know what the postmodern world thinks of God and the study of God by virtue of the academy’s long shuffling of spiritual things from “divinity” to “religion” to “religious studies” to “social change.”7

God is invisible. But man and woman are not. The invisibility of God seems, in the postmodern mind, to allow for the marginalization of God. But man and woman are before us, physical, tangible, concrete. We see one another; therefore we exist. But what is man, precisely? What is woman? What is humanity? The problem with this central question is that one may only answer it satisfactorily with reference to the aforementioned matter—namely, the existence of God. Centuries ago, Calvin knew where the conversation would go: “The knowledge of ourselves not only arouses us to seek God, but also, as it were, leads us by the hand to find him.”8

This last point matters greatly for the pages to come. In what follows, we will sketch a biblical understanding of man and woman with reference to delineated differences and gender dysphoria. We will see that the Scriptures speak with conviction and compassion on the contested matters before us. My view, the historic view of the millennia-old Christian church, is that the sexes are binary—man and woman.9 Further, while we all undergo suffering as a result of Adam’s fall, men and women who experience gender dysphoria should not undergo bodily changes but instead, with vivified awareness of the witness of Scripture and a moral imagination ignited for God, should pursue something greater and more effectual than any transition: transformation.

To these possibilities, accessible through the plan of the Father, the atoning accomplishments of the Son, and the restoring agency of the Spirit, we now turn.

God Made Two Sexes: A Biblical Exploration of Binary Gender

The discussion among the four views in this book is, at its core, a conversation over the Bible. For any true Christian, the Bible is our authority—it is inspired, inerrant, and authoritative. The Bible is not one guide among many; the Bible, according to the Protestant Reformers, is norma normans—the “norm of norms,” the standard that rules all others.10 As with other ethical matters, this discussion of transgender identity among professing believers is at base a referendum on biblical authority and biblical sufficiency. Much, in other words, is at stake in this conversation.

Genesis 1–3 and the Created Order

The Scripture begins with the creative activity of Yahweh, who dynamically makes all that is. Yahweh does not use existing material, but rather speaks and causes life in various forms to take shape from chaos. When God makes the stars by his Word, he makes actual stars. When he makes birds and beasts and fish, he makes actual birds and beasts and fish. There is a one-to-one correspondence between what God intends and says and what comes to pass.

So it is on the sixth day, when the Lord’s aesthetic ingenuity reaches its peak. The creation of the man and the woman, the bearers of God’s image, is the height of all God’s initial activity (Gen. 1:26–27). The man and the woman each bear the image of God, even as the man is given responsibility to lead and guide the woman. There is thus an order to creation: the image-bearers have dominion over the animal kingdom.11 Within the one-flesh covenant, the man has God-given spiritual authority. In Genesis 2, he is formed first, made from the dust of the ground; the woman’s body proceeds from his own, as a rib is taken from him; he names the woman, even as he has named the animals; at the chapter’s close, he is tasked in the plan of the ages with leaving father and mother, and he is called—not the woman—to hold fast to his wife. All this speaks to the man’s God-given and God-focused spiritual authority.12

The woman possesses a distinct, God-ordained identity as well. She is a “helpmate,” one fashioned by God to complement her husband. Dorothy Patterson’s reflections are helpful here: “There is nothing demeaning about being a helper. It is a challenging and rewarding responsibility. God Himself assumed that role on many occasions (Ps. 40:17, ‘You are my help and my deliverer; O my God, do not delay’; Heb. 13:6, ‘So we say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper”’). . . . The fact is that there is no suggestion in Scripture that women are inferior or incapable in any sense—neither in personhood, which is the same as man’s, nor in function, which is different from man’s.”13

This does not suggest that she is lesser than the man but rather that she bears distinct capabilities and gifts that the man does not have. The woman looks to the man for leadership and sees herself as the one given to him by the Lord to aid and bless him. She is not in competition with him; she sees no inherent threat in his God-rendered authority, for she sees that he is indeed the one who will answer to God for his oversight. His strength is not his own; she knows that the man’s body was given for her, and thus his physical ability is her blessing, not her cursing. Finally, he is called and bound by God to hold fast to her, to care for and provide for her, and to never let her go.14

Sadly, in Genesis 3 we see the undoing of this holy plan (see vv. 1–13). The serpent subverts the created order, seeking dominion over the woman, who leads her husband. Adam does not rise up and crush the serpent’s head as he should, using his force and honor to destroy the one who has targeted his wife. Instead, he meekly, passively submits to satanic subversion. But though the devil has destabilized divine design, he has not overturned it. After the eating of the forbidden fruit, the Lord goes to Adam and addresses him, not the woman.15 He holds the man responsible. It is his leadership that has failed. The man blames the woman and, ultimately, God himself for his sin.16

So the Lord curses the order he has made. The sentence he pronounces is stern and strong as iron: for disobeying God, the man will now abuse his authority over the woman and discharge his duty of provision in pain and toil. The woman, by contrast, will know great pain in bearing children and will seek her husband’s place, battling him in the home; she has usurped his authority already, which he received passively instead of rebuking his wife and rejecting the serpent’s word-twisting, and now she will do so throughout the ages (see Gen. 3:16–19). Thankfully, although the serpent will bruise the heel of the woman’s offspring, this same figure will crush the serpent’s head. The work of the Messiah, in other words, is the restoration of creation order. The atonement will put all things to rights in the end.

There is no more important passage of biblical text for our present conversation than this. Genesis 1–3 gives us reality, not a theological fairy tale. God makes the man, and God makes the woman. For this reason we believe in “binary gender.” Said better: we believe in the sexes. The sexes are not arbitrar...