Embodied

Transgender Identities, the Church, and What the Bible Has to Say

Preston M. Sprinkle

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830781232
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

Compassionate, biblical, and thought-provoking, Embodied is an accessible guide for Christians who want help navigating issues related to the transgender conversation. Preston Sprinkle draws on Scripture, as well as real-life stories of individuals struggling with gender dysphoria, to help you understand the complexities and emotions of this highly relevant topic. This book fills the great need for Christians to speak into the confusing and emotionally charged questions surrounding the transgender conversation.
With careful research and an engaging style, Embodied explores:

• What it means to be transgender, nonbinary, and gender-queer, and how these identities relate to being male or female
• Why most stereotypes about what it means to be a man and woman come from the culture and not the Bible
• What the Bible says about humans created in God's image as male and female, and how this relates to transgender experiences
• Moral questions surrounding medical interventions such as sex reassignment surgery
• Which pronouns to use and how to navigate the bathroom debate
• Why more and more teens are questioning their gender

Chapter 1

PEOPLE

My friend Lesli was born female. But from the time Lesli was four years old, they experienced life as a boy.1 Lesli felt like a boy. Thought like a boy. Played like a boy. “When all of the other little girls wanted to play tea or house, I wanted to play football,” Lesli told me. “At the age of four I proclaimed that Wonder Woman was going to be my wife and we would have super-powered children. I thought nothing of it.”2

Lesli also remembers loving Jesus wholeheartedly from a very young age. “My earliest memories are of the church nursery and Sunday school. I have always known that I was a beloved child of God. I cannot remember a time when God’s truth was not an integral part of my life.”

Lesli’s struggle increased with age, making it hard to fit in at youth group. “I started to keenly feel a distance between myself and other girls,” Lesli remembers. “I could not relate to their emerging womanhood. They were spending hours putting on makeup, styling their hair, and talking about boys. None of this interested me in the least.”

Like most kids wrestling with their gender identity, Lesli was wrestling alone. No one to talk to, no one to listen. Nobody seemed to care. Lesli sank into dark periods of depression. And when isolation met depression, suicidal thoughts quickly followed. “I lived this charade until high school rolled around,” Lesli said, “becoming increasingly despondent and suicidal.”

Finally, Lesli summoned the courage to go to the pastor for help. Lesli explained their dysphoria to him, hoping for some pastoral guidance. Instead of offering guidance, Lesli recalled, “My pastor escorted me out the back door of his office and told me to never come back again. And I didn’t. I didn’t step foot in a church for the next eighteen years. I hated Christians, especially pastors, from that point on.”

Lesli, desperate to follow Jesus, was ushered out of the church simply for struggling with gender dysphoria.

This book is about people. Beautiful, honest, and courageous people like Lesli. And people like Carol and Stephanie.

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Stephanie grew up as a stereotypically feminine girl on the autism spectrum.3 When she was thirteen years old, she told her mother, Carol, that she was transgender. Stephanie’s declaration seemed to come out of nowhere. No prior history of gender dysphoria. No tomboyish interests or behavior. Carol found out that Stephanie had just heard a presentation about being transgender at school—a school where over 5 percent of the student population identified as transgender or nonbinary.

Carol took Stephanie to a gender clinic to seek counsel. The clinician told Carol that

I must refer to my daughter with masculine pronouns, call her by a masculine name, and buy her a binder to flatten her breasts. He recommended no therapy, and there was no consideration of the social factors that obviously affected her thinking. I was directed to put her on puberty-blocking drugs.

Doctors often recommend puberty blocking drugs for pre-pubescent children wrestling with their gender identity. But we don’t know a lot about the long-term health risks when kids take these drugs. From what we do know, they may have an adverse effect on a person’s bones, heart, and brain.4 Nevertheless, clinicians told Carol that puberty blockers were the best way to treat her thirteen-year-old daughter. “I was falsely assured that these drugs were well-studied and that they were a perfectly safe way for her to ‘explore gender.’ I was told that if I did not comply, she would be at higher risk of suicide.”

Carol feared that if she pushed back or questioned the medicalization of her child, she might lose custody of her, since such questioning could be viewed as bigotry and lack of acceptance. In New Jersey, where Carol and Stephanie lived, “the Department of Education officially encourages schools to report such parents.” Still, Carol wondered, “Why are physicians medicalizing children in the name of an unproven, malleable gender identity?”

This book is about people. People like Lesli, Stephanie, and Carol. And people like Alan.

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Alan grew up as a pastor’s kid but couldn’t wait to leave the church after he graduated high school.5 Ever since he could remember, Alan had an unchosen desire to dress, act, and behave like a woman. He had no one to talk to, no one to guide him. And seeing the church’s attitude toward LGBTQ people made him feel even more isolated and ashamed. He also grew tired of the hypocrisy in the church: “Despite being a pastor’s kid, I’d become upset at the hypocrisy of Christians saying they were full of grace but not putting it into practice (especially concerning LGBTQ+ issues).”

After high school, Alan left the church. But he couldn’t get away from Christians. One day, a Christian friend asked to hear Alan’s story, so Alan told him everything. His desire to be a woman. His sexual attraction to men. His failures in trying to follow his own convictions about sexual ethics.

Alan expected to be condemned. To his surprise, he was loved. “Instead of the shaming and condemnation I expected, I was told that despite my past and present desires, God didn’t hate me and I was lovable by others and by God.” These simple words pierced his soul. Alan gave his life to Christ, all because he had the courage to share his story with a friend who received him graciously. “If I never learned about pure, undistilled grace, I would have transitioned to a female and left the church,” Alan said.

The thing that brought me to an acceptance of Biblical masculinity was not a poignantly laid-out exegetical argument against transsexuality nor a fire and brimstone diatribe against homosexuality but a man who gave me the space to speak about my desires openly and let me know he and God loved me nevertheless.

Alan’s profound point is worth repeating: “A man who gave me the space to speak about my desires openly and let me know that he and God loved me nevertheless.” It was love, not logic, that changed Alan’s heart. People are rarely argued into the kingdom.

This book is about people. People like Lesli, Stephanie, Carol, Alan, and many others you’ll meet in the coming pages. It’s about Kat and Christian, about my friend Kyla, who transitioned to male eight years ago but encountered Jesus several years later and detransitioned back to female. It’s about Benjamin, a pastor who has wrestled with gender dysphoria his whole life. It’s about fathers whose daughters are now sons, and sons whose fathers are now mothers. It’s about Matt, whose struggles with periodic anxiety only seem to diminish when he wears women’s underwear. It’s about my dear friend Hannah, who is one of the friendliest, most enjoyable, most biblically astute Christians I know—and who also transitioned from male to female three years ago.

PEOPLE AND CONCEPTS

This book is about people. A diverse group of beautiful people created in God’s image. People who are often marginalized and misunderstood, shamed and shunned by those who don’t share their experiences. People who are infinitely valuable in God’s eyes. And it’s because of people that we need to understand concepts: biblical, theological, scientific, medical, and philosophical concepts about human nature, male and female bodies, and what it means to live according to the image God created us to be.

There are two dangerous trends I sometimes witness in the transgender conversation. The first trend is to become a culture warrior in all things trans*. These soldiers couldn’t care less about actual trans* people. Their only interest in the topic is to disprove the transgender ideologies they read about in clickbait headlines. Women becoming men. Men becoming women. Ten thousand genders! Has everyone gone mad!? So you read, and only read, certain tirades mocking the views of trans* activists, exposing them for being illogical and unscientific. You feel the satisfying warmth of winning an argument as you live vicariously through your favorite political pundit. Meanwhile, little do you know that the person you sit next to in church every week secretly struggles with his gender identity. It’s tearing him up inside, and he has no one to talk to. He experiences church not as a hospital for saints but as a graveyard for the marginalized—and so many Christians are whistling through it.

Jesus is building an upside-down kingdom where outcasts have their feet washed, the marginalized are welcomed, and dehumanized people feel humanized once again. Where truth is upheld, celebrated, and proclaimed. Where those who fall short of that truth are loved.

A second trend is to react against the first trend and become a lover instead of a thinker. I’m just going to love people—period. By which some people mean, I don’t need to bother with all the theological and scientific complexities of human nature. All that stuff just callouses over your heart. I certainly resonate with these concerns. Some theological discussions hiss with hate and pacify our love for actual people—the people who are often the subjects of our debates. But swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction—empathizing instead of thinking deeply—can do deep damage as well.6 Christian economists Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert prove this quite well in their aptly titled book When Helping Hurts.7 Sometimes compassion without critical thinking can move you to do things that make a person feel good in the short run but cause harm in the long run. If I’m rushed to the ER with a severed limb and blood squirting out of my shoulder, I don’t want a surgeon with empathy. I want a surgeon who excelled in medical school.

People and concepts. Both are important. Both are necessary. Jesus is building an upside-down kingdom where outcasts have their feet washed, the marginalized are welcomed, and dehumanized people feel humanized once again. Where truth is upheld, celebrated, and proclaimed. Where those who fall short of that truth are loved. We will be better positioned to embody the kingdom and love people well once we’ve understood some basic (and some quite complex) biblical, theological, and scientific concepts about what it means to be human—sexed and embodied beings who bear God’s image.

THE QUESTION OF INCONGRUENCE

It’s because of people that we’re going to explore various conceptual questions in this book. Are male and female the only options? What about people who are intersex? Can someone be born with a male brain in a female body, or vice versa? Do men have to act masculine and women have to act feminine to be godly? Should a Christian ever transition? And which pronouns should non-transgender people use for transgender people?

We’ll get to all these questions and many others. But one foundational question underlies them all. It’s a question fundamental to all the others. And it’s one we’ll keep coming back to in the coming pages. The question is this:

If someone experiences incongruence between their biological sex and their internal sense of self, which one determines who they are—and why?

For example: If a biological male feels or thinks or believes that they are a woman, are they a woman or a man? If they have an internal sense that they are female, and their body says they are male, then which one are they, and why? Is the body or mind more definitive for determining who we are?

Why would the body overrule the mind, if there’s incongruence? Or why would the mind overrule the body, if there’s incongruence? These aren’t abstract intellectual questions akin to “how many angels can stand on the head of a pin?” They are foundational questions central to what discipleship looks like for Christians who experience such incongruence.

The question of incongruence is ultimately a question about human ontology. Ontology is a philosophical term that has to do with the nature of being; specifically, what does it mean to be human, especially a sexed embodied human? Ontology isn’t just a fancy philosophical concept that should be locked up in the ivory towers of academia. It’s fundamental for discipleship—becoming more like Christ. We need to first understand who we are (ontology) before we know what it means to become who God wants us to be (discipleship). Ontology is integral to discipleship, because discipleship means living as we were designed to live—living as divine images.

Another crucial aspect of living as we were designed to live—an aspect embodied by Jesus and demanded of all who claim to follow him—is that we would be kind. Embodying God’s kindness (Rom. 2:4) is an essential part of Christian discipleship, especially toward those the church has shamed and shunned. Especially toward people like my friend Lesli.

WE WOULD BE HONORED TO

As you might recall, Lesli was booted out the back door of a pastor’s office after going to him for help. But people need love and community. If they can’t find it in the church, they’ll search for it elsewhere. And that’s what Lesli did. They quickly found love and acceptance among LGBTQ people, many of whom had also experienced ridicule from Christians. Lesli also fell in love with a woman named Sue, and they ended up getting married. Sue had a rare disease that caused her hands to shake. One night, she went outside for a smoke, but her hands were shaking so badly that as she was lighting her cigarette, she lit herself on fire. Lesli was inside doing the dishes when they heard Sue screaming. Running outside to see what was happening, Lesli found Sue engulfed in flames. Immediately, Su...