Mercy Not Sacrifice
Last week, Russell Moore wrote a column for The Gospel Coalition called “Joan or John?” about how to handle the “sin” of transgender identity in your congregation. His column presents the made-up scenario of a transgender woman tearfully approaching a pastor to repent of her sex change. It’s a textbook display of the breathtaking presumptuousness of cisgendered heterosexual males who judge people with lives they are clueless about by making false analogies with the sin in their own lives.
There is nothing in the Bible which condemns transgender identity. Moore tries to make Genesis 1:27 into his proof-text. But just because God creates humans “male and female” does not tell us that God does not create females who have male anatomy or people who have both male and female anatomy. Nothing in the Bible tells us that it’s sinful for someone who is born anatomically male to discover that they are really female and make life changes accordingly. Moore defines his fictitious Joan character’s sin in the following paragraph:
God’s creation is good, and he does not create generic persons but “male and female,” in his own image (Gen. 1:27). In seeking to “become” a woman, John has established himself as a god, determining the very structure of his createdness. Part of the freedom that comes in Christ is John’s recognition that he is a creature, not a god, not a machine, not a freak.
So here’s how I would rewrite that paragraph to explain what Moore’s sin is:
God’s creation is good, and he does not create generic, cookie-cutter males and females, but complex people with strange varying mixtures of masculinity and femininity, including people whose gender identities do not match their anatomy and people whose anatomy and gender identity is neither fully male nor female. In seeking to tell Joan that she’s a man and not a woman, Russell has established himself as God, reducing the mystery of Joan’s createdness to a binary gender assignment. Part of the freedom that comes in Christ is for Russell to recognize that God is God and he is not.
Moore is right that there is no such thing as a generic human being. And that’s precisely the truth that calls out his presumptuousness as a wannabe everyman. White cisgendered heterosexual men like Moore and myself have been socialized to view ourselves as the generic human beings in the world who are entitled to project our own struggles with sin onto people with very different identities, presuming that their struggles are analogous to ours instead of admitting that we don’t have a clue what other people are living through. Moore says for example:
I was saved from, among many other things, covetousness. Coveting seems natural to me. Not coveting is unnatural to me. Not a day goes by in which coveting isn’t the easier, more natural thing for me. But I fight against covetousness because God is conforming me into the image of Christ.
Since Moore didn’t have the balls to openly use the word “lust,” I’ll use it. Most heterosexual evangelicals like me and Moore are fighting a lifelong battle against lust, partly because of the exquisite sex fetish/taboo that repressive evangelical culture has swollen into us with and partly because there are legitimate, important social boundaries that men have to train ourselves to respect when it comes to our sexual appetites. Since our sexual attraction to women we aren’t married to feels “natural” and we have to repress this “natural urge” in order to be faithful husbands, then we feel justified expecting other people to repress their “natural urges” too, whether it’s their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Except that these analogies are completely invalid. My experience of lust is absolutely categorically different than whatever “natural” inclinations are experienced by transgender people. Just because I can slap the adjective “natural” onto something doesn’t mean that I’m talking about the same type of thing at all. The fact is that I simply don’t have a clue what it’s like to be transgender. There are only two types of of beings who understand transgender identity: transgender people themselves and the God created them. Non-transgender people who try to explain transgender identity are playing God, plain and simple. And it’s infuriating to the white cis-het males who have been putting the rest of humanity under our microscopes since the time of the Enlightenment when someone has the audacity to claim that there are mysteries that we absolutely cannot explain or make analogies to.
Moore says, “To baptize one created a man as ‘my sister in Christ’ (whatever the baptismal formula used) isn’t doing justice to a God who speaks the truth.” That presumes that God cannot create a woman with male anatomy or a person with non-binary anatomy. What if God has in fact created a woman whom you’re choosing to call a man? What’s at stake for Moore is not truth itself, but a truth that he has complete dominion over. Truth that is between transgender people themselves and God is unacceptable to Moore. Because he wants to be God.
Moore refers in his piece to eunuchs, an ancient term for people whose bodies were outside the gender binary. He defines a eunuch as “someone wounded physically by his past sin but awaiting wholeness in the resurrection from the dead.” That goes completely against what Isaiah and Jesus both say about eunuchs.
Isaiah 56:3-5 says, “Let no eunuch complain, ‘I am only a dry tree.’ For this is what the Lord says: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant— to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever.”
Jesus says in Matthew 19:12, “There are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
Both Isaiah and Jesus seem to be saying that eunuchs are actually elite within the kingdom of God; they certainly don’t define eunuchs pejoratively as people who are “wounded physically by past sin.” I know that I have encountered a deep wisdom and gentleness among the non-binary-gendered people that I’ve met. I can’t imagine what it’s like to go through the experiences they’ve gone through. But I do suspect that I have much to learn from them about how to be a human being with a body and how to let God love me and my body both.
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