What Russell Moore gets right about transgender and intersex identity<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Predictably, there have been a lot of ignorant Christian responses to Caitlyn Jenner's coming out. Someone today shared an older article by Jonathan\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/2015\/06\/03\/what-russell-moore-gets-right-about-transgender-and-intersex-identity\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Russell Moore gets right about transgender and intersex identity\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Predictably, there have been a lot of ignorant Christian responses to Caitlyn Jenner's coming out. 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{"id":13335,"date":"2015-06-03T08:40:36","date_gmt":"2015-06-03T13:40:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/?p=13335"},"modified":"2015-06-03T12:12:37","modified_gmt":"2015-06-03T17:12:37","slug":"what-russell-moore-gets-right-about-transgender-and-intersex-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mercynotsacrifice\/2015\/06\/03\/what-russell-moore-gets-right-about-transgender-and-intersex-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"What Russell Moore gets right about transgender and intersex identity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"Rublev$ <\/a>

Rublev Icon of the (gender-ambiguous) Trinity, Wikimedia C.C.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Predictably, there have been a lot of ignorant Christian responses to Caitlyn Jenner\u2019s coming out. Someone today shared an older article <\/a>by Jonathan Merritt about transgender and intersex identity. In it, Merritt quoted Southern Baptist spokesman Russell Moore (accidentally) saying something right. Talking about intersex people who are born with ambiguously gendered bodies, Moore says that it\u2019s \u201ca question of epistemology not ontology.\u201d Moore is exactly right (just not in the way that he meant these words). This whole \u201cdebate\u201d is a crisis of his epistemology, not the actual ontology<\/em> of the beautiful, differently gendered people that he thinks he can explain dismissively. Don\u2019t worry; I\u2019ll explain the vocabulary.<\/p>\n

Epistemology<\/em> is the exploration of how we know what we know<\/em>. Rene Descartes\u2019 famous statement \u201cI think; therefore I am\u201d is an example of an epistemological claim. For the past several centuries of the modern era, western European culture has operated with a very confident, rationalistic epistemology. White men for many generations have traveled the world and put everything under our microscopes, whether plants or animals or other human beings. The basic epistemological assumption that today\u2019s straight, cisgender white men have inherited from our ancestors in the European Enlightenment is that we really can know everything about everybody else<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We have been socialized by our cultural legacy to confidently explain people and situations we don\u2019t actually understand, because we\u2019re the world\u2019s expert scholars of theology, science, anthropology, psychology, etc. One presumption that we\u2019ve inherited from the Enlightenment is the idea that every human being is basically the same at the core. Cultures and idiosyncrasies of personality are like clothing that we wear on the outside of our identity, but there\u2019s a core default human identity that everyone shares.<\/p>\n

This is reflected most clearly in the old-fashioned sentences where the word \u201cman\u201d is used to represent the entirety of the human species, like \u201cman is the only creature with a concept of God\u201d or \u201cman has always enjoyed going to war.\u201d Read any textbook from before 1980 (or perhaps even 1990) and you\u2019ll see that it\u2019s filled with references to this mysterious character called \u201cman\u201d that lacks an \u201ca\u201d or \u201cthe\u201d in front of it. Of course, the use of the word \u201cman\u201d to describe humanity has become politically incorrect today, but the underlying epistemology remains with those who have uncritically adopted the Western mind.<\/p>\n

Mike Huckabee provides an excellent example <\/a>of this epistemology when he says that he wishes he had pretended to be transgender in high school so that he could shower with the girls. Why would a straight, cisgender teenage boy pretend to be a girl? So he could see girls naked. If all of humanity is just \u201cman,\u201d then it\u2019s perfectly reasonable for Mike Huckabee to project his imagined motives onto people he doesn\u2019t understand, because everybody\u2019s exactly the same. That\u2019s the reason for the transgender bathroom freakout in Houston and other places adopting non-discrimination ordinances. Dirty old men like Huckabee presume that every transgender woman has the exact same motives they would for sneaking into a girls\u2019 bathroom. They can\u2019t imagine that people would just want to go potty in a place where they won\u2019t get beat up.<\/p>\n

Now the other vocabulary word Russell Moore used is ontology<\/em>, which refers to the study of something at the deepest level of its being. <\/em>Moore is correct (in spite of himself) when he says that his existential crisis over transgender and intersex people is not a \u201cquestion\u201d of their actual \u201contology.\u201d He is incorrect in presuming that human ontology always works itself out into two neat, straightforward categories of male and female. It doesn\u2019t. Just because God creates humanity \u201cmale and female\u201d doesn\u2019t mean that he always creates humans either 100% male or 100% female. It\u2019s a spectrum, not a binary.<\/p>\n

The Bible says nothing prescriptive<\/em> about transgender identity being a sin. Twisting the description<\/em> of male and female creation into a prescription is an abuse of the text. The reason that people like Russell Moore and Mike Huckabee have to make it into a sin is because it threatens their epistemology. Even if I have the Bible memorized backwards and forwards, it doesn\u2019t give me the authority to tell transgender people that I know their bodies better than they do. The truth of their bodies, their ontology, is between them and God.<\/p>\n

If I slap a dismissive label on their stories, like<\/a> calling them modern-day Gnostic heretics, then I\u2019m the one who\u2019s playing God.<\/em> I simply have to trust that they are genuinely seeking the truth about themselves and listen with complete sympathy and humility so that they can discern their bodies\u2019 truth in a gracious, loving atmosphere. To trust other people with their own bodies\u2019 truth is unacceptable and infuriating to people who have inherited a long legacy of giving themselves the authority to know everything about everybody else.<\/p>\n

The white conservative evangelical condemnation of transgender identity in the absence of any actual prescriptive Biblical teaching on the topic shows that this has never been about the Bible\u2019s authority. It has always been about the authority of the Bible-beater. It has always been a crisis of man\u2019s epistemology, not his (or her) ontology.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"