Transgender a new challenge for evangelicals

The popular press has lately given a great deal of attention to the increasing acceptance of same sex marriage in certain parts of the country. It has also followed referenda and litigation concerning whether marriage can be understood as something between two people—with no reference to the sex of the parties—rather than exclusively between a man and a woman. The meta-narrative woven by advocates of same sex marriage is that “love is love,” regardless. The sex or gender of the people involved has no bearing on the quality of the “love” that exists between the two. That “love” is what is recognized and formalized in the act of Holy matrimony.

The increased visibility of transgender people is a natural corollary of genderless marriage. Consider recent headlines around Kristin (formerly Chris) Beck, the former Navy SEAL who underwent sex reassignment surgery. Beck insists that the armed forces must become open to transgender Americans, “The military needs to get past gender and look at people like me as a person, not just as a male or female, and understand that I can still do a great job.” Beck has chronicled her story in the book Warrior Princess.

Gay marriage removes sex and gender as a consideration in the act of uniting two people as husband and wife. It essentially argues that sex and gender are not meaningful. The same is true for transgendered people–sex and/or gender are also devoid of meaning. That is to say, for transgendered people the experience of being a sexed person is at odds with their internal psychological experience of being gendered. In other words a transgender man—unlike an intersexed individual—has male chromosomes, male reproductive anatomy, male sex hormones, and yet internally identifies as a woman. To complicate matters, transgender does not imply a certain type of sexual orientation.

We can add transgender as a new “first” to the litany of “firsts” celebrated by progressive Presbyterians. The first openly transgender man will now lead More Light Presbyterians (MLP), a LGBTQ advocacy organization active in the Presbyterian Church (USA).   MLP has announced the appointment of Alex McNeill as Executive Director. McNeill comes to the position with a litany of experience among liberal religious groups including serving as Development Director for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. McNeill’s role, according to the organization, will be to “help MLP chart a new strategic direction to help empower individuals to become advocates for LGBTQ inclusion and equality in their own congregations and communities.”

McNeill’s appointment may provide a glimpse into what to expect from More Light Presbyterians and other progressive organizations. The passage of Amendment 10-A effectively opened the door for openly practicing homosexual candidates and clergy to serve as pastors in contradiction both to Scripture and the teachings of the church. As the number of evangelical churches and clergy in the denomination declines, it’s likely that “progress” will speed up. Now it seems that this trajectory will expand by placing the celebration of transgender people as front and center in the progressive agenda. McNeill states, “I’m honored to join More Light, which has always been on the forefront of the Christian tradition of fostering acceptance for the most vulnerable among us. I look forward to building on this proud tradition to create a fully welcoming church.”

One of the persistent problems with respect to sexuality in the context of the PC (USA) is the political commingling of “welcome” with “celebration” or “advocacy.” It is an expedient strategy since it immediately enables the user to label those unable to either celebrate or advocate as also “unwelcoming.” The sad result has been the appearance of bifurcation in the church between those who welcome and celebrate and those who reject and denounce. This is a false and misleading appearance that is not reality in most places across the denomination. It is a (mis)perception, tool if you will, to sunder the church and to bring about a new and diminished reality for the PC (USA) caused by the near ejection of evangelical churches and members from a once diverse body.

The same threatens to be the case with transgender Christians. We’re offered the same false alternative as with homosexuals in the church—we can be welcoming but only if we are simultaneously affirming, celebratory, and willing to advocate for transgender as God’s will for some people. This is problematic since neither the Scripture nor the tradition of the church considers transgender per se as a category of human experience. And, to be sure, the topic itself is complex. And as with any pastoral and theological issue, it is considerably more than an issue—it is life for a number of people.

Yet, in light of this, the answer is not simply to choose autonomy in the absence of any clear discussion of transgender issues in the Scripture nor is it to embrace some extra-biblical hermeneutical lens to create reference where none actually exists. Instead the solution is to consider the affirmative teachings of Scripture and the church with relation to human sexuality, holy matrimony, and human flourishing in general.

The contemporary transgender movement is essentially the continuation of the attempt to deny that a connection exists between sex (referencing bodily structure and chemistry) and gender (one’s self-perception). In some respects it comes quite close to a gnostic denial or devaluation of the physical—we are who we are on the basis of our interior self, free to choose to alter our physical structure according to our own “inner self-knowledge.”

This view stands in quite stark difference with the traditional understanding of human nature as revealed in Scripture. Scripture reveals that humanity has both sex and gender. The Genesis creational accounts affirm that God created us as male and female—a single humanity, yet a differentiated nature. This notion is problematic in an age in which modern feminist philosophy has critique any notion of gender essentialism and replaced it with the notion that gender is simply the result of social construction. There may be little doubt that some elements of gender are influenced by culture, that’s not the same thing as contending that gender in its entirety is rooted exclusively in its culture of origin. Evangelicals will need to give conscious attention to creating an affirmative theology of gender that avoids the twin evils of reductionism and cultural captivity in its variegated forms.