Gender fluidity and the Bible
from The Jubilee Centre:
Given our wider culture’s confusion around gender issues, how are Christians even to start thinking about the subject?
A series of high-profile cases – transgender celebrities such as Caitlyn Jenner and the Wachowski twins, Brighton & Hove City Council’s decision to ask four-year-old primary school children to choose their preferred gender identity, and the Obama administration’s law to allow transgender students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity, to name a few – have brought trans issues firmly to public attention. The Danish Girl, a recent film about Einar Wegener, one of the early recipients of gender reassignment surgery, also indicates the changing landscape of what projects studios view as commercially viable, a barometer of wider sensibilities.
One problem in this highly controversial area is that we have not yet articulated an overarching framework within which to think about gender fluidity – and that’s as true for our culture as a whole as it is for Christians.
Binary categories?
For Christians, the starting point has often been the binary division of Genesis 1:27, ‘So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.’ That works well enough for most of us, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that there is a significant minority of the population who don’t fall neatly into the clear-cut categories of male/female (sex) or masculine/feminine (gender), just as we realised some time ago that hetero/homo were far too reductionist labels to classify the full breadth of human sexuality.
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