Transgenderism and the Bible: Reading It Pastorally

A Fresh Look at the Verses the Church Uses to Exclude Transgender People

One of the greatest issues in church life today is how to respond to the growing visibility of transgender people who confess Christian faith and want to belong to the church. Neeza Powers, popular social media influencer, recently gained fame by publicly putting their faith in Jesus and subsequently documenting their detransition online from living as a trans woman back to living as their biological sex.

The evangelical church went wild! Finally, someone who can publicly testify that it can be done! Evangelical fervor was short-lived after Neeza’s faith journey drew them to Roman Catholicism. Then, when Neeza discovered that detransitioning was not good for their mental health, they went back to living as a trans woman and lost over 500,000 followers in one day! Comments on Neeza’s posts range from Christians who fully accept Neeza as a trans-woman to Christians who insist that Neeza must live and dress like a man using their birth name and sex if they want to be a Christian.

Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash

Theology is not the only field wrestling with the emerging visibility of transgender individuals. Sociology, biology, linguistics, political science, and psychology have all been faced with new questions and new challenges to old beliefs; each producing its own reactions to the challenge.

Meanwhile, the church has responded with prolific theological statements about transgender identity and human sexuality. The Church of God, a Pentecostal denomination headquartered in Cleveland, TN released this statement addressing what it refers to as the “mass delusion” of the “transgender revolution.” They are not alone. The Southern Baptist Convention and Assemblies of God put out similar statements. The church has said more about transgender people in the last 25 years than it has in the first 2,000 of its existence.

Yet, it has remained depressingly silent on the issues of pastoral care for transgender people who confess the Christian faith in all the ways that matter and that once made you a Christian; for people like Neeza Powers. Like most things, churches have defaulted to forming the right public statements and avoiding the personal investment required for true discipleship. I would bet that less than one percent of the ministers who voted for these theological statements have ever had dinner or spent time with a trans man or woman. The pastoral posture is one of community and discipleship. It is the most incarnational posture of the church. Good theology is always done in proximity to people.

The verses most often cited in these denominational statements deserve a closer look than they usually get. Some say more than people think. Some say less. And some are not really about transgender identity at all. In this piece, I am going to highlight the main verses I find Christians wrestling with as they try to engage the rising visibility of transgender people in our lifetime.

Genesis 1:27

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Genesis 1 organizes creation around a series of binaries. Light and darkness. Land and water. Heaven and earth. Male and female. These are the central organizing categories of created reality. Every binary in Genesis 1 also exists on a spectrum at its edges. For instance, when you stand knee deep in the ocean, are you in the ocean or on land? Between day and night, there is dawn and dusk. There is an atmosphere between heaven and earth. Biologically, there are instances where a person is genetically or physically somewhere between male and female. The text establishes the binaries that exist at the ends of their respective spectra.

Non-binary identity adds another layer of mystery to all of this. If anything, Genesis 1 would seem to present the strongest creational argument against a non-binary understanding of gender, since the text does organize humanity around male and female as its categories. But even there, mystery remains. We do not fully understand what non-binary people experience or why. And the church’s track record of making confident pronouncements about things it does not fully understand has not been good.

Pay attention to the two sequential statements in this verse. God created humanity in his image. And then, male and female he created them. The image of God, the imago dei, is what separates humanity from the rest of biological life. Every human bears it. The male-female binary is real and present in creation, but creation’s matrix is not solely written in binary. The atom, for instance, exists as a trinity of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and even within that trinity, there are binaries: protons are positive, neutrons are negative.

Creation is more complex than any single organizing principle, and the male-female binary, as meaningful as it is, is not the central feature of what it means to bear the image of God, since God is not binary. God is trinity. The imago dei is about human beinghood. That is the theological point of Genesis 1:27. Each of us was made by God with intention, and divine image-bearing belongs to every human being.

Genesis 2

And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.”

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man.

And Adam said:

“This is now bone of my bones
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

Genesis 2 tells the creation story a little differently. Where Genesis 1 emphasizes the ordering of creation, Genesis 2 emphasizes human relationships. The focus is on Adam having a comparable mate, on how the man and woman are joined at the side so to speak, and on the ways they complement and complete each other. You might say Genesis 2 is more about the gender realities than the biological ones, because it notes the role of relationship and the ways the man and woman complement each other. The emphasis is on compatibility and mating.

Genesis 1 and 2 are doing different things. Genesis 1 establishes male and female as creational categories. Genesis 2 establishes the relational and complementary reality of gender. Reading them as one single argument about biological sex flattens what each account is doing on its own terms.

Marriage is not the topic of this blog, but since it is first mentioned here in the Bible, here is an obeservation to keep in mind: there is no such thing as a monolithic “biblical marriage.” In various places you will find that the Bible allows for polygamy, forced marriages, and has mixed opinions on interracial marriage.

Deuteronomy 22:5

A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for all who do so are an abomination to the Lord your God.

A few things are worth thinking about here. First, this is from the Torah or Jewish Law. Paul is explicit in Galatians that the Law functions as a teacher pointing us toward Christ. It is not the Christian’s law to follow. The New Testament never restates this specific prohibition. Moreover, it sits in the same section of Deuteronomy that prohibits mixing fabrics and plowing with an ox and a donkey together:

You shall not sow your vineyard with different kinds of seed, lest the yield of the seed which you have sown and the fruit of your vineyard be defiled.

You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together.

You shall not wear a garment of different sorts, such as wool and linen mixed together.

It also allows a man to rape a virgin a claim her as his lifelong wife:

If a man finds a young woman who is a virgin, who is not betrothed, and he seizes her and lies with her, and they are found out, then the man who lay with her shall give to the young woman’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has humbled her; he shall not be permitted to divorce her all his days.

What men wore when Deuteronomy was written would be considered feminine by modern Western standards. Long robes. Flowing garments. The text assumes a world where male and female clothing were clearly distinguishable within a specific cultural context. Scottish men wear kilts. Roman men wore togas. Fashion has always been culturally relative. The church already applies this kind of cultural reasoning to similar texts. Almost nobody argues today that men must have short hair and women long hair as a binding theological principle, even though Paul addresses it directly in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16.

Is it a sin for a woman to wear a pair of men’s jeans? Is it a sin for a man to wear a more feminine cut of sweater? What if his hair is too long, or her hair too short? If that doesn’t matter, where is the line? Who drew it? Within global Christianity, there is no universal, specific gender-based dress code.

Psalm 139:13-14

For You formed my inward parts;
You covered me in my mother’s womb.
I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

This is a poem of praise about God’s intimate knowledge of the person. David is marveling that God knows him completely, inside and out, before he was born. The imago dei point from Genesis applies here too. To be fearfully and wonderfully made is to be human, to bear the image of God, to be known and loved by the Creator.

But to say that the sin of transgender people is that that they change the way God made them may be a misstep. We all do that in so many different ways. Do we have tattoos? Braces for our teeth? Do we tan or bleach our hair? Have plastic surgery? Use a nickname? Are any of these denying the way we were born?

One thing worth sitting with: Paul warns that when communities fixate more on created things than on the Creator, the hyperfixation creates problems rather than solving them. It seems as though the modern church is so focused on sex that it has become one of our core beliefs, when in actuality, it is not. The people paying the price for that fixation are the ones we keep talking about rather than talking to.

1 Corinthians 6:9

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God.

This verse is part of a larger portion of the letter where Paul is addressing two men involved in a lawsuit with one another. Paul is connecting their behaviors with other sins, saying that taking another Christian to court is tantamount to these other worldly behaviors. The vice list is rhetorical, not exhaustive.

This is where translation matters. Look at how different versions of the Bible translate the latter part of this passage: KJV: “neither effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind” NKJV: “neither homosexuals, nor sodomites” NIV: “nor men who have sex with men” MSG: “those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex” NRSV: “male prostitutes, sodomites”

Five translations. Five different renderings. That variation reflects genuine uncertainty about two Greek words, malakoi and arsenokoitai, that do not have clean English equivalents.

Malakoi literally means soft. In the Greco-Roman world it was a pejorative term for the younger passive partner in a pederastic relationship, the most common form of male same-sex behavior in that culture. Young men would sell themselves to older men in what we might recognize today as a sugar daddy arrangement. It was exploitative and transactional. Arsenokoitai appears here for the first time in preserved Greek literature. It is a compound word combining “male” and “intercourse.” Scholars debate whether it means “men who have sex” or “men who have sex with males.” Some argue the ambiguity makes it impossible to say Paul is referring to what we would recognize as consensual adult same-sex relationships. Others argue that Paul’s strong Jewish background, which consistently condemned male same-sex practice, makes his meaning clear enough.

What is worth thinking about is that the text is addressing specific sexual behaviors in a specific cultural context. Gender dysphoria did not exist as a category in Paul’s conceptual world. Effeminate is a translation choice, not a straightforward rendering, and the word Paul used had a very specific meaning in his cultural moment that does not map cleanly onto modern transgender identity.

Romans 1:26-27

For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.

The first thing worth saying about this text is that it is about sexual behavior, not gender identity. Paul is describing what people do with their bodies in relation to other people. He is not describing people who experience their gender differently from their biological sex. Those are two different things, and the church conflates them constantly. Transgender people can be straight, gay, bisexual, or celibate. Their gender identity does not determine their sexual practice, and using this text as an argument against transgender identity specifically requires collapsing a distinction Paul himself does not make.

Paul is drawing here from the Wisdom of Solomon 14:12, “the making of idols was the beginning of fornication,” which represents a prominent Jewish perspective about Gentile sexual immorality. Romans 1 is primarily an argument about idolatry and its consequences. When communities exchange worship of the Creator for fixation on created things, disorder follows. The sexual behavior Paul describes is in that context, as consequence rather than primary subject.

The natural order argument Paul makes is real. Creation is heteronormative in the sense that biological reproduction requires male and female. And Paul seems to connect departures from the natural order to something larger than individual moral choice. He is describing a cultural and spiritual condition.

One thing worth sitting with: Paul warns that when communities fixate more on created things than on the Creator, the hyperfixation creates problems rather than solving them. It seems as though the modern church is so focused on sex that it has become one of our defining beliefs, when in actuality, it is not. The people paying the price for that fixation are the ones we keep talking about rather than talking to.

“No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.” Deuteronomy 23:1

Acts 8:26-39

Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, the queen of the Ethiopians… As they were going along the road, they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.

Most conversations about the Bible and transgender identity skip this passage entirely. The Apostle Philip is sent by the Holy Spirit down a desert road where he encounters an Ethiopian eunuch, a high-ranking court official in charge of the entire treasury of the Kandake (Candace), queen of Ethiopia. He was wealthy, educated, and powerful enough to own a personal scroll of Isaiah and to travel to Jerusalem for worship. He was also a man whose body placed him outside the clean categories of his world.

In the ancient Near East and Greco-Roman world, eunuchs were men who had been castrated, either in childhood, as prisoners of war, or as slaves placed in royal service. Their castration made them trusted administrators precisely because they could not produce heirs and therefore posed no dynastic threat. But their bodies occupied an ambiguous space. They were male but not fully male in the conventional sense. Some ancient writers treated them as a third category of person alongside men and women. Their existence did not fit the standard binary categories of the ancient world cleanly.

Deuteronomy 23:1 was unambiguous about their standing before God: “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.” The legal exclusion was explicit. Whatever the reason behind it — purity codes around bodily wholeness, concerns about fertility, or prohibitions against pagan self-castration practices — the text excluded this man from full participation in the covenant community.

And yet the eunuch had been to Jerusalem to worship. He was sitting in his chariot reading Isaiah. Specifically, he was reading Isaiah 53, but he was carrying a scroll that also contained Isaiah 56:3-5, where God speaks directly to eunuchs: “Do not let the eunuch say, I am just a dry tree. For thus says the Lord: to the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.” The prophet had already anticipated his inclusion before Philip arrived on that road.

When the eunuch asks what prevents his baptism, Philip answers nothing. No theological debate. No conditions. No discussion of Deuteronomy 23. The Spirit had already settled the question by sending Philip in the first place.

New Testament scholar Richard Hays, historically known for cautious and traditional interpretations, pointed to this moment as a Spirit-led correction to scriptural exclusion. The early church had to adjust its theology in light of whom the Spirit had already embraced. The narrative does not resolve the tension between Deuteronomy 23 and Acts 8 theologically. It simply tells us what happened. The Spirit moved. The man was baptized. He went on his way rejoicing.

What This Means for the Church

The church’s default posture toward transgender people has been to demand repentance and gender conformity. And if you cannot or will not, you do not belong here.

Repentance requires culpability. Culpability requires a moral choice. The evidence, biblical, psychological, and experiential, suggests that transgender experience is not solely, or even primarily a moral choice. And the church is not equipped to make the determination of voluntary versus involuntary on a case-by-case basis. Parsing sin was never the Christian’s vocation. We are not spiritual clinicians. We are not inside anyone else’s experience.

I am empathetic to Christians who are uncomfortable around trans individuals. I understand where they are, because I used to be there too. And still am about some things. When you dig your heels into the concreteness of your lived reality, it is hard to relate to those with a very different one. I work as a chaplain with dementia patients. To have any real relationship with them, I have to meet them where they are. I have to enter their reality as much as possible and walk alongside them in it. I do not withhold relationship until they meet my expectations. I do not make my comfort the condition of their belonging.

The dementia analogy is not perfect. Transgender people often do not experience their identity as an unwanted condition they would choose to be free of. They experience it as who they are. Nor is it the result of a deficient brain, as with dementia. But the pastoral instinct is the same: presence and accompaniment rather than demand and distance.

What would it look like to meet transgender people where they are? What would it look like to let them grow in the Lord alongside us, bringing their questions to the text the same way the rest of us bring ours? What if a transgender person can love God, believe in Jesus, and still be transgender, in the same way any other person carries involuntary realities that God does not always change?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the beginning of conversations the church actually needs to have. Because transgender identity presents us with new ethical realities. Questions about gender-affirming medicine and surgery. Questions about science and what it tells us about biological sex and gender. Questions about language and pronouns and what it means to honor the dignity of a person in how we address them. These are not simple questions and the church should not pretend they are.

How can we have those conversations honestly if transgender people are not at the table? How can we think through the ethics of gender medicine without the people most affected by those decisions being part of the community doing the thinking? The church has been having this conversation about transgender people without transgender people.

What would it look like to sit with that mystery rather than resolve it prematurely? What would it look like to say we do not fully understand this, and we want to understand it better, and we want to understand it with you rather than about you?

That posture does not require abandoning the Bible. It requires reading it honestly, holding our conclusions with appropriate humility, and making enough room at the table for the people most affected by our conclusions to speak into them.

From the Author: I admit I have so much to learn on this subject. As I finished this piece, I realized that the limitations of my language and understanding might get in the way of the heart of the piece, which is an invitation to make space in our biblical interpretation for a more open understanding of gender roles and binaries to more clearly see people with real lives, emotions, and stories. It has been my contention for some time that if the church intends to be incarnational and in touch with the real world, which has largely moved on and forgotten what the church has to offer, it must create some margins in its dogma for honest conversation. This will require humility and a willingness to admit we may be wrong about some things. If we err, let us err on the side of love, acceptance, and forgiveness, which are the hallmarks of Christian faith— and not judgment, exclusion, and works as many seem to believe.

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:18