A new book by Rob Smith, a lecturer at Sydney Missionary and Bible College, The Body God Gives: A Biblical Response to Transgender Theory, has been given an Award of Merit in the Christianity Today Book Awards for 2025. This places it as one of the two top books awarded, alongside a book with a similar title but a different topic, The Reason for Church: Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism by Brad Edwards, which was Book of the Year.
The multifaceted Smith, a former professional musician, lectures in Theology, Ethics, and Music Ministry at SMBC.
Rob Smith’s book was also awarded the Book of the Year for the Apologetics and Evangelism category.
“The Body God Gives is an expansive and compassionate book detailing how gender is grounded in biological sex,” Christianity Today’s Ashley Hales, editorial director, features, writes. “Smith has done his homework: He engages with secular gender theorists, highlighting where transgender theory has gone off course. In a world that says we are self-defined, Smith’s book makes the biblical position credible to outsiders.”
The book is based on Smith’s PhD thesis, which has the title “Identity and Embodiment: An Evangelical Assessment of Transgender Theory.” Smith’s position is that God intends a person’s gender to be grounded in his or her biological sex, hence the title The Body God Gives. In his book, Smith is critical of transgender theory, which posits that the sexed nature of the body does not determine the gendered self.
Sam Allberry, author of “Is God Anti-Gay?” describes Smith’s work as “a remarkably gracious, insightful, and clear book on a highly contested issue in the Western world today. Robert Smith combines the analysis of a scholar and the heart of a pastor, and has done us all a terrific service in the process.”
Smith described writing his book in an interview on The Pastors Heart: “
“The whole journey into this domain was fundamentally pastorally motivated and came out of pastoral questions and pastoral situations that I was aware of, and that, well, some of them are very close to me. And so really from the get-go, I was not only trying to wrestle with the ideas and the scriptures, but also just with the pain of people and the confusion has well taken hold at a much larger level in our culture.”
Smith describes to The Pastor’s Heart his view that there are three, not two, responses to transgender issues. “I think most, for most people, sex is biology, and gender is the way you do sex in the world, the way you think about sex in yourself, the way you express it in dress, and other ways. So for non-trans theory, that’s pretty straightforward. Gender is something that builds off and extends out of sex. And so, okay, if you’re male, your body’s male, then your gender will be according to that and expressed in masculine ways that make sense to the world. Now, that’s non-trans theory. Okay, so we’ll park that one.
“But here we come to two versions of trans theory. In an earlier version of this, I just had one version, and I realised over time, actually, there are two different takes on trans theory. So the kind of more traditional soft version, as I’ve called it, would say, your sex is determined by your biology. But your gender is determined by something quite independent. It’s your gender identity. Now that’s soft trans theory. Yes, my body’s masculine, but I feel like a woman, and therefore I really am a woman because, well, my gender identity is that of a woman. Now, that’s the soft version.
“Now, the hard version would say, not only is my gender determined by my gender identity, but that gender identity is so significant, in fact is the truest thing about me. So it actually determines my sex. If I feel like a woman, then I’m actually a female. My gender identity tells me I’m a woman. So therefore, as many in the sort of hard version of transgender would say, well, I’m a woman with a …
“And so in that sense, my gender identity has reclassified my body. That’s the hard version. And so I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have hormones or surgeries. If my gender identity is woman, then I’m a female. I don’t need to do anything about myself. I can just be exactly as I am, but still claim to be a woman. So that’s the hard version of trans theory. So it’s important to recognise, those two variants are out there… Even within these kind of two categories, there’s a lot of different nuances.”
The Body God Gives: A Biblical Response to Transgender Theory, Baker Academic, 2025, is available at Koorong and Reformers for $54.99
Smith was part of a more popular treatment of the topic: The Gender Revolution by Patricia Weerakoon, with Robert Smith and Kamal Weerakoon from Matthias Media.