OPINION What happens when the mem illustrating this article does not work? Lance Lawson on why gender and chromosomes may not align as neatly as many suggest.
Christian disputes about the now famous Bp Budde sermon have been unusually intense, even by the normal standards of online culture wars. Over the past week or so, I’ve engaged in some of these conversations and listened in on others, and I’ve gained an even greater appreciation of what’s at stake in the Christian community’s grappling with the so-called gender wars.
For those Christians convinced that ministries of oversight and teaching are by God’s design reserved to men, the bishop’s gender alone, regardless of anything else, has been a profound sore point and the focus of criticism, as it is always in various contexts. Aside from that given, two themes have been dominant as I’ve observed it. One I fully expected, the other has somewhat surprised me – at least in its intensity.
The former is the charge of political bias. The Episcopal Church, the American denomination (an Anglican Communion province) in which Mariann Edgar Budde is the Bishop of Washington, is commonly presumed to be aligned with left or progressive politics. For quite a few Christian critics, Budde’s sermon, generally, and her plea to President Trump, in particular, was but one more piece of evidence of that political alignment. As the criticism went on, the bishop promoted leftist talking points rather than Jesus. Other Christians have been expressing the counter-confidence that Budde’s message placed her firmly in the biblical covenant and prophetic justice tradition of defending the marginalised.
Lest there be any doubt, the latter is my assessment. But my central motif is more directly the second of the two themes I’ve just alluded to, namely transgender, the Christian conversation I believe must be had now for the gospel’s sake. My sense of the urgency of this conversation, especially among evangelicals, has only been heightened by the potency of reaction to a single word in Budde’s sermon, ‘transgender’, and its coupling with the noun ‘children’. It’s insisted by many conservative Christians that this is indicative of a ‘gender ideology’ to which the bishop subscribes and which she was intentionally promoting in her sermon.
~~Male and female he created them (Genesis 1:27)~~
In an earlier piece, I referenced a newly written and published so-called Christian “creed” for “Sexual Integrity”, including a single paragraph proscribing, as against God’s design, any attempt to alter a person’s gender. This is not to say there’s anything novel in that kind of statement. Indeed something along those lines has become a commonplace as evangelicals have responded to all talk of gender non-conformity.
The Church’s credal tradition has been about core gospel truths, such as the divinity of Christ, not sexual (or any other) ethics. And the biblical underpinnings of Christian credal confessions have drawn on the breadth of the Scriptural witness. In contrast, the “creed” of immutable binary gender seems to rest on a single verse (v27) of the first Creation narrative, Genesis 1. (If there are other biblical foundations to the statement, I’ve not been made aware of them).
On that one verse, so it appears, it’s proclaimed as a matter of doctrine not only that both women and men share in the imago dei (the image of God), but also that:
• there are only two genders in human Creation;
• every human is ‘biologically’ either male or female;
• the genitalia of every newborn child is determinative of the gender God created them to be (so every child born is either a ‘biological male’ or a ‘biological female’);
• the child’s evident ‘gender’ at birth is God’s last word on the subject (i.e. it’s immutable);
• any suggestion, let alone action, to the contrary, is a sin, a rebellion against God’s creative design.
I want to highlight in this the language of biology. A common phrase employed by evangelicals who reject any place for gender transition is ‘biological (fe)male’. A person’s gender identified at birth is fixed by God, meaning that come what may that’s the gender they fundamentally are; because ‘biology’.
What I find especially perplexing is the insistence on the ‘biology’ of gender, as a biblical hermeneutic, on the part of Bible students and scholars who I know are not creation literalists. From many conversations I’ve had, and evangelical sermons I’ve heard, it’s plain that the majority of evangelical theology graduates today (and the colleges where they studied) would read and expound the Creation accounts (Genesis 1,2), according to literary genre, as theological texts and not as history or science in any post-enlightenment sense. Thus most would not subscribe to a literal 6-day or young-earth creation.
And yet we would pluck out a single verse from a chapter we agree is not a source of atmospheric or geological science, and in effect insist that that verse is a primary source of biological science; a complex field in which few bible students are trained. And then we must contend with the published insights of actual current genetic science, which are not readily harmonised with the authoritative ‘biology’ we claim to draw from the Bible. One starting place for this might be a short piece from about 2019, in which biology professor Dr Rebecca Helm introduced the complex interplay between biological, chromosomal, genetic, hormonal and cellular sex. The piece has been re-shared many times on social media and other platforms. Here is but one instance.
In closing this post, I’ll point very briefly to a burden I’ve carried for some time now. I desperately don’t want the errors the evangelical community, myself included, made for decades in treating gays, lesbians and bisexuals as the enemy to be repeated with the transgender community. And that’s why this all matters.
First published at fullofgraceandtruth.net, it was Edited to work as a stand-alone by The Other Cheek and removing one reference to trans, to focus on intersex issues. Publication of this piece does not imply an endorsement of other pieces by Lance Lawson, and this applies to The Other Cheek running pieces by authors in general .
Here is the piece by Dr Helm that Lance Lawson refers to. This has been shared many times on the net, so here’s one more time.
“Friendly neighborhood biologist here. I see a lot of people are talking about biological sexes and gender right now. Lots of folks make biological sex sex seem really simple. Well, since it’s so simple, let’s find the biological roots, shall we? Let’s talk about sex…[a thread]
“If you know a bit about biology, you will probably say that biological sex is caused by chromosomes: XX and you’re female, XY and you’re male. This is “chromosomal sex” but is it “biological sex”? Well…
“Turns out there is only ONE GENE on the Y chromosome that really matters to sex. It’s called the SRY gene. During human embryonic development, the SRY protein turns on male-associated genes. Having an SRY gene makes you “genetically male”. But is this “biological sex”?
“Sometimes that SRY gene pops off the Y chromosome and over to an X chromosome. Surprise! So now you’ve got an X with an SRY and a Y without an SRY. What does this mean?
“A Y with no SRY means physically you’re female, chromosomally you’re male (XY) and genetically you’re female (no SRY). An X with an SRY means you’re physically male, chromosomally female (XX) and genetically male (SRY). But biological sex is simple! There must be another answer…
“Sex-related genes ultimately turn on hormones in specific areas on the body, and reception of those hormones by cells throughout the body. Is this the root of “biological sex”??
“What does this all mean?
“It means you may be genetically male or female, chromosomally male or female, hormonally male/female/non-binary, with cells that may or may not hear the male/female/non-binary call, and all this leading to a body that can be male/non-binary/female.
Read more: https://bit.ly/3ZFPL9B
Another major point in this discussion to note is that the vast majority of humans are genetically male or female without the characteristics Helm is discussing. This was covered in a recent piece on the Other Cheek: The intersex/Eunuch puzzle.