MERISMS, EUNUCHS, AND THE 8 GENDERS: A CHRISTIAN REFLECTION ON GENDER AND IDENTITY - PART 1
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In my experience, if one is called to serve the outcast, the weird, the socially unacceptable, and the powerless within the Episcopal Church, then there is no better mission field than youth ministry. Youth ministry is where you will experience the hard work of making space for powerless human beings and witness the near-impossible work of a still-developing person making sense of the 21st century. At my last call, a conservative Episcopal Church in Georgia with a pre-COVID membership of around 3,000 people, I built a youth community that experienced Christ by playing Dungeons & Dragons. It didn’t take long to realize that the space I had created drew into it those who were marginalized because of their neurodivergence, lifestyle, sexuality, or gender identity. This essay is written with that tribe in mind.
At the time, because of the polarization of local church politics and the larger culture we lived in, I didn’t feel safe enough to openly pastor my students who did not fit the status quo of an upper class, white congregation. We just stayed in our D&D group, and I made myself available to them individually. But now I am at the School of Theology at Sewanee, I wanted to really look into scripture, tradition, and reason to see what evidence there was for the hate (in our local cultures) and polite dismissal (in our church culture) of those who are trans. Trans-sex/sexuality/genderism is a divisive and polarizing issue today, and when I looked at scripture, it became clear that it has always been that way. Viewing gender nonconformity through the lenses of Old Testament scripture and the Judaism of Jesus offers some astonishing clarity on the subject, and my prayer is that this work inspires you to develop your unique Christian response to trans gendered non-conforming (TGNC) humans that transcends the current vulgar diatribes.
Before getting into the meat of the matter, we should discuss how we use our scriptures. Every time a person, theologically trained or not, opens the Bible looking for answers, they are entering into a negotiation with the text. Greek and Hebrew words do not often translate well into English. First and second century culture will not translate seamlessly into twenty-first century culture. There is scriptural evidence of both a masculine and feminine deity when referring to Adonai. In no way is this essay an intention of telling anyone what is right or wrong. I have not found any groundbreaking data; there is nothing new here. What I have done is negotiated with scripture, applied a Jewish tradition and interpretation to that negotiation, and reasoned a Christian response using one of the very few teachings of Jesus we have on the subject.
A complicated topic such as this should begin in one place: the beginning. Robert Alter has spent a lifetime working with and translating the Old Testament. He translates Genesis 1:1 as “When God began to create heaven and earth.” This simple phrase is an example of a merism. A merism is a literary device commonly used in scripture to represent the entirety of something by mentioning its opposing polarities or extremes. The scripture doesn’t mean that God begin to create only heaven and earth, but rather, God began to create heaven, earth, and everything between. This is important, because the same literary structure is used again in Genesis 1:27:
And God created the human in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.”
God creates male and female at the same time. Both are made in God’s image. This merism suggests that biological sex is not a binary, but a spectrum, with zakhar, “the one with phallus” on one end, and nekevah, “the one with the hole” on the other. It also does not place one above the other in importance, but side by side. One cannot infer that one sex is “better” than the other in any way from the first creation account. The second creation account in Genesis 2 is a near complete rebuttal of Genesis 1, placing the male above the female and making the female’s actions the catalyst of sin. You can decide which account is “right” and get back to me. My negotiation, based on my lived experience, is to take Genesis 1 into account over Genesis 2, and reinforce that the equality of gender and the spectrum of maleness and femaleness was created by God, in God’s image, and it was good enough to survive thousands of years to reach us today.
This is where we get into weeds. If you spend any amount of time in the LGBTQIA+ community, you will find that there are three unique conversations occurring that parallel each other. In mainstream media and in church pulpits, we merge all three conversations into one, and cannot figure out why we do nothing but argue because of it. When you are having three conversations at once, it’s impossible to be clear about much of anything. My students have taught me that biological sex does not equal sexual orientation which does not equal gender. When one of my students introduced themselves as “trans,” I knew it was my job to understand from what and to what they were transitioning. This could be an issue of accepting their sexual orientation, and/or their biological sex and/or their gender. In this essay, I’m only going to look at gender, because including either or both of the other two topics guarantees a fight - and because we as a society decide what gender means.
What is gender, anyway? According to the American Psychological Association (APA), gender identity is "a person's deeply felt, inherent sense of being a girl, woman, or female; a boy, man, or male; a blend of male or female; or neither male nor female." (1) A person's internal sense of their own gender, whether it corresponds to the sex they were assigned at birth, is a complex concept that cannot be rigidly defined because of human cultural differences and the evolution of gender roles over time. If God created maleness and femaleness on a spectrum, and gender identity is an internal sense and not a taught sense, then what does it mean to be transgender? APA guidelines state, “Transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people have a gender identity that is not fully aligned with their [biological] sex assigned at birth.” (2) The first guideline in the document written to psychologists states: “Psychologists understand that gender is a nonbinary construct that allows for a range of gender identities and that a person’s gender identity may not align with sex assigned at birth.” (3) “Gender” is our socially constructed understanding of the characteristics, roles, expectations, behaviors, and likenesses of women, men, girls, and boys. A social construct does not exist in objective reality but as the result of human creation and acceptance over time. Social constructs exist only because humans agree that they exist. Numerous studies show that, as a social construct, gender identity varies from society to society and can change over time. (4) We collectively decide what it means to be a man, boy, male, or woman, girl, female. For example, I know from personal, painful experience that my idea of masculinity was vastly different from my now deceased grandfather’s.
Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People, The American Psychological Association, December 2015, Vol. 70, No. 9, 832– 864
Guidelines, (2015).
Ibid
Mary Zaborskis, Gender Studies: Foundations and Key Concepts, Jstor Daily, November 29, 2018
