Beyond binary

A friend asked me to comment on this:

https://sundayschoolanswers.wixsite.com/kalebgraves/post/a-christianity-beyond-binary

A Christianity Beyond Binary

God is beyond gender binary, so why can't our faith be too?

I’m a Christian, training to be a minister, and LGBTQ affirming. I was affirming of gender non-conforming and transgender people before I supported people seeking same-sex relationships. This may seem like a bigger step than just acceptance of same-sex marriage, but this affirmation is backed up by medicine, scripture, and praxis that has only gotten stronger since I took this position a few years ago.

For a couple of reasons I'm skipping over the "medical evidence:

i) I'm skeptical of research that's designed to yield a desired result. Science can be politicized and mirror the ideological agenda of the scientist, where they begin with what they want to be true, then produce studies to prop it up. That's not paranoid. I wouldn't trust the research of tobacco companies on the health hazards of cigarette smoking. 

ii) But even if we grant for argument's sake that there's a biological basis for gender non-conforming and transgender people, that means they're biologically defective. 

Scriptural Evidence

The Bible never explicitly addresses transgender, nonbinary, or even intersex issues…

i) The explicit teaching of Scripture was never the criterion. Implicit teaching will suffice.

ii) The Bible is pervasively cisnormative and heteronormative. 

…and all supposed condemnations, such as against “soft men” in 1 Corinthians 6:9, are explicitly linked to binary concepts of gender that we don’t even hold today, such as women being “soft” because they were inherently undisciplined and hedonistic, whereas men were thought to inherently be the morally fit and disciplined sex. (9)

Really? Pagan men were notoriously promiscuous. 

What we can look at, however, is the nature of God and how it is expressed in people made in God’s image. God is not a binary being. Throughout the scriptures and church tradition, all three persons of the Trinity are described using both male and female terminology for their inherent qualities. For instance, Yahweh or “the Father” in Proverbs 8:24 is described as giving birth to Wisdom using the Hebrew term חוּל, to writhe in childbirth. (10) Other passages like Deuteronomy 32:11-12, Psalm 131:2, Hosea 11:3-4, Isaiah 49:15, and Isaiah 66:13 explicitly describe Yahweh’s actions and attributes as ones which in that time would have been binarily female. So, the “Father’s” inherent traits include both “male and female” on our binary. 

i) In a handful of cases, Scripture uses maternal imagery for God. In the case of Deut 32:11-12, the comparison is to an animal (bird), not even a human being. 

ii) Holding a child in one's arms is not a distinctively feminine or maternal trait (Hosea 11:3-4). Is Kaleb so unobservant that he's never seen fathers holding their children in their arms? 

iii) There's no exegetical justification to make Yahweh exclusive to the person of the Father. 

The “Son” or “Logos” also explicitly refers to Itself as Chokmah, known as Lady Wisdom, when incarnate as Jesus (Matthew 11:19, Luke 7:35-37). Chokmah is a feminine figure in the rest of the Bible, depicted not as the Son but the Daughter of Yahweh (who births her like a Mother) in Proverbs 8:22-31. The Son is also the Daughter, and so another member of the Trinity inherently has traits which we would define in cultural binary as both “male” and “female.”

The fact that in a single passage of Scripture (Prov 8), wisdom is personified as a woman hardly means the concept of wisdom is feminine. That doesn't automatically carry over to any and all passages about divine wisdom. It's just a fictional illustration. And the reason for Lady Wisdom is to provide a virtuous counterpart to the allure of prostitutes. 

The Holy Spirit is the most feminine member of the Trinity. The Hebrew and Aramaic word for Spirit, רוּחַ, is a grammatically feminine word which uses female pronouns and verbs. When the entirety of the Old Testament speaks of the Holy Spirit, She is grammatically female. When Jesus would have spoken of the Holy Spirit in Aramaic, She would have been grammatically female.

Grammatical gender is often arbitrary. For instance, Scripture uses the word "spirit" (Hebrew=ruach, fem.) for male figures (e.g. the spirit of Pharaoh [Gen 41:8] and the spirit of Jacob [Gen  45:27]).

Some Semitic speaking Christians, like Syriac and Arabic, continue to speak of the Holy Spirit as female today, especially when referring to ordained women. "But let the Deaconesses be honoured by you in the likeness of the Holy Spirit." (Didascalia Apostolorum, 9.48)

That custom has no divine authority. 

The New Testament, however, also speaks of the Holy Spirit with neuter pronouns, and possibly also masculine. Again, the third member of the Holy Spirit is understood as both male and female. 

The NT sometimes breaks the rule of grammatical gender to indicate the personality of the Spirit. 

God is beyond gender binary. If male and female both have the image of God in them, then God must have the fullness of male and female in Herself/Himself/Themself. And as such, there is no reason to think that a human being who is also beyond our gender binary is somehow offensive to God who also is. They too hold God’s image, perhaps expressing it even more fully than some of us who are cisgendered.

i) The image of God is a narrow concept. Humans as earthly representatives of God. You can't retroengineer God's nature from human nature by using the image of God as a bridge, as though the image of God implies one-to-one correspondence between divine and human attributes. Some things are true about God that are not true about humans while some things are true about humans that are not true about God. We have a body, God doesn't. God has always existed, we haven't. God is omnipotent and omniscient, but the image of God doesn't imply that we enjoy the same attributes. 

So even if we grant, for discussion purposes, that God is nongender binary, it doesn't entail that humans are nongender binary. The inference is blatantly invalid. 

ii) God's mind contains the concepts of manhood and womanhood inasmuch as God is the creative source of both, like a male playwright or novelist has the idea of female characters. Manhood and womanhood originate in God's imagination. But that of itself doesn't make God nongender binary, any more than Racine's female characters make him nongender binary or Virginia Woolf's male characters make her nongender binary. 

Evidence from Affirming Christian Praxis

When it comes to praxis, how Christians act, I lean on the scriptures' description that we judge trees by their good and bad fruit, and we can judge teachings and teachers based on their outcomes. (Matthew 7:17-18, Luke 6:43, Galatians 5:22-23, Ephesians 5:9, James 3:17)

So, if scriptures do not directly condemn being transgender or nonconforming, we have to look at the fruit. What fruit does affirmation create? What fruit does rejection create?

That comparison only works if you already know the difference between edible mushrooms and poisonous mushrooms. Kaleb has no criterion to distinguish good fruit from rotten fruit. Does the LGBT lifestyle product nutritious fruit or noxious fruit? 

Gender nonconforming and transgender people's well-being is tied to how their family, peers, and society treats them. This is backed up by multiple studies. In several short term studies, close family support cuts suicide attempts for LGBTQ people as a whole by up to 50% (11) (12) (13) Repeated long-term studies also show that broader peer and societal acceptance after medical and/or social transition brings transgender mental illness and suicide rates down to no difference from the rest of the population. (14) (15)

i) Theology can't be dictated by emotional extortion. 

ii) Studies I've seen show that trans who undergo sex-change operations are often suicidal afterwards. 

iii) As a practical matter, there will never be total acceptance. In terms of mate-selection, Normal men will always prefer biological women rather than transgender women; likewise, normal women will always  biological men rather than transgender women.

iv) In addition, trans rights have become a pretext to abuse, endanger, and discriminate against normal/biological women in women's sports, shelters for battered women, locker rooms, and prisons. 

Conclusion

We must keep families together…

It's the trans lobby that's separating families by having custody terminated for parents who refuse to subjugate their kids to brainwashing, chemical castration, and mutilation. 

…and people safe. 

It's the trans lobby that endangers boys and girls through puberty blockers and sex-change operations, as well as putting biological men in women's shelters and prisons.