e) How should Christians respond?

The first and fundamental responsibility of every Christian is to live by every word that comes from the mouth of God, irrespective of whether our culture makes this easy or hard. This means we need to listen carefully to what the Bible teaches us about human sexuality and gender identity, and then to work out how we live, love and minister in a very confused and sometimes hostile culture, and to the many confused individuals within it (if not within our churches also).

This, in turn, means that we have both a pastoral task and a political task. Both are important, although some of God’s people will be better able to engage in one more than the other. As we now turn to examine the Scriptures, my primary interest is in the pastoral implications of the Bible’s teaching. To help us, I want to flag up front the key pastoral questions we need to answer so that we might be alert to how the Bible’s teaching speaks to them:

• How do we teach and encourage those who are conflicted and confused by the social changes going on around us?
• How do we counsel and care for those who, through no obvious fault of their own, experience a profound sense of gender incongruence?
• How do we effectively evangelise gender non-conforming people?
• What does repentance mean for someone who has transitioned gender?
• What does Christian discipleship look like for someone who battles ongoing gender dysphoria?

3. Biblical and Theological Exploration

It’s taken us a little while to get here, but we now come to the most important of our tasks: engaging with the word of God in Scripture. Under the following headings, my aim is to explore some of the chief ways in which the Bible’s teaching speaks to the issues raised by the transgender revolution and the phenomenon of gender incongruence. In terms of method, I will be combining a biblical theological approach (which seeks to be sensitive to the unfolding nature of the Bible’s teaching) with a systematic theological approach (which is concerned to synthesise the Bible’s overall teaching), while keeping an eye on the pastoral questions raised above and addressing them at appropriate points along the way.

a) The binary nature of sex

With refreshing clarity, the basic, binary and dimorphic nature of human sex is revealed in the creation account of Genesis 1 and then repeated in Genesis 5:

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make man (Heb. ’adam) in our image …”
²⁷ So God created man (Heb. ’adam) in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male (Heb. zakhar) and female (Heb. neqevah) he created them. (Gen 1:26-27)

¹ … When God created man (Heb. ’adam), he made him in the likeness of God.² Male (Heb. zakhar) and female (Heb. neqevah) he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man (Heb. ’adam) when they were created. (Gen 5:1b-2)

The implication of these texts is plain: God has created no third sex! This was not only the case before humanity’s fall into sin (hereafter ‘the Fall’), as we see in Genesis 1, but remains the case after the Fall, as we see in Genesis 5. Lest we be in any doubt, this point is underlined by none other than Jesus himself. In answering a question about divorce posed by the Pharisees, he references Genesis 1:27 (and 1:1 also), interpolating the word ‘from’ (Gk. apo) to indicate that the binary nature of human sex is not only an ongoing fact but one with ongoing implications:

“Have you not read that he who created them from (Gk. apo) the beginning made them male and female …” (Matt 19:4; cf. Mark 10:6)