Gender Identity, The Fall, and God's Good Creation

Jerry Brown, the Governor of California wound up in the news recently for signing legislation that allows "equal access" in schools for students who believe themselves to be "transgendered." That is, students in California schools who believe that they are not the gender into which they were born, will have the option to use whichever restroom they choose. This same access will be accommodated by athletic teams as well. For instance, a boy who feels himself to be a girl will be allowed to try out for the girl's volleyball or soccer teams. The complexities and moral hazards for such an arrangement are legion.

Russell Moore, the newly appointed President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, has written a helpful piece for the Washington Post.

Dr. Moore writes:

Laws such as those in California will quickly test the boundaries of society’s tolerance for a psychological and individualistic definition of gender. There are reasons, after all, why societies put boys and girls in different bathrooms, men and women on different sports teams.  When gender identity is severed from biological sex, where does one’s self-designation end, and who will be harmed in the process?

As conservative Christians, we do not see transgendered persons as ”freaks” to be despised or ridiculed. We acknowledge that there are some persons who feel alienated from their identities as men or as women. Of course that would be the case in a fallen universe in which all of us are alienated, in some way, from how God created us to be.

But we don’t believe this alienation can be solved by pretending as though we have Pharaoh-like dominion over our maleness or femaleness. These categories we believe (along with every civilization before us) are about more than just self-construction, and they can’t be eradicated by a change of clothes or chemical tinkering or a surgeon’s knife, much less by an arbitrary announcement in the high school gym.

The transgender question means that conservative Christian congregations such as mine must teach what’s been handed down to us, that our maleness and femaleness points us to an even deeper reality, to the unity and complementarity of Christ and the church. A rejection of the goodness of those creational realities then is a revolt against God’s lordship, and against the picture of the gospel that God had embedded in the creation.

Read the entire article HERE.