Generally, conservative Christians who condemn transgender people nevertheless believe in a God who is mysteriously three persons in one; a God in whose image both men and women are created, implying that God at least in essential “image” is not gendered; a God who goes by different names and different pronouns in different contexts and who appears to people in different forms, including a burning bush and a cloud; a God who calls on followers to undergo ritualistic death to lead a new life; a God who transitions to human form in the person of Jesus; and a God whose fundamental moral lesson is to “love one another.”
One might be tempted to think that these conservative Christians’ animosity toward transgender people is rooted less in theology than in unquestioned traditions, irreligious dogmas, and political expedience, given the ease with which transgender people may be scapegoated.
On April 1, the Colorado House Judiciary committee heard bill 1312, aiming to protect trans rights. Testimony, limited to two minutes per person, lasted for over nine hours. Sadly yet unsurprisingly, much of the opposition to the bill involved claims that transitioning to a different gender defies God.
(Note: I think that the final section of the bill as introduced seriously overreaches in restricting speech, but my complaints are not rooted in religion nor in ill will toward transgender people. Here my focus is on the religious backdrop, not the details of the bill.)
In fact, the Christian Bible does not say anything clearly ruling out a transgender identity. For example, Nehemiah 9:14 does not say, “Though shalt not, if born a male with a penis, identify or live as a woman, nor, if born a female with a vagina, identify or live as a man.”
As several people pointed out to the committee, it should not matter if the Bible did say that. We live in a free country with a government charged with defending the rights of individuals, not in an authoritarian theocracy. To take other examples, the fact that the Bible demands death for “witches,” people who curse their parents, adulterers, and people who work on the Sabbath, does not mean that we do or should start murdering people on such absurd grounds.
Nevertheless, a lot of people take religious beliefs quite seriously, and secular people too can learn something from theological discussions (I’m an atheist). So reviewing the religious arguments for and against legal protections for transgender people is helpful, and the committee hearing in question provides a useful backdrop for that.
Religious Claims against Transgender Identities
Most people who spoke against the bill did not invoke religion. Instead, they claimed that gender-affirming medical care and even social transitioning are harmful, that most children who initially claim to be transgender eventually grow out of that if allowed to do so, and that generally children who claim to be transgender (or nonbinary) do so to mask other problems. Proponents of the bill articulately countered those claims. Here my focus is on the religious claims.
One person said:
This bill in practice will outlaw living as a faithful Christian in Colorado, who believes and affirms what the Bible declares and what God has created in nature. The state has no authority to compel speech that denies basic fundamental reality. Christians cannot be forced to lie about what God has made clear. Requiring people to use preferred pronouns or chosen names that contradict their sex is to mandate participation in lying.
This statement falsely claims that the Bible clearly condemns claiming a transgender identity, and it presumes that God made every person with a gender matching biological sex. So the idea here is that there is a male gender and a female gender, and gender always corresponds to body parts. If a person born with a penis rejects their male gender, goes this view, the person rejects God’s plans and designed order.
Aside from the fact that this claim ignores rare cases where chromosomes do not line up with genitalia in the usual way, the claim ignores the obvious counter that God has created some people as transgender, such that their gender in the social and psychological sense does not match the gender usually associated with their genitalia or chromosomes.
Several religious leaders spoke against the bill, and I will include their names here because of their public roles. Here is one comment:
My name is Jonathan Helvoigt, and I represent New Covenant Church in Lakewood. . . . And as a Christian, I also come representing the reigning king Jesus Christ himself, the true father of all butterflies, who is without question in opposition to this bill. It is my responsibility then to urge you to fear God and keep his commandments, especially this house, which has been specifically appointed by him to exalt those who honor him and condemn those who don’t.
This bill is unambiguously hostile to those who bear the image of God; male and female created he them, children and adults alike. It is hostile to the family itself, the building block of society. It is hostile to commerce and education. Its hostility to religious liberty and free speech is comical in its lack of subtlety.
We are responsible to oppose every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ. This bill insists Christians disregard these commandments from our Lord. The damage this bill will do to the people in Colorado is incalculable. The power this bill provides for weaponization by the wicked against the righteous is also easy to see. It reads as a manifesto and long-term plan for taking children from conservatives and shutting down Christian businesses and schools. These are the very families and institutions that produce enduring health for the state, since they are rooted in creation order, historic faith, and ancient tradition, as opposed to those subject to the shifting waves of popular opinion.
Too many have died or been radically disfigured at the altar of this obviously demonic ideology, and those voting in the affirmative will without question answer to their maker one day for having no excuse for their direct rebellion to his word. You have heard the testimonies here, and so has God. I charge you in the name of Jesus Christ to vote no on bill 1312.
The first thing that strikes me about this statement is Helvoigt’s breathtaking hubris in presuming to speak for God with no concern whatsoever that he might be misinterpreting God’s message. Then comes Helvoigt’s literal demonization of his opponents. The proponents of the bill are not just wrong, in this view, but evil, guided by demons to oppose God. This is the sort of language through which self-professed Christians for centuries tortured and murdered people with different beliefs and lifestyles. Helvoigt voices the perspective that “God doesn’t make mistakes” even as he rejects the possibility that God may have created some people as transgender.
Interestingly, Helvoigt’s church holds that “men and women [are] equally made in the image of God.” This implies that God in his “image” is or contains both (or neither) man and woman, and so is definitionally nonbinary. But Helvoigt refuses to consider the implications of this or what it might mean for God’s creation.
Sadly yet unsurprisingly, Helvoigt’s church advocates a strict power hierarchy that totally rejects transgender as well as gay people and demands subservience of women. I quote at length from the Church’s web site:
We believe that God’s design of a person’s maleness, or femaleness respectively, is clear through their biology. Since God creates everything according to its purpose, we believe that a person’s soul is always born with the body it was designed for. Therefore, a person’s gender is a person’s sex and vice versa. This is good and was decided before the foundation of the world. A person’s sex is accompanied by distinct responsibilities and functions within the family, the church, and society. Because we trust in the sovereignty of God, this is all to be received with thanksgiving. Adam and Eve were made to complement each other in a one-flesh union that establishes the only normative pattern of sexual relations for men and women, such that marriage ultimately serves as a type of the union between Christ and his church. In God’s wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable, but rather they complement each other in mutually enriching ways. God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord. In the ministry of the church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to be developed to their full potential in the manifold ministries of the people of God. The distinctive leadership role within the church given to qualified men is grounded in creation, fall, and redemption and must not be sidelined by appeals to cultural developments.
“Cultural developments” in this context are what most of us call moral progress.
Helvoigt brought two of his church colleagues with him. Jarrett Roster affirmed his “compassion and love for people who are confused about their identity.” The recipients of Roster’s love might be forgiven for thinking that Roster’s aim is to deny and change who they are, not love them for who they are. Being transgender is a disease, in Roster’s view, and the cure is to join his cult:
The answer for this suffering is . . . coming to the Lord Jesus Christ, and confessing your sins, praying to him, repenting for them, and believing he can heal you from them. If anyone here confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord, was raised from the dead, and he’s ascended to the right hand of the Father, you will be saved. You will be saved and brought into new life, and a family reconciled to Yahweh, the one that created you. Your identity is found here, and given freely without cost, not by yourself, not by your school, but by your house, but God. That’s where your identity is. Put your trust in him, and he will deliver you from the pain and suffering of gender dysphoria.
Jeremy Randazzo, a pastor at Redeemer Christian Church in Arvada, shared a similar message:
[I am] here to speak as a representative of the Lord Jesus Christ and his church. . . . We must obey God rather than man, and this bill seeks to legislate against our Constitutionally guaranteed right to act on our conscience for the love of our neighbors bound in the oppression of gender dysphoria. Now repeatedly today we’ve been accused of trying to erase and deny people’s authentic selves, when in fact we are trying to protect people from the erasure and denial of their true selves. The men and women God created you all to be is under attack by the cult of gender deconstruction.
Randazzo again confidently claims to speak for God and refuses even to consider that some people are authentically transgender, able to live a rich and full life as such.
Religious Arguments in Favor of Transgender Identities
Several people who testified in favor the bill directly responded to those who disparaged transgender people in the name of religious faith.
Bruce Parker of Rocky Mountain Equality said, “I had not intended to talk about the church, but some of the opposition testimony moved me to talk about my understanding of faith. I grew up attending church in Pikeville, Kentucky, and was a Bible Bowl champion. I learned to love my neighbor as myself, to care for the vulnerable, and to be my brother’s keeper.”
One person professed to being “an observant Jew” who believes “the Talmud and the Midrash originally teaches us that there are more than six genders within the tradition of Judaism.”
Another person who has a Masters in Divinity said:
In the Bible there are multiple people who God gives a new name to when the old name no longer fits them. Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, Jacob to Israel, Saul to Paul. In my beliefs, we are invited into co-creation with God. It’s why God gave us wheat and not bread, why God gave us grapes and not wine.
I think that we are given bodies to change as we see fit, to co-create them together with God, not just to take what we are given. I believe that the diversity of creation is the diversity of the image of God, as we are all created in the image of God. It was because of my own trust in God that I was able to question a gender identity I had taken for granted nearly my whole life.
Other Christians have told me that I couldn’t be gay or trans, that I was a boy, and that was final. But it was my experience of the unconditional love of God that allowed to me to let go of what I’d been told I had to be and live into who God was freeing me to be.
Michael DeSantis of the Jefferson Unitarian Church also addressed the religious claims head-on:
I am a nonbinary person who uses they/them pronouns and lives here in Denver. I’m also one of the ministers at Jefferson Unitarian Church in Golden, Colorado, Colorado’s largest unitarian universalist or UU congregation. I’m here to support this bill on behalf of our church. But my testimony draws upon values shared by UUs across the country, and by people of faith all across the great state of Colorado. And our shared values our UU faith affirms, as did our Christian universalist ancestors, [are] that divine love is the power that holds us together, and that we must work to make that love real in the world.
Because of these commitments, last June, delegates from our one-thousand plus congregations across the country voted overwhelmingly to pass a binding resolution which states, among other things, that ‘being transgender, or identifying with any gender, other than the one assigned at birth, is a beautiful and divine manifestation of humanity.’ As a people of faith we UUs also draw inspiration from moral and religious traditions that affirm the call to love our neighbors. We take seriously the teachings, such as that of Jesus of Nazareth, who says in the Gospel of John, that he came so that humanity might have life, and have it abundantly. And he is pretty clear that that life is in this world, not the next.
Listen, I’m a pastor, and I have a lot of trans and nonbinary congregants, and I spend a lot of time in pastoral care conversations with them, talking about the deep psychic and emotional pain that they have gone through, often in religious communities, also through the legal system. Pain from things such as deadnaming and misgendering, I have countless stories about that. And it is clear that those experiences, they do limit their ability to live and to live life abundantly.
This legislation, it would go a long way to ensuring as many children as possible receive the often life-saving affirmation of their identities that they know to be true, and that we and many other people of faith affirm to be holy.
In response to a question from the committee, DeSantis offered an interesting take on Genesis:
Obviously we as Unitarian Universalists . . . fully support separation of church and state. That is fundamental, and we don’t think that religion should . . . influence policy. On the other hand, if we’re going to start talking about things like the Bible, what the Bible says about gender, in Genesis, when it says that God creates, what’s often taken as ‘Adam,’ it is the adam, which is actually an androgynous person, right? And so, it just is strange to me that the Bible gets turned on this, when it is so ambiguous at best about some of these pieces.
There’s also a piece that if we were in the opposite situation here, and there was trying to be restriction on those of us who affirm trans people, that, because we have passed a binding resolution as Unitarian Universalists, that that would actually infringe on our freedom of religion, and our ability to live out our faith by affirming trans people. So I just think that, in order to ensure the freedom of religion as it is experienced across the spectrum, that allowing people to affirm who they know to be true, and children’s identities, is really the way to go.
To this, Representative Ken DeGraaf pointed out that Genesis says “male and female he created them.” DeGraaf then got into a heated exchange in which he characterized gender-affirming medical care as “genital mutilation,” prompting one person testifying to ask DeGraaf if that’s how he’d characterize the “boob jobs” cisgender women from his district get.
DeSantis expanded their point:
First of all, to all the trans people who’ve been hurt by both this hearing and just other cis institutions of power, like, I see you, I love you, I see you. With the adam, the male and female he created them, how is the Hebrew, Representative DeGraaf? Because I will just say that mine is not great, but what I will say is that . . . male and female, God created that one creature, both male and female, not male and female as in different people. And so what I will say is that the Talmud, the earliest Rabbinical source, the Rabbinical scholars who are reading this, in Hebrew, understood and talked about it in terms of androgyny. . . . Again, we should not be basing this on Biblical religion, but if we’re going to be bringing it into it, you best be doing facts.
For what it’s worth, the interpretation DeSantis lays out strikes me as strained (ChatGPT offers some pointers for further reading). Here’s what Genesis 1:26–27 says (in the updated New Revised Standard Version): “Then God said, ‘Let us make humans [adam] in our image, according to our likeness. . . .’ So God created humans [adam] in his image, in the image of God he created them [or him], male and female he created them.” Genesis 2 retells the creation story, where “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground” and then later made the woman from the man’s rib.
An article from the Human Rights Campaign handles the first passage from Genesis rather differently:
[W]hen God creates men and women in Genesis 1, it’s after creating opposites in every other corner of creation—day and night, land and sea, flying birds and swimming fish. Humans, then, are also created in an opposite pair—male and female. But the problem with a literal reading of this text that even though Genesis 1 sets up these binaries, God’s creation exists in spectrums.
In between day and night we have dawn and dusk; between land and sea we have coral reefs and estuaries and beaches; between flying birds and swimming fish we have penguins. . . . No one would argue that a penguin is an abomination for not fitting the categories of Genesis 1, or that an estuary isn’t pleasing to God because it’s neither land nor sea. In the same way, God gives every human a self that is unique and may not always fit neatly into a box or binary.
The Human Rights Campaign also takes on Deuteronomy 22:5: “A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for whoever does such things is abhorrent to the Lord your God.” HRC suggests that under this passage a transgender woman who wears women’s clothing is totally fine. HRC further suggests reasons to read the passage as specific to cultural issues of the time.
I would add that Christians routinely either violate other provisions of the same chapter or else completely ignore them, so it makes no sense for them to insist on strict adherence to the dress code:
6 “If you come on a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. 7 Let the mother go, taking only the young for yourself, in order that it may go well with you and you may live long.
8 “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof; otherwise you might have bloodguilt on your house, if anyone should fall from it.
9 “You shall not sow your vineyard with two kinds of seed, or the whole yield will be forbidden, both the crop that you have sown and the yield of the vineyard itself.
10 “You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey yoked together.
11 “You shall not wear clothes made of wool and linen woven together.
12 “You shall make tassels on the four corners of the cloak with which you cover yourself.”
In sum, nowhere does the Bible clearly rule out someone identifying as transgender, and aspects of the Bible lend support to transgender people. During the committee hearing, some religious people invoked their religion to demean transgender people, others talked about how such religious attitudes had harmed them, and still others invoked their religion to affirm transgender people and their identities.
Similar Debates Engage Atheists
Notably, various anti-trans arguments made by some religious people at the committee hearing sound a lot like anti-trans arguments made by some atheists. So a person does not need to invoke religion to come up with an anti-trans stance. What lessons can we draw from this?
I want to briefly recount a dispute within the Freedom from Religion Foundation, something that “Friendly Atheist” Hemant Mehta has discussed.
On November 7, 2024, FFRF published an article by Kat Grant arguing that, because of rare cases of unusual alignment of chromosomes with genitalia, “any attempt to define womanhood on biological terms is inadequate.” Grant sees this as opening up space for transgender and nonbinary people. Grant concludes, “A woman is whoever she says she is.”
The problem with Grant’s case is that most transgender and nonbinary people do not have unusual biology in terms of chromosomes and genitalia at birth. And Grant’s purely subjectivist conclusion is not satisfying. If someone can arbitrarily declare to be a woman, can someone also arbitrarily declare to be a mouse or a sportscar? It seems like something is missing from Grant’s case.
In response, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne responds both to Grant’s subjectivism and to their treatment of biology: “Feelings don’t create reality. Instead, in biology ‘sex’ is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells (‘gametes’).” (See also Coyne’s more-recent article in the Wall Street Journal.)
Coyne is not just equating biological sex with gender. He writes:
The biggest error Grant makes is the repeated conflation of sex, a biological feature, with gender, the sex role one assumes in society. To all intents and purposes, sex is binary, but gender is more spectrum-like, though it still has two camel’s-hump modes around ‘male’ and ‘female.’ While most people enact gender roles associated with their biological sex (those camel humps), an appreciable number of people mix both roles or even reject male and female roles altogether.
So far this is a reasonable and trans-inclusionary position. So Coyne is not making Helvoigt’s mistake of presuming that gender necessarily matches up with biological sex in the same way for every person. Coyne accepts the existence of transgender and nonbinary people.
But then Coyne makes the equally silly error of conceptual essentialism, the notion that a word can have only one legitimate meaning. Coyne writes, “Under the biological concept of sex . . . it is impossible for humans to change sex—to be truly ‘transsexual’—for mammals cannot change their means of producing gametes. A more appropriate term is ‘transgender,’ or, for transwomen, ‘men who identify as women.'”
As I wrote in reply to Richard Dawkins, who, along with Coyne and Steven Pinker, resigned from FFRF’s board over the dispute:
“What is a woman?” Any person who is not an idiot quickly realizes that very often we use the same term to mean different things in different contexts. Last year I proposed a two-part definition of “woman”:
woman(1): Someone born with female reproductive organs including ovaries and a uterus [we can add “large gametes” or eggs].
woman(2): Anyone who expresses or identifies with traditionally female modes of self-awareness or behavior.
Or, as one of my friends summarized not quite precisely, “Sex is what’s between the legs, gender is what’s between the ears.”
If you pretend that biological sex is the same thing as gender, or that the first definition of “woman” precludes the second, you just are not approaching the issue thoughtfully or honestly.
As Mehta reviews, Coyne makes some unjustified conclusions about transgender people. Coyne says trans people never should “compete athletically against biological women,” a stance that does not account for competitions among children before puberty, sports or tiers where potential physiological advantages are not relevant, and potential sporting tiers based on physical characteristics other than biological sex.
Coyne says that trans women “should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters,” which, aside from being based on a bullshit report, ignores the characteristics of individuals and the agency of women seeking help.
Coyne says that a transgender woman, “if convicted of a crime, should not be placed in a women’s prison,” ignoring the fact that a transgender woman placed in a men’s prison faces extreme danger and that our available choices here are not binary.
So, in the end, Coyne manages to end up in a bigoted stance against transgender people despite theoretically allowing for their existence.
It is worth pointing out the differences between Coyne’s views and Helvoigt’s views. Helvoigt draws his views from his personal interpretations of his religious texts; Coyne seeks to point to evidence, however flawed his conclusions. Helvoigt absolutely rules out an authentic transgender identity; Coyne at least recognizes that transgender and nonbinary people exist. Helvoigt’s views on transgender people are part of a broader stance on strict social hierarchy demanding the subservience of women; Coyne does not accept any of that. Helvoigt’s views imply that transgender people basically have no rights to public accommodations or gender-affirming care; Coyne, although he carves out unjustified exceptions, says “transgender people should surely enjoy all the moral and legal rights of everyone else.”
In short, aspects of Coyne’s position are reasonable, and, where Coyne’s position is unreasonable, at least Coyne has not ruled out in advance consideration of a rational response.
As an atheist, I think it’s important to observe that atheism is not a positive philosophy (but just a lack of belief in the supernatural) and does not guarantee a reasonable approach. Obviously atheists can make important mistakes, as I think Coyne has done. But at least atheists who embrace reason (not all atheists do!) are committed to thinking seriously about rational arguments and evidence, whereas religionists such as Helvoigt (not representative of all religious people!) mire themselves in dogma. These are differences that matter.
