Transgender Bible Quotes

The thing is, we can't be in right relationship to each other if we can't see each other. We can't be fully present in any relationship if we're walling off part of ourselves or hiding beneath a mask.

There are two ways to interpret what Paul says in Galatians 3:28 about our being one in Christ: either it means that we're all whitewashed and homogenized and our differences are erased... or it means that we're called to find a way to make our different identities fit together, like the bright shards in assorted colors that make up the stained glass windows of a cathedral. Are we called to sameness, or are we called to oneness?

Sometimes compassion without critical thinking can move you to do things that make a person feel good in the short run but cause harm in the long run.

If there’s a mistake at all, it’s that we’ve created this understanding of gender that is so deeply limiting of God’s creation.

It might seem daunting to a congregation to have to learn about pronouns, or to designate a bathroom gender-neutral, or to have difficult conversations about what it means to affirm LGBTQ+ identities. But transgender people are not a burden for Christianity, or for the church. They come bearing gifts!

If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. If you want to know what we are like and what we should become, look at Jesus.

The Bible’s primary invitation to every Christian is not to act more like a man or to act more like a woman, but to act more like Jesus.

Acceptance is the first step of discipleship. And Christian discipleship is about pursuing the image God created us to be.

To listen is to love. You can’t love without listening.

we need to really get to know someone on a practical level and enter their story before we give an opinion on whether they should make a life-altering decision.

Jesus Christ did not perform any transgender miracles and no disciple was gay.

The scriptures were written by men in eras when the idea of masculinity and power went hand in hand. When reading the Bible, it’s easy to conclude that God is a man. But how can the force that brought all things into being be constrained by gender? Legalistic Christians demand that biological sex and gender are one and the same. But God doesn’t have a body. He created biology, but doesn’t inhabit it as we do. So how can God be a man?

I believe God made all of me—gender identity included—and intended for me to be a transgender person who sees the world through a different lens. I don’t think God made a mistake. I think God made me transgender on purpose.

Christians are not solitary individuals called to follow Jesus on our own and demand that others do the same. We’re a community of radical misfits, called into a motley family filled with grace and truth where no one should walk alone.

And if a trans* person comes to your church, they should be welcomed with open arms and accepted. Not just accepted, but embraced, delighted in, listened to, learned from, honored, loved, cared for, and shown the heavenly kindness saturated with compassion.

Jesus is building an upside-down kingdom where outcasts have their feet washed, the marginalized are welcomed, and dehumanized people feel humanized once again. Where truth is upheld, celebrated, and proclaimed. Where those who fall short of that truth are loved.

But correct science and correct theology are pointless if we’re not willing to love and honor, listen to and learn from, care for and be cared for by the trans* people God has gifted us with. Jesus cherishes them and values them. Would they say the same about you?

I do theology as a matter of survival,” explained Rev. Broderick Greer, who is black and gay, “because if people can do theology that produces brutality against black, transgender, queer, and other minority bodies, then we can do theology that leads to our common liberation.

This need not be the case. When Christians read the Bible through the lens of Jesus’ gracious life and ministry, they will be able to see lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as their sisters and brothers, faced with all the usual human problems, and loved equally by God.

When we look at stories of renaming in the Bible, we often find that a character is handed a new name they never asked for. While I'm sure Abraham treasured the new name and promise God gave him, and while Peter probably felt honored in the moment Jesus proclaimed him the bedrock of the church, not everybody comes by their new name so easily. Some people have to fight for it.

In no way should we minimize the psychological difficulties that a person with one of these conditions might experience. These are ripe pastoral opportunities to embody the love and life of Jesus toward people who, for whatever reason, might feel “othered” by society (intentionally or unintentionally) or by their own self-perception of what it means to be a “real” man or woman.

However you define the problematic present-day stranger—the religious stranger, the cultural stranger, the transgendered stranger, the homeless stranger—scripture’s wildly impractical solution is to love the stranger as the self. You are to offer the stranger food and clothing, to guarantee the stranger justice, to treat the stranger like one of your own citizens, to welcome the stranger as Christ in disguise. This is God’s express will in both testaments of the Bible.

But charting our identities along a line in two dimensions has its limitations; namely, it doesn't accurately reflect the human diversity we observe. We don't see each other, or ourselves, in only two dimensions, and bisexual and nonbinary advocates are suggesting that it's long past time to update our ideology. Perhaps, instead of insisting that each person can be charted along a line, we should be looking up and seeing the multitude of sexualities and gender identities that exist in 3D, sprinkled through space like the stars.

What God was giving the eunuchs, through Isaiah's proclamation, was not just a place in society, and not just hope for a future. By giving the eunuchs the same kinds of gifts given to Abraham and Sarah--a name, legacy, family, acceptance, and blessing--God was consciously associating the two stories in the minds of the people. God was giving the eunuchs a story to connect to--a story that set a president, grounded in divine grace. That was the story I needed to hear. I needed to know that my problems were like the eunuch's problems, which were like Abraham and Sarah's problems, and that all of these complications were overcome by God's great love.

There’s a difference between suffering willingly, like Jesus did, and suffering at the hands of other people without any choice in the matter. Christ accepted our sins. He took them on himself and he suffered because he chose to suffer, whereas so many people now who are dying and being murdered aren’t choosing that. It is thrust upon them.

Eiesland goes on to say that Christians must not only develop theology that includes disabled bodies, but that they must let that theology be created by disabled people themselves. “Such a theology must not be construed as a ‘special-interest’ perspective, but rather an integral part of reflection on Christian life. We must come to see disability neither as a symptom of sin nor an opportunity for virtuous suffering or charitable action. The Christian community as a whole must open itself to the gifts of persons with disabilities, who, like other minority groups, call the church to repentance and transformation.

Black theologians also have an incredible amount to teach the church about embodied theology—especially in the United States, where Black bodies have been considered inferior and disposable. In a country built on the backs of Black slaves, and in our modern world where Black people are gunned down by police and mysteriously found dead in prison cells, calling Black bodies holy is another necessary and revolutionary act.

Better to sit down to listen and love a person before waxing eloquent on the nature of their experience.

Jesus’ sexed embodiment challenges the notion that biology is irrelevant to identity.

If something is truly “biblical,” it needs to actually come from the Bible.

Men aren’t commanded to be masculine, and women aren’t commanded to be feminine. They’re both just commanded to be godly.

Humans differ in how they are male and female, but this doesn’t mean sex categories exist in addition to male and female.

Genesis 1 is talking about biological sex—male and female—not what we have labeled gender identity or gender role. And it’s perfectly fine for males and females to resist cultural stereotypes as males and females.

Does Jesus accept, affirm, and celebrate godly men who can’t throw a football and who cry while watching Downton Abbey? Absolutely. Jesus values godliness, not gender stereotypes. But does Jesus use the eunuch to show that a person’s internal sense of self is more definitive than their biological sex when there is incongruence between the two? I think this is a bit of a stretch.

The eunuch passage calls us to a broader biblical vision of what it means to be a man or a woman, reminding us that we don’t need to mimic the cultural scripts of masculinity and femininity.

Paul is most certainly deconstructing social hierarchies associated with sex difference. But it’s unlikely that he’s doing away with sex difference itself.

Paul is boldly declaring that women (who were usually treated very poorly in the first century) are given status equal to men in God’s kingdom—a beautiful statement that only makes sense if sex differences are real.25

No matter what year it is, we still haven’t arrived. It’s important to keep our fallibility in mind whenever we’re tempted to overturn a biblical truth because it seems to clash with some settled perspective in science. Science is rarely settled.

Now, we do have to be extra cautious about making the biblical writers speak more directly to our current conversation than they intended. We have to understand what the Bible says on its own terms, in its own context, as it addresses its own situations.

Christian acceptance is always acceptance into a flawed community seeking holiness and repentance.

All of this is dehumanizing. We can’t just care about “intersex” when it comes up in an argument. Intersex people are people—image bearers of the divine and gifts to the church.

We need to make sure we’re talking with people, not just about people.

Though some intersex people embody traits from both categories, there are still only two categories of sex.

And this is true, if by “gender” they mean biological sex. But that’s not the way the word gender is typically used today. When two people use one word in different ways, chaos ensues.

Leaving aside the ethical question of transitioning, we need to really get to know someone on a practical level and enter their story before we give an opinion on whether they should make a life-altering decision.

it can be easy to adopt a depersonalized posture, one that forgets about the lives of real people. A posture of argumentation instead of listening. A posture of being right instead of being love.

Whatever interpretive hurdles exist, they all—on some level and to varying degrees—affirm that male and female sex distinctions are a creational good that should be honored.

Some people have culturally specific gender categories, such as the Two Spirit people in many Native American tribes, the fa’afafine of Samoa, the hijra of India, the sekrata of Madagascar, and the muxes of Mexico. These cultures recognize more than two genders, and often people in these additional gender categories were historically held in high esteem or considered spiritually powerful in some way.

It’s really hard to be your best self when you’re in a cage.

My trans-ness is only related to the image of God in me inasmuch as it allows me to naturally, politically, and morally be in right relationship with myself, with my community, and with creation as a whole. It has nothing to do with it and everything to do with it.

To ignore the contributions from people with bodies different from our own is equivalent to saying some bodies are not as holy as others—that some members don’t belong in the body of Christ—despite scriptural witness to the contrary.

When our churches support or even organically formulate the idea that transgender people are morally, intellectually, or theologically inferior, we feed right into the hatred that leads to death for an already marginalized group.

We have closed our ears to the cry of the parents who have lost their children because of toxic theology; we have turned away from the tears of the youth who ask if Jesus can love them just as they are. Too many of those questioning their gender identity have been made to feel that they must choose between God and an authentic and healthy life. Not all of the people forced into that decision make it out alive.

The thing that brought me to an acceptance of Biblical masculinity was not a poignantly laid-out exegetical argument against transsexuality nor a fire and brimstone diatribe against homosexuality but a man who gave me the space to speak about my desires openly and let me know he and God loved me nevertheless.

Masculinity and femininity—gender roles—are kind of like height. Males are taller than females. The average height of American males is five feet nine inches tall, while the average height of females is five feet four inches tall. But this doesn’t mean every male is taller than every female. Some women are six feet tall, and yet no one would say they are not female because they fall outside the general pattern. There’s a clear difference in average, and yet much variation within each sex. The same is true of masculinity and femininity. Most males are more physically aggressive than most females. This forms the stereotype that aggression is a masculine trait. On the other hand, some females are more aggressive than some males. This doesn’t mean aggressive females aren’t females. These behaviors are generalities. We don’t determine whether a person is male or female based on whether they match the stereotype of their sex.

It’s fundamental for discipleship—becoming more like Christ. We need to first understand who we are (ontology) before we know what it means to become who God wants us to be (discipleship). Ontology is integral to discipleship, because discipleship means living as we were designed to live—living as divine images.

He gave me a new German translation of the Bible and opened it to the first page. There I read again and again: 'Und die Erde war Wirrnis und Wüste. Finsternis allüber Abgrund. Braus Gottes brütend allüber den Wassern.' It could have been written about me, I thought. I thought that the beginning had been like this and I kept on hearing these words sound in my heart.

The Scriptures tell us that right and wrong do exist. Our duty is to do what is right, and it is not too difficult to discern. For example, look at the issue of transgendered people and using bathrooms. Just because someone is confused, doesn’t mean we give up our common sense. Many who have had sex-change surgery want to change back. They have big regrets. They may change their looks on the outside, but their chromosomes stay the same on the inside. Figuring out which bathroom to use should be a pretty simple matter, if you think about it. God has given each of us a certain kind of plumbing. Guys go to one bathroom and ladies go to another. You see, bathrooms are supposed to be biological and not social. But, of course, there is much more to this agenda than meets the eye. This is the breakdown of the family. This is an assault on what God says is right and wrong. God says man and woman in marriage, and the world says any combination of genders in marriage is fine. The Bible says to have kids within a heterosexual family, and the world says to have kids within any kind of family structure you want. On a recent plane flight, a guy named John was sitting next to me. He loved logic. Everything had to be logical for him. When I asked him, “If you could have any job on planet Earth and money wasn’t an issue, what would you want to do?” He didn’t hesitate. He said, “Philosophy professor at a university!” I already knew this was going to be a good conversation, but his reply was icing on the cake! Then out of nowhere he asked me, “What do you think about gay marriage?” This seems to be the only question on people’s minds these days! Some people are interested in your answer; others just want to label you a bigot. Whether or not they want to categorize you doesn’t matter; our job is to tell people the truth. So I asked him, “When people get married, how many people get married?” He responded that he didn’t understand my question. So I said, “When you go to a marriage ceremony in India, China, Russia, Canada, or the United States, how many people are in that ceremony?” He replied, “Two.” I then continued, “Where did the number come from?” You should have seen the look on his face. He didn’t have a clue. I let him know it came from the oldest writing ever on the subject of marriage. It came from the Jewish Torah, and in the book of Genesis, it says: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Genesis 2:24 The interesting thing was that John knew the verse! When I said it out loud, he finished it by saying, “one flesh.” Someone had taught him that verse at some point through the years. Then I said, “Whoever gets to tell you how many people can get married can also tell you who gets to be in that number.” He loved the logic. But, of course, God is logical. That is why it is logical to believe in Him. I also read somewhere: Whoever designs marriage gets to define marriage! That is a good statement, and I have been using it as I talk with people about this subject.

...If Jesus came to bring abundant life to all who follow him, that means that transgender Christians should be able to stop spending every single bit of their energy defending themselves against those 'clobber passages,' in order to concentrate instead on becoming better disciples. We should be able to move from survival practices to thriving faith. Jesus didn't come to make things marginally more bearable. He came to give us abundant and eternal life.

What Happened to Our Hearts Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. (1 Peter 2 v 11) Inside every heart, there’s a war; and the heart is both the victim and the culprit. Why? Because every person’s heart is inhabited by sinful desires, and produces sinful desires. There is an ongoing battle within the heart in which unhelpful desires wage war with our conscience. Bitterness. Anger. Envy. Greed. We cannot trust our feelings or all the passions that reside within us simply because we feel them. Our hearts are not pure—far from it: The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17 v 9) The nature of deception is to convince us that our hearts will not be satisfied unless we indulge what our hearts desire. But our hearts lead us astray in countless ways. Envy robs people of joy and contentment, sours friendships, and can lead to compromising morality in order to “get ahead.” Envy does not produce flourishing or joy in people. Indulging envy only results in misery for yourself and others. But none of us think this way as envy rages on. In the moment, the wrath and bitterness of envy assuages the sense of loss and jealousy residing within each of us. Not every impulse we experience should be indulged. We should be suspicious about “listening to our hearts.” Actually, everyone knows this is true. Prisons are full of people who acted in accord with their feelings—and who have been told by society that they shouldn’t. Every time a therapist tells a patient to view themselves more positively, they are accepting that there are feelings that are unhelpful to someone’s fulfillment. Our hearts’ desires can be at war with what is actually good for our hearts. The real question is: which desires should be fed, and which should be starved?

Being creatures means that we cannot re-create ourselves in any fashion or form that we desire by a simple act of the will or the complex work of a surgeon. When we as creatures reject the Creator's blueprint, we are both rebelling against the natural order of how things objectively are, and (thought it may not seem like it) we are rejecting the life that is going to be the highest good for us.

There are times when I think Christians need to see ourselves more in the ninety-nine sheep who stayed put, and ask ourselves if we may have been part of the reason that the lost sheep got lost in the first place.

Can a man become a woman? Can a woman become a man? How and when should children be confronted with the debates about gender? What are we to do with children who are a member of one biological sex but feel as though they were born in the wrong body? What do we say to someone experiencing these feelings and desires? How do we love and help those who are deeply hurting? These questions go deeper than simply what we understand by “gender.” They go to what we understand by “humanity”: who we are, how we got here, what it means to be a human, and what role (if any) God plays in that.

This period when Christian ideas of sexual morality were challenged and overturned coincided with (and very possibly contributed to) industrialized hormonal contraception. This is not the book to debate the pros and cons of the pill—but one consequence of its availability was to sever the connection between sex and procreation. This was nothing short of revolutionary. While people in times past engaged in pre-marital sex, there was always the potential for a pregnancy to occur. Not any more—and this has enormous repercussions for how society thinks about the purpose of sex. No longer is sex assumed to take place only in marriage.

Gnosticism says that there is an inherent tension between our true selves and the bodies we inhabit. The idea that our true self is different than the body we live in communicates that our body is something less than us, and can be used, shaped, and changed to match how we feel. The concept that our gender can be different than our biological sex is a modern form of the old Gnostic idea. What this means, practically, is that a man can identify as a woman, even if they have male chromosomes and the body of a man.

While the Bible does speak clearly on many matters—you'd have to be deaf not to hear the condemnations of murder, stealing, adultery, greed, etc.—there are, in fact, many questions at the margins of each of these, for which there are not clear answers. If you are not a pastor it's easier to maintain the comforting illusion that these hard cases are rare. But they are not.

love, in its truest form, reveals God to us. If we ask the question, “what does God think,” and our response does not lead us deeper into love, does not lead us back to the project of opening and expanding and including all people in to the family of God, then we are working against the flow of God’s spirit.

Sometimes how we believe is just as important as what we believe

when people use the term “gender,” make sure you ask them what they mean.

Discipleship includes inviting God to tell us who we are and who he wants us to become.

theologian Marc Cortez puts it: the image of God is “a declaration that God intended to create human persons to be the physical means through which he would manifest his own divine presence in the world.

one transgender person.” Trans* people are about as diverse as non-trans* people. What do Donald

We are broken actors living on a broken stage, and we do not stand on the stage for very long.

For many transgender people, some of the most painful rejection they’ve experienced has been in church.

I learned from Job that sometimes things happen in the world that don’t make much sense to us human beings. I learned from Abraham what it’s like to have your name changed. I learned from the apostle Philip that sometimes you have to say yes to God even when you have no idea what God is doing. And of course I learned from Jesus, who after his resurrection chose to show his body to the disciples—a body that was scarred and transformed, and yet still his own.

God created us with the ability to also be creators, and some of those creators created surgical procedures and medical procedures and concepts and ideologies and systems and communities that do wonderful things! If we aren’t taking part in that creative process, then we’re going against our very created nature. —Lawrence

discrimination, and rejection, then the obvious solution is to create an environment in which the injured, the worn-out,

Nobody talked about it.” When M was in high school, they joined some friends who attended a youth group at a large nondenominational church in town. Rather than pews, M found comfy chairs and couches. Rather than hymns, there were praise songs. It felt as if faith was springing up fresh and new, and M took to it like a duck to water. Near the end of high school they began to discern a call to ministry, but the church M was now attending didn’t approve of women in ministry; so, as someone assigned female at birth, M hit a brick wall. “I was told, ‘Women can’t be ordained.’ So it took me two years, even when I was read as a cisgender straight woman, to overcome that basic gender

sporting my favorite blue baseball

Virtually every church tradition, by theology, interpretive strategies, or pastoral practice, makes accommodations for divorced people who seek to remarry. These accommodations permit divorced people to enter unions that are outside the rule laid down in the Bible. But we can't have it both ways. We can't apply a strict "biblical marriage" rule to gay people and not apply it to those who are divorced and remarried.

Too often the church is a stumbling block that catches the feet of trans people on the road to God, rather than the sanctuary that houses the fountain of living water.

At the messy, lovable, chaotic potluck that is life in the church, transgender Christians have a lot to bring to the table. We can help the church see Scripture through different lenses; we can help other Christians understand their own gender identities; we can help to break down barriers created by sexism and misogyny; we can remind people of the diversity of God’s creation, and of God’s unlimited nature; we can stand in the gaps and bridge middle spaces where others may be uncomfortable or uninformed; we can help make connections between the sacred and the secular, making the church more relevant for the world, and we can provoke people into asking questions about themselves and about God that they may never have thought to ask before.

If I never learned about pure, undistilled grace, I would have transitioned to a female and left the church,” Alan said.

Saving just the main group or just the individual wouldn’t do any good, because the flock is more than just the sum of its parts. When Jesus goes after that lost sheep, what he’s telling the flock—what he’s telling us—is that we’re not complete without each other.