A few weeks ago, I found the linked article in my news feed, and I’ve been thinking about a reply ever since. I would generally write such a reply on my other blog, QLATB.com, but that site is undergoing a revamping, so here it is.
I’ve held for sometime, that Christian opposition to accepting LGBTQ persons is entirely based on rigid notions of gender expression and gender roles. God is our Father, and this is the foundation for gender roles of male and female, dominance and submission.
But, Mohler raises his concern:
“The transgender revolution is a much greater challenge to Christianity even than same-sex relationships or even same sex marriage,” Mohler said. “And that’s because the issue of gender identity cuts right to the heart of what it means to be human, and what — according to a biblical worldview — it means to be made a man or a woman.”
This refers to the anthropomorphic God in Genesis 1:26
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. (KJV)
And Genesis 2:22:
Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.(NIV)
To believe in a scientific notion of Gender that accepts a spectrum cannot be aligned with the creation myths some Fundamentalists cling to so feverishly.
For these fundamentalists, the rallying cry may be about men in women’s bathrooms, because they cannot accept that there may be gender identities that fall outside of this traditional idea.
Truly, humanity could not have come into creation in this way. It would have meant that woman would have had identical DNA to man, and the proliferation of the planet’s population impossible. My favorite tidbit is about men’s nipples. Nipples serve a specific role in female anatomy, but serve no purpose in male anatomy. The creation myth tells us God made woman from a rib because Adam had no compliment, after all of the animals and the birds had been created. This suggests woman came into being for a purpose, and that purpose was different from man’s. So why did Adam have nipples? God gave other body parts to women that man didn’t have, so why did God give men nipples?
This suggests that 1) women could not have come from men, and 2) Gender isn’t as distinct between the two as this old myth would suggest. But hey, why let some Science stand in the way of believing a creation myth.
For Mohler, transgender people are just confused, but in reality, the problem comes from trying to force the real world to fit within a myth.