Partners in Creation: What being a transgender Christian means to me

Humans need stories. Go to any community, in any nation, on any continent, at any point in our history, and you’d find people sharing stories with one another. Stories help us to remember where we came from, to remember what’s important to us, to evoke powerful emotions, to imagine the lives of others both like and unlike ourselves. Whether the stories are “real,” in the sense of being accurate accounts of historical events, isn’t important; what’s important is how they make us feel, and what we can learn from them. The book of Genesis is a collection of stories, probably passed down orally from one generation to the next, until they were finally written down during the Jewish exile in Babylon. The scribes who compiled these stories had a mission: to remind the Jewish people of who they were, and whose they were, so that they wouldn’t lose their cultural identity while they were cut off from the Holy Land. The purpose of these stories was not to present a historically and scientifically accurate accounting of the literal history of the world, but to teach the next generation about the unique God they believed in, and how they believed God saw and related to the world God had created. So we have to look at these stories with a literary, poetic eye, hold them up against the world we see, and try to understand what truths they have to share with us within that context.

As a trans person, there are a few things I notice about the creation myth at the beginning of Genesis. The first is that the creation is described in the language of binaries, but each of those named binaries also contains a spectrum or gradient between the extremes. God separates light and darkness, but creates dusk and dawn to transition between them—and light is, itself, a spectrum of innumerable colors. God separates water from land, but the world also contains many wetlands, reefs, and tidal zones. God fills the world with plants and several named kinds of animals—water animals, birds that fly, livestock, crawling things, and wild beasts—but we can see that the world is full of creatures that have intermediate forms: things that are neither animal nor plant, like fungi and bacteria; birds and mammals that live in the water, like penguins and whales; and, of course, all the countless kinds of creatures that once lived on the earth, but are long extinct. Looking at the story through a poetic lens, the creation myth shows God creating the highlights, the ends of the spectrum of possibilities—and by inference, we can see that all the intermediate points are part of the same creation. Rather than a pantheon of gods who made different parts of the world—often through violent struggle, as in the Babylonian creation myth—the Jewish story tells of one God who is responsible for everything, from A to Z. This creation came about not by accident, or by violence, but as a single, unified work of incredible vastness, complexity, and beauty. And what is the last binary/spectrum that is mentioned in Genesis 1? “So God created humanity in God’s own image … male and female God created them” (Genesis 1:27).Light and darkness. Water and land. Plants and animals. Male and female. God created these, and all the beautiful possibilities in between.

A second thing that I notice about this creation story: “God saw all that God had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31, emphasis mine). All of these named binaries that are actually spectra? God calls them very good. A sunset over the Pacific Ocean? Very good. A bird that swims and catches its food like a fish? Very good. The yellow slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, which is not an animal or a plant, and instead of “male” and “female” has 720 distinct mating types (that we know of)? Believe it or not, very good. And if all these wild and wonderful in-betweens are very good, then that means that all of the possibilities between man and woman are very good, too. Science has identified about 40 different ways that human bodies can develop as intersex, occupying various intermediate states in the gradient between “biologically male” and “biologically female.” (At least 2% of the world’s population are intersex—roughly the same number who have red hair, or green eyes.) And that’s just the physical sex characteristics. In transgender people, like me, the differences show up in the interplay between the brain and the rest of the body, where the person’s internal gender identity doesn’t match the one that their parents assumed they would have at birth. And then there’s gender expression, which is how “masculine” or “feminine” a person acts when they’re out in the world.
Male, intersex, female. Man, nonbinary, woman. Masculine, androgynous, feminine. Each one is a spectrum, with countless intermediates between the extremes. Add up all the possibilities along all three of these axes, and we can see that there are many, many ways to be human. And all of them are part of God’s blessed, very-good creation.

There’s one last thing about this story that I want to point out, because as a trans person I feel it may be the most important: God chose to make humanity an active partner in the creation. God charges the first human with naming the animals (Genesis 2:19-20) and taking care of the earth (Genesis 2:15), and even tells humanity to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). In this, the story recognizes that humans have tremendous power to reshape our world. God does not tell us to passively accept things as they are, but commissions us to use that transformative power to make life better for ourselves and our children. (This power also has a dark side, of course, when we misuse it and abuse the creation, but that’s another essay.)Later in the Bible, we see Jesus blessing this transformative power when he establishes the sacrament of communion (Luke 22:17-20). The two elements that he chooses for this sacrament, bread and wine, do not exist in the wild; they are created by humans, using our knowledge of microbiology to transform grain and grapes into something new. God takes two things that were created by human ingenuity and uses them to represent and celebrate the relationship between God and humanity.

As a trans person, I am applying this same God-given transformative power to my own body. I use estrogen patches and testosterone blockers, developed by human ingenuity, to change my body into something new, reshaping it to match the gender identity God placed inside me. Like grapes that are turned into wine, or grain that is turned into bread, my body is the raw material for an act of creativity and transformation. God has given me the dignity of being an active partner in my own creation. Some folks describe trans people as being “born in the wrong body.” They see us as being broken or defective in a way that needs to be fixed. For some trans people, that’s how it feels. For me, though, I feel blessed that I get to be a partner in choosing my body’s form. This body is God’s gift to me, and the fact that this gift came with “some assembly required” is part of the fun. Imagine if you were given a house by someone who loved you, but some parts of the house are not quite “you.” So you repaint the walls, or swap out carpets for hard floors, or even knock out a wall and add a new extension. You can do all of that, and it doesn’t mean that you’re any less grateful for the gift. You’re just making it your own, and no one has the right to tell you that you can’t. It’s your house! And yes, all of those changes might take a lot of time, money and effort, but they’re worth it, because in the end you’ll be a lot more comfortable, because the house is what you wanted it to be. So it is with trans people and our bodies; we’re not rejecting what we were given, we’re just remodeling.

Dear God, thank you for making us your partners in creation. Thank you for the gifts of our bodies and brains, in all their wondrous diversity, and the many, many ways to be human that you have blessed and called “very good.” Thank you for the gift of our bodily autonomy, the freedom to shape these vessels that house our spirits. Help us to use the power and freedom you have given us to make the world a better and happier place, for us and those who come after us. Remind us that everyone around us bears the image of God, and help us to honor that image and love one another. Amen.