Transgender - Religion
Focus on the Family is "dedicated to defending the inherent honor, dignity, value and equality of the two sexes as created in God’s image – intentionally male and female – each bringing unique and complementary qualities to sexuality and relationships. Each of the two sexes is a glorious gift from God. Our sexuality is meant to be offered back to Him either in complementary unity with the opposite sex in the context of marriage for procreation and mutual delight or in celibacy for undivided devotion to Christ.
"Not only do male and female together reflect the image of God, but their coming together in a marriage relationship to bring forth new life is used in Scripture as the deepest and most intimate analogy of God’s relationship with His people. Throughout both Testaments, God and His people are portrayed as husband and wife or as a groom and bride. The creation account found in Genesis lays out this gender-based, matrimonial picture and sets the stage for the final, eternal union of God and His people – of Christ and His bride – described in Revelation....
"The modern “transgender” movement is systematically working to dismantle the reality of two sexes – male and female – as the Bible and the world have always known this to be. If the transgender lobby succeeds, there will be striking consequences for individuals, marriage, family, children and society at large....
"We affirm the Christian view that to be human is to be holistically united as body and spirit. Scripture teaches that even in heaven believers will have gloriously redeemed physical bodies. In contrast, transgender revisionists hold to the pagan view that the body is a container that the spirit is poured into. They erroneously conclude that either God has mistakenly put an opposite-sex spirit into the wrong body or that the body is not the real person – that only the spirit is real. As Christians, we believe that God can heal these disconnected, gnostic views and bring restoration and wholeness – where body, soul and spirit are in unity."
The Christian Medical & Dental Association (CMDA) relates that "The naming of gender as a category set apart from sex is an idea foreign to the holistic view of the person as understood within Christianity. Christians affirm the biblical understanding of humankind as having been created male and female, with the two sexes having equal dignity and a complementary relationship to each other.
"At the heart of disagreement over transgenderism is a difference in worldviews. If the human body is nothing more than the product of mindless, random, purposeless physical forces, then one may do with it what one wishes, even to demand medical and surgical cooperation in projects to alter, amputate, or reconstruct normal tissue to conform to the patient's revised psychological sense of identity. If, on the other hand, our bodies are an inseparable aspect of our true selves and are a good gift from God, who has designed the sexes to be wonderfully paired, and who has a purpose for humanity, then respecting the gift of given sexual identity and the ensuing moral obligations to our neighbors is the surest path to human flourishing...."
CMDA "cannot support the prevailing culture’s acceptance of an ideology of unrestrained sexual self-definition that, in celebrating gender fluidity and gender transition efforts, is indifferent to biological reality and opposed to the biblical understanding of human sexuality....
"CMDA is especially concerned about the increasing phenomenon of parents enabling their gender-questioning children or adolescent minors to receive hormones to inhibit normal adolescent development. Children and adolescents lack the developmental cognitive capacity to assent or request such interventions, which have lifelong physical, psychological, and social consequences.56 Facilitating hormonal or surgical transitioning interventions for those who have not reached the age of majority is a form of child endangerment and abuse....
"The inability of men, including men who identify as women, to bear children is not an illness to be remedied by medical or surgical means, such as uterine transplantation. Uterine transplantation into biological men cannot be justified medically...
"Transgender-identified individuals have the same rights shared by all other humans. We oppose granting special rights and privileges based on transgender identification. These special rights can negatively impact the rights of others (e.g., bathroom designations that allow biological males access to shared female restrooms or showers, female athletic competitions that give participating biological males an unfair physiologic advantage, affirmative actions, or claims for unnecessary medical interventions)."
Transmitted and developed through dualistic Gnosticism in the East, the notion of an androgynous creation was adopted by the Haggadists in order to reconcile the apparently conflicting statements of the Bible. the Midrash states (Gen. R. viii.): "Jeremiah, son of Eleazar, says: God created Adam androgynous, but Samuel, son of Na?man, says, He created him 'double-faced,' then cutting him in twain and forming two backs, one to the one and the other to the second".
The fathers of the Christian Church at pains to refute this "Jewish fable"; Augustine writes against it in his commentary on Genesis, ad loc. ch. 22. Strabos,agreeing with Augustine, declares this opinion to be one of the "damnatæ Judæorum fabulæ." Others revive the question, and Sixtus Senensis in his "Bibliotheca Sacra" devotes to it a special chapter (ed. Colon. 1586, fol. 344, 345). An alchemic interpretation has been given to "Adam androgynus," by Guil. Menens, "Aurei Velleris libri tres, Theatrum chemicum," vol. v., p. 275, Argent., 1660.
Gnosticism generally teaches that the material world is created by an emanation or 'works' of a lower god, trapping the divine spark within the human body. This divine spark could be awakened and reunited with the higher God through 'gnosis' or knowledge. certain Gnostic texts speak about the divine being both male and female, or beyond the concept of gender altogether. This may resonate with transgender individuals, or those who identify as non-binary or genderqueer, as it can provide a spiritual framework that affirms their gender identity.
Cambridge research student Joshua Heath in 2023 examined Renaissance and Medieval paintings of Jesus’ crucifixion while asserting that one of the wounds on his body “takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance,” according to the newspaper The Telegraph. To prove his point, Heath used the 14th-century painting ‘Pieta with the Holy Trinity’ by Jean Malouel, which is a part of the Louvre’s collection. The painting depicts Jesus with a side wound, from which blood is streaming down to the groin. “In Christ's simultaneously masculine and feminine body in these works, if the body of Christ [is] as these works suggest the body of all bodies, then his body is also the trans body,” Heath said.
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