Transgender Women

Cultural Chameleons

In this series I surface current cultural arguments around various controversial topics and how they miss the mark by a consistent Biblical standard. While these arguments may help move in the right direction they can be challenged or subverted by pointing out their lack of grounding in ultimate truth.

Sex and gender are not the same

Sex is the defined by biological markers (chromosomes, sex organs) and gender is defined by societal norms. What is the significance of the separation in terms of application? Often the answer is in the ability to change one’s gender but not one’s sex. The argument goes that XX chromosomes don’t dictate a societal role of, lets say, nurturing. Typically this starts as much more superficial in the presentation as a gender not in behavioral characteristics. I’m a man and I feel like a woman -> I’m going to dress like a woman -> I’m going to act like what I think a woman acts like -> I’m going to change some of my physical sex characteristics because those are seen as an outward gender expression. Of course chromosomes are not outwardly socially expressed and thus do not need to be “changed”. We’ll walk through each of the steps in this process below.

Gender identity

The first step is to sense, feel, and declare how much man-ness or woman-ness you have. The APA refers to this as “a person’s internal sense of being male, female or something else.”

Identity mapping

This is based on your perception of society and how it has defined men’s and women’s roles. You could say that this is mapping your internal preferences to inputs from the world. The world says men like trucks, I like trucks; therefore I must be more man. It accepts the dominant societal definition and maps their preferences onto it. A person’s gender identity is determined by the prominent society that a person lives. If a person with XX chromosomes was trying to map their gender identity to the highland culture of pre-18th century Scotland, and had a preference for bright plaid kilts, they may feel more “like a man.” While culture is an input to a person’s determination of gender identity it remains solely based on their feelings or preferences.

“One is not born, but becomes a woman.” - Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Can any or all aspects of identity be self determined? Personal preferences exist and if that is what determines identity, it is not untethered from societal experiences. In that case it is stating that “who I am” is the sum of my preferences. And when those preferences are grouped in a certain way they mean either man or woman. Or perhaps I get to map those preferences to a third gender or to an animal. I get to make that decision to map those preferences however I wish and make a determination about my gender. I am the arbiter of my identity.

Born this way

What may be even a more prominent idea is that someone can actually ground this feeling outside of any cultural experiences. You are a woman if you feel like you are a woman, even if it has no tethering to your physical body, expression or culture. I just know I’m a woman. This is also why some believe that babies or children who have very little exposure to gendered norms, can feel they are the wrong gender. This would be a similar argument to how someone can be born gay. They are gay prior to any recognition of or interaction with sex or gender.

The view that we are just born as more female or male, leans on not my own determination of preference mapping but determinism. Something made me a man, a woman, gay, a cat. So what makes someone one way or another from birth? Is it biological determinism and the right condition of cells coming together in the womb? Was someone’s brain built with just the right conditions to make them believe these things and act the way they do? The same process that evolved single-cell bacteria into human beings also can evolve the brain chemistry of a man to “be a woman.”

Liberty chameleons

Those focused on personal liberty may grant that everyone is free to identify however they’d like but only object when expression interferes with someone else’s liberty. Relying on American liberty and grounding moral oughts on the Constitution can only goes as far as political expression and makes no claims on what is morally right within a persons thoughts. While this distinction can be appropriate to limit civil government’s role in personal thought lives, it is not definitional of what is an ultimate right.

You can believe that the government should stay out of our heads and our bedroom and still disagree that identity is mutable and contingent on something other than truth. There is again an analogous relationship between gender identity and homosexual identity. The concept of Side B Christianity grants that people can identify as gay and only condemns acting out that identity in harmony with Christian tradition. This affirmation concludes that there is no moral issue with defining your own identity separate from objective truth. This is not a consistent Christian view of identity.

Essential identity

When we are attempting to define “identity” we are looking at “who we are.” This has taken different shapes formally through history. Some key questions however are exactly what we have been exploring. Is identity received, chosen, or negotiated? If it is received, from where? Prior to the past century many have seen identity as essentially linked to purpose and received. Christian tradition says identity is received from God, even before we are born (Gen. 5.2). Aristotle’s defines “the essence of each thing is what it is said to be intrinsically” (Metaphysics, Book Z). We are who we are absent our feelings about how it maps onto societal roles or what we believe about the physiology of our brain or cells. These more modern concepts of identity are shaped around a subjective individualistic drive. Even in the half-hearted pushback from libertarians, they believe that everyone can have their own opinion and that they are valid. Truth cannot be found. This is not the case, God has defined who we are from the beginning in respect to our gender identity and it maps 1:1 with the physical, biological characteristics that we observe from birth.

Gender expression

This could be seen as the personal output of gender. After defining for myself the level of male or female I feel I am, I can now primarily dress and act the part. This is reflecting back to the world what was input from the world initially. Whatever I determined man and woman to be is now applied to myself to conform to my outward expression to match. If I, in my own interpretation (input), have determined certain characteristics to be associated with woman, not based on anything objective, but on personal observation of majority culture, and I’ve determined that my identity is a woman, by the criteria above, I will start to apply those characteristics to myself and express those characteristics externally to the world in which I’ve observed.

Gender expression can be most visibly seen starting with exaggerated gender observations. A deep understanding of woman-ness is not readily available from cursory pan of culture. The inherently performative nature of expression aims it’s sights on the first exaggerated characteristics it sees and attributes to woman. This is why superficial traits such as wearing makeup or the clothes they wear are the first things that are expressed. Often this hyper focus on gender, also amplifies the importance of sexual expression. This leads to a focus on transforming the body and targeting the distinctive sexual organs as an expression of gender. Those that focus on becoming trans-women then agree with many of their detractors, and against the difference between sex and gender, and start to attribute the very outward sexual organs as an expression of gender. A penis becomes an expression of gender.

This then also translates into participation in group social expressions of gender. Those transitioning to a gender expression of woman seek to be affirmed in that they then can participate in spaces that have been designated as only for women. This includes restrooms, locker rooms and sports. The physiological sex characteristics that forced women’s sports to be created distinct from men’s sports is disregarded in the mind of someone who retains the physical advantages of a man’s biology but wants to be socially affirmed as a woman.

Conservative or Red Pill Chameleon

Gender expression starts with the idea that someone can chose to be something that they are not (gender identity). Expression is just the next step in a misunderstanding of a true identity that is given from creation. If you only recognize the conservative political leanings, either fiscal or even some social beliefs, then you are left without a foundation of Christian identity and may think you still can play as a transgender woman (Blaire White, Caitlyn Jenner). They are ungrounded in Biblical values and contradict themselves by believing that they can be something they are not. This also is applicable for “red pill” men that focus on sexually degenerate behaviors while trying to sleep with as many women as possible. This view also approves of a “conservative” pinup calendar featuring women revealing their bodies for men that are not their husband because they believe in smaller government. The Bible is not an ala carte menu to pick and choose what is true from what God says. You cannot reject what He has made you and then ground your beliefs in sand. A set of beliefs around sex and gender are sourced from the same book that provides us with morality that claims all of the moral stances that are typically associated with a conservative politic.

What is a woman?

If a woman is someone who embodies the cultural and sociological aspects of what an individual observes as being a woman, then this question of “what is a woman” becomes circular. We need to go to a more objective source of truth for what makes a man and a woman if we are then going to express that in the culture. A clear understanding of the inputs to the definitional man and woman are required to then output the expression of those “genders” in society. While there may be some variation in history of what expression is representative of the Biblical virtues of man and woman, that source is still the transcendent aim. You are otherwise failing about in the sea of subjective whims and observations in a shifting society that is unsure of what makes a man and a woman. Distortions occur that skew what we see of a man and woman and we also believe that sexualizing woman is somehow their true calling and not to transition to men. Both are false. Conservative pin-up posters are still distractions from true womanhood. It remains true that expression is based on inputs but not from secular culture but from how God defines a man and a woman in scripture. Texts referring to what it is to be a husband and a wife, a father and mother help to define what behaviors and attitudes are becoming of a man and woman.

Attraction

Attraction takes these subjectively defined characteristics and tries to form a bond between two people. Because it is acceptable to have men attracted to men and women attracted to women, these pairs do not even need to be of opposite sex or gender. Someone born with male sex characteristics who believes their identity to be a woman and expresses themselves that way can be attracted to either another person born with either male or female sex characteristics that may or may not believe their identity and expression match their gender assigned at birth. There are no rules. Attraction is also subjective.

The way the coupling is even labeled indicates perhaps what is the intended telos. Attraction, either sexually or romantically, is the goal. When attraction is the ultimate end then of course it will be subjective. Every individual has preferences and these can then be expressed in “I like that.” But simply, “I like that,” is perhaps only an end goal when there is nothing else larger to point to. When the guiding worldview is primarily utilitarian then the greatest good will always be in the eyes of the subjective individual.

Chameleon’s Ends

When conservatives also don’t share an ultimate end for coupling (or as history would label it, marriage), then they too fall back to a subjective attraction. There are conservatives too that think that marriage’s goal is to love someone. That it is about just being happy. And perhaps some legal and tax benefits. The acceptance of gay coupling by conservative individuals, as long as it doesn’t diminish marriage, is just as misguided. You also can’t just be as surface as saying, marriage is about making kids. You get all the arguments like, “what about couples that can’t have kids?” Is someone who is infertile just as wrong about getting married as those that are attracted to the same gender? The fruits of marriage, whether those be children or otherwise, are a gift, not a guarantee. It does not follow then that because one of the fruits looks impossible that the goal of a marriage has been thwarted. If you say that marriage is only about being happy or about making kids, you are not aiming high enough.

Ultimate goals

Just as if you say marriage is about being happy or the greatest happiness for the most people, you also can say that about all of life. You not only run into the subjective definition of happiness, either individual or collectively, but happiness while we travel through less than a century of life seems fairly meaningless. Why are we here ultimately and what does that have to do with our identity, our expression and who we travel life with? The creator of the world and the one who brought each of us about gives us a guide for how to live life and what an ultimate goal should be. The Bible outlines how God created everything (and it was very good), how humans rebelled against Him by trying to identify as God, and how He was gracious and paid back the price we could not pay. We owe everything to God whether we believe in him or not. He breathed life into our unique perfectly-made selves (not as we imagine but as we actually are), sustains us everyday, and wants for us to recognize Him as our creator and acknowledge our need.