Trans Theology 101

It is a travesty that zesty, left wing, theological material is often inaccessible to the majority of people due to lack of time, money, and ease of access. Join M.Div student Micah Auten each week as they share theological resources straight from the ivory tower down to the paved streets. If you’re looking for faithful, ideological reflection  this show is for you!

My Website: https://micahmedia0.wordpress.com/

Questions? Email me at micahauten@outlook.com 

Music by Oleksandr Stepanov and Ikoliks from Pixabay 

Music by Denis Pavlov from Pixabay

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Alright, what's up, Saints and Sinners? I'm your host, Micah Otten, and this is This Week in Seminary, the podcast where I summarize and share with you readings from the Ivory Tower down to the paved street. This week in seminary, we're talking about trans theology. Let's get into it. Alright, so trans theology 101, a little bit of context. I had an opportunity to do a presentation on just a very basic outline of transgender Christian theology specifically for my local church in the area. I had a lot of fun doing that. I'm hopefully going to post the video recording on YouTube, so check that out. Otherwise, I plan to post the slides for this on my website for as a resource for other people. But today I'm just gonna go through and talk about each slide and kind of give you the gist of it, right? And for my interest, I'm interested in systematic theology and slash or dogmatic theology. Some people think those are two separate fields. I don't really care. I'm interested in how being trans interacts with uh formal ideas of Christian theology and then new ways to utilize those insights creatively. So I'm gonna go through this presentation with you. Again, if you want to see the slides, hop on over to my website where it'll be posted there and you can follow along. But let's get into this very basic outline. So, first thing, what does it mean to be trans? Most basic form, it just means identifying as a gender different from your gender assigned at birth. So everybody was assigned a gender at birth. Most people fall into the male box or the female box, and that gender includes both your biological sex and the behaviors and clothing patterns and other things associated with that gender. So women wear dresses, men wear cargo shorts, women play with Barbies, men play with G.I. Joes, right? Those are all things that constitute gender. There are different ways of being trans. Some people move entirely from the female box, entirely to the male box, and vice versa. I'm non-binary, so I don't really identify with either of those boxes completely. I prefer to stay outside of them or fluctuate in between them, just play with it really. And most people are cisgender, meaning that the identity that they were given at birth completely fits them. So what is theology, right? If we're having trans theology and that's the trans side of theology, where is the theology side of theology? So theology is God discourse. It is constituted by the word theos, meaning God, and logos, meaning discourse, and so literally theos, logos, god discourse, and it's generally it means something like the systematic study of the ideas of a religion, which includes sources, development, relationships, and application to life. So trans theology is going to be God discourse at the intersection of trans identity, and it's going to utilize both theological discourses and queer discourses together to create novel theological insights. And I would argue that this is for the greater good of the Church Universal. So getting started with the specific kind of theology that Christians do, most of the time it is Trinitarian in shape. So I have this quote from Patrick Chang pulled from Radical Love, but in that book he basically says that God's very being consists of the continuous sending forth of this radical love to others, right? So that Trinitarian shape actually constitutes the specifically Christian doctrine of God, and that is already a relational, loving, outpouring identity. There are typically three names in the Godhead. The gendered ones are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the non-gendered ones are creator, redeemer, and sanctifier. Some people think that the creator, redeemer, sanctifier is modalist, meaning that God basically is three different masks at three different times. I would argue that if your notion of redemption is something like the restoration of creation and that involves a co-participation of creation within your divine plan, then creator, redeemer, and sanctifier is not modalist because the the fact that creation has the resources already in it to have enough to share and constitute justice within creation right now, and that it requires us to participate in doing justice to make uh the distribution of Earth's resources fair and equitable for all, means that creation is wrapped up in redemption and sanctification already. And I also am just not opposed to functional analysis of identity, right? And this this thing's kind of weird to me when people insist on like the father-son holy spirit language because they say that creator, redeemer, sanctifier is it's too reductionistic, it's a role reduction. I think that's really asinine because father is also a role, and so is son. And just for that matter, like if somebody says that they're a truck driver, their identity that involves the actions that they do to become a truck driver. And so, just generally in keeping with my ontological worldview, I don't really think there's a difference between action and labels. You are what you do, and your activities is more important for constituting your identity than just the identity marker itself, right? I think saying that somebody is a trucker when they don't do any of the things associated with trucking would be an instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness that Whitehead talks about. That was a bit of a tangent, but those are the names in the Godhead. And so that means really what we're working with is a diverse set of categories that's going to cover a lot of material as a part of this. So the first area we're gonna cover is creation, and I have some quotes here pulled from John Calvin, but he says, it were cold and lifeless to represent God as a momentary creator who completed his work once for all and then left it. Here especially we must dissent from the profane and maintain that the presence of the divine power is conspicuous, not less in the perpetual condition of the world than in its first creation. He also says, Nor at first did anything whatever exist that did not exhibit some manifestation of the divine wisdom and justice. Right? So I'm Presbyterian, which means specifically I come from the Reformed tradition, and John Calvin is generally considered to be the founder of that tradition, which is not to say that we have to go everywhere that he goes, but we should try to use him as a touchstone for doing some of our theology, see what he says, what is the method that he's using here, right? When we're doing theology within our tradition, let's at least see what's here first. I love these quotes because it kind of implies that if you are aware of it, then like anything in creation can potentially teach you something about God. And so when we're doing trans theology, we're thinking, what about creation might clue us in to the divine plan for gender relations? And I would argue that queerness actually pervades the entirety of the created order. So cycles of clownfish, clownfish change their biological sex based off of population needs. So men become women, women become men, vice versa, they do it all the time. Southern leopard frogs also change their biological sex. Bighorn sheep live in sex-segregated herds, so the female herd live separately from the male herd, and about 5% of the population will change their gendered behavior. So this is an example of a gender change, not a sex change, and they will go live with the herd opposite to their gender assigned at birth and basically take on all the same social roles and social functions. In terms of people in history, we have Saint Marina, who was a monk, she was born female, and then joined a male monastery, so I'm gonna use he him pronouns for him, and actually accepted responsibility for fathering a child that he clearly didn't father, and essentially lived his entire life as a male monk and wasn't discovered to be female until after his death. And also, really ironically, he is the saint of the falsely accused, which I just feel like inherently makes him a queer icon because we're always getting shade. And so, just to know that, like the the female monk who joined a male monastery then became the saint of the falsely accused is so rich to me. We also have the public universal friend, uh born in 1752 as Jemima Wilkinson. They experienced a severe illness, and then when they came back from the brink of that, they insisted on being called genderless pronouns. They wouldn't respond to anything other than non-gendered pronouns and the explicit title public universal friend, and they dressed in a variety of male and female clothing. They also used the authority of God's word to deny the authority of mortal men to try to control their preaching, which I just think is objectively awesome. And the last example I have for gender queerness is actually Jesus Christ. And here's why. So in the New Testament, basically you have an experience uh of the person of Jesus, and then everybody who experiences him is just like, holy crap, what happened? And so they're looking at the Old Testament and going, Surely there was something in here that got us there, right? And they're just sticking labels to him like spaghetti on the wall, right? There's identify him as logo, son of man, son of God, Messiah, and an interesting strand of the Old Testament theology that they use is actually wisdom theology. So in 1 Corinthians 1:30, the apostle Paul says, in contrast, God is why you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God. And Old Testament wisdom was actually identified as a divine feminine hypostasis of God. And then that label gets applied to Jesus, who is male, which implies that Jesus is either non-binary, a drag queen, or something of the sort. And that's that's just keeping in line with the the fact that God as an entity actually escapes all of our language for them. And so when Genesis says that in my image I created them, male and female, I created them, that was even before Jesus, like God is clearly beyond gender there. So this is actually really consistent with the long tradition of doing theology and is not necessarily a new reading. So those are some figures in creation and history that show forth, I think, the wisdom of God. These are resources mostly pulled from the book Biological Exuberance, but that book covers well over 500 examples of queer animals in nature. This is not new, it's not novel necessarily, it's not weird or necessarily unique to specific species. This is just a thing that happens across nature. So that should change our question a bit to if the whole of creation testifies to God's glory, and God's creation contains such exuberance for life, why don't people accept trans people? Right? So we've moved from creation to the fall, alright, in terms of our theology. And for here, I'm gonna pull from Jose Ignacio and Gonzalez Foas in Mysterium Libertionis, Fundamental Concepts of Latin American Liberation Theology. And specifically their notion of sin is an offense against God, which is human damage, and that's precisely because there is an attack upon human beings, which is God's image recapitulated in Christ. And there's a falsification of the Trinitarian truth of God there. And I would also like to argue that this is true for creation as a whole. An offense against God is damage to creation. And this notion of sin is important because it's changing us away from an over-emphasis in Reformed theology to see sin as a breaking of the law, right? And that changes our notion about what needs to be done. So other theologians like Gagnan and O'Donovan would represent the opposite position from me. They don't think that trans Christians are authentically Christian, and that's precisely because homosexuality like breaks the created category of male and female, and I think that's a really bad notion of sin, primarily because you're taking your conceptual clarity as being more important than the health and well-being of my body, the bodies of the people who are in my community, and just generally you're treating the abstract concept of male and female as more important than the concrete embodiment of people who are actually living. Nobody has ever offended the abstract concept of male because it is an abstraction from real life. And so I'm trying to actually pull you towards greater conceptual clarity here by pointing you out the fact that people like me do exist, have always existed, and there's a long creation history of transness well before humans were humans. And where that really hits the road in terms of practical applied ethics is that there's a lot of suffering going on in the trans community right now. So 366 trans people were murdered in 2025. Trans people on average are more than four times as likely than cisgender people to experience violence victimization. And in 2025, there were over a thousand anti-trans bills proposed in America, as opposed to just 174 in 2022. Right? So this is becoming a hot button issue. It is against the created order to deny transsexuality, and it's also constituting human harm. So we have really good reasons there to suspect that maybe our theology about this before was wrong. And whenever you have that theme of creation going to sin and the fall, now we're gonna start talking about redemption. So from here I pulled a quote from Michael Zabarashuk, and he says that the praxis of suffering can issue in the praxis of freedom. The very disintegrative character of the radical suffering, which is the greatest challenge to any sort of historical formulation, points to the necessity of engagement within that historical process for the actualization of God in the world as freedom. So that's really dense. Basically, what he's saying there is that the concrete realities of suffering that's constituted by the violence and the disavowal that transgender people face gives us an opportunity to reconfigure or reconstruct history with our experiences actually taken into account, which then creates greater freedom. And that is actually a a part of actualizing the making concrete or real the divine plan that God has for all of creation. And then that is going to look like the freedom in history is going to look like Jesus, right? So this is where we get to our Christology, Jesus as God, and Jesus primarily looks like healing for the broken and uh critique and tearing down of the powerful. So if you're following along in the slides, there should be pictures of Jesus healing people, and there should be Jesus driving out the money changers in the temple. I also found a picture of the rich man burning in hell. So if you are somebody that believes in hell, just know only rich people go. It's the only example that we have of people burning in hell. Finally, there's a push towards universality within the Christian narrative, right? So 2 Corinthians 15, 19 through 20 says that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself and that we're ambassadors for Christ, right? Like we make God's appeal basically for him. And this points towards, okay, if we're gonna say that transness has a universal import, what is that import? Well, I would suggest that you read Before They Were Men by Jacob Tobias. They have a great book about all the ways in which men actually are hurt by gender norms because they're not allowed to express emotion, and because they are supposed to be the active ones in every relationship, right? There's very little receiving back, right? They can't be an object of appreciation because then they would slip into the female category, which we've defined in super binary ways. And women can you know worry less about their appearance, be more assertive. Hormone replacement therapies for men and women become easier. It really can help in extending the quality of life for most people to take hormones after menopause or as you get older. So these are just some of the few ways in which loosening our gender binaries and categories to let trans people in actually makes our own life easier, right? So it's not just one group wants something and another group is losing. It actually can be a win-win for everybody. So now we've moved from creation to sin to suffering, redemption. So now we're gonna talk about spirit. And for reformed theologians, and this is one of the biggest differences between Lutherans and Reformed, the the Holy Spirit works with the word most of the time, right? So Herman Bevink says that the Holy, while the Holy Spirit can work apart from the word, ordinarily word and spirit go together, and the reformed prefer cum verbo with the word. And B. A. Gerish in his systematic theology says that Christian interpreters have commonly argued that Christ's presence in the Holy Spirit actually liberates him from the temporal and spatial limits of individual body existence, right? So the Spirit actually takes takes the embodied Jesus and makes him present to us in our own circumstances, which is actually the reason that we can still do theology in a new and creative way. And John Calvin says that for the same reason he's said to have sealed us and given the earnest and given the earnest love of spirit in our hearts, because as pilgrims in the world and persons in a man are dead, he so quickens us from above as to assure that our salvation is safe in the keeping of a faithful God, right? So John Calvin really says it like the spirit presses the the necessity of Jesus upon us specifically. And so that's actually gonna form the creative way in which we appropriate that message and person of Jesus in our own time. And then some practical things that come out of this, right? So we've kind of done thousand-foot theological levels, but use people's correct pronouns. There's a huge correlation, which you can find on the Trevor Project website about using correct pronouns and a reduced risk of suicide. Celebrate queerness, not just accept, but give queer people compliments on their outfit, prop up when they're doing good. Most of us don't hear that very often, especially because of the climate that we live in. So this would be really great to hear. Give people compliments. And especially for left-wing Christians, be loud and proud about your faith, right? Because the the right has very vocal spokespersons. And it's kind I would I would say it is pretty much an offense against the glory of God that those are the people that represent Christianity. I think we have a moral obligation in our current day and age to actually be vocal about better counter-interpretations of scripture that are way more in line with how Christians have done theology, ethics, and ecclesiology throughout throughout church history than these bozos. So be loud, be proud about your faith. And there's a summary slide at the end. It's slide number 26. But if you really just need like the spark notes on trans theology, that's where I'd pull from. Otherwise, there's about three slides of references, so you can find these people, look them up, read about them if you'd like to, but that's kind of the outline there for how this is going to work. Right? We're taking some of the same themes that are always present in a Christian theology, and we're integrating them with a trans experience, and then trying to articulate why being accepting and supportive of trans and queer Christians is actually most in line with the trajectory of faith that we've received. So that is the way that I do trans theology. But, anyways, thank you for listening to this weekend seminary. As always, if you have any questions, please email me at micaauten at outlook.com. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please consider liking and sharing with friends and family. Until next time, this has been this weekend seminary.