Trans Spirituality 2/8/21

We are all aware of the recent decision by President Biden to return to the Obama era status of allowing open transgender military service. But does that mean that everything is wonderful? Of course not.

In the Western world, 2000 years of oppression by the Church, along with their choices in interpretation of Hebrew Bible verses mean that we continue to have misinterpretation and misrepresentation of meanings of sex and gender that lead to discrimination, forced gender roles, stereotyping, parents who would rather see their children dead than queer, and others such as the Pope who say that trans people corrupt God’s creation. This was the most shocking, given that a) the Pope is a scientist, b) the Pope is a Bible scholar and c) when he was an Archbishop he put out a missive admitting that gay people are in fact God’s children.

So let’s take a look at some of my Bible scholarship to understand this.

Genesis 1:27

God created the Adam in the Divine image

In the Divine image God created the Adam

Male AND female, God created them.

I won’t give you the Hebrew, since most can’t access it, but I will tell you that the traditional text has a marking that shows “male and female” to come as a single text body. Now let’s consider God for a minute. Remember this is before the concept of the Christian God Jesus. God is infinite, transcendent and has no body. But, if we were to try to describe God with human characteristics to understand God better, God would have infinite possibilities of any given characteristic.

So why does God then get limited characteristics like male or female gender, mainly male? Because of language and patriarchal authorship. Human form? Our limited imaginations, etc.

This verse is dealing with assigned sex. So, IF God were to have assigned sex, God would need to have infinite possibilities. This is doubled in our verse, in parts one and two. Thus, the Adam (humanity) needs to have infinite possibility too, since they were created in God’s image. And the Hebrew text says that. Male AND female in literature analysis belongs to the class called merism, two bracketing terms that include everything. For example, “day and night” represents 24 hours a day or 24/7. “Male and Female” does not mean a binary state.

So, if God created the world with infinite possibility of assigned sex, what does this mean for all of us? It means that we have always had the possibility of being more than male or female, and we have always had the possibility of being trans, non-binary, Intersex, asexual, etc. In modern theory this is represented as sex or gender distributed in multi-dimensional space, kind of like all the stars in the sky. And you are a single star in that sky. And I’m another one, and so on. And that is how God intended us to be all along.

So, if, like me, you see yourself as non-binary, and feel like writing about it, my publisher and I have put out a call for contributions for a new anthology on non-binary identity. Please see my website for details.

In the meantime, keep learning, and STAY SAFE!

Peace out,

Rona

Tags: featured, nonbinary, spirituality, Transgender

Category: Transgender Body & Soul