For better or worse, the challenges of “transgender” are ours to face today. Vaughan Roberts recent little book, Transgender, in the Good Book Company’s Talking Points series is designed to help us do so. It is deliberately brief, aiming not to “answer all our questions,” but to “give us the tools to start to think and talk biblically” (p. 65). As such it is very welcome assistance. Thinking and talking about the questions raised in relation to this issue will be far richer if they can begin from the points this book takes us to.
The book has six chapters. The first two outline the basics of the issue of transgender, and suggest how it relates to broader social trends towards individualism and self-determination. The next three sketch the biblical story under three headings: creation, fall, and rescue. The final chapter, titled “Wisdom,” begins to consider how we might respond to some of the practical challenges we may meet.
There is great value in each of these parts. The comments in the first two chapters are accurate and well-judged, though here the constraints imposed by brevity are keenly felt. (There is much more to say both about the phenomenon of transgender and the broader cultural story of which it is a part, and I felt nervous about oversimplification.) The overview of the Bible’s teaching is full of valuable observations—such as Roberts’ comments about the Ethiopian eunuch (p. 67)—and gets quickly to crucial questions: the goodness and meaning of the body, the impact of the fall, the significance of hope and suffering in the Christian life. It also offers interesting ways to think about some of the difficult questions at stake here. For example, Roberts suggests “art restoration” as an analogy for how we might think about the kind of work we each need done on us: we do not need to be constructed, we need to be restored. This analogy allows Roberts to maintain a distinction between changes to our bodies that are reparative and changes that are transformative. “The aim,” he writes, “is to restore the Creator’s intention; but we are not to try to change it. And that will certainly mean accepting the sex that he has given me” (p. 40).
The final chapter, which suggests some practical responses, is also very welcome. It is too rarely recognised that the issue of transgender raises complex practical challenges quite distinct from the challenges it raises to our understanding. The kind of practical carefulness Roberts shows here, for example in relation to gender stereotypes or issues of naming, is greatly needed.
Perhaps the greatest strength of the book, though, lies in Roberts’ instinct that understanding the character of the Christian life is critical in relation to this issue. The discussion titled “The Christian Experience Now” is, to my mind, the best section of the book. Here Roberts speaks deftly, and with authority, of the reality that the Christian life involves suffering in hope, and helps us imagine how a Christian struggle with transgender desires could be deeply admirable:
“The way in which God works to grow us in Christian maturity is rarely by removing the obstacles of our disordered bodies and minds. Very often, God allows them to continue. And amazingly, through the ongoing struggle with our disordered bodies and minds God renews the inner person, so that we become more and more like Christ. It seems to me that some of the great heroes of our faith are those who go on with very deep struggles. Some of them are bodily—a profound disability perhaps. Others are psychological—depression perhaps, or ongoing gender dysphoria. But as Christians determine to walk the way of the Spirit and to praise their Creator, their faith grows and deepens, and they become more and more like Jesus.” (p. 60)
This quotation, however, also highlights a point at which the argument of the book is perhaps not complex enough. Roberts’ overall argument is that although feelings of gender dysphoria are not simply chosen (p. 19), they also should not be embraced. For the person who experiences gender dysphoria, the right response is to “resist feelings that encourage them to see themselves as anything other than the sex of their birth” (p. 61). There is an important parallel, for Roberts, with the struggle against same sex attraction: persistent same sex attraction is not simply chosen, but is still to be resisted (p. 51).
The question is whether this is quite an adequate account of “transgender”. The problem is that there is, as Roberts recognises (pp. 17–18), a wide range of different kinds of transgender experience, ranging from what seem to be very cavalier claims to be “gender fluid”, to the debilitating, nearly life-long experiences of profound incongruence that created the medical category of gender dysphoria. Can all these experiences be understood in the terms Roberts sets out?
Roberts’ argument depends on seeing a significant difference between transgender experiences and more bodily conditions. Gender dysphoria is a disorder of the mind, not the body; it is in a “completely different category” to intersex conditions (p. 49).
But is this quite right? In my opinion, this is what needs to be said about most transgender experiences, but maybe not all. The problem is that the distinction between the mind and the body is not that neat. We have, on the whole, come to see mental illnesses such as depression or schizophrenia as genuinely bodily, in the sense of having to do, at least in part, with the chemistry of the brain. This is why managing these conditions may involve medication. The distinction Roberts makes above between “bodily” and “psychological” is thus a little problematic.
One of the challenges of transgender is that at least some kinds of transgender experience seem to be, from one point of view, very much like a serious mental illness. This is why gender dysphoria remains in compendiums such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But if that is the case, then we might need to say more about how a person should live with this condition than the kinds of things we might say to someone struggling to resist persistent sexual desires they understood to be wrong. We might also need to talk about management of the condition.
That will seem to many to be a very dangerous suggestion in our current climate. For doesn’t it open the door to all the disastrous forms of individualism of the “iWorld” that Roberts mentions in chapter two? It should be noted, though, that to insist on seeing the most serious forms of gender dysphoria as mental illnesses—“mental disorders”—goes firmly against the current of contemporary culture, which is moving towards saying that there is nothing “disordered” about transgender feelings at all. There will, of course, be all sorts of tricky questions about what managing gender dysphoria can rightly involve; but we must remember that to talk in this way is already to resist the claims being made about gender today.
