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What Russell Moore gets right about transgender and intersex identity

What Russell Moore gets right about transgender and intersex identity

Last updated on: June 3, 2015 at 12:12 pm by Morgan Guyton

What Russell Moore gets right about transgender and intersex identity 2015-06-03T12:12:37-05:00 Morgan Guyton

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Predictably, there have been a lot of ignorant Christian responses to Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out. Someone today shared an older article by Jonathan Merritt about transgender and intersex identity. In it, Merritt quoted Southern Baptist spokesman Russell Moore (accidentally) saying something right. Talking about intersex people who are born with ambiguously gendered bodies, Moore says that it’s “a question of epistemology not ontology.” Moore is exactly right (just not in the way that he meant these words). This whole “debate” is a crisis of his epistemology, not the actual ontology of the beautiful, differently gendered people that he thinks he can explain dismissively. Don’t worry; I’ll explain the vocabulary.

Epistemology is the exploration of how we know what we know. Rene Descartes’ famous statement “I think; therefore I am” is an example of an epistemological claim. For the past several centuries of the modern era, western European culture has operated with a very confident, rationalistic epistemology. White men for many generations have traveled the world and put everything under our microscopes, whether plants or animals or other human beings. The basic epistemological assumption that today’s straight, cisgender white men have inherited from our ancestors in the European Enlightenment is that we really can know everything about everybody else.

We have been socialized by our cultural legacy to confidently explain people and situations we don’t actually understand, because we’re the world’s expert scholars of theology, science, anthropology, psychology, etc. One presumption that we’ve inherited from the Enlightenment is the idea that every human being is basically the same at the core. Cultures and idiosyncrasies of personality are like clothing that we wear on the outside of our identity, but there’s a core default human identity that everyone shares.

This is reflected most clearly in the old-fashioned sentences where the word “man” is used to represent the entirety of the human species, like “man is the only creature with a concept of God” or “man has always enjoyed going to war.” Read any textbook from before 1980 (or perhaps even 1990) and you’ll see that it’s filled with references to this mysterious character called “man” that lacks an “a” or “the” in front of it. Of course, the use of the word “man” to describe humanity has become politically incorrect today, but the underlying epistemology remains with those who have uncritically adopted the Western mind.

Mike Huckabee provides an excellent example of this epistemology when he says that he wishes he had pretended to be transgender in high school so that he could shower with the girls. Why would a straight, cisgender teenage boy pretend to be a girl? So he could see girls naked. If all of humanity is just “man,” then it’s perfectly reasonable for Mike Huckabee to project his imagined motives onto people he doesn’t understand, because everybody’s exactly the same. That’s the reason for the transgender bathroom freakout in Houston and other places adopting non-discrimination ordinances. Dirty old men like Huckabee presume that every transgender woman has the exact same motives they would for sneaking into a girls’ bathroom. They can’t imagine that people would just want to go potty in a place where they won’t get beat up.

Now the other vocabulary word Russell Moore used is ontology, which refers to the study of something at the deepest level of its being. Moore is correct (in spite of himself) when he says that his existential crisis over transgender and intersex people is not a “question” of their actual “ontology.” He is incorrect in presuming that human ontology always works itself out into two neat, straightforward categories of male and female. It doesn’t. Just because God creates humanity “male and female” doesn’t mean that he always creates humans either 100% male or 100% female. It’s a spectrum, not a binary.

The Bible says nothing prescriptive about transgender identity being a sin. Twisting the description of male and female creation into a prescription is an abuse of the text. The reason that people like Russell Moore and Mike Huckabee have to make it into a sin is because it threatens their epistemology. Even if I have the Bible memorized backwards and forwards, it doesn’t give me the authority to tell transgender people that I know their bodies better than they do. The truth of their bodies, their ontology, is between them and God.

If I slap a dismissive label on their stories, like calling them modern-day Gnostic heretics, then I’m the one who’s playing God. I simply have to trust that they are genuinely seeking the truth about themselves and listen with complete sympathy and humility so that they can discern their bodies’ truth in a gracious, loving atmosphere. To trust other people with their own bodies’ truth is unacceptable and infuriating to people who have inherited a long legacy of giving themselves the authority to know everything about everybody else.

The white conservative evangelical condemnation of transgender identity in the absence of any actual prescriptive Biblical teaching on the topic shows that this has never been about the Bible’s authority. It has always been about the authority of the Bible-beater. It has always been a crisis of man’s epistemology, not his (or her) ontology.

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