Transgender People Exist—And That’s Ok

If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the news over the past few years, you have almost certainly heard about how a lot of conservatives are really mad that transgender people exist. They routinely insist that acknowledging the existence of trans people is “gender ideology” and that it goes against both science and the Bible. They insist that there are only two genders—male and female—and that a person’s gender is determined by their chromosomes and can never, under any circumstances, truly be changed.

In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that these arguments are, in fact, incorrect and that the existence of more than two genders is totally compatible with both science and the Bible. This essay has taken me nearly a month to research and write, so it will be quite long and will incorporate evidence from a wide range of different fields, including biology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and religious studies.

The arguments that conservatives are pushing

For four years, the Trump administration sought doggedly to legally define transgender people out of existence. For instance, this article from The New York Times discusses how, under the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services attempted to legally redefine gender and sex as identical, declaring that gender is an unchangeable biological condition determined solely and strictly by a person’s chromosomes and that “male” and “female” are the only two possible genders. A memo issued by the department includes the following statement:

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth. The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

As I will discuss in a moment, this is not even an accurate definition for biological sex and it certainly isn’t an accurate operational definition when applied to gender. Fortunately, Joe Biden has already undone many of the Trump administration’s regressive policies in this area. Unfortunately, the argument that there are only two genders and that gender is strictly determined by a person’s genetics is still one that conservatives are aggressively pushing.

On 24 February 2021, Democratic Representative Marie Newman of Illinois, who has a transgender daughter, hung a transgender flag outside her office in the Capitol. Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose office is directly across the hall from Newman’s, responded by hanging a huge sign outside her own office with the message: “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. ‘Trust The Science!’” Shortly thereafter, she tweeted a video of herself hanging the sign with the additional words: “God created ONLY TWO genders.”

Through her sign and her tweet, Greene was making two simultaneous arguments in favor of the idea that there are only two genders. The first argument is that there are only two genders according to “science.” The second argument is that there are only two genders according to the Bible.

Unfortunately, even though these claims are not factually correct, they often still sound reasonable to a shockingly large number of Americans. Indeed, sadly, Greene’s claim that there are only two possible genders is one that even many people who consider themselves liberals would probably agree with.

The wrong argument

Greene probably intended her assertion that there are “only two genders” as an argument against people who are assigned either male or female at birth and later decide to transition to the other of these genders. This argument, however, doesn’t actually work, because trans women are women and trans men are men. The existence of people who transition from male to female or female to male is entirely compatible with the idea that there are only two genders.

Nonetheless, there are, in fact, many people who do not fit into this gender binary of male and female. These people often use different labels to describe themselves, including “genderqueer,” “agender,” “bigender,” “genderfluid,” “transfeminine,” “transmasculine,” et cetera, but they are generally grouped together under the umbrella label “non-binary.”

I strongly suspect that Greene does not understand the difference between sex and gender. The term sex refers to a person’s physical, biological qualities, including their genetics, their hormones, and their genitalia. The term gender, on the other hand, refers to a cultural construct of personal, behavioral, mental, and social characteristics that usually tend to be associated with biological sex within a given culture.

A few other terms are also important to define here. The term gender identity refers to a person’s self-conception of their own gender. Meanwhile, the term gender expression refers to how a person projects their conception of their own gender identity to the world.

I’ll admit that this all probably seems very complicated, especially if you have never heard any of this before. If you’re confused, below is a helpful visual aid titled “The Gender Unicorn.” It was created by the organization Trans Student Educational Resources to help children understand the differences between “gender identity,” “gender expression,” and “sex assigned at birth.” I’ll be using all these terms that I have outlined here fairly extensively throughout the rest of this article.

ABOVE: Chart from Trans Student Educational Resources explaining the differences between “gender identity,” “gender expression,” and “sex assigned at birth”

Let’s talk about chromosomes, kids!

First of all, physical, biological sex is not a simple, immutable binary of “male” and “female,” but rather a complicated web of many interrelated but ultimately independent aspects, all of which exist on some degree of a spectrum of variation. Some of these aspects can be changed in one direction or another through human intervention and some of them cannot. The aspects that can be changed exist on a spectrum of mutability, with some aspects being more changeable than others.

Let’s start out by talking about chromosomes, since they are the very first thing that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene inevitably seem to bring up in these kinds of discussions. Most people assume that a person’s biological sex is immutably determined by their sex chromosomes, that the only possible sex chromosome combinations are XY and XX, that anyone who has two X chromosomes is automatically fully anatomically female, and that anyone who has one X chromosome and a Y chromosome is automatically fully anatomically male. All four of these assumptions, however, are verifiably incorrect.

First, let’s talk about what the X and Y chromosomes actually do. The X chromosome is much larger than the Y chromosome. According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, the X chromosome is believed to carry approximately 155 million base pairs and somewhere between 900 and 1,400 genes, amounting to approximately five percent of all DNA in the entire human cell. Many of these genes are absolutely vital to the proper formation of basic organs. This means that it is impossible for a person to survive without at least one X chromosome.

The Y chromosome, by sharp contrast, only carries approximately 58 million base pairs, amounting to a grand total of only somewhere between seventy and two hundred genes. It does not contain any genes that are necessary in order for a person to survive. Instead, it only carries genes that cause a person who would otherwise be entirely anatomically female to develop male physical features.

ABOVE: Size comparison from the website Punnett’s Square showing a human X chromosome (left) and a human Y chromosome (right)

Although XY and XX are certainly the most common sex chromosome combinations, there are many other combinations that are known to occur naturally in humans. For instance:

• Some people are born with only one complete X chromosome and no Y chromosome. This is known as Turner syndrome. This combination of chromosomes causes a person to develop female anatomy, but they are often unusually short, have an unusually short, webbed neck, low-set ears, and swollen feet and hands. They generally cannot enter puberty without undergoing hormone replacement therapy and they are generally reproductively infertile. They are at greater risk of hypothyroidism, congenital heart defects, and diabetes. The ends of their pinky fingers may be unusually turned inward towards their ring fingers—a phenomenon known as clinodactyly.

• Some people are born with three X chromosomes and no Y chromosome. These people usually develop with completely normal female anatomy, but there are sometimes subtle physical signs that they have an extra X chromosome. For instance, they often tend to be taller than the average woman, they may have an unusually increased distance between their eyes, they may have decreased muscle tone, they may display delayed language development, and they may display clinodactyly.

• Some people are born with two X chromosomes and one Y chromosome. This combination of sex chromosomes is known as Klinefelter syndrome. It usually causes people who have it to develop unusually small male genitals and be reproductively infertile. In many cases, they also have a tendency to grow unusually tall, have weaker muscles than most men, have less body and facial hair than most men, have a weaker libido than most men, and have a more feminine distribution of body fat.

• Some people are born with one X chromosome and two Y chromosomes. This combination of sex chromosomes is known as XYY syndrome. It causes people who have it to develop with mostly completely normal male anatomy, but they are often unusually tall, they may have increased levels of acne, and they are more likely to develop learning problems. Contrary to what you may have heard in popular culture, people with one X chromosome and two Y chromosomes are not more likely to become violent criminals.

• Some people are born with two X chromosomes and two Y chromosomes. People with this combination of chromosomes may display all the symptoms of Klinefelter syndrome and XYY syndrome simultaneously.

• Some people are born with three X chromosomes and one Y chromosome. These people usually display physical characteristics very similar to those seen in people affected by Klinefelter syndrome, but, in people with XXXY syndrome, the physical characteristics tend to be much more prominent.

Most people with the conditions I have described here identify as either male or female. Nonetheless, the mere fact that other combinations of sex chromosomes aside from XX and XY are possible makes discussion of biological sex a lot more complicated than most people realize.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a person with untreated Klinefelter syndrome—a genetic condition in which a person is born with two X chromosomes and one Y chromosome

If you think that this is all really strange and surprising, you’d better pay close attention, because things are about to get even more surprising. Believe it or not, it is actually possible for one person to have multiple sex chromosome combinations at the same time.

This article by Claire Ainsworth, published in the magazine Nature on 22 October 2018, describes the bizarre case of a forty-six-year-old woman pregnant with her third child who visited the clinic of the geneticist Paul James at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia. Routine follow-up tests revealed that the woman’s body was composed of two different sets of cells with two completely different sets of genes.

One of these sets of cells was chromosomally female, bearing two X chromosomes. The other set, however, was chromosomally male, bearing one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. Geneticists believe that two originally separate embryos must have merged while they were in the woman’s mother’s womb. The woman herself was the result of this merge and she therefore bore some cells with genetic material originating from one embryo and some cells with genetic material originating from the other.

What’s surprising is that, until the researchers discovered it by accident, no one had any idea that a large portion of the cells in this woman’s body bore male genes. She looked and sounded like a completely normal woman and thought of herself as such. If she hadn’t visited James’s clinic, she would have in all likelihood gone to her grave never knowing that part of her body was chromosomally male.

And now for an anatomy lesson…

Not only are there more viable combinations of sex chromosomes than most people realize, there are also more possible variations in anatomy. In order to understand this, we need to talk about how human sex anatomy develops.

During the first few weeks of embryonic development, human embryos do not have genitalia at all. At around five weeks, however, all human embryos begin to develop proto-genitalia. The process begins in exactly the same way for both embryos that will later develop female anatomy and embryos that will later develop male anatomy. Both kinds of embryos start out with exactly the same proto-genitalia. Embryos in this stage of development are described as “undifferentiated.”

The default sex for a human embryo is female, but there is a gene for male sex development that is usually located on the Y chromosome, known as SRY. If an embryo does not have this specific gene, its proto-genitalia will continue to develop uninterrupted into female sex organs. If, however, the embryo does have the SRY gene for male sex development, then this gene will kick in after about six weeks, causing an entirely separate gene known as SOX9, which is normally located on chromosome 17, to activate, thereby causing the proto-genitalia to develop into male sex organs instead.

This means that male and female sex organs are actually fundamentally the same structures that have simply developed in different ways. Each male sex organ is homologous to a female sex organ and vice versa. For instance:

• The clitoris is homologous to the penis.
• The clitoral hood is homologous to the foreskin.
• The labia majora are homologous to the scrotum.
• The labia minora are homologous to the scrotal raphe.
• The ovaries are homologous to the testes.
• The fallopian tubes are homologous to the appendices of the testes.
• The vagina, cervix, and uterus are homologous to the prostatic utricle.
• Skene’s glands are homologous to the prostate.

All of these are nothing but variations on the same proto-structures.

Why does this matter? Because some people are born intersex, meaning the distinctions between these parts may be significantly blurred or some parts may be missing altogether. For instance, some intersex people are born with an organ that can either be described as a macroclitoris or a micropenis. Similarly, some intersex people are born with an organ that can either be described as a bifed scrotum or incompletely divided labia majora.

ABOVE: Diagram from Wikimedia Commons showing the differentiation of male and female reproductive structures that normally occurs after about six weeks of development

When chromosomes and sexual anatomy don’t match

It is possible for a person who has two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome to naturally develop as phenotypically male and a person who has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome to naturally develop as phenotypically female. This is possible because the X and Y chromosomes are analogous and they have a region of genes in common, known as the pseudoautosomal region. During meiosis in the father, the pseudoautosomal regions of the X and Y chromosomes cross over, resulting in some genes being swapped between the two chromosomes.

Normally, this has no effect on a person’s sex, but sometimes a mutation can occur in which the gene SRY, which normally triggers male sex development, is transferred to the X chromosome. The result of this is that there are some people who have two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome who naturally develop male physical characteristics, including even male genitalia. This is known as XX male syndrome or de la Chapelle syndrome.

The exact opposite of XX male syndrome can also occur. Sometimes, the genes on the Y chromosome that cause the development of male genitalia are missing or turned off, meaning a person who has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome sometimes develops physically normal external female genitalia. This is known as XY gonadal dysgenesis or Swyer syndrome. People with this condition generally cannot enter puberty without hormone replacement therapy and they are generally reproductively infertile.

Androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) is a different condition in which a person who is born with a Y chromosome has cells that are partially or completely unable to respond to androgens (i.e., male hormones). A person with mild androgen insensitivity syndrome (MAIS) will usually develop with a mostly male phenotype, but they may have reduced fertility, smaller genitalia, less body hair, a higher-pitched voice than most men, and larger breasts than most men.

A person with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome (PAIS) will develop with intersex genitalia that are neither completely masculine nor completely feminine. They may have a micropenis or macroclitoris and a bifid scrotum that resembles a vulva. The testes are often internal and undescended. (You can see a couple photographs of what this looks like here.) They will also typically develop a feminine figure, often complete with feminine breasts and wide hips, feminine body hair distribution, and a high-pitched feminine voice.

People with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) naturally develop with a completely female external appearance. They look and sound completely female and have completely female external genitalia, despite having a Y chromosome. Internally, however, they have undescended testes instead of ovaries and they do not have a uterus, meaning they cannot menstruate and they cannot become pregnant.

5α-Reductase deficiency is yet another intersex condition in which a person with one X chromosome and one Y chromosome is partially or completely unable to convert testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, which is necessary for the normal masculinization of genitalia in the uterus. As a result, people with this condition are usually born with ambiguous genitalia. They usually have a micropenis or macroclitoris, a bifid scrotum that resembles a vulva, and internal undescended testes.

People with this condition are easily interpreted at birth as female. With the onset of puberty, however, they develop fully male secondary sex characteristics, including deep voices, broad shoulders, larger Adam’s apples, facial hair, thicker body hair, and more muscular bodies. Their genitalia also usually become more masculine, with the micropenis/macroclitoris becoming enlarged to look more like a penis. The result is that a child previously assumed to be female may appear to undergo a spontaneous change of sex, taking on a largely masculine appearance.

The long and short of all this is that it is possible for a person to naturally develop with external physical features that are usually associated with members of a sex different from the one that their combination of sex chromosomes is usually associated with.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a group of women with androgen insensitivity syndrome and related conditions. All of these women have a Y chromosome, but they have naturally developed with female appearances.

Hormones

Moving on from anatomy, let’s talk about hormones. Most people believe that testosterone is a “male hormone” that is only active in men and that estrogen and progesterone are “female hormones” that are only active in women. In reality, all human beings who do not have unusual hormonal anomalies have some amount of all three hormones—testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone—active in their bodies at essentially all times.

The ovaries and the testes are homologous organs and they actually produce the same hormones, just in different quantities. The ovaries produce estrogen and progesterone, but they also produce smaller amounts of testosterone. Likewise, the testes produce testosterone, but they also produce smaller amounts of estrogen and progesterone. Much smaller quantities of testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone are also excreted by the adrenal glands in both men and women.

The hormonal difference between people who have male anatomy and people who have female anatomy is a matter of quantity, not a matter of absence. People who have male anatomy generally tend to have higher levels of androgens like testosterone than people who have female anatomy and people who have female anatomy generally tend to have higher levels of estrogen and progesterone than people who have male anatomy.

The exact amounts of these hormones, however, aren’t necessarily consistent, even among people with the same anatomical sex. Some people with male anatomies naturally tend to have more estrogen and less testosterone than other people with male anatomies, while some people with female anatomies naturally tend to have more testosterone and less estrogen than other people with female anatomies.

Hormone levels also vary significantly simply on a daily basis. The simplest everyday activities and even thoughts can change hormone levels. For instance, a study published in 2013 in The Journal of Sex Research titled “Sexual Fantasies and Gender/Sex: A Multimethod Approach with Quantitative Content Analysis and Hormonal Responses” notes that engaging in sexual activity with a partner causes increased testosterone in women, and so do “sexual thoughts in the absence of external stimuli.” In other words, even just thinking about sex can cause a woman’s testosterone levels to increase.

It is also important to note that the overall amounts of these hormones inevitably tend to change over the course of a person’s life. Notably, people with female anatomies who are not taking synthetic hormones and who are still at an age where they are capable of menstruating naturally tend to have much more estrogen and progesterone in their bodies than people with female anatomies who have gone through menopause and no longer menstruate.

ABOVE: Models showing the chemical structures of estrogen (left), progesterone (middle), and testosterone (right)

A case study in eunuchs

Approximately 95% of all sex hormones—including both testosterone and estrogen—in people with male anatomy is produced by the testes. If you remove or crush the testes of a person with male anatomy (i.e., castrate them), then the only testosterone or estrogen in their system will be the very small amounts excreted by the adrenal glands. This means that, if a person with male anatomy is castrated before puberty, they will never go through puberty naturally and will never develop any secondary sex characteristics associated with either sex.

In some ways, people with male anatomy who are castrated before puberty superficially more closely resemble people born with female anatomy than people born with male anatomy who are not castrated; their voices remain high-pitched, they will never be capable of growing beards, and they will never display male-pattern baldness. Additionally, especially as they grow older, eunuchs tend to develop facial features and body fat distributions resembling those of postmenopausal women, with fat being stored in the chin and neck, chest, and hips.

These similarities in appearance, however, can be misleading. Notably, adult people with female anatomy actually tend to have higher levels of testosterone than adult people with male anatomy who were castrated before puberty, meaning people who were castrated before puberty generally tend to have less body hair and tend to be less muscular than most women.

Meanwhile, uncastrated adults with male anatomy usually have small amounts of estrogen, but people with male anatomy who are castrated before puberty have almost no estrogen whatsoever. Consequently, they actually tend to be significantly taller than the average man, with unusually long legs, arms, fingers, and toes. This is because estrogen has an important role in sealing the epiphyseal plates at the end of puberty, ending bone growth. Since people who have been castrated do not have estrogen, their epiphyseal plates never seal, causing them to continue growing a bit longer than most men.

People who are castrated after going through male puberty are affected by castration differently from those who are castrated before puberty. Notably, they generally retain their deep voices, beards, body hair, and height. They may, however, lose some of their muscle mass and develop a more conventionally feminine distribution of fat over time and, if they are not already bald at the time of their castration, they will never develop male-pattern baldness.

ABOVE: Photograph taken c. 1900 of the Italian castrato singer Alessandro Moreschi, who was castrated as a child and consequently never went through puberty

Brains

Most people today believe that all people who are born with male anatomy have fundamentally different brains from all people who are born with female anatomy and vice versa. This, however, is not actually true. Researchers are increasingly finding that even the brains of cisgender men and women are fundamentally similar and there are, in fact, no hard-and-fast distinctions between so-called “male” and “female” brains—only general tendencies.

For instance, in 2015, a group of research psychologists published a study titled “Sex beyond genitalia: The human brain mosaic” in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The researchers examined and analyzed the brains of over 1,400 cisgender men and women using an fMRI machine. They concluded that nearly everyone who took part in the study displayed some significant brain features more commonly associated with members of the opposite sex.

In fact, the percentage of brains that were actually “internally consistent” (i.e., displaying only features traditionally seen as “feminine” or “masculine”) was somewhere between 0% and 8%. In other words, the study concluded that, at least when it comes to brains, sex is a spectrum and almost no one’s brain can be consistently described as “male” or “female.”

Moreover, the physical structure of the brain actually changes over time—sometimes to a very significant degree. This is known as neuroplasticity. This means that, even if a brain has noticeable “male” or “female” tendencies at one point in time, those tendencies can change over time so that, years later, the same brain might display different tendencies altogether. It is also not entirely clear to what extent the observable tendencies in women and men’s brains are a result of innate biology and to what extent they are a result of social conditioning.

ABOVE: Illustration from this article in The Guardian showing some of the overlap between so-called “male” and “female” brains identified by the 2015 study

Unfortunately, many of the neurological studies that have been conducted on the brains of transgender people are highly problematic because many of them have been conducted by cisgender sex researchers who regard transgender people as mentally ill and have therefore seen it as their mission to determine the source of this supposed illness. Many sex researchers also hold a lot of other really backwards assumptions about trans identity that affect the ways they interpret their data.

Nonetheless, some studies do seem to indicate that transgender men’s brains tend to differ from the brains of cisgender women and transgender women’s brains tend to differ from the brains of cisgender men. For instance, a review article published on 14 January 2016 in the journal International Review of Psychiatry titled “Neuroimaging studies in people with gender incongruence” concludes that the brains of trans women and trans men who have not undergone hormone replacement therapy or sex reassignment surgery tended to differ from the brains of cisgender men and cisgender women respectively.

Another review article published on 2 June 2016 in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior titled “A Review of the Status of Brain Structure Research in Transsexualism” extensively discusses research on trans women who were sexually attracted to men, who came out at a young age, and who had not undergone any treatment for gender dysphoria and trans men who were sexually attracted to women, who came out at a young age, and who had not undergone any treatment for gender dysphoria. The paper concludes that both of these groups displayed distinctive brain morphologies that differed from those of both cisgender heterosexual men and cisgender heterosexual women.

The paper hypothesizes that transgender people who experience gender dysphoria at a young age and are sexually attracted to members of the sex they were assigned at birth may have some kind of intersex condition that only affects the central nervous system. The same paper also notes that hormone replacement therapy physically changes the brain structures of transgender people, causing them to more closely resemble the brains of cisgender members of the gender they identify as.

A study published on 15 January 2018 in the journal Scientific Reports, titled “Grey and white matter volumes either in treatment-naïve or hormone-treated transgender women: a voxel-based morphometry study,” found that transgender women who had not undergone hormone replacement therapy or sex reassignment surgery displayed closer similarities in multiple specific regions of the brain to cisgender women than to cisgender men.

All of the studies discussed here should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, since this is very much still an open field of research and there are many competing hypotheses on the subject.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a human brain

Gender

I think I have now adequately demonstrated that, biologically speaking, sex is a complicated spectrum. Now I will talk about gender. As I have already mentioned, the term gender refers to the cultural constructs that usually tend to be associated with biological sex. Gender is therefore not a physiological concept, but rather a social and cultural one.

I want to take a moment to explain exactly what I mean here, since, whenever people like me say that gender is a social construct, people tend to misunderstand what we mean. No one denies the fact that some people have penises and other people have vaginas. No one denies the fact that there are certain physical characteristics that tend to be associated with these body parts.

What we mean when we say that gender is a social construct is that the categories of “male” and “female” are ones that human beings have invented. Objectively speaking, chromosomes are just tiny wads of DNA and genitals are just lumps of flesh. Nature by itself ascribes no meaning to these things. Human beings are the ones who have decided that these things are meaningful. To quote Hamlet, Act II, Scene II: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

The gender categories that human beings have created, however, are often blurred. After all, human beings are complicated and there are a whole multiplicity of factors to consider. Human beings have the ability to decide (or not decide) which of these factors are important for determining gender and it is possible for different people to have different assessments of whether a person belongs in a certain category, or any category.

There are several different models for deciding what gender a person socially belongs to. In the following sections, I will talk about a few different models that I think are inadequate and why I think they are inadequate. Then I will talk about a model that I do think is adequate and why I think it is adequate.

The chromosome-based model

The model that most die-hard conservatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ben Shapiro cling to holds that a person’s gender in society is immutably determined by their chromosomes. Objectively speaking, however, this is the most ludicrously naïve and flimsy of all the models of gender that have been proposed.

I have already explained that chromosomes don’t even necessarily determine biological sex, since people with de la Chapelle syndrome have two X chromosomes, but naturally develop as phenotypically male. Meanwhile, people with Swyer syndrome or complete androgen insensitivity syndrome have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome but naturally develop as externally phenotypically female. When chromosomes don’t even necessarily determine a person’s biological sex at birth, it is absurd to insist that they must dictate a person’s adult gender.

Fundamentally, I think that chromosomes are completely irrelevant to any discussion of whether a person is socially a woman, a man, or neither. No one can see your chromosomes and it’s not even possible to be completely sure of what your chromosomes are unless you’ve had genetic counseling.

Indeed, for the vast majority of human history, no one on the entire planet had even the faintest clue that the structures we now call “chromosomes” existed. Chromosomes weren’t identified until the late nineteenth century, the hypothesis that chromosomes are the carriers of genetic material wasn’t articulated until 1902, and sex chromosomes weren’t identified until 1905. This means that, for nearly all of recorded human history, people assessed gender based exclusively on factors other than chromosomes.

ABOVE: Image from Wikimedia Commons of the karyotype of a human with one X chromosome and one Y chromosome

The genitalia-based model

The model that has been most widely accepted throughout history has not been the chromosome model that twenty-first-century conservatives adore, but rather a genitalia-based model. This model has considerably more merit to it than the chromosome-based model, since, unlike chromosomes, genitals are actually externally visible and therefore have some social relevance. Despite this, however, the genitalia-based model is still fundamentally flawed.

One particular problem that the genitalia-based model poses for conservatives is that, due to the existence of people who are born with intersex genitalia and people whose genitals have been partially or completely removed, accepting the genitalia-based model requires a person to accept the existence of more than two genders. In fact, believe it or not, this is actually what the vast majority of people did prior to the discovery of chromosomes.

People born with genitalia that are neither fully recognizably male nor fully recognizably female were quite common in the ancient world. Regardless of how these people thought of themselves, in pre-modern societies, other people frequently assigned them (usually from birth) to third gender categories, describing them as “eunuchs from birth,” “congenital eunuchs,” “hermaphrodites,” or “androgynes.”

Probably the most famous so-called “eunuch from birth” in the ancient world was the Gaulish orator Favorinus of Arelate (lived c. 80 – c. 160 CE), who is described by multiple contemporary sources as having been born without testicles. As an adult, he is said to have been unable to grow to beard, to have had a high-pitched, feminine-sounding voice, and to have had a soft, effeminate body. Here is a description of him written by his slightly younger contemporary Polemon of Laodikeia (lived c. 90 – c. 144 CE), as translated by Tamsyn Barton:

“. . . a eunuch born without testicles, rather than castrated. I doubt whether you could find anyone of this type apart from the one who was from the land known as that of the Celts. He was lustful and dissolute beyond all measure, for his eyes were those of the worst type of man . . . he had a puffy forehead, soft cheeks, a wide mouth, a long, thin neck, thick legs and fleshy feet. His voice was just like a woman’s, and all the rest of his limbs and extremities were soft; and he did not walk upright, but with slack joints and limbs. He took great care of his person, [by nourishing] his thick hair, and by rubbing medicaments into his body, in short, using anything to arouse desire for sex and coitus. He had a voice like a woman’s, and thin lips. In the whole human race, I never saw anything like him or his eyes.”

Modern experts think that Favorinus may have partial androgen insensitivity syndrome and that this may be the reason why his contemporaries evidently perceived him as neither completely a man nor completely a woman.

There are also numerous surviving stories from antiquity about young women spontaneously growing penises and turning into young men. For instance, the Greek historian Diodoros Sikeliotes (lived c. 90 – c. 30 BCE) tells one such story in his Library of History 32.10.2–9 about a young woman named Heraïs who spontaneously grew a penis and became a man, adopting the male name Diophantos. Stories like this one may have inspired by real-life instances of people with conditions like 5α-Reductase deficiency being assigned female at birth only to develop masculine sex characteristics with the onset of puberty. Diodoros refers to Diophantos in the story as “bi-formed.”

Additionally, it was very common in many pre-modern societies for people to castrate boys and men whom they sold into slavery. Regardless of how they thought about themselves, people born with male anatomy who were castrated—especially those who were castrated before puberty—were generally seen by others as neither fully male nor fully female. Instead, they were usually assigned to the third gender category of “eunuch.”

The Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BCE) routinely lumps women, children, and eunuchs together as having a common nature in the sense that they are less than fully masculine. For instance, here is a description from his treatise On the Generation of Animals 5.3, as translated by Arthur Platt:

“Women do not go bald because their nature is like that of children, both alike being incapable of producing seminal secretion. Eunuchs do not become bald, because they change into the female condition. And as to the hair that comes later in life, eunuchs either do not grow it at all, or lose it if they happen to have it, with the exception of the pubic hair; for women also grow that though they have not the other, and this mutilation is a change from the male to the female condition.”

The notably eunuch-phobic early Christian writer Augustinus of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 CE) describes how eunuchs were generally perceived in the ancient world in his apologetic treatise The City of God 7.24, writing these words about castration: “hic ita amputatur virilitas ut nec convertatur in feminam nec vir relinquatur.” This means: “Thus, his manhood is amputated, so that he neither turns into a woman nor remains a man.”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Assyrian limestone relief carving from the Central Palace at Nimrud, dating to between 744 and 727 BCE, depicting a beardless eunuch with eunuchoid facial features

This, however, leads directly into one of the major failures of the genitalia-based model of gender, which is that, even if we don’t talk about transgender people, this model inherently discriminates against intersex people and people whose genitals have been involuntarily amputated.

It is inherently cruel and insensible to tell an intersex person who wants to live as a woman or a man that they cannot do this because their genitals are not “normal.” Likewise, it’s cruel and insensible to tell a person who still identifies as a man whose genitals have been involuntarily removed or destroyed in an accident that he can no longer live as a man. These are things that people have certainly done in many cultures throughout human history, but they are not things that we should continue to do in the modern era.

This is probably a good place for me to mention that the idea that there can only be two sexes and that a person’s sex must be decided at birth (or even before birth) by a physician causes very real harm to intersex people. Medical ethics guidelines generally prohibit surgeons from giving a person who identifies as transgender any gender-affirming surgeries until the person has attained an age at which they are capable of giving informed medical consent. Nonetheless, doctors routinely perform unnecessary and invasive surgeries on intersex babies and children who are too young to give informed consent to make their genitals appear outwardly “normal.”

It’s really strange how conservatives freak out over adult transgender people voluntarily choosing to undergo hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery, but they support using these same procedures on intersex children without their consent in order to “normalize” them.

Another huge problem with the genitalia-based model of gender is that it doesn’t accurately describe how people live and interact on a daily basis, even in cisnormative spaces. People’s genitals are nearly always hidden when they are in public and, in cisnormative spaces, it is normal for a person to guess another person’s gender based on how they look wearing all their clothes, without ever seeing their genitals.

There are non-op trans people who pass extremely well as members of the gender they identify as and it may be impossible for someone to guess what sort of genitals a person has based on looking at them with their clothes on. Thus, in practice, a person’s gender is not usually assessed by others on the basis of the genitals anyway.

The transmedicalist model

Another model of gender that has been proposed is the so-called “transmedicalist” or “truscum” model. This is a model that is very popular among transgender people with far-right political leanings. It has been perhaps most influentially promoted by the YouTuber Blaire White, who is both a trans woman and die-hard conservative. This model holds:

• that a person’s gender identity is psychologically innate from birth
• that there are only two legitimate genders (male and female), meaning people who identify as non-binary aren’t valid
• that a transgender person is a person who is literally born with the brain of the sex that is “opposite” from the sex of their body
• that, in order to be transgender, a person must experience painful gender dysphoria (which must usually be confirmed by a formal medical diagnosis)
• that all transgender people must fully medically transition to the sex they identify as
• that anyone who identifies as transgender but who does not experience painful gender dysphoria or who does not intend to fully medically transition is not really transgender, but rather a “transtrender” (i.e., a person who is only pretending to be transgender for, I don’t know, popularity or something)

This model is popular because it allows for the valid existence of cis-passing binary trans people (such as Blaire White herself) while still maintaining conservative assumptions about there only being two genders and about men and women being fundamentally and immutably psychologically different. This model, however, is fundamentally flawed because it relies heavily on some very incorrect assumptions about psychology.

As I’ve already discussed above in the section about biological sex, there are no hard-and-fast distinctions between male and female brains; there are only general tendencies and almost no one has a brain that can be described as consistently “masculine” or “feminine.” Our brains are also inevitably physically change over time as a result of all kinds of different factors, including our diets, hormones, activities, environment, and acculturation. For all these reasons, saying that every person is born with a brain that is inherently, conclusively, and immutably either “female” or “male” is overly simplistic.

The connection between having a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and having a “masculine” or “feminine” brain is also somewhat tenuous. When a psychologist or psychiatrist diagnoses someone with gender dysphoria, they do so on the basis of what the person says about how they feel; they don’t typically examine the person’s brain with an fMRI machine to see how “feminine” or “masculine” their brain activities are.

ABOVE: Photograph of Blaire White, a die-hard conservative trans woman who is currently probably the most influential promoter of so-called “transmedicalism” on the internet

The gender expression-based model (i.e., the “performativity” model)

A more coherent model of gender is the “performativity” model. This model is most closely associated with the American academic philosopher Judith Butler (who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns). Butler’s model holds that gender has nothing to do with innate biology or psychology and is really all about performance.

Essentially, this model holds that each society has certain roles and expectations for how people of a certain gender are supposed to act. A person creates their gender through performance, either by conforming to the way the society that the person inhabits expects that a “woman” or a “man” is supposed to look and act, or by flouting those conventions and refusing to conform.

This model can naturally only be applied in an extremely culturally specific manner, since gender roles and expression vary drastically across cultures and across time periods. For instance, in the United States in the twenty-first century, wearing makeup is considered feminine and men who wear makeup are mocked as effeminate. In ancient Egypt, however, wearing makeup was considered completely normal for both men and women. Most ancient Egyptian men at least rimmed their eyes with kohl, a kind of ancient eyeliner.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Egyptian sculpture discovered at the site of Saqqara dating to the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt (lasted c. 2613 – c. 2494 BCE) depicting a male scribe whose eyes are probably lined with kohl

Similarly, in the United States in the twenty-first century, men are expected to wear their hair short and women are expected to wear their hair long. In the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic Era (lasted c. 323 – c. 30 BCE), however, it was fashionable for elite men to go clean-shaven and wear their hair in long, luscious curls.

This was the fashion because this was how King Alexandros III of Makedonia (i.e., the man commonly known in English as “Alexander the Great”) wore his hair. Naturally, every man wanted to imitate the most famous conqueror in recent history. At the time, this style was considered extremely masculine, since it was the hairstyle of a famous conqueror. Nowadays, though, most people consider it highly “effeminate.”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Greek marble portrait head of Alexandros III of Makedonia from the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki

It was likewise fashionable for young men in Renaissance Italy to go clean-shaven and wear their hair all the way down to their shoulders. Indeed, the normal fashion for young men in Renaissance Italy was so feminine by contemporary American standards that modern American viewers routinely mistake young men in Italian Renaissance paintings for young women.

For instance, in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous fresco The Last Supper, which he painted in the late 1490s, John the Apostle, who sits at Jesus’s right hand, is portrayed as beardless with long hair. He looks so feminine by modern American standards that people who don’t know art history often mistakenly identify him as a woman (usually Mary Magdalene).

Similarly, as I discuss in this article I published in March 2019, Raphael’s famous fresco The School of Athens, which he painted between 1509 and 1511, includes a young, beardless figure with long hair flowing down their back. This figure is most likely supposed to be a young male philosopher. Nonetheless, he is commonly (but probably mistakenly) identified as the female philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria.

ABOVE: Portrait from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence of the male Italian Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Again, to really hammer this point home, in the United States in the twenty-first-century, dresses and skirts are seen as exclusively female articles of clothing and men are expected to wear trousers. There have, however, been many cultures throughout history in which it is has not only been culturally acceptable for men to wear skirts, but culturally unacceptable for men to wear anything else.

The ancient Greeks and Romans regarded trousers as an inherently barbaric article of clothing. No ancient Greek or Roman man would have been caught dead wearing such a garment. Instead, they wore garments that, to a twenty-first-century American eye, could easily look like dresses.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Greek bronze sculpture from the site of Delphoi dating to c. 470 BCE, depicting a male charioteer wearing an Ionic chiton

The garment that has traditionally been worn by Greek men in modern times is the foustanella—a kind of long, frilly, pleated skirt. This kind of skirt seems to have emerged in the early centuries of the second millennium CE. The oldest definitive surviving depictions of foustanelles come from pottery fragments dating to around the twelfth century CE or thereabouts. The skirt reached the peak of its popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, Greek men had begun to abandon the foustanella in favor of western-style trousers.

ABOVE: Greek pottery fragments from the city of Corinth dating to the twelfth century CE, depicting long-haired warriors wearing foustanelles

ABOVE: Illustration created in 1820 by the French artist Louis Dupré, depicting a Greek warrior wearing the foustanella

Conceptions of what women are supposed to look like are also culturally constructed and vary drastically just like conceptions of what men are supposed to look like—sometimes even within a single culture over the course of its history.

To give a famous example, in China during the Tang Dynasty (lasted 618 – 907 CE), the ideal for women was for them to be as large and plump as possible. During later dynasties, however, the ideal shifted in the exact opposite direction. People came to idealize thinness and daintiness to such an extent that girls from upper-class families would tightly bind their feet, starting in childhood, in order to painfully physically re-shape them to make them smaller and daintier.

ABOVE: Painting of a court lady tuning a lute by the Tang Dynasty painter Zhou Fang (lived c. 730 – c. 800 CE)

ABOVE: Photograph taken in the 1870s by the Chinese photographer Lai Afong of an upper-class woman displaying her “lotus foot”

Not only do the ways men and women are expected to look vary drastically across cultures, but also the roles they are expected to fulfill in society. People living in the twenty-first-century United States often assume that men and women’s roles are fixed and that the roles they fulfill in modern American society are the same ones they have always fulfilled in all societies throughout history. This, however, is far from the case.

It is true that, as a general tendency, in societies throughout history, men have tended to be more likely than women to do work that requires higher levels of physical strength. This is primarily due to the fact that men tend to be, on average, physically taller, bulkier, and stronger than most women. Despite this, however, there is still tremendous variability in men and women’s roles across cultures and there have been many cultures in which women are known to have done work that requires significant physical strength.

It is a popular misconception that, in pre-historic hunter-gatherer societies, men always hunted and women always gathered. In reality, anthropologists have observed that, in general, contemporary hunter-gatherer societies tend to be very egalitarian, with women and men frequently taking part in similar activities. Prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies generally seem to have been similar.

ABOVE: Photograph from the website OpenDemocracy of young Hadza women in Tanzania taking part in the maitoko ceremony, which involves them dressing as hunters

In contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, it is quite common for men to gather and it is also common for women to hunt small game. Even when it comes specifically to the hunting of big game, there is growing evidence that, at least in some pre-historic hunter-gatherer societies, it was relatively common for women to hunt big game alongside men.

A new study published in the journal Science Advances on 4 November 2020 includes an analysis of twenty-seven skeletons of prehistoric peoples found in the Americas dating to around 9,000 years ago associated with big game hunting. The study concludes that 41% of the individuals analyzed were mostly likely biologically female.

Indeed, even warfare itself has not always been an exclusively male preoccupation. As I discuss in great detail in this article from February 2021, there is compelling evidence that, in some pre-modern societies, some women actually fought as warriors and they were, at least in some cases, quite successful at it. For instance, ancient Greek historians mention the existence of Skythian and Sauromatian female warriors who rode on horseback and fought with bows and arrows. The skeletons of numerous such female warriors have been excavated by archaeologists.

ABOVE: Detail from an Attic red-figure lekythos dating to around c. 420 BC depicting Amazons fighting

Altogether, I think that the performativity model has a lot of merits. It allows for the existence of both binary and non-binary trans people and it allows for the wide range of different gender expressions that exist across different cultures. It does, however, have a problem, which is that it does not really do a good job of accounting for the existence of people who look and behave in ways that a given society expects a person of a certain gender to look and behave while still privately identifying with a different gender than the one they are outwardly performing.

Historically, there have been women who have dressed as men, taken male names, and adopted male identities for prolonged periods of time purely for pragmatic reasons and not out of any abiding sense of male identity, often in order to access institutions that have traditionally been closed to women, while still continuing to privately identify as women. Meanwhile, around the world today, there are many closeted trans people who strongly identify with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth and yet cannot publicly express the gender they identify with due to the circumstances in which they live.

If we go by the performativity model, a woman who dresses as a man, takes a male name, and adopts a male identity for pragmatic reasons is no different from a transgender man because, even though they have very different internal conceptions of their identities, they are outwardly performing the same. Likewise, by this same model, a closeted trans person who is performing the gender they were assigned at birth is no different from a cisgender person of the same assigned sex, because they are both outwardly performing the same.

Some people may not think this is a problem, but I think that defining gender by outward performance is somewhat clumsy for this reason.

ABOVE: Manuscript illustration by Jean Pichore from 1501 depicting Joan of Arc, who famously wore masculine clothing on many occasions

The self-identity model

The only model of gender that I think is suitable to be applied in the modern world is one of self-identification. If a person identifies as a women, then they are a woman. If a person identifies as a man, then they are a man. If a person identifies as neither a man nor a woman, then they are neither a man nor a woman. For most people, their self-identified gender will most likely align with their genitalia, but this should not be seen as necessarily the case.

Now, of course, critics at this point are probably going to object: “Well, if you can identify as whatever gender you want, why can’t I identify as an attack helicopter? How is that any different from identifying as ‘transgender’?” This is a very common retort, but it is obviously not a reasonable objection. I think that even the people who make this retort realize this and only say it because they enjoy being glib.

“Woman,” “man,” and “non-binary” are all categories of human being. It is possible for a human being to literally be a woman, a man, both, or neither. It is not possible for a person to literally be an attack helicopter. In order for someone to become an attack helicopter, they would have to stop being a human being.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an attack helicopter

Now, I’m sure that other people are going to object: “If a person can identify as whatever gender they want, why can’t a person identify as whatever race they want? Rachel Dolezal was born white, but now she identifies as Black! If being transgender is just about identifying as transgender, how are transgender people any different from her?”

This is yet another obviously bad faith argument, because there are huge differences between transgender people and Rachel Dolezal. For one thing, Rachel Dolezal didn’t just claim to be Black herself; she also repeatedly lied about her parentage, claiming that her father was a Black man, even though he really wasn’t. She also told a whole plethora of other lies about her ancestry and upbringing. It was only after these lies were exposed that she started claiming to be “transracial.”

Moving beyond that, while it is true that gender and race are both social constructs, they are nonetheless fundamentally different in nature. Race is a social construct that, in twenty-first-century American society, is inextricably tied to ancestry and a history of ancestral oppression. A person cannot change their ancestry, so it automatically follows that, under the definition of race that is currently generally accepted, a person cannot change their race either. When it comes to gender, on the other hand, a person of any ancestry may be a man or a woman.

ABOVE: Photograph of Rachel Dolezal as a teenager (left) and photograph of her as she looks today as an adult (right)

Transgender and third gender people throughout historical cultures

Conservatives usually maintain that transgender people are a bizarre modern aberration resulting from the breakdown of “traditional family values” and that, back in the good old days, there were no such people. The historical evidence, however, seems to contradict this belief.

As I discuss in this article I published in August 2020, the word transgender is a modern coinage, but people to whom modern people might apply this label have existed throughout all of human history. For instance, in ancient Sumer in the third millennium BCE, there was an order of priests known as Gala, who served the goddess Inanna and worked in her temples.

Some of these priests were cisgender women, but most of them were people assigned male at birth. Hymns meant to be performed by Gala were composed in the eme-sal dialect, which, in literary texts, is exclusively used to render the speech of female characters. Some of the people assigned male at birth who joined the Gala adopted female names and they had a reputation for taking the passive role in anal sex with men.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Sumerian statuette of two gala priests dated to c. 2450 BCE, discovered in the temple of the goddess Inanna in the city of Mari in Syria

Similar priesthoods have existed in more recent cultures. For instance, the Phrygian goddess Kybele, who was introduced to the Greek-speaking world in around the sixth century BCE and was formally introduced to the Roman pantheon in 205 BCE, had an order of priests known as Galli. These were usually people who had been assigned male at birth, but it was traditional for them to deliberately castrate themselves, wear their hair long, and wear saffron-colored dresses, perfume, makeup, and earrings.

They typically lived as mendicants, travelling from place to place, begging others for food and supplies. They performed ecstatic dances at festivals to the accompaniment of pipes, cymbals, and tympana and they were sometimes known to practice self-flagellation. They were widely seen as belonging to a third gender. The Latin writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 CE), who lived in North Africa, portrays a group of Galli in his novel The Golden Ass as referring to each other as women.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a funerary relief of an Archigallus from Lavinium dated to the second century CE on display in the Capitoline Museums in Rome

The Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) wrote a work titled Dialogues of the Courtesans, which includes a description of a fictional character who was assigned female at birth who dresses as a man, goes by a male name and male pronouns, has sex with women, and insists that he is a man. Loukianos was writing fiction, but it is probably safe to assume that his fiction is rooted to some degree in the social reality of the time. It is extremely likely that people like the trans man described in his dialogue really existed.

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus—who came to the throne on 16 May 218 CE at the age of approximately sixteen and is best known today by the posthumous nickname “Elagabalus”—is referred to in historical sources as male, but is alleged to have plucked out all their body hair, worn makeup and wigs to look like a woman, regularly prostituted themself in brothels and taverns, referred to a man as their “husband,” insisted on being referred to as “lady” rather than “lord,” and even offered a large reward to any physician who could give them a vagina by means of an incision.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to tell how much of what the historical sources tell us about Elagabalus is actually true, since all of the surviving sources about them were written by people who absolutely detested them and wanted to portray them in the worst possible light. Roman historians routinely made up stories about emperors they didn’t like to portray them as “effeminate,” since this was an extremely efficient method of character assassination in the Roman world.

Many of the stories that are told about Elagabalus in Kassios Dion’s Roman History and the Historia Augusta are clearly cribbed from stories attested in older sources about earlier imperial figures. Even if we assume that all the stories about Elagabalus are completely made-up, however, the mere fact that Roman historians thought these kinds of stories were believable only demonstrates that the concept of a person whom we might describe as “transgender” existed in the ancient world.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait head of the emperor Elagabalus

People whom modern people might describe as transgender didn’t just exist in so-called “pagan” societies, but even within Christian societies. Historically speaking, in Christian societies, it has been far more acceptable for people assigned female at birth to transition to a male identity than for people assigned male at birth to transition to a female identity.

The medieval Christian tradition is full of stories about people assigned female at birth who adopted male identities in order to join monastic communities and lived as men until their deaths. One particularly famous example of this is the story of Saint Marinos the Monk, which is recorded in a Byzantine Greek text dating to around the early seventh century CE.

Marinos is said to have been given the name “Marina” at birth, but he adopted a male identity as Marinos at a young age in order to join a monastery with his father. He is supposed to have lived as a man for his entire adult life, so that the other monks had no idea that he had female genitalia until they were washing his body after his death to prepare him for burial.

ABOVE: Fourteenth-century French manuscript illustration of Marinos and his father Eugenios entering the cenobitic monastery

In some societies, old traditions pertaining to gender flexibility have survived up until the present day. Notably, ever since very ancient times, there have been people in India who were assigned male at birth who have castrated themselves and adopted the dress, speech, mannerisms, and gender roles of women.

The Kāmasūtra, a well-known Sanskrit treatise on how to live a pleasurable life that was written by the ancient Indian philosopher Vātsyāyana in around the second or third century CE, describes such people in part two, chapter nine. The passage reads as follows, as translated by Richard Francis Burton:

“Eunuchs disguised as females imitate their dress, speech, gestures, tenderness, timidity, simplicity, softness and bashfulness. The acts that are done on the jaghana or middle parts of women, are done in the mouths of these eunuchs, and this is called Auparishtaka. These eunuchs derive their imaginable pleasure, and their livelihood from this kind of congress, and they lead the life of courtesans. So much concerning eunuchs disguised as females.”

Today, these people are known in Hindi as hījṛās. They are legally recognized as a belonging to a third gender, being neither men nor women, but rather a separate gender of their own. Many of them do work in the sex industry for survival, but not necessarily all. They usually live in organized communities composed entirely of hījṛās.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a group of hījṛās in Bagladesh in 2010

Meanwhile, in many Balkan societies, there is an ancient tradition that a person assigned female at birth can swear an oath of celibacy, cut their hair, adopt male clothing, and take on male gender roles, thereby becoming, for all social and cultural purposes, a man. These people are known in the Albanian language as burrnesha and in English as “sworn virgins.” Some burrnesha also adopt masculine names and masculine pronouns and will express offense if they are referred to as “she.”

ABOVE: Photograph taken on 16 May 1908 by the anthropologist Edith Durham of an Albanian burrneshë in Rapsha, Albania

Today, the tradition of burrnesha has died out everywhere except Albania and parts of the Republic of North Macedonia. The few burrnesha who remain are nearly all over the age of seventy. An article published in The Guardian on 14 August 2014 titled “Last of the burrnesha: Balkan women who pledged celibacy to live as men” includes interviews with two elderly burrnesha.

One of them, named Diana, uses male pronouns. He says that, growing up, he always “felt like a boy” and that he flouted social norms by playing futboll (i.e., the Albanian name for soccer), wearing trousers instead of dresses, and getting in fights. He insisted to his father that he wanted to be a burrneshë. When he was seventeen, he cut his hair and swore his vow of celibacy.

ABOVE: Photograph from this article in The Guardian of Diana, a modern burrneshë who, at the time of the interview, lived in Durrës, Albania

And now… the Bible!

I think that I have now shown that, scientifically speaking, sex and gender are both complicated, it is possible for a person who was assigned one gender at birth to transition to a different gender, and there are more than two possible genders. I, however, doubt that the evidence I have presented so far will be enough to persuade most conservatives, since many conservatives will still object that all the things I have argued so far go against the Bible. This is such a common objection that I feel it is important to address in depth.

Before I do that, though, allow me to clarify the perspective from which I am approaching this issue. Although I am no longer personally religiously a Christian, I was a Christian for a long time and I was highly devoted to the study of the Bible. I am still very interested in studying the Bible, even though I no longer regard it as the word of God.

I have read every part of the Bible many times, including large parts of the New Testament in the original Koine Greek. As an ancient historian, I am familiar with Biblical scholarship and I have extensive knowledge of the cultural and historical background of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. I therefore think I have a fairly good understanding of what the Bible says.

Problems with using the Bible as a moral guide

With that out of the way, let’s get into it. I’ll start out by saying that using the Bible as your final moral authority on anything is probably not a good idea, since the Bible gives at best inconsistent positions on important issues. For instance, in the Book of Deuteronomy 20:16–18, God directly and explicitly commands the Israelites to completely annihilate every last Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite from the face of the earth, sparing absolutely no one—not even the livestock. It reads as follows, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God.”

This is a command for a bloody and horrific genocide, which, if it had actually been carried out exactly as it is described here, would have involved killing potentially more human beings than the Nazis killed during the Holocaust.

To be very clear, I am not arguing that it is wrong to be Christian or even that it is wrong to hold the Bible in great reverence. It is possible to do both of these things without believing that genocide is morally justified. What I am saying here, though, is that, if you are a Christian, then it is more accurate—and morally justifiable—to see the Bible as a collection of diverse texts written by fallible human beings trying to understand God in their own ways, rather than the infallible, unquestionable, 100% literally true word of God himself.

ABOVE: Samson Slays a Thousand Men with the Jawbone of a Donkey, painted by the French painter James Tissot (lived 1836 – 1902)

The Book of Genesis on gender

Whenever people talk about gender in the Bible, it is common for people who believe that male and female are the only possible genders and that a person can never change their gender from the one they were assigned at birth to immediately cite the Book of Genesis 1:27, which reads as follows, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version:

“So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”

In order to understand what this verse really means, we need to put it into its historical, cultural, and literary context. Judeo-Christian tradition holds that the entire Torah, including the Book of Genesis, was written by the prophet Moses. It has, however, been almost universally accepted among Biblical scholars for nearly two hundred years that this attribution is wildly implausible.

None of the works that are now included in the Torah even claim to have been written by Moses. They also contain clear references to things that didn’t happen until centuries after the time when Moses supposedly lived and passages that suggest the author believed that Moses was a legendary figure who had died many centuries before his own time. Notably, the Book of Deuteronomy 34 describes Moses’s death and burial in great detail and concludes with a eulogy that makes it sound like Moses had been dead for a very, very long time. It reads as follows, as translated in the NRSV:

“Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. He was unequaled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his servants and his entire land, and for all the mighty deeds and all the terrifying displays of power that Moses performed in the sight of all Israel.”

Pretty much no one in Biblical studies nowadays seriously argues in favor of Mosaic authorship for the Torah.

ABOVE: Moses with the Ten Commandments, painted in 1648 by the French Baroque painter Philippe de Champaigne

The books of the Torah also contain stories that blatantly contradict each other, which suggests that they were not composed at a single point in time by a single author. Indeed, as I discuss in great detail in this article I published in September 2020, the Book of Genesis actually contains two very different creation stories that directly contradict each other. The first creation story is the “Seven-Day Story,” which is found in Genesis 1:1–2:3. The second creation story is the “Adam and Eve Story,” which is found in Genesis 2:4–3:24.

In the article I have linked, I analyze the many glaring discrepancies between these two stories. Notably, in the first story, God creates animals before humans, he creates humans simply by declaring them into existence, and he creates men and women at the same time. In the second story, by contrast, God creates Adam (the first man) first by molding him from clay. After this, he creates the animals. Finally, he creates Eve (the first woman) last by fashioning her from Adam’s side.

There is a lot of scholarly debate about when these creation stories were written, but the most likely conclusion is that both of these stories were composed by Jewish priests living in Babylon during the Babylonian captivity (lasted c. 597 – c. 539 BCE). This was a very dark time in the history of the Jewish people. The Babylonians had conquered the kingdom of Judah, they had destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and they had taken the Jewish elites to their capital as prisoners.

The authors of these stories were living in a foreign country amid foreign peoples who worshipped foreign deities. Naturally, they wanted to portray their own God as superior to all foreign deities and they chose to do this by emphasizing their God’s universality—by portraying him as the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of all things.

This notion of God as the universal creator is absolutely central to the Seven-Day Story. The whole story begins with the following declaration in Genesis 1:1:

“בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃”

“bərē’šîṯ bārā’ ’ĕlōhîm ’ēṯ haššāmayim wə’ēṯ hā’āreṣ:”

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

In this passage, the phrase “הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃” (haššāmayim wə’ēṯ hā’āreṣ) meaning “the heavens and the earth” uses a binary pair to represent everything that exists in the universe. The idea is not that God only created the heavens and the earth and nothing else, but rather that he created the heavens and the earth, along with everything in between and everything beyond.

ABOVE: The Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Plants from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted c. 1511 by the Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo

As the story continues, it emphasizes this notion of binaries that represent greater diversity. The text says that God created day and night (Genesis 1:4–5), that God created seas and dry land (Genesis 1:9–13), and that God created the sun and the moon (Genesis 1:14–19).

In every single instance where the Seven-Day Story says that God created things in binary pairs, there is the understanding that, behind these simple binaries, there inevitably lies much greater complexity. For instance, there is twilight that is neither fully day nor fully night, there are marshes that are neither fully sea nor fully dry land, and there are lights in this world aside from just the sun and the moon. Every pair has natural exceptions.

Finally, Genesis 1:27 describes God as creating human beings. The verse reads as follows in the original Biblical Hebrew:

“‏וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים׀ אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם׃”

“wayyiḇərā’ ’ĕlōhîm| ’eṯ-hā’āḏām bəṣaləmwō bəṣelem ’ĕlōhîm bārā’ ’ōṯwō zāḵār ûnəqēḇâ bārā’ ’ōṯām:”

The NRSV translates this verse as follows:

“So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”

To interpret this passage to mean that God created human beings as exclusively male and female and that no other sexes or genders can possibly exist would be an egregious misinterpretation.

In this passage, the phrase “זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה” (zāḵār ûnəqēḇâ), meaning “male and female,” is simply a pars pro toto. The author is using two common qualities associated with human beings to represent the totality of qualities that human beings possess. The meaning of this passage is, quite simply, that God created human beings with all the complexity, diversity, and versatility that human beings display.

Obviously, it is impossible to know what the ancient Hebrew author of this story—who has, in all likelihood, been dead for over 2,500 years—would think of the contemporary political debate over whether trans people’s gender identities are valid and whether they should be allowed to exist. Nonetheless, to interpret this passage as a straightforward denial of the legitimacy of any gender identity other than cisgender woman and cisgender man is woefully tendentious.

ABOVE: The Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted c. 1512 by the Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo

The Book of Deuteronomy 22:5 on cross-dressing

People who believe that it is against the Bible for trans people to exist also frequently cite the Book of Deuteronomy 22:5. The verse reads as follows, as translated in the NRSV:

“A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does such things is abhorrent to Yahweh your God.”

The anti-trans interpretation of this passage only works if the interpreter starts out with the presumption that trans people’s gender identities are invalid and that trans people are really the genders they were assigned at birth.

If, by contrast, the interpreter starts out with the presumption that trans people’s gender identities are valid, then one can actually interpret this passage as pro-trans. If trans men are really men and trans women are really women, then forcing them to wear clothing associated with a gender they are not against their wills is abhorrent to Yahweh. Meanwhile, non-binary people are neither men nor women, so these rules don’t even apply to them.

Thus, whether a person interprets this passage as anti-trans or pro-trans depends entirely on what the interpreter themself already believes about about whether trans people are valid.

To better understand this passage and its contemporary relevance (if any), let us consider the historical and cultural context in which it was most likely composed. Modern Biblical scholars usually identify the Book of Deuteronomy as the “book of the law” that the high priest Hilkiah brought forth in the eighteenth year of the reign of King Josiah of Judah (ruled 640 – 609 BCE), as described in the Second Book of the Kings 22. Although Hilkiah claimed to have “discovered” the book in the Temple, it is generally accepted among scholars that he actually either wrote it himself or had someone else write it for him.

We can therefore say that the Book of Deuteronomy—or at least an early proto-version of it—was most likely written by a member of the priestly class in Jerusalem in around 622 BCE or thereabouts. This makes it one of the oldest parts of the Torah.

ABOVE: Illustration made by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld in 1858 depicting King Josiah hearing the word from the “book of law”—which is believed by scholars to have been an early form of the Book of Deuteronomy

The chapter in which the commandment prohibiting cross-dressing appears is a compilation of miscellaneous rules governing the extreme minutiae of everyday life. These rules were originally only meant to apply specifically to life in the kingdom of Judah during the reign of King Josiah in the seventh century BCE. I have never met a single Christian who actually follows these rules and, indeed, I suspect that the vast majority of Jewish people do not completely follow them either. Deuteronomy 22:9–12 reads as follows, as translated by the NRSV:

“You shall not sow your vineyard with a second kind of seed, or the whole yield will have to be forfeited, both the crop that you have sown and the yield of the vineyard itself.”

“You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey yoked together.”

“You shall not wear clothes made of wool and linen woven together.”

“You shall make tassels [i.e., tzitziyot] on the four corners of the cloak with which you cover yourself.”

Virtually all clothing in the twenty-first century is made from different kinds of fibers that have been woven together and virtually all Christians in the twenty-first century wear clothing of this kind on a daily basis. This is, according to Deuteronomy, just as bad as cross-dressing.

Similarly, Deuteronomy commands the wearing of tzitziyot—the knotted tassels with blue stripes that are traditionally worn by observant Jewish men on the fringes of their garments. Virtually no Christian man in the twenty-first century has ever worn them, but yet the commandment that all men must wear tzitziyot is given in exactly the same context in exactly the same chapter as the command that men and women should not wear clothing associated with the other gender.

Even the prohibition against cross-dressing itself has seldom been widely enforced even in overwhelmingly Christian societies. In Europe during the Middle Ages, it was common and widely considered socially acceptable for men to dress as women for entertainment purposes.

For instance, it was seemingly quite common for knights during the High Middle Ages to dress as women during jousting tournaments as a kind of joke. Meanwhile, medieval European Christians venerated dozens of so-called “transvestite” saints like Saint Marinos, who were born with female bodies, but adopted male clothing and identities. The fact that these saints were seen as cross-dressers did not make them seen as any less holy.

I am therefore going to say that, even if you don’t accept the pro-trans interpretation of the passage that I mentioned earlier, the rule against cross-dressing in Deuteronomy 22:5 probably doesn’t have much relevance to twenty-first-century life anyway.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a tzitzit—the kind of tassel that is traditionally worn by observant Jewish men on the fringes of their garments

The Book of Deuteronomy 23:1 on castration and emasculation

Another passage that people who believe that the existence of transgender people goes against the Bible like to cite occurs in the Book of Deuteronomy 23:1. The verse reads as follows, as translated in the NRSV, with the divine name restored:

“No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of Yahweh.”

The people who cite this passage generally interpret it as applying to modern trans women who have undergone some form of gender-affirming genital surgery. This interpretation, however, is woefully tendentious to say the least.

First of all, the social and cultural context that the original author of this passage almost certainly had in mind could not possibly be more different from the context that exists today. The author who wrote this passage over 2,600 years ago was almost certainly not thinking of women born into male bodies who undergo the voluntary surgical removal of their penis and testicles, but rather of men who had been forcibly captured, enslaved, and castrated as a condition of enslavement.

Furthermore, this commandment is clearly motivated by a desire for perceived masculine purity, rather than by any kind of coherent moral philosophy. The reason why the passage prohibits eunuchs from entering “the assembly of Yahweh” is not because eunuchs are inherently bad people or immoral, but rather because it was believed that eunuchs were not fully male and therefore not eligible to take part in the assembly with the “real” men.

The Hebrew Bible is not even consistently negative about eunuchs either. On the contrary, the Book of Isaiah 56:3–5—written by an anonymous author whom modern scholars have dubbed “Third Isaiah,” who most likely lived during the Achaemenid Period (lasted c. 539 – c. 332 BCE)—promises that Yahweh will reward all eunuchs who follow his commandments and give them a name that will last forever. The passage reads as follows, as translated in the NRSV, with the divine name restored:

“Do not let the foreigner joined to Yahweh say,
    ‘Yahweh will surely separate me from his people,’
and do not let the eunuch say,
    ‘I am just a dry tree.’
For thus says Yahweh:
‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
    who choose the things that please me
    and hold fast my covenant,
I will give, in my house and within my walls,
    a monument and a name
    better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
    that shall not be cut off.’”

Finally, as I shall discuss in a moment, the New Testament is generally pro-eunuch. In the Gospel of Matthew 19:12, Jesus seems to imply not only that people who have had their testicles and/or penis removed may enter the kingdom of heaven, but also that, for some people, castration may actually be necessary in order for them to enter.

ABOVE: Photograph taken by Sarah E. Bond, used in this article in Forbes, showing a Roman-era castration clamp found in the river Thames

Jesus on sex and gender

I have now covered most of the passages in the Hebrew Bible that are relevant to the discussion of what the Bible says about gender. Now I will move on to the New Testament. The New Testament in general tends to present attitudes towards sex, gender, and sexuality that are quite different from those that generally prevail throughout most of the Hebrew Bible.

While it is important to note that the Hebrew Bible contains a lot of material that goes against the so-called “traditional family values” that contemporary Evangelicals like to celebrate, it does generally portray gender as relatively fixed and married heterosexuality as normal and natural. There aren’t really many passages that seem to advocate for unmarried celibacy and there are a whole lot of passages that seem to celebrate heteronormative sexuality. (See, for instance, my discussion of the Song of Songs in this article I wrote in May 2020.) The Hebrew Bible can therefore be seen as, in general, relatively sex-positive when it comes to heterosexual sex within the confines of marriage.

As I discuss in this article I published in May 2020, however, Jesus is closely associated with an ascetic apocalyptic movement within Second Temple Judaism that generally took a rather dim view of sexuality in all forms—including even marital sex between a husband and wife. The gospels don’t portray Jesus as openly preaching against traditional marriage per se, but they do portray him as saying a lot of things that seem to imply that he thinks it is preferable for a person to reject sexuality altogether and pursue a life of unmarried celibacy. This attitude towards sexuality notably influences many of Jesus’s statements about gender.

For instance, in the Gospel of Mark 12:18–23, the Sadducees, members of a major sect of Second Temple Judaism that denied the existence of a resurrection after death, approach Jesus and ask him a deliberately sophistic question involving an extremely contrived scenario about marriage in the Kingdom of Heaven that is meant to show his belief in a future resurrection to be ridiculous. Here is what Jesus says to them as a reply in the Gospel of Mark 12:24–25 in the original Koine Greek of the New Testament:

“οὐ διὰ τοῦτο πλανᾶσθε μὴ εἰδότες τὰς γραφὰς μηδὲ τὴν δύναμιν τοῦ θεοῦ; ὅταν γὰρ ἐκ νεκρῶν ἀναστῶσιν, οὔτε γαμοῦσιν οὔτε γαμίζονται, ἀλλ᾽ εἰσὶν ὡς ἄγγελοι ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς.”

The NRSV translates this passage as follows:

“Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.”

Jesus’s reply here seems to suggest that he thinks that marriage, sex, and possibly even gender are merely temporary, earthly things that will eventually pass away and that will not exist in the Kingdom of Heaven.

ABOVE: The Pharisees and Sadducees Come to Tempt Jesus, painted between 1886 and 1894 by the French painter James Tissot

Jesus’s inclusiveness

Things only get more interesting from here. While the gospels generally tend to have a somewhat more negative view of sexuality in general than most of the texts in the Hebrew Bible, they are also in some ways more accepting towards people who are socially marginalized, including poor people, prostitutes, tax collectors, foreigners, and—as we shall see in a moment—eunuchs. All four canonical gospels agree in portraying Jesus as showing contempt for traditional religious authorities and focusing a large part of his ministry on the marginalized and the oppressed.

In the Gospel of Matthew 21:23–32, the chief priests and elders of the Temple in Jerusalem—the most important religious authorities in Second Temple Judaism—question Jesus’s authority. Jesus responds by telling them a parable. In the parable, one son tells his father that he will do what he asks, but doesn’t actually do it. Another son tells his father that he will not what he asks, but he changes his mind and actually does it. Jesus explains the meaning of the parable to the priests, saying in verses 31–32:

“ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι οἱ τελῶναι καὶ αἱ πόρναι προάγουσιν ὑμᾶς εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ. ἦλθεν γὰρ ἰωάννης πρὸς ὑμᾶς ἐν ὁδῶ δικαιοσύνης, καὶ οὐκ ἐπιστεύσατε αὐτῶ· οἱ δὲ τελῶναι καὶ αἱ πόρναι ἐπίστευσαν αὐτῶ· ὑμεῖς δὲ ἰδόντες οὐδὲ μετεμελήθητε ὕστερον τοῦ πιστεῦσαι αὐτῶ.”

This means, as translated in the NRSV:

“Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John [the Baptist] came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.”

This teaching flips the conventional schema about who is righteous on its head. Here Jesus is literally saying that some tax collectors and prostitutes—people whom society at the time regarded as sinful—might enter the Kingdom of God ahead of the most revered and respected religious authorities.

ABOVE: Illustration from a fifteenth-century CE Byzantine manuscript depicting Jesus with John the Baptist

“For there are eunuchs…”

The gospels also portray Jesus as applying a similar attitude towards eunuchs. While the Book of Deuteronomy presents castration as shameful and a disgrace, the gospels portray Jesus as taking exactly the opposite perspective: that, at least in some cases, not having testicles can actually be a good thing.

In the Gospel of Matthew 19:1-9, the Pharisees come to Jesus and they ask him whether it is lawful for a man who has married a woman to divorce his wife. Jesus responds by quoting Genesis and telling the Pharisees that a man may not divorce his wife under any circumstances, unless the wife in question has been unfaithful. Jesus’s disciples are shocked by this teaching and they say to Jesus: “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” Jesus replies to them with the following declaration, in the Gospel of Matthew 19:11–12:

“οὐ πάντες χωροῦσιν τὸν λόγον [τοῦτον], ἀλλ᾽ οἷς δέδοται. εἰσὶν γὰρ εὐνοῦχοι οἵτινες ἐκ κοιλίας μητρὸς ἐγεννήθησαν οὕτως, καὶ εἰσὶν εὐνοῦχοι οἵτινες εὐνουχίσθησαν ὑπὸ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, καὶ εἰσὶν εὐνοῦχοι οἵτινες εὐνούχισαν ἑαυτοὺς διὰ τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν. ὁ δυνάμενος χωρεῖν χωρείτω.”

Here is the passage as it is translated in the NRSV:

“Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”

This passage is extremely relevant to any discussion of Jesus’s teachings about gender and sexuality. Remember that when he uses the word εὐνοῦχοι (eunoûchoi), he’s talking about people with abnormal genitals, who were widely considered in the ancient world to be neither fully male nor fully female.

First, Jesus acknowledges the existence of intersex people who are born with non-normative genitalia. Next, Jesus acknowledges the existence of men who have been forcibly castrated by others. Finally, Jesus implies that any man who believes that he cannot control his own sexual urges should deliberately castrate himself and turn himself into a eunuch “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.”

Obviously, I do not recommend for anyone reading this to try castrating themself at home—not least because this is dangerous and potentially deadly. Nonetheless, what Jesus says in this passage seems to simultaneously undermine what modern conservatives love to insist about the Bible supposedly saying that sex is binary and contradict that law about castration that conservatives love quoting from the Book of Deuteronomy.

ABOVE: Illustration from a fifteenth-century French manuscript depicting a man deliberately cutting off his own testicles and possibly also his penis in literal accordance with Jesus’s statement in the Gospel of Matthew 19:11–12

The baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch

The Gospel of Matthew 19:11–12 is not the only passage in the New Testament that mentions eunuchs. The Book of the Acts of the Apostles 8:26–40 tells a story that the apostle Philip went on the wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza. There, along that road, he met a person who is described in the Greek text as “ἀνὴρ αἰθίοψ εὐνοῦχος δυνάστης κανδάκης βασιλίσσης αἰθιόπων, ὃς ἦν ἐπὶ πάσης τῆς γάζης αὐτῆς.” This means: “an Aithiopian man, a eunuch and a powerful person [at the court] of Queen Kandake of the Aithiopians, who was in charge of her entire treasury.”

As I discuss in this article I published in September 2020, αἰθίοψ (aithíops) is the most common word in Greek for a Black African person, but, in this particular passage, the kingdom that the author is thinking of is clearly the Kingdom of Kush, which, as I discuss in greater depth in this article I wrote about ancient African civilizations in June 2020, controlled the lands south of Egypt along the Nile River in what is now Sudan. The term Kandake was actually a title that was held by certain Kushite royal women during this period, but Greek and Roman authors almost universally mistook it for a personal name.

The eunuch who is described in this passage is almost certainly a person who was born with male genitalia who was forcibly castrated—and perhaps also emasculated—in order to serve at the court of the Kandake of Kush. This person would have been forbidden from taking part in Jewish worship on account of the rule in the Book of Deuteronomy 23:1 and many people in the ancient world, such Aristotle or Augustine, would have regarded him as not fully male on account of his lack of testicles. The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, however, refers to him as an ἀνήρ (anḗr), which means “man,” which suggests that this is how he viewed himself and how he preferred to be addressed.

Moreover, according to the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, Philip noticed that the Aithiopian eunuch was reading a passage from the Book of Isaiah and asked him if he understood what he was reading. The Athiopian eunuch invited Philip to sit with him and explain the passage, so Philip told the eunuch all about Jesus’s teachings and his death and resurrection. The eunuch asked Philip to baptize him in the name of Jesus and Philip did so.

The Aithiopian eunuch in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles 8:26–40 is a not a transgender person; he is a cisgender man who has been castrated. Nonetheless, he is a person whose genitals arguably do not fully align with his gender identity. Despite this, the apostle Philip still welcomes him as an equal and as a fellow Christian. I think that the Aithiopian eunuch therefore potentially provides a model for how Christians may be able to accept transgender people.

ABOVE: The Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch, painted sometime between c. 1625 and c. 1630, attributed to Hendrik van Balen and Jan Brueghel the Younger

Paul’s statement that there is “neither male nor female”

It’s also somewhat ironic that people appeal to the Bible to argue that there are only two genders considering that perhaps the most famous statement about gender in the entire Bible is a statement denying that gender has any relevance in the eyes of God. I am, of course, referring to the apostle Paul’s famous words in his Epistle to the Galatians 3:28, which reads in the original Koine Greek as follows:

“οὐκ ἔνι ἰουδαῖος οὐδὲ ἕλλην, οὐκ ἔνι δοῦλος οὐδὲ ἐλεύθερος, οὐκ ἔνι ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ· πάντες γὰρ ὑμεῖς εἷς ἐστε ἐν χριστῶ ἰησοῦ.”

This means, as translated in the NRSV:

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

This statement seems far more closely in line with what Jesus says in Mark 12:24–25 than anything you are likely to hear from present-day Christian transphobes.

ABOVE: The Predication of Saint Paul, painted c. 1779 by the French Neoclassical painter Joseph-Benoît Suvée

Paul’s condemnation of μαλακοί in 1 Corinthians 6:9–10

Of course, not everything Paul wrote is quite so progressive and inclusive. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians 6:9–10, Paul lists a few types of people whom he believes will not be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. His list reads as follows in the original Koine Greek:

“ἢ οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι ἄδικοι θεοῦ βασιλείαν οὐ κληρονομήσουσιν; μὴ πλανᾶσθε· οὔτε πόρνοι οὔτε εἰδωλολάτραι οὔτε μοιχοὶ οὔτε μαλακοὶ οὔτε ἀρσενοκοῖται οὔτε κλέπται οὔτε πλεονέκται, οὐ μέθυσοι, οὐ λοίδοροι, οὐχ ἅρπαγες βασιλείαν θεοῦ κληρονομήσουσιν.”

People who believe that transgender people go against the Bible simply by existing and being themselves frequently cite the translation of this passage in the King James Version, which reads as follows:

“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

The people who cite this passage usually interpret the word “effeminate” in this passage to refer to transgender women and take this passage as evidence that trans women will burn in the unquenchable fires of Hell for all eternity. This interpretation is, of course, based on the incorrect assumption that trans women can’t really be women and must therefore be effeminate men.

Even if we look past that, though, the translation of this passage in the KJV is rather misleading. Unfortunately, the New Revised Standard Version’s translation of this passage is egregiously terrible—even worse than the KJV’s—so here is my own translation of the passage:

“Or do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Neither the prostitutes, nor the idolaters, nor the adulterers, nor the males who allow other males to sexually penetrate them, nor the males who sexually penetrate other males, nor the thieves, nor the covetous, nor the drunkards, nor the abusive, nor the robbers will inherit the Kingdom of God.”

In Classical Greek, the word μαλακοί (malakoí) literally just means “soft ones” or “softies,” but it is loaded with all sorts of connotations and can carry a whole array of different meanings in different contexts. In this specific context, Paul is most likely using the word to refer specifically to men and boys who voluntarily take the “feminine” or passive role in sex by allowing other males to sexually penetrate them either anally or orally. To put it in modern parlance, he’s specifically talking about gay male “bottoms.”

Paul intentionally pairs the word μαλακοί with the word ἀρσενοκοῖται (arsenokoîtai), which is not attested in any earlier sources; as far as we know, this passage from Paul is the first time that it is ever used. It is clearly formed from the adjective ἄρσην (ársēn), meaning “male,” and κοι- (koi-), which is the o-grade stem of the verb κεῖμαι (keîmai), meaning “to lie down.” The word therefore literally means “those who lie with males.” Paul is most likely using the word in this context to refer specifically to men who sexually penetrate other men and boys either anally or orally. In modern parlance, he’s talking specifically about gay male “tops.”

Thus, Paul is most likely using the words μαλακοί and ἀρσενοκοῖται to refer to two different, specific kinds of men who participate in the specific sexual act of same-gender male penetrative intercourse. Even if someone thinks that trans women are really men, this verse could still only even possibly apply specifically to trans women who participate in penetrative sexual intercourse with men, who make up only a fraction of trans women overall.

As far as this verse’s applicability to present-day gay and bisexual men is concerned, a couple of points are worth mentioning. First, this passage only condemns men who participate in the specific sexual act of same-gender male penetrative intercourse. It makes no mention of same-gender-attracted men who are celibate or who only participate in non-penetrative sexual activities.

Second, it is important to remember the historical context in which Paul wrote this letter. He was writing in the Greek language to the Christian community in the Greek city of Corinth. I therefore strongly suspect that, when he used the words μαλακοί and ἀρσενοκοῖται, he was most likely primarily—if not exclusively—thinking of the participants in Greek-style pederasty.

Greek pederasty typically involved an older partner known as the ἐραστής (erastḗs) and a younger partner known as the ἐρώμενος (erṓmenos). There is intense scholarly debate over the precise details of how this system actually worked in practice, but, speaking very generally, the erastes was most likely usually somewhere in his twenties and the eromenos was most likely usually somewhere in his mid-to-late teenaged years.

Some Greek pederastic relationships in which the eromenos was older and more mature (say, eighteen or nineteen) would probably be acceptable today. Unfortunately, many pederastic relationships were probably exploitative, since it is likely that, in many cases, the eromenos was too young to truly give informed enthusiastic consent. In some cases, the eromenos may have been as young as thirteen or fourteen. Such relationships are widely agreed to be immoral and are illegal in most western countries today.

I doubt that Paul would be a supporter of gay rights if he were alive today. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that the kind of same-gender relationships he had in mind when he wrote 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 aren’t the kind that most people today usually have in mind when they read it.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to c. 480 BCE depicting an erastes and an eromenos kissing

Conclusion

I think that, by now, I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish. It is a scientific fact that biological sex is a complicated spectrum that can’t be perfectly and consistently divided into simple categories of “male” and “female.” Gender identity is also complicated and, for thousands of years, there have been people whose gender identities have not corresponded to the sex they were assigned at birth. Finally, there’s nothing in the Bible that says there are only two genders. In fact, the Bible contains references to people who, in the ancient world, were often considered to be neither completely male nor female.

I don’t think that anything I have said here will be enough to convince someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, since people like her don’t really care about evidence. I do, however, hope that I have convinced some people who might otherwise have taken the assertion that there are only two genders as axiomatically true.