God’s transcendence of sex does not involve ignoring chromosomes.
The comment of the Democrats’ Texas Senate nominee that has drawn the most flak is probably that “God is nonbinary.” He made the comment in a speech opposing a 2021 bill requiring K–12 student athletes to participate in sports based on the sex indicated on their original birth certificates.
Talarico, then and now a state representative, started by claiming that the bill endangers the lives of kids who identify as transgender, and that the bill amounts to “picking on kids.” Then he turned to the Bible, saying:
God is both masculine and feminine, and everything in between. God is nonbinary. In Genesis 1:26, God speaks of God’s Self in the plural, saying, Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. That’s the infinite multitude of God: the masculine, the feminine, and everything in between. Trans children are God’s children, made in God’s own image. There’s nothing wrong with them, nothing at all. They are perfect, they are beautiful, and they are sacred. Bullying children is immoral. It’s a sin, a special kind of sin.
Some of this, stripped out of context, is Christian orthodoxy. As the Catholic catechism puts it, “God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God.”
But Scripture and Christian orthodoxy also affirm that human beings are not God and do not transcend sex the way God does. People who consider themselves nonbinary are not nonbinary in the way God is, and God isn’t nonbinary in the sense self-described nonbinary people are. God’s transcendence of sex does not involve ignoring chromosomes.
Second: Christian supporters of the bill do not deny that children who consider themselves transgender are made in God’s image, and it is demagogic to say they do. Those supporters may not consider trans children “perfect,” since nearly all human beings — in Catholic teaching, there are only two exceptions; in most Protestant teaching, there is only one — are marked by original sin. But it’s the people on Talarico’s side of trans arguments who believe these children are so imperfect, so flawed, that they were “born in the wrong body” and require drastic surgical or hormonal transformation.
His argument against the bill, which passed over his vote and became law, consisted of the evidence-free, hysterical assertion that it will cost children’s lives; the misreading of Scripture; the argument-free assertion that the bill is nothing but “bullying children” (he throws in the adjective “hateful” at the end); and absolutely nothing else. Don’t listen to the speech if you’re looking for anything so banal as an explanation for why female student-athletes should have to go up against biologically male competitors.