It’s in the Washington Post, and — yes — it involves the attempt to use the Bible to justify radical transgender ideology. Here is “bisexual Christian writer” Eliel Cruz explaining why the Bible doesn’t provide meaningful guidance on the gender identity debate. Despite countless verses that discuss the different roles for men and women, the creation story which clearly details that God created mankind as “male and female,” and even a clear prohibition against men or women passing themselves as members of the opposite sex (“A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this”), Cruz insists all this inapplicable. Why? Because the Bible is talking about cross-dressing, not transgender identities.
I’m not making this up. Here’s Cruz on Deuteronomy:
That verse talks about cross-dressing . . . Being trans is not cross-dressing. It is embodying a gender that does not align with the one that was given at birth.
According to his reasoning, if a pregnant man wore female maternity clothes, then “he’d” be a cross-dresser and condemned in scripture. But it gets better. Here’s Cruz on creation:
An anti-trans understanding of the Genesis story also lacks context. Gender and sex are different things. They don’t always align, and neither is binary. The biological reality of intersex individuals is a testament to that. The biological and psychological reality of transgender and intersex individuals needs to be the context in which Christians read scripture.
Wait just a moment, isn’t he simply presuming away the entire argument? The alleged existence of a gender/sex distinction is the key question on the table. Is it really true that a biological female is “really” a male because she “feels” male (and given the Left’s thorough deconstruction of gender roles, what does it even mean to “feel” male)? Or is it the case that this feeling represents a disorder — a problem — for which there should be compassion, counseling, and treatment? In this context, the concept of a created order is of vital importance, as is the concept of men and women fulfilling separate (and complementary) roles within that order. Cruz takes an ideological construct as gospel, then reads scripture in the light of his concocted beliefs.
But this is nothing new for progressive Christians. The biblical same-sex marriage “debate” may have been one of the saddest jokes in theological history. Every single time the Bible refers to same-sex sexual contact, it condemns it clearly and unequivocally — often in the harshest possible terms. Liberal theologians took that reality and created a theory where the Bible was “really” only talking about weird temple cult practices of the ancient pagan world (or Roman orgies), and then argued that the Bible didn’t condemn the “loving, monogamous” gay relationship — as if those kinds of relationships never existed before modern times.
Intellectual or theological integrity is beside the point, however. What matters is that articles like this simply exist. Now lazy academics and gullible Christians have all the hyperlinks they need to prove that the issue is “open to interpretation” or even that the Bible endorses the latest permutation of the sexual revolution.
Back when I was practicing commercial litigation, cynical lawyers used to say of expert witnesses, “You can find a Ph.D. to say anything you want.” The same goes, apparently, for progressive believers. The radicals make up the theories; some liberal Christian somewhere will make up the biblical excuse.