God’s gender isn’t male, female or even binary — so why are we?
A closer look at Hinduism, Christianity and other faith traditions reveals a sacred history of gender fluidity — long before the culture wars made it controversial.
By Rev. Elizabeth Stevens | FāVS News Columnist
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News.
I sometimes do a little exercise where I go through both the male and the female gender constructs, inviting people to raise their hands when they hear something that is true for them. What happens is quite enlightening. People are all over the place. It quickly becomes abundantly clear that the roles assigned to us by the gender binary are not a perfect fit for any of us.
That’s because they are a cultural construct that try to force unique and complex human beings into rigid and narrow categories. It would be like trying to sort all the colors in a box of 128 crayons into two boxes labeled “black” and “white” — only there are over 8 billion different “colors” of people.
Last fall, I taught a class at the University of Idaho on Gender and Religion. It was fascinating to dig a little deeper into how different cultures and religions treat gender. The two sentence version of what I learned is that in every major faith tradition, there’s evidence of support for a belief in the sacredness of all genders.
Every major faith tradition has at various points also been infected by the patriarchy and weaponized to oppress women and queer folk.
What Hinduism teaches about gender
Take, for example, Hinduism. Hindu people tell beautiful myths around gender-fluid gods, and there are stories of gender equality sprinkled throughout their sacred scriptures.
Hijras, people who transition from one gender to another, used to be revered, and were believed to have special powers to bless marriages and children.
Yet in Hindu countries, for hundreds of years, it wasn’t uncommon for widows to throw or be thrown onto their deceased husband’s funeral pyre, a practice known as Sati, which, thank goodness, is no longer practiced.
But what about Christianity? There can be no question that conservative Christians are the driving force behind our country’s current trajectory of demonizing and persecuting people who fall outside of rigid gender norms. However, a closer look at Scripture actually offers a more nuanced point of view.
‘Male and female he created them’ isn’t what you think
Let’s start with the most common passage that is used to attack transgender people: “male and female he created them.”
It’s part of a poem — and just as the creation of day and night doesn’t make dusk or dawn unacceptable or unnatural, and the creation of land and sea doesn’t exclude coastal wetlands, those words were never meant to force humans into a binary. And lest we forget, according to the text, both male and female were created in God’s image.
There are two passages in Deuteronomy — one about wearing the wrong “gender” of clothing and one about eunuchs — that are also used as justification for attacking transgender people. Taken in context, these passages are meant to condemn pagan religious practices, not to forbid people embracing their authentic gender identity.
Additionally, there are all kinds of rules in Deuteronomy, about what kind of fabric we can wear, whether people should have tattoos, how to wear one’s hair, what to eat and what not to eat.
When it comes to Deuteronomic rules that they don’t want to follow, Christians assert that Jesus satisfied the Old Covenant and established a new one. So where is the integrity in pulling out a couple of obscure passages and insisting these are rules that must be followed?
Is God even male?
Then there’s this interesting fact: God, godself, seems to be represented as gender non-conforming in the original text. Most often, whoever wrote the Bible did use masculine words and pronouns for the deity. Most often isn’t always, though.
In the second verse of Genesis, and in other places as well, God is referred to as “Elohim,” which is a feminine noun. God is also described as a mother giving birth and a mother hen. We see words used for God that are plural and genderless. To say that God is male and that there are only two genders is to selectively ignore parts of the very text conservatives claim is inerrant.
Creating God in our image
While it is a statement of faith that we humans are created in God’s image, it’s a statement of fact that humans create God in our image.
Across cultures, the sacred stories we tell all anthropomorphize to try and make God understandable. Sometimes people imagine a God that exemplifies the best of us, and sometimes people imagine a God that displays all of the nasty characteristics we do.
The relevant question is: Do our imaginings help us be better? Or do they reinforce or justify our harmful behaviors?
Why wouldn’t we choose a version of God that centers love? A version of God that helps us bend the arc of the universe toward justice and makes space for complexity and diversity?
Why wouldn’t we embrace as truth the possibility that every single beautiful and unique human being that exists on this beautiful and beleaguered planet is sacred and worthy of respect and care? If we gender God at all, let’s choose a God big enough and complicated enough to hold space for all the ways people are people.
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