Theology and the End of Gender (original) (raw)

Transgender Theology Blog, 2023

Abstract

“What is a woman?” Now the title of a supremely incurious documentary by conservative American commentator Matt Walsh, this question is also a live one in British political discourse. Rather than an invitation to deeper discussion about the nature of gender, it aims to shut down political questions about trans rights by re-framing the discussion as a kind of competition around sex and gender difference. This competition is focused on the crudely biological, so that more than one journalist has asked Kier Starmer why he ‘struggles with the penis question’ – a demeaning and dehumanising way to talk about the actual trans people affected by policy decisions, but no less predictable for all that. However, ‘what is a woman’ is also a deeply theological question. I don’t just mean that, taken seriously, it raises all sorts of important theological questions, although it does. Rather, is a question which has been debated by Christian theologians for almost as long as there have been Christian theologians, and their discussions have not necessarily followed the routes you might expect.

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