Transgenderism took center stage in America when Bruce Jenner announced his gender transition in 2015. He quickly amassed millions of followers on social media, was featured on the covers of magazines, and was declared the “woman of the year” on various award shows.
For decades preceding his announcement, the psychiatric community officially considered transsexualism a diagnosable mental disorder. Then in 2013, gender identity disorder was changed from a disorder to a dysphoria in the psychiatric industry bible, the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” As one journalist put it, this change “shifted the emphasis in treatment from fixing a disorder to resolving distress over the mismatch” between one’s birth gender and identity.
After Jenner’s transition, voices across society advocated for the widespread acceptance of transgenderism. It was no longer a disorder requiring treatment. Instead, it was simply a decision requiring affirmation, if not celebration. This sudden shift led to discussions and debates about pronouns, bathrooms, surgeries, and hormone therapy.
The winds of public sentiment are prone to shifting on transgenderism. In terms of public policy, it seems headed in a direction more consistent with Judeo-Christian values. However, in a country like the U.S. where the whims of the electorate can change suddenly, Christians should have little confidence in the staying power of the present moment. Instead, they need to root their beliefs in something more solid than celebrities and policymakers.
What does the Bible teach about the relationship between our biological sex and gender identity? This is the question Christians need to consider, and it’s the question Robert Smith sets out to answer in his new book, “The Body God Gives: A Biblical Response to Transgender Theory” (Lexham Academic, 2025). In this volume, Smith argues we can only conclude from a study of Scripture that “the sexed body reveals and determines the gendered self” (15).
Smith, an ordained Anglican minister and lecturer in theology, ethics, and music ministry at Sydney Missionary and Bible College in Australia, offers a scholarly explanation of the biblical claims about biological sex and gender identity while interacting with trans-affirming interpretations. The author has done evangelicals a great service with the depth and scope of his research. It will serve as a defining volume and standard textbook in Christian ethics for years to come.
Though the book offers a thorough and thoughtful examination of the issues, the conclusion is simple: God only and always creates humans as male or female. And the body God gives us governs and guides our gender identity.
Sex is biological. We are either male or female based on the sexual reproductive organs God gives us. Gender refers to the social and psychological dimensions of how we operate and understand our place in the world as either men or women. Our gender identity impacts how we relate to others and how they relate to us.
God’s design for humanity is that our biological sex determines our gender identity. To disconnect or disregard our biological sex when it comes to our gender identity is disobedient to God, harmful to ourselves, and injurious to our relationships with others.
The Authoritative Self
Every day, we don’t merely have experiences. We also interpret those experiences. For better or worse, we try to fit them into a story that helps us make sense of God, the world, and our place in it. For Christians, we must interpret our experiences through the lens of Scripture. As Smith puts it, “It is essential that Scripture be allowed to govern and guide, illumine and evaluate, confirm and correct the interpretation and application of all other sources of knowledge” (49).
The change over the last decade regarding transgenderism is the outworking of a longstanding presupposition underlying modern Western culture: the self is authoritative. This principle means we are the authoritative interpreter who gets to decide the meaning and significance of our experiences and perceptions. If we decide that our gender identity differs from our sexed body, then we have an unquestionable right to remedy it through surgical procedures and hormone therapies.
In this mode of existence, our self-perception is more determinative and final than our biological sex. Or to put it in more Christian terms, the decision about my identity belongs to me and not the God who made me. Individual autonomy and self-determination are nothing new in American society. They have become synonymous with the pursuit of happiness. But their roots go back further than the founding of America (125).
In more recent times, according to Smith, the transgender movement has been influenced by Michel Foucault.
He, like no other before him, prosecuted the case that what we think of as natural, is in fact, cultural; what we think of as objective is, in fact, subjective; what we think of as freedom is, in fact, oppression…Because categorization is a form of control, the best way for control to be resisted is for categories to be denaturalized and deconstructed (125-26).
The transgender movement reflects a culture whose core belief is that the self is supreme and any attempt to restrain or challenge it is oppressive. Transgenderism found legitimacy in the academy before taking center stage in pop culture. Smith devotes a section to summarizing the history of gender studies and analyzing its primary texts before turning his attention to the claims of the Bible.
The Biblical Texts
Smith spends half the book journeying through Scripture, stopping to offer an in-depth analysis of key passages cited in transgender discussions. He starts where the Bible does, with the creation of Adam and Eve.
When God created our first parents before sin ever entered the world, Moses tells us, “male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). As a result, “Sex binary is basic to the divine design” (207). The creation account compels us to conclude that every human has something they share with one another (the image of God) while also something that differentiates them from one another (male or female).
As Smith observes, “Sexed embodiment, then, not only enables us to represent God and exercise dominion in his world, but it determines our sexed identity (as male or female), establishes our gendered relationships (as son or daughter, brother or sister, etc.), and signals our potential marital and reproductive roles (as husband or wife, father or mother)” (209).
God made us material creatures and assigned us sexual reproductive organs. The psychological components of our gender identity are governed by our biological sex. As Smith states, “Psychology is designed to be informed by biology, the perceiving mind by the objective body” (274).
If you need to know how God wants you to present yourself to the world, you need to look at the body he gave you. Our bodies are gifts to be received, not problems to be solved. When we hide, change, or destroy the bodies God has given us, we exchange “the truth of God for a lie” (Romans 1:25).
Adam and Eve’s sin began with doubt about God’s goodness before it evolved into outright disobedience. Similarly, Smith argues the “transgender temptation” begins with “doubt about the goodness or reality of one’s sexed body” before it results in “disobedience in the form of cross-gender identification and cross-sex presentation” (292).
When they sinned, not only did Adam and Eve hide from God, they hid their sexual distinctiveness from each other. As Moses tells us, “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Genesis 3:7). Sexual shame and dysfunction are introduced into God’s world and continue to manifest themselves today in various ways.
Smith goes on to consider the commands in Deuteronomy that forbade cross-sex presentation (Deuteronomy 22:5) and the prohibition of eunuchs from participating in sacred assemblies (Deuteronomy 23:1). Moving into the New Testament, we discover the mission of the church now includes introducing eunuchs to the good news of Jesus and baptizing them into the life of his church (Acts 8:34-40). Those who were previously kept out are now incorporated into the new community Christ is building.
Of all his exegetical insights, Smith is at his best when meditating on the embodiment of Jesus as male. Having been miraculously conceived, the male body of Jesus was dependent on the female body of Mary for life and nourishment. The incarnation reinforces the divine importance of biological distinctions. “Both pre- and post-partum, the Son of God depended for his human life on the reality and integrity of Mary’s sex” (326).
God calls his children to conform to Christ’s character, not his gender. Smith explores New Testament passages regarding gender before concluding, “As the New Testament makes plain, christoformity includes learning to see ourselves and express ourselves sexually in ways that accord with God’s creational purpose for the particular sex given to each of us” (332).
At the resurrection of the dead, sexual distinctiveness will be retained even when we are fully glorified. As the “Westminster Confession” states, “At the last day, such as are found alive shall not die, but be changed: and all the dead shall be raised up, with the selfsame bodies, and none other (although with different qualities), which shall be united again to their souls forever” (32:2, emphasis added).
The Pastoral Issues
If you are looking for a book to put into the hands of a person considering a gender transition, this is likely not the book for them. The purpose of this volume is not pastoral, but scholarly, interacting with the claims and writings of gender-affirming scholars as well as the claims of Scripture.
The struggle experienced by people who perceive a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender is real. Gender dysphoria can be due to physical issues. For a very small percentage of people, there are problems at birth when it comes to their biological sex due to the malformation of their reproductive organs (95). In these cases, “difficulty in discerning whether someone is male or female does not mean they are neither” (85).
Gender dysphoria can also result from things done to people or observed by them. Sexual abuse and trauma can lead people to perceive their God-given gender as undesirable. But gender confusion also results from spiritual issues. People refuse to acknowledge and live in alignment with the sexed body God has assigned to them.
Our first parents tried to understand the world apart from God when they took the fruit and ate it. Instead of clarity, it resulted in confusion, shame, and isolation. Gender dysphoria and sexual confusion aren’t new. As long as we tarry in a sin-riddled world, the church will have to patiently answer questions from people who are sincerely confused about themselves, the world, and their place in it.
If you’re looking for another weapon to use in the culture war, this book isn’t for you. Smith doesn’t offer advice on public policy or preferred pronouns. Instead, he provides a theological interpretation of Scripture for “the church of the living God, which is the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15).
For those interested in guidance on how the visible church can address these issues, I’d encourage you to consider the report from the PCA’s Ad Interim Committee on Human Sexuality.
The Good News
As Christians, we must patiently and faithfully proclaim the truth of God’s design for humans when it comes to sex and gender. And we are also compelled to say this: transgenderism isn’t an unforgivable sin. Though it is a clear violation of God’s design and directives, God forbid that any person think they have sinned themselves out of the reach of God’s love or outside the possibility of entrance into his kingdom because of their transgenderism.
Jesus stands ready to receive Bruce Jenner into his kingdom along with any others who have pursued an identity different from the body God gave them. Jesus lived, died, and was raised victorious over sin, including the sin of distorting the body and setting aside the identity he gave you. As Smith reminds us, “No bodily deformity, including genital mutilation, can prevent those who ‘draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith’ from entering ‘the holy places by the blood of Jesus’” (318).
Anyone who repents, confesses the reality of their transgression, and casts themselves on Christ as their only hope can be assured of God’s forgiveness and eternal fellowship with him. To the transgendered person, the message of the church is the same as it is for anyone: repent and believe the gospel. For those who do, our Savior welcomes the penitent while saying to them, “Go and sin no more.”
Andy Jones is the editor of byFaith and a teaching elder in Tennessee Valley Presbytery.