God created human beings in his image as male and female (Gen. 1:26–27). Our bodies are good gifts given to us by God that we are to use for his glory (1 Cor. 6:12–20). As a God of order and design, God opposes the confusion of man as woman and woman as man.[6] This point about confusion is the extended argument Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16. The passage is complicated and full of interpretive questions about the nature of women’s hairstyles and head coverings in the first century Roman world. But thankfully the overarching point is simple and clear: it is disgraceful for a man to take on the appearance of a woman, and it is disgraceful for a woman to take on the appearance of a man (1 Cor. 11:14–15). 

According to the American Psychological Association, “Transgender is an umbrella term for persons whose identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.” At the heart of the APA’s definition—and at the heart of the transgender movement itself—is a sharp distinction between sex and gender.

As many use the word today, sex has to do with biology, with chromosomes, with hormones, with internal and external anatomy. Sex, they tell us, is “assigned at birth” based on these biological realities.

By contrast, gender identity, we are told, has to do with how a person feels, with someone’s internal sense of identity, and with how a person chooses to express this identity through clothing, hairstyle, voice, appearance, behavior, names, and pronouns. Gender, on this account, is socially constructed and need not correspond to sex as biologically defined. On this understanding, not only are sex and gender separated, but people need not be constrained by two gender choices (non-binary) or by any fixed gender at all (gender fluid).

The purpose of this article is to explore what the Bible says about this constellation of beliefs. We will see that the Bible does not support transgenderism. Instead, God has created each of us as either male or female, and he desires that we live our lives—in appearance, in attitude, and in behavior—according to our biological sex.

In support of this conclusion, let me highlight four essential biblical truths about being male and female.

Truth #1: Our Bodies Matter

The only life we have to live here on earth is the life of the whole person, body and soul. All our hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, adventures and failures are experienced as embodied persons. Everything we do to love God and love our neighbors, or to rebel against God and mistreat our neighbors, we do as embodied persons. As John Kleinig puts it in his excellent book Wonderfully Made, “All human life on earth shares the same common condition: it is lived life in the body.”[1]

Many people have an ambivalent relationship to their bodies. While it may seem that our culture thinks too much about the body—being obsessed with looking good, losing weight, and preventing the natural effects of aging—the opposite is also true: we think too little of our bodies. Even with all our scientific knowledge, we do not marvel at the complexity, beauty, and intricate design of the human body. Truth be told, many of us hate our bodies. We deem them too dark or too pale, too skinny or too fat, too gray, too slow, too weak, too wrinkled, too unattractive. Many of us would rather be free from the shame and the burdens we associate with our bodies.

And yet, God’s word tells us a different story. God formed our inward parts; God knitted us together in our mother’s womb (Ps. 139:13). Even though we feel the effects of the Fall in our bodies, still each one of us is fearfully and wonderfully made (v. 14). The fact that the perfect Son of God took on human flesh means that embodiment is not inherently dirty or evil. The fact that Christ was resurrected and now reigns in heaven as the perpetual God-man means that the human body is not antithetical to the deepest union and communion with God. The fact that our final hope is the resurrection of the dead means that embodiment is good and desirable, and that without our bodies our redemption would be incomplete (Rom. 8:23).

Before we can address the claims of transgenderism directly, we must think about our bodies in the right way. God isn’t just concerned with the inner world of our thoughts, desires, beliefs, and feelings. The Bible commands us: “Glorify God in your body” (1 Cor. 6:20). Our arms and legs, our eyes and ears, our hands and feet, our sexual organs are agents for honoring God or dishonoring him. The human person is not like a puppet whose mouth and limbs are moved by an external agent separate from the puppet itself. Neither is the human person like a machine whose external functions are controlled by an internal processor that can be pulled from that machine and placed in another machine. Think of how often Jesus physically touched someone’s body or was touched by someone else (Mark 1:41; 5:27, 41; 6:56; 7:33; 8:23; 9:27). Jesus understood what our world can implicitly deny—namely, that our bodies are not incidental to who we are. Our bodies matter to God, and they should matter to us.

Truth #2: Our Bodies Are Given to Us as a Gift

It is an obvious biblical truth—stated clearly already in the very first chapter of the Bible—that we are created beings (Gen. 1:26–27). This is not just true of Adam and Eve, but of every human being descended from them (Gen. 5:1–2). Our lives, our souls, our bodies, our whole selves are a gift from God.

This simple truth—that God created each one of us—means that we did not create ourselves (Ps. 100:3). We did not cause ourselves to be born. We did not put our skin and bones and organs and muscles together. We did not decide whether to be male or female, or what color eyes to be born with, or whether we would come out of the womb hairy as a chimney sweeper or bald as a cue ball. Our bodies were given to us.

To put the same truth in a different way, the Bible insists that there is a given-ness to the body. If there is one fundamental error in transgender ideology, it is the lie that says our material bodies are malleable, while our immaterial feelings and sense of identity are sacrosanct. Transgenderism only “works” if we assume that when our bodies tell us one thing, and our internal feelings and perceptions tell us another thing, that our bodies must be mistaken. This is not the way the Bible understands the body. The truth is that I am more than just my thoughts and desires and beliefs and feelings; I am body and soul. Our bodies were created for us, and they are us. As Kleinig puts it, “We cannot appreciate the complexity, beauty, and mystery of the human body unless we realize that it is given to us. We do not make our bodies; they are made for us. They are provided for us with all their main characteristics.”[2]

One of the ironies of our age is that outside of transgenderism, most people are adamant that the objective realities of the body must not be supplanted by what we think and feel. If someone has white skin, they should not identify as black. If someone is European by descent, they should not identify as Asian. If a healthy teenage girl thinks she is drastically overweight, her parents will tell her that the negative assessment of her body is wrong. If a man smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, his doctor will warn him about the objective harm he is doing to his body whether he thinks he is in danger or not. Men and women are told to get early screenings so we can detect breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, or other maladies because we know that if the body tells us something—even something we don’t want to hear—we need to listen to our bodies.

One of the reasons that transgenderism makes sense in our day is because we do not want to think of our bodies as imposing limits and constraints. We like to think that we are free to become whoever and whatever we want. But such “freedom” is neither good for us nor, in the end, possible. By definition, human bodies must deal with limits and constraints.