“Transforming is a classic example of reader-response hermeneutics. This school of thought focuses on a text’s effect on the reader or audience, not on what the inspired authors intended to communicate. For example, Hartke suggests that the physicality of Jesus’s resurrected body legitimizes sex-change surgeries.”

Austen Hartke’s Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians is a book by a self-identified transgender Christian man attempting to make a biblical and theological case for the inclusion of transgender persons in the church. “Inclusion” is one of the underlying themes of the book and is a concept that drives Christian discourse around transgenderism. But often it’s not fully defined. Everyone—liberal or conservative—agrees that inclusion is a laudable and essential ethic for the church to embrace. Jesus Christ ministered to the despised and rejected, insisting that his kingdom is meant exactly for those the world despises.

At the same time, everyone acknowledges there are some criteria for evaluating what ought to be praised and affirmed under the banner of inclusion. All professing Christians would agree there are some ways of living that are deeply incompatible with God’s kingdom. The church doesn’t sanction every identity, perception, or desire simply by inclusive fiat. After all, the Bible posits ethical criteria for evaluating whether someone’s identity, perception, or desire is appropriate, moral, and conforms to God’s revelation.

The question isn’t whether transgender-identified persons possess dignity and worth. Up for debate is whether a transgender identity is biblically permissible or edifying based on what Scripture says about God making us male and female in his image. Christians should declare the image-bearing dignity of all persons as a general category, since every human being is a unique, precious creation bearing God’s image and deserving respect and kindness. This includes those who identify as transgender.

But this isn’t the type of inclusion Hartke argues for in Transforming. Hartke argues that anything less than full affirmation of transgender identities fails to be inclusive and robs transgender persons of both dignity and identity. The discussion about what inclusive does and doesn’t mean is crucial. Unfortunately, Hartke tries to justify transgender identities with arguments foreign to the Bible’s teaching about male and female.

Summary

Hartke’s book is a combination of personal memoir, biblical exegesis, theological interpretation, and narratives of self-identified transgender persons. The main argument is that transgender identities are compatible with the Christian faith—when the Bible is rescued from cultural bias and from inflexible biblical interpretations that rely on simplistic binaries.

In chapter 1, readers are confronted with the hardships that transgender individuals encounter in America at the hands of religious conservatives. Affirming transgender identities, Hartke argues, would alleviate stress and the disproportionate suicide rate in the transgender community. The book insists there is nothing wrong with a transgender identity, and that problems encountered by transgender individuals are the result of internalized shame flowing from minority stress. Removing any hint of stigma or disapproval is one of the book’s chief aims.

In chapter 2, readers learn about the ever-expanding list of definitions that accommodate the worldview of gender fluidity. Transforming goes so far as to argue that sex—not just gender—is socially constructed because XX or XY chromosomes are meaningless to determine identity. “It’s humans who make that distinction and who decide what is within the range of normal for a particular category,” Hartke writes. In Hartke’s view, a human is a blank canvas awaiting self-creation.

Hartke relies on “Brain Sex Theory” to prove the existence of transgender identities, comparing the brain scans of transgender men (biological females) to cisgender men, and transgender women (biological males) to cisgender women. Hartke concludes:

Parts of the brains of transgender people seem to match their true gender, rather than their assigned sex, though we don’t yet know if this difference is something that exists when the person is born or something that develops over time.

Hartke claims that brain similarities explain transgender identities, though on the next page Hartke acknowledges there’s no known cause for why people experience gender-identity conflicts. This seems to be a contradiction. Chapter 3 looks at a framework for understanding transgender identities—is it a sin, sickness, or specialty? Hartke is convinced that the biodiversity of creation allows for a broader conceptualization of human existence other than just male or female and that a transgender identity reflects the diversity of creation.

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