This month, Representative-elect Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware, became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.  Her historic election follows a campaign season in which both Mr. Trump and many other Republican candidates (including, here in Pennsylvania, successful Senate candidate David McCormick) made opposing the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and specifically transgender persons a keystone of their campaigns.  Now, President-elect Donald Trump “says he will affirm that God made only two genders, male and female.”

So what does that mean for Representative-elect McBride?  Just last week,

Both of the Genesis creation accounts refer not simply to God’s generic creation of humanity, but specifically to the creation of women and men. Genesis 1:27 says,

God created humanity in God’s own image,
        in the divine image God created them,
            male and female God created them.

Genesis 2 describes the special creation of the woman from the very stuff of the man.  In its climax, this account of creation declares, “This is the reason that a man leaves his father and mother and embraces his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen 2:24).

Many interpreters have therefore concluded that Genesis presents the union of male and female as God’s intention for humanity, and indeed for all the natural world.  By this reading, same-sex intercourse, since it does not involve a union of differences, violates God’s will, as does any blurring of the distinctions between male and female.  New Testament scholar N. T. Wright proposes that our gender identity cannot be separated from our physical being, which is a part of God’s good creation.

But I am not persuaded that Genesis must be read in that way.  Note, after all, that rather than the traditional “Let us make man” in Genesis 1:26 (so KJV, RSV, ESV; NIV reads “mankind”), the CEB has, “Let us make humanity” (compare NRSVue).   This is not, as some may claim, an instance of political correctness, but is rather a matter of accurate translation. In Hebrew, the word for “man” is ‘ish (see Gen 2:23-24); the word for “male” is zakar (see Gen 1:27). But the word used in Gen 1:26 is ‘adam, which means not “man,” but “humanity.” It is particularly important that we translate ‘adam correctly, because Genesis 1:27 goes on very plainly to state, “male and female God created them.”

Phyllis Bird proposes that the additional designation “male and female” is necessitated by the statement that ‘adam is made in God’s image, since God is genderless: “There is no message of shared dominion here, no word about the distribution of roles, responsibility, and authority between the sexes, no word of sexual equality” (“ ‘Male and Female He Created Them’: Gen 1:27b in the Context of the Priestly Account of Creation,” Harvard Theological Review 74 [1981]: 151).

It must be said, however, that Bird’s restriction on the meaning and application of Gen 1:26-27 seems overstated. After all, the blessing in Gen 1:28 is not addressed expressly to males, but addresses ‘adam collectively:

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, and everything crawling on the ground.”

To be sure, Israel’s traditions were not always equal to this insight! Yet here it is, at the very beginning of the Bible. Men and women alike are made in God’s image.  Sexism is denied any place in God’s ordered world.

Further, there may indeed be a hint here about how God might be viewed. While admittedly, male images of God predominate in Scripture, female images as well can be found.  In Proverbs 8, the sages of ancient Israel describe divine Wisdom itself as a woman.  In the Psalms, God appears as a midwife (Ps 22:9-10), while in Hosea 11:3-4, God speaks as a mother:

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;
        I took them up in my arms,
        but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them
        with bands of human kindness,
        with cords of love.
    I treated them like those
        who lift infants to their cheeks;
        I bent down to them and fed them.

Similarly, Jesus cries out to Jerusalem, “How often I wanted to gather your people together, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you didn’t want that” (Matt 23:37//Lk 13:34).  God is neither male nor female, for neither masculinity nor femininity can fully capture the Divine.  Indeed, both masculinity and femininity reflect aspects of God, who makes all humankind, of every gender, race, and nation, “in our image, according to our likeness” (Gen 1:26 NRSV).

Attempts, then, to derive from Genesis 1:27 a rebuke of transgender persons, or the affirmation of a rigid sexual binary as the God-imposed norm, are seriously misplaced.

While in Genesis 1 the creation of humanity is described as a single act, Genesis 2 describes the special creation of woman. After creating the human (Hebrew ha’adam), God recognizes a problem: “Then the LORD God said, ‘It’s not good that the human is alone. I will make him a helper that is perfect for him'” (Gen 2:18).

So the LORD God put the human [Hebrew ha’adam] into a deep and heavy sleep, and took one of his ribs [Hebrew ‘akhad mitsal’otaw] and closed up the flesh over it. With the rib [Hebrew tsela’] taken from the human [Hebrew ha’adam], the LORD God fashioned a woman [Hebrew ‘ishah] and brought her to the human being [Hebrew ha’adam] (Gen 2:21-22).

While most translations render the word tsela’ as “rib,” based on its use in related Semitic languages as well as in Late Hebrew and Aramaic, in the Hebrew Bible this term always means “side”: for example, the side of the Ark in Exod 25:12; the side of the Tabernacle in Exod 26:20; a hillside in 2 Sam 16:13; one of two double doors in 1 Kgs 6:34.  Accordingly, in the rabbinic commentary on Genesis, R. Samuel bar Nahman says,

“When the Holy One, blessed be he, created the first man, he created him with two faces, then sawed him into two and made a back on one side and a back on the other.” When some objected that God had taken only a rib from ha’adam, “He said to them, ‘It was one of his sides, as you find written in Scripture, ‘And for the second side [tsela’] of the tabernacle’ (Ex. 26:20)’” (Bereshit Rabbah 8.1).

Rather than the Woman being made from a relatively insignificant portion of the Man, as is often held, Gen 2:20-21 describes major surgery: the Lord God uses one entire side of the original Human to fashion the Woman, basically splitting ha’adam in two!

Phyllis Trible notes that sexual gender first enters the Hebrew text of this creation account at Gen 2:23-24. Prior to this, the Human is always addressed as ha‘adam, which as we have seen means “the Human,” and not “man.”  But now, for the first time, the explicitly gendered terms Woman (‘ishah) and Man (‘ish) are used. Trible proposes,

In other words, sexuality is simultaneous for woman and man. . . . Man as male does not precede woman as female, but happens concurrently with her. Hence, the first act of creation in Genesis 2 is the creation of androgyny (2:7), and the last is the creation of sexuality (2:27) (“Eve and Adam: Genesis 2—3 Reread,” in Womenspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow [Harper & Row, 1979], 76.  Originally published in Andover Newton Quarterly 13 [1973]).

Intriguingly, this idea—that both sexes were present in the first Human–is also proposed in Bereshit Rabbah 8.1:

Said R. Jeremiah b. Eleazar, “When the Holy One, blessed be he, came to create the first man, he made him androgynous, as it is said, ‘Male and female created he them’.” 

The Late Hebrew word used here is indeed ‘androgiynos, a loanword from the Greek. In his translation, Harry Freedman (Midrash Rabbah, Genesis, Vol. 1 [London: Soncino, 1939], 54) has “an hermaphrodite [bisexual],” and observes in a footnote, “Normally androgynos means one whose genitals are male and female, but here it means two bodies, male and female, joined together.”   Hence R. Samuel bar Nahman, as we have seen, understands God in Gen 2:27 to saw that original hermaphrodite apart, into male and female halves!

The Greek and Latin versions of Genesis address the problem of how to reference the first Human by introducing the personal name “Adam” at Gen 2:19 (note that the KJV follows them in this!): the point in the narrative where the Woman’s origin story begins.  The generic Human becomes a very specific person, with a name, once relationship with another created person comes into play. Certainly, whether we are persuaded by Trible and the rabbis or not, it is far from clear that Genesis requires a distinct line between male and female.

Another text often cited in this conversation is Deuteronomy 22:5:

Women must not wear men’s clothes, and men must not wear women’s clothes. Everyone who does such things is detestable [Hebrew to’ebah] to the LORD your God.

That same word, to’ebah, is famously used in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13.  The first reads, “You must not have sexual intercourse with a man as you would with a woman; it is a detestable practice.”  The second goes further: “If a man has sexual intercourse with a man as he would with a woman, the two of them have done something detestable. They must be executed; their blood is on their own heads.”  The word rendered “detestable” in the CEB (see also the NIV) was translated in the KJV as “abomination.”

Leviticus 18 and 20 are purity legislation.  This is, in fact, what Lev 18:26-28 explicitly states:

You must not do any of these detestable things, neither citizen nor immigrant who lives with you (because the people who had the land before you did all of these detestable things and the land became unclean), so that the land does not vomit you out because you have made it unclean, just as it vomited out the nations that were before you.

In Leviticus, to’ebah is not about ethics or morality, but about ritual impurity and defilement: these are acts which defile the land, making it unclean. Of course, male homosexuality (note that nothing is said here about women engaging in same-sex relations) is grouped in these chapters with other “abominations” such as incest (18:6-18), child sacrifice (18:21), and bestiality (18:23)–actions anyone would regard not merely as unacceptable, but as grotesquely immoral.  But here, they are condemned not as the moral offenses they clearly are, but specifically because they defile the land.

After all, also among these “abominations,” and in no way distinguished from the others,  is this command: “You must not approach a woman for sexual contact during her menstrual uncleanness” (Lev 18:19).  During her menstrual period (Lev 15:19–23), neither the woman herself nor anything she lies or sits upon are to be touched, because she is ritually unclean–so obviously, in this worldview, men should avoid sexual relations with menstruating women. But earlier in this book (Leviticus 15:24), the man who has sex with a woman during her period merely shares in her impurity—like her, “he will be unclean for seven days.”  Leviticus 18 and 20 go far beyond this:

If a man sleeps with a woman during her menstrual period and has sexual contact with her, he has exposed the source of her blood flow and she has uncovered the same. Both of them will be cut off from their people (Lev 20:18).

I have written about these verses in greater detail  before.  Put briefly, they come from a section of Leviticus called the Holiness Code (Lev 17—26), which “democratizes” the idea of holiness: not only are the priests and the sacred objects pertaining to worship set apart as belonging to God, but all of Israel is God’s, and so is called to a higher standard of commitment, service, and ritual purity: “You must be holy, because I, the LORD your God, am holy” (Lev 19:2).  In the radical view of ritual purity the Holiness Code upholds, sexual contact with a menstruating woman is to’ebah: an abomination to be punished by exile from the community (compare Ezek 18:6; and 22:11, where to’ebah may refer to Lev 18:19 and 20:18).

Likely, this is the idea back of Deut 22:5 as well: rather than affirming an inflexible gender binary, this verse regards cross dressing as a ritually defiling act. After all, this same chapter goes on to condemn planting a vineyard with two different kinds of seed, plowing a field with two different types of animal, and making a garment with two types of thread, and further requires fringes at the corners of every garment.  Clearly these are not moral judgments; they are purity regulations. Like not eating pork (Lev 11:2-8) or shellfish (Lev 11:9-12), they are lifestyle choices that make Israel culturally distinctive.

So–no.  I do not believe that the Bible compels us to regard maleness and femaleness as inflexibly fixed.  We can affirm masculinity and femininity as God’s good creation without denying the created goodness of those whose gender does not fit into those traditional boxes.  Certainly, the Bible does not support the graceless inhospitality, prejudice, and hatred toward a duly and properly elected colleague demonstrated by Reps. Mace and Johnson.