Faith, Gender, and the Sacred Binary: A Theological Examination of the SCOTUS Transgender Athlete Ruling

While doing research for an analysis of the recent Supreme Court ruling on transgender athletes, I came across two very different pieces on faith and transgender identity. One was from Focus on the Family (FOTF). The other from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

My initial research thesis stated that Christian Nationalist theology uses the binary gender as a divine order, which reads transgender identity as a disorder or distortion — with the implicit logic that trans people are, at minimum, confused sinners and, at maximum, threats to a sacred structure. Complementarianism supposes that God created us as male and female. The two genders have specific roles within society and the family. It is patriarchal — men are leaders and women are followers. A transgender individual, in this reading, is in defiance of this God-given order. While it does not explicitly state that transgender individuals are predators, it constructs the theological architecture that makes that framing available and coherent to its audience.

By contrast, the HRC article demonstrates that the non-affirming reading of Scripture requires significant selective omission and ignores a substantial body of text that complicates the binary. In particular, it focuses on instances in which the Bible speaks of eunuchs as examples of those outside the complementarian binary.

The HRC Foundation piece treats Scripture as a living text requiring contextual interpretation, historical scholarship, and pastoral attentiveness to human outcomes. It engages seriously with the actual Hebrew and Greek contexts, cites peer-reviewed scholarship, and applies what it calls the “good fruit / bad fruit” test from Matthew 7 — essentially asking whether a theological position produces human flourishing or harm.

The Focus on the Family piece treats Scripture as a fixed rulebook delivering binary, self-evident truths. Its hermeneutic is essentially proof-texting: Genesis 1:27 establishes male and female; therefore, deviation is disorder. Scholarship, historical context, and lived experience are treated as threats rather than tools for interpretation.

Two Frameworks, One Text

Both documents engage Genesis, but diverge sharply in method. The HRC piece notes that Genesis 1 establishes binaries as bookends, not exhaustive categories — dawn exists between day and night, estuaries between land and sea — and argues the text was never meant to be a taxonomy. FOTF reads the same passage as a definitive categorical separation that mirrors God’s own separating acts in creation, treating the binary as sacred architecture.

The FOTF piece doesn’t just oppose transgender identity — it requires complementarian gender hierarchy as its theological foundation. The document explicitly argues that male and female roles are essential to God’s metaphor: husbands symbolize God’s initiative; wives symbolize Israel’s response. Transgender identity is framed as distorting “the picture of Christ’s initiating, self-sacrificing love.”

This is precisely the complementarian framework my thesis identifies as the theological engine behind “predator” framing. If male and female are divinely fixed metaphors for divine authority and human submission, then any disruption of that binary becomes not merely sin but cosmic disorder — a distortion of the God-humanity relationship itself. That is a very short theological step to treating transgender women as people who are fraudulently occupying the female role in that metaphor.

The HRC piece explicitly names complementarianism and notes its “consistent history of leading to emotional, spiritual and physical violence against anyone… who does not completely and unwaveringly conform to gendered expectations.”

Reading Genesis Otherwise

Both documents anchor their arguments in Genesis 1:27: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

The simple word doing the heavy lifting here is “and.” FOTF and those who interpret the Bible literally read this “and” as meaning either male or female. However, there is another way to read this “and” — as both. If God created them in his image as male and female, this could be read to mean that God is both male and female simultaneously, rather than as separate, either/or entities.

The HRC article argues that the binaries described in Genesis don’t exclude the possibility of transition zones. The land is made separate from the sea, but the shore, the estuary, and the mangrove exist as something that is both at the same time. Indeed, these spaces are dynamic and rich precisely because they contain aspects of two separate systems.

In the same way, the very verse FOTF uses to argue the sacred binary may equally be read as revealing the spectrum we know exists in nature. Between the night and the day lies the dawn and the dusk — the transition from one to the other, neither wholly one thing nor the other.

Eunuchs and the Spectrum

In Matthew 19:11–12 (NET), Jesus says:

“Not everyone can accept this statement, except those to whom it has been given. For there are some eunuchs who were that way from birth, and some who were made eunuchs by others, and some who became eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who is able to accept this should accept it.”

Writing on about this passage on Facebook, biblical scholar Jenny Carter observes: “One is done to a person by others. One is chosen by the person later. And the first, from birth, is the one that’s neither done to them nor chosen, something true of them from the very start, before any decision and before anyone laid a hand on them. The structure of the list forces it, and so does the Greek. The phrase Jesus uses is ek koilias mētros, which means, literally, from the mother’s womb. It is not a word about preference, choice or lifestyle. It points to the body a person was born with, at the very beginning, before they could decide anything at all. From birth can’t mean decided, because deciding is the third category, and the womb comes before any deciding… The faithful reading is the one that lets all three stand, and the first one, plainly, is a person born outside the male norm from the beginning.”

While the Bible and its ancient authors had no understanding of the modern term transgender, they understood that there were people who did not fit into the neat, easy binary. Some were made that way by force. Some chose — in a society that placed a strong priority on children and marriage — to refrain from marrying and having children; in modern terms, we might read these as people who are asexual. Still others were that way from birth. Whether we would identify them today as intersex or transgender, the end result is the same: the binary was never understood as a rigid structure, but as a spectrum.

The HRC piece devotes substantial attention to eunuchs in Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Matthew 19, and Acts 8, arguing that Scripture itself contains figures who don’t fit binary gender categories and that Jesus explicitly references them. FOTF ignores this body of text entirely — a significant omission given how directly it bears on the question.

From Theology to Policy

What does this mean when we look at the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding West Virginia and Idaho laws banning transgender athletes from competing on girls’ and women’s sports teams? It means that the rigid binary held sacred by Christian Nationalists — and now enshrined in law — has been used to deny a group representing less than one percent of high school athletes full participation in their chosen sport.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion cites studies claiming that trans female athletes retain an edge from the testosterone present during their development, which supposedly gives them an unfair advantage. The West Virginia plaintiff who sued to challenge that state’s law was on puberty blockers at the time, and her lawyers argued that she held no biological athletic advantage over competitors designated female at birth.

The Scapegoat and the Distraction

Our nation is so steeped in the gender binary that even those who share no beliefs in Christian Nationalist ideology are often unable to view gender as a spectrum — particularly where trans women are concerned. Men are perceived as leaders, with certain privileges granted to them by society that afford them more opportunities. The implicit assumption seems to be: surely no man would choose to become the “weaker sex.” The idea is so beyond many people’s understanding that they view trans women as inherently defective and suspect — performing as trans in order to gain access to spaces they would otherwise be excluded from.

This suspicion does not arise in a vacuum. It is cultivated by the same theological architecture that frames binary gender as cosmic order. When the sacred binary is destabilized, something must be blamed — and it will not be the framework.

More importantly, by focusing on a small fraction of the American population, labeling them defective, disruptive, and dangerous, politicians are able to ignore the truly pressing issues facing our nation: fixing our broken healthcare system, eliminating government corruption, and addressing climate change. The culture wars — of which the erosion of transgender rights is a central front — are used as a distraction from real, serious problems.

Transgender Americans deserve our respect, our understanding, and our support. They are not a threat to women and girls, to the fair practice of sport, or to the family. They are the scapegoat, the other, that Christian Nationalists are using to advance their agenda. The theology that produces that framing, read carefully and in full, does not support it.