Beyond a Binary God: A Theology for Trans* Allies

by Tara K. Soughers

Many feminine images from the Bible, such as the Wisdom figure, Sophia, were used to describe Jesus in the early church, prior to the flowering of visual art—even Mother was a term applied to Jesus. However, by the time the controversy around artistic representations of Jesus was settled, Jesus was being portrayed as exclusively male, although sometimes as an androgynous- looking male. While race and other characteristics could vary from Jesus’s

See Dan MacClellan video: "Was Jesus intersex for 1000 years before becoming a cis man?"

There are no standard culturally determined gender roles that have stood the test of time. In our time, when people talk about the traditional family, they are often discussing a way of distributing roles based on gender that arose in response to the Industrial Revolution. While there was a culturally approved segregation of work in earlier eras, the differences were often not so rigidly enforced as they were later. The whole family joined together to do the work that needed to be done and all genders and ages were involved in the work, as families did not live in a nuclear configuration, with parents and children living apart from their extended family network. Families stayed together, and generations often occupied the same home. Instead of work being separate from the home, the preindustrial societies’ home was the place where work occurred, so it was easier for everyone to be involved in all facets of labor.