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The following excerpt comes from the book Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation & Embodiment in Scripture (Westminster John Knox Press, 2025), edited by Joseph A. Marchal, Melissa Harl Sellew, and Katy Valentine. The volume explores various ways to read Jewish and Christian biblical texts that account for gender variation.

This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction.

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Gender variation is as ancient as stories about creation.

That such a statement is simultaneously obvious to some and controversial to others is one very clear sign of why we need trans biblical interpretation, now more than ever.

People are increasingly enlisting appeals to “the biblical” (texts or histories or sometimes just vague impressions) to discuss trans people and practices of gender variation and nonconformity. On the one hand, some more liberal groups have hailed the increased social and political visibility of (a few) trans and gender nonconforming people, claiming the arrival of a trans tipping point or marking trans rights and representation as the leading edge, or “what’s next,” in a sequence of civil rights fights. On the other hand, this moment of visibility—marked with certain kinds of progress, acceptance, and inclusion—is also matched with ongoing and even increasing violence against trans and gender nonconforming people, most especially trans women of color. The years in which we have been researching, writing, and editing the essays for this collection (the late 2010s and early 2020s) have been marked by persistent, resurgent violence against trans and gender nonconforming people. Not so coincidentally in this same short period, reactionary and regressive forces have directed a concerted, rapid-fire effort to pass hundreds of laws targeting especially trans and gender nonconforming young people, stoking panic and fear.

These conditions alone are enough to explain why biblical studies needs more sustained engagement with trans studies, even before we notice that many of these phobic and violent efforts appeal to biblical or historical claims. Indeed, a number of the essays in our collection explicitly take on such oppressive efforts, starting with our opening essay by Max Strassfeld. The Christian right is increasingly using trans people, especially young people, as targets in longer-standing fights over supposed family values. Too many groups refer to notions of divine creation or biblical times in efforts to construct gender identities as binarily distinct and complementary and to stabilize their (twenty-first-century) notions of sex, gender, and embodiment. In short, there is a fierce urgency for this collection and the development of trans biblical interpretation to create and support better, more sustained, and more informed engagements of biblical texts and traditions.

This collection provides an abundance of attention to precisely these matters, demonstrating the relevance and importance of trans approaches to scriptures, not only about creation, but about a range of biblical figures and events, parables and passages, practices and processes. By necessity this involves deeper and more reflexive attention to our practices and processes as biblical readers, receivers, and interpreters—how we cite, narrate, or explain biblical texts and traditions. Such attention and reflection are all the more crucial given the contexts in which we are currently laboring and living (if we’re lucky).

This volume comes out of this urgent moment by drawing upon and selecting from an increasing, critical mass of scholars interacting with trans studies. This attention reflects the work of a growing, if still relatively small, set of trans and gender nonconforming scholars attending and presenting at meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. Trans hermeneutics is now entering a key phase, with several vital questions animating its current growth.

• How are trans hermeneutics evolving as an independent and intersectional lens for interpreting biblical texts and traditions?
• How do interpreters navigate the relationships between gender variation in the ancient west Asian and Greco-Roman contexts and current-day variation and gender nonconformity?
• What makes a biblical reading trans, or a trans reading biblical for that matter?

The contributors to this collection address these key questions from a variety of angles, shaping a number of approaches and emphases, appealing to different conversation partners and communities of accountability, and ranging widely across and past the edges of biblical traditions. They provide compelling new ways of engaging the stories of survival and solidarity, the forms of proclamation, incarnation, and transfiguration, and the impact of laws and letters we find in biblical texts and traditions. Their approaches converse with, draw upon, and intersect with feminist, queer, antiracist, posthumanist, or abolitionist approaches. The scholars assembled here move in varied gender constellations, including trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and cisgender, among other gender identities. Together, these essays take readers from Genesis, through the Gospels and epistles, and into rabbinic and early Christian scriptural engagement.

Toward Trans Biblical Variations of Interpretation

Trans people are not a particularly “new” phenomenon, and trans movements have been happening for much longer than you may have heard. Trans people have been engaging biblical materials for longer than you might think, too! Approaching biblical interpretation in light of these longer histories in turn alters our approaches to biblical texts and traditions.

Premodern archaeologist Mary Weismantel, for example, disputes that such a historical approach forces a more recent category onto ancient remains. Rather, transgender studies’ finer sensitivity to the potential complexity and variety of gender and embodiment means that it is even more suited to explain ancient phenomena. For Weismantel, a transgender kind of archaeology does not aim “to re-populate the ancient past with modern trans men and trans women,” but “to replace the narrow, reductive gaze of previous researchers with a more supple, subtler appreciation of cultural variation.” Essays like Rebecca Wiegel’s and Ky Merkley’s in our collection likewise deploy trans as a category for historical analysis more than a category of identification.

As biblical scholars tend to do, many others in trans studies focus on historical or temporal processes, an emphasis that persists in several more recent efforts to think trans historically in pre-modern contexts, and particularly in essays by Strassfeld, Esther Brownsmith, and Wiegel in our collection. This makes some sense as the word trans resonates not only spatially, but also historically, connoting the crossing of time. Such connotations could boost our confidence about trans existence across time (and space), as reflected in the recurrent tactic among trans activists and writers like Kate Bornstein and Leslie Feinberg to claim past ancestors as a buoy for trans identification, legitimacy, and solidarity. These people are often described strategically, if also still colloquially and a bit cheekily as “trancestors,” and the essays in our collection by Justin Sabia-Tanis, Katy Valentine, and Mini Khumalo and Eric Thomas explicitly appeal to biblical examples of such ancestors.

Thus, we emphasize, with the co-editors of Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern, that transgender people and practices are not “new.” Indeed, as Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska stress about a number of pre-modern settings, transgender and gender-nonconforming people keep showing up, including in narratives about gender confirmation or transition. An openness to the differences of the past can help us meaningfully trace the place of outliers: “wherever and whenever structures of meaning existed for making sense of gendered experience, we will find people who were, in whatever way, outliers to those structures.” Further, as Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt stress in Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, non-normative gender is very often intertwined with religion in the texts and traditions of the past. This history demonstrates that trans or genderqueer subjects need not be posed as “against” or “outside” of religion (let alone Christianity!), as so many phobic forces might be claiming in the present. No doubt the concepts of gender in the medieval period are different from those in the modern period, yet transgender approaches can pay attention to gender norms and their transgressions in both periods. Such transgressions in the past can challenge those who deploy biblical interpretation in marginalizing and stigmatizing directions in the present.

Many previous readings also highlight the role of specific figures of ancient gender variation, namely androgynes and eunuchs, who will remain central in the longer treatments of biblical texts found within more theological and pastoral resources. Sabia-Tanis and Virginia Mollenkott, for instance, countered conservative and fundamentalist arguments from the (so-called) order of creation by also narrating how much the gender of the first human and the deity in Genesis do not conform to binary gender constructs. After all, if both male and female are made “in the image of” the God in Genesis 1:26–27, then this deity is also androgynous. Such an image corresponds with an increasingly popular declaration among (somewhat) progressive theists that “God is nonbinary!” Mollenkott counts the use of maternal “labor pains” to describe Jesus or Paul (in John 16:21–22 and Gal 4:19) and women putting on the presumably male body of Christ in baptism (Gal 3:26–28; Eph 5:30) as examples of transgender imagery in the New Testament. Sabia-Tanis argued that “eunuchs are the closest biblical analogy we have to transgendered people.” Mollenkott also identified the role of the eunuchs of Matthew 19 and Acts 8 as demonstrating a biblical acceptance of transgender and transsexual people. Sabia-Tanis enthusiastically concluded: “To me, seeing the record of our ancestors there at all, is affirming and amazing, but we are there.”

In her own essay in our collection, Joy Ladin revisits her remarkable Soul of the Stranger with the explicit aim of clarifying how she defines trans hermeneutics in relation to experience. To Ladin, a “trans experience” is any experience in which someone notes a slippage between themselves and the identity-defining roles and categories they have been assigned. If one but learns to pay attention, then, anyone can look for mismatches or conflicts between their sense of themselves and the gender roles and categories others expect from them. For Ladin, this approach has the salutatory ability to apply to our readings of biblical texts, while also undermining how the trans / cis binary oversimplifies and erases how variations and changeability are a part of any category.

While Ladin shifts our focus to the many kinds of trans experiences of mismatch between expectation and reality that anyone can have, Wiegel makes a strong case for specifying a single criterion for historically identifying a trans person in the pre-modern past. Like others, Wiegel critiques scholarly approaches that have over-identified trans as another disruptive version of queer and highlights the variability in gender categories in different cultures, both historically and geographically. This variability is not particularly a problem for doing trans historiography for Wiegel, if we do not expect people in the past to imitate our present-day categories. In fact, this helps Wiegel to arrive at her argument that a historian can call someone trans if that person sought to move from one position of sexed or gendered intelligibility to another position of sexed or gendered intelligibility or, finding their cultural categories insufficient, seeks out a quasi or un-intelligible space. Wiegel then applies this narrow definition to see which people might fit it in biblical texts, starting with Jesus’s vexing saying about “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven” in Matthew 19:12. Yet, even in this most rigorous contraction, Wiegel also shows how this concise definition can shift our attention away from expected texts in previous searches for trancestors toward wider sets of texts, including those that involve movements that do not at first appear to be analogous to transgender narratives, as in the emphasis on virginity over marriage in texts like 1 Corinthians 6–7.

The two essays that bookend the collection—by Strassfeld and Merkley— provide some of the most helpful engagements of androgynes in Genesis 1 and clothing prohibitions in Deuteronomy 22, precisely through their treatment of distinctly Jewish and Christian traditions of interpretation, among the rabbis and early church fathers, respectively. Strassfeld’s essay strategically juxtaposes the rabbinic treatment of androgynes with the very different contemporary legal context in which trans people are (recurrently) targeted in the present-day USA. The rabbinic approach to androgynes and hybrid animals stems from a rather different, if also rather religious reading of creation from the one promoted by the brand of evangelical Christian theology that animates so much anti-trans animus in more recent years.

After Strassfeld’s opening essay, the next three expand the array of biblical texts and characters from the Hebrew Bible treated within trans interpretation. Ladin argues that Jacob’s resistance to his birth assignment (as the second-born son) is a meaningful example for trans hermeneutics, not because this made him transgender, but because this resistance is akin to how trans or nonbinary people refuse or challenge their birth assignments. The next two essays, by Aysha Musa and Brownsmith, approach two other biblical characters as nonbinary: Jael in Judges and Mordecai in Esther.

Our collection turns then to a number of essays on the Gospels and letters of the New Testament. Indeed, Trans Biblical intentionally provides more attention to these texts from the distinctly Christian canons of scriptures, for two reasons. The first is that both Jewish studies and Jewish devotional communities of practice are relatively “further ahead” than their larger Christian counterparts in considering trans people and practices of the past and the present. The second reason, though, is the more potent: some of the loudest transphobic forces in the present day come from those who claim to be Christian. Many people need to understand these particular biblical texts and traditions differently and better.

The next three essays by Sabia-Tanis, Valentine, and Khumalo and Thomas focus primarily upon prominent portions of the canonical Gospels: the parable of the good Samaritan (in Luke), the transfiguration (in Mark), and the incarnation of the Word (in the prologue to John). Sabia-Tanis adeptly transposes the beloved Samaritan parable into our present context by placing transgender people at the center, not the margins, of teachings by Jesus. The disproportionate violence against trans people, especially trans women of color, could suggest an analogy to the person who was robbed, assaulted, and abandoned, yet Tanis primarily reads the Samaritan as trans to convey a lesson about our neighborly obligations as exemplified by those who have been excluded and despised. Prompted by insights from trans Christians, Valentine explores the transfiguration of Jesus in Mark 9:1–9 as a positive example of a gender transformation in the Gospels. Khumalo and Thomas advance an understanding of Jesus as a proto-ancestor in Africana interpretation, for readers in critical empathy and responsive ally relationships with transgender people, particularly given Jesus’s incarnation in the flesh.

The next three essays move the collection into an engagement with the Pauline epistles, but not before Wiegel’s essay revisits the eunuchs of Matthew 19 alongside the valorization of sexual renunciation in 1 Corinthians 6–7. These two texts are alike, not because the latter shows that the former is “really” about celibacy, but because both advocate crossing categories and thus transgressing gender boundaries. Jaeda Calaway’s essay seeks a transgender touch across time with transformed bodies later in 1 Corinthians, particularly the glorified, resurrection bodies in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul’s ongoing androcentrism strikes a dissonant chord for Calaway as a trans woman, yet this cannot block out the description of bodies in transition that resonates, a rise from flesh into a glorious sparkling. Marchal similarly moves the focus from the individual person of Paul to other figures like Hagar, Onesimus, and Epaphroditus, alongside (formerly) incarcerated trans women and their networks of support and solidarity today in order to creatively reposition biblical practices of letter-writing, circulation, and assembly within longer histories of imprisonment and enslavement.

Our final two essays explore beyond the biblical canons, interpreting and engaging Gospel of Thomas and Tertullian and, in turn, reflecting upon other, canonized texts. In the Gospel of Thomas’s emphasis on an introspective process of salvation focused on one’s inner, less visible self, Melissa Harl Sellew finds strong resonances with trans people’s experience, especially processes of self-understanding, self-acceptance, and public assertion of our true gendered selves. Merkley similarly zeroes in on other moments of contestation, namely the meaning of clothing in early Christian negotiations of scripture within Roman norms of masculinity, demonstrating how long gender has been a multicultural site of contestation, given the ancient presence of gender nonconforming people, even in these early Christian debates. The mere presence of this contestation allows for more inclusive and gender expansive readings within the Christianity of today.

The scholars assembled in this collection provide a series of distinctive and important interventions within both biblical studies and trans studies. The present and future of more just arrangements of gender and embodiment require a greater reckoning with the past and a new kind of attention to the many kinds of gender variation. Sabia-Tanis’s essay particularly emphasizes the present-day goal of justice: the purpose of trans hermeneutics is to liberate humanity from the tyranny of oppressive gender norms.

It is extremely valuable to see gender variance in the biblical materials themselves. Gender variation is as ancient as stories about creation! And stories about resistance, and escape, and resurrection, and transfiguration, and incarnation, and on and on. Biblical texts and traditions are more capacious and variable than most expect, often disrupting present-day assumptions of a gender binary. Trans Biblical sharpens our awareness of what is “in” these texts and builds up our capacities for what can be done “with” our encounter with/in biblical texts and traditions.

Joseph A. Marchal is Professor of Religious Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Ball State University.

Melissa Harl Sellew is Professor Emerita of Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures at the University of Minnesota.

Katy E. Valentine is a public scholar and owner of Soul Forge Coaching.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 64 of The Revealer podcast: “Transgender Perspectives on the Bible.”