The first thing we need to do before we can even look at the transgender area of human sexuality and the challenges it presents is to begin to get a handle on the language. There are many people, both Christadelphian and non-Christadelphian, coming to these pages looking for answers to questions about this area of sexuality. Their questions are many and varied. An example might be parents whose children are coming home with questions about the subject, such as, “My friend Liam says his name is now Mia and wants me to call him that. I don’t understand. Should I call him Mia?” Or the parents of the teenager who is expressing pretty strongly the feeling “that I was born in the wrong body”.  Or perhaps the viewer might be that teenager himself or herself looking for some answers or some help. Or perhaps someone interested in the moral issues without having a direct involvement in the subject. 

Looking at any of the areas of human sexuality we address in these articles presents some challenges, but the transgender topic is especially difficult. The transgender ideology is largely a phenomenon that started somewhere in the 1980s and has grown rapidly since. Not only is there a fresh vocabulary that has recently come into existence, but letters or words are being created on a regular basis as the various combinations of gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender expression are collapsed into acronyms or just single letters to convey a concept. All we can do in this very brief overview is touch on a few of the notable factors and point the way to resources that can help with further questions. 

Let’s start with something that we seem to be surrounded by in every form of media we may run into, the term LGBTQ+. This term gets expanded on almost a daily basis, but LGBTQ+ is a good starting point: it refers to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual (has to do with sexual attraction, not gender identity), transgender, queer or questioning. The plus represents non-cisgender and non-straight identities that aren’t contained in the acronym. Cisgender refers to someone whose internal sense of gender corresponds with the sex that person was identified as having at birth. 

Let’s get going by starting off at “sex assigned at birth” versus “gender identity”. According to definitions found across the web, sex assigned at birth is the sex assigned by a doctor at birth based on some combination of sex chromosomes, genes, gonads and internal and external genitalia, as well as physiological hormones: male or female. Gender identity is one’s internal sense of being male, female, both or neither. 

The word transgender is pretty clear; it describes a person whose gender identity is different than the sex they were assigned at birth. The word is an adjective and can encompass any variety of non-binary and gender-expansive identities. 

A couple of examples will reveal how quickly the concepts can get complicated with language:

1. Consider Eric, a transgender man who grew up with his parents assuming he was a boy. For as long as he could remember, he considered himself to be a boy. He didn’t know about transgender identities until he was older and could finally see himself in the things his parents said about him and took the step of coming out. 
   

2. Consider Victor, a non-binary person who uses they/them pronouns. Victor was one who grew up being told they were a boy but they never knew themselves to be a boy. They came out as non-binary (one whose gender identity doesn’t fit comfortably with either “man” or “woman”) in order to reflect their authentic experience with their gender identity.

Gender expression is the way a person may outwardly reflect their internal sense of gender through presentation, clothing, hair, voice, and body language. 

Sexual orientation refers to whom a person is physically/emotionally attracted to – still a separate category from gender expression and from gender identity. A transgender man could be gay, bisexual or straight; these are all expressions of his sexual orientation.  

The movement has led to theological viewpoints being labelled in one of two ways:

1. Affirming – a theological view that all expressions of gender are an integral part of God’ s design for diversity within the created order. 
   

2. Non-affirming – a theological view that transgender and other expressions of gender variance are either a) sinful within themselves or b) that they are morally neutral but nevertheless a kind of disorder, mental illness, or other brokenness.

In order to expand our understanding a bit further, we might look next at the section entitled Core Beliefs of the Transgender Movement.