In the Image of God
When certain Christians assert a religious freedom right to discriminate against trans individuals – particularly, a right to misgender them – their argument typically proceeds something along these lines:
1. They believe every individual is created in the image of God.
2. Part of that image is the person’s sex (and by extension, gender).
3. In particular, a person’s sex/gender is inalterably assigned by God from conception.
4. They are forbidden from lying or falsifying God’s choice.
Therefore, they say, they are religiously obligated to refer to people by their chromosomal sex, regardless of how they identify or publicly present. This religious duty, in turn, is used to press against rules and policies which require respectful treatment of trans individuals (including refraining from deliberately misgendering them, deadnaming them, and so on).
What’s interesting about this framework is that a lot of it actually resonates with how I view the relationship of my Jewish faith and trans individuals – with some crucial alterations. To wit:
1. I believe every individual is create in the image of God.
2. Part of that image is the person’s sex (and by extension, gender).
4. I am forbidden from lying or falsifying God’s choice.
The major distinction, of course, comes in prong 3:
3. A person’s sex/gender is not necessarily or inalterably assigned by God from conception, but rather can be part of a person’s own process of discovering who they are. Where such self-discovery leads to a person to conclude they are trans, non-binary, or any other identity that departs from the sex they were assigned at birth, they are not deviating from God’s plan. They are uncovering their authentic self as God has created them.
The result of this process is part of God’s image. Those who refuse to accept it are not cleaving to God’s image, they are rejecting it.
God’s process of creation is not, in my understanding of Judaism, a set-and-forget sort of deal. It is not a matter of passively being puppeteered by a divine hand. It something we do together – we are partners in creation. To deny the results of that partnership is, for me, a denial of God’s plan and practice just as much as it is for adherents of other religious views who adhere to a more static and calcified notion of the role of the divine.
And so for me, and I suspect for many Jews, the religious freedom obligation pushes in the other direction. Many conservative states have, or are considering, laws which require (at least in certain contexts) non-recognition of trans identity. For Jews (and others) who share my religious precepts, these laws would force me to deny – to bear false witness to – a key attribute of how God created some of my peers. I do not believe – and this is a deep, fundamental commitment – that God’s “image” of trans persons was for them to be locked in a body or sex or gender identity that clearly is not authentically theirs. When they find their full self, they are equally finding God’s image of themselves.
Consistent with my lengthily expressed feelings on the subject, I suspect that what’s good for the goose will not be good for the gander. Despite the clear parallel, liberal Jews who assert religious liberty rights to be exempted from laws seeking to enforce by state mandate a transphobic agenda will not meet with the same success enjoyed by their Christian peers.
Nonetheless, there is value in promoting this sort of framework, and in unashamedly asserting Jewish independence from hegemonic conservative Christian notions of true religiosity. It is not woven into “religion” that God’s image requires rejection of trans individuals’ full selves. That is a choice, an interpretation of some religions or of some who call themselves religious. Other religions, other religious persons, have a different interpretation of how to respect and dignify the facet of God that is in every one of us.
