(RNS) — Across the country, trans and nonbinary individuals, families and communities are navigating the far-reaching ramifications of President Trump’s executive orders that have denied our existence and threatened our access to passports, health care, U.S. military service and school athletics.
The administration’s shock-and-awe affront to trans and nonbinary people capitalizes on an election season that scapegoated trans Americans and encourages a continued barrage of anti-trans legislation. In 2024 alone, 672 anti-bills were introduced in state legislative bodies and in Congress that target trans and nonbinary children, youth and young adults in ways that make them unsafe and say they don’t belong in schools, libraries, health care facilities and on sports fields.
This slew of attacks is inseparable from the rise of Christian nationalism in recent years and closely parallels the strategy used to politicize and restrict abortion access, which had been largely apolitical until the time of the Roe v. Wade ruling. Christian nationalists are now deploying eerily similar arguments about “defending innocent children” in their war against gender-affirming care.
There is overwhelming medical and psychological evidence that such care saves young people’s lives. In denying them access to it, the administration and its allies are not defending young people but trying to repress and control them.
Controlling people’s bodies is an age-old means of maintaining power, wealth and social position that requires “othering” categories of people in order to isolate and marginalize them. It was only when Rome became solidified as a dictatorship (under Augustus) that the empire passed laws stipulating monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Today, an administration obsessed with unchallenged power has portrayed a tiny, frequently poor and marginalized percentage of the general population as a symbolic threat to the order of things.
Gender diversity is a fact of human existence older than Scripture and is thoroughly attested to in the Bible. Jesus’ teaching about eunuchs in the Gospel of Matthew makes clear there are human beings who exist outside of the gender binary from birth, as well as those who live outside the gender binary “for the sake of the kingdom.” In the story of the Ethiopian eunuch’s baptism, the Book of Acts lifts up the spiritual leadership of gender non-conforming people of African descent.
In the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Isaiah, God affirms not only the sanctity but the spiritual importance of people outside the gender binary, promising us “a name better than sons and daughters.” The Book of Esther names no fewer than 10 gender non-conforming people: Mehuman, Biztha, Harbona, Bigtha, Abagtha, Zethar, Karkas, Hegai, Shaashgaz and Hathak—some of them described as assisting Esther’s defense of her people against imperial violence. The Talmud reflects this affirmation of gender diversity, recognizing no fewer than seven genders.
Despite this sacred lineage, attempts to legislate the violent erasure of transgender and nonbinary people are now a central plank in U.S. federal policy, as well as in state and local campaigns and in many churches. Oftentimes, the holy name of Christ is invoked as a cover for this violence. There are pastors and other religious leaders who devote their careers to questions of gender and sexuality as people go hungry and without health care or shelter.
Transgender and nonbinary people are created in the image of God. God’s liberating action will break through in this world through the steadfast work and witness of people of goodwill who are beholden to a higher law, who refuse to comply with unjust executive orders, who continue to defend the vulnerable against abuses of the powerful in courtrooms and school buildings and hospitals and in the streets across the country.
God’s love and truth are alive whether elected officials seek to legislate them out of existence or not. God’s Word continues to call for justice and mercy for all people regardless of the distortions of the Word by religious and political leaders obsessed with the worship of their own power. They are not God. And God will not, and cannot, be stopped.
(Moses Hernandez McGavin, a minister with the Freedom Church of the Poor, is a Catholic cultural worker, teacher and organizer. Aaron Scott, a founding pastor of the Freedom Church of the Poor, is a partner of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice, and the author of “Bring Back Your People: Ten Ways Regular Folks Can Put a Dent in White Christian Nationalism.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
