Can Transgender Views Be Defended from Genesis?

If one’s interpretation of Genesis leads to the idea
that males can get pregnant, something has gone
very wrong in Biblical hermeneutics.

by Jerry Bergman, PhD

Given the importance of interpreting passages in the Bible, a field of scholarship has been raised, called hermeneutics, to study interpretation problems. Hermeneutics, the science and art of Biblical interpretation, is now the subject of both seminary classes and entire books.[1]

One of the clearest teachings in the Bible that needs no drawn-out analysis is the creation of Adam and Eve. The Bible says, “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). God then “called his name Adam” (Genesis 5:2). Further, “God said, ‘It isn’t good for the man to live alone. I will make a suitable partner for him’” (Genesis 2:18). That helper was Eve: “But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept …[what]  the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man…. The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living”. (Genesis 2:20–22, 3:20).

The Desire To Fit In

Denial of this simple straightforward teaching has spawned much debate, primarily due to the attempt to negate the clear teaching of Genesis by infusing evolution into it. One of the many examples of this debate was the November 2013 meeting of The Evangelical Theological Society held in Baltimore, Maryland. One presentation was about the latest research before a packed audience of theologians, arguing that the existing human genetic diversity could not be the product of anything less than a population of 100,000 parents living eons ago.[2] The article supported the evolution worldview and rejected the creation worldview, which the writer called the

old-time religion [that ] is strong in America. To take just one measure, for decades more than 40% of all Americans have consistently told Gallup pollsters that God created humans in pretty much their current form, less than 10,000 years ago. They are embracing an account of man’s origins promoted by Young Earth Creationists who lean on a painstakingly literal reading of the Scriptures, swatting aside the counter-claims of science (fossils are a relic of Noah’s flood, they argue, and evolution is a myth peddled by atheists). In a recent poll 58% of Republicans and 41% of Democrats backed creationism. The glue that underpins such faith is the principle of Biblical inerrancy—a certainty that the Scriptures are infallibly and unchangingly true.[3]

In answer to the question, “If Adam and Eve are the first humans, does that mean we’re all related?,” rejecting the creation account produced the follows response:

Humans did not just pop up fully formed as homo sapiens. That being said, we do all have a common ancestor that we share with other primates. So it’s likely we are all very, very distantly related. We’re also likely very, very distantly related to all the apes, chimpanzees and other primates, so say “Hi!” to your cousins the next time you visit a zoo.[4]

The curse made it hard to live in the world, but God did not leave himself without witness. (AIG Creation Museum)

Evolutionary Adam?

The belief that we humans are the product of one couple 6,000 years ago in a non-evolved world produces a very different outlook than the belief that the world consisted of no less than 100,000 humans who lived in a world evolutionists date at over 350,000 years ago and that was governed by evolutionary forces.[5] In this latter world, natural selection would have produced, not one human family, but numerous human families that were quite different in many physical and mental traits.

The logical outcome of this long period of natural selection was that some human families evolved to be superior in some ways to other human families. In fact, this was the conclusion of Francis Galton who, based on the evolutionary belief he learned from his cousin Charles Darwin, spent his life developing the field he named eugenics, which literally means ‘well-born’. In Discover Magazine in 2003, Carl Zimmer said that the end result was

one of the most shameful chapters in the history of science…. Perhaps most chilling, though, were the ways in which American eugenicists influenced their German counterparts. “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning the prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock,” Adolf Hitler told a Nazi confidant. The Rockefeller Foundation and other philanthropy institutions in the United States funded the research of American-trained German eugenicists even after the Nazi Party had made its genocidal intentions clear. That research played a major role in the subsequent mass murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally disabled and others deemed a threat to the purity of the so-called Aryan race.”[6]

On the other hand, two people created 6,000 years ago would produce a very homogeneous population of humans that were male and female as God created them; the woman a complement of the man. It would not create a world in which some men had women’s bodies, and some women had men’s bodies, as the modern transgender movement claims.

Do No Harm: Is Transgenderism a New Eugenics?

It appears that the modern transgender movement is repeating some of the same mistakes as occurred with the eugenics movement. If we evolved from a population of 100,000 that lived 350,000 years ago, a wide variety of people would have resulted, due to mutations, including some “females” with the body of a male and some “males” with the body of a female. Thus evolution could rationalize these and many other variations of humans.[7]  In short, evolutionists argue that

evolutionary thinking can help illuminate our understanding of gender diversity and transgender experience. ‘Gender diversity’ here is used to mean a gender identification outside the conventional binary gender categories of ‘male’ or ‘female’, where both terms have typically been presumed to apply exclusively and unfalteringly from conception to death.[8]

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (May 2023), after noting that “Transgender, non-binary, and gender diverse (trans) people have worse health outcomes than cisgender individuals,” examined why this was so. The study compared 256 trans people and 1,255,942 cisgender people in the Medicaid database, with 1,651 trans people and 1,465,565 cisgender people in the commercial database, that had delivered a child.[9]

The focus was on persons who were born female and had “transgendered” into a male, and, as a “male”, became pregnant and delivered a child. One concern was that the risk from prior, or ongoing use, of testosterone might place trans people at a heightened risk of perinatal complications. One scenario involved 256 persons identifying as male (as a result of transitioning), who became pregnant and, instead of aborting the child as is common in this population, chose to carry their child to full term.

Harmful Results

Compared with cisgender people, trans people were younger (cisgender mean age, 26.65 [SD, 5.44] vs. 23.48 [SD, 5.50] years), less likely to be White (cisgender at 49.8% vs. 33.6%), and more likely to have a chronic health condition (cisgender at 14.9% vs. 22.7%) all significant at P < 0.001. Compared with cisgender people, trans people in the commercial data set had higher rates of certain chronic conditions, including anxiety and depression (3.4% vs. 5.5%; P < 0.001).

Study limitations include the fact that higher-risk sub-populations of trans people giving birth may have been missed, including persons who did not identify as trans to their clinician. The study may not have had a long enough follow-up to detect a difference in the outcome of severe parental morbidity and testosterone use. Larger sample sizes evaluating patient-reported outcomes are required to better characterize birth outcomes between trans and cis persons.

Summary

The trend of the existing studies so far support the conclusion that the transgender movement will, as a whole, cause much harm to both society and its victims as also did the eugenics movement. Both movements have rejected the teachings of Genesis and replaced them with Darwinism based on an erroneous worldview. Because the teachings of the Creator have been dismissed, we would expect certain outcomes in the transgender movement to not go as well as ideal. And this is exactly what has been found.

References

[1] Lantz, Charles. HERMENEUTICS: The Science and Art of Biblical Interpretation. Sophia’s House Publication, Lansing, MI, 2012.

[2] “All about Adam,” The Economist; https://www.economist.com/united-states/2013/11/23/all-about-adam, 23 November 2013.

[3] “All about Adam,” 2013.

[4] Pedigo, Craig. 2023. https://www.quora.com.

[5] Tuttle, Russell H. Human Evolution. Brittanica; https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution, 28 March 2023.

[6] Zimmer, Carl. Unnatural Selection. Discover Magazine, 30 September 2003, pp. 77-78.

[7] Wren, Bernadett, et al. Can evolutionary thinking shed light on gender diversity? British Journal of Psychology Advances 25(6): 352-362, May 2019.

[8] Wren, et al., 2019, p. 352.

[9] Stroumsa, Daphna. Pregnancy outcomes in a US cohort of transgender people. Journal of the American Medical Association; https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2805062, 11 May 2023.

Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,300 publications in 12 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,800 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 60 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.