God's Gender

A guerrilla campaign to knock sense into right-wing Christians

From the beginning, Christians have insisted that gender is not about genitalia.

Today, all of a sudden, most American Christians have changed their minds.

Christians insist, now, that sex and gender and genitalia must all be about the same: you can’t have a sex or a gender that doesn’t correspond to whatever your genitalia is.

Make that your genitalia at birth. As determined at conception.

Christians didn’t used to believe this.

Christians didn’t believe this in the 1980’s when I was a young atheist trying to make sense of Christian beliefs.

Back then, I thought I was being smart in pointing out that God should not be referred to as He or Him—for the obvious reason that God, by definition, doesn’t have a penis.

Shoot, God doesn’t even have a body.

My Christian friends pushed back intelligently, explaining that one’s gender was distinct from one’s sex: that, in fact, gender was not tied to genitalia at all. And this distinction was why God, body or not, could be masculine. And was masculine as a matter of religious faith.

Okay, I could see they had a point.

This was the 1980’s and I (who previously had never thought about the distinction between sex and gender) was forced to realize that the issue was more complex than my simplistic gender = genitalia assumption.

So I backed off on referring to God as It.

Fast-forward to today.

Now most Christians have changed their mind. They have decided that sex = gender = genitalia is exactly right.

Even more so, it’s got to be the genitalia you were born with.

Here’s the new Christian theology: If you were born with a vagina (or with XX chromosomes, in some accounts) you are the female sex and gender, and if you were not then you are not. If you were born with a penis (or with XY chromosomes, in some accounts) you are the male sex and gender, and if you were not then you are not.

What about God?

Was God born with penis or vagina or chromosomes of any sort?

No.

God wasn’t even born.

Therefore: God is neither male nor female, neither masculine nor feminine.

Hmm….

That’s right, Christians now think the atheist back in 1980 was right all along.

God is an It after all.

Here’s my modest proposal:

I propose that atheists—and transgender people and Democrats and old-fashioned Christians—start referring to God as It in every instance.

And each time a Republican refers to God as He or Him, call them out for their wokeness.

Indeed, thinking the way these Christian Republicans think, it should be illegal to misgender God as male or female.¹ (Certainly it’s blasphemous, so why not write it into our laws? We are a Christian nation, right?²)

God is an It. This is their theology.

If you refer to God as He or Him, you are being woke (separating gender from genitals)—and we will call you out.

We should do this repeatedly. Maybe they will start to understand (or remember) why they used to believe that gender was not about genitalia or sex chromosomes.

And why being woke is maybe intelligent.

Let’s treat it as a guerrilla campaign to knock some sense into the Christian world.

1. Yes, some Christians misgender God as female and not just male. I was born into Christian Science, a denomination which every Sunday presents the “spiritual” translation of the Lord’s Prayer, beginning, “Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious…” in place of “Our Father which art in heaven…” As far as I know, this has never been controversial.

2. I kid. Writing theological positions into Federal law is a good way to push Christians into war with other Christians, given that there are 45,000 denominations all with differing theologies. Those of us who are non-Christian might not be happy either.