A Critique of ‘Transformed’ 6

This is the last of six posts on the Evangelical Alliance’s Transformed report. See the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth.

Conclusion

This is a bad report – and it is bad not just when judged from the position of someone like me, who happens to disagree with nearly everything in it. It is bad in its own terms.

The report insists that ‘Love requires empathy and compassion – listening and understanding the otherness and challenge to someone else’s identity’ (p.15). Well, judged by that standard, this is a loveless report. It talks the talk about compassionate listening, but the voices of transgender people are all but excluded from its pages. The report does nothing at all – and I really do mean nothing – to help its readers learn seriously about trans people’s experience, their views, their lives, their questions, their needs. It hides them from view, while pretending to have done them justice.

The report intends to root itself in the bible. But it will not allow the picture it paints of the biblical big picture to be disturbed by the awkward details of the particular texts that it cites. The authors seem simply not to have noticed that their own exegesis shows the text to be significantly less neat than their argument needs it to be: their hard-edged ‘big picture’ steamrollers everything in its path, regardless of who is in its way.

The report wants us to be serious about bodies. But it itself shaped by a deep dualism, which doesn’t entertain the possibility that transgender experience might be rooted in the body. And it is shaped by inattention to the actual variety and complexity of real human bodies. In fact, it isn’t serious about real human bodies at all: it is serious about a stylised, binary representation of bodies. And when the authors do have to face real bodily complexity, in the shape of intersex conditions, they’re the ones willing to resort to surgery to bring those bodies back into line with their diagram.

In these and other ways, this is a bad report. The Evangelical Alliance sought to offer us ‘A brief biblical and pastoral introduction to understanding transgender in a changing culture’. Instead, they have given us an extended exercise in bad faith.


This is the last of six posts critiquing this report.

1. Whose stories?
2. The varieties of trans experience?
3. Listening to the Bible
4. Confused bodies
5. The rest of the report
6. Conclusion

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