At the same time, the biblical authors view the human person as an integrated whole. As John Cooper writes: “Biological processes are not just functions of the body as distinct from the soul or spirit, and mental and spiritual capacities are not seated exclusively in the soul or spirit. All capacities and functions belong to the human being as a whole, a fleshly-spiritual totality.”52 In other words, Scripture understands “human beings holistically as single entities which are psychosomatic unities.”53 We are dealing, then, with a both-and: an ontological duality (a distinct body and soul) within a functional holism (an integrated person).
Otherwise put, and without wanting to minimise the reality of the psychological distress experienced by sufferers of gender incongruence, there is simply no space within biblical anthropology for the kind of ontological mismatch that is sometimes claimed. The soul is the soul of the body, as the body is the body of the soul. As David writes:
13 For you formed my inward parts;you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.Wonderful are your works;my soul knows it very well.15 My frame was not hidden from you,when I was being made in secret,intricately woven together in the depths of the earth.16 Your eyes saw my unformed substance;in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me when as yet there was none of them. (Ps 139:13-16)
There is, then, no person or soul or spirit that has been created independently of the body and then placed in the body (or perhaps in the wrong body). As the Lord knit my body together in my mother’s womb, “I was made in the secret place.” The sex of the body, then, reveals the gender of the person.
This understanding has profound and far-reaching implications, which Oliver O’Donovan expresses both clearly and compassionately:
The sex into which we have been born (assuming that it is physiologically unambiguous) is given to us to be welcomed as a gift of God. The task of psychological maturity – for it is a moral task, and not merely an event which may or may not transpire – involves accepting this gift and learning to love it, even though we may have to acknowledge that it does not come to us without problems. Our task is to discern the possibilities for personal relationship which are given to us with this biological sex, and to seek to develop them in accordance with our individual vocations … Responsibility in sexual development implies a responsibility to nature – to the ordered good of the bodily form which we have been given. And that implies that we must make the necessary distinction between the good of the bodily form as such and the various problems that it poses to us personally in our individual experience. This is a comment that applies not only to this very striking and unusually distressing problem, but to a whole range of other sexual problems too.54
So, while all kinds of things can and do go wrong with us – both physiologically and psychologically, the Bible offers no support to the idea that one can actually be a man trapped in a woman’s body or a woman trapped in a man’s body. That may well be a person’s subjective feeling, but it is not an objective fact.
This is not to deny that there are social or cultural elements to gender expression and gender roles. Nor is it to deny that a person’s gender identity may be at odds with their biological sex. The point is, contrary to the prevailing view of our culture, the true gender of the inner person is revealed by the sex of their outer body. Sam Allberry puts it this way:
Our culture says: Your psychology is your sexual identity – let your body be conformed to it.
The Bible says: Your body is your sexual identity – let your mind be conformed to it.55
e) Prohibitions against gender bending
Such an understanding also helps us to see the rationale behind the Bible’s condemnation of a number of behaviors that fall under the banner of ‘gender bending.’
(i) The first of these behaviors is that of cross-dressing. This is addressed directly and unequivocally in Deuteronomy 22:5:
A woman (Heb. ’ishshah) shall not wear a man’s (Heb. gever) garment, nor shall a man (Heb. gever) put on a woman’s (Heb. ’ishshah) cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination (Heb. to‘evah) to the Lord your God.
There can be little doubt that this text condemns cross-dressing in the strongest possible terms. This is clear from the use of the Hebrew word to‘evah, which means “detestable, repulsive or loathsome” and is applied to any act that is “excluded by its very nature” or is regarded as “dangerous or sinister.”56 It is thus the word applied to various idolatrous practices (Deut 7:5; 13:14), homosexual intercourse (Lev 18:22; 20:13) and other violations of the created order.57