Anti-Trans Lutheran Thinks Personal Pronouns are a “Sinful Delusion”
For my own sake, I do my best to avoid the LCMS entirely, but sometimes the world likes to tempt me by dropping pieces of anti-trans Lutheran literature directly in my lap. This is one of those times. This week I had the privilege of reading a free booklet distributed by Concordia Publishing House entitled “In the Image of God: Gender & Sexual Identity.” If you want to spare yourself from a discussion of the unmasked disgust with gender-expansive people that lies within these pages, just know that it says exactly what you think it says, and go about your day. Who wrote this? Nowhere in this booklet or on the CPH website is the booklet’s author ever made clear. All we know about the author is that they are a “middle-aged dad” and not a “twenty-five-year-old surfer dude.” And based on their fervent belief that one must identify as the gender they were assigned at birth, and their deliberate misunderstanding of personal pronouns, I’m fairly certain that the author uses he/him pronouns. See how easy that was to discern? But the anonymous author here would like to have you think that understanding people’s pronouns is a cosmic mystery. In the image of God? I’m getting ahead of myself. Rather, I want to start by talking about the title of this booklet, “In the Image of God.” This part of the title is so large on the cover that you might not notice at first that it has anything to do with gender. But why call it that? Based on the context of what the booklet is about, I can only guess that perhaps the author is implying that trans people are not made in the image of God? This is peculiar because it implies that God is cisgender, which means he has a biological sex. But God (not Jesus) pretty clearly does not have a physical body. He doesn’t have a penis, XY chromosomes, or small gametes. And yet he is described primarily as male because…why? Trying to disentangle the meaning of this title, or the gender of God, for that matter, would be quite the tangent that I’m not very well equipped to take, but I recommend this intriguing video which reinforces the fact that the title makes no sense. Being trans is fake news, or something The booklet starts with the question, “How can this world be […]
#anti-trans-lutheran #bible #christian #christianity #lcms #lutheran #lutheran-church #lutheran-church-missouri-synod #trans #transphobia #transphobic
