- Hello, world!
It's Austen.
Let's talk about being
transgender and Christian.
This week's video is a bit of an
introduction of things to come.
In the next couple of weeks,
I'm going to be doing some
videos focusing on the question,
"Are the gender roles we find the Bible
"still binding on us today?"
Spoiler alert: the answer is
almost definitely yes AND no.
But let's unpack this a little bit first.
When we talk about gender
roles, what do we mean?
Gender roles can be
really quickly defined as
the roles or parts we play in society
that help designate us as male or female.
I know that definition
leaves out non-binary people,
but that's kind of what gender roles do.
Gender roles are kind of
like characters in a play,
even though we like to put
people in boxes and say
that's the hero, and that's the bad guy,
and that's the wizard,
nobody sticks in one box,
in one gender role, all the time.
Some stereotypical male gender
roles include things like,
father, provider, and husband,
and some stereotypical female ones include
mother, care-giver, and wife.
We tailor the way that we dress and act,
and interact with each
other to either fit in
or get out of these gender roles.
And while some people
find them really helpful
in understanding their own identity,
other people find them really
suffocating and unhelpful.
So, what kind of gender roles
do we find in the Bible?
Well, generally, what we find is that
then, as now, gender roles
had a lot to do with power.
In the Old Testament, men had
much more power than women
and actually the word for
'husband' is directly related to
the word for 'master' in
Biblical Hebrew, so there's that.
Women in ancient Israelite
society had fewer rights than men
and because they were
involved with menstruation
and childbirth, which were
seen as ritually unclean,
they were sometimes considered a danger
to people that were trying
to stay ritually pure.
On the other hand, we find
some women in the Old Testament
who did have a lot of power,
like Moses' sister Miriam, and Deborah,
who was a judge and leader of Israel.
We see a lot about gender
roles in the Old Testament
and who's supposed to be doing what,
but the main way that
people were identified
was by their familial role.
Whether they were a father, a
mother, a son, or a daughter.
In the New Testament we get all kinds
of mixed messages about gender roles.
The Letters of Paul say several
negative things about women,
including saying that women
shouldn't teach or speak in
church and should always accept
their husband's authority over them.
On the other hand, there are
women in the New Testament
who do teach and speak.
Like Euodia and Syntyche in
a letter to the Philippians,
and like Lydia in Acts,
who basically sustains
the whole of the early church.
We also have to look closely at the way
Jesus treats men and women, and how Jesus
works within and outside
of the gender binary.
Now, to get to the heart of the question
about whether these Biblical gender roles
still matter for us today,
we have to take a page out of
Anthropology and Sociology's handbook,
and make a distinction between
what is normal and what is normative.
When something is normal, it
just means that it's common
for that time or place.
For instance, it is normal
for people of all genders
to wear jeans in casual environments.
If something is normative,
however, that means that
it is the rule by which everything
else has to be measured.
We might say today that it's normative
to say 'thank you' when
somebody gives you something.
It's not a law.
We're not going to be thrown
in jail if we don't do it,
but it's a social contract
that we all are taught and understand.
In short, something that is normal is
descriptive of a current situation.
Something that is
normative is prescriptive
of what we should do
in a certain situation.
So when we're looking at
Biblical gender roles,
we have to ask the question,
"Is this behavior or action
normal or normative?"
Is it a description of
how things were once,
or is it telling us how
things should always be?
And if we do find that
some Biblical gender roles
are normative, then how
do we, as transgender and
gender-nonconforming
people deal with that?
In previous weeks when
we've looked at eunuchs,
we've looked at people
outside the gender binary,
but does the Bible tell us
about what it means to be
a man or what it means to be a woman?
When can these gender roles be
helpful and life-giving
things, and when are we
called to break out of them
in favor of greater unity?
So subscribe and keep tuned in
because I hope we find
about a dozen answers
for each one of these questions.
Please let me know in the comments below
if there's a specific Biblical passage
that you would like to see discussed
that has to do with gender roles,
and we will see you back here next week.
Peace, everybody.
