Within a few months, or even weeks, the equality act is expected to be passed into law.  While it sounds good – after all, what American would oppose equality? – it is a dangerous piece of legislation which could threaten Christian ministries and eventually, if not immediately, lead to persecution.  According to Alliance Defending Freedom (A legal organization which seeks to protect religious rights), the bill “poses a devastating and unprecedented threat to free speech [and] religious freedom.”  Specifically, it “could forbid churches and religious nonprofits from requiring their employees to live out their religious beliefs about marriage, sexual morality, and the distinction between the sexes.”   It could seek to force churches to allow their bathrooms to be used based on a person’s self-proclaimed gender rather than their God-given sex.  Churches, and Christian camps, schools, mission agencies, adoption agencies, and other organizations could be threatened if they refuse to hire LGBTQ employees.  Christian colleges which maintain separate male and female dormitories based on their students’ biological sex could be threatened if they refuse to allow a male who identifies as a female to stay in the girls’ dormitory.  Christians should have a thoughtful and Biblical response to these threats.  This month and next, I will focus on the Biblical position on Biological sex, while the following month, I will focus on our response to our culture which has gradually become hostile to our faith in this area.

The Bible is clear when it comes to biological sex.  In the creation account, the Bible says that God created just two sexes: male and female (Gen. 1:27).  Significantly, this is repeated in the genealogical record of Adam: “This is the book of the genealogy of Adam. In the day that God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them and called them mankind in the day they were created.” (Gen. 5:1-2). No other genders are ever mentioned in scripture.  Rather, from Genesis to Revelation we see continual and frequent references to just these two genders.  The Bible uses such words as male and female, but also husband, wife, son, daughter, king, queen, prophet, prophetess and others that clearly refer to two, and only two, genders!  In other words, a person’s sex is either biological male or female, and therefore cannot be changed.  This is in stark contrast to our culture’s belief that gender is fluid (Health Line currently recognizes sixty-four genders) and changeable.

Finally, transgender people are liars.  A transgender man (a man assigned as a female at birth) is not a man, but a woman.  A transgender woman is not a woman, but a man.  Not only does a transgender person reject their God-given sex, but they lie about their sex and expect society and those around them to do the same (Prov. 12:22).  It’s likely that the equality act will eventually criminalize truth in order to protect the lie that a man can become a woman and vice versa.  As Christians, we ought to have a strong conviction (based on scripture) that there are only two sexes, and that a person cannot change their sex/gender.