Biological Calvinism

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On my trip back from speaking at Triangle Freethought Society in North Carolina this past weekend (which was wonderful by the way), I worked my way through “Gender Heretics: Evangelicals, Feminists, and the Alliance Against Trans Liberation” by Dr. Rebecca Jane Morgan. 

A transfeminist, charismatic Christian, and historian of modern Britain, pop culture, and queerness, Dr. Morgan examines the at first seemingly odd pairing of the Evangelical Christian anti-trans movement and the Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) movement of the past several years. It’s a fascinating history, digging into the key characters and ideas that have informed this alliance over the past several years, and one I highly recommend if you enjoy any of my own work. But as I was sitting on the plane from Raleigh to Charlotte, I couldn’t help but have the term “Biological Calvinism” rattle around in my head as I read. I admit that this could be in large part inspired by a skeet I happened to see by self-professed “not a transphobe” Jerry Coyne (yes we’re talking about Coyne again, apologies), positing that we should do away with the concept of gender as separate from “biological sex” altogether. Certainly an…interesting turnaround from his previous claim that he believed that gender is different from sex, his issue was merely that people were denying “biological realities that people cannot change sex.”

The core of my work, even when I go off on other tangents, always returns to the idea that transphobia and anti-trans politics in the United States (and large parts of Europe) is based primarily in colonial/big-C Conservative Christian theologies and understandings of gender. Regardless of your personal beliefs in a deity, or lack thereof, it is an inescapable cultural truth that the hyper conservatism of various Christian groups has left a scar on the American consciousness around gender, sex, and sexuality, amongst a large number of other things (throw a rock on the internet and you’ll find someone talking about the “Protestant Work Ethic” and the “American Dream” as just one example.)

So it’s probably not that surprising that I see statements saying that we should only categorize people on the basis of some type of biology that is present at birth, whether that be chromosomes or genitals, and immediately start thinking about the concept of “predestination.”

“Predestination,” in the briefest definition that I can provide, is the theological idea that the Christian God has already determined each person’s life from beginning to end, and there is nothing that anyone can do about it. God has “preordained” who will be going to heaven or hell, and we’re just along for the ride. In the specific Calvinist thread, your actual faith or love or actions don’t even matter, because God has already made the decision on who is going to be saved. 

Let me put my own personal bias up front on the table here, because I have never claimed to be a bias free source. I am a lawyer and theorist, not a journalist, so I am under no ethical obligation to avoid taking specific stances on things. Coming from a strong Catholic background, in which we believe in both faith and works as being key elements of the path to salvation (what things like “faith” and “salvation” actually mean I am much more flexible on), I admit I’ve always had a difficult time wrapping my head around this concept, despite all of my efforts to be generous to a wide variety of philosophies that differ from my own so long as they don’t result in harm to other people. After all, it seems a bit convenient that the people who believe in predestination are all convinced that they themselves are a part of the “preordained” residents of heaven. I’ve never met a Calvinist that believes they’re going to hell.

All of that being said, I do find myself experiencing similar frustrations with the philosophy of so-called “secular” anti-trans advocates. Over and over again I hear them claim that the “rational” and “scientific” approach to gender is to simply adhere to biologically determined categories. According to both religious and secular factions of the anti-trans movement, you have no say on who you are. Your status as a man or woman is purely a matter of fate, random biological processes, or some other entity outside of the self in whatever way you want to conceptualize it. Anything to the contrary is a dangerous subversion of the “natural order” of things that must be corrected for the good of society.

I’ve been trying for years to figure out why exactly this is, and what we can do about it. Some of it, as previously mentioned, goes to my usual argument that our modern Western gender binary has been over enforced by what I tend to call “Imperial Christianity.” The level of beef I have with St. Paul/ancient writers attempting to pass themselves off as Paul is astronomical, second perhaps only to the Roman Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity a state sponsored religion to begin with. Imperial/fascist systems do not have room for gender diversity. The fascist mindset requires all people to have predetermined social roles that begin at birth in order to psychologically prime them to be compliant with authoritarianism. These social hierarchies are determined by race, gender, class, ethnicity, and disability amongst other categories depending on the specific culture the fascist regime comes about in, and when successfully enforced seem to most people like an inevitability. I don’t doubt that this still remains the case, or my blog and career would be taking a radical turn. Continuing to encourage the deconstruction of the Imperial Christian influence on our culture and mindset is perhaps one of the most urgent projects we can engage in in the battle against Christian nationalism.

That being said, I think some of the struggle I find with the anti-trans crowd does also come out of the mainstream messaging of the past couple of decades surrounding transness and trans identity. A frequent critique I hear from anti-trans atheists is that the notion of “gender” as internal identity is equivalent to the idea of a “soul” that is separate from our “biology.” As the fight for mainstream acceptance has evolved, many trans advocates have attempted to reach cis communities by using the “born this way” arguments of our gay peers. For many people, their first conceptualization of transness is some formulation of the phrase “I was born in the wrong body,” or “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body.” In some ways this has been effective at encouraging empathy with trans people. By appealing to the way people understand their own masculinity or femininity and the discomfort they would likely feel if the world consistently viewed them differently, people have a better chance at beginning to realize that transness is, at the very least, not some alien threat to the social order.

But this framing often fails us by being overly simplistic. I often describe “born this way” rhetoric as an intro level course. You get the bare bones understanding that gets you to the minimum understanding of the topic. The problem comes, however, when people think that the “intro level” is all that there is to understand, and far too many cis people do not care to investigate the concept past that point because they feel like it does not impact their own lives. This can lead even the most “liberal” of transphobes to come to the conclusion that transness is something that can and/or should be only provable by some kind of biological process. They rely so much on “hard science” that any other structure for understanding the world, and therefore for making law and policy, is “woo” nonsense on par with faith healing and anti-vax science denialism.

When you dig deeper into ideas about gender and transness and queerness in general, the reality is actually far more complex. I am far from the first queer person to point out the flaws in the “born this way” strategy. In that regard I am not saying anything new. In the past couple of decades there has definitely been a notable shift to the idea that gender is not merely something you “are” but something you “do.” I myself will often joke with queer friends that I’m agender/genderqueer because I started in the performing arts incredibly young and all of my performance energy has been used up. But again I think this idea is also overly simplistic. Cis people often read the idea that “gender is a performance/political statement” as “gender is a choice” and come to the conclusion that their refusal to treat trans people with basic dignity is merely a political opinion, and any resistance to it is “censorship” or “stifling dissent.” But even amongst trans people who take on these slogans in their politics, you will still see an insistence that our existence is valid and far more internal than a political or lifestyle choice.

Gender cannot be simplified to any single structure. It is influenced by biology, yes, but also culture, history, politics, and myriad other social factors. What makes someone a “man,” “woman,” or otherwise varies deeply depending on what part of the world and what historical moment you find yourself in.

Which leads me back to my original idea of “Biological Calvinism.”

Let me be clear here that I don’t think Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, or any of the other big name secular transphobes are literal Calvinists. They don’t believe in God, and as much as their worldview is beyond influenced by Imperial Christianity, I would not go as far as to force an identity as any kind of believer in a deity onto them. But I think there is at least something to be said for its utility as an analogy for an incredibly parallel philosophy, even if you want to reject the more direct influence on Calvinist theology on the anti-trans movement. The very core of secular transphobic philosophies, and especially secular TERF philosophy, is the idea that we are preordained into specific gender roles and life paths the moment our genitals become visibly identifiable. This system of thinking inherently leads to biological essentialism, defining us as more or less likely to be sexual predators or victims from birth, more or less likely to be nurturing or aggressive from birth, more or less likely to excel at sports from birth, and any other number of dichotomies with no possible other influences on these aspects of our personalities, skills, interests, and existence. This is no different, at least on a functional level from a theology that claims that people are born on a predetermined pathway to heaven or hell.

I do recognize that the inverse of this understanding is similarly a parallel to my own theological beliefs about the relationship between “faith” and “good works.” At the end of the day my understanding of gender does not solely depend on either internal belief or associated action isolated from each other. Instead gender is a mix of both internal understanding of the self and how that leads us to actively experience and interact with the world. Even trans people who are in the closet, or who do not wear their transness as a political identity, still have active interaction and experiences distinct from their cis counterparts, as well as their out/political trans counterparts, informed by their internal understanding. Cis people too have a gender identity and gender experience informed by their internal understanding of their masculinity and femininity. The parallel also continues when you consider that what is considered a “good” work relies heavily on the social and cultural context you are existing in. How we actively express and experience gender also relies heavily on similar social and cultural influences. And I truly believe humans are generally happiest when they are able to freely and openly integrate these concepts into their everyday lives.

I don’t think it is possible to completely divorce theology from other types of philosophy and politics. Theology is philosophy, and very often political philosophy. There is a reason you cannot escape it when taking any kind of political theory class. I also don’t think it is entirely necessary to do so in order to protect secular democracy. Instead I think what is far more productive to the end goal of religious pluralism (assuming that the shared end goal is, in fact, religious pluralism, which is a topic for another day) is to be honest and aware of the ways that religion and theology have and continue to influence our culture and approach to politics. When we recognize it, we can start to examine it for what it actually is, deconstruct it, and figure out what we need to do to reconstruct our philosophies into reasonable human centered policy that values the balance of both diversity and unity within the human experience.

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Kat (they/them) is a queer lawyer, activist, and theorist focusing on the intersections of law, queerness, religion, and politics, with the occasional bit of theology, political theory, and legal theory thrown in for good measure. Originally from rural southern Indiana, Kat earned their B.A. in Political Science in 2019 before continuing on to earn their J.D. in 2022, both from Indiana University- Bloomington. A former Equal Justice Works Fellow for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Kat has spent their professional career fighting for the separation of church and state and LGBTQIA+ rights. Outside of work you can find them at a ballet or contemporary dance class, sipping on dirty shirleys at their local gay bar, or playing video games with their cat, Merlin.