Disney, Christianity and the erasure of transgender people

There is an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to erase the existence of transgender people.

Since taking office in January, Trump has banned words like “gender,” “nonbinary” and “transgender” from government documents and websites; he’s ordered that all new and renewed passports must reflect the recipient’s gender assigned at birth regardless of whether the recipient has transitioned; he’s ordered the military to purge transgender service members regardless of their rank or service; he’s banned transgender students from playing on a sports team that conflicts with their gender assigned at birth; and the list goes on.

These orders are doing real harm to individuals, communities and our country.

The National Park Service website for the Stonewall National Monument — a monument commemorating the 1969 Stonewall riots in which transgender women played a huge role and which was a turning point for LGBTQ rights in this country — was scrubbed of all references to “transgender” and “queer.” The erasure went so far as to remove the “T” and “Q” so that the acronym on the website now only reads LGB.

The Christian faith teaches us that all people bear the image of God, which should make the erasure of an entire segment of our community deeply unsettling.

“Behind the president’s efforts is a cruel and vicious political ideology cloaked in the rhetoric and symbols of Christianity.”

I’ll admit I have serious ethical concerns about medicalized, gender-affirming care for minors. Those concerns come from personal experience working with teens — including nonbinary and transgender teens — for almost 15 years. But those concerns in no way prevent me from recognizing and speaking out against the hateful, harmful attempts by this administration to erase human beings.

Behind the president’s efforts is a cruel and vicious political ideology cloaked in the rhetoric and symbols of Christianity.

Christianity is a religion whose central tenant is to love God, neighbor and self. Yet if someone unfamiliar with the faith were to look at the way the trans community is being targeted by a president who declared himself to be anointed by God, he or she would assume Christianity and gender nonconformity are incompatible.

That simply isn’t true.

Disney’s mistakes

Nevertheless, this belief has gained new traction in light of recent decisions made by The Walt Disney Company.

In December, news broke that Disney eliminated a transgender character from Pixar’s new animated series Win or Lose. That in and of itself is disheartening because it seemed Disney — a publicly-traded company — was capitulating to the president’s discriminatory efforts even before he was in office.

However, last week news broke again that after eliminating the transgender character, Disney is adding an explicitly Christian character to the series. Coincidence?

Some journalists have interpreted these two actions as Disney actively pitting the Christian community against transgender people. While that may not be the company’s true motivation, the optics are not good.

What can be said, though, is that Disney has missed an important opportunity to offer the American public a way to have a compassionate and more nuanced conversation about gender identity and the Christian faith.

Let’s remember Biology 101

When I began thinking about Disney’s decision and its complicity in the ongoing erasure of the trans community, I returned to an episode of the podcast “The Bible for Normal People” I’d heard years ago. It featured Megan DeFranza, whose research investigates gender, intersex and theology.

In the episode, DeFranza explained “intersex” as “a broad umbrella term that talks about bodies that don’t fit the medical definitions of male and female. There’s a mix of male and female characteristics in the same body, and that can happen in a lot of different ways.”

For those who haven’t recently taken biology, it’s worth revisiting a few basics. While a baby might be born with XY chromosomes (a typical male pattern) or XX chromosomes (a typical female patter), some babies are born with an extra copy of the X or Y chromosome.

But biology is way more complex than these simple letters.

Androgens (sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen) play a role in how the chromosomal patterns are expressed both during gestation and at puberty. If a fetus has a sensitivity to or an overabundance of androgens, the baby can be born with both male and female characteristics (intersex).

We saw the politicized effects of this play out before the Olympics last summer when runner Maximila Imali, who is intersex, was barred from competing.

In the podcast, DaFranza was asked about how the term “intersex” relates to transgender individuals. She replied, “Right now, the only difference between intersex and transgender people is that transgender people cannot point to a medical diagnosis … yet.”

Individuals who are intersex can experience gender dysphoria similar to that experienced by transgender people, but they can point to a genetic variance for their dysphoria. While science cannot yet point to why transgender people experience gender dysphoria, it might someday.

Jesus was aware of gender-nonconformity

While labels like “intersex” and “transgender” are newer terms, Jesus and the early church fathers spoke of individuals whose gender was not on a strict binary.

In a conversation about marriage in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus references several groups of people. After telling the disciples if someone divorces his wife for reasons other than unchastity and then remarries, he commits adultery, the disciples moan that it would be better not to marry. Jesus replies:

Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.

The description “eunuchs from birth” is a category into which some intersex expressions fit. Yet when speaking of these people, Jesus doesn’t condemn them. Instead, he simply acknowledges their existence and draws from an ancient rabbinic tradition that understood gender much more expansively than we do today.

“According to our ancient rabbis, there are six distinct genders.”

An op-ed published by Jewish Rhode Island Rabbi Alex Weissman writes:

According to our ancient rabbis, there are six distinct genders. The two we are most familiar with are n’kevah/female, and zachar/male. … Two others our tradition recognizes are the tumtum and the androgynous. The tumtum is a person with indeterminate or obscured sex characteristics while the androgynous is a person with both “male” and “female” sex characteristics.

Weissman shares how this understanding of gender variance shows up in the Talmudic discussions about our ancestors, including Adam, who is described as androgynous. In the Talmud, gender variance is also blamed for the fertility troubles experienced by Abraham and Sarah:

In a Talmudic discussion about why it was so hard for our ancestors to have children, Rabbi Ami states that the parents of the Jewish people, Avraham and Sarah, were tumtumin. He brings his evidence from two verses in the book of Isaiah, “Look to the rock from where you were hewn, and to the hole of the pit from where you were dug. Look to Avraham your father and to Sarah who bore you” (Isaiah 51:1-2). Seeing a parallelism in the two verses, Rabbi Ami argues that Avraham and Sarah’s genitals were “hewn” and “dug,” i.e., that their bodies were changed as they changed genders and were only then able to conceive.

It’s stressing again that in these ancient texts from both the Jewish tradition and Matthew’s Gospel, neither the ancient rabbis nor Jesus speak of gender variance in negative terms. Rather, gender nonconformity simply is. It is a natural part of life.

“Gender nonconformity simply is. It is a natural part of life.”

Even St. Augustine — not someone particularly known for his compassion around the topics of gender and sex — noted in City of God:

As for hermaphrodites, also called androgynes, they’re certain very rare, but every culture has people that they don’t know how to classify as male or female. In our culture, we call them by the better sex. We call them men.

Again, here is an early church father simply acknowledging the existence of people who do not present in strict gender binaries. He does not place a value judgment on their difference or existence but rather says in his society they elevate them to the status of men. In his patriarchal context, this would have afforded them greater freedoms than categorizing them as female.

Considering the testimonies from these ancient religious witnesses, Trump’s attempts to erase the existence of gender nonconforming individuals is at odds with our faith traditions.

Equally egregious is the president’s cozying up to the Christian nationalists and joining them in demonizing transgender people. This is gross and it isn’t Christian.

But this erasure isn’t just about people who are transgender

I’ve noted elsewhere that the Christian extremists concerned about gender identity are actually expressing terror around the disappearance of patriarchal norms, the rise of gender equality, and society’s challenge to “purity culture.”

According to a 2020 study by researchers at Albany Medical College, over the past 25 years the demographics of individuals seeking hormone therapy for gender dysphoria has shifted dramatically.

Twenty-five years ago, trans women (those transitioning from male to female) outnumbered trans men (transitioning from female to male) two to one. Today, those seeking hormonal treatment for gender dysphoria are trending younger and are primarily trans men.

Yet, Trump’s first executive order was titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The text of the order repeatedly states its intent is to protect women from “men (who) self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women … (which) attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety and well-being.”

If the majority of those seeking treatment for gender dysphoria today are primarily trans men (females transitioning to males), then why do women’s spaces need protecting? Nowhere in the executive order or in any of the various state legislative efforts claiming to protect women has there been any concern expressed for protecting men’s spaces from the trans men who will be entering them.

“The language around protecting women is really about asserting dominance over the bodies of individuals classified as female at birth.”

That’s because the language around protecting women is really about asserting dominance over the bodies of individuals classified as female at birth — whether they are cisgender or transgender. It’s about keeping the female body pure, normalizing bodily oppression and perpetuating rape culture.

The language used is also rooted in racism.

There is a reason those who study the rise of Christian nationalism in America emphasize its connection with white supremacy. The language around protecting women from predatory men has an unsavory history in the United States. It isn’t that long ago that Black men in America were lynched regularly, and far too often the reason given was to protect some white woman’s body.

Christians cannot sit idly by

Returning to Disney’s choice to placate the president and the warped Christian ideology that props him up: Imagine if Disney had embraced the age-old axiom “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

As I’ve written elsewhere, art is a powerful medium with the potential to both reflect and shape collective memory.

That’s why fascist regimes target artistic and cultural institutions first: to reeducate the masses.

That’s why Trump’s hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center — one of the largest performing arts organizations in the United States — should alarm everyone.

That’s why Disney’s failure to exhibit moral courage in this moment is so very sad.

Had they instead incorporated both the transgender and the Christian characters into the storyline of this series about a youth sports team, they could have inspired conversation and had a profound impact on this present moment. Instead they join the ranks of media and social media companies like Meta, ABC and the Washington Post who have sacrificed freedom of expression at the altar of Trump.

This January sketch by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Anne Telnaes for the Washington Post was rejected by the Post’s editorial page editor, prompting Telnaes to resign. The cartoon mocked the media and tech oligarchs who have bowed down to Trump. With each passing day this political cartoon becomes more relevant.

 

Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with BNG and as program director at Faith Commons. She is a spiritual director and a recent master of divinity degree graduate from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.

 

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