Recently in Houston a bill was presented advocating for racial, LGBT, and transgender rights. If passed, this bill would be the largest stepping stone since the Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage. Initially the bill nicknamed “Hero” was met with enthusiasm but on November 3 the bill was rejected after a majority vote. T-Shirts from opponents read “No men in women’s bathrooms.” The failure of the bill has left some disillusioned but many see it as a chance to begin raising awareness. Anti-hero ads portrayed the proposition 1 bathroom ordinance as a license for sex offenders and malicious men to violate women and children. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7thOvSvC4E
Controversy over the US school district ruling that the Illinois’ Township High School District violated the rights of a high school student, who was banned from full privileges in the Women’s locker room, has raised transgender issues to the national spotlight. Recently the school district has began to fight back arguing that no human rights violations took place. The backlash and pseudo scientific arguments of the anti-hero advertisements show clearly there is a lack of knowledge about transgender people.
How the rhetoric of bathroom controversies actually plays out is vastly different than the unfounded claims of labelling transgender men and women as sexually exploitive opportunists. Here is a picture of Michael Hughe a transgender man taking a selfie in the Women’s bathroom. Ironically, it is more traumatizing for little girls to have to go to the bathroom with Michal Hughe, a functioning member of society who happens to feel most comfortable pursuing a gender different than the one assigned on his birth certificate, then for him to use the men’s bathroom.
Another issue involves U.S. Army Reserve Capt. Sage Fox who is transgender. Initially she was given sanction to be active as a captain based on the militaries lifting of the ban on transgender officers. However, two weeks later the decision was reversed and Capt. Sage Fox was placed on inactive status. 
Her commander said to her when she tried to come in for training “You don’t get it. Don’t come tomorrow. Take the orders and go away.” Today roughly 15,500 transgender people are serving in the military, according to the Williams Institute. Transport that to the local high school of our future generation. The message is pretty clear: ”we affirm your body when your holding our gun and shooting at our enemies, but when your home don’t pretend to be one of us.”
Pressing behind the political issues lays a certain narrative commonly taken for granted. Westerners inherit a Judeo-Christian value system that largely has been legitimized by certain readings of the Jewish origin story of Genesis 1-3. Genesis 1:27 reads “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Western society has seen these verses as establishing both normative gender roles/appearances, and deriving the dignity and worth of all human life. In this context, dignity and worth are objective values, neither achieved through herculean piety nor discarded by horrific violence. Gender identity/roles are derived from the divine image making them objective representations of God. Therefore, no violence can ever be done to Western notions of gender identity and normative roles since they are resistance to human experiences and notions of justice and equality.
This narrative has been called into question by queer theorist Judith Butler and poststructuralist Michal Foucault among others. Bulter notes patriarchal power and gender stipulation are the “cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as…prior to culture” (Butler 1990: 7). In similar ways origin stories like the Genesis account function to stabilized the status quo and transport culturally constructed values to the shining glory of platonic forms. Butler argues that gender is not given but “performed.” Foucault in The History of Sexuality draws attention to identity as “bio-history. The pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of human history interfere with one another.” All the bumping up against the dark objects of reality are part of the blind method of determining ourselves and our world.
The Imago Dei has been a mechanism in the hands of prejudice, but it can also be a liberator. The Genesis account can be read in two ways. It can either mean that God is male and so Adam is the truest image of God and eve is less than human. Or it means that God is beyond gender and is inter-sexual. If the later is the case being made in the image of God can mean freedom and self-acceptance. If the former is true than anything non-male is less than anything deviating from the archetypal male form is not fully made in the image of God. The same logic that calls transgendered people broken also condemns autistic children, those with down syndrome, and those who experience atypical physiologic deviations. If Transgender people are broken then so are they. In Exclusion and Embrace Volf argues:
“The nature of God tells us nothing about what it means to live as male in distinction to female or as female in distinction to male. We can find in our notions of God only those things about femininity or masculinity that we ourselves have placed into these notions. Being gendered, language about God will shape how we understand femininity and masculinity, but it should not be used to legitimize a particular construction of femininity and masculinity.”
Applied to a transgender context, language about God only gives us the affirmation to love and embrace others, not the license to discriminate and construct exclusive society norms. Perhaps we can finally triumph over the bigotry and hate of our forefathers. I don’t know how this plays out in the political scene, but no progress can happen when dehumanizing knifes are being whirled at the Transgender community. Maybe we are finally at a day when we will judge people, not by their anatomy, but by the content of their character.
Simulacrum Rei 