Texas Democrat candidate for the senate, James Talarico, has ventured into theological territory meant to challenge orthodox views about God and human sexuality.[1] Trying to challenge the Christian understanding of gender and sexuality, he alleged that God is ‘nonbinary’. Clarifying his comment, he averred that God is ‘beyond gender’. These are contradictory claims.
To suggest that
God is nonbinary is to locate Him in the created order. When people claim to be ‘nonbinary’, they are
making a claim about their sexuality.
Sex, as we should know but also can see from Genesis 1.26ff, has to do
with procreation and multiplying the species on the earth. Those claiming to be nonbinary are claiming
sexuality, whatever ‘nonbinary’ means to them.
Talarico’s second
statement is correct: God is beyond gender.
This is because He is beyond the created order. God is not both male and female. He has no sexual identity. The fertility cult of Canaan understood their
gods in terms of sexual identity, even pairing male and female gods. The God revealed to Israel was wholly other
than the created order, including sexuality.
Talarico, however,
confuses being beyond gender with being beyond a single gender. For him, God’s
greatness is in being gender inclusive.
His objective is to affirm transgender inclusion in female sports. However, God’s being is beyond the created
order, not inclusive of whatever variety there is within it. Of course, we might add the obvious: God’s
created order consists of only two genders, male and female. Talarico is wrong on both accounts.
The politician
ventured a further comment from Genesis 3.28, that there is neither male nor
female in Christ. His confusion seems to
know no bounds. First, as even he is
aware, this passage is about Christians, not everyone. Is he proposing that Christians should have
transgender males participate in female sports, but not others outside of
Christ? Of course not. Yet Paul has no such confused discussion in
mind. His point is not, of course, that
Christians recognise no genders but that gender does not exclude one from being
a Christian. We might add that Paul’s
statement recognises two genders, not the multiple genders of recent, Western,
post-Christian culture.
Talarico seems to
think that he has shamed Christians with their own theological claims. Instead, he has shamed himself with his
simplistic, confused, and wrong understanding of Christian theology. Yet the roots of his error are not new with
the attempt to squeeze transgenderism from Holy Scripture. For decades, the feminist movement has
affected theological thinking of the same order. In an attempt to undermine patriarchy,
interpreters of Scripture were encouraged to find feminine metaphors for God
and His work. Of course, many metaphors
are used in Scripture of God, including ones that include gender, marriage, and
paternal roles. One wrongly understands
such metaphors as anthropomorphisms.
Anthropomorphism refers to attributing human characteristics to
something that it not human. In this
case, it is attributing gender identity to God through the use of metaphors. Thus, feminism, or persons submitting to
feminist interpretation and agendas, has (at times) understood female metaphors
for God an actual attribution of human gender to God. This has led some to refer mistakenly to God
as ‘Mother’. This is the step Canaanite
religion took, with the advantage of polytheism’s male gods and female
goddesses. It is the step now taken by
Talarico in his promotion of transgender identity and the undermining of the
actual female gender by trying to include men in women’s sports on the basis of
their non-biological fascinations.
Political efforts to approve of or even enforce transgenderism in
post-Christian society are not limited to legislatures. The Court of Justice of the European Union
issued a ruling on 12 March that affirms transgenderism. The ruling declares that the 27 countries of
the EU must recognise one’s ‘lived identity’, not biological identity, in
identity documents.[2] The ruling opposes any understanding that
civil law should be based on natural law.
On the contrary, as Marcus Tullius Cicero stated in the 1st c. BC, ‘But
of all the things involved in the debate of educated men, surely nothing is
preferable to the plain understanding that we have been born for justice and
that right has been established not by opinion but by nature’ (Laws I.28).[3] Also, ‘But truly the most foolish thing is to
think that everything is just that has been approved in the institutions or
laws of peoples.... So it happens that there is no justice at all if not by
nature, and what is established for the sake of advantage is undermined by that
advantage’ (Laws I.42). Cicero elaborates:
But if rights
were established by peoples’ orders, if by leading men’s decrees, if by judges’
verdicts, there would be a right to rob, a right to commit adultery, a right to
substitute false wills if those things were approved by the votes or
resolutions of a multitude. But if there is such power in the opinions and
orders of the foolish that the nature of things is changed by their votes, why
don’t they establish that bad and ruinous things should be held to be good and
salutary things? Or if law can make right out of wrong, can’t the same law make
good out of bad? But we can divide good law from bad by no other standard than
that of nature (Laws I.43-44).
Indeed, by its ruling, the EU’s Court of Justice makes a mockery of
justice. The logic of the Court is that
people must be able to move freely in EU countries, and so a transgender person
with documents affirming the transgender identity must be able to carry the ‘lived
identity’ throughout the countries of the EU.
Not to do so would be a denial of one’s ‘dignity and freedom’ in parts
of the EU, as in Bulgaria, whose laws are based in nature and state that sex is
biological.
The Court of
Justice of the European Union illustrates for us how a minority’s imaginations about
reality can become law for all. If
Talarico were elected to the United States’ august body of legislation, and if
his ilk somehow gained control of the Senate, theologically erroneous arguments
would be unnecessary. The ‘Trans-Society’
needs no theology or natural law to press its agenda. All one needs is the idea that law should
support one’s ‘dignity and freedom’, whatever one imagines oneself to be.
[1] See the report in C. J. Womack, ‘Texas Democratic Senate Nominee
James Talarico Doubles Down on God Being “Beyond Gender” Comments,’ Fox News (22 March, 2026); Texas
Dem James Talarico defends ‘God’s sausage’ comment, outlines Senate campaign
strategy | Fox News (accessed 22 March, 2026).
[2] Cf. Jonathon van Maren, ‘EU’s Top
Court Rules All 27 MEMBER Nations Must Recognize “Transgender”
Identities,’ (19 March, 2026); EU’s
top court rules all 27 member nations must recognize ‘transgender’ identities
(accessed 22 March, 2026).
[3] Marcus Tullius Cicero in On
the Republic and On the Laws, trans. David Fott (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2014).
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