Bible ‘portrays gender as a colorful spectrum,’ theology professor says

The Bible supports the idea of individuals changing their sex and taking drugs and surgeries to do so, a professor at a Catholic university in Ohio wrote recently.

Professor Esther Brownsmith teaches classes on Scripture at the University of Dayton in Ohio. She was responding to the vote yesterday to prohibit men from competing in women’s sports and to ban minors from taking drugs and surgeries to make themselves look like the opposite sex. The vote overrode a veto by Governor Mike DeWine.

Brownsmith (pictured) claims that Joseph’s “amazing technicolor dreamcoat” was really clothes a princess would wear.

“This is just one of the ways that the Bible indicates that the ‘shapely and beautiful’ Joseph (Genesis 39:6) crossed gender boundaries, and he was not the only one: Deborah led an army, Mordecai breast-fed his cousin Esther, and Daniel was probably a eunuch,” the Biblical scholar wrote in an opinion piece today for the Dayton Daily News.

The Bible does not support the idea of gender being a “rigid binary,” according to Brownsmith.

She wrote:

For scholars like me who research the Bible, these are just a few of the ways that scripture portrays gender as a colorful spectrum, not a rigid binary. Even God is sometimes described with feminine language, as a midwife or nursing mother. Yes, the Bible was written in a patriarchal time, but it recognizes that people reimagined and reshaped their gender identities back then—just like they do today.

In fact, the Bible supports the idea of kids undergoing drug and surgical interventions to remove healthy organs, according to the professor.

“As a professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Dayton, I believe that scripture and trans rights are not at odds. To the contrary: the Bible calls for us to support society’s most vulnerable members, and that call has rarely been more urgent,” she wrote.