The Body God Gives

Over the past decade and a half, transgenderism has gone from a marginal phenomenon to a central political dispute. This did not happen spontaneously. As Robert S. Smith outlines in his new book, The Body God Gives: A Biblical Response to Transgender Theory, the initial philosophical moves for redefining gender identity and roles were made in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1970s and 1980s came a further shift, as some feminist and queer scholars argued that sex does not determine gender infallibly. Finally, with scholars like Judith Butler in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries came the idea that sex and gender are both social constructions and nothing more.