Trans Women Are Not Women: A Biblical Case

Trans Women Are Not Women

A Note Before We Begin

Two commitments are held together throughout this response. First, every person referenced here is an image-bearer of God, and that demands a certain baseline of sobriety and seriousness in how we engage. Second, that same respect for persons is precisely why we cannot simply nod along to claims that contradict reality as God has established it. Real love speaks truth. Flattery is not kindness. What follows is an attempt to speak clearly, logically, and biblically.

On the Phrase “Assigned at Birth”

The video opens with a distinction designed to sound like a neutral medical observation: sex “assigned at birth” is different from gender identity. But notice what that phrase is quietly doing. “Assigned” implies that sex is something external observers stamp onto a person, like a label slapped on a package. The doctor looks, makes a judgment call, and assigns a sex. On that framing, the assignment is arbitrary, external, and potentially wrong.

That is not what Scripture teaches, and it is not what the science shows either.

Psalm 139:13 says God formed the psalmist’s inward parts and wove him in his mother’s womb. The Hebrew qanah and sakak describe intimate, purposeful craftsmanship. God is not a passive observer annotating what He sees. He is the active Creator designing the person from the inside out, and that includes the body’s sex. Genesis 1:27 is even more direct: “Male and female He created them.” The Hebrew zakar (male) and neqevah (female) refer to the sex distinction God Himself established. God does not create sexually undifferentiated persons who later self-identify. He creates them as male and female.

The phrase “biological sex” deserves a note here. That modifier – “biological” – was introduced by gender ideologists specifically to create conceptual room for a contrasting “psychological” or “social” sex. The word is simply sex. Male and female. There is no other kind. A physician who records a newborn’s sex is not making an arbitrary assignment that could just as easily have gone the other way. He is recognizing and recording a fact established at fertilization months earlier.

Logically, the “assigned at birth” framing only works if you accept a prior dualism that the real person is somehow separable from and potentially in conflict with the body. Scripture gives no such dualism. The body is not a shell housing the real person inside. The body is part of the person. This is why the resurrection is bodily (1 Corinthians 15). God does not rescue the soul from the body, He redeems and glorifies the whole person, body included. A theology that pits inner identity against the body God created is not a Christian theology. It is a recycled Gnosticism that the church rejected in the second century when Valentinus and Marcion taught that the material body was either evil or irrelevant to the true self. The church condemned those teachings then, and the same framework deserves the same verdict now.

Scientifically, sex is determined at fertilization by the chromosomes: XX produces female development, XY produces male development. This chromosomal reality is present in every cell of the body and cannot be altered by hormones, surgery, or social declaration. The physician observing a newborn’s sex is recognizing and recording a biological fact present since conception. As developmental biologist Dr. Paul Hruz of Washington University School of Medicine has written, the claim that sex is merely assigned rather than recognized fundamentally misrepresents the biology of human sexual development. Eric Vilain, a geneticist at UCLA who has studied sexual differentiation extensively, has stated plainly that sex determination in humans is a robust biological process driven by genetics, not social observation.

On Womanhood as “Lived Experience and Social Role”

This is the video’s central claim. The argument is that womanhood is not a matter of sex – it is an experience. It is the set of roles, expectations, and social realities that a person lives out. Therefore, anyone who lives out those experiences qualifies as a woman.

The philosophical source of this argument is Judith Butler, whose 1990 book Gender Trouble introduced the concept of gender performativity – the idea that gender is not something you are but something you do, a set of repeated performances that produce the appearance of a natural, stable gender identity. Butler was explicit that this framework was not a neutral description of reality but a political intervention designed to destabilize what she called the “heterosexual matrix” – the assumption that biological sex, gender identity, and sexual attraction naturally align. This is the theory the video is presenting to a Filipino public audience as though it were settled science or common sense. It is neither. It is a specific ideological position originating in postmodern feminist theory, held by a particular academic tradition, and explicitly designed to subvert the natural order.

And it collapses under its own weight even on purely logical grounds.

The argument is circular. What experiences make someone a woman? The experiences of being treated as a woman, of living out the social expectations placed on women. But that already assumes we know what a woman is before we can identify her experiences. You cannot define the category by the experiences that flow from the category. The argument produces nothing.

Scripture takes a completely different approach. When God names the woman ishah in Genesis 2:23, He does so on the basis of what she is – “she was taken out of Man” – not on the basis of what she has experienced or performed. Her nature precedes and grounds her roles. This is not a peripheral point. It is the entire foundation of biblical anthropology: identity is received from the Creator, not constructed by the creature. Psalm 100:3 says it plainly: “It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves.” The creature does not define itself. Isaiah 29:16 rebukes precisely the presumption being made in this video: “Shall the potter be considered as equal with the clay, that what is made would say to its maker, ‘He did not make me’?”

Look at the diversity of women in Scripture and this becomes undeniable. Ruth was a widow and a foreigner. Deborah was a judge and military leader. Mary was an unmarried teenager. Lydia was a merchant. Phoebe was a church servant. The Proverbs 31 woman was a businesswoman and homemaker. These women share almost nothing in terms of lived experience and social role and yet every one of them is, without question, a woman. Not because of what they did or experienced, but because of what they were. The category preceded and contained all that diversity. It was not constituted by it.

There is also a deeper problem with the experiential framework. If womanhood is constituted by social roles and cultural expectations, then what counts as womanhood in 21st-century Manila differs from what it was in 1st-century Rome, which differs from what it is in a hunter-gatherer society in the Amazon. The category becomes culturally relative, historically unstable, and ultimately incoherent as a shared human reality. And the historical record is unambiguous: every human civilization without exception has recognized male and female as categories grounded in the body. Anthropologist Donald Brown’s landmark 1991 study Human Universals identified the recognition of sex differences as one of the universal features of human cultures across all times and places. Even cultures that recognized gender-variant social roles such as the hijra of South Asia, the fa’afafine of Samoa, or the two-spirit individuals recognized in some Native American traditions never claimed that biological males were literally women. They created distinct third-category social roles, which actually presupposes the male/female binary rather than dissolving it. The idea that womanhood is a performed social identity rather than a biological reality is not ancient human wisdom rediscovered. It is a novelty invented in late 20th-century Western academic theory, and it is contradicted by the universal testimony of human civilization.

On “Trans Women Are Women With Transgender Experience”

Transgender-identified males are women, the video says and the reason given is that they have a “transgender experience.” But this simply restates the conclusion inside the premise. It assumes the very thing it needs to prove. No argument has been made. A claim has been dressed up as an explanation.

Biblically, Deuteronomy 22:5 is directly relevant: “A woman shall not wear man’s clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman’s clothing; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD your God.” The Hebrew to’evah – abomination – is the same word used in Leviticus 18 for sexual sins against the created order. This is not a peripheral concern about fabric choices. The broader context of Deuteronomy 22 is revealing: the surrounding verses address the mixing of different kinds of seeds, the yoking of different kinds of animals together, the mixing of wool and linen. The entire chapter is structured around the principle of honoring the distinctions God built into creation. The prohibition on cross-dressing sits squarely within that framework. It is not an isolated clothing rule. It is a specific application of the principle that the male/female distinction God created is to be honored, not transgressed. Old Testament scholar Peter Craigie, in his commentary on Deuteronomy in the New International Commentary on the Old Testament series, confirms that the prohibition targets the deliberate blurring of sex distinctions established at creation, not merely a concern about particular garments.

Matthew 19:4 closes the question at the highest possible level of authority. When asked about human sexuality and marriage, Jesus does not reach for cultural tradition or contemporary consensus. He reaches to creation itself: “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female?” Jesus treats male and female as permanent creational givens. He gives no indication whatsoever that a person’s inner sense of self can relocate them from one sex to the other. When the Son of God speaks on the nature of male and female and grounds His answer in Genesis 1, no subsequent academic consensus has any authority to override that answer.

On Dismissing Chromosomes

The video acknowledges sex chromosomes and then sets them aside as insufficient to determine gender identity.

Human sexual differentiation is not a loose collection of independent variables. It is a biological cascade. The sex chromosomes (XX or XY) determine gonadal development – ovaries or testes. The gonads produce sex hormones that direct the development of the entire body: skeletal structure, musculature, reproductive organs, and neurological development. This is a unified, directional biological system. Declaring chromosomes irrelevant does not make them so, because chromosomes are the upstream determinant of the entire system.

The implicit claim running beneath this section of the video is the “female brain in a male body” argument common in transgender advocacy, the idea that neurological development can produce a brain whose sex does not match the body’s chromosomal sex, and that this neurological reality constitutes the person’s true gender identity. Research on sex differences in brain structure is real; male and female brains do show average statistical differences across large populations. But these differences do not constitute a “gender identity center” whose mismatch with the body creates a transgender person. A major 2018 review by Daphna Joel et al. in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, examining neuroimaging data from over 1,400 individuals, concluded that human brains cannot be reliably classified as male or female on the basis of structure alone and that the evidence for a distinct “transgender brain” is not established. Neuroscientist Dr. Lawrence Mayer, writing in The New Atlantis in 2016, reviewed the available neuroscience literature and concluded that the research does not support the claim that transgender-identified individuals have brains resembling those of the opposite sex. The neurological argument for transgender identity is not established science. It is an ideological claim in search of scientific cover.

The video also implicitly relies on inflated intersex prevalence figures to suggest that biological sex is not clearly binary. The strict biological definition of intersex, cases where sex is genuinely developmentally ambiguous, affects approximately 0.018% of the population, per Leonard Sax’s analysis published in the Journal of Sex Research (2002). The higher figures sometimes cited by advocates – up to 1.7% – include conditions such as late-onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia that have no effect on sex development in any externally visible or functionally ambiguous way. Even Anne Fausto-Sterling, whose original work generated the higher figures, acknowledged in subsequent writing that her numbers had been misused by advocates. Intersex conditions are recognized in medicine as developmental variations within the male/female binary, not evidence that the binary itself is arbitrary.

On the Appeal to Academic Experts

The video cites academic and expert consensus as though it settles the question. It does not.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:20: “Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” Romans 1:21-22 describes exactly what happens to human intellectual systems built on the suppression of God’s revealed truth: “their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.”

The Christian’s final authority on the nature of humanity is not the American Psychological Association. It is the God who made humanity, whose word is truth (John 17:17), and whose revelation in Scripture is sufficient for every matter it addresses (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Scripture is the final authority above all claims of human expertise, not merely above soft science as opposed to hard science, but above all human knowledge. We do not accept biblical anthropology because science has not yet contradicted it. We accept it because God has declared it.

Romans 1 deserves its full weight here because it is the most directly relevant passage in all of Scripture to the current cultural moment. Paul’s argument is not merely that people become intellectually confused when they reject God. He describes a specific, predictable pattern: first, the Creator is rejected and His truth suppressed (Romans 1:18-20). Then the creation order is inverted; the creature is worshipped rather than the Creator (Romans 1:21-23). Then sexual distinctions are blurred and exchanged, with males and females abandoning their natural function for what is contrary to nature (Romans 1:24-27). Then a whole ecosystem of intellectual justification is constructed to support and celebrate what God has condemned; Paul calls this a “depraved mind” that not only practices these things but gives “hearty approval” to those who do (Romans 1:28-32). The current academic consensus on gender identity is not a neutral intellectual development. It is, precisely as Paul described two thousand years ago, the predictable intellectual fruit of a culture that has suppressed the knowledge of God.

That said, the scientific data in this case also strongly corroborates Scripture, and the supposed expert consensus is far weaker than the video implies. Academic consensus is a social phenomenon subject to political pressure and institutional capture. The APA’s 1973 declassification of homosexuality as a disorder was not driven by new scientific evidence. It was driven by organized political activism, gay activists disrupted multiple APA annual conferences, demanded inclusion in panel discussions, and ultimately pressured the APA’s nomenclature committee into a vote. Ronald Bayer documented this process in detail in his 1981 book Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis, concluding that the decision was driven by politics, not science. The same pattern of ideological pressure shaping clinical consensus is visible in the gender identity debate today.

The Cass Review, an independent review commissioned by England’s National Health Service and led by Dr. Hilary Cass, published in April 2024 after four years of work, concluded that the evidence base for pediatric gender transition was “remarkably weak” and that the ideological environment had made it nearly impossible for clinicians to raise concerns without professional retaliation. The review examined over 100 studies and found that the quality of evidence supporting social transition, puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones for minors was so poor that no reliable conclusions could be drawn about their safety or efficacy. Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway have all since restricted or reversed their pediatric gender transition protocols in response to similar evidence reviews. These are not conservative governments acting on religious grounds. They are Nordic social democracies responding to the evidence. The claim that “experts agree” on this issue is not an accurate representation of where the science actually stands.

On the Diversity Argument

This is the video’s most rhetorically effective moment: listing genuinely diverse categories of women – disabled women, elderly women, students, Christian women, Muslim women, and then appending transgender-identified males to that list as though the move is equivalent.

It is not equivalent, and the move is a bait-and-switch. Every category in that list consists of biological females. The diversity they represent is diversity of experience, circumstance, age, and belief within a common category defined by sex. Appending biological males to that list does not extend the diversity within the category. It introduces something categorically different while disguising it as more of the same.

The logical error here is the continuum fallacy – the claim that because a category contains internal variation, its boundaries must be arbitrary. But internal variation does not dissolve categorical boundaries. There is enormous diversity among triangles: equilateral, isosceles, scalene, right, obtuse. That diversity does not mean a circle is a kind of triangle. The definition – a three-sided polygon – remains the boundary within which all the diversity sits. Diversity within a category does not grant membership to things outside it.

Biblically, the women of Scripture are genuinely diverse. Ruth and Deborah and Mary and Lydia and Phoebe share almost nothing in life situation, personality, cultural background, or social role. The Bible celebrates all of them. Every single one is a biological female. The diversity enriches the category. It does not erase its boundary or extend it to those outside it.

On Empowerment and Women’s Rights

The video closes by framing the inclusion of transgender-identified males within womanhood as an empowerment; a strengthening of women as a collective. This needs to be examined against actual outcomes.

When biological males compete in women’s sports on the basis of so-called gender identity, biological women lose scholarships, records, and competition places. World Athletics formally excluded transgender-identified males from female competition in 2023 after its own review concluded that inclusion materially disadvantaged biological females. World Aquatics followed with its own exclusion policy in 2022 after commissioning independent scientific analysis. World Rugby had already done the same in 2020, citing both fairness concerns and the safety risks posed to female players by the retained physiological advantages of biological males. These are not conservative advocacy organizations. They are the governing bodies of major international sports responding to documented, measurable outcomes.

When biological males are housed in women’s prisons on the basis of so-called gender identity, women in those facilities face documented safety risks. A 2020 report by Keep Prisons Single Sex, drawing on UK Ministry of Justice data, found that transgender-identified male prisoners had conviction rates for sexual offenses significantly higher than the female prison population into which they were being placed. The Ministry of Justice’s own data confirmed that the majority of transgender-identified prisoners in the UK female estate were convicted of sexual or violent offenses.

When women’s medical research, legal protections, and clinical care categories are redefined to include biological males, the sex-specific data and protections those categories were designed to serve are eroded. Dr. Carole Hooven of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology has written extensively on how the ideological pressure to avoid sex-specific language in medicine is compromising clinical care, particularly in areas like cardiovascular disease, pharmacology, and reproductive health, where male and female bodies respond differently in medically significant ways.

None of this is empowerment for women. It is the redistribution of women’s protected spaces, opportunities, and categories to biological males.

Genuine advocacy for women requires accurate categories. Proverbs 31:8-9 calls us to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves and to judge rightly. Right judgment requires right categories. You cannot advocate for women while simultaneously dissolving the definition of the word.

On the Desistance Data

There is one further scientific point the video does not address but which is critically important. The video treats so-called gender identity as a stable, innate inner reality that must be affirmed. The clinical data tells a different and sobering story.

Multiple independent studies across different countries consistently show that the majority of children who experience distress about their sex desist; that is, they come to identify with their biological sex by adulthood, when not subjected to early social transition. Steensma et al. (2013) in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry studied a Dutch cohort and found desistance rates of approximately 84%. Singh et al. (2021) in a long-term follow-up study found that the majority of boys who experienced childhood gender dysphoria identified as gay or bisexual men in adulthood rather than as transgender women. Zucker’s 2018 review in Psychological Medicine synthesized multiple studies across different populations and confirmed the desistance pattern as robust. A 2022 study by Littman in Archives of Sexual Behavior raised additional concerns about the rapid-onset presentation of gender dysphoria in adolescent peer groups, suggesting social contagion as a significant contributing factor in the recent dramatic increase in cases, particularly among adolescent females.

The Cass Review flagged the desistance data as among the most important and most consistently ignored findings in the field. The therapeutic approach that produces desistance outcomes, watchful waiting without early social transition, is now being suppressed in many clinical settings precisely because it conflicts with the affirmation-only ideology the video promotes. Children who might have grown into healthy adults comfortable in their biological sex are instead being placed on pathways involving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgical procedures, on the basis of an ideological commitment that is not supported by the evidence. This is not a compassionate position. It is a harmful one dressed in compassionate language.

The people in and behind this video are image-bearers of God living in a world broken by the fall, and people who experience genuine distress about their embodied sex are suffering real pain. That suffering deserves to be taken seriously. But taking suffering seriously does not mean validating every interpretation of that suffering or every proposed solution to it. A physician who tells a patient what they want to hear rather than what is true is not being compassionate. He is being cowardly.

The Bible has the most compassionate possible message for anyone in that situation, not affirmation of a false framework, but the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is the only word that tells the truth about the depth of the problem and the reality of the solution.

Here is what that gospel says.

God made you. Your body, including your sex, is not a mistake. It is not a cage your true self is trapped inside. It is the purposeful work of a wise and loving Creator who formed you with intention (Psalm 139:13-14). The concept of being “born in the wrong body” is a theological impossibility. God does not make souls and accidentally attach them to wrong bodies. The Creator who knit you together in the womb does not make category errors. The distress a person feels about their body is real but the interpretation of that distress as evidence of a body-soul mismatch is false, and it leads people away from the only One who can actually help them.

The fall is real, and the suffering it produces is real. We live in a world where the creation is subjected to futility (Romans 8:20), where our bodies experience disorder, and where our inner lives – including our sense of self – are not reliable guides to truth about who we are. Jeremiah 17:9 is unsparing: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” The fallen inner life cannot be trusted as an infallible authority on who the person is. Sanctification involves the renewal of the mind (Romans 12:2), not the capitulation of reality to the pre-renewal mind’s perceptions.

Christ redeems the whole person. Not just the soul. The bodily resurrection is the ultimate statement that the body matters, that God does not discard it as a mistake about the person, but glorifies it. Sanctification is not the process of making the body conform to a disordered inner sense of self. It is the whole person, mind, will, emotions, body, being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ (Romans 8:29).

The gender ideology framework misdiagnoses the problem (the body is wrong), prescribes a false solution (alter the body to match the feeling), and offers no coherent destination (an endlessly revisable self-constructed identity). The gospel correctly diagnoses the problem: the fall has corrupted the totality of man, his experiences, including our experience of our own bodies and selves. It prescribes the true solution: repentance for rebelling and turning away from God, faith in the life, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, salvation and sanctification through Christ alone. And it offers a certain destination: glorification, the whole person conformed to Christ and freed from every effect of the fall forever.

Our hope is found in Christ Jesus alone