(ANALYSIS) This column examined the emotionally complex issues surrounding transgender, “gender fluid” and “non-binary” sexuality only two months ago. The focus in that piece was a Tennessee case that the U.S. Supreme Court will decide by June on whether 26 states can still limit or ban gender transition treatments for minors.

With the transgender policies among President Trump’s blizzard of new executive orders, further explanation is needed on the cultural reality of deep-seated religious concepts. In particular, the resolutely “binary” Bible depicts humans as either male or female and underlies 2,000 years of Jewish and Christian teaching. Similarly with the Quran and Muslims. How should that heritage affect secular society and policy? 

Though Trump’s campaign emphasized immigration and cost of living problems, his late-emerging transgender agenda was among additional factors that helped him manage a popular vote win by 1.5 percent and carry all seven battleground states. The new executive orders oppose:

1. Funding for transition treatments with those under age 19

2. Legal recognition of multiple rather than two genders (with pronouns or passports)

3. Defining “sex” as different from biological gender at birth

4. Teaching of so-called “gender ideology” and transition assistance at tax-supported schools

5. Transgender soldiers, and 6) athletes born male competing in women’s sports. Inevitable legal challenges will proceed.

Under point one, Trump declared, “It is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.” 

U.S. Catholicism, in particular, anticipates major conflict with Trump on planned mass deportation of immigrants. Yet his stance against youth transitions drew praise last week from Minnesota’s Robert Barron, who chairs the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. He declared youth transitions, which have notably increased in the U.S., to be “unacceptable,” “dangerous,” and something that “must end.”   

Efforts to change a youth’s sex are “based on a false understanding of human nature,” Barron contended. “So many young people who have been victims of this ideological crusade have profound regrets over its life-altering consequences, such as infertility and lifelong dependence on costly hormone therapies that have significant side effects.”      

Pope Francis is often considered a liberal among pontiffs, but he approved the Vatican’s strict 2019 education decree “Male and Female He Created Them.” Last year, he endorsed the lengthy “declaration” Dignitas Infinita from the Vatican office on doctrine, which counts the new “gender ideology” among assaults upon “human dignity.” That text draws upon Francis’s 2016 “apostolic exhortation” Amoris Letitia. 

That decree, in turn, quotes the concluding report from a 2015 international Synod of Bishops. The bishop-delegates stated that gender “ideology” denies “the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without gender differences, thereby removing the anthropological foundation of the family.” Resulting education and law promote personal identity “radically separated from the biological difference between male and female. Consequently, human identity becomes the choice of the individual” and is changeable. The bishops insisted humanity’s creation depicted in biblical Genesis 1 means “the difference between the sexes bears in itself the image and likeness of God.” 

Much the same comes from America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), representing conservative and evangelical belief more generally. The day after Trump defunded youth transitions, SBC’s public policy spokesman Brent Leatherwood celebrated abolition of “the radical gender madness that has plagued our government,” adding that “culture is consumed by the fiction of gender fluidity.”

Leatherwood said transitions “go against God’s design for gender and sexuality and perpetrate permanent, detrimental harms against children, both physically and psychologically.”

He also urged Congress to turn Trump’s edict into permanent law, applying this official SBC stance from 2023. He then praised Trump’s order against trans athletes for “protecting women. Southern Baptists believe our biological realities cannot be ignored, and any attempt to do so will inevitably bring harm to women and our society.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or “LDS,” long nicknamed “Mormon”) clarified policy last August in the latest revision of its “General Handbook.” Persons who feel “their inner sense of gender does not align with their biological sex at birth” share “divine worth” with all people, deserve compassion, and are welcome to attend worship, it says. But they cannot receive the priesthood normally granted male church members, or hold specified church offices, or enter temples to participate in central rites. The church teaches against transitions or identifying or “presenting” oneself differently from birth gender. 

American Islam’s most authoritative summation is a 2022 paper by Yasir Qadhi, dean of The Islamic Seminary of America, posted online by the Fiqh Council of North America, which he chairs. 

Qadhi, who combines a Yale Ph.D. with degrees from seminaries in the Mideast, states “there are simply too many verses in the Quran that refer to the two sexes for us to deny a fundamental gender binary” in God’s creation of humanity, shown in everyone’s DNA. Gender as a “cultural human construct with no necessary link to biological sex” is “untenable” under Islamic law, human history, biology, and “common sense.” However, transgender “feelings over which a person has no control are not sinful if not acted upon.” 

In Judaism, authorities in the Orthodox branch have consistently opposed transgenderism, especially bodily modification through surgery and hormones, but also such aspects as name, pronoun preference, attire, or grooming. The retired executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, said most of its rabbis believe religious law means that “birth gender” is a person’s “gender for life.” However, Weinreb personally thinks the sanctity of life (also raised by the abortion question) permits transition if a “gender dysphoria” patient is suicidal.

Religious support for transgender rights has been gaining recently in the U.S., but is not so robust. For instance, the customary liberal Christian and Jewish organizations did not take a stand on the transitions issue in the pending Supreme Court case. 

Among “Mainline” Protestants, one example is the Presbyterian Church (USA), which in 1996 approved continued ordination of a pastor who transitioned from male to female. A 2018 declaration commits the denomination to “inclusion of transgender people, people who identify as gender non-binary, and people of all gender identities within the full life of the church and the world.” 

United Church of Christ agencies ardently advocate for transgender concerns, in line with a 2003 General Synod resolution affirming that “transgender and intersexual people are currently offering valuable ministry within the United Church of Christ, both as lay people and as clergy," recognized by the denomination’s Coalition for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns.

Similar belief has developed in Judaism's non-Orthodox branches. In 2003, Reform Judaism admitted its first openly transgender rabbinical student. In  2015, its conference of rabbis directed congregations to consider rabbi candidates regardless of gender identity. That same year, a Union for Reform Judaism resolution affirmed “the full equality, inclusion and acceptance of people of all gender identities and gender expression,” including “the right of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals to be referred to by their name, gender, and pronoun of preference.”

Judaism’s Conservative branch followed suit in 2016 with a Rabbinical Assembly resolution committing to “the full welcome, acceptance, and inclusion of people of all gender identities in Jewish life and general society.” All Conservative schools, camps, and agencies are to create “fully inclusive settings” and teach Jews that transgender and gender non-conforming people need “to be known by the identity, name, and pronoun of their choice.” 

The Unitarian Universalist Association established an Office of Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Concerns as early as 1996. In 2002 the first openly transgender parish minister was hired. A 2007 General Assembly resolution urged affirmation of transgender persons in employment, congregational life, and public advocacy.

Further resources to consider: The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocate, compiles data on U.S. religious views, including among Buddhists and Hindus. On the traditionalist side, the detailed 2024 policy of the 13,000-member Christian Medical & Dental Associations is especially important.

Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.