What the Bible Actually Says About Gender (And What It Doesn’t)
The OU Essay, "Demonic" Language, and What We're Really Arguing About
If you’re a news junkie like I am (and perhaps even if you’re not), you’ll know that a University of Oklahoma student recently received a zero on a psychology essay after writing that “society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders” is “demonic and severely harms American youth.” The assignment asked students to react to an article about gender roles and peer pressure, sharing their personal opinions, connecting the research to their own experiences, that sort of thing.
Samantha Fulnecky, a junior psychology major, wrote that she believes gender roles reflect God’s original plan for humanity and that teaching children otherwise constitutes spiritual harm. Fair enough! Lots of Christians believe something similar. But here’s what strikes me: she cited no specific biblical passages, and no sources beyond the assigned article. When her graduate instructor gave her a zero for not meeting the assignment’s requirements, Fulnecky filed a discrimination complaint, the instructor was placed on administrative leave, and conservative media outlets turned the whole thing into a referendum on religious freedom in higher education. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt even weighed in!
But let’s be clear about something: this isn’t primarily a story about academic freedom or grading rubrics. It’s a story about what happens when cultural assumptions dress themselves up in religious language, theological certainty replaces biblical literacy, and saying “the Bible says” functions to end conversation instead of inviting us to actually open the book and see what’s there.
In her essay, Fulnecky gestured toward the Bible, and claimed its authority without ever engaging with what scripture says about gender, bodies, or the complexity of human identity. That omission matters, because what the Bible says about these questions is far more complicated and surprising than culture war talking points allow.
When Christians claim biblical authority for gender essentialism, they almost always begin with Genesis. “God created them male and female” becomes the mic drop, the end of discussion. Fulnecky’s essay does exactly this, asserting that “God made male and female and made us differently from each other on purpose and for a purpose.”
But Genesis 1 and 2 aren’t scientific textbooks or comprehensive anthropological treatises. They’re ancient Near Eastern liturgical poetry, beautiful and profound statements about God creating, creation being good, and humans bearing God’s image. The “male and female” language in Genesis 1:27 is primarily about procreation and partnership, not an exhaustive taxonomy of every possible form of human gender and sexual differentiation.
Consider what Genesis doesn’t say. It doesn’t discuss intersex conditions, which (depending on how you define them) may affect anywhere from 0.02% to 1.7% of births. It doesn’t address hormonal variations, chromosomal differences beyond XX and XY, or any of the documented biological complexity that challenges tidy binary categories. It doesn’t provide guidance on how communities should respond to people whose bodies don’t fit neatly into “male” or “female” boxes. Put simply, the text isn’t trying to do the work that modern Christians keep asking it to do.
Ancient Israel wasn’t naive about sexual and gender complexity. The Hebrew Bible itself contains multiple categories for people who didn’t fit conventional male/female classification. The terms saris (often translated as “eunuch”) and seris (sometimes rendered as “barren woman” but referring more broadly to those unable to reproduce) appear throughout scripture, referring to those who existed outside standard gender categories. These weren’t theoretical concepts but described real people who lived in Israelite communities, went to church, and showed up in biblical narratives without anybody calling them demonic.
Indeed, these categories were central to Israel’s religious life. Eunuchs held positions of power and trust throughout scripture and are featured prominently in stories about God’s inclusive love.
In Isaiah 56, God speaks directly to eunuchs who feel excluded from the assembly. The context here matters: Deuteronomy 23:1 explicitly barred eunuchs from entering “the assembly of the Lord.” This was law, clear and unambiguous. But Isaiah records God reversing that exclusion:
“Let no eunuch say, ‘I am only a dry tree.’ For this is what the Lord says: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant—to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever.’”
Here, God doesn’t just permit exceptions to the law but overturns it entirely. People who were legally barred from worship are now promised honor within the temple itself. Those who couldn’t fulfill traditional roles of marriage and procreation receive “a name better than sons and daughters.” The text explicitly welcomes people who exist outside conventional categories of male and female into the very heart of the covenant community.
These aren’t peripheral details. They’re central to the biblical witness about who belongs in God’s community and how that community should respond to people whose bodies and identities challenge our categories.
Christians, too, seldom mention what Jesus himself taught on the subjects of gender and sexuality. In Matthew 19, we find Jesus discussing marriage and divorce. His teaching is strict, declaring that divorce is permitted only for sexual immorality. His disciples respond with frustration and suggest it might be better not to marry at all.
But instead of doubling down on the marriage imperative, Jesus does something unexpected. He opens the door wider:
“Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”
Jesus explicitly acknowledges that not everyone fits into conventional categories of male and female, married and procreating. He names three types of eunuchs: those born that way, those made that way by others, those who choose it. And notice, he doesn’t call any of these categories sinful or contrary to God’s plan. He simply acknowledges their existence and suggests that the kingdom of heaven has room for all of them.
It’s equally important what Jesus doesn’t say. He doesn’t call these conditions tragic or temporary or in need of correction. He doesn’t promise that in the resurrection everyone will be “normal.” He acknowledges that some people exist outside the categories his culture assumed were universal, and he’s fine with it. “The one who can accept this should accept it.”
This isn’t some fringe text or obscure reference. It’s Jesus speaking directly about people who exist outside traditional gender categories, and he does so with matter-of-fact acceptance, not condemnation.
Perhaps the most troubling part of Fulnecky’s essay isn’t what she gets wrong about scripture; it’s what she gets wrong about theology. When she writes that believing in multiple genders is “demonic,” she’s making a profound theological claim that deserves scrutiny.
In Christian theology, to call something demonic is to identify it with powers that actively oppose God, that seek to destroy what God has made, and/or that spread deception and death. She’s not expressing mild disapproval or theological disagreement; it’s spiritual warfare language, the vocabulary of cosmic evil.
So when you call transgender people, or those who affirm transgender identity, demonic, you’re making a specific claim: that these humans (people made in God’s image, people for whom Christ died, people whom God loves) embody or serve forces of evil. You’re suggesting that their existence itself constitutes rebellion against God.
Think about that. If transgender people are demonic, then the image of God cannot be present in their bodies. If gender nonconformity is demonic, then Jesus’s incarnation failed to extend to bodies like theirs. If acknowledging gender diversity is demonic, then God’s creative work is more limited than Genesis suggests.
This isn’t just offensive; it’s theologically incoherent. The doctrine of the incarnation insists that God became human in Jesus Christ, taking on flesh and dignifying human bodies by inhabiting one. The doctrine of the imago dei insists that every human being bears God’s image. These are non-negotiable doctrines central to Christian faith, and you can’t affirm them while simultaneously declaring that an entire category of human beings is demonic.
As Christians, this should horrify us. It weaponizes the language of spiritual warfare to justify treating image-bearers of God as enemies. It looks at people who are often vulnerable, marginalized, and suffering, and declares them agents of evil. The gospel doesn’t permit or condone that kind of violence.
I want to be clear about something else: I don’t think Samantha Fulnecky is a villain. I think she’s a young woman who learned a truncated version of Christianity that handed her conclusions without teaching her to read. She can invoke “the Bible says” but apparently was never taught to actually cite scripture, and can claim God’s authority but wasn’t equipped to engage with what God actually says. She knows the culture war talking points but not the biblical texts that complicate them.
And that’s tragic, because it means she’s been set up to fail academically and spiritually. She’s been handed a faith that can’t accommodate complexity, that collapses under gentle scrutiny, and requires her to denigrate people in order to defend what she’s been told God demands. That’s not a gift. That’s a burden, and it’s one that many who grew up in evangelical spaces know intimately.
The real failure here isn’t Fulnecky’s. It’s the failure of communities that never modeled a faith strong enough to acknowledge ambiguity and generous enough to extend dignity even in disagreement.
That kind of formation—the kind that produces theological certainty without biblical depth, conviction without wisdom, and boldness without charity—creates people who are perpetually at war and perpetually defensive. It creates Christians who can write essays calling others demonic without any apparent awareness of how far that language diverges from the Jesus who ate with tax collectors, touched the untouchable, and welcomed outcasts into God’s kingdom.
So what would it look like to approach questions of gender and identity with both theological seriousness and biblical humility? What would it mean to engage with scripture instead of just invoking it?
It would mean reading Genesis carefully and recognizing what the text does and doesn’t claim, taking seriously the biblical witness about eunuchs and God’s explicit welcome to people whom religious communities often exclude, and letting Jesus’s own words about those born outside conventional categories shape our theology instead of pretending he never said them. It would mean acknowledging that biological sex is more complicated than we’ve been told, that gender identity doesn’t always align neatly with anatomy, and that real human beings live in bodies and hold identities that challenge our neat categories. And most importantly, it would mean refusing to use theological language as a weapon. Calling people demonic, claiming they oppose God’s plan, suggesting their existence constitutes spiritual warfare—this kind of rhetoric doesn’t just “speak truth in love” but inflicts real harm on real people, many of whom are already bearing the weight of rejection, discrimination, and violence.
The Christianity I’m interested in reclaiming isn’t one that requires less conviction or settles for theological mush, but one that takes scripture seriously enough to actually read it, wrestles honestly with complexity, and extends the same radical welcome that Jesus offered to everyone the religious establishment wanted to exclude.
Adhering to that faith isn’t easy; it’s certainly harder than subscribing to the one that reduces everything to sound bites and culture war skirmishes. But it also hews more closely to the God who overturned religious law to extend welcome, to the Jesus who acknowledged people living outside conventional categories, and to the gospel that doesn’t need to tear anyone down to protect God’s honor.
That’s a Christianity worth defending, and a witness that’s worth the cost.