Transition is sacred. In the creation account of Genesis 1, the refrain “and there was evening, and there was morning,” repeats after the telling of each day’s creation. No other sentence is recurrent in this chapter, signaling deep significance in a continuous spectrum to the essence of all that is. Movement. Connectivity. Transition.
This Hebrew song reveals ancient beliefs about all existence as fundamentally whole and transitory. As the creation story reveals (see full chapter below), everything in the cosmic oneness emerges in the same way, through individuation and integration. Any individuation: distinction, separation, and opposite paradoxically requires integration: movement, connectivity, and transition. In creating the heavens and the earth, God makes the following distinctions between opposites, each of which are followed by the chorus about connected movement:
day from night: And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
water under the sky from water above it: And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
land from sea: And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
vegetation from earth: And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
sun from moon: And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.
mankind from animal, male and female he created them: And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
The word universe means to turn into a single whole. This is the essence of the Genesis 1 creation story, turning into wholeness by integrating opposites. Both light and dark represent the whole truth of us. Both water above the sky and water below it represent the whole truth of us. Both land and sea represent the whole truth of us. Both vegetation and earth represent the whole truth of us. Both sun and moon represent the whole truth of us. Both male and female represent the whole truth of us. Each of us.
Wholeness requires individuation. I am not you, and you are not me. The day is day, and the night is night. Conformity brings destruction because its foundation is a lie. We usher in paradigms of dominance if we think others are supposed to be the same as us. Instead, we are in relationship, just as the opposites inside of me are in relationship. My day is in relationship with my night. I contain parts of you, and you contain parts of me because like the universe, we are whole.
Wholeness requires integration. We are created just as the universe is created, as evidenced in verse 26, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.” The author uses plural pronouns for God here, indicating the integrated plurality in cosmic oneness. They/them. Our likeness to God means we, too, have plurality. We, too, are made from distinctions, and we, too, transition between them. The universe inside of us is incomplete without the connections between our opposites. Turning into a single whole is a process, not done in a single day.
Our transgender neighbors embody the essence of all existence as they turn into wholeness from integrating their opposites into their human experience. As mirrors, transgender people show us our fundamentally whole and transitory nature. We are comprised of opposites, too. We change and move, too. This is life. Though not every person experiences a gender-specific transition in this existence, none of us stays as we once were. And there was evening, and there was morning.
The Divinity in Transition
The introduction of Genesis indicates that divinity itself originates with the darkness of primordial waters. As spirit, or energy, God was in the darkness, the place without form. Verse 2 says, “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” God exists in the realm of the formless, the unseen, the energetic, and with water. This realm is the unconscious, our unconscious.
The first act of creation was to integrate light into the darkness. So it follows that the first thing we can do to become whole is to bring forth our light from our darkness, or in other words, to bring forth consciousness from our unconsciousness. Light symbolizes that which is revealed, known, or in awareness, whereas darkness symbolizes everything hidden or unknown. The spirit of God hovers in this darkness, in this unconsciousness. The divinity in our unconscious self becomes manifest through its integration with our conscious self. Integration of consciousness and unconsciousness must be a consistent process, as consistent as the perpetual turning of each day. And there was evening, and there was morning.
The process of transitioning between gender identities mirrors the process of integrating one’s divine self. Transgender people are uncovering the hidden truth of themselves, the part of themselves that once lived in their unconscious, where the Spirit of God hovers. In other words, by transitioning, transgender people are integrating the realm of God into the light.
Others can integrate the realm of God into the light, too. As often as the earth turns, new revelations of ourselves are ready to be borne into the light, if we will let them. Perhaps it’s time to finally face one’s repressed traumas that remained hidden in the dark waters. Perhaps it’s time to step into the truth of one’s unknown strength. Perhaps it’s time to become aware that our unconscious views of ourselves motivate how we consciously view others. Perhaps it’s time to bring one’s poetry into the light, after years of being locked away alongside the rest of one’s passion. Perhaps it’s time to become conscious of one’s unconscious shame and how it results in one’s hiding. Perhaps it’s time to cry again to process your grief.
Like fishers of men, this process requires bringing life up to the surface from the depths of the water. In so doing, you use movement to bring heaven to earth, the opposites that God created in the beginning. You do so by transitioning between the opposite realms. And there was evening, and there was morning. You become whole, and therefore you become holy.
Beginnings are marked by the parting of waters, just like every human’s exodus through parting amniotic waters during one’s birth. The Mother delivers you. Movement. You cannot stay in the womb forever, nor can you stay outside of it forever. The waters cleanse us as a baptism, preparing us for life in our new existence, whether in our birth or in our death. The waters are always finding balance.
Like water, transgender people move toward the balance of opposites. Like the universe, they are whole and turning. Like light, they are particles and waves, distinct and transitioning. Like God, they individuate and integrate.
They are whole, and therefore they are holy.
Religion and Gender Binaries
Despite the reverence of transition revealed in Genesis 1, religious affiliation is associated with transphobia. Particularly, people who identify as white evangelical Christian are shown in research studies to be largely unaccepting of transgender people, as compared with other groups.
The Pew Center (2022) conducted a study examining religious affiliation and attitudes about gender. They found that the majority of U.S. adults overall say that gender is determined by a person’s sex assigned at birth, based on binary categories of male and female. White evangelicals (87%) and Black Protestants (70%) largely believe that gender is based only on sex assigned at birth. In contrast atheists (76%) and agnostics (67%) largely believe that gender can be different from the sex category that doctors assign people at birth.
Unfortunately, religious beliefs appear to preclude sufficient understanding about the nature of us. Not only is a gender binary biologically inaccurate, as evidenced by intersex people, but also the conflation of gender with biological sex reveals a misunderstanding of gender; gender is not about biology but identity. (For more information on gender and sexual diversity, sign up for this free course titled “Queering Identities: LGBTQ+ Sexuality and Gender Identity,” with information from Dr. K. Mohrman and Dr. Jacob MacWilliams.) Still, one does not have to fully understand biology, culture, identity, or social constructions to afford others basic human agency, bodily autonomy, which harms no one. And yet, “[T]he share of White evangelicals who say society has gone too far in accepting people who are transgender increased from 61% in 2017 to 68% today.”
A scholarly review of multiple research studies about religion and prejudice against transgender people corroborates the Pew Center’s results: “[S]elf-identifying as with either being ‘religious’ or as Christian (and to a lesser extent, being Muslim) was associated with increased transprejudice relative to being nonreligious (and to a lesser extent, being Jewish).” Additionally, the American Bar Association notes the conflict between so-called “religious rights” and access to medical care for transgender people.
Christians appear to be committed to fixed gender binaries, rather than understanding gender as a continuum of socially-constructed identities. The Pew Center reports:
“For instance, most U.S. Christians – including 81% of White evangelicals, 67% of White Protestants who are not evangelical and 64% of Catholics – say government documents should not include options other than ‘male’ and ‘female’ for people who don’t identify as either.”
In essence, Christians are a group that are likely to hold prejudices against transgender people. Of course, Christian ideology seeps into politics. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed bills that ban gender-affirming care for minors, will not allow schools to discuss preferred pronouns, and will require that people use designated bathrooms based on binary perceptions of gender, resulting in indiscriminate enforcement from agencies who are to oversee bathroom use based on perception.
Those who claim to know “the God of the Bible” (especially white U.S. Christians) would be wise to heed the significance of transition to the divine creation of life. The chorus is the first chapter of our sacred text, after all. That the refrain, and there was evening, and there was morning, repeats after every description of the creation distinctions indicates the sheer necessity of transitioning between opposites in the process of becoming whole, of becoming holy.
Questions for Christianity
Much of contemporary Christianity and Catholicism is largely marked by hierarchy, authority, and control, mechanized by fixed binaries. If you can separate, you can dominate. If you require assimilation, you will want to control others to be like you. Without integration and individuation, you will reproduce paradigms of dominance, which are responsible for the world’s atrocities.
Binary thinking creates trauma, and trauma creates binary thinking. Binaries and trauma mutually constitute each other. Existing within an either/or ideology is evidence of one’s unhealed wounds. Healing happens during the integration of one’s opposites and the individuation of oneself, distinct from others. Restoration requires facing the truth in one’s dark unseen, where the Spirit of God hovers.
Can the religions of this world embrace the divinity of wholeness, the holy essence? Can the people within them embark on their own healing journey of experiencing the transitory evening and morning in the process of integrating all opposites?
Will the majority of white evangelical Christians stay in trauma by believing they live in a world made of static binaries? Or will they acknowledge the continuum of gender and sex? Will they maintain their desire for control? Or will they let others be who they are? Will they continue to ignore their own creation song, which beckons, And there was evening, and there was morning? Or will they apply the work of conversion to their own selves and not to others? Will they continue to believe that what matters is what they can see in their conscious mind, their stated rules, creeds, and theologies? Or will they begin to dip into the unconscious darkness, where the Spirit of God hovers?
Second Corinthians 4:18 says, “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” The unseen is the darkness of the unconscious. It’s every truth we repress, whether our shame, our strength, our trauma, our rage, our poetry, or our gender. That which lies below is the eternal because it is the truth.
In this unseen, formless, unconscious darkness, we find that we are not only one thing, as our conscious self once believed. We are all things. In the space of the eternal, where the Spirit of God hovers, Christians can find that we’re not only nice, only chaste, only honest, only gentle, only sacrificial, only helpers, only sinners, only right, only certain, or only human. We find that we are each trait’s opposite, too. To become whole, or holy, we must embrace the truth of each distinction of us. We must move and change. We must transition.
I’m a living example of a Christian who finally learned the divinity of wholeness and transition in my world, so I am happy to support anyone who is willing to enter into the dark, amniotic, birthing waters of new beginnings.
This Memorial Day post is in memory of every trans person who has died as a result of transphobia, of religious bigotry, and of state-sanctioned violence.
Many thanks to Kim, who teaches me about wholeness.
Genesis 1 NIV
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.
11 Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.”23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.
24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
Amy, thank you for your wise, powerful, and holy words! What a blessing you are. I’m grateful you have come into my life. Stay awesome! Peace