Constructive Theology and Gender Variance
Constructive Theology and Gender Variance
Some Christians are anxious and uncomfortable about gender diversity and transition. Sometimes, they understand these issues as a rejection of God's intention for creation. Gender diversity has also been assumed to entail self-deception, mental ill-health, and dysphoria. Yet, humans are inherently transformative creatures with a vocation to shape their own worlds and traditions. Transformative creaturely theology recognizes the capacity of gender to shape humans even as we also question it. In this book, Susannah Cornwall reframes the issues of gender diversity and transition in constructive Christian theological terms. Resisting deficit-based discourses, she presents gender diversity in a way that is positive and non-oppositional. Her volume explores questions of the licit limits of technological interventions for human bodies, how gender diversity maps onto understandings of health, and the ethics of disclosure of gender diversity. It also brings these topics into critical conversation with constructive Christian theologies of creation, theological anthropology, Christology, and eschatology.
- Provides an overview of existing theological accounts of gender transition
- Takes the Christian theological tradition seriously and brings it into conversation with other disciplines such as those falling within gender healthcare
- Offers a means to reframe gender transition in non-competitive terms
Product details
November 2022Adobe eBook Reader
9781108857420
0 pages
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- Part I. Setting the Scene:
- 1. Introduction: transformative creatures
- 2. Detransition, impermanence, and the innocence of changing one's mind
- 3. Existing Christian theological responses to transition: being transformed/being, transformed
- Part II. Telling Truths:
- 4. Autonomy and trans people: authenticity, responsibility, recognition
- 5. Gender transition, truth-telling and artifice
- 6. Self-protection or 'gender fraud'? Ethics and the burden of disclosure
- Part III. Limits, Technology, and Health:
- 7. Technological interventions and licit limits: on the alteration and augmentation of bodies
- 8. Trans people, health, and diversities of order
- 9. Fertility, generativity, and gender theology in the operative mood
- 10. Transforming humanity: gender, race, and animality
- 11. In Christ, everything has changed: Christology and creation
- 12. Transformative creatures reprised: theological anthropology and eschatology.
