What is God’s gender?
What is God’s gender? I am Christian and I am going to consider that question about the Christian God as described in the Christian Bible.
If you believe the Bible is the word of God, then it is trivially easy to say that God is male. Right at the beginning of the Bible, God is mentioned using male pronouns.
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:27, NIV, emphasis mine
Note that, although male and female were created in the image of God, God’s pronouns here are “he” and “his”. Both male and female are in the image of God, but God is male. Being made in the image of God does not mean that we are identical to God. We can be in his image, yet have some attributes that are different.
The metaphor of God as a father is perhaps one of the most dominant metaphors in Scripture, and fathers are male. God is also compared to a mother (Isaiah 66:13) but there are no examples of female pronouns being used for God.
We take God’s word for what his gender is. We don’t concern ourselves with his “genetic sex” or his “natal sex”. We certainly don’t ask questions about his genitals. We don’t concern ourselves with what some human wrote on a piece of government-mandated paper at some point. We don’t need a medical report about God.
If we can do that for God, then we can do that for people too. I am male; I use male pronouns to describe myself. If you are interacting with me and wish to know my gender for some reason, then you should be able to take my word for it. You shouldn’t need to know what my “genetic sex” is, or what my “natal sex” was1. I won’t answer any questions about my genitals, and it is only in very specific and very rare circumstances that I will share the details of government-mandated pieces of paper or medical reports say.
If someone says they are male, then we should accept that they are male. If someone says they are female, then we should accept that they are female.
1. To the best of my knowledge, I have never had any sort of genetic testing done. I literally don’t know what my genetic sex is, and neither does anyone else. My “natal sex” is presumably recorded in my medical records somewhere, but I’ve never looked that far back into my medical records, so I don’t know what it is.
