What if Jesus Were Trans

This morning I made a TikTok in which I pretended to be Joseph. Not the one with the multicolored coat or the one from Arimathea. I pretended to be Jesus’s adopted Dad, posting a two-parter about having to deliver the Son of the Most High on a road trip with his bride.

I decided to add a twist, because . . . well, partly because I wanted to piss off some people, but partly because I got to thinking that Jesus being trans would not affect the story at all, really.

Honestly, genuinely, seriously, what does Jesus’s genitalia have to do with anything at all? It’s not a part of the Biblical narrative about Jesus. There are thousands, I’m sure, of sermons about the cultural significance of various stories about Jesus relating to women and how that differed from the norms of the day or of today or of whatever. But those stories wouldn’t be any different if Jesus had been a transgender man.

It sounded like a cute idea at first, so the first thing I did was investigate all the different Bible passages people would dig up to show THIS ABSOLUTELY COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED. Obviously a big one would be Jesus’s circumcision. So I looked it up and felt the dropping sensation of my theoretical narrative getting shot down. It was right there in the heading under Luke 2’s later portions:

The Circumcision of Jesus

Then I looked a little closer at the actual text about His circumcision, and it says this: “When it was time to circumcise the child, he was named Jesus.”

Hold up . . . it never says He was circumcised. It just says the time came for it to happen. That’s weird. Luke was supposedly a doctor. This gospel is supposed to be loaded with meticulously curated details and facts. And this is the only gospel that even mentions the circumcision (indirectly as it does). Huh. That’s fun.

So at this point, I was getting pretty into the idea. And it triggered another thought: that weird contradiction between the nativity story of Matthew—which made it sound like Mary and Joseph lived in Bethlehem all along and moved to Nazareth by way of Egypt after Herod got spooked by the Magi and ordered the slaughter of all males 2 years and younger—and the one in Luke that had Joseph and Mary starting off in Nazareth, heading to Bethlehem for a census and never bringing up Egypt, the Magi, or any of that craziness . . . and presumably going back to Nazareth because that’s where they lived? Yeah, this new “Jesus was trans” idea adds an element of intrigue.

See, what if Jesus was born with female genitalia, but he was raised as a boy because that’s what all the angels said he was? They told Mary he was a boy. They told Joseph he was a boy. They told the shepherds he was a boy. The Magi clearly expected him to be a boy. So when they visited Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, they assumed he was a boy too. Now, the biblical account has the Magi being warned in a dream not to return to Herod and Joseph taking his family to Egypt to escape until Herod bit the dust.

But. What if Herod’s men came looking for a boy and found Mary, Joseph, and what they presumed upon inspection to be a baby girl? If this edict from Herod really happened, there would have to be some explanation for why they never found Jesus. So maybe the whole thing about Egypt got reverse engineered to match the story. Maybe that’s why only Matthew includes anything about it. Maybe rumors got the best of people. Either way, the stories of Luke and Matthew don’t match up. Any attempt at harmonizing those two accounts involves admitting that somebody left out something pretty important. Personally, I like this new attempt the best.

And it brings a certain sense of good and healthy pride to the story of Jesus’ baptism after which God the Father calls out from heaven, “This is my son, in whom I am well pleased.”

A son indeed.