Gender as Violence: A Trans-Christian Response to the UK Culture War

The UK Supreme Court ruling of April 2025, which defined ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010 as biological sex, is not merely a legal event. It is the codification of a theological error: the ‘conceit of complementarity’, a binary anthropology whose intellectual roots run from early examples of theological complementarianism through the Vatican’s institutionalised war on gender to contemporary British law. In this article I argue, drawing on Adrian Thatcher (2020; 2023) and on my own trans-grounded theology, that binary gender essentialism is exegetically unsustainable, christologically refuted and doctrinally dangerous. I propose a theology of the gender galaxy in place of the linear continuum, assert the holiness of trans bodies against a long theological tradition of bodily disgust, and call the church to prophetic resistance.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Modern Believing
Published
2026-10-12
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3828/mb.2026.30
Primary Topic
Theological Perspectives and Practices
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Gender as Violence: A Trans-Christian Response to the UK Culture War

Alex Clare-Young
Modern Believing
Theological Perspectives and Practices
article

Gender as Violence: A Trans-Christian Response to the UK Culture War

Alex Clare-Young
article en

Abstract

The UK Supreme Court ruling of April 2025, which defined ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010 as biological sex, is not merely a legal event. It is the codification of a theological error: the ‘conceit of complementarity’, a binary anthropology whose intellectual roots run from early examples of theological complementarianism through the Vatican’s institutionalised war on gender to contemporary British law. In this article I argue, drawing on Adrian Thatcher (2020; 2023) and on my own trans-grounded theology, that binary gender essentialism is exegetically unsustainable, christologically refuted and doctrinally dangerous. I propose a theology of the gender galaxy in place of the linear continuum, assert the holiness of trans bodies against a long theological tradition of bodily disgust, and call the church to prophetic resistance.

Modern BelievingVol. 67(4)
Openalex Percentile: Top 5%
Theological Perspectives and Practices
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