Transgender: A Useful Category of Biblical Analysis?

This paper revolves around issues of anachronism and identity in moving toward a transgender hermeneutic of interpretation. Putting Joan W. Scott’s work on gender as a category of historical analysis in conversation with María Lugones’ and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyèwùmí’s discussions of gender and coloniality, the paper proposes the terminology of “gendered category” in order to resist colonialist assumptions inherent within the term “gender” and allow for more possibilities of analysis. With that grounding, the paper turns to an interpretation of the Jacob narratives in Genesis 25 and 27, arguing that the status of firstborn son (bəkōr) in the ancient Near East can be productively understood as a gendered category. It does not argue that Jacob is transgender in the sense of the modern identity marker, but rather that Jacob’s navigation and crossing of the gendered categories of his day carries certain compelling parallels to the ways in which transgender people today experience their identity across prescribed categories