When transgender issues are in the public eye, as with Elliot Page's announcement this week, the reaction of many Catholics and evangelicals provides us an interesting Rorschach test to something that runs deep in the soul and psyche of bothg religious groups. /1

There's a fixation in evangelicalism and Catholicism on gender roles, and on defending biological gender roles as set in stone, as "natural" and God-given. There's a fixation on making all of this the most central thing about Christianity — when it's not at all that. /2

Where does this fixation come from? Though I think evangelicals and Catholics reacting to the "unnaturalness" of gender fluidity — though nature itself attests to this fluidity — often do not face this, the fixation reflects a huge investment in a male-dominant worldview. /3

The fixation on combating any recognition of gender fluidity in evangelical and Catholic circles reflects an often unacknowledged commitment to keeping heterosexual males at the pinnacle of creation and of social arrangements. /4

It's impossible to have meaningful conversations about what nature and science ACTUALLY tell us about gender issues, as long as this commitment to heterosexual male dominance is unacknowledged and unexamined by those promoting the biology-is-conclusive approach to gender. /5

To put the point differently: the natural-law theology undergirding Catholic thinking about these issues, which evangelicals have now also adopted, is unconvincing to very many of us who think that sociological analysis also needs to be taken into account. /6

If we talk about what "nature" or "God" wants, without talking about how the world actually functions — and that requires us to use social theory and analysis — what we're really talking about, without acknowleding it, is what WE want, tagged as "nature" and "God." /7

WE want a world in which straight men remain on top, and this is why discussions of gender fluidity or gender transition trouble us so much — we/us being evangelicals and Catholics. But because we're fixated on nature or God as totally explanatory when we discuss these issues, /8

and because we pay little attention to sociological analysis which shows us that the dominance of straight men is socially constructed and divinely ordained, we don't even recognize what's really driving us, making us uncomfortable with gender fluidity. /9

Sorry: /9 should read "and NOT divinely ordained."