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

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.