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Omnigender: A Trans-Religious Approach
This book bridges traditional religious doctrine and secular postmodern theory regarding gender. Through an examination of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and church history as well as the exploration of other religious traditions and cultures, Mollenkott honors the experience of people who do not fit within the traditional binary concept of intersexual, trans-sexual, or otherwise-gendered individuals.
198 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 28, 2008
i pretty much hated this book from beginning to end. from the fact that mollenkott as a female identified lesbian really has no right to be talking about transgender issues (or calling herself trans), to the conflating she constantly does between sexual orientation and gender identity, to over-reaching in extreme ways to read transgender identities into the bible, on and on. this book was really just poorly done, poorly argued, and just plain horrible, which is a shame because the good things she had to say were veiled by her inappropriate terminology and methodology. i am highly disappointed.
October 3, 2009
I wanted to like this. And I had been wanting to read this for a long time. But it was not well argued. It was not well thought out and did not respect trans people. My understanding Leslie Feinber is the zhe likes to be refered to as zhe or hir, not she or him. Drove me crazy. Oh well, much better books out there than this one.
January 15, 2021
I’m giving this book an extra credit star for its pioneering work to connect two seemingly distant worlds: evangelism and the transgender community. The work was more valuable to me when it attempted to relate to other religions, too, as well as describing non-binary people throughout historic cultures. Finally, the parts about modern moral philosophy and the studies of all of gender’s surprisingly complexity was a good overview.
I think there is also an importance in using Biblical and Jesus’ teaching to avoid cruelty, and have a charitable response to all. I wish all Christians wouldn’t need this explicit instruction, but I know that some do. The author did this work, literally citing chapter & verse.
I think there is also an importance in using Biblical and Jesus’ teaching to avoid cruelty, and have a charitable response to all. I wish all Christians wouldn’t need this explicit instruction, but I know that some do. The author did this work, literally citing chapter & verse.
December 19, 2021
Update (2021-1219-1458): I'm giving this 3.5 stars because i don't trust other people to be able to see the problems in this book beyond the fact this book seeks to help religious queer people. i have a lot of reading & experience prior to this, and it's merely influential in my life due to timing. so please read this review for those sorts of notes. -end update-
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does it have problems? well, yeah, queer theory only really started to open up towards the end of the late 1980s & so this is like towards the beginning of shit. Like the gender unicorn didn't exist until 2015, and heterosexism's bigotries had proven that we were not dealing with a legal positivist oppression as is still assumed in 2021.
besides that, this book does its best to help put forward a record of what was happening within the TGNC movement, but it also sought to help give an affirmative theology so christians etc wouldn't kill themselves due to queerphobia.
that being said, since i was a TGNC girl when I was in kindergarten I had been shown this book, and I had rejected it because it was like I didn't see myself as a trans girl, I didn't see myself as crossing-over, I understood that I was a girl being forced to convert into being a boy. So that adversion to "trans" combined with the lack of numbers & the lack of institutional support for omnigender measures alienated me from my own people to say the least of it. i wish i had been more openminded to reading this even though she get some of the categories wrong.
like for example, her work on intersex people being forced to have surgery made me feel like operative trans people were going thru conversion torture too, but then without talking about how jesus might have lived in a different gender system besides the fact that androgyny was likely more tolerated, it was awkward to hear the argument of chromosomes be used to say that an intersex person had a different gender identity as if the binary cisgender intersex people didn't exist. like this is way before she talks about how different societies have had different gender systems.
also remember how i said this is more of a historical snapshot of TGNC & Intersex activism when the topic of queer theory had only opened up like about a decade prior to this book? so basically due to the fact that it was the schema favored by the established perisexist cissexist heterosexist settler colonizing academia & all its research, it's analysis of homosexuality vs heterosexuality inherits how settler colonial academia wanted to normalize child sex abuse as a matter of sex, genitals, bioessentialism. this is not her problem, this is the problem of the schema she was centering due to how it was an institutionally powerful schema.
while she does say that these systems she listed would not necessarily be approved of today, i wish she would've tried to break free of that more. granted, IDK what sorts of censorship she was facing, but obviously having resources like the gender unicorn with language centered on not only the TGNC experience but the omnigender world we want. That being said, it is awkward to talk about the TGNC & omnigender schemas when in fact these are being made within the dictatorship of the bourgeois *heterosexist settler colonizers. like this means we still need to combat binarism, which has to do with the destruction of gender systems of the colonized.
at best, i remember there was a book from 2006 called "condundrum" which evaluated like 3 different ways "homosexuality" existed, one involved transgender people, one involved "age gaps" which often amounted to child sex abuse for rites of passage as opposed to like someone in their 30s dating someone in their 50s or whatever, and the last one was called "egalitarian" which is what we have in our society, even though "condundrum" said that's not as common. In fact, the egalitarian arguments put forward by Omnigender means we're focusing on like consent, etc. but the problem with that book is that its grammar focused too much on physiological sex & Darwinist exterminationism as opposed to having a social safety net, along with too much focus on LGB. To be fair that 2006 book did have a lot of queer stuff to say, but it was awkward. Meanwhile Mollenkott's book gets a re-up with a 2007 edition which I will also review later, but right now the point was to say that if we're going to attack the vocabulary then it's because: we need a grammar based on consent instead of bioessentialism, & if you attack Mollenkott etc for different vocabulary then that's bioessentialist & fascist because you're not going after the established institutional powers & socio-economics, as well as not coping with the fact that TGNC people, we needed to make our own vocabulary & grammar yet, we TGNC people still needed to organize & make community & such.
as for her points about activism, while i do respect a lot of what she said, and it still holds up, she has way too much faith in USAmerican Democracy which did not hold up at all. I believe revolutionary communists, IDK what to say about the anarchist vs ML vs ML-M divides except to say that campaign finance & election reform & regulating the banks cannot work because capitalism creates monopolies & prices are inherently a form of discrimination. While I could list off a bunch more, the point being is that while we can build antifascist-pipelines & deradicalization structures, we also need to recognize that fascist canvassing & the state's control of the media thru control of access for interviews & announcements & fodder for news programs, our antifascist, egalitarian, and omnigender outreach & social service organizations will not receive funding from the state, partly because social service organizations resemble the businesses.
meanwhile the book makes various predictions & proposals, but i think the 1 that startled me the most is that she didn't think thru how ecofascism is a thing, which to be fair, wasn't legible back in 2001. like there was a line about hormone polluting the water creating intersex conditions might inspire some perisexists to become ecologically concerned, but we saw in 2013ish with "infowars" how the fascists don't care about the environment, they want to genocide us. it's such a widely shared incident that frogs are now part of pride art.
one of the better proposals i saw was the parks service making more egalitarian monuments & having more pride art. in fact, we saw the power of this in 2020 & even in 2021, so i do appreciate this a lot. I will simplify this though and say that graffiti is also an effective method. however the parks service put out an lgbt+ history resource in like 2015/2016 & i still share that resource document on tumblr whenever i see it.
so i give this 5 stars because it documents a lot of things that were going down, but you do need to be critical. one of the major points of the book is to stop lgbt+ people from killing themselves, give them hope, and work together to change shit. so i consider that a success & i need y'all to give the permission for this book to be wrong when reading it. the citations are incredibly important
---
---
does it have problems? well, yeah, queer theory only really started to open up towards the end of the late 1980s & so this is like towards the beginning of shit. Like the gender unicorn didn't exist until 2015, and heterosexism's bigotries had proven that we were not dealing with a legal positivist oppression as is still assumed in 2021.
besides that, this book does its best to help put forward a record of what was happening within the TGNC movement, but it also sought to help give an affirmative theology so christians etc wouldn't kill themselves due to queerphobia.
that being said, since i was a TGNC girl when I was in kindergarten I had been shown this book, and I had rejected it because it was like I didn't see myself as a trans girl, I didn't see myself as crossing-over, I understood that I was a girl being forced to convert into being a boy. So that adversion to "trans" combined with the lack of numbers & the lack of institutional support for omnigender measures alienated me from my own people to say the least of it. i wish i had been more openminded to reading this even though she get some of the categories wrong.
like for example, her work on intersex people being forced to have surgery made me feel like operative trans people were going thru conversion torture too, but then without talking about how jesus might have lived in a different gender system besides the fact that androgyny was likely more tolerated, it was awkward to hear the argument of chromosomes be used to say that an intersex person had a different gender identity as if the binary cisgender intersex people didn't exist. like this is way before she talks about how different societies have had different gender systems.
also remember how i said this is more of a historical snapshot of TGNC & Intersex activism when the topic of queer theory had only opened up like about a decade prior to this book? so basically due to the fact that it was the schema favored by the established perisexist cissexist heterosexist settler colonizing academia & all its research, it's analysis of homosexuality vs heterosexuality inherits how settler colonial academia wanted to normalize child sex abuse as a matter of sex, genitals, bioessentialism. this is not her problem, this is the problem of the schema she was centering due to how it was an institutionally powerful schema.
while she does say that these systems she listed would not necessarily be approved of today, i wish she would've tried to break free of that more. granted, IDK what sorts of censorship she was facing, but obviously having resources like the gender unicorn with language centered on not only the TGNC experience but the omnigender world we want. That being said, it is awkward to talk about the TGNC & omnigender schemas when in fact these are being made within the dictatorship of the bourgeois *heterosexist settler colonizers. like this means we still need to combat binarism, which has to do with the destruction of gender systems of the colonized.
at best, i remember there was a book from 2006 called "condundrum" which evaluated like 3 different ways "homosexuality" existed, one involved transgender people, one involved "age gaps" which often amounted to child sex abuse for rites of passage as opposed to like someone in their 30s dating someone in their 50s or whatever, and the last one was called "egalitarian" which is what we have in our society, even though "condundrum" said that's not as common. In fact, the egalitarian arguments put forward by Omnigender means we're focusing on like consent, etc. but the problem with that book is that its grammar focused too much on physiological sex & Darwinist exterminationism as opposed to having a social safety net, along with too much focus on LGB. To be fair that 2006 book did have a lot of queer stuff to say, but it was awkward. Meanwhile Mollenkott's book gets a re-up with a 2007 edition which I will also review later, but right now the point was to say that if we're going to attack the vocabulary then it's because: we need a grammar based on consent instead of bioessentialism, & if you attack Mollenkott etc for different vocabulary then that's bioessentialist & fascist because you're not going after the established institutional powers & socio-economics, as well as not coping with the fact that TGNC people, we needed to make our own vocabulary & grammar yet, we TGNC people still needed to organize & make community & such.
as for her points about activism, while i do respect a lot of what she said, and it still holds up, she has way too much faith in USAmerican Democracy which did not hold up at all. I believe revolutionary communists, IDK what to say about the anarchist vs ML vs ML-M divides except to say that campaign finance & election reform & regulating the banks cannot work because capitalism creates monopolies & prices are inherently a form of discrimination. While I could list off a bunch more, the point being is that while we can build antifascist-pipelines & deradicalization structures, we also need to recognize that fascist canvassing & the state's control of the media thru control of access for interviews & announcements & fodder for news programs, our antifascist, egalitarian, and omnigender outreach & social service organizations will not receive funding from the state, partly because social service organizations resemble the businesses.
meanwhile the book makes various predictions & proposals, but i think the 1 that startled me the most is that she didn't think thru how ecofascism is a thing, which to be fair, wasn't legible back in 2001. like there was a line about hormone polluting the water creating intersex conditions might inspire some perisexists to become ecologically concerned, but we saw in 2013ish with "infowars" how the fascists don't care about the environment, they want to genocide us. it's such a widely shared incident that frogs are now part of pride art.
one of the better proposals i saw was the parks service making more egalitarian monuments & having more pride art. in fact, we saw the power of this in 2020 & even in 2021, so i do appreciate this a lot. I will simplify this though and say that graffiti is also an effective method. however the parks service put out an lgbt+ history resource in like 2015/2016 & i still share that resource document on tumblr whenever i see it.
so i give this 5 stars because it documents a lot of things that were going down, but you do need to be critical. one of the major points of the book is to stop lgbt+ people from killing themselves, give them hope, and work together to change shit. so i consider that a success & i need y'all to give the permission for this book to be wrong when reading it. the citations are incredibly important
December 29, 2024
3.5 stars (rounding up)
Omnigender could be thought of as having multiple components, which vary in their effectiveness (imho).
Virginia first lays out the definitions she'll be using. Even in the revised 2007 edition, the definitions used feel strange because so much has changed in the interim. You'll need to absorb her set of definitions (including ones like "transgenderist") to read further in.
After this, we get to a combo of trying to inspire the religious reader to care about these issues and to consider the various evidence in the Bible for gender as a spectrum and similar. Some of this section I felt was pretty interesting (including for example the implications of parthenogenesis for Jesus), but others I felt strained against any recognisable theological models for the audience Virginia wrote for. For example, conflating a spiritual analogy like the Body of Christ with the implication that this would necessarily have physical sexuality implications felt confused.
Looking through some of the reviews here, I do agree she will conflate gender and sexuality, though I read them as a cultural one rather than one Virginia was trying to push. Later in the book, there's a section about how gender (and third sexing) happens in a variety of ancient and modern cultures. From Virginia's perspective, in a culture where simply being gay others you to the point you're seen outside your gender of birth, that's sufficient to look at that experience from a trans perspective.
The final section is about the pursuit of the omnigender society, a kind of gender-as-a-spectrum and post-gender approach. I honestly didn't really click with this section and ended up largely skimming it looking for deeper analysis or clear calls to action.
Omnigender could be thought of as having multiple components, which vary in their effectiveness (imho).
Virginia first lays out the definitions she'll be using. Even in the revised 2007 edition, the definitions used feel strange because so much has changed in the interim. You'll need to absorb her set of definitions (including ones like "transgenderist") to read further in.
After this, we get to a combo of trying to inspire the religious reader to care about these issues and to consider the various evidence in the Bible for gender as a spectrum and similar. Some of this section I felt was pretty interesting (including for example the implications of parthenogenesis for Jesus), but others I felt strained against any recognisable theological models for the audience Virginia wrote for. For example, conflating a spiritual analogy like the Body of Christ with the implication that this would necessarily have physical sexuality implications felt confused.
Looking through some of the reviews here, I do agree she will conflate gender and sexuality, though I read them as a cultural one rather than one Virginia was trying to push. Later in the book, there's a section about how gender (and third sexing) happens in a variety of ancient and modern cultures. From Virginia's perspective, in a culture where simply being gay others you to the point you're seen outside your gender of birth, that's sufficient to look at that experience from a trans perspective.
The final section is about the pursuit of the omnigender society, a kind of gender-as-a-spectrum and post-gender approach. I honestly didn't really click with this section and ended up largely skimming it looking for deeper analysis or clear calls to action.
July 4, 2020
If you came here looking for a trans-centric reading of the Bible, or a transgender theology, or even a book on trans-religious approaches, this book is not for you.
For a book headed with "a trans-religious approach", there is VERY LITTLE on trans persons. The author reconceptualizes the category "trans" in a strange way that includes any gender non-conformity including bisexual, gay, and cis-people. As such, she at one point calls herself "trans", even though identifying as a "female lesbian" who is cis.
Even then, the "religious approach" focuses on Christianity and pays lip-service the a few others (with very little scholarly interaction).
What results is a book that is mostly historical where you can just read some Feinberg. Also, this is quite clearly dated, and the "omnigender" moniker doesn't work very well - in the aim at "inclusivity" she ends up doing what she says she intends not to do, that is, erase the experiences of religion from trans persons. There is little to none interaction with first hand experiences of trans persons.
Instead, for a Christian trans theology, read Joy Ladin's the Soul of the Stranger, or even Transgendering faith, and if you want something on gay or lesbian theology (which for some reason Mollencott dedicates the majority of the book to) read the Queer God by Althaus Reid.
For a book headed with "a trans-religious approach", there is VERY LITTLE on trans persons. The author reconceptualizes the category "trans" in a strange way that includes any gender non-conformity including bisexual, gay, and cis-people. As such, she at one point calls herself "trans", even though identifying as a "female lesbian" who is cis.
Even then, the "religious approach" focuses on Christianity and pays lip-service the a few others (with very little scholarly interaction).
What results is a book that is mostly historical where you can just read some Feinberg. Also, this is quite clearly dated, and the "omnigender" moniker doesn't work very well - in the aim at "inclusivity" she ends up doing what she says she intends not to do, that is, erase the experiences of religion from trans persons. There is little to none interaction with first hand experiences of trans persons.
Instead, for a Christian trans theology, read Joy Ladin's the Soul of the Stranger, or even Transgendering faith, and if you want something on gay or lesbian theology (which for some reason Mollencott dedicates the majority of the book to) read the Queer God by Althaus Reid.
Read
June 3, 2025While I think there’s a lot of merit in this - well researched and cited, spoke extensively on the liberation, respect, and equality of trans people and all “othered” people in general - it’s very obviously outdated. The wording (such as transgendered and transgenderist) and lack of appropriate pronouns (they/them mainly) were grating. I also found it very strange that Mollenkott referred to anyone who didn’t fit into the cisheteronormative stereotypes as “transgenderists” even if they (herself included) weren’t trans at all. She referred to gay, lesbian, and bisexual cis people that way.
TLDR; it was weird but potentially informative.
*I do not give star ratings to non-fiction*
TLDR; it was weird but potentially informative.
*I do not give star ratings to non-fiction*
August 14, 2022
The cover of this book goes so fucking hard. Landmark book, though somewhat outdated. Still has a lot to offer today.
March 5, 2008
Part of the problem for me, reading this book, is that I am uninterested in trying to justify things through religion. I feel like if you need to square the way you are with your religion, then there is something wrong with the religion. That being said, I guess that the discussion of shamanism and its ties to transgender theory were, if not particularly interesting, then at least well-stated.
November 5, 2012
Readable and helpfully distilled for newcomers to gender studies. I found her optimism both encouraging and somewhat out of touch, however. I would have appreciated further treatment of obstacles to implementing the vision she suggests.
May 15, 2013
fascinating theory of gender conceptualized as a christian identity. i find that this theory fits everyday real life expressions of gender as a pastiche as opposed to a dichotomy soley based on chromosomes. but thats why she's a legend in those circles lol this bitch is prolific
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