Eunuchs, Violence, and the Kingdom of God
Can the references to eunuchs in the New Testament help us to think theologically about trans people, gender diverse people, and queer people more generally?
Context: Doing Trans History, Doing Trans Theology
There is a great deal of material arguing that, yes, they can. A recent BlueSky discussion centred around an article by J. David Hester, entitled “Eunuchs and the Postgender Jesus: Matthew 19.12 and Transgressive Sexualities,” which argues that eunuchs functioned as a ‘symbol of sexual transgression’ and therefore their positive inclusion in Jesus’s teaching indicates an ‘explicit rejection of the heterosexist binary paradigm.’
This approach is shared by Lewis Reay, in an article entitled ‘Towards a Transgender Theology: Que(e)rying the Eunuchs.’ Reay also offers a reading of Matthew 19, and argues that the category of ‘those who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven’ can be argued to at least include ‘those born intersex, those who are transgender in the broadest sense of this word and, third, those who are gender different, or gender queer.’ As a result, Matthew 19 ‘includes all those marginalized by virtue of their gender expression.’
I could multiply examples here of trans and queer scholars finding themselves, in various ways, in the Biblical figure of the eunuch. Katherine Apostolacus gives a helpful overview of many of these readings in her article ‘The Bible and the Transgender Christian.’ Although we might want to challenge her conclusion that the push for a more thoroughgoing understanding of the role of eunuchs in scripture is perhaps the only truly innovative contribution trans readers have made to Biblical hermeneutics, this conclusion does emphasise just how often the figure of the eunuch appears in trans theologies and trans reading of Scripture.
It’s not surprising that trans people and those seeking to argue for our full inclusion in the life of the Church have found important precedent in the references to eunuchs. Eunuchs, almost by definition, occupied a space on the margins of normative gendered experience. Their appearance in the New Testament as positive exemplars of faith, both in Matthew 19 and in the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8.26–39), is a powerful example of non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality being included in Christian community.¹
¹I’m not going to talk about the role of the eunuch in intersex readings of scripture here — there are important tensions between queer and intersex approaches to these texts, and too often intersex readings and perspectives are folded into ‘trans’ or ‘queer’ readings. For an introduction to these perspectives, see Intersex, Theology and the Bible, e.d. Susannah Cornwall.
Queer and trans historiography raises important questions about how we interact with phenomena in the past which are both like and unlike contemporary experience. One approach to historical method is what Apostolacus calls ‘self-insertion’. In scriptural terms this is about finding resonances for trans and queer experiences within the biblical text, so that trans and queer people can find ways to appropriate Christ’s message of salvation for themselves within a contemporary Christian culture which often excludes them. In historical study, this often involves the suggestion that trans or queer readers are better able to recognise those like them in the historical record, particularly in contexts where sources are unlikely to speak transparently about these experiences.
Another approach is to allow the historical record to ‘speak for itself’. This approach takes it as read that, because different cultures have different norms and subcultures, it’s impossible to talk about historical figures being ‘trans’ or ‘gay’ because these categories do not have stable meanings. As this essay will suggest, it is important that we pay attention to the different contours of how sex and gender are constructed in different contexts — my concern about the common deployment of ‘eunuchs’ for trans theology emerges from the ways these readings don’t take proper account of what being a eunuch meant.
However, Kit Heyam, in their Before We Were Trans, also points out that a selective application of these ideas ‘often make[s] it difficult for us to talk about trans history at all’ (2). If we can only call people ‘gay’ or ‘trans’ who express their experiences in their own words and in ways that correspond to our modern understandings, we’re not going to get very far.
Heyam pushes at this interpretative knot, arguing that, if it is true that we can’t straightforwardly speak of ‘transness’ in the historical record because ‘transness’ emerges from our modern nexus of sex and gender experience and expression, it should be equally true that we cannot speak helpfully of sex or gender at all. What it is to be a man in the twenty-first century is in many ways fundamentally different to what it was in the past. ‘Maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ rest on vastly different understandings of the body, of society, of interpersonal relatedness, of conventions about dress and behaviour than they did even five hundred years ago, so it seems strange to assume that we know precisely what, for example, St. Paul is talking about when he speaks of ‘women,’ ‘men,’ or ‘virgins.’
So, if we can’t straightforwardly recruit eunuchs for trans theology, but if we also can’t simply assume that there are no non-normative gendered experiences to draw on when thinking theologically about transness today, what are we to do?
My suggestion here is that we should place Biblical eunuchs in their historical context, not as a way to argue about the inclusion of trans, queer, and gender non-conforming people within today’s Church, but as a way of thinking about how gender functions as a system of control, both now and then, what that means for the positive references to eunuchs in the New Testament, and how we might draw on this material today.
Eunuchs and the Regime of Gender
The article by J. David Hester which provoked the thoughts in this essay is a wide-ranging and detailed account of the contexts and understandings of eunuchs relevant to Matthew 19. Hester argues that eunuchs were perceived as ‘a monstrous identity formation, a source of sex-gender confusion,’ and draws attention to the strange constellation of power and marginalisation that this positioning led to.
However, there is a strange elision in Hester’s article, as there is also in Reay’s essay: the question of how eunuchs are made, and what that means for them, and for the kind of theologies which might emerge when we consider them.
It is not that Hester doesn’t acknowledge that, in a huge number of cases, eunuchs were survivors of sexual violence, the non-consensual or coerced removal of sexual function through genital mutilation. He includes in a footnote a list of Greek terms for ‘eunuch,’ including words whose English equivalents are ‘torn,’ ‘pressed,’ ‘crushed,’ ‘cut off,’ and ‘cropped.’ Another footnote includes an anecdote from Herodotus’ Histories viii.105–106, discussing the eunuch Hermotimus who served in the court of Xerxes. On meeting the slave trader Panionius, who had castrated him, Hermotimus asked ‘tell me […] what harm had I or any of my forefathers done to you or yours, that you made me to be no man, but a thing of nought?’, and then compelled Panionius to castrate his four sons, before the sons castrated their father in turn.
Although acknowledged, then, this violence is reduced to footnotes, and the story of Hermotimus serves Hester simply to illustrate the tension between the positions of influence eunuchs could hold at court and their status as gender outsiders. Partly, this is because the story of violence isn’t the story Hester is telling. Hester’s article aims to provide context for the limited but documented history of ritual castration or autocastration among early Christians, as well as to argue that eunuchs would not have been understood by Jesus’s contemporaries as synonymous with celibacy. He wishes to focus on voluntary, non-coerced practices because he is arguing for the permissibility of these practices (both in terms of sexuality and gender) within Christianity.
As various people pointed out on BlueSky, though, by eliding the violence involved in many eunuchs’ experience of becoming eunuch, such readings risk tacitly approving of this violence, or at least of grounding contemporary support for trans inclusion within violent frameworks.
I want to suggest that the anxiety surrounding eunuchs in the ancient world, which Hester so helpfully traces, can point us towards a more complex account of how gender functioned in the ancient world, how it continues to function today, and what that means for a Church which, as the New Testament references to eunuchs make clear, must have space for those who have been caught up in the violent enforcement of gender.
As we’ve already pointed out, Hester’s account gives great detail about the challenge eunuchs posed to ancient constructions of masculinity, and how commentators on the Levitical proscription of ‘a man lying with a man as with a woman’ (18.22) made a direct link between this proscription and the cultural association between penetration and effeminacy.
A reference to Philo here is representative: not just those who are penetrated but those who penetrate ‘debase the sterling coin of nature’ and pursue ‘an unnatural pleasure […doing their] best to render cities desolate and uninhabited by destroying the means of procreation’ (Philo Special Laws, iii.37–42). This was seen to be cyclical — while to be penetrated sexually was to lose one’s place within the male social order, to do so repeatedly and willingly was to collude in one’s own ‘unmanning’ and the unmanning of society.
What I find particularly interesting, however, is that Hester does not dwell on why a gender regime with such a horror of the gender transgression associated with eunuchs would continue to make them and continue to use them in important religious and courtly roles. That eunuchs can give us a particular insight into gender in the ancient world is made clear from the fact that the elites of the Roman Empire end up both using eunuchs and seeking to ban their being made (‘even if they are willing’).
Talia Bhatt’s important essay ‘The Third Sex’ provides tools for getting to the heart of this apparent contradiction. Bhatt’s essay is a deep engagement with the Western anthropological and sociological literature on ‘third sex’ categories in non-Western cultures, and particularly with how the hijras of South Asia are presented as idealised examples of ‘proper’ gender transgression, as opposed to the apparently reactionary desire of ‘Western’ trans women to simply be seen as women. For Bhatt, this approach is both naive in its representation of non-Western cultures (as though South Asia had no misogyny before becoming a site of Western imperialism!) and vicious in its accusation that ‘transsexuals’ are agents of patriarchy shoring up a regime of gender difference.
Bhatt argues that, far from being a challenge to the ‘gender binary,’ ‘third sexes’ are an integral part of its function, cross-culturally and throughout history. The gender binary relies on being able to sort all members of the population into two categories, male and female. Usually, when it encounters people who don’t quite fit, the system simply smashes them into the next best category. Since ‘man’ is clearly the dominant, most important category, it is usually the case that transgressors become ‘woman’. This is why accusations of effeminacy are used to discipline men who step out of line, because to be associated with woman is to risk losing everything. (Again, we see this stated more or less explicitly by ancient authors).
However, this scheme lacks a mechanism for disciplining gender traitors who embrace their association with women, or those women who fail on account of being unable or no longer able to perform their reproductive function. For that there has to be what Bhatt calls a ‘dumping ground’, a category into which all those who fail to uphold their place in the regime of reproduction can be inserted, a category with which those who might think about failing can be threatened. Because it relates to reproduction, this ‘third sex’ category encompasses all kinds of gender traitors, all kinds of people we would now consider queer or trans alongside people who simply had the misfortune to experience sexual assault, to be sold to slavers as young, attractive boys, or to have little or no interest in sex or reproduction.
This analysis shows why eunuchs were such a potent symbol in their cultures. It is not just that the possibility of being a eunuch drew attention to the fault lines in ancient masculinity — the existence of eunuchs, and the violence of their making, was necessary for the maintenance of this masculinity. Hermotimus considered himself to have been made ‘a thing of nought’ by his castration, despite his senior position at court — and the horror both of his violation and his loss of status led him to repeat this negation against the person who had perpetrated it.
Eunuchs, therefore, stand not simply for the possibility of modes of sex/gender existence other than the gender binary — they stand in fact for the violence inherent in maintaining this binary, and the threat of castration which underpinned it. Again, one of Hester’s footnotes is revealing. Hester notes that the emperors Domitian, Nerva, Hadrian and Constantine all passed laws making it illegal to make eunuchs, and that it was despite this that eunuchs retained their cultural visibility. This gesture of performing the State’s disapproval of certain ways of being, while also continuing to rely on the existence of those ways of being, is repeated in Conservative campaigns around restrictions on pornography — as well as in the apparent relationship between anti-trans views and online searches for trans porn.
Eunuchs, then, embody one particularly visible point at which the gender regimes of the ancient world exerted themselves in physical violence. Obviously, domestic abuse and sexual violence are the most common forms of this violent maintenance of gender, but it is in the bodies of eunuchs that this violence became visible within the public, courtley sphere. For the Kingdom of God to include eunuchs on equal, even exemplary terms, then, doesn’t just mean including ‘a figure that undermined and threatened male privilege,’ as Hester suggests. In fact, it doesn’t really mean this at all, because eunuchs didn’t primarily function as a ‘third sex’ challenging male privilege, they functioned as exemplars of the violence by which male dominance was maintained. However, this doesn’t mean that eunuchs can tell us nothing about the Kingdom of God, or the relationship of the Kingdom to the regime of gender.
Gender Policing and Violence Today
In one of those strange, horrible co-incidences, the discussion of eunuchs and trans theology among a group largely made up of American Episcopalians was taking place on the same day that a number of conservative newspapers in Britain were taking a particularly vile editorial line on a trans teenage girl who was stabbed nine times in a premeditated attack.
Both The Telegraph and the Daily Mail began their coverage by stating ‘a transgender girl was repeatedly stabbed by a group of masked youths after lying about her gender and then performing a sex act on a boy.’ This framing is clearly intended to shift responsibility away from the attackers and onto the victim, who, we are supposed to assume, would have been fine if she’d just admitted to being trans.
Of course, the story is more complex than this. In a report by The Times, we hear that the victim had ‘been attacked in the past because of her transgender identity.’ There is a double bind here — the position of trans people in society, particularly over the past five or so years as anti-trans news reports have steadily increased in frequency, is such that simply being openly trans is to be at risk of violence. The victim in this case sought to avoid this risk by being ‘stealth’ — living as a woman without being openly trans.
This didn’t protect her. The boy in question secretly filmed her performing oral sex on him, and shared the footage with friends, one of whom outed her as trans. He then held her at knife-point until she admitted to it, and apologised for not disclosing sooner. The boy then arranged for a group of friends (male and female) to attack her, an attack which only ended because a member of the public intervened.
Disclosure, then, leads to violence, as does non-disclosure. As Jess O’Thomson points out, there is another element at play here, too — new CPS guidelines suggest that a trans person failing to disclose their birth sex could be treated as ‘deception as to sex’ sufficient to vitiate consent and render the encounter non-consensual. This is the line being taken by many right wing commentators and Mumsnet denizens — that the victim in this case was in fact the perpetrator of assault.
I raise this here because this case demonstrates how extra-judicial violence functions to perpetuate male dominance in contemporary society. Although the law has found the attackers guilty of a transphobic attack, the story as it appears in the media serves to present trans people in general, and the victim in particular, as duplicitous, hyper-sexual, and legitimate targets for retributive violence.
Eunuchs in the ancient world marked the point at which masculinity was enforced by violence, as the act of castration both provided ‘unmanned’ bodies for sexual exploitation, and as a warning about what could happen to those who failed to perform masculinity appropriately. The same is true, particularly of trans women, in contemporary society. The ‘tr**ny’ exists as a pornographic trope, as a social monster, and as a legitimate target of violence from those who wish to assure themselves that they are adequately performing masculinity.
The Kingdom of God
This is where, I think, we can start to think about how the positive presentation of eunuchs in the New Testament might help us to develop a trans theology.
The eunuchs of the ancient world and the trans people of today, as a whole, are too different to make generalisations about. Eunuchs were often eunuchs because of sexual violence performed against them. They were often enslaved people who had little or no choice about their gender presentation or the roles they played within society. Even when they achieved significant political power, their status as eunuchs remained involuntary, and impossible to erase.
Although there are examples of ‘voluntary’ eunuchs, and although some of these people probably experienced a relationship to gender very recognisable to trans people today, the differences in cultural gender expectations, and the particular understanding of eunuchs in ancient Roman culture, mean comparisons in terms of gender ontology are hard to make.
However, the connection between trans people and eunuchs is much clearer when we look at the nexus of violence and gender transgression. Despite the huge differences in social position and cultural meaning, trans people and eunuchs both function in their respective societies as examples of what happens to people who are outside the gender binary. Whether voluntarily or involuntarily, to fail to exist within the gendered norms of a society is to become a target for violence.
The enactment of this violence proves that the perpetrators are loyal to their gender, while the victims of violence become cautionary tales, so that the violence is not just directed at the specific victim, but at anyone who might be at risk of stepping outside their expected gender.
And yet, eunuchs are associated with the Kingdom of God. This figure of the violent enforcement of gender norms is not placed where patriarchy places it, beyond the pale, but at the heart of the Kingdom. The Kingdom of God, which we hear repeatedly involves a reversal of hierarchies and the vindication of victims, is a place where those at the sharp end of gender enforcement find their vindication.
This does not just mean that there is space in the kingdom for a wider variety of gendered modalities than there is in society — it means that the violence which is at the heart of gender as we have known it until now is revealed as illegitimate, as anti-Christ. And if gender no longer has to do with violence, then gender as seen with the eyes of the Kingdom is something fundamentally different to gender as we know it now.
A trans theology, then, might start here. Not with the argument that gender minorities are somehow welcome in the Kingdom, but with the observation that, in Christ, gender no longer partakes of violence.
We cannot know what this will look like, but we know that it will be liberation. If eunuchs are exemplary figures in the kingdom, we know that gender without violence does not simply erase gender expression — no-one is coming to take our genders away, but we will be free to live without the threat of gender’s violent enforcement.
To be trans is to be constantly at risk of this violent enforcement, is to live gender more aware than most of the way that gender relies on threat to sustain itself. To live gender into the Kingdom of God is to hope and work for the undoing of this violence, for a world where gender enforcement no longer manifests itself in sexual assault, street violence, and media dehumanisation. This is the world that the New Testament figure of the eunuch points us towards. Not just a world where patriarchy is called into question, but one where male domination is unthinkable, because unenforceable.
Works Cited
Apostolacus, Katherine. 2018. ‘The Bible and The Transgender Christian: Mapping Transgender Hermeneutics in the 21st Century,’ Journal of the Bible and its Reception 5.1.
Bhatt, Talia. 2024. ‘The Third Sex’
Cornwall, Susannah (ed.). 2015. Intersex, Theology, and the Bible: Troubling Bodies in Church, Text, and Society (New York; Palgrave Macmillan).
A. D. Godley (tr.). 1920. Herodotus, with an English Translation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press)
Heyam, Kit. 2022. Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (London: Basic Books).
Hester, J. David. 2005. ‘Eunuchs and the Postgender Jesus: Matthew 19.12 and Transgressive Sexualities,’ Journal for the Study of the New Testament 28.1.
Philo. Special Laws.
Reay, Lewis. 2009. ‘Towards a Transgender Theology: Que(e)rying the Eunuchs,’ in Trans/Formations, ed. Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood (London; SCM Press). 148–167.
