CoE General Synod Q&A — if my spouse has a sex change, are we still married in the eyes of the Church?

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Miss Prudence Dailey (Oxford) to ask the Chair of the House of Bishops:

Q86. Given that the Church of England’s teaching about marriage is that it is a lifelong and exclusive union between one man and one woman, if one person in a couple undergoes gender transition, has consideration been given as to whether they are still married according to the teaching of the Church of England?

The Bishop of Newcastle to reply on behalf of the Chair of the House of Bishops:

A. The Pastoral Advisory Group considered this question in the context of one specific case and I cannot comment here on the personal circumstances involved or draw a general theological principle from a single instance. However, we noted two important points. When a couple marry in church they promise before God to be faithful to each other for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health – come what may, although we preach compassion if they find this too much to bear.

Secondly, never in the history of the church has divorce been actively recommended as the way to resolve a problem. We have always prioritised fidelity, reconciliation and forgiveness, with divorce as a concession when staying together proves humanl unbearable. In the light of those two points, if a couple wish to remain married after one partner has transitioned, who are we to put them asunder?

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21 COMMENTS

  1. For your 4th of July reading pleasure….TJ in full rant mode. This pretender to the see of Newcastle is really getting on my bad side.

    To parse this answer and translate into English-

    A. The Pastoral Advisory Group considered this question in the context of one specific case and I cannot comment here on the personal circumstances involved or draw a general theological principle from a single instance.

    That is to say, the HoB has issued guidance on transgenderism and transsexuality without having a clue as to the theological principles involved. They discussed one case. No consideration of theological implications, then issued guidance to change the pastoral practices of the church. The question asked would be the first question asked by many lay people and clergy- not to mention the media, and it was required of the HoB and its various subcommittees that they be able to answer it long before issuing pastoral guidance on trans issues, or education.

    However, we noted two important points. When a couple marry in church they promise before God to be faithful to each other for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health – come what may, although we preach compassion if they find this too much to bear.

    This is a lie, told in what Mark Twain identifies as the 2nd best way to lie- that is, you “mostly tell the truth” but swap in details that lead to falsehood. In this case the lie is “a couple marry in church…” No, one man and one woman marry in church. By adopting the word “couple” rather than “man and woman”, the HoB (who are being represented by the heretical bishop of Newcastle) have changed the doctrine of marriage. A “couple” is any two beings. One could be a robot or a cat.

    Secondly, never in the history of the church has divorce been actively recommended as the way to resolve a problem.

    Another lie told by using truthful words. In fact, this is entirely true on its face, but ONLY if you use the Biblical meaning of marriage and the Biblical meaning of divorce.
    The Biblical definition of “divorce” is that a man leaves his wife, or a woman leaves her husband, or that the marriage of one man to one woman is otherwise dissolved. It is impossible for there to be a divorce between two men, or between 2 women, because the marriage only exists between 1 man and 1 woman.

    We have always prioritised fidelity, reconciliation and forgiveness, with divorce as a concession when staying together proves humanl unbearable.

    Yet another lie. Again, 2 men cannot divorce, and 2 women cannot divorce.

    The correct answer to the bits so far is clearly, the marriage is immediately annulled at the request of either partner. If they choose to sue each other in civil court, stay out of it. But the marriage clearly is not within the definition provided by our Lord, or in numerous other places in Scripture, nor within the definitions used throughout the church throughout history- no matter whether one considers marriage a “sacrament” or one of those “rites sometimes called sacraments” or a “rite of the church.”

    In the light of those two points, if a couple wish to remain married after one partner has transitioned, who are we to put them asunder?

    The woman should be deposed for this sentence alone. And perhaps the entire HoB. Not only have they completely relinquished moral authority and taken up a pagan understanding of marriage and sexuality, but they think it is funny and have sent this pretender to the episcopacy out to parody scripture and ridicule orthodox Christians.

    My conclusions:
    If you are a bishop reading this and do not excommunicate this heretic bishop who worships PRIDE and ridicules Christianity, you have abandoned the communion of the Church. That means you, so-called “conservative” and “orthodox” bishops of Church of England. Either drive out the strange and unholy doctrines from within your own ranks, or call it a day and go home and let Christians have the church back. And get that underway, along with a Christian answer to the question, before Synod opens.

    If you are in the Global South, or indeed an Anglican bishop anywhere, do you really need any more reasons to stay away from the Lambeth conference? They intend to use all the psychological means at their disposal to convince you to accept this heresy as Christian doctrine. THIS is an example of the degree to which the bishops of the Church of England have fallen, that they present this blasphemy as the official doctrine of the Church. Your attendance will be stated as your endorsement when they pen the final communique and address the final news conference.

    • Well said TJ. The problem is that we don’t appear to have any Bishops with the moral courage to redress the Bishopette of Newcastle. A woman who I imagine must have been aware or sanctioned the abhorrent queering the church event in her cathedral.
      Blind guides comes to mind.
      Oh that the Lord would raise up a priest to be a Bishop, or for a current Bishop within the CofE to speak out and call the whole lot involved in this to repentance.

      • Lol, I got the heretic bishop mixed up in my head with the heretic dean and got the genders mixed up ….which I suppose is not out of character with the subject matter. They do appear to be of one mind, in any case. I apologize to the gentle readers, but will do some minor editing to correct pronouns, or at least the pronouns that I think apply, for the moment, to the various parties, until they change them….

        • Isn’t it right, but for the wrong reason? A man who gets a “sex change” is still a man, however much he or his doctors delude themselves. Hence, no reason to divorce from his wife – the marriage is still by a man to a woman.

          • MIchaelA,
            My principle argument would be that whether one is talking about a sex change in the surgical sense, or a “declaration” of gender change (the CoE guidance conflates the two into the same thing), the fact of the change amounts to being abandonment of the marriage, since one of the partners has “abandoned” their identity as male or female within the marriage. A marriage requires a husband and a wife. When one of the spouses refuses that identity, the marriage itself has been abandoned by one of the partners.

            And, lets face it- the CoE bishops’ guidance is designed as a back door authorization of same sex marriage (and has been since 2004). All that is required is for one partner in a same sex relationship to register with a government office as the opposite sex, and they can be married. There is NO requirement in the Gender Recognition Act (that has been in place for 15 years) or the CoE bishops’ guidance, for anyone to have surgery.

          • One should also note that whether surgical alteration or “declaration”, there is no where within the guidance a requirement that the spouse have any input in the decision. The decision, if reached unilaterally, or against the advice and without the consent of the spouse, could, again, be construed as abandonment.

  2. I agree that the Response is problematic in terms of the CofE’s official teaching. However, the situation can be remedied by a simple “alteration.” Let it read thus:

    Q86. Given that the Church of England’s teaching about marriage is that it is a lifelong and exclusive union between one man and one woman, if one both persons in a couple undergoes gender transition, has consideration been given as to whether they are still married according to the teaching of the Church of England?

    Response: But of course!

  3. The Church of England has given its blessing to marriage between two people of the same gender…

    …but only if they were man and wife when they originally took their vows.

    — Kaya Burgess (@kayaburgess) July 4, 2019

  5. Ironically, the answer is seen as wildly transphobic:

    Dr Jane Hamlin, from the Beaumont Society, a national support group
    for the transgender community, said the Church’s stance was
    “encouraging”.

    “However, it is clear that, because this only
    applies to couples who married before the transition, the Bishops do not
    really accept the transition at all,” the society’s president told the
    Daily Telegraph.

    “They still see the trans man or trans woman as he/she was appearing at the time of the wedding.

    “This is disappointing.”

    Source: Premier

    • Hmmmm…It has been my understanding that the CoE (per its guidance) accepts everyone as whatever gender they say they are- no surgery necessary to change, just a form to file with HM government to get it changed on your ID. And then one can marry so long as the person one is marrying has an ID indicating that they are the other sex (or gender, as we said in the old days). They made this very clear at the Synod in fall of 2018, but indeed haven’t questioned anyone’s presentation of themselves since the “Gender Recognition Act” of a decade or more ago. I tried to find some news articles- ones I found verified the basics, but were all of the Daily Mail or Pinknews variety. However, the announcement above makes clear that orthodoxy in regards to marriage is no longer a possibility among CoE bishops.

  6. I heard that one of the Democrat hopefuls in the US said during the debate that he believed transgender women should have access to free abortion. That sounds like a policy that would not strain the national budget.

    • I suppose a transwoman could hire a surrogate mother to get pregnant and then abort the baby. Perhaps that is what Mr. Castro meant.

      • He is just be anticipating technology. We aren’t far away from the use of transplanted organs for such things (would not be surprised to find the Europeans are already doing this). Given the relative importance of all things LGBTQetc in modern cultural propaganda, making people “fully functional” in their chosen gender(s) is likely a major priority for a lot of medical researchers nowadays.

  7. Consider that no one in this “marriage” has changed his or her sex. They are still man and woman no matter how much one has mutilated themselves. I would suggest that, unless there is abandonment or adultery, they are still married.

    I would also suggest that “gender” is a grammatical term referring to words being masculine, feminine and neuter. It is not a synonym for a person’s “biological sex”.

    • MLB-
      While the grammatical usage is the primary definition of gender (masculine, feminine or neuter nouns in Latin, for instance), the second definition in virtually every dictionary on the planet is: biological sex of male or female. The current most common usage is the third definition (in many currently issued dictionaries, but not ones 10 years old or older), which is gender identity. Whether this appears in your personal dictionary or not, it is being taught in virtually every major university of the western world. There are “gender studies” and “gender science” courses and even majors. Vast amounts of graduate and post-graduate research. Those folks will tell you there are as many as 73 identifiable “genders” (as of most recent article I’ve read). According to the “guidance” of the bishops of the Church of England, you can have a special liturgy used if you change from one to another if they are far enough apart that you would like a name change to go with.

      Beyond that, for those of use of a certain age….. there were male and female “genders” when we were growing up, because the word “sex” was never used in polite conversation if there were persons of the “opposite gender” present.

      • The word ‘gender’ has so many indeterminate and vague meanings that it is practically useless as a means of communicating understanding. The resulting confusion is an example of the achievement of one of the aims of cultural Marxism to produce a dysfunctional society comprised of dysfunctional people who are unable to communicate with each other, because they have neither an accurate understanding of reality nor any process by which an accurate understanding could be transmitted to another person. (It was the feminists – the first wave of the cultural Marxists – who sowed the seeds of this confusion by propagating the baseless dogma that any differences between the sexes (other than reproductive ones) were the result of the patriarchal imposition of gender stereotypes.)

        It is therefore essential for those who wish to oppose the cultural Marxist agenda to define and use words in a way which enables a clarity of understanding and communication between each other, and to reject ‘semantic creep’, an example of which can now be seen in the transgenderists use of the word ‘violence’ to describe the act of disagreeing with them.

        In my view, since it is impossible for a member of the human species to change sex, and marriage is between a human of the male sex and a human of the female sex, it is completely irrelevant whether one party changes his or her gender (by which I mean the social expression of characteristics which are arbitrarily ascribed to one sex or another).

        “…because the word “sex” was never used in polite conversation if there were persons of the “opposite gender” present.”
        I’m writing from the UK side of ‘The Pond’, and this provokes the observation that I have always been astonished at the American squeamishness about anything to do with the subject of sex.

        • Well, understand that I am old enough that I was using “polite conversation” in its 1950s sense, and describing the circumstance one grew up in when one’s father was the rector.

          In the defense of us Americans- at least by the time we had reached adulthood, we understood that groups of naked males “frolicking”, spanking one another’s backsides and giving one another massages had a sexual component, something apparently lost on Oxford and Cambridge PhDs with decades in England’s finest schools, despite their lack of “squeamishness.”

          I would hold that surgical alteration of one party in the marriage can be construed as “abandonment” of the spouse.

          My assumption is that anyone who read my “opening rant” will recognize where I stand on the subject of the original article. My comment to MLB was in no way intended (granted, what I intend and what the reader interprets are not always the same thing, and sometimes I am rather too indirect) to approve of new definitions of the word gender, but rather to point out that when the progressives use the word, they mean something entirely different than what we might mean. I generally use the term “biological sex” so as not to confuse the issue with the word “gender”, but do occasionally slip, having spent too much time in meetings in US institutions of higher ed.
          Having put all that as delicately as I can, I will refrain from further comment, I think.

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