Check out this new essay: Taking T for Jesus: The transphobic evangelicals hawking hormones, Maud Newton, The Baffler, August 21, 2024.
In this essay, Newton explains that Kenneth Copeland "has amassed an alleged estimated net worth of $760 million and why he is often described as the wealthiest pastor in the United States." These sorts of people used to promote faith healing, but now they promote supplements because there's money in it.
"A 2019 post on Copeland’s Victory Channel website, '3 Ways Hormones Keep You in Divine Health' ... [says] that there is a certain amount of testosterone established by God for elderly Christians to restore their most essential manliness or womanliness and that, via God, Colbert knows what that amount is."
On the other hand, pastors like him of course
"condemn people who undergo sex-hormone treatment. Trans people are possessed by demons; they are destroying families, threatening children, and ushering in the end of the world, according to [Kenneth] Copeland and his ilk. 'We were created male and female in the image of God,' the Copeland Network tweeted in October 2020. 'In causing people to question their gender, what Satan is really doing is causing people to doubt the image of God.'"
Newton writes:
"In many ways, my mom has always been an outlier insofar as notions of 'biblical womanhood' are concerned... * * * it wasn’t so surprising that my mother would find her way to testosterone. What surprised me was that she believed Jesus endorsed it, even as she’s fully in favor of legislation banning hormones for trans and nonbinary people."
In online forums like Reddit, where Christians ask whether it's morally acceptable to take hormones, answers vary:
"Some suggest, for example, that due to changes from pesticides, microplastics, and other environmental pollutants many men may need testosterone supplements to reach God-intended levels. Others maintain that hormone therapy is appropriate only in cases where a specific believer needs a particular sex hormone to manifest their (sorry, his or her) biological sex in the traditional way. Still others take the position that hormone issues should be addressed more naturally, through changes in diet and exercise. One thing that just about everyone in these forums does agree on is that a trans person taking hormones for gender confirmation is an abomination."
I try to pay attention to where right-wing anti-trans funding comes from. It's interesting to me that one of the wealthiest Christian leaders is profiting off selling cross-sex hormones to his followers and then using his influence to say that it's bad to change your gender.
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