The Most and Least Transmasculine Bible Verses

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Genesis 27:15-24

Then Rebekah took the choice clothes of her elder son Esau, which were with her in the house, and put them on Jacob her younger son. And she put the skins of the kids of the goats on his hands and on the smooth part of his neck. Then she gave the savory food and the bread, which she had prepared, into the hand of her son Jacob...

Isaac said to Jacob, “Please come near, that I may feel you, my son, whether you are really my son Esau or not.” So Jacob went near to Isaac his father, and he felt him and said, “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” And he did not recognize him, because his hands were hairy like his brother Esau’s hands; so he blessed him. Then he said, “Are you really my son Esau?”

He said, “I am.”

Lying to your parents, allying with your mother in a campaign of deceit against your father, pitching your voice a little lower but no so much lower that it sounds like you're trying to do something different, maintaining plausible deniability, experimenting with forearm hair.

Judges 16:15-17

Then she said to him, “How can you say, ‘I love you,’ when your heart is not with me? You have mocked me these three times, and have not told me where your great strength lies.” And it came to pass, when she pestered him daily with her words and pressed him, so that his soul was vexed to death, that he told her all his heart, and said to her, “No razor has ever come upon my head, for I have been a Nazirite to God from my mother’s womb. If I am shaven, then my strength will leave me, and I shall become weak, and be like any other man.”

Vanity about your hair, lying to a girlfriend who is also lying to you, deploying the truth strategically and in exasperation to avoid a fight, irrational fear of premature baldness, trying to apply "not like other girls" to maleness but worriying you're not pulling it off.

2 Samuel 14:25-26

"Now in all Israel there was no one who was praised as much as Absalom for his good looks. From the sole of his foot to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him. And when he cut the hair of his head—at the end of every year he cut it because it was heavy on him—when he cut it, he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels according to the king’s standard."

Hair, vanity, attention.

2 Samuel 14:2

And Joab sent to Tekoa and brought from there a wise woman, and said to her, “Please pretend to be a mourner, and put on mourning apparel; do not anoint yourself with oil, but act like a woman who has been mourning a long time for the dead.

Like how you're not necessarily aware something's "up" before you become conscious of it later, but say you do a lot of theater in high school, you're getting cast as a lot of old ladies.

John 20:24-27

Now Thomas, called the Twin, one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said to him, “We have seen the Lord.”

So he said to them, “Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.”

And after eight days His disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, “Peace to you!” Then He said to Thomas, “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.”

"The body that represented the open mesh of all possibilities"

Hebrews 7:1-3

For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the Most High God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him, to whom also Abraham gave a tenth part of all, first being translated “king of righteousness,” and then also king of Salem, meaning “king of peace,” without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like the Son of God, remains a priest continually.

Grandiosity, family estrangement, being particularly demanding about your birthday presents.

Least

Genesis 41:36

"Then that food shall be as a reserve for the land for the seven years of famine which shall be in the land of Egypt, that the land may not perish during the famine.”

This is really just a more general piece of advice for surviving a famine that applies to all kinds of people.

Deuteronomy 3:11

“For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of the giants. Indeed his bedstead was an iron bedstead. (Is it not in Rabbah of the people of Ammon?) Nine cubits is its length and four cubits its width, according to the standard cubit."

I don't mean even this as a dig about trans men and height, really; it's just a description of one particular guy's really big bed that doesn't have a lot to do with our whole thing.

Proverbs 31:16

"She considers a field and buys it; From her profits she plants a vineyard."

I mean, good for her, but it's out of our bailiwick for sure.

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]