Keith Tiller was both trans and an evangelical Christian. Tiller has said that he was a habitual cross-dresser in the 1980s, and was on the path to surgery. However he had a religious experience, and, rather than join a LGBT-positive church, he joined the Evangelical Alliance, and from there regarded trans persons as sinners.
He relies particulary on Genesis 1:26-27 (“And God [Elohim אֱלֹהִים] created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”), Mark 10:6 (“But from the beginning of the creation God [Theos] made them male and female”) and Deuteronomy 22 (“The woman shall not wear that which pertains to a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment, for all that do so are an abomination to the Lord your God.”).
Tiller openly spoke of his own healing from gender dysphoria, and used that as the basis of his expertise. In the 1990s he set up his own ministry in Bromley, south east London, and evangelical churches sent trans persons from their congregations. The ministry was called Parakaleo (Greek for I summon) and offered prayer-based trans-to-cis conversion.
In 1996, one of the persons referred was Mark Dainton, who, living as female, had joined an evangelical church. While preparing for baptism, Dainton revealed her past to the pastor and his wife. They were shocked and told Dainton that this was an act of rebellion against God. This led Dainton to return to her ‘once hated male identity’, marriage to a woman and a referral to Parakaleo. Dainton and Tiller worked together and wrote a booklet Male and Female He Created Them. However six months later, Dainton found the urge to be female had returned, and by then transsexual websites were starting to appear on the then new internet to give her support.
Tiller felt deceived by this reversion, and suggested that Dainton would change sex yet again (although there is no record that she did so). In the 2000s he wrote several documents that were endorsed by the Evangelical Alliance. They urged compassion for trans persons as for other sinners, but insisted that God’s given gender cannot be changed. “Church leaders may encounter pressure from members of church congregations to enforce conformity to established gender roles. Such pressure may prematurely anticipate the personal work of the Holy Spirit.”
However, the trans person is not accepted as the gender that she feels that she really is. She is told that she is a sinner. The Alliance maintains its opposition whenever it is proposed that the government ban conversion therapy.
- Keith Tiller & Mark Dainton. Male and Female He Created Them. Parakaleo Ministries,
- Keith Tiller. ‘Ministry update’, Parakaleo Ministry, 2001.
- Keith Tiller et al. Transsexuality. Paternoster, 2001. By members of the Evangelical Alliance, Conclusions online.
- Keith Tiller. “Transsexualism: Some Considerations to assist Church Leaders who encounter Transsexual People”. Evangelical Alliance, 2001. Archive.
- Keith Tiller. Transsexualism: some considerations to assist church leaders who encounter transsexual people, Evangelical Alliance, 2003.
- David Batty. “What happens if you change your sex ... and then change your mind: Mistaken Identity”. The Observer, 31 July 2004: 17-8.
- Keith Tiller et al. “Gender Recognition: A Guide for Churches to the Gender Recognition Act”. Evangelical Alliance, 2006.
- Keith Tiller. Towards an understanding of transsexual behaviours, 2010. Previously available from the Internet Archive, but now removed.
- Christopher Dowd. Transfaith: An Exploration of Gender in the Church From the Margins. ThD theism University of Birmingham, August 2014: 72-6, 101
- Rebecca Jane Morgan. “God of Hate: Evangelicalism’s Transphobia Problem”. medium.com, February 12, 2022: 4-6.
- Rebecca Jane Morgan. Gender Heretics: Evangelicals, Feminists, and the Alliance against Trans Liberation. Pluto Press, 2023: 151.
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“male and female created he them” can of course be read two quite different ways: 1) as the Alliance takes it, men and women are different and it is a fundamental mistake to change sex. 2) (Genesis 1:27) implies that Elohim the Creator is both father and mother. Elohim is both male and female. God is fully androgynous and all of us, male, female and other are partly male and partly female. This reading inspired much speculation in Midrash and Kabalistic texts, many of which compared the Genesis androgyne with that in Plato's Symposium. The word Elohim is plural and some read it as a group of gods, both male and female.
