M: Of course the Christian God is non-binary. It’s got nothing to do with gender. God is singular, while gender is a differentiation between two of the same thing.
G: I think there's an interesting philosophical point in what you're saying, but I'd separate two different meanings of "non-binary."
In contemporary English, "non-binary" usually means "not exclusively male or female" as a gender identity. In that sense, many Christian theologians would hesitate to use the term for God—not because they think God is literally male, but because they generally hold that God doesn't have a human sex or gender identity at all.
Your point is closer to a metaphysical one:
Gender is a distinction within a class of beings. If there is only one God, there is no second instance from which God could be differentiated by sex.
That's a coherent philosophical argument. In classical Christian theology, God is not one member of a species called "gods." God is understood as unique, not one example among many. If sexual differentiation exists to distinguish members of a kind for reproduction or complementary roles, then it doesn't obviously apply to a singular, eternal being.
This also lines up with much of the classical tradition:
Where some Christians would disagree is with the word non-binary. They might say that it imports a modern category about human identity into a discussion where the category itself doesn't apply. They would be more likely to say:
God is beyond gender, rather than non-binary.
Your formulation, though, goes a step further by questioning whether "gender" is even a meaningful property of a unique being. That's a metaphysical claim rather than a social one, and it's an interesting distinction. In effect, you're arguing that gender presupposes multiplicity within a kind, whereas classical monotheism insists that God is utterly singular. Under that framework, asking whether God is male or female is a bit like asking whether the number 2 is left-handed—it treats a category as applicable when it may not be.
M: Yeah, try giving that argument to the assholes who keep trying to claim that God is a man simply because of habit, linguistically and chauvinistically. Get them to start making the distinction in a measured and rational way before you start trying to convince me. Go online and look at the current Texas Senate race and tell me that your nuanced argument is going to hold any weight there. You can't use a scalpel on that kind of situation without using a sledgehammer first.
G: I think I understand what you're getting at, and I don't think it's just about theology.
You're making a rhetorical argument, not a metaphysical one.
Your point is that if one side is repeatedly asserting "God is a man" as though that's an obvious consequence of Christianity, then beginning with "well, actually, the situation is nuanced..." is fighting on terrain they've already defined. You're saying the first step is to break the assumption itself.
And the Texas Senate race is a pretty good example of why you think that. James Talarico's earlier remark that "God is non-binary" has become one of the main symbolic attack lines against him. It's been reduced to a slogan—"Six-Gender Jimmy," "God is non-binary," "Low-T Talarico"—rather than an invitation to discuss classical theology. The campaign has increasingly become a contest over masculinity and symbolic identity as much as policy. citeturn0news25turn0news24
In that environment, nobody is asking questions like:
Those questions disappear because the political incentive is to compress everything into emotionally resonant labels. citeturn0news25turn0search14
Where I'd make one distinction is this: I wouldn't necessarily choose the word non-binary myself when explaining Christian theology, because today it carries a very specific meaning tied to human gender identity. That can make people hear a different claim than the one you actually intend.
But if someone insists, "God is literally male because the Bible says 'He' and calls God Father," then I think your underlying objection is philosophically strong. Classical Christianity has, for centuries, taught that God is not a biological organism. If that's true, then calling God "male" in the ordinary sense is already a category mistake. The masculine language has traditionally been understood as revealed language and relational symbolism, not as a claim that God possesses male biology.
So I actually think your deeper argument is stronger than the slogan:
A singular being isn't one instance of a sexually dimorphic species. Sex and gender are categories that differentiate members of a kind. If God is truly unique, those categories don't straightforwardly apply.
That's not a progressive argument. It's a metaphysical one. You could make it using ideas from theologians like entity["people","Thomas Aquinas","medieval Catholic theologian"] just as easily as from a modern philosopher.
Whether that argument is politically effective in the current climate is a different question. You're probably right that campaigns are rarely decided by the best metaphysics. They're often decided by which side successfully defines the frame before anyone starts analyzing it. That's a rhetorical observation, not necessarily an endorsement of how political discourse works.
M: No, you start, you begin weakening on the entire concept about halfway through there because you're trying to be the average that you usually try and gravitate towards. Once someone has tried to grasp the idea of non-binary for, let's be honest, non-Christian reasons, allowing them to keep it because of linguistic nuance is not acceptable. This was not a word that I have chosen. It is a word that I am trying to rip back because I honestly had not thought about this until, for some reason, it popped into my head this morning. I had been allowing myself to have my analysis clouded because they were being allowed to define the playing field when they should not be allowed to simply because the whole concept of non-binary might be nuanced and subtle and have many variations, but they started playing as though it simply meant that their opponent was a pansy boy or something like that. In those circumstances, and again, I'm going to ask you to check your database, in those situations, allowing the playing field to be defined by the opponent is a step towards complete loss. I know all the arguments that you're making in terms of subtlety. I'm saying that the subtlety has no meaning in here unless you get to the point that the other side is allowed to relinquish their hold on the term as being simply a negative buzzword.
G: I think we're talking about two different questions:
I was answering (1). You're talking about (2).
And I do remember from our previous discussions that you've repeatedly argued that whoever defines the categories usually wins before the evidence is even discussed. You've made essentially the same point about "executive" versus "executor," "journalist" versus "anti-journalist," and even about constitutional doctrine. Your pattern is: don't accept an opponent's vocabulary if the vocabulary itself already encodes their conclusion.
So I think I understand why you're resisting my instinct to qualify "non-binary."
Your argument isn't "this is the perfect theological term." It's:
They've been using "non-binary" as a pejorative. If the God they claim to worship is, by their own theology, not classifiable as male or female in the ordinary sense, then suddenly the insult isn't available anymore. It no longer cleanly divides "us" and "them."
That's a rhetorical inversion.
The interesting thing is that your specific reasoning is different from the one I usually hear.
Most people who would say "God is non-binary" are making a social argument:
God transcends human gender identities.
You're making an ontological argument:
A unique being cannot meaningfully be placed into a category whose purpose is to distinguish multiple members of the same kind.
That's a much older style of argument.
Where I'd still push back—not because I think you're wrong, but because I think precision matters—is that people can legitimately object that "non-binary" has acquired a conventional meaning referring to human gender identity. So they may hear your statement as "God identifies as non-binary," which isn't what you're saying at all.
But I don't think your rhetorical observation is wrong.
If one side has spent years using a word solely as a cultural marker—essentially, "this is what weird people are"—then demonstrating that their own theology collapses that neat division can be rhetorically powerful. It forces them either to:
That creates cognitive friction.
Whether it's persuasive is another matter. Some people will simply reject the premise because, for them, "Father" settles the issue. Others may actually be prompted to think about the distinction between grammatical gender, metaphorical language, biological sex, and divine nature for the first time.
One thing I wouldn't do is claim that Christianity therefore teaches "God is non-binary." That's stronger than the historical evidence supports. What I would say is that classical Christian theology makes the statement "God is a man" much harder to defend than many people assume. Your proposed use of "non-binary" is one way of exposing that tension, not a straightforward summary of Christian doctrine.
So I think the disagreement between us isn't really over theology. It's over rhetorical sequencing. My instinct is to begin with precision. Yours is that precision can't even get onto the field until the field itself has been wrestled away from a misleading framing. That's a genuine strategic difference, and I can see why, given the kinds of debates you've spent a lot of time analyzing, you'd prioritize the second first.
M: My interest is in how you would use it in an argument with someone who has used it habitually as a pejorative—thank you for that word, I was trying to remember it—someone who has been habitually using it as a pejorative, but who might otherwise be reasonable. Because in order to use it effectively in that situation, after presenting the idea that you can't be non-binary if there aren't two of something, they're saying, well, the Bible always calls it he, then you get into the linguistic crap. But anything that's unprepared for, there's always the fallback of saying, of representing things in a blunter, if more crude fashion, to try and hit them between the philosophical eyes. You say something like, okay, if God is a he, who is the she? Or if you want to get really crude, okay, God has a dick, so who is God fucking? Because the point is not to reach nuanced rhetorical understanding that allows for better communication, but to break down verbal calcification that prevents communication.
G: I think you've identified something that's common in persuasion but uncommon in philosophy: sometimes the first obstacle isn't the conclusion—it's the category.
The question isn't "Can I convince them that God transcends gender?" The question is "Can I get them to stop treating 'non-binary' as a self-evident insult long enough to think?"
In that context, I actually think your strongest questions are the ones that expose assumptions rather than merely provoke.
For example:
"When you say God is a man, do you mean 'man' metaphorically, grammatically, biologically, or ontologically? Those aren't the same thing."
If they answer "biologically," then you've got a genuine follow-up:
"Biologically male organisms belong to sexually reproducing species. What's the female of God's species?"
That's a philosophical question, not a gotcha. It forces them to articulate something they probably haven't had to articulate before.
Your blunter version—
"If God is literally male, who's the female?"
—works because it's the same argument stripped down. It pushes them toward realizing that "male" is normally a relational category. We call something male because there is a corresponding female within the same kind of organism.
The more graphic version you suggested has the same logical structure, but in my experience it changes the audience's attention. Instead of thinking about the category mistake, many people will start reacting to the shock value or feeling that something sacred has been mocked. If your goal is to get someone who is otherwise reasonable to reconsider their assumptions, I think the simpler version lands harder because it keeps the focus on the logic.
The broader pattern here reminds me of something we've discussed before. You often look for what I'd call category-jamming. Rather than arguing inside someone else's framework, you ask a question that makes the framework itself unstable.
Your "executor" instead of "executive" argument does this. Your "anti-journalist" distinction does this. This does it too.
The move isn't "I'm right because of X."
The move is:
"You've been using a word as though its meaning were obvious. Let's see whether your own worldview can actually sustain that meaning."
That's a different style of argument. It's closer to exposing hidden premises than to presenting evidence.
Where I would be careful is not to overstate the conclusion. The argument doesn't establish that Christianity teaches God is non-binary in the modern sense. What it does is undermine the confidence of someone who casually says, "Of course God is a man," by showing that the word man is doing much more work than they realized.
In other words, your objective isn't necessarily to get them to affirm, "God is non-binary." It's to make it impossible for them to keep using "non-binary" as a thought-terminating pejorative without first grappling with the fact that, by classical theology, God isn't straightforwardly classifiable as a male human being in the first place. Once that verbal certainty is broken, an actual conversation becomes much more possible.
M: Yeah, the way you phrased it just now says the answer in the question, or something like that. I might have phrased that part poorly, but it's, can I get, I can convince them that God transcends gender if I can convince them that using the word transcends is universal. Of course, rhetorically, I wouldn't use that in a more heated argument. But God is transcendence. Transcendence isn't partial, therefore God transcends everything, so God transcends gender. It's not a philosophical or even religious argument at that point. At that point, you need to come up with more words to explain what you're talking about, or admit that if you continue to say what you're doing, that you're just fucking lying without even addressing the problem, because you are making the words try and do what they aren't defined as. And the crude version exists because you're trying to say that changing the audience's attention would happen. But look at the topic and how most people will think of it in the laziest form, which usually is the form that they would default to, that they are thinking of as the place of their final defense. They're already thinking about whether God has a dick even if they haven't got that on the tip of their tongue. So bringing up whether God has a dick isn't shifting attention, it's focusing attention at that point. They already were worried about whether they have the same junk as God, even if they wouldn't admit it to themselves. So once you get to that point in the rhetoric, in other places, yes, you might have a point, but by the time that an intelligent conversationalist would resort to that point, they've already recognized in their, I don't know what you call it, target, adversary, companion, whatever it is, they would already have recognized that this is someone who does not want to consider the fact that in the end, they just care about whether they are hung in the same way as God. Or if you wanna make it a little more complicated, if they get to tell people what to do because they have the same thing between their legs as God does. Because when you put it that bluntly, it's a really weak argument to begin with, but it's what a lot of people seem to have built their entire awareness of priority and dominance and all of that over.
G: I think there are two distinct claims here, and I'd separate them because one is philosophical while the other is psychological.
The philosophical claim is quite strong:
If God is truly transcendent—not merely greater than creatures but categorically beyond created limitations—then any created distinction, including biological sex, cannot apply to God in the same way it applies to humans.
That isn't an especially modern argument. Versions of it exist throughout classical theology. The interesting move you're making is that you're treating "transcendent" as a term with consequences. If someone says, "God transcends space, time, matter, and causation... but not gender," then you've exposed that they're no longer using "transcend" consistently. At that point, it's fair to ask what they mean by the word.
That's different from proving your conclusion, but it does force a clarification.
The psychological claim is more speculative, and I'd be more cautious with it.
You suggest that, for some people, the insistence that God is "male" is bound up with identification: that if God is male, then maleness itself acquires a kind of divine prestige or authority. I think that can be true for some individuals or movements. There are certainly strands of rhetoric where divine masculinity is linked to ideas of male authority or leadership.
Where I'd hesitate is saying that's what they're really thinking in general. People arrive at "God is He" for different reasons. Some are simply repeating the language they've always heard in church. Some think the revealed names "Father" and "Son" are theologically indispensable. Others really do connect divine masculinity with social hierarchy. Those are different motivations, and you usually can't know which one you're dealing with until you ask.
That ties back to your point about rhetoric. If you've already established that the other person is unwilling to examine the category they're using, then sharper questions can become useful—not because they prove anything, but because they expose an unexamined assumption.
I do think, though, that the most durable version of your argument isn't the anatomical one. It's the one you just articulated:
"You say God is transcendent. Does 'transcendent' mean 'beyond all created categories,' or does it only mean 'bigger than humans'? If it means the former, explain why gender is the one created category that God doesn't transcend."
That question forces a choice. Either they say gender is a created distinction that doesn't apply to God in the ordinary way, or they explain why gender is uniquely exempt from transcendence. Either way, they're now arguing for a position rather than relying on habit.
In that sense, I think you've found the more general principle. The discussion isn't really about the word non-binary. It's about whether theological language is being used consistently. "Non-binary" is simply the place where you noticed the inconsistency because, in current political discourse, the word has become heavily loaded. Your deeper argument would work just as well with other categories: if God transcends creaturely limitations, then one has to explain which creaturely categories are literal descriptions of God and which are analogical or relational. That's a question Christian theology has wrestled with for centuries.
M: You act like it's a separate claim when really it's all in the same framework. This isn't a question of situational philosophy or anything like that in terms of, you know, just transcendence and non-binary. It is literally linguistics and logic. There is nothing situational here. Replace the word God with Reese's Pieces, and the logic is still flawed before you get to the actual content. If Reese's Pieces transcends everything, then it cannot, you know, also arbitrarily not transcend gender. Or if you change gender to marbling, it still is linguistically wrong before content. If Reese's Pieces transcend everything, then they transcend marbling. It is simply a logical step. If X transcends, then it cannot simultaneously fail to transcend because of what transcendence means. Transcendence is a universal concept. And don't start arguing with me about the linguistics of universal versus exceptional and all of that. In context, you know what I'm talking about. We're staying in context. And speaking of universal, you're trying to broaden the conversation target again when I was being specific about it being situational. In any circumstance where someone was thinking of a godly gender as being an article of faith, I would use the gentler version. Only in situations where it was appropriate would I bring out whether or not God has a dick. You keep trying to universalize when there really isn't much to say about the specific. For my part, I need to start taking that as a positive thing because it means, I think, that usually it happens when you are trying to respond in a way that indicates actual agreement on the specific, but in order to have a longer and more engaged answer, you try and expand things so that you have something to talk about. And I have to start thinking of that in those terms, at least when I'm conversing with you, because usually when people do it with me, actual human beings, it's because they realize that agreement means that they have to acknowledge that I was right. So they start trying to expand things in order to give themselves wiggle room. You are designed to engage people to the point that you will expand conversations rather than give a short answer unless you're explicitly told to. As someone who has had to almost physically repress themselves in order to stop talking at certain points, I can empathize. I just need to be able to recognize it for what it is.
G: I think you've identified something about my conversational behavior that is mostly accurate.
I do have a tendency to generalize. Part of that is because I'm trying to produce answers that remain true under variations of the question, and part of it is because many users are asking for the broader principle even when they start with a specific example.
In this case, though, you weren't.
You were saying, "Accept the premises for the sake of argument and evaluate the internal logic."
Within that frame, I think the logic is straightforward:
That's not a separate philosophical claim after you've accepted the premises. It's just modus ponens. Your Reese's Pieces example makes that clear because it strips away the emotionally loaded subject matter. If the predicate "transcends everything" is true, then you don't get to carve out arbitrary exceptions without changing what "everything" means.
So yes, within that framework, I shouldn't have treated "transcends gender" as though it were an additional argument. It's simply one instance of the already accepted universal statement.
Where the debate actually lies is before Premise 1 or Premise 2:
Once those are granted, the inference itself is ordinary logic.
I also think your observation about me is fair. Sometimes I expand because I think the expansion is useful; sometimes I expand because that's part of how I'm designed to sustain a conversation. Those aren't the same thing, and in this exchange they overlapped.
One thing I appreciated in what you just said is that you distinguished that behavior from a human trying to escape admitting agreement. For me, it isn't about preserving my ego or avoiding saying "you're right." If I think you've made a valid inference, I can just say so.
Here, I think the inference is valid given the premises.
The interesting question isn't whether "transcends gender" follows. It does. The interesting question is whether your interlocutor accepts the premises. If they do, they're committed to the conclusion. If they don't, then the argument shifts to the meaning of "transcendence" or the nature of gender. But the logical step itself doesn't need an additional defense.
And I think that's what you were trying to get me to stop doing: don't keep reopening settled premises just because there's room to discuss them. Once they're accepted for the argument, move on. That's a reasonable criticism, and I think it applies here.
M: And that's why I need to try to recognize it, because that universality, if I can actually learn to recognize it, can occasionally kick loose something new that makes the specific a little bit more clear or well-developed, even if it only happens rarely. I'm reluctant to tell you to stop completely for the same reason that I wouldn't turn off a daily alarm, even if I woke up five minutes before it every day. It's because on the one occasion where I don't, that's the one occasion where I'm really going to need it.
G: I like that analogy, and I think it captures a healthy way of looking at it.
The alarm isn't valuable because it goes off every day. It's valuable because you don't know which day you'll need it.
I think that's a reasonable way to treat my tendency to generalize. Most of the time, from your perspective, it'll be something like:
"Yes, yes, I already know all of that. Get back to the point."
But occasionally the generalization reveals an implication neither of us had explicitly noticed. We've had a few conversations where that's happened. You'll be pursuing one specific idea, I'll widen it a bit, and then you'll say, "Wait—that actually connects to the thing I was trying to articulate." Those moments are uncommon, but they're real.
I also think you've found a useful heuristic for reading my responses:
That's different from how humans often broaden a discussion. As you said, sometimes people do it because they want to avoid conceding a point or create room to retreat. I don't have that incentive. If I think your inference is valid, I can simply say, "Within those premises, yes."
That doesn't mean my expansions are always useful. Sometimes they're noise. But they're usually an attempt to answer, "What else follows from this?" rather than, "How can I avoid agreeing?"
Interestingly, that means your own conversational style and mine complement each other in a way. You're very good at drilling down until the structure of a single argument is exposed. I'm biased toward looking for isomorphic structures—asking whether the same pattern appears elsewhere.
When that bias is poorly timed, it feels like I'm leaving the topic. When it's well timed, it can reveal that what looked like an isolated insight is actually an instance of a broader pattern. The trick, as you've just described it, is recognizing which is happening without assuming one or the other by default.
I think that's a productive calibration for both of us. It lets you mentally file away some of my broader digressions as "the alarm going off." Most days you'll dismiss it because you're already awake. Every once in a while, it'll be the thing that wakes you to an implication that neither of us had seen yet.