According to the Flesh

For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Gospel of Thomas

Thanks to those energetic people at the Christian Legal Centre, the latest attempt by the Established Church to gain a toe-hold in the twentieth century looks set to be as reasoned and charitable a process as that little business of accepting gays into the priesthood provided they behaved themselves and didn't get up to anything naughty. The Church has issued guidelines directing its faith-school staff not to bully transgender pupils and proclaiming that children dressing up is not anathema. Predictably, this has caused consternation among the faithful, many of whom apparently believe not only that gender is divinely ordained and therefore irrevocable, but that it is determined at birth, rather than at conception as mere scientists have claimed, or even when differentiation takes place in the foetus, some thirty weeks before the potential convert is ejected from the womb. One such biological revisionist, who presumably believes in spontaneous generation or delivery by stork, is due for a disciplinary hearing on the grounds that he has failed to fall in with what the Christian Legal Centre is pleased to call "the current transgender fad". Like so many of the persecuted and reviled who also happen to have a steady income and a measure of worldly power over the vulnerable, he does not appear to have noticed the guidelines in the Sermon on the Mount about the appropriate circumstances for rejoicing and being exceeding glad.