This article examines the contribution of Derrick Sherwin Bailey to debates on homosexuality within the Church of England during the 1950s. Against a backdrop of increased prosecutions and public controversy, Bailey argued that homosexuality was an innate condition that should not be criminalised. Through influential publications and submissions to the Wolfenden Committee, he helped shape support for legal reform while maintaining traditional Christian teachings that regarded homosexual acts as sinful. The article highlights the tension in Bailey’s thought between scientific understandings of homosexuality as natural and theological concepts of natural law, a tension that continues to influence contemporary debates on sexuality.
In this piece, I draw on Adrian Thatcher’s work on the theology of human gender, particularly his critique of domination and gender injustice within Christian theology and ethics, and extend the discussion through dialogue with insights from Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour. The aim is to consider how Thatcher’s dismantling of hierarchical gender binaries ‘in Christ’ might also shape our relationships with other-than-human beings amid an ongoing climate catastrophe for which humans are largely responsible.
The UK Supreme Court ruling of April 2025, which defined ‘woman’ in the Equality Act 2010 as biological sex, is not merely a legal event. It is the codification of a theological error: the ‘conceit of complementarity’, a binary anthropology whose intellectual roots run from early examples of theological complementarianism through the Vatican’s institutionalised war on gender to contemporary British law. In this article I argue, drawing on Adrian Thatcher (2020; 2023) and on my own trans-grounded theology, that binary gender essentialism is exegetically unsustainable, christologically refuted and doctrinally dangerous. I propose a theology of the gender galaxy in place of the linear continuum, assert the holiness of trans bodies against a long theological tradition of bodily disgust, and call the church to prophetic resistance.
Naomi Browell is completing her doctoral studies at the University of Glasgow. Her thesis investigates the experience of Scottish Episcopal liturgy through the lens of female victim-survivors of male sexual violence.
