Trans-Formed: A Reflection on Romans 12:1-3

"Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you." Romans 12:1-3 (NIV)

Romans 12 begins with a call to offer ourselves—our bodies—as a living sacrifice to God. But this is not a command to erase ourselves. It’s not a call to suppress who we are. It is, instead, a response to mercy: “in view of God’s mercy…” The grace of God is already the starting point. Everything Paul says here flows from that. The transformation that follows is not something we manufacture by striving to be “better Christians.” It is something the Holy Spirit does in us—a transformation, not a replacement. A re-newing of the mind, not a discarding of it.

Too often, this passage has been twisted by Christians to justify rigid and exclusionary ideas about what it means to be human. For example, people have used it to argue that we must conform to their narrow ideas of gender and sexuality—as though being “transformed” means aligning with a culturally conditioned, biologically deterministic ideal. But that’s not transformation according to the Spirit; that’s conformity to the world. That’s exactly what Paul warns against. We are all, as Christians, in the business of accepting ourselves, not according to cultural and binary expectations, but according to the will of God. 

I find it ironic when this passage is used against our transgender siblings. For a transgender person, conformity to the world would mean rejecting their identity as a trans person and instead accepting the identity bestowed upon them by culture, biology, or (sometimes) religion. What if the pattern of this world isn’t queerness or transness, but rather the binary thinking and gender essentialism that flattens God’s diverse creation into either/or, once-and-for-all categories? By coming out as trans, then, they are in fact being "transformed" by the "renewing" of their mind. They are embracing not what the world has told and is telling them they are, but who they know in their bones they truly are, and—presumably at least—who God has created them to be. What if the real call of Romans 12 is to resist the pressures of social conformity and allow the Spirit to teach us to see with sober judgement, so that we can finally begin to see each other and ourselves truthfully, through the lens of grace?

Transformation in Christ is never about becoming someone else; it’s about becoming more fully who we truly are, in communion with the God who knows us intimately and calls us beloved. The mind renewed by the Spirit does not impose shame or restriction—it perceives God’s will as good, pleasing, and perfect precisely because it makes room for joy, freedom, honesty, and authenticity.

To “think of yourself with sober judgment” (v.3) is not to think less of yourself—it’s to be honest, grounded in grace, and in touch with the faith God has given you. For many, especially our trans and queer siblings in Christ, that sober judgment involves undoing years of religious shame and recovering the voice of the Spirit that says, “You are mine. Just as you are.”