According
to certain Christians, the fact that the Bible states "male and female
created He them" means that God only recognizes two genders, those
assigned at birth. To be trans or nonbinary is unacceptable, and
intersex status a tragic birth defect that must be corrected.
Of
course, the Bible also says "the Lord makes poor and rich." This binary
of rich and poor appears multiple times in biblical language. Do
conservative Christians therefore say it is an abomination to be middle
class?
Or consider the verse, "He will bless his loyal followers,
both young and old." You'll find this binary of young and old many
times. Yet there is no Christian movement to declare that people cannot
be known as middle-aged, but must either be designated as old or as
young.
The phrase "male and female created He them" comes from
the book of Genesis, in what Christians call the Old Testament and Jews
call the Torah. Christianity started as a Jewish sect, reading Jewish
Torah scrolls, and practicing Jewish religious traditions. Many of these
traditions were relinquished fairly early in Christianity, such as the
requirement of circumcision. By 300 years in, kosher dietary laws had
been abandoned.
But many other Jewish traditions lasted much
longer. One of these was recognition of intersex babies. Under the
Jewish religious rules of halacha, babies were not just classified as
male or female, but under a four-sex system that also designated babies
androgyne (both) or tumtum (neither). People born androgyne were to
perform the religious duties assigned to both men and women; people born
tumtum were not required to practice either set of duties. Jewish
tradition also recognized additional categories for those whose gender
status changed, due to intersex characteristics manifesting at puberty,
or to never experiencing puberty at all, or to human intervention such
as surgery--all categories later Christians would lump together as
"eunuchs."
For many centuries, Christians recognized androgynes,
tumtums, and eunuchs as well as men and women. The Church canonized
saints with these designations. It was not until the Middle Ages that
the novel idea arose that the phrase "male and female created He them"
was not a poetic dyad, but a limitation the Church should implement in
categorizing human beings. And the courts immediately started dealing
with a stream of cases involving people assigned to one binary sex at
birth, but living as the other, or living in their birth-assigned sexes
but having intersex bodies that they or the community felt was more like
the sex to which they were not originally assigned.
This shift
from accepting sex and gender diversity to squashing it into a binary
was awkward from the very first. And violent, too: some intersex people
were burned at the stake, like witches. The categories of witch,
intersex person, and gender-transgressor were often conflated. It was a
ugly time in history--witness the Inquisition--in which all sorts of
people who deviated from norms were tortured and burned alive in the
name of God.
Today, Christians are not in the witch-burning
business. That period of history is viewed as one of superstition and
terrible persecution. Yet some conservative Christians continue to
revile people who are gender expansive, deem gender transition
illegitimate, and demand that intersex babies receive forced genital
reconstruction. They claim they must impose an eternal binary, for the
Bible tells them so.
But there's no need for that. The phrase
"male and female created He them" is a poetic dyad, just like the
phrases "rich and poor" or "old and young."
Persecuting the
socially marginal is the exact opposite of what Jesus called on
Christians to do. Justifying such persecution by referencing a snippet
of poetic Biblical language is not just nonsense. It is a great moral
wrong
