Understanding the Biblical Binary of "Male and Female"

 

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

Conservative Evangelicals Embrace Intersex Genital Mutilation

 

Something frightening happened this week that may have a profound impact on intersex infants and the intersex community. In the midst of the constant bombardment of news of political and natural disasters that is the state of things in the U.S. today, you may not have even noticed. But you need to know about it. A large group of conservative evangelical Christian leaders signed and released a document they call the "Nashville Statement." To the extent that it got media attention, it has mostly been because it says true Christians must oppose same-gender love and marriage, and refuse to acknowledge gender transition or even that gender identity exists.

But while morally repugnant--including to a huge number of Christians--there's nothing new in that part of the Nashville Statement. We knew conservative evangelical activists oppose LGBT rights. What's new is that this declaration officially puts intersex advocacy in the very same boat. Intersex advocates are sinners now, officially, they say. And this is going to infuse a blast of energy into attacking us politically that our small but growing movement has not experienced before.

So we need to be prepared. We need the help of allies. And we need to understand what this Nashville Statement says.

What is the Nashville Statement?

The Nashville Statement was written by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, a group that has been around since the 1980s. Its original focus was on fighting feminism, but it expanded its mission to opposing same-gender marriage, and then to denying recognition of trans identities and gender transition. The Nashville Statement is a manifesto, and the 187 conservative evangelical leaders who initially signed it intend it to serve a number of purposes. One is stop the spread of tolerance in their own followers by declaring acceptance of sex/gender/sexual variance to be a sin in itself. Another is to create a document to use in legal battles seeking to oppose LGBT+ rights by making claims to a "religious freedom" to discriminate. And a third is to try to frame variance in sex, gender, and sexuality for the public as disorder. It is, they say, on one level an issue of physical or mental disorder. But more importantly, they claim, it is evidence of a general social disorder, an international shared sickness, based in rejection of God's order of creation.

It's in this context that the Nashville Statement frames intersex status, calling it a "physical disorder of sex development." And as an intersex advocate, I find this both frightening and fascinating, because it is adopting what we call "DSD" language, and doing this explicitly to attack intersex advocacy.

What is "DSD" Language and Why Does it Matter?

Prior to 2005, the term "intersex" was used by medical practitioners and by people born sex-variant alike. But late in that year, the term "Disorders of Sex Development" or "DSD" burst onto the scene. It came out of a big conference that involved medical professionals and some intersex advocates. The goal of the intersex participants was to stop doctors from rushing to cut up the genitals of babies born sex-variant. And, ironically, it was at the urging of some intersex advocates that one of the things that came out of this big conference at the last moment was the statement that people should stop using the term "intersex," and start using "Disorders of Sex Development" instead.

Those intersex individuals who helped introduce DSD language thought that it would slow down the rush to surgery. Their reasoning was that the term "intersex" evokes sexual perversion, queerness, and radicalism. But "DSD" just sounds like any other medical condition, and so, they hoped, would cease freaking out parents and doctors. Instead of stigma and shame, there would be medical conditions that could be treated calmly, deliberately, and with the minimum intervention necessary. Sex-variant people would be empowered in interactions with medical professionals, and sex-variant advocates seen as reasonable people. Those were good intentions.

But that's not how things worked out.

In fact, what happened is that most out intersex advocates quickly rejected DSD language as repugnant. We didn't see ourselves as "disordered." We saw the problems we faced as socially and medically produced. The forced genital surgeries and other treatments imposed on us without our consent didn't "save" us, they caused us terrible suffering. They constituted intersex genital mutilation. Our problem did not lie in our sex-variant bodies, it lay in a society that framed such bodies as horrifying rather than just an eternal part of natural human diversity.

But you know who loved DSD language, and rushed to embrace it? The medical community, which used it to justify continuing, even intensifying interventions into sex-variant bodies. Disorders, after all, should be cured! Oh, and many parents of intersex kids quickly adopted DSD language, too, after hearing it from doctors, because it supported their desire to have their children "cured" and become "normal." These parents and doctors alike had a shared vision of intersex children being transformed into "regular" girls or boys who would gratefully grow up to be genderconforming and happily, heterosexually, married.

So in 2017 what we find is that in the U.S., we have two competing terms being used to describe those born sex-variant. Advocates call ourselves intersex, as do human rights organizations supporting us, while the medical community and those seeking medical "cures" use DSD language.

Right under the surface of the embracing of DSD language by doctors and many parents has been a great deal of homophobia and transphobia, though that has remained a subtext. It is that subtext that we now see revealed in the Nashville Statement, as conservative evangelical Christians have climbed aboard the DSD boat. Let's look at the Nashville Statement language to see how they deploy the language of disorder, and why.

The Nashville Statement and What it Means

I'll give you the most relevant text from the Nashville Statement for you to read yourself, but I have to warn you--it's written in evangelicanese. What the words mean for the conservative evangelical Christian activists who wrote them may not be at all apparent from the words as they are understood in ordinary English. So what I'll do is give you the text, and then a translation into everyday English.

Here is the most relevant language, from Articles IV-VI of the Nashville Statement:

• Article IV: We affirm that divinely ordained differences between male and female reflect God’s original creation design and are meant for human good and human flourishing.
• Article V: We affirm that the differences between male and female reproductive structures are integral to God’s design for self-conception as male or female. We deny that physical anomalies or psychological conditions nullify the God-appointed link between biological sex and self-conception as male or female.
• Article VI: We affirm that those born with a physical disorder of sex development are created in the image of God and have dignity and worth equal to all other image-bearers. They are acknowledged by our Lord Jesus in his words about “eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb.” With all others they are welcome as faithful followers of Jesus Christ and should embrace their biological sex insofar as it may be known. We deny that ambiguities related to a person’s biological sex render one incapable of living a fruitful life in joyful obedience to Christ.

Translated from the evangelicalese, this says something like this: "God requires binary sex and gender, and forbids homosexuality or gender transition. LGBT people are all sinners. Being born intersex is not the individual's fault, so it's not a sin. It is, however, a medical disorder, and if a doctor can be found who will assign an intersex child male or female, then infant genital surgery must be embraced, and the individual must identify with their assigned sex and as heterosexual or they become a sinner."

Oh, and thus under Article X, which compels rejection of sex, gender and sexual variance, parents who fail to seek out intersex genital mutilation for their children, or who accept it if their intersex children do not identify as straight members of their medically-assigned binary sex--those parents are committing a terrible sin and cannot call themselves Christians.

Intersex Advocacy as Sin

What the Nashville Statement reveals is that intersex advocacy is now fully on the radar of conservative evangelicals, who oppose it.

The main goal of intersex advocacy is to stop doctors from being allowed to impose unconsented-to sex change surgeries on babies. Our society would never allow this for the endosex babies it frames as "normal," and should not allow it in the case of intersex ones. Medical interventions aimed at changing the sex characteristics of someone's body should only be performed if a fully informed, sufficiently mature individual requests them of their own will. (Yes, of course, if an infant has a functional impairment that endangers their physical health, parents should be able to consent to medical treatment limited to fixing that impairment--but the vast majority of intersex genital surgeries are performed without the child having any functional problem.)

After this core priority, the goal of intersex advocacy is to ensure intersex children can grow up in a family, community and medical regime that treat intersex bodies and healthy and beautiful. We want to ensure intersex children full freedom to explore and assert their own gender identity, whatever it may be. We want them to have access to any medical interventions they mature to desire, but to make decisions about any medical interventions completely free from coercion, in a context where choosing to access no interventions is fully supported.

The Nashville Statement calls this sin.

According to the Nashville Statement, part of submitting to the will of God means, in the case of intersex individuals, submission to the will of doctors. Doctors are treated as agents of God's will in determining a binary sex to which to assign a poor benighted, disordered intersex infant. It may seem quite strange for religious authorities to declare medical authorities diviners of God's will, but in fact this partnership between religion and science in enforcing binary sex/gender ideology has been around for centuries--you can read my prior post discussing that here. It was perhaps at its height during the heyday of European colonialism, when Christian missionaries partnered with European scientists and doctors to pathologize and dismantle nonbinary sex categories among colonized peoples. But there's an ongoing religious and scientific partnership in proselytizing the ideology of "natural sex," and we see that very clearly in the case of the Nashville Statement.

Here, we see conservative evangelical leaders joining doctors in framing intersex as disorder. Intersex people must be medically assigned to a binary sex and have their bodies altered to conform to it as much as possible. To object to this is now not simply to fail to respect medical authority-- it is now proclaimed to violate God's will.

What Does This Mean for Intersex Advocacy?

I believe that what this means for us is that a storm is coming. In the past, conservative evangelical opposition to variance in sex, gender and sexuality hasn't focused on intersex advocates. We've been dismissed as pitiful, freakish, and rare, and conservative religious approaches to us haven't been consolidated.

Well, now they have been. And in terms of advocacy, for me the main takeaway here is that the Nashville Statement answers the questions of whether intersex advocacy should be making common cause with LGBT advocates.

For many years, intersex communities have been divided over whether we should be placed "under the LGBT+ umbrella." Intersex support groups where parents of intersex children have had a strong voice have tended both to embrace DSD language and resist the idea of allying with LGBT communities, because their goal has been one of assimilation. The have desired to to distance the community from people viewed as radical and queer and present intersex people (or "people with DSDs") as "normal." This tendency is likely to continue. There's a growing number of parents who have been educated by trans and intersex advocacy who oppose surgical alteration of their intersex babies' genitalia, but for the larger group that view intersexuality as a curable disorder, the Nashville Statement is actually likely to be fairly resonant.

But then there are those of us who are out intersex advocates fighting the pathologizing and mutilation of our bodies. And among us, while opinion about whether to ally with LGBT advocacy groups has been much more positive, there are still those of us who have been against it. This is not because of an assimilationist desire, but out of frustration with LGBT+ organizations that have demonstrated poor allyship. I will acknowledge that there's been a substantial amount of ally failure. Common examples include organizations that put an "I" in their group acronym (such as LGBTQIAA) without having any out intersex people in their group; treating sex variance as an abstract concept to use to advance an LGBT group's agenda without recognizing us as actual people around them who need to be understood and aided; misunderstanding intersex community needs as being primarily about respect for gender identity instead of ending IGM and other forced medical interventions; and denying that physical sex has any reality as a tactic for fighting transphobia, which makes it impossible to even articulate our mutilation and suffering.

But whether we are satisfied with how we have been treated by LGBT organizations and advocates or not, we are all in the same boat in the eyes of those who would cause us vast suffering and call it "Christian love." And because our community is most likely to be in the closet, our organizations younger and smaller, and our suffering least understood by the general public, we really really need the aid of LGBT community partners.

So: it is time for us to do a whole lot more educating--of both LGBT advocates with whom we share common cause, and of the general public. And it is time to prepare for the active opposition of conservative evangelical groups that have announced in the Nashville Statement that opposition to IGM is now right up there with advocating marriage equality or support for gender transition as acts that claim "ruin human life and dishonor God."

The Problematic Ideology of Natural Sex

What is human nature?

In the Western world today, science and religion are often understood to be enemies. It’s believed they offer two competing explanations of how the world works. What I want to show you is how when it comes to understanding human nature, Christianity and Science are in fact complete bedfellows. They both are deeply invested in a belief system, which I will call the Ideology of Natural Sex. And both have been shoring up that ideology, enforcing it brutally, and imposing it by force on others around the globe, for centuries.

What is this Ideology of Natural Sex? What do authorities from the Pope to our medical and scientific textbooks jointly believe, and insist we believe, about sex? It’s their unified theory of sex, gender and sexuality, and it goes like this:

“As ordered by God/evolutionary biology, humans come in two and only two physical sexes. This is the nature of things because a male and a female make a reproductive unit. The purpose of sexual interaction is reproduction. Thus, the determinative factor in dividing men from women is genitalia. Genitalia determine gender—the way society organizes people through gender roles, and the way people should properly identify and understand their place in the world. And this world is one in which men are (by God’s design or by biological imperative) the dominant sex, the sexual “aggressor,” while women’s interests center on nurturing families and offspring.”

Four things that are central to my own life pose challenges to this ideology. The first is that the empirical reality of physical sex is that it is a spectrum, and people, like myself, have always been born intersex. The second is that people around the world and throughout history have identified with genders other than male or female, and/or have been assigned to one sex at birth, and felt called to move to live in another. The third is that people engage in sex all the time that is not procreative. This is true of people who are infertile, people in same-sex pairings, and fertile men and women who do not wish to conceive with one another at the time of their sexual interaction. And the last is the reality that gender inequality is not inevitable. Patriarchy, the privileging of men over women, is a form of inequity that is successfully being reduced.

How have religious and scientific authorities dealt with these challenges over the past several centuries? They have periodically declared them to be “unnatural.”

Now, if ever you want to know when to suspect an ideology is at work, you can be sure it is the case when someone tells you something is unnatural and should not occur. Because here’s the thing about true natural laws: they function whether you want them to or not. Nobody needs to urge or force anyone else to obey them. Consider gravity. It’s a natural law, so nobody needs to enforce it. No religious tracts or psychological textbooks have been written urging people to obey the principle of gravity and refrain from floating about bumping into ceilings. Or consider this example: people may argue over vegetarianism, and whether it is healthy. But you have never seen a letter to the editor or an internet comment war complaining about how kids these days are engaging in the unnatural practice of giving up both meat and vegetables and choosing to engage in photosynthesis instead.

There is no #PhotosynthesisIsUnnatural hashtag because it truly is unnatural for people to turn green and live off sunlight directly instead of eating things for energy. Truly unnatural things do not occur, so they generate no outrage squads decrying their transgression.

As for the “laws of natural sex”—well, it’s another story.

Around the world, over the past four or five hundred years, people have been cajoled, threatened, forcibly re-educated, beaten, imprisoned, locked in mental hospitals, put in the stocks, publicly humiliated, mutilated, and burnt at the stake for violating one or more of the precepts of “Natural Sex.” That’s the sure sign of enforced ideology, not a true natural law.

And it’s not just a story of superstitious, ignorant days gone by. There is a war being waged over the ideology of “Natural Sex” today. And in that war, religion and science stand hand in hand on the same side. Who stands on the other?

Intersex people whose genitals are surgically mutilated without their consent to force their bodies to resemble binary sex expectations.

Trans people who are treated as having a mental illness, as delusional, as perverted, as pariahs.

People in same-gender relationships, who have made great strides in the West recently in terms of a right to secular marriages, but who are still not permitted to marry in many religious denominations, and who are not protected from perfectly legal discrimination of many sorts in many places.

Oh, and women pursuing sexual pleasure. Religious authorities frame women in particular as ruining themselves through seeking sex outside the context of marriage. Meanwhile, scientists continue to frame female orgasm as a puzzle as they state it is “unnecessary,” since women can conceive without it. Women, according to both religion and science, should want babies, and only engage in sex to make them, not for fun.

The extraordinary thing is, with so many groups fighting and suffering for recognition denied them under the ideology of “natural sex,” how incredibly powerful that ideology is, how amazingly resilient. We are taught the Ideology of Natural Sex so early, by parents and media and schools and churches, that we believe in it at the same fundamental level that we believe in things like gravity.

And even when individuals are persecuted in some way under the Ideology of Natural Sex, very often it never occurs to them to challenge the whole, as that seems unthinkable, but only one small part of the ideology impacting them particularly. Thus we have women who decry female genital mutilation as cruelly enforcing the belief that women should not have sex for pleasure, yet who see similar surgeries being performed on intersex babies as appropriate, as heroically “correcting malformation.” We have gay men and lesbians who frame themselves as natural and normal, wanting only to marry and reproduce like anyone else, while disdaining trans people as "crazies" who are making gay people look bad by association under the LGBT umbrella. We have people born with sex-variant bodies who reject the label intersex, and wish only to be referred to as “people affected by disorders of sex development.” Why? Because they are worried that the term “intersex” will make others associate them with trans people or think they have nonbinary identities or otherwise find them disturbingly transgressive of the Ideology of Natural Sex, and God forbid, they don’t want any of those things to be thought of them.

And everywhere, everywhere, we have ignorance of the long and violent history of the imposition of the Ideology of Natural Sex under European colonialism.

The genius behind framing an ideology as “natural” is that its history erases itself. Why would anyone study the history of something natural and eternal? We don’t study the history of covalent bonds in chemistry or cumulus clouds in meteorology.  And so we don’t study the spread of European binary sex ideology under colonialism. If you do, you’ll find that all over the world before European colonialism there were societies recognizing three, four, or more sexes and allowing people to move between them—but that’s a subject for another post. Suffice it to say that societies were violently restructured under European colonialism in many ways, and one of those was the stamping out of nonbinary gender categories and stigmatization of those occupying them as perverts.

Meanwhile, missionaries and European scientists spread the word that nonprocreative sexual practices—same-gender relationships, oral sex, masturbation—violated God’s will or the scientifically known purpose of sex, and were thus both sinful and sick. Christian missionaries even taught that the only acceptable intercourse involved a married man atop his wife, other positions being “unnatural.” Scientists concurred, saying that only in the missionary position would gravity lead semen to the uterus. Nature, colonized peoples were taught, requires men to be on top--of society, and in sexual activity, literally.

Most people today are ignorant of this history of the ongoing struggles to impose the Ideology of Natural Sex on reluctant nations and social groups. This ignorance allows each generation to believe that those who do not fit under the ideology, such as intersex and trans people, are rare freaks—or, if there are many challenging the ideology at that time, such as feminists demanding access to birth control and abortion, or the gay pride movement, as a brand new threat to an until-then-eternal system.

And for a system that is presented as eternal and inevitable, the Ideology of Natural Sex is also strangely framed as fragile and endangered, requiring vigorous defense. One example: the 20^th century claim that “homosexuality is unnatural, and if it is tolerated, the human species will go extinct as procreation will stop.” This claim was made by opponents of the so-called gay liberation movement, many of them religious conservatives, but using the language of science. And after all, for many years, scientists had been claiming that homosexuality was a medical disorder that must be cured.

The really weird thing about the end-of-the-species claim, if you think about it, is that it presumed that if same-gender sexual activity were tolerated, then nobody would ever have mixed-gender sex again. Why would people who presumably happily identified as heterosexual think something like that? Well, it’s because each of the precepts of the Ideology of Natural Sex are seen as inextricably linked. The purpose of sex is reproduction; this requires men and women; people must accept their assigned gender roles. Allow two men or two women to have sex, and the other precepts will fall as well. Society as we know it will collapse, and in fact, we’ll die out as a species as we won’t reproduce anymore. Our nature will be destroyed and humans will suffer an apocalypse.

Today, in the early 21^st century, intersex and trans issues are coming to the fore. And the same patterns emerge, as they have in the past of which we are unaware.

From science and medicine, what we see is the framing of bodies, identities and behaviors that fall outside the Ideology of Natural Sex as disorders to be classified and treated. The goal is to restore the “natural order” through techniques developed by science: eugenic programs, surgical “normalization,” and psychotherapies. Consider intersex status right now. There is a growing social movement of intersex people to put an end to the nonconsensual genital surgeries that have been imposed on intersex children since the 20^th century. But doctors are extremely resistant to this movement. Living with a sex-variant body is presented by doctors as a fatal condition. It will lead to social death, which may lead in turn to suicide. Without a body that conforms to binary sex expectations, it will be impossible to find a mate, so even if one lives, it will be an empty life, a painful one full of strange nonconforming behavior and self-loathing. Surgeons claim they are compelled to continue intersex genital mutilation to preserve life and quality of life, dismissing the cry of intersex advocates that these “treatments” in fact degrade their quality of life.

From the religious side, what we see is an assertion that Natural Law created by God must be affirmed by all human laws. To do otherwise is not only an offense to God, but will destroy humanity. Speaking recently of the supposed danger of the trans rights movement, Pope Francis said, "We are experiencing a moment of the annihilation of man as the image of God." Natural law, understood as decreed by God, requires binary sex, and that gender conform to that binary sex. Worldly laws must not be enacted to acknowledge and support people's gender identities. In fact, say religious conservatives, to speak of gender at all is to offend God. There is only sex, and never before have humans suggested that one also has a gender identity and should express its inner truth! (The fact that gender identity recognition and gender transition are as old as humanity is a history that we’ve already seen has been erased by the “natural law” framing.) And fascinatingly, the Catholic church evokes science to “prove” its position. Sex, the Church states, is determined by DNA. DNA, unlike clothing or hormones or genitals, cannot be changed. Thus, one can never change one’s “true” sex. Gender transition is a wicked lie, a deception, and according to Pope Francis, as dangerous to humanity as nuclear weapons. It must be stopped and “nature” defended.

So science and religion walk arm in arm, trumpeting the ideology of the Natural Law of Sex. This gives everyone in the general population something to latch onto in framing the oppression of some group as necessary and good. Are you a socially conservative religious person who finds trans people disgusting? Claim that the statement “male and female created He them” in Genesis is not a generalizing poetic phrase but a morally prescriptive statement that must be socially enforced. Are you a radical cis feminist who disdains the Pope, but shares with him disgust for trans people?  Claim that DNA determines sex, that gender identity is a delusion, and that trans women are thus sick male threats to the safety of “biological women.”

There’s something for everyone.

What makes the Ideology of Natural Sex so powerful is that, like all deeply effective belief systems, it is so taken-for-granted that it is like water to a fish. Most people are unaware of the very concept of a sex/gender ideology. And therefore, merely to ask the question “How many genders are there in your society?” strikes them both infantile and very offensive. Show them a drawing of intermediate genitalia and they gasp in profound shock. Present them with a visibly trans body and they laugh or gag or feel incited to commit violence.  These strong negative reactions occur because having your ideology challenged is bad enough, but when you didn’t even know it was an ideology in the first place, it makes you question everything. And sadly, most people don’t want to do that at all.

But we have to do it.

If we truly believe in science, in a rational world where we look objectively at what is, rather than impose our beliefs onto reality, then we need to reject the Ideology of Natural Sex. We need to see the reality of the sex spectrum and stop framing intersexuality as a rare disorder that somehow violates natural law. We need to understand that different societies have divided the sex spectrum up into different numbers of social sexes, and that binary sex is no more or less arbitrary than trinary or quartic sex systems. We need to give up the silly idea that sexual interactions only serve reproductive purposes, when it is massively evident in nature that nonprocreative sex is everywhere in social species. We need to become aware of the omnipresent world history of gender transitioning, and let go of the myth that not until the 20^th century introduced modern surgical transition procedures did “real” gender transitions occur.

And if we truly believe in religion, then we must adhere to the precepts of compassion that all religions teach, and stop using religion to oppress minorities or spread hate.

Intersex people, trans people, queer people, lusty women. . . we don’t violate natural law. In fact, we’ve always been a part of human nature. And accepting and respecting us as we are will not cause the end of the world. At all.

It could, however, spell the start of a kinder and fairer world. So please, just let go of the Western Ideology of Natural Sex.