Genesis 1 and gender

When non-affirming Christians bother to make any appeal at all to scripture when discussing gender identity, the first destination is usually Genesis 1:27:

27   So God created man in his own image,
    in the image of God he created him;
    male and female he created them.

Possessing a gender identity that is different from what your physical characteristics might suggest would seem to blur the lines between male and female. Because God created two categories for gender, anything that might subvert this is clearly outside of his will—or so the argument goes.

This line of reasoning is flawed on multiple levels.

The first is that the imperative is manufactured outside the text. The verse itself is an indicative description of one of God’s acts in creation. While the creation is recognized as “good”, there is no implication that there is a command to treat the established categories as immutable.

While it is true that in some instances, a declaration may imply some level of moral force—such as when Jesus emphasizes the undesirability of divorce by appealing to God’s creation of kinship bonds in marriage—we need to be careful about how and when we decide to turn statements into commands.

In this particular case, given the rather formulaic nature of the description of creation, it stands to reason that anything we say about the pairing “male and female” should be applied to the other sets of categories, as well.

For example, just a few verses earlier, it says:

10 God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

If we’re not supposed to subvert the categories of “male” and “female”, then it seems that we should not subvert these categories, either.

Does this verse preclude us from building dams, which transform previously dry land into artificial lakes?

What about projects like the Panama and Suez Canals?

Irrigation ditches?

Does it mean that we can’t create artificial islands, transforming bits of sea into dry land?

Similarly, the following verse establishes even more categories:

11 And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so.

Are we to infer from this that botanists attempting to breed seedless fruits are acting in opposition to Divine Will?

These conclusions are consistent with importing imperatives into the creation narrative, but I have yet to find anyone who believes such things—and I suspect it would be difficult to take such a person seriously.

A more thorough reading of the creation narrative gives us even more reasons to doubt the simplistic reasoning presented at the beginning of this post.

Genesis 1 is filled with enumerations of categories:

• Light and dark (Genesis 1:4)
• Day and night (Genesis 1:5)
• Heaven (“The Expanse”), waters above, and waters below (Genesis 1:6–8)
• Earth and seas (Genesis 1:10)
• Vegetation, seed-bearing plants, and seed-bearing fruit trees
• Sun, moon, and stars (Genesis 1:16)
• Swimming sea creatures and flying birds (Genesis 1:20–21)
• Livestock, creeping things, beasts of the earth (Genesis 1:24)
• Male and female (Genesis 1:27)

When I was in college, one of my Bible professors introduced me to the term “merism”, which is a literary device in which an enumeration of parts is symbolic of a larger whole or spectrum.

The sets of categories in Genesis 1 are clearly merisms, and they imply a much larger scope of creation than simply what is listed. If we refused to acknowledge this, we’d make all sorts of problematic discoveries:

• Dawn and dusk (not quite day; not quite night)
• Chickens and penguins (birds that don’t fly)
• Rivers, lakes, swamps (not dry land, but not “sea”, either)
• Frogs (swim early in life, live on land later—but I don’t know if we could even say that they “creep”…)
• Precipitation (water that is neither above nor below)

As we go through each of the categories that are established in Genesis 1, we invariably find parts of nature that don’t quite fit the given structure. This is a good thing, as it makes creation much more interesting!

Having discovered this for everything else that was created, choosing to interpret “male and female” as meaning that nothing else exists seems arbitrary and perhaps even a bit silly. In fact, reading the creation narrative with a critical eye should cause us to expect to find that reality is more complicated than two alternatives with no exceptions.

And this is precisely what we do find. Even when only looking at physical characteristics, we find many example of people who are “intersex”—meaning that their sexual characteristics do not cleanly line up with our traditional definitions of “male” and “female”.

While an expansive view of creation leads us to expect—perhaps even celebrate and learn from—intersex people, their very existence is problematic for interpreters who wish to maintain a strict binary. Typically, intersex conditions end up being labeled as “disorders” or “products of The Fall”, with no regard for the experience or viewpoints of the people on the receiving end of these labels.

While intersex conditions may not be the same as variations in gender identity, they prompt us to accept that the line between male and female is already blurry, and a careful reading of the creation narrative demonstrates that we should accept this.

This line of reasoning may not get us all the way to “variations in gender identity are one of the things that we should expect”, but it does preclude us from using Genesis 1 as an argument against that position.

In a future post, I’ll discuss the other passage that is often trotted out in “scriptural” discussions about trans folks.

(I should add that I am far from the first person to make these observations about Genesis 1. Austen Hartke’s Transforming¹ first put me on this interpretive trajectory.)