Intersex in Christ: A Review

Spoilers: It's a weird book.

Thousands of books are written each year by Christians, attempting to address issues people face every day. Questions of marriage, how one ought to parent, how to forgive, how to grieve – nearly every facet of what it means to be human is talked about, thought about, typed about. Yet, somehow, no one knows about intersex conditions, something that affects millions. This is one of the unknown injustices of Christendom today – intersex people face an uphill battle just to be recognized as persons.

As it stands today, I have found four (4) books written by Christian theologians that attempt to answer sections of the web of questions that intersex people exist within. Jennifer Cox's 2018 book Intersex in Christ is the one I'll be talking about today. I will also reference Megan DeFranza's Sex Difference in Christian Theology, as she gives more statistics on the medical side of things. That being said, Cox is the primary focus.

It’s worth giving at least a quick summary of what intersex conditions are like. Intersex people are, generally speaking, born with some kind of ambiguity about their bodily sex. Some conditions, e.g., Klinefelter syndrome, result in someone with XY DNA and male genitalia nonetheless having a body form that is like that of a woman – breasts, wide hips, etc. Other conditions, like partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, will result in the person having ambiguous genitalia – they may have something that lies between a penis and a clitoris, for example. Someone with CAIS could have XY DNA and testes, but would have a vagina instead of a penis and go through female puberty.

I'm going to hold going into more detail on intersex conditions for my review of DeFranza's book, but if you want to learn about them now, some helpful search terms are:

• Complete/Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS/PAIS);

• Klinefelter Syndrome;

• Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH);

• 5-alpha reductase deficiency.

To be sure, this is by no means an exhaustive list of intersex conditions - just a subset that illustrates how "intersex" is not one, unified type.

Before moving onto the argument, I want to pause briefly to reflect on the fact that a condition which millions of people are born with¹ has four books written about it by Christians. (Even if the ones I have found are not exhaustive, it’s an indictment that I’ve only found four.) And it's not just a lack of authorship – most people don't even know what intersex conditions are! In terms of numbers, intersex conditions are in the same ballpark as the rates of Down Syndrome, which occurs in roughly .125% of humans.² Imagine a world in which people with Down Syndrome are a completely unknown group in most circles of society – that is what intersex people face today. This is worthy of mourning; Christians have a responsibility to meet the marginalized far better than what we do currently.

Indeed, Cox recognizes this fact, and begins her book with a chapter that focuses on intersex conditions: what they are and how they happen, yes, but also the stories of intersex people.

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Intersex people face deep trauma, shame, and confusion, sometimes from the moment they are born. Doctors don't know what to do with an intersex child – which only serves to instill horror in the parents of a newborn intersex person. If the doctors don't know what to do, how can parents feel comfortable with it? Often, newborns with intersex conditions immediately have surgery on their genitals as an attempt to make them "normal". Parents imbibe, as a consequence, the idea that intersex conditions are inherently shameful.³ Cox’s first chapter explores these themes, and nearly does its job admirably – that is, until Cox forgets the entire point of the chapter and spends the last five pages on a section entitled "The Gender Agenda".⁴

Given that this book was written in 2018, the word agenda was already in vogue for right-wing politicians to bandy about when talking about "the Left". I'm not here to talk politics. Nor, indeed, is a book discussing the struggles of intersex people the place to do so. Her credibility plummets with this move. Inserting political rhetoric as an attempt to scare the reader into agreement is not scholarship, but sophistry. Even if you believe that "there is a radical agenda to get rid of the idea that humans are made male and female"⁵, the usage of "radical agenda" can be taken as nothing more nor less than an attempt to sidestep the arguments of proponents of said "agenda".

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The Big Questions

The kinds of questions that intersex people face today, in particular within the church, are things like:

• Does God love me? Is my body more broken than "normal" people? Why am I invisible to the church? Am I lovable at all?

• Who can I marry? Can I get married? What will happen to my body in the resurrection?

• Should I have surgery to "fix" my body? Do I need to present as a specific gender? Why did doctors, upon my birth, screw up my body, without my consent?

First, if you have any heart at all, many of the questions on screen should break your heart. Imagine your own child asking these questions. No one should be asking if God loves them, especially because of uncertainty about their own bodies.

To answer these questions, it is necessary to give an anthropology of humanity, and in particular to attempt to understand the origins of intersex conditions, gender, and the ways that these interact with each other.

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Chapter 2: Cox's Foundational Argument

Before I get to my critiques of Cox's main argument, I want to give her credit where it's due. She rightly stresses that embodiment is good in all its various forms:

So the only image of God that can be seen on this earth is the embodied human being. Without our bodies, then, we could not be the image of God.⁶

Of course, if our bodies are integral to the Imago Dei, then the body of the intersex person, too, is good. This is important to stress, and I'm glad she does so. The issue is that she can't actually make up her mind on whether she believes the quoted sentence above...but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Her anthropology of intersex conditions from Chapter 2 is roughly as follows:

1. The world was originally made completely perfect, and humans were made male and female with no ambiguity between them. Cox writes, "There was nothing ambiguous or morally gray. All was good and clearly so...No longer is the world only good all the time."⁷ (Emphasis mine.) In other words: because of the natural perfection of, and lack of ambiguity in the world, intersex people did not exist before the Fall.

2. Intersex conditions, then, only came about after the Fall of Adam and Eve.

3. This implies that, in the resurrection, intersex bodies will not exist.

It is within this framework that she tries to answer other questions that intersex people face. I find the first premise, bluntly, to be completely absurd. Cox says the following:

The first humans were made male and female, two sexes sharing a common humanity. Both human embodiment and human sexuality were declared to be good. Unfortunately, the disobedience of the first humans produced fundamental changes to the world. Among those changes is the distortion of human sexuality, one expression of which is the existence of intersex variations.⁸

Part of her claim is that, because everything was completely good before the Fall, there could not have been biological ambiguity amongst the first humans. But what about the fact that Adam and Eve were protecting the Garden from something?⁹ I believe the talking snake would also like a word. Is that not a display of ambiguity and/or evil pre-Fall? The snake is introduced as an ambiguous character, who we almost immediately see is, in fact, a bad character. Based on that alone, her claim is false.

Even ignoring the obvious falsity of the claim that everything was "completely good" pre-Fall, I cannot accept her claims for the simple fact that I believe evolution is true (or, at least, is wholly compatible with the teachings of the Bible). I'm not a biologist, and this isn't the article to defend that view regardless, so I'll leave that there for now.

Assuming evolution is true, the claim that there were no intersex people before the Fall is immediately hard to defend. Most theological accounts¹⁰ of how evolution interacts with the Genesis story are okay with things like diseases and pre-Fall physical death – it would be weird to try to carve out an exemption for intersex conditions in this view.

With these facts in mind, I think her foundation is provably faulty. As we'll see, undermining this foundation causes a lot of issues for her answers down the road.

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Chapter 3: Two Sexes/Two Genders?

Cox tries to defend her claims of two sexes and two genders with other means. The existence of intersex people raises important questions about how we should be thinking about the binary of male and female. To defend her absolutist version of the binary, she turns to marriage in Chapter 3. Unfortunately, this chapter begins with more sophistry and fear-mongering:

I’ve only underlined the words/phrases that are clearly intended to moralize/scare you into agreement. I had to sharpen my pencil. Twice.

This is abhorrent. This is a book, ostensibly, about intersex conditions and how Christians should meet intersex people. Yet here we find sophistry and rhetoric better placed in a campaign speech than a scholarly work. Using words like pagan, Gnostic, agenda, abandon…none of it casts light on the task at hand.¹¹ It is so bad that one wonders if this political soapboxing was interference from a publisher or editor, rather than the words and thoughts of Cox herself. Luckily, this nonsense is dropped and we return to the actual issues:

In parallel to God, human beings are created as male and female for the purpose of love. Being male and female is the primary distinction of humanity, although it is not the only distinction between human persons. Therefore, being male and female is the fundamental basis of human love, but not the only one.¹² (Emphasis mine).

The caveat "but not the only one" is never explored in the book. She doesn't expound on what other bases of love might look like; for all intents and purposes, it may as well have never been included in the first place. She goes even further than this, saying:

The principal relationship of love is marriage...The bond of marriage is the basis of human community.¹³

...marriage between a man and a woman is very significant. It is an important reason for two human sexes. Without being sexed and gendered beings, humans cannot live out the sacrament of marriage, which points us towards our destiny.¹⁴

Clearly, she wants to ground the ability for humans to love in the male/female dichotomy. If this works, then she indeed has a basis for defending the binary, because love is a fundamental teaching of Christianity. Unfortunately, I think this logic borders on the nonsensical.

Marriage is, of course, an incredibly important topic and symbol within Christian theology. But her claim that it is the “principal” relationship of love? Biblical malpractice. Do we not follow Jesus, who said that the greatest love is not marriage, nor sex, but to lay down one's life for his friends?¹⁵ Am I, as a man, only able to love women because that is the grounds for love itself? Is my singleness, which Paul wished that all were like himself in,¹⁶ grounds for saying that I do not have access to the principal relationship of love?

Claiming that "the bond of marriage is the basis of human community" is wild. Did she forget that in the New Jerusalem, we will neither marry nor be given in marriage?¹⁷ If marriage is the basis of human community, how on earth (is this a pun?) could human community function in a world where there is no marriage? And, before anyone thinks that resorting to the "Christ and the church = marriage" metaphor would fix things, no, it doesn't. Even if we try to take that analogy as nearly literally true,¹⁸ (for of course it cannot be literally true, seeing as both Jesus and I are male, nor could Jesus “marry” more than one person), it doesn't address the fact that there will be community between human persons not named Jesus.

What about how eros, the Greek word for romantic love, is never used in the New Testament? There is not a single instance of it. Even when talking about husbands and wives, the Bible does not once use "romantic" love as something that couples ought to strive for. If any kinds of love are going to be the grounds of human relationship, it seems to me that the New Testament is unanimous in nominating agape and philia as candidates, not eros.

When it comes to her claim that, without sexual difference, "humans cannot live out the sacrament of marriage", she says this without justification. Why is that the relevant difference? Whether I agree with the claim that marriage is between a man and a woman is irrelevant to my issue with Cox on this point. You cannot just say these things without explaining them – at least, if you want to be taken seriously as a scholar. What about other differences? Why is race, or gender, or personality, or any other axis of human difference, not a good grounding for marriage, but biological sex is?

Finally, her argument attempts too much. Were it successful, it would be an excellent argument that everyone ought to marry! The only tiny issue with that is the New Testament is abundantly clear: earthly marriage is not guaranteed to the believer. Jesus says that we will receive a hundredfold mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters,¹⁹ but nowhere does he mention that you will receive a spouse. Cox's argument cannot even get off the ground.

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Chapter 3 closes with a brief section on egalitarian/complementarian views of gender, followed by a section on intersex, gender, and marriage. She rightly points out that complementarian views of gender make things quite difficult for intersex people, and that an egalitarian understanding of gender roles and vocations make a lot more sense for intersex people. I do think this is a positive point in favor of egalitarianism, honestly – if someone caught "between the sexes" should be able to do things like preach, why shouldn't women?²⁰

The last section is very odd to me. She spends about 7 pages making sure everyone agrees that intersex people can follow Jesus, just like those who are unambiguously sexed. (Isn’t that obviously true?) There's a random throwaway line that celibate singleness is a symbol of the importance of marriage,²¹ which is another odd take, but I digress. But then, out of nowhere – and I do mean nowhere – she says the following:

Transitioning is an acceptable option, as long as this does not happen within an existing marriage.²²

So she goes through all this work of defending the binary, and then throws this in at the end. Again, this is out of nowhere. She doesn't talk about transitioning – medically or socially – at all leading up to page 90 (the last page of the chapter, I might add). I had to read this three times to make sure my eyes did not deceive me.

In her model, this binary of male and female is absolute. There will be no in-betweens in heaven. You must have a man and a woman for a marriage. And yet, intersex people can move, essentially fluidly, between the two categories. What about trans people? If, someday down the road, neuroscientists prove that the experiences of transgender people are essentially grounded in an intersex condition of the brain, what then? Would Cox be okay with transgender people transitioning? Somehow, based on the scaremongering above, I don't think so. A strange line to end a strange chapter.

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Chapters 4 and 5: A Welcome Reprieve

Chapters 4 and 5 are entitled "Jesus and Intersex" and "The Cross and Intersex", respectively. Chapter 5 is largely about proving that the atonement occurred for intersex people. Perhaps this is a real issue that intersex people face – if it is, I welcome hearing about anyone's experiences here – but from my perspective, this chapter was space that could've been better used for something else. Of course Jesus's saving work happened for all people, intersex, unambiguously sexed, or otherwise.

The most interesting part of chapter 5 was her reflection on the shamefulness of Jesus's death. The cross has become such a well-known symbol for Christianity that we often forget what it represents, namely, the most shameful death possible in Roman society. Cox says that it was "the height of inappropriateness" to even mention the word "cross" in civilized society.²³ Jesus relates to and understands what shame is like, because he was put through it in his death. Other than that, though, this chapter didn't really contribute much to what I see as the necessary questions to answer.

Chapter 4 is, in my opinion, her best chapter. Therein, she focuses on how Jesus ran his ministry, and I think her reflections are laudable and applicable not just for intersex people, but for any other group caught in the borderlands. She meditates on the story of the blind man in John 9:

Jesus displayed his glory in healing the man and encouraged his disciples to use their limited time wisely to meet people's needs (9:4), rather than apportioning blame...The ministry of Jesus demonstrates that he was far more interested in helping people than condemning them on the basis of things over which they had no control.²⁴

Far too often, the church is concerned with "fixing" people, rather than meeting them where they are. Why are we, so often, quick to point out the speck in another's eye rather than dealing with the log in our own?²⁵ We, too, are sinners – every judgment we call down on another we also call down on ourselves. Of course, more than just intersex people experience apathetic shunning at the hands of Christians.

My own experience of being exclusively attracted to men, something I do not have control over, has often felt like the church thinks I need to be "fixed" or that something is "wrong" with me. Side X theology is a particularly horrid version of the prosperity gospel built on this assumption – that true Christian piety requires that one be attracted to the opposite sex, that one can "pray the gay away". I'm sure this category of language/experience extends to those with disabilities, intersex conditions, and many other things as well, although I can't speak from my own experience on those.

The other passage Cox turns to is Matthew 9: this is where Jesus calls Matthew, the tax collector, into ministry.

Jesus was unconcerned about what others thought of the tax collector. He called the man to follow him. Then, in an even more outrageous act, Jesus went to eat with the tax collector. Eating a meal with someone was a symbol of approval of that person.²⁶

In particular, the approval that Jesus was seemingly extending to Matthew is striking to me. Many Christians are afraid of associating with gay people, trans people, or using those terms, because they don't want to come off as "approving" of certain actions. Jesus, however, is openly transgressing this logic by eating with Matthew! Fully exploring this idea would take a full post of its own, as there's nuance here worth exploring, but today is not the time for me to write that article. The point remains that Jesus didn't care about what people would assume based on his actions; he did the right thing regardless.

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Chapter 6: Resurrection and Intersex (no longer?)

Unfortunately, this chapter is where Cox's scaffolding really starts snapping under its own weight. She attempts to construct what the resurrection will be like for intersex people, but because of her faulty exegesis of Genesis 1-3, the entire structure comes crashing down with calamitous consequences.

Before we get there, a quick aside. One of my issues with this book is that Cox often presents things as more absolute than is justified. Her claim on page 127, for example:

Christians have maintained through history that humans will continue to be sexual beings when resurrected. Women will be women and men men.

This is all well and good, except it leaves out that this was a hotly contested question in the early church! Tertullian and Origen both believed that resurrection bodies will be genderless. Ambrose and early Jerome seem to heavily lean that way.²⁷ Cox reiterates on page 138:

The historic Christian position on the sexed body in the resurrection is consistent in affirming that male and female will continue on beyond the resurrection of the dead.

False! A simple recognition that the debate is not so clear-cut as "we have always universally believed this" would've sufficed; in her desire to show the strength of her position, she instead shows weakness or ignorance on this point. Further, given that she cites DeFranza, who explicitly talks about Tertullian, Origen, etc., Cox either knows of them but thought it better to occlude the facts, or only skimmed DeFranza's book – neither option is particularly commendable.

Anyway. She starts by presenting the only two alternative lines of thought that existed at the time she wrote this, namely, the thoughts of DeFranza and of Susannah Cornwall.²⁸ DeFranza argues that intersex conditions will remain in heaven, just as racial, temporal, linguistic, and cultural differences will remain, citing Revelation 7:9. Cox summarizes DeFranza as saying:

In the eschatological community, there will be all kinds of people, including eunuchs and intersex persons. These divisions and distinctions are not done away with, because in the eschatological body of Christ difference will no longer matter.²⁹

DeFranza justifies this move by citing Isaiah 56:3-5, which reads:

[3] Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the LORD say, “The LORD will surely separate me from his people”; and let not the eunuch say, “Behold, I am a dry tree.” [4] For thus says the LORD: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, [5] I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. (ESV)

In Jewish law, the “eunuch” category included those who were “eunuchs from birth”, which likely included some intersex people. Jewish law also treated eunuchs as “in between” men and women – many of the restrictions for both genders applied to eunuchs. Isaiah focuses, however, not on eunuchs becoming men or women, but on God bringing them into his temple as eunuchs. Because of this, argues DeFranza, we should believe that intersex people and eunuchs will remain such at the resurrection. Personally, I think DeFranza is cooking with gas with this argument, but we’ll get into it more when we treat her book.

I want to note that Cox’s entire critique of DeFranza and Cornwall, combined, is four pages.³⁰ This is a shockingly scant amount of time and effort to spend critiquing the only two alternatives.

Cox grounds her critique in the framework of disability studies. She says that there are three general ideas when it comes to understanding disability:

• the medical model, which sees disability purely in terms of measurable, medical conditions;

• the social model, which sees disability as something "produced by societal attitudes and restrictions", not something inbuilt into the person;

• the cultural model, which "understands disability as a product of the way in which cultures narrate and organize the world."³¹

Using this scaffold, Cox says that DeFranza and Cornwall both recognize, rightly, that society and culture will be changed, transformed, and renewed in the resurrection, but that they likewise fail to recognize that our bodies will also be changed, transformed, renewed.

This is the whole of her critique. That's it! It's a reasonable start, or a summary, but not a whole critique. Cox swiftly moves on, however, to attempt to build her own construction of the eschaton for intersex people.

Cox does give positive reasons to believe that our resurrection bodies will still be sexed, although she again spends but 4 pages (136-139) on the question. The whole of her argument, I believe, is reasonably summarized by this quote:

In the absence of any indication of Scripture that human sexuality will be removed, we must conclude that sexual difference will remain part of human identity in the resurrected state.³²

I don't have a particularly firm opinion on this question yet – my intuitions lean vaguely towards our resurrection bodies being sexed, but I don't think this is obviously correct; non-sexed bodies seem a priori feasible. Where I disagree with Cox is that she again makes the jump to saying that therefore, intersex people will not be intersex in the resurrection, but rather fully male or fully female.³³

Of course, her faulty foundation makes this position untenable. But, even if we ignore this issue, I think her view remains hanging in the air without support. There's a Sorites paradox³⁴ here: what does it mean to be "fully" male, or "fully" female? Is a woman with a large clitoris as a result of nearly complete androgen insensitivity syndrome not "fully" female? Is a man with mild Klinefelter syndrome not "fully" male simply because of a slightly feminized body form? I'm not even sure it makes sense to talk about "fully" male or female in the first place. Fully male compared to what, being partially male? What would that even mean?

Cox goes on:

No consequence of human sin can undo the faithful word of the Creator. Therefore, those who presently have intersex bodies will be restored to male or female when raised from the dead.³⁵

But she belies the weakness of her own position, when, two pages later, she says the following:

Medicine does not need to change intersex bodies to make them acceptable...The intersex body, unusual as it is, is good. It is therefore to be accepted without the need to change its appearance.³⁶

She, rightly, says that there is a difference between medicine as healing and plastic/cosmetic surgery. But then she says that intersex people do not need to change their bodies, technology which we do have, to be "more male" or "more female" – we can accept them without change. What a strange thing, to say that a state of the world is caused by sin and will be "fixed" in the resurrection, only to claim moments later that we should not attempt to fix the very thing that God will fix! How would God changing the external genitalia of an intersex person be anything other than divine cosmetic surgery?

I think it is much more coherent to say, in line with DeFranza and Cornwall, that if bodies will still be sexed in the resurrection, there is no good reason to believe that intersex people will have their bodies changed to fit some cultural ideal of "male" or "female". We must recognize that what makes someone more male or female is a representation of our culture. In America, masculinity means the Marlboro man; silent, aloof, nearly emotionless. In Italy, masculinity means being effusive, emotional, open-hearted and conversational. As it is with personality, so it is also with our standards for physical masculinity or femininity.

This leads us to what is, for me, the strangest and most disappointing part of the book. Cox recognizes that many intersex people do not feel like they fit into either sex category or gender category very easily, which raises an important question: who can they marry? Can they marry at all?

Cox is oddly lax about the idea of intersex people transitioning between genders, saying that choosing a gender should be a process of grace, and that it is okay to transition out of one and into the other. While I think I tentatively agree with her on that, at least with regard to socially transitioning, it seems utterly incongruent to her absolute framing of male/female as intransgressible categories. Then she destroys even the foundation of her entire project with the following single sentence:

Having made the decision about gender, it is then possible to determine whether a romantic relationship can be considered heterosexual or homosexual.³⁷

What?

This sentence grounds what makes something homo- or heterosexual, not in biology, but wholly in terms of gender. Evidently all that matters, according to Cox, is that there are not two "husbands" or two "wives" in terms of gender categories. In other words, marriage between two men or two women is perfectly alright, as long as one of the people in the marriage is working under the "husband" gender norms, and the other person is working under the "wife" gender norms.

This is, of course, deeply incoherent, if you also want to claim (as Cox does) that homosexuality is outside the will of God.³⁸ That claim necessarily must invoke biology on some level for it to have any substance at all. Further, if Cox is okay with intersex people moving fluidly between genders, what grounds does she have to stand on when she employs such invectives against “accepting gender as fluid” on page 68? Her entire argument has come crashing down.

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Summary

While I think this book has some interesting thoughts, it's not worth your money on the whole. There's only two chapters that had material I genuinely found helpful, namely Chapters 4 and 5. Everything else was far too often alternating between internal contradiction and sophistry for me to find much of worth. In other words, this book should've been a monograph containing Chapters 4 and 5, with everything else left on the cutting-room floor. Dr. Cox’s heart is in the right place, and I think that shines through on occasion. All too often, however, her desire to see intersex people unified with other Christians is marred and shadowed by political grandstanding or poor scholarship.

Next up is one of the major alternatives to Cox, Megan DeFranza's Sex Difference in Christian Theology. I have already essentially finished reading this book, so my review should come out relatively soon. Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Final Rating: Weird/5.

1. The exact numbers are contested, mostly because what counts as an "intersex" condition is not currently well-defined. DeFranza says the most conservative estimate is .02%, and the highest estimate is a staggering 1.7% (DeFranza, Sex Difference in Christian Theology, p. 45). The lower number gives an estimate of 1.6 million people, while the higher gives 136 million people.

2. DeFranza, Sex Difference, p. 46.

3. Cox, Intersex in Christ, pp. 28-33.

4. Cox, Intersex, pp. 34-38.

5. Cox, Intersex, p. 36.

6. Cox, Intersex, p. 42.

7. Cox, Intersex, p. 45.

8. Cox, Intersex, pp. 39-40.

9. The word used in Genesis 2:15 for "keeping" the garden, the charge of Adam, is the same as the word used in Genesis 3:24, when God charges the cherubim to "guard" the garden. In both cases it's the word לִשְׁמֹ֕ר.

10. A helpful resource for this question is the excellent book Evolution and the Fall. Edited by

James K.A. Smith

and William Cavanaugh, it is a collection of essays by experts of various things, from evolutionary biology to philosophy to ancient Hebrew. This video of Gavin Ortlund’s may also be of interest.

11. Nor, I might add, does she use them according to their definitions. I find it odd that “pagan” has become a catch-all word for “moral behaviors contrary to christian teaching”, when “pagan” has an actual, specific meaning. In particular, there is not one unified “paganism” but many forms. I’m no expert on paganism(s), but from the skimming I’ve done/conversations I’ve had, pagans are often more dualistic when it comes to gender than Christians. See, e.g., Wicca, who worship a male God and a female Goddess.

12. Cox, Intersex, p. 71.

13. Cox, Intersex, p. 72.

14. Cox, Intersex, p. 75.

15. John 15:12-13.

16. 1 Corinthians 7.

17. Matthew 22:29-33.

18. A move which I find suspect, given that Paul calls it a mystery (Ephesians 5:32).

19. Mark 10:29-30. This topic will get multiple articles of its own in due time.

20. Cox, Intersex, pp. 77-80. To be clear, I am not intending to give a robust defense of egalitarianism here; I am neither qualified enough, nor able to become so at the moment, to give such a defense – I don't even know what my own views are on the question yet.

21. Cox, Intersex, p. 83.

22. Cox, Intersex, pp. 89-90.

23. Cox, Intersex, p. 116.

24. Cox, Intersex, p. 105.

25. Matthew 7:1-5.

26. Cox, Intersex, p. 107.

27. DeFranza, Sex Difference, pp. 85-91.

28. In particular, she presents thoughts from Cornwall's 2010 book Sex and Uncertainty in the Body of Christ.

29. Cox, Intersex, p. 132.

30. Cox, Intersex, pp. 132-135.

31. Cox, Intersex, p. 134.

32. Cox, Intersex, p. 139.

33. Cox, Intersex, p. 140.

34. The Sorites paradox is the classic question involving drawing seemingly arbitrary lines when given a fuzzy term. This is best illustrated by an example. Imagine you have a pile of sand. Remove a single grain, and you obviously still have a pile of sand, right? Each single grain is not cause for ceasing to call it a “pile”, and yet eventually not only would there be no pile, but there would be no sand at all. So what gives? For more on this, see this excellent article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP).

35. Cox, Intersex, p. 140.

36. Cox, Intersex, pp. 142-143.

37. Cox, Intersex, p. 151.

38. Cox, Intersex, p. 150.