In the rush and excitement of leaving for the 1988 Olympics, Maria Patiño, Spain’s top woman hurdler, forgot the requisite doctor’s certificate stating, for the benefit of Olympic officials, what seemed patently obvious to anyone who looked at her: she was female. But the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had anticipated the possibility that some competitors would forget their certificates of femininity. Patiño had only to report to the “femininity control head office,” scrape some cells of the side of her cheek, and all would be in order – or so she thought.
A few hours after the cheek scraping she got a call. Something was wrong. She went for a second examination, but the doctors were mum. Then, as she rode to the Olympic stadium to start her first race, track officials broke the news: she had failed the sex test. She may have looked like a woman, had a woman’s strength, and never had reason to suspect that she wasn’t a woman, but the examinations revealed that Patiño’s cells sported a Y chromosome… According to the IOC’s definition, Patiño was not a woman.
When Anne Fausto-Sterling published her book, “Sexing the Body” in 2000, the story of Maria Patiño was widely unknown, but gender studies and political debates over the last 25 years have revealed that the rigid categories of either “male or female” are far too simple to explain the complexity of the human sexed body.
According to medical research compiled in 2000, the estimate of intersex babies born in the United States is just over 1.7%. If that number sounds small to you, imagine this: “a city of 300,000 [roughly the size of Buffalo New York] would have 5,100 people with varying degrees of intersexual development.” Or to put it in other terms, 1.7% is more than 2x the number of people serving in the combined numbers of active and reserve military and the Coast Guard.
In some ways, the number is still very small, but intersex research has had a big impact on biologists and gender theorists over the last few decades. Both medical science and social science are asking the same questions, “Would humankind benefit from a new system of gender classification? Should we make room for categorizing the sexed human body in ways not limited only to “male or female”?”
As Christians, we might wonder, “What does the bible say about this?”
The truth is, not much. Biblical writers were, however, aware of at least one more category of the human body that exists somewhere in between male and female: the body of the eunuch. Jesus offers a summary of the ways in which eunuchs are made in Matthew 19:12: “For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Note that Jesus avoids moralizing the reality of the eunuch. Jesus does not call the eunuch’s existence, “sin,” or explain how the eunuch fits into the sex-spectrum. Jesus simply tells us that there are eunuchs, and that these are the ways in which eunuchs are formed.
But here is something else scripture tells us about the eunuch. Eunuchs were not accepted into the center of Jewish life as other male bodies were. Regardless of the way in which the bodies of eunuchs were made-so, whether by birth, by others, or by their own will, these bodies were excluded from social and religious life based on the way in which their bodies were sexed. God’s creation is made up of male and female, but according to Jesus, humanity also includes eunuchs, which includes those who were born in ways that don’t fit into “male or female” binary thinking.
What we learn from the life of the eunuch is that binary thinking too often leads to moral judgments based on two opposites. If you want to see what I mean, read down the left and right columns below. This is the original Pythagorean table of opposites that Aristotle made popular in the 2nd century:
“Good”
- warm
- right
- mind
- straight
- light
- good
- in
- happy
- open
- male
“Bad”
- cold
- left
- body
- crooked
- darkness
- evil
- out
- sad
- closed
- female
Which side do you think our social system today would classify as the “bad” side and “good” side? It seems pretty obvious. And guess what, I didn’t make this up. This is the way in which Pythagoras classified the terms thousands of years ago, and it’s still alive and well today.
Those things that we commonly think about in terms of binary opposites really exist on spectrums, and yet binary thinking is used to explain one end of the spectrum in positive terminology, and one end of the spectrum in negative terminology. This means that when we put words in the middle of the binary, there are some words closer to one end of the “acceptable” side, and some closer to “unacceptable” side. Binary thinking continues to be the source of much of the subconscious discrimination people experience in today’s world.
As we move into PRIDE month, this June, let us remember those in our community and beyond who do not fit into the binary, those who identify as intersex, non-binary, transgender, queer… as essential to the diversity of persons created in the image of God. As beloved. As part of the varied and beautiful body of Christ, and our church, the congregation of Trinity Cathedral.
The Rev. Canon Adrienne Koch