land and water, only!

You may have heard the saying that there are two kinds of people in the world—

those who divide people into two kinds,

 and those who don’t...

We love categorizing things, especially into opposites: land and sea, sun and moon, day and night, light and dark, male and female. And it's easy to read a passage in the Bible and assume that this is how things are. For example, that when God made humankind and it says, "male and female he created them", that this is all there is. There are men and there are women.

Let's step back and take a look at some earlier verses in Genesis 1:

 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:9-10 NIV)

God took one thing (the water under the sky) and divided it into two things. Land. Seas. That's all there is.

But that's not all there is. Land meets sea and sea meets land, and where they do, there are things like marshes, which are not land and not sea. Oh, oh. They are in between, sort of land and sort of water. They don't fit the creation story. Are they bad? Evil? The result of the fall? Or a natural part of God's creation? And what about swamps and bogs?

Can you picture Christians hearing about this and boycotting marshes?

Some people are born intersex, neither typically male nor typically female:

Intersex people are individuals born with any of several sex characteristics including chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies". (Wikipedia)

That's how it is. It doesn't contradict the Bible; it just expresses the reality of life which goes beyond literary techniques like using opposites. 

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In the book Transforming - The Bible & the Lives of Transgender Christians, Austen Hartke writes about Genesis 1: 

"Based on the dualities we've seen in this chapter, it's not surprising to find humans broken into two groups here: male and female God created them. But this verse does not discredit other sexes or genders, any more than the verse about the ration of day from night rejects the existence of dawn and dusk. As M Barclay puts it, "This chapter talks about night and day and land and water, but we have dusk and we have marshes. These verses don't mean there's only land and water, and there's nowhere where these two meet.' These binaries aren't meant to speak to all of reality - they invite us into thinking about everything between and beyond." In the same way we call God the Alpha and Omega, implying all things from first to last and in between, the author of Genesis 1 is merely using the same dualistic poetic device to corral the infinite diversity of creation into categories we can easily understand." (page 51)

Interesting, eh?

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Michaela Nicole @michaelaatencio asked the following question:

i'm nonbinary. how does this reconcile with the verse, "male and female he created them," you may ask?

and then goes on to explore the creation story further, with posts like this one:

You can read the rest of their related posts on Twitter, and give some thought as to how there is so much diversity and nuance in God's creation and in the Genesis telling of it...