Last year I had a conversation with the leader of a proselytizing Christian group that had taken over the central plaza on my college campus. They were holding up signs saying that any sex outside the context of a marriage between one man and one woman damned a person to hell. I'll give them this: they were coherent in their sexual beliefs. They were also holding up signs about masturbation earning one eternal damnation (an assertion that did not win them a lot of converts in the college audience).
I stepped aside with the leader, and asked him respectfully what his religious precepts would advise for me. I explained that while I lived as a man, and he saw me as one, I was born with an intersex condition and was assigned female at birth. Since I was neither male nor female, how was I to follow a command that marriage only be contracted between a man and a woman?
The religious leader stared at me for a bit, then rallied. He said that he wanted to tell me that he had great pity for me, and that God did not intend that I be born intersexed. "Birth defects," he explained, "exist because of Adam's fall. Original sin warped God's creation, and that's why tragedies such as the birth of a baby with crippled legs or like you occur." He explained that when Jesus came again, all of this disorder would be purged, and there would be no more people like me. I mustn't be angry at God but at sin for putting me in my position.
I told him that I believed that I was born exactly as the universe intended, and was not angry at God. What upset me was how I was treated by my fellow human beings. In any case, given that I did exist as an intersex person, whom did he believe I was permitted to marry?
He asked me what the doctor had put on my birth certificate, and I said "female." He gave me a grave face, and told me, "I'm sorry, but then that is what you are. You may look like a man but you are not, and you can't marry a woman. It's like the case of a transsexual, even though it is not your choice." So, according to this religious leader, sex assigned at birth governs marriage law, and there can be no sex transitions, for intersex people or for those born with normative genitalia. (Nonintersex trans people get the extra distasteful twist of the lip for a "choice," but the end result is the same.)
I then asked the religious speaker if he thought I should marry a man. He looked very uncomfortable and just shook his head. I said, "So you don't think I can marry anyone?" He suggested that I dedicate myself to God's will and eliminating sin rather than dwelling on my personal situation.
I guess that's what monks and nuns do: dedicate themselves to God, and live a life of celibacy. And since he didn't think I could marry anyone, and sex is only allowed in marriage between a woman and a man trying to procreate, celibacy is what he felt God required of me.
In the parlance of my Jewish ancestors, Feh.
I did ask him one more thing: why did he think that the doctors had picked the "right" dyadic sex for me? Couldn't I be trusted to look into my heart and know myself better than they? He just said that doctors are the ones who know, because they have the technology and the tests.
I don't know when or how doctors became the oracles of divine will for good Christians. In fact, I'm sure that when doctors declared that masturbation was healthy, the members of the group I encountered rejected that promasturbation prescription vehemently. . .
The majority of Americans would see the group I encountered as rather extreme. Yet the majority of Americans have enacted marriage laws that reach the same conclusion for intersex people: marriage is only acceptable between a "man" and a "woman." The fact that I'm neither by birth is some sort of unfortunate, bizarre accident. Doctors can be relied upon to pick the right sex for intersex babies, and that should clear the whole problem up.
But even doctors aren't so sanguine.
!!
