Dr. Votaw-Freer wrote her doctorate at a Christian university, still attends church, and is intersex. She doesn't ask readers to leave their faith at the door; she asks conservative and progressive Christians alike to read their own tradition more completely than the culture war usually allows.
"Male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27) is the verse most often treated as settling the question of gender once and for all. Biblical scholars across the theological spectrum broadly agree on something the culture-war version of this verse skips: Genesis 1 is organized as a series of paired categories, light and darkness, water and sky, sea and land, none of which are meant as an exhaustive inventory. Twilight exists between day and night; coastlines exist between sea and land. Ancient readers understood these as organizing poles, not a claim that nothing exists between them.
Classical Jewish legal literature took the existence of people outside a strict binary as a given rather than a contradiction to be explained away. The Mishnah and later rabbinic sources discuss the androgynos (having both male and female characteristics) and the tumtum (indeterminate sex) as real legal categories requiring real answers about inheritance, marriage, and communal role, debated by legal scholars not known for theological looseness, centuries before the modern West had this conversation at all.
A tradition that has spent centuries making room for people outside a simple binary isn't being asked to abandon its convictions. It's being asked to remember them.
"A woman shall not wear a man's apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman's garment, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD your God" (Deuteronomy 22:5) is frequently cited as a conversation-ending proof text. The same chapter also covers what to do with a bird's nest found along the road, forbids blending wool and linen in a single garment, and requires a railing around a rooftop. Almost no one citing verse 5 as timeless moral law is also checking their clothing tags for prohibited fiber blends. That inconsistency isn't a rhetorical trick; it's a genuine question serious biblical scholars have debated for centuries about which Deuteronomic laws carry forward and which were tied to ancient ritual practice.
Read three passages about eunuchs in canonical order and a trajectory appears. Deuteronomy 23:1 excludes a eunuch from the assembly entirely. Centuries later, Isaiah 56:3–5 explicitly welcomes eunuchs back, promising them "a monument and a name better than sons and daughters." Later still, Matthew 19:12 has Jesus name three categories of eunuchs unprompted, without condemnation, simply as a fact about human variety. Whatever one concludes from it, that's a text that develops, revisits, and expands on the same question over time rather than settling it once and never returning.
Islamic legal tradition took up an equivalent question with its own category, the khuntha (intersex person), debating inheritance, prayer position, and marriage rights, not whether such people existed at all. Across cultures with no contact with one another, from the hijra of South Asia to the two-spirit traditions of many Indigenous North American nations to the sworn virgins of the Balkans, the pattern repeats: societies have found ways to name and incorporate people who don't fit a strict binary, long before any modern vocabulary for gender identity existed.
Using a person's chosen name or pronoun is sometimes framed as endorsing a theological claim the speaker doesn't hold. But names and titles used throughout scripture, "the Pharisees," "Caesar," were themselves human-made labels adopted without a theological audit. Referring to someone by the name they go by has always been ordinary courtesy, not a confession of belief, and English has absorbed far bigger grammatical shifts than a chosen pronoun without any doctrine noticing.
None of this requires abandoning the conviction that bodily sex matters, that it connects to something real about human community and responsibility. That conviction has deep roots and doesn't have to be surrendered to extend basic welcome to a person whose body didn't develop the way the chart says it should have. Christianity's clearest historical precedent for expanding its own moral circle without abandoning its core commitments is its slow, costly reckoning with slavery: a change that abolitionists like Frederick Douglass argued for from inside the tradition, on the tradition's own terms, as a deepening of its convictions rather than a departure from them.
The question every tradition eventually has to answer isn't whether it will change. It's whether the change brings it closer to its own neighbor, or further away.
The book gives this subject its own full chapter, including the author's own story of losing, and rebuilding, a faith community.