In the Image of God, Male and Female

by Jenny Howard
May 18, 2008
Trinity Sunday

“God created human beings in his own image;
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”
--Genesis 1:27 (Revised English Bible)

This is one verse out of the first Creation story in the Bible. I picked it out from all the lectionary passages for today because it’s the one that keeps bothering me.

What I’m going to say will make more sense if you know a little about who I am. The two important facts here are: 1) I’ve been called by God to proclaim the good news of God’s grace, God’s love, and God’s justice to all people; and 2) I’m transsexual. The first means what it sounds like: I’m going to be a minister when I grow up, God (and the church) willing. I’m starting seminary this fall. The second fact means that my life is complicated. Everyday life is complicated, and pursuing ordination gets especially complicated.

I’ve thought about gender a lot more than most people I know. Certainly prayed about it a lot more, too. Everything from, “Please make me a girl,” to “Please make me normal,” to “I hate you for doing this to me, God!” But it all comes back to Genesis 1:27. “Male and female he created them.” Why? What was the point, or what is the point?

Of course, I’m bringing this up because, if there weren’t genders, I wouldn’t have had to spend my whole life trying to figure out which one I am. And you can’t tell me that’s how all of life is created. Bacteria and viruses aren’t gendered, and they certainly obey the command to be fruitful and multiply (says the woman with the lingering chest cold). Why can’t people just split in two when it’s time, like bacteria?

Yeah, yeah. Simplifying humans’ lives wasn’t one of God’s objectives when God created Creation. But this is God we’re talking about. Couldn’t God see that, millions of years later, there would be people who loved God and wanted nothing more than to live their lives to carry out God’s will… but that these people would be bitterly opposed by a lot of other people who also loved God? If God could foresee that, why not just avoid the whole problem, and not create gendered humans in the first place? No gender, no transgender. No gender, no same-gender-loving couples. For that matter, no gender, no gender oppression.

I don’t have a dramatic call story. Just, in the last few years, now that I’ve finally pretty much resolved my gender identity, I began to hear a persistent little voice, “Jenny. Jenny. I have work for you to do.” It was so little at first that I can’t even say exactly when it started. I just ignored it at first. But it didn’t go away. “Jenny! Listen! I have work for you to do.” I tried arguing God out of it, for one very obvious good reason: “Look, God, what are thinking? I’m transsexual. There’s no way. Go find someone who people will accept as being called by you.” When that didn’t work, I tried being rude and rebellious; as they say in the south, I sassed God, “Go away! You’re being ridiculous! Leave me alone!”

For some reason, God ignored my demands and kept calling me. Nor did God make any move to undo my little transsexuality problem. I finally gave in. I mean, not only was I unlikely to win an argument with God, chances are that I was on the wrong side of the argument. Fine. Called and trans. I still asked, “Why, God? What’s the point of calling a trans person?”

I think by now you get the idea why that verse of Genesis bothers me. “Male and female he created them” has been the source of a lot of my troubles. And maybe the source of the troubles of a lot of the folks reading this.
But still. But still, there has to be an answer to why God did it this way. You can say it’s God’s will, and God’s will is inscrutable. And you’d be kind of right. But that’s not a really satisfactory explanation to me. The answer, I think, lies in the middle of the verse: “In the image of God, he created them male and female.” Aha! God worked with what he knew! God’s image is male and female, and God knew that! It makes sense, if you think of a human-like God: when you’re creating something brand new for the first time, work with what you know.

But it also makes sense if God is, for you, more mystical, ineffable. In this understanding, which is closer to my own, the Creation simply is. “Should”, and “could”, and “might”, and “would” aren’t meaningful words. God is as God is; and so what God made is as it is. In more concrete language, “God’s will” is not an expression of what should be; it is an expression of the way things are made to be. God’s will then, is another way to say “what is.” Not “what is” in the sense of how things appear to be; rather, “what is” in the truest, most foundational sense. Our tasks, then, are to discern what truly is; then to align ourselves with we have found, with what is, i.e. with God’s will.

Where does all this leave me with Genesis 1:27? It leaves me knowing that our gendered reality is God’s will. Male and female, in God’s image. It just is, in the same way that God just is. And it leaves me to not only accept, but to celebrate and even worship all the God-given complexity that our gendered reality leads to, whether heteronormative, or transsexual, or gay, or lesbian, or…
Thanks be to God.