Intersex at Bible college

Lines are all around us. Having been raised and educated in fundamentalist evangelical contexts, I saw lines clearly drawn around everything from sin and salvation to sex and gender. It was the latter that triggered my questioning of the traditional demarcations I was taught to embrace and defend. My journey in discovering my intersex variations and navigating gender dysphoria challenged my addiction to answers and pushed me toward what Cynthia Vacca Davis eloquently calls an “acceptance of the space around the lines as a necessary part of the image itself.” Intersexion cultivates this sort of space as it tells the stories of two people: Davis, an adjunct professor at a conservative Christian school, and Danny, who entrusts Davis with his story of being intersex in a conservative evangelical community.

I approached this book cautiously. Davis is both cisgender (someone whose identity and biology match the gender they were assigned at birth) and endosex (someone who has biological traits primarily consistent with accepted definitions of male or female). As she notes, intersex traits (the blending of organs and systems typically assigned to either male or female anatomy) are much more common than most people are aware. Often these traits go unnoticed, adding to the obscurity of their frequency. While the presence of such traits often complicates gender identity, not all intersex people are transgender (experiencing a shift away from the gender assigned at birth and adopting a gender expression more suited to their psychological makeup). For those who, like Danny and me, are transgender, trusting a cisgender person with our story can be tenuous.

It only took a few paragraphs for me to let my guard down. It quickly became clear that Davis is a gifted storyteller. The readability and relatability of the narrative allow the process of storytelling to fade effortlessly into the background while the intricacies of the subject matter emerge.