Theology in the Raw - 760: #760 - Life as an Intersex Christian: Lianne Simon

Episode Date: October 7, 2019

Lianne was born with an intersex condition called Mixed Gonadal Dysgenesis, where some of her cells have a Y chromosome while others do not. Lianne was originally reared as a male, but later had surgery to become male. (Or, did her surgery confirm her male status that was there all along? Or both? Or neither? It’s beautifully complex…) Most of all, Lianne is an incredibly intelligent and compassionate child of God who preaches and embodies the gospel. In this conversation, we talk about many things related to intersex, gender identity, Christianity, and how the “I” relates to the LGBTQIA conversation. About Lianne's father was a dairy farmer and an engineer, her mother a nurse. She grew up in an environment filled with love and good books. A rare genetic condition gave her a pixie face and an intersex body. As a child, Lianne was so tiny and frail that her parents feared losing their half-girl son. After coming to faith in Christ, Lianne confronted her medical and gender issues. She and her husband live in the hills north of Nashville, Tennessee. Lianne is co-founder of Intersex and Faith, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help communities of faith minister to those born with a body that isn’t entirely male or female. Intersex and Faith hopes to accomplish this via education, advocacy, and support. The documentary, Stories of Intersex and Faith, examines how some people reconcile their faith with having a body that’s not entirely male or female. Their small-group curriculum is in beta testing. And they connect the parents of intersex children with those of like faith. Lianne is also an #ownvoice author of novels with intersex main characters. Connect with Lianne Simon http://www.intersexandfaith.org http://www.liannesimon.com https://twitter.com/liannesimon https://www.facebook.com/lianne.simon.1 Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I have on the show today my guest, Leanne Simon. Leanne Simon is a fantasy author, an intelligent person, and an intersex Christian. And she'll explain what she means by that term intersex on the show. We'll talk a lot about intersex or otherwise known as differences in sex development or disorders in sex development or intersex or hermaphrodite. We'll talk about all of those terms and phrases and which ones you should use, which ones you shouldn't use, how intersex conditions are related to the transgender conversation and many, many other very interesting and yet not very talked about topics related to intersex faith in Christianity.

I'm so excited about this interview. I mean, I'm recording this after I already talked to Leanne and Leanne is an awesome person. She's incredibly smart, provocative. incredibly smart, provocative. I love the fact that she challenges people on, for lack of better terms, people on both sides of the debate, you know, whichever, whatever that means, both sides of the debate. She, anyway, I'm going to stop because she's awesome. And you're going to enjoy this conversation. I think I absolutely love this conversation. You can connect with Leanne Simon on Twitter, and I've got some, her Twitter account on the show notes. That's where I first connected

with Leanne. We dialogued a little bit on Twitter. I've been a big fan of hers from a distance, and I'm really excited to have her on the show. If you want to support Theology in the Raw, you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. That's patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. If you have enjoyed the various guests that I've had on the show, if you've been provoked and challenged and blessed by the conversations I've had, if you have benefited from theology in the raw in any sort of way and want to give back to the theology in the raw ministry, then please go to patreon.com forward slash theology in raw. You can contribute for as little as five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month or $25 a month or $50 a month. And I have a couple

sort of supporters at $100 a month. If you want to join the Patreon, sorry, the Theology in the Raw community, then you can go to patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw support show. And in return, you get access to premium content. There is a lot more going on with Theology in the Raw than you may realize if you are not supporting the show, because there's a lot of stuff that only my Patreon supporters know about and are engaging in. OK, without further ado, I want you to get to know my new friend, Leanne Simon. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I am here with a friend from a distance, somebody who I've been following on social media for quite some time, and we have some mutual friends, and we've chatted on the phone once,

but somebody who I have been just wanting to get to know for many years now, so I'm so excited to have Leanne Simone on the podcast. Did I pronounce your last name correctly, Leanne Simone? Is that right? Simon's fine, actually. Simon. I'm so sorry. My husband's family was Russian, and Ellis Island changed their name and shortened it.

So who knows? Oh, my God. See, this is what happens when you have social media friendships being built. You don't know how their name is pronounced. Right. You don't know. It's like the Megan thing with DeFranza. I've had people correct me on that. Leanne and I have a mutual friend, Megan DeFranza, but it's spelled M-E-G-A-N, which most people just naturally pronounce it Megan, but it's Megan.

And I've said that before. People say, no, it's Megan. I'm like, you don't know her then. Right. Yeah. Well, why don't you do that? Well, let's do this. Let's start with your story. I mean, and this could probably take the rest of the podcast for you to tell your whole story.

And then I would love to get into many different questions and topics related to intersex and Christianity and so on and so forth. All right. I have a condition called mixed gonadal dysgenesis, and it means that I have a Y chromosome in some of my cells and not in others. That resulted in my having a mix of gonadal tissue types. So some of it was ovarian, some of it was testicular, but most of it was mixed because it all ended up failing. I, between the legs, I was small, masculine in shape and unable to either father a child or penetrate someone. And I was raised initially as a boy by parents who were not very strict on very strict on gender issues and who gave me a gender neutral name initially. My father was an engineer who had grown up on a dairy farm so he had never gone to college and so the first thing that my parents said to me was you're going

to college. So any other issues could slide but not going to college. So any other issues could slide, but not going to college. My mom was a nurse who didn't take me to doctors unless I needed stitches or had broken a bone. Their attitude when I started expressing a lot of imagination and curiosity was to give me more books, encourage me to read. And they didn't care if I read things like Heidi and A Little Princess. And, you know, I was reading. That's what was important to them. I was reading. That's what was important to them.

When I was, I was so tiny and frail that my parents were losing me. I was at two years old, just 18 pounds. Oh my gosh. At nine, I was wearing a size 6X clothes. I was wearing a size 6X clothes, which meant that my sister, who was three years younger than me, was about the same size as me. When I was in fifth grade, I finally caught up to the shortest person in my class. About that time, the principal said I had to stop playing with the girls, I had to go play with the boys, even though I was so much smaller than all of the guys. I played exactly one game of baseball, got hit in the face by a bouncing ground ball, and went home with a black eye.

My mom was not happy about that. One of the guys, however, invited me to listen to a record album that he had. Since he was always nice to me, I went to his house and sat on his bed and while the music played, he strummed air guitar and mouthed the words. Let's see if you know the tune. It's close your eyes and I'll kiss you. Tomorrow I'll miss you. Remember I'll always be true. It's the first time that I'd ever heard the Beatles.

And I was instantly in love with them and with him. And so I wanted to get married to Jim and have his babies. And that was about the last time that it was okay to be feminine. We moved. I never saw Jim again. My dad started encouraging me to be more masculine, And my dad started encouraging me to be more masculine, which, you know, for a long time, I felt like I had been born on the wrong side of the Grand Canyon. That boy was on the other side of the Grand Canyon.

There was no way across. cross. And, you know, I prayed diligently and thought that perhaps God would make me a real boy. He didn't. And I blamed myself for that because I still wanted to be a mom when I grew up. I first heard the gospel at Vacation Bible School when I was five or six, maybe as old as eight. I asked so many questions that one of the women took me aside and just told me Bible stories. I determined to obey my parents, be a good little girl, and love Jesus, but I didn't really know what the gospel was about. I grew up in Methodist churches, but first heard the gospel from a classmate in high school. He was one of those kids that was always passing out tracts about the rapture. those kids that was always passing out tracts about the rapture. I didn't care too much about that, but he was always nice, and he encouraged me toward a very personal childlike faith in Jesus.

So I visited the local Southern Baptist Mission, and the pastor led me down Romans Road explained the gospel to me and asked me if I wanted to pray and ask Jesus into my heart and I said well yeah and I assumed as a new Christian that I could be this person that my parents wanted and that the school expected. And instead what happened was this mask that I had built up to function socially crumbled. I had to be much more transparent with the world and I don't know if you know Myers-Briggs but I'm INFP and also probably Asperger's although that's never been diagnosed at least ADHD on the spectrum. INFP is 3% of the world's population between 3 and 4%

we make up about a third of all suicides and so my life went downhill and being a genius I decided I had to get away from home so I got a full tuition scholarship, moved from a supportive family in Illinois to a boys dorm in Miami. And there it was made clear to me that physically I was not male.

that physically I was not male. And a lot of things happened. Some of them I won't talk about, but suffice it to say that one of the boys proved that he could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. I wasn't strong enough to resist. whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. I wasn't strong enough to resist. And they generally frowned upon people like me anyway, so it's not like they're going to punish him.

The school decided that I had gender issues, so they gave me the choice between expulsion and therapy. So I cut my hair and bought a motorcycle and tried to delay long enough that the therapist wouldn't say I was a hopeless case. I managed to test out of enough credits to graduate. If you look at my transcript it says 69 credits attempted and 121 earned. So I actually got almost half of my credits by CLEP tests and advanced placement tests and talking people into giving me credit for classes that sort of thing. One of my professors introduced me to some people who did government contracts

they didn't care what I looked like or what trouble I'd had because I was good enough at computers but they hired me and so I found myself on an overseas doing classified work for the U.S. government. The men stayed in the barracks. The security rules for women applied to me. So I stayed in the BOQ in my own room, and I had to have an escort wherever I went on base because they were that afraid of something happening to me. Less than six months after I graduated from college, I got into a motorcycle accident, not my first one.

But it was one that convinced me that if I didn't deal with my issues, I would die in the next one. deal with my issues, I would die in the next one. I had that as a near certainty that if I didn't repent before I got up off the ground, the next one would be my last. So I made an appointment with a psychiatrist who referred to Johns Hopkins, who was the leading institution on intersex at the time. That's where Dr. John Money worked. That's where a few years later, one of the anti-transgender trollers worked. I won't mention his name. But the psychiatrist had a policy, and I guess it was Johns Hopkins policy that she wanted me to establish a sexual relationship with a

gay man before she would do any therapy I had not had sex. I considered myself a Christian and didn't want to have sex until I got married. I understood that there was no way I was going to have sex in the first place, at least not vaginal intercourse. And I was deathly afraid of being naked with someone who expected me to be male. So I didn't go. I found an endocrinologist willing to treat my issues. And he lectured me on my weight, first of all, because I was grossly underweight and anemic. At the time, I had what's called Tanner 2 sex development, which is what you would expect from a preteen.

So I looked like an anorexic girl with the private parts of a little boy. I had the face that's characteristic of Turner syndrome, which means I have a small jaw and I had a very pixie feminine face. And the endocrinologist, after I promised to to gain weight said that estrogen would help him gain weight it would get rid of the depression that I had from low hormones and he said I wouldn't have any trouble at all being accepted as a girl so he put me on estrogen the, of course, is that I would have surgery because the gold standard in intersex treatment was the willingness to have vaginal intercourse and the ability to do so. to do so. Some would call that heterosexually centered, which indeed it was at the time, but their attitude was if you couldn't have vaginal intercourse, you couldn't get married, you couldn't have a full life. My attitude at that point with the church was if I went to them,

they would just start talking about effeminacy and homosexuality. And they wouldn't tell me how to fix it all. Real quickly, Leanne, can you give us a date? Cause I mean, I'm, I'm thinking like, is this the early eighties and I'm going to, or. No, I went on estrogen when I was in 1974. Oh, wow. So this is way, okay. And the Wayback Machine, indeed. Yeah.

And so six months after that, my sister called and said that my parents were getting a divorce and I needed to come home. And I had already been on, as I said, I'd been on hormones for six months. I had gained probably 10 pounds, which had gone to my hips. The guys at work were joking about me having gotten myself pregnant because the first two weeks I threw up every day, same time. And I didn't know how long my job would last because I had a security clearance and I was developing breasts. And at that time, you had to have surgery before you could change your ID on

anything. So eventually I was going to lose my job, probably not be able to have surgery, but my parents got a divorce. My mom decided that she would be supportive, that she would loan me the money for surgery so when the house sold I flew out to San Francisco I changed from wearing a t-shirt to an embroidered peasant top and people started treating me like a girl at that point. Surgery was three stages as outpatient with no nursing care to speak of and the hospitals would not take you in if anything happened

because this was a doctor who did primarily transgender surgeries. It took me from September to November to finally heal. I went back to see my mom. She said that for the first time in my life, she knew I'd be okay. My only male cousin welcomed me and eagerly accepted the change and asked for my own job back. And they said that they had been downsized. They'd be happy to write a letter of recommendation. And then they said that technically speaking, you're still an employee because when your supervisor find out why you had left, he had you put on extended leave so that your insurance would not lapse. And we talked the insurance company into covering all of your treatment. Wow. So I walked out of there with no debt except for my student loan and found a

new job I went through a long period well I went through about five years of just being a manic all the time because I was a kid again I'd never had a childhood or a teenage years I really didn't know what to do about guys who wanted to date. And I didn't know what to do about the way that women were treated in the workplace. and so I was back in church I managed to catch the measles almost die from it but some of the people who had prayed for me were very close friends so I shared my history with them and they said that I had just ruined my testimony and they wouldn't talk to me again. So I found another job in another state and didn't go to church for a long time. When I did go back to church, it was to a church that I just didn't tell and they were fine. Because there was no doubt in your presentation that you were female at that point.

Like nobody would ever. No, no. I mean, I got questioned like three times in 40 years, which could have been by accident. You know, I don't know. But I read an article online by a Reformed scholar who was talking about transsexuals, but what he said was that the surgical alterations were merely an elaborate disguise that things like Deuteronomy 23 didn't apply. Deuteronomy 23 basically changed your legal sex state to become a eunuch, that kind of thing.

It said that nothing you did to your body changed your sex in the eyes of God, which is the whole creational intent, God's holy purpose in creation outlook that a lot of Christians have. And I didn't question that I was a woman. I questioned my right to be one. And this so troubled me that I went to my church and I said, look, here's my history, at least what I know of it. And here's what this guy says. And I want to know what I should do.

If you tell me I have to be a boy, that's fine. But that means a lifelong hopeless quest to be masculine enough. I didn't know it even then, but I'm on high doses of testosterone now, and my body uses that for breast milk. Really? Yeah. So who knows what I would have done had I gone on testosterone either of those times. Maybe if they'd given me enough, it would have done something. I don't know. It wouldn't have made me taller. It wouldn't have changed my sexual orientation,

probably. Would not have changed my face except to give me facial hair. So wouldn't have change my mannerisms but anyway the church decided that in terms of God's law I was female at this point and that I needed to look to the Bible for what that meant and that I should be content with where the Lord had put me with his providence in my life and rely on him for things like this. And they said that you can get married to a man so long as he knows before. so it wasn't until 1999 that I finally met someone else with a similar condition and so I went to England and met with so I went to England and met with an AIS and met with an AIS support group.

And that gave me enough courage to actually tell a boyfriend my history, the condition, what my options had been, and he cried. He said that his diabetes and high blood pressure would be more of an issue in our relationship than my history of intersex. And it turns out that he was right. Did he have AIS? No, he, he's, he's just a fairly ordinary guy who,

when he was born had a cancerous growth out of his side so he went through high radiation treatments until he was like six years old so he understands right some plus he has a birthmark that's this hairy bumpy black thing on his arm that's maybe 12 square inches oh wow and so he got brutally teased for as a child so he has empathy yeah for stuff like that for our audience the ais androgen insensitivity syndrome where somebody somebody would have an XY chromosome, but would have female, typically female presentation. So similar to... Right. In the complete form. And let's talk about that for a minute, because there are some misconceptions online. A woman with the complete form of androgen insensitivity has XY chromosomes, externally has female typical genitals, internally has testes rather than ovaries and uterus.

But all of her cells have this genetic variant that means they can't respond to male hormones. So it's not just the exterior that's female. The testes can't give her a male puberty, and the testes don't produce sperm. So the combination of the testes and the sperm. So the combination of the testes and the androgen sensitivity act like you've got ovaries that are infertile. So if she's not castrated, she'll have a normal female puberty, but without getting her period. She could go her entire life without knowing that she's got a Y chromosome. Yeah. So it's not like she's just a broken male. Right. So if the approach you're taking is God's holy purposes in creation or creational intent, you'll look at the Y chromosome because in the garden you know Y chromosome means male so you would say

she's male if you look instead at Matthew 19 where it talks about someone going against creational intent for the sake of the kingdom. If you look at for the sake of the kingdom, she's just an infertile female. She's a barren woman, scripturally. Well, and I don't... Do people... Well, I'm sure people

do. I mean, I don't think it's helpful, really, to determine, to use one kind of biological sex criterion to determine whether somebody is male or female. And I've seen you interact with some people online on that where somebody says, no, Y chromosome means male. I'm like, well, that typically triggers the development of the fetus in the woman.

But it's more complicated than that. I mean, you have reproductive systems, you have endocrine systems, you have the chromosomal thing. I mean, to reduce it to one of those kind of criteria just doesn't seem very helpful. Well, if you apply it consistently, you end up – a woman with Swyer's syndrome has a uterus but no gonads. She's still XY. She can carry a baby to term with a donor egg. A chimera, and you know a good friend of both of ours who's a chimera, which is the result of an XX conception and an XY conception becoming a single fetus and a single person, they can have a complete female and working reproductive system and still be XY in their blood or their brain

or in their testes that are also in there. Right. The testes probably aren't working at this point, but to just say, well, there's a light chromosome is ludicrous. Or to say that God's creational intent was that there be two people, you've got to live as two people,

nobody's going to even go there. We didn't even know about the chromosome until, what, like 100 years ago or something. So I don't, I mean, the biblical authors in as much as we honor the human author and their knowledge, yes, they're inspired, but they're not robots, you know? I mean, they didn't know any about a wife. They would base it on reproductive structures, typically probably external genitalia. So, um, right. But, but those, those who were intersex were expected to, by the time they were adults, settle into living as a man or a woman. Or maybe, you know, some places still had unit capability.

You could just stay kind of ambiguous. Right. You could just stay kind of ambiguous. Right. And there were a few cases where things were tried in court where they suspected that the person was really male living as a woman or really female living as a man. But even in those cases, they weren't nearly as focused as we are today on determining who's male and who's female. Right. Right. Leanne, I would love to get in. We've touched on it a little bit, but can we go back and just talk about language?

I think a lot of Christians, well, at least in my circles, Christians are really well-intentioned, you know, and they really do want to know, like, what are the terms I should use or not use? And they're trying to grasp that, just trying to get up to speed on this conversation, which can be really difficult with the internet and so many things out there. So there's various terms people have used.

The older term would be hermaphrodite. The newer term is intersex, but then you also have things like disorders of sex development or differences of sex development. Can you just give us the lay of the land on the various terms that Christians should even use, people should even use when they're trying to talk about this conversation?

As Christians are well aware, people can be really, get really tense about what words you use what pronouns are used what words you use for certain things and I know that you almost have to ask not only pronouns but you know are you okay with intersex do you want difference of sex development but when people are talking to each other i don't think most people care yeah i use intersex but so many people so many christians anyway don't know what intersex is that I tend to get back to you know mix gonna add all this Genesis and the effects of it and one of the first people at my church that I was talking to about my condition I know you know I

have a white chromosome in some of my cells and she's not a stupid person but she said what's a chromosome oh wow and i'm like i am in super trouble now because i well you know some of my cells are male and some of them are female which is not technically correct because cells aren't really male or female right yeah especially when you're an adult um a friend in our church hadL, so she had to have a bone marrow transplant. She got the transplant from a man, so her blood karyotype is now XY. It didn't change anything about her. It didn't change anything about her health, except she was happy to have blood again. So within the intersex community, is intersex more or less a non-offensive term?

That seems to be the most widely self-identified term. I think most people use intersex because we get tired of disorders of sex development. It's kind of like people having to say that they're same-sex attracted instead of gay. Yeah, okay okay that's a good analogy um you know when i when i and i i've actually tried to to to not say that i'm an intersex christian okay you know although it's not just my body that's intersex it had systemic effects that you know we are not just our bodies but neither is you know some people say that our sex extends beyond our body i don't know whether i agree with that or not i don't know whether or not that's true but i do know that

not being entirely male or female does something to you yeah in your heart and brain here's the way i would word it because i've been in i'm in knee deep in these conversations now i'd say i mean biological sex is by definition a bodily category so it's determined by body but has multiple i mean myriad of effects on our whole being because we are integrated whole beings you know so even even think about how how much uh you know your So even, even think about how, how much, uh, you know, your endocrine system affects your weight, your thinking, your brain function, your behavior. And then you add in societal expectations for maleness and femaleness and how

that even from as early as six months old affects our self perception or perception of others. So male and femaleness is so intertwined and complicated, but determining whether a, let's just say, whether a non-intersex person is male or female, that is a bodily category is how I've tried to think about it. Well, you know, it's a bimodal distribution even then. We were never meant to be clones of Adam and Eve.

There's a great deal of sex variation that we wouldn't consider intersex. Like you can be six foot four female and people are going to look at you strange, but because the overlapping graphs are often beyond the male average category, right? You're over there, but we don't consider that as really a sex thing yeah we sometimes ignore the diversity within each sex category which is a wide obviously massive diversity sometimes we only emphasize male female diversity right and and we we publish these things on biblical manhood and you know and come up with all of these masculinity things that are expected of Christians that frankly I think it

hurts men because they can no longer have a Jonathan and David sort of friendship without being looked at askance. Right. Yeah. So, so going back to the terminology. So you're saying intersex is by and large of an accepted term, but it's going to be unknown to a lot of people. Disorders of sex development is more of an official medical term, but can be not the chosen term for people who are actually intersex the one of the main objections to that term is we feel that it

medicalizes intersex okay that it says that it's a medical diagnosis that the that the doctors are in charge of its definition. And so if you, let's say that you're born with a clitoris that's a lot larger than a woman would ordinarily have, suddenly you have a medical condition. And it may not be a medical condition. It could just be normal variation. It doesn't even have to be a result of the fall at that point. some pretty strong tension between the intersex community and the medical community, especially when people are, when doctors are performing surgeries, I mean, on babies being born. Can you give us a little, catch us up to speed on the history of that kind of tension and where we're at with that? All right. So in the early, well, okay,

let's start with the Victorians just briefly. They started looking for what they consider a true sex in intersex people. And they based that on gonadal histology, which means, is this tissue ovary or is it testis? If it's testis, the person's male, regardless of anything else. the person's male, regardless of anything else. Wow. Even if they have a, you know, the CAIS people were male because they had gonadal tissue that was testis. Yeah.

So in the 1950s, Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University, a psychologist, theorized that you could take an intersex newborn, modify its genitals in the first few weeks after birth and if the parents let there be no doubt as to the child's sex then generate gender identity would follow the new genital shape and his theories formed the basis for all of these surgeries. Feminists twisted his theories to say that we're a blank slate at birth and we learn gender. Christians took his theories as gender identities learned. And so an awful lot of the kids grew up knowing that there was something so shameful their parents couldn't talk about it. They knew that the doctors had lied to them, but they couldn't get their medical records.

They were uncomfortable with the sex that they were being told they were. And there were two classic cases. One is a circumcision that was botched and they raised the child as a girl and it was identical twins. So it was a perfect experiment for Dr. John Money. And the child who was raised as a girl never felt like one and ended up committing suicide and the other brother eventually committed suicide. The other case is Dr. Reiner was a urologist at Johns Hopkins and he did surgeries on a condition

called colloquial extra feet. In colloquial extra fee the abdomen doesn't close so the genitals are never formed so what they would do on a baby that had that condition but had two good testes they would castrate give a vaginal canal surgically and raises a girl he found out that when he did follow-up that a majority were living as boys, even with a vagina. Another reason that we're so opposed to the genital surgeries is when you do a vaginoplasty, create a new vagina, it wants to shrink. shrink. And how do you keep it from shrinking? You use a plastic rod and dilate it, which means that the parents are expected to dilate their child's vagina on a regular basis until they're old enough to do it themselves. And this can be a child who's not so sure that they're a girl in the first place. So these are the sorts of things that, you know, none of this happened to me.

My mom kept me away from the doctors. And I still have this tribal angst or anger about these things. So that when someone starts talking about, you know, we're thinking about doing the surgery on the baby, I'll be like, do you really understand if the doctors explain dilation to you? And I've ended up being the one when the doctors didn't tell them that they would have to after the surgery. Wow. That, in fact, there was one case where the doctors didn't tell him even after the surgery, you know, the first few days after surgery. And they came to me and said, well, you know, we've had the surgery and our girl's saying that she's a boy and what do we do? And I'm like, well,

surgery at this point doesn't matter. You know, you've got to preserve your child's options as best you can at this point doesn't matter you know you've got to preserve your child's options as best you can at this point would would the perspective within intersex let's just say intersex advocacy communities or the movement would the perspective be wait until the child is older and they can decide whether they want the surgery or not in In cases where there's no immediate health risk, does the health risk thing play a factor? Well, there are very few cases where there's an immediate health risk, really only one group of conditions. But yes, the stand that most intersex advocates take is wait until the child's old enough to

give informed consent and then you know we typically would say at that point make the same surgeries available that were that you wanted to do before the surgery so the problem at this point is um let's say that a child with mixed genital dysgenesis is 11 years old or nine years old or whatever and has been scheduled for genital surgery to make the the genitals more masculine looking. And if at the last minute the child says, well, why can't you make them more feminine looking? They're going to cancel surgery.

They're going to bring in a psychologist. And the child won't be able to have genital surgery until they're 18. the child won't be able to have genital surgery until they're 18. Because they just got reclassified as transgender instead of intersex because they don't agree with what the doctor originally thought they should do. So the same, same person, same genitals. The problem is that the doctor got the gender wrong. The gender outcome.

Okay. And so one of the areas where we've made some strides is doctors do actually try to figure out what's the most common outcome in this condition. And then go with that if they're going to do the surgery common outcome in terms of gender identity development right okay so like in colloquial extra fee they're not as likely to do a bad castration and vaginal surgery because they know that most of them are going to end up being boys anyway. Because they would have a full functioning male endocrine system, right? Which is going to affect in most cases your gender identity. If you go back to

Dr. Money's theories, and I know that a lot of intersex people hate him, what he really said was that gender identity forms in the last several months of before birth yeah and in the first couple of months after birth birth when the testosterone surge occurs in a male right so he's figuring if you can stop that testosterone surge, maybe you can push a male to being a female. When is the post after birth testosterone surge? Is it for the first few months, a couple of years? I'm not an expert in that.

I just read about that. I can't recall. I'm going to get it wrong if I say. Yeah. So just for our audience. So I mean, in. Yeah, just I mean, just just for our audience. So, I mean, in, yeah, just, I mean, just a 30 second kind of overview from, I'm not a, not a doctor, but I feel like I've been, you know,

getting a part-time medical degree, but how much stuff I'm reading on this, but so, so the default, all humans, the default is they'll grow into a female. If there's a presence of a Y chromosome, in most cases within the womb, you have, you know, that will trigger the production of testosterone in eight to 10 weeks, which pushes out typically male genitalia, reproductive systems. But then the last third of pregnancy, there's another, and this is a little bit more debated. We're not sure about the effects of this,

but there's kind of another wash of testosterone that, you know, the phrase people use is it masculinizes the brain, right? And then after birth, again, we're not sure exactly the length of it, but there's another testosterone surge. And those last two kind of testosterone kind of surges or washes or whatever, typically, I keep using title, I hate these little broad breast absolutes or whatever, but typically will, um, produce, uh, stereotypically masculine or male typical behaviors, you know, rough and tumble play even in a male gender identity. Um, but in cases where maybe the testosterone is not as much or the receptors don't receive it like male, like typical males do, um, then they might, uh, not have male typical behavior patterns or even a male

typical gender identity. Did I get that? How do I do it? Is that generally? I think that's really close. And given that there's still a lot of variety in, again, the bimodal distribution, And again, the bimodal distribution, the distribution of normal, quote unquote, male is fairly wide. You can have a big testosterone surge or a fairly small one. the overall genital shape is formed before the circulatory system is complete. Okay. So genital shape has more to do with local effect of the testes or ovaries so that in mixed genital dysgenesis, you can have one good testes on one side and a streak ovary on the other side.

And what you get is genitals that are more masculine on one side than on the other. So the genital shape forms a lot earlier than gender identity. And that's why in at least some intersex conditions, there's this unpredictability of gender identity. That, yeah, you know, that it, in the typical classic Mexican adult genesis, you have one good testis and one streak ovary, and the ambiguous genitals are kind of to the feminine into the scale, there's a partial uterus,

most of those will identify as boys eventually. One good testes. Okay, that's all it takes. Now, if there's two ova testes, so there's not one good testes, you end up with more masculine genitals than you would have in the classic case but the genital the gonads tend to die over time so you end up with without this testosterone wash

as big so you end up with relatively more masculine genitals, but more of them thinking they're girls. Nobody that I know of has actually looked into it much. This is just anecdotal. So you can, you know, you can chuck it all if you want. Just in the people that I've met, that's been, been my experience. And, you know, I ran a support group for Mexico and Adolescent Genesis. You know, I'm aware of like 50 cases. So I did not do a survey or anything. But, you know, we like simple answers as Christians that I'm not sure that the Bible gives.

Going back to the medicalization, the tensions there. So is that still, have there been improvements made within the medical community on seeing how some of these surgeries early on have gone south and now there's, is there more caution and maybe more, let's wait and see before we start operating against where the person doesn't have, they're not of age where they can give informed consent? A lot depends on which doctors you're talking about. centers for intersex treatment have rules that

for instance require the parents to talk to an intersex adult before they okay the surgery or to meet with other parents who have taken their child through the surgery so that there's at least a lot more making the parents aware of what the outcomes can be. Okay. Before they do the surgery. There are some people,

some doctors who just continue to do the surgery because that's what they've always done. There are now support groups that are amazing because so many parents as soon as they find out you know that what the condition is they'll go do a google search and they'll find they'll find AISSG or A-DSD or the Kleinfelter Support Group. And there you have hundreds of people who have been through it, who know what the realities of it are, and who can advise you. Like www.ais-dsd.org is one of the larger ones. Okay.

So the involvement of the support groups has probably even had more effect than the advocates have had. Yeah. What about in a case where there's a very mild intersex condition? In fact, I forgot the name for this one maybe you can help me where there's um uh low testosterone uh x y chromosomes um uh full male anatomy reproductive like it's male but the opening of the the penis that is on the bottom of the shaft the whole of the penis is on the bottom of the shaft uh low testosterone and i most people might not even say this is the intersex condition but sometimes it is or classified as such but like um i know one case where they you know they operated they

they relocated the hole so it's on the tip of the penis rather than the bottom of the shaft they gave them some testosterone as a child so there, I guess there's no immediate health risk. I don't think, um, but they did. And this is where the debate comes. Were they so obsessed with this standard of being male that the whole of your penis must be at the top, not on the bottom of the shaft? Or were they saying, Hey, look socially, you know, it can really maybe traumatize the kid if if if all of a sudden he sees other boys peeing you know he realizes that he's so different and

maybe somebody sees him peeing from the bottom of the shaft and not you know um what about something like that like to me it might and correct me if i'm wrong my initial initial perception is i don't think you need to wait for informed consent with something like that kind of surgery or am i missing something there well um tiger devore is a good resource on that okay he's an intersex man who at one point worked at johns hopkins with dr money and who underwent hypospadias repair surgeries as he was growing up multiple times. And the two reasons that you do hypospadias repair, one is because you think that the child, that a newborn baby is going to care what the person who changes the diapers care thinks. And the other is so that they can stand up when they go to the bathroom. Right. and the other is so that they can stand up when they go to the bathroom right as a result of all of the surgeries he's had he has a whole bunch of scar tissue and his genitals don't function well and he doesn't feel much he says that he would much

rather have had his unmodified because there was nothing else wrong with his body and no medical reason to do the surgery. It was cosmetic for the comfort of everyone else. Now on one of the presuppositions about doing hypospadias repair is it's a one and done. And you'll find that statistically it's not. Yeah, it's not. and done and you'll find that statistically it's not uh yeah it's not it's not it's a repeated surgery and it's using tissues that don't like the constant urine stream that goes by them and it's having lots and lots and more scar tissue in the genitals that are very sensitive.

And what you do is you cut down on the sensitivity of it. So that you end up with a bunch of people who are scarred by the surgeries that you're performing because you don't like the fact that they're not, because you don't like the fact that they don't look as male as you want them to. And it comes down to that. There's no functional requirement to stand up when you pee to be male. Wow. So you're saying it is this kind of social expectation that men stand up to pee that is driving a lot of these

surgeries which end up producing more harm and what's your what's the person at your church going to think if they change diapers and see that which I want to at least the

motivation could be good and pure, right? I think that... Like I'm trying to save this child from social stigma and all the stuff that might come from that. Now we can say, well, that society needs to get with the program and that person changing the diaper shouldn't care. But that's a utopian thing that will never exist.

Of course society is going to react. I think that most individual doctors and certainly most parents want what's best for the child. Okay. Christianity who want what's best for their movement rather than for the individual child or they talk themselves into believing that it's best for the individual child now admittedly a lot of Christian leaders who are pushing this Y chromosome thing are not in favor of the surgeries they're just in favor of course in the gender. You know, they would say that a woman with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome is male. Well, okay, but think about that. That makes her effeminate. That makes her homosexual.

And you don't have to ask, I mean, you can ask anyone in, whose that came up over revoice that they're not pleasant and they're and i'm not sure either side is being forthright at this point yeah it's about it's not about whether or not we have outreach to people who have these temptations it's just gone so far away from that that it's not funny. And I'm still trying to get my Presbyterian, the PCA, to release a clarification that says, here's our real understanding of intersex

rather than just accept what General Assembly did. Wow. because i'm not sure that anybody who voted for it really believes it it's just they needed the national statement so they took it as it was and passed it oh the national statement if you want yeah got lots of thoughts on that but i would just to give you hope maybe maybe my audience, I do think there is a, for sure, a growing number, if not a much larger percentage of the evangelical population that are more, I would say, in a very helpful way, centrist or looking for more thoughtfulness, more nuance, much more grace. or looking for more thoughtfulness, more nuance, much more grace. And maybe it's just the community, because I run in more centrist kind of evangelical circles. I don't, well, I'm not invited to the more conservative brand of Christianity.

Or I'm disinvited. That's been happening quite a bit, actually. People invite me to come speak, and then they Google around and say, oh, yeah, we're not going to have you come speak. But I. But I don't know. I feel like there is more of a silent or quiet, I'm going to say majority of Bible-believing, church-going evangelical Christians who are tired of the culture war, who want much more grace. And maybe it's, again, it's hard

because I am going off anecdotal evidence. Obviously the places where I speak are going to resonate with my posture. And so maybe it's a jaded perspective, but I just, everywhere I go now, even some really conservative churches, they're just hungering for much more grace. I'm shocked at how much more,

how much grace and nuance and thoughtfulness and humility Christians are wanting in this conversation. Well, I think that the national statement crowd, let's call them for a second. Sure. I think that they are kind of, well, let's put it this way. Before my husband and I moved to Tennessee, we were members longstanding of Orthodox Presbyterian churches.

The OPC. Wow. Just to the right of the SBC. Some jokingly said the only perfect church. But OK, so the OPC, you know that they're a lot more conservative than the PCA. Right. But my OPC church in Georgia was aware of all that we're talking about. They know my history. They know the condition I have and the decisions I made 45 years ago. And they were supportive. The only thing that they said was, you're doing these public speaking engagements as Leanne and you're living your life in the church as Jennifer they're both your name but you need to be as transparent in the church as you're being with the people you talk to and I said you know I don't think the church is ready for that

this this would cause all kinds of division and i'd rather people just not know than cause division and the last thing i want to be known as instead of leanne simon or jennifer simon is that intersex lady yeah i don't want my life to revolve around intersex. And one of the reasons that I spent 45 years living as a woman is I didn't want the rest of my life to revolve around what gender I was going to be or whether I was doing a good enough job at it. Wow. You know, that's, that's what's so upsetting to me about General Assembly passing the national statement. Yeah. Interesting. Because it takes me all the way back to, you're not good enough. You can never be good enough. And like, well, yeah, I know that.

Jesus is the answer to that. Okay. I understand that. But saying that my lifelong quest has to be to meet the stereotypical male or female is ridiculous yeah you know this is the body god gave me and to do something that glorifies him with this body is what i've been trying to do um and i think those are probably two of the different viewpoints about intersex in the world. Now, most of my intersex friends don't want anything to do with Christianity. Really?

And it's just because of statements like, you know, the Y chromosome determines whether you're male or female, period. you know, the Y chromosome determines whether you're male or female, period. Or people just having to make sure that they say, you know, your condition is a result of the fall. You are a result of the fall. It should not have happened. You should not be here. You should be somebody else.

And I'm like, when was the last time you told a woman in labor that her pains were a result of the fall I mean come on just you know half of the things that are different about your own body are a result of the fall it permeated everything guys you know

I really want to go here let's go deeper here because this is something i've been thinking and actually rethinking about i hear you saying that intersex conditions might on paper factually be a result of the fall i mean i wasn't there so but it's saying that in a very insensitive way at the wrong time or being very selective in what you pin on the result of the fall is what's the problem? Or how would you unpack? Well, let me just, can I just ask you, frankly, do you think the intersex conditions are a result of the fall? And then move from there on how Christians should think through that.

I think that everything in the world was affected by the fall. Sure. To pick out intersex conditions and say, okay, they're a point, they're a result of the fall, is really the wrong question to ask. Because then you have to get into, is that woman who had two large clitoris that you cut off, was her large clitoris a result of the fall? How large can it be before it's a result of the fall? You know, a woman with Turner syndrome, their average adult height is four foot eight. It's a result of Turner syndrome because she has just one X chromosome. Somebody who's XXY is going to be tall, at least taught statistically. Is that a result of the fall? If you're outside of this

bimodal distribution at all, how far away do you have to get before you're a result of the fall? So I hear you saying there is natural, and we could say beautiful and glorious diversity within maleness and femaleness. There's also other conditions, whatever we can talk about, but when does one, when does something leave being simply part of the diversity and become now a condition or a disorder or something that's not right? You're saying there's at least, we can all acknowledge there's some, a lot of gray area fuzziness here that it's

almost like why are we even like who cares right i mean but the the reason that they are asserting that intersex is a result of the fall is to other intersex to make it other and and i think I can demonstrate that because people who insist that it's a result of the fall, typically, when they get back to that woman with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, deny the effects of the fall on her body, that it's made her not male anymore. They point back to the garden before the fall and say, she's essentially male because of the Y chromosome in the testes, rather than saying, look, she's a result of the fall and she needs to glorify God with how she is, even if it's just common grace. You know, it's like God, we were naked and unashamed god clothed us he drove us out of

the garden he put a guard there so we couldn't back get back in there's some things that we need to handle by looking to the kingdom rather than back to the garden and i would say most cases you've got both choices in terms of your attitude and how you approach it. Are you going to the New Jerusalem? You're going to tell me that everybody's going to be stereotypically male and female there? I don't think so. We're not going to be given a marriage. We're not going to be,

I don't think we're going to be having sex there. I don't think women who are resurrected are going to be having periods there. So tell me how we are at that point. I don't think men are going to be having erections there. Okay. Because it's not about sex at that point. You're messing with this. I love it. I love it. I'm going to have you back on Theology in Raw because you are doing exactly what I love to do on this podcast. Some people have. So wait, real quick. So you're saying that the motivation with at least some Christians and making sure we say it's the fall is because they want to say you as an intersex, not you, but just intersex people are actually male or female.

And we need to make sure we put them in one of those categories. They say it's a result of the fall, but then they deny the effects of the fall. See, I would say. Because they go right back to before the fall to define male and female right or at to look for god's intent in creation rather than post-fall reality it's like how's how how is a woman with I S going to appear anywhere near male? Yeah. I think on paper you can say theologically, and again, with all the nuance and consistency that we're advocating for, I think you could on paper say it's the, you know,

a condition might be a result of fall along with many, you know, I was born deaf in my left ear. I was born naturally prone to lust against monogamy. I can go through a whole list of stuff that I'm like, yeah, there's, I am a walking by-product of the fall. I'm also a walking by-product of God's glory and his image. And that's all meshed together in a beautiful, complex, redeemable way. Oh, where was I going with that? But your purpose is to glorify God with a body game.

Exactly, exactly. But I would also say, I personally wouldn't say that therefore we should try to determine which sex an intersex person is. I would say you are what you are. Like our mutual, we have a mutual friend who is on the podcast, Christian. which we have a mutual friend who's on the podcast, Christian. And Christian has a very rare intersex condition where Christian is, I mean, both male and female, just across the board, chromosomal, reproductive, everything.

And Christian says, well, who can I marry? I'm like, honestly, your situation, flip a quote. Like, I think you're in a, you are a beautifully complex person. I mean, that sounds almost bad. I don't think we need to determine whether you're male or female and then sort it all out. I would say you're a very beautifully unique person and glorify God in who you are now.

Don't try to like change who you are now. I told him that I think that he's free living as a man to marry a woman yes and i know there are those who think that intersex people shouldn't have sexual activity because their justification is that we are in part at least homosexual at that point. But my question back to them is, how can I then wear any clothes? Because I am in part cross-dressing at that point. Right. So, you know, you can't, it's, some of those questions are not things that are profitable to answer. are not things that are profitable to answer.

Sometimes the answers are really only useful. Well, let me give you an example. I was in a discussion online with some people who were talking about whether or not the soul is sexed or gendered. And I was just trying to see how consistent they were are in their arguments. And they were saying, well, you know, it has this implication for the culture wars. And they said, yeah, well, the soul has to be sexed. And that's why you can't change the body sex. Because no matter what you do to the body, the soul is still the same sex. And I said, well, the body the soul is still the same sex and i said well but the fall had an effect on that and that means that if the soul is sexed you can have a mismatch with the body which is exactly

what some transsexuals were telling you and you have to cut them slack at this point and they so they changed their mind they said well no then we can't believe that see that that i'm like that's the cart driving the horse man you can can't have a view that you hold, that you therefore build evidence to make sure it fits that view. That's just putting everything backwards. You go where the evidence, if you believe in a sex soul, that's different from the body, then yeah, that would be a great foundation for advocating for a transgender ontology,

for lack of better terms. But to then change your view because you don't like the results of where it's going to lead. That's just, then you held your view for the wrong reasons. Well, I, I like to see consistency in people. I like to examine their arguments and ask them questions on it. Yeah. But I have to admit that the older I get, the less certain I am about doctrine and the more certain I am of my need for Jesus.

So good. Yes, doctrine is important. Yeah. It's extremely important. But if it doesn't center on Jesus, it'll lead to death. Leanne, I just have a couple more minutes. I wanted to ask you this the whole time but it's got to be brief

I've got another podcast here in a few minutes How do you feel about LGBTQI? When intersex is brought into the LGBTQ conversation do you find that to be helpful or it depends or not helpful? Or how do you feel about that? My OPC pastor suggested that I withdraw in as much as possible from any relationships with LGBT groups or activities or conversations. And I told him that I didn't get to decide who the church considered a leper

and most christians consider intersex to be at least at first glance a part of the lgbt community and in order to help people with help the parents of intersex kids i I am working with LGBT people on a regular basis. And my position is people who are B-side, you need to support as best you can as a church. You know, I understand you can argue about the theology of language at that point. Fine. Help them. Draw them into your families. Hold them accountable. The A-side people, I think the worst you can accuse them of is that they might be wrong. I don't think this intentionally shaking their fist in God's face is a place to go. Okay. intentionally shaking their fist in God's face is a place to go. Okay. So I have a quote from you in, where's that book? Love Thy Body with Nancy Mercy.

And she has a quote of you. And I actually even asked her, I said, are you sure this quote is in context and everything? And I don't have it in front of me. But it was something about how you felt that all kind of being brought into the kind of LGBTQIA community was unhelpful. We're used as a pawn by both sides. Yeah. to try to deconstruct gender and the other side to say, yeah, but, or it's not the same thing as transgender. Transgender is bad. Intersex is okay. But then they ignore the overlap and the things

that happen in some conditions, which is one of the things that I appreciate about the authors of the national statement is they were consistent. They went with the Y chromosome and said, that's it for everybody. No exceptions for intersex. So I don't know. It takes energy for me to have discussions about whether or not intersex should do this or should do that yeah because and and i'm sure that that lgbt people feel the same way that christians have to be so focused on talking about them instead of how can we realistically share the gospel with you and help you. Yeah. I fully have seen the same thing where intersex is used as a pawn on both. And it's important to say both sides. And this is where, and I've, I'm sure failed in that and done things that are wrong. I'm on a,

always on a learning curve. And I just more recently had just been really passionate about let's listen to consider intersex as intersex, not as a sort of sub argument for one side or the other, because that's just because maybe unintentionally, but it can be very dehumanizing to, you know, just use this faceless concept to build an argument or whatever. And I, I do, I do see it on both sides. This is especially true when people make pronouncements and you know that they've never spoken to anyone who's intersex. You at least do. Okay.

And because there are some things that they simply don't know. They're going based. I don't know what they're going based on. Maybe Nancy Piercy's book or maybe Denny Burke's book, you know, or Alice Drager even. I, you know, some of these, some of these people are friends of mine. I would recommend actually Jenny Cox's book, Intersex in Christ. She's a professor in Australia. Cox? C-O-X? C-O-X. I'll let you read her book or talk to her. yeah she's um

much as i love megan i think she takes a much more conservative approach to it jenny does megan megan i think is more even-handed or diverse in her who she brings in in the christian world whereas jenny cox is is mainly dealing with conservative evangelicals. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And I would recommend both books highly, okay? Yeah. So Megan's book, Sex, Difference, and Christian Theology, which I've blogged about and interact

with Megan quite extensively on, and it's, I mean, it's, let it's, it's, let me say incredibly thorough, well-argued, very well-researched book. Much more so than Jenny's book. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, Megan's book, it's a little bit more difficult to read. Right. You have to be prepared. This is an, this is an academic book. I mean, it's really clear, but it's, it's a heavy book, but hey, I've got to go, Leon. Thank you so, so much for being on the podcast.

I've been dying for this podcast for so long now. I mean, I may have told you before, but I've been looking at just following you on Twitter and stuff for quite some time now. So, yeah, I'm really honored to have you on, and thanks so much. I think you've given us so much food for thought and hopefully caused us to maybe rethink some previously held categories, which I think is always, always a good thing. So thanks for being on Theology in a Row.

Well, you're welcome. It was a pleasure. Thank you.