Sooner or later, in any fight about gender, someone reaches for Genesis 1:27: "male and female he created them." They quote it like a mic drop, as though God made two sexes, closed the file, and that settled the entire list.
The problem isn't that I dislike where the argument leads; it's that the verse misreads what Genesis 1 is and how the chapter works.
So what's actually going on in [[Genesis 1]]?
In most English translations, verse 27 reads something like:
"So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."
A beautiful line…and not a biology textbook.
Genesis 1 Was Never a Complete List
Let’s start with the obvious: Genesis 1 doesn't even try to name everything God made. It never mentions bacteria, or galaxies, or cacti, or the platypus, or the strange creatures we keep pulling out of the deep sea. The chapter is hardly an exhaustive inventory; it's a poem about a good God bringing order to a formless world.
So when Genesis says "male and female," it isn't ruling out everything it skipped. Nobody reads "God made the land and the sea" and concludes that beaches are a sin against creation; absence from the poem can’t possible be the same thing as a denial. Treat this one verse as a complete catalog of human biology, and you've handed a poem a job it never applied for.
The Bible Speaks in Merisms
Now, at the risk of making you feel like you’re back in high school English, we have to talk about literary devices. Genesis 1 runs on a literary device called merism, which names two opposite ends in order to gesture at everything that lies between them. “I looked high and low.” “This pantry has everything from A to Z.”
The writer of Genesis uses merism constantly. "The heavens and the earth" means the whole cosmos, the stratosphere included. "Evening and morning" means the entire day, 3:23 PM and all. "Day and night" and "land and sea" do the same work. Every pair names two poles and scoops up the space between.
That space between is actually where most of the world actually lives. God separated land from sea, then filled the world with marshes, beaches, tide pools, and swamps. He made the land animals and the sea animals, and then the frogs, who stubbornly refuse to pick a side. The poles don't erase the middle; they frame it.
"Male and female" works the same way, naming the two ends of the human family in order to gather everyone into the picture. Read inside its own literary world, the verse isn't drawing two boxes with a wall between them; it's throwing its arms around the whole species.
A lot of the confusion comes from smuggling Genesis 2 back into Genesis 1. We hear "male and female" and immediately picture Adam and Eve, two individuals in a garden.
But Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are two distinct creation accounts, written in different styles and pursuing different purposes. Adam and Eve don't arrive until chapter 2. In chapter 1, the Hebrew word behind "humankind" is adam — not yet a personal name, just a word for humanity itself. Genesis 1:27 isn't zooming in on one couple; it's talking about all of us, the whole image-bearing species, every person those two poles were always meant to hold.
Stop Asking the Poem the Wrong Question
Underneath all of this sits a simple mistake: asking an ancient creation hymn to answer a modern question it was never built to address.
Genesis 1 tells you that the universe is not an accident, that you carry the image of God, and that God looked at the whole of it and called it very good. It isn't a ruling on intersex bodies, on gender identity, or on the categories printed across a government form. Those questions are real and worth taking seriously, but this poem simply isn't where they get settled.
So when someone quotes "male and female he created them" to shrink the circle of who belongs, they have it exactly backwards. Genesis 1 doesn't hand you a fence: it gives you a doorway. And the God of that poem looks out over the whole various, beautiful, unlisted range of creation—trans, intersex, nonbinary, and every last person in the room—and says what God says over everything else: very good.
