"The argument, which was put to me by conspicuously pious, intelligent, theologically sophisticated but fundamentalistic Christians of my acquaintance, is roughly as follows. Genesis 1:27 states that from the beginning of creation, God made each given member of the human species either male or female, and not both or neither. Thus, determinate maleness or determinate femaleness is the mark, above all else, of what it is to be created human. Validity of baptism is reserved for those who are human: one could immerse or sprinkle a dog, cat or tin of tuna, sincerely intending to baptise these, while uttering the formula of baptism, but no attempt to baptise these could ever be valid because dogs, cats and tins of tuna are not the kinds of thing which can be baptised and only human beings can be baptised. Since I am intersexed and my congenital physical sex has been found to be as ambiguous as it could be, I do not satisfy the divine criterion for humanness, which requires that one objectively be either determinately male or determinately female. It follows that, like dogs, cats and tins of tuna, I am not the kind of thing which could have been baptised validly. I presume that this is not the official view of the Church into which I was baptised as a young adult almost twenty years before either the Church or I realised that my anatomy was way beyond the tolerances of "industry-standard"." -Sally Gross
