Congratulations, it's a girl!", "Congratulations, it's a boy!" - These short messages are far more significant than clichéd congratulations. Because there is hardly a more momentous determination in a person's biography than that of their gender shortly after entering this world.
I.
Depending on the appearance of the genitals, a newborn is assigned to a specific gender if possible, and this assignment is of existential importance for a person's self-image and how they are perceived by others. The socially and culturally dominant binary gender model therefore promotes and cements a wide range of experiences of disadvantage, marginalisation and discrimination for people with variations in gender development - in other words, for people who identify themselves in terms of gender beyond the categories of "male" and "female" or who do not or do not only identify with the gender recorded at birth.
The scientific guarantor of sex determination sub utraque specie was not least biology. However, it is precisely biology that impressively demonstrates how breathtakingly diverse the sexual appearance and expression of "female" and "male" individuals can be and how fluid the transitions between the two can be. The legislator has taken account of this scientific finding that gender is actually much more complex than assumed in everyday knowledge and anchored in social conventions by introducing a third positive gender entry in addition to "male" and "female" in German civil status law on 1 January 2019. However, even this regulation does not change the fact that a person's gender is and remains primarily the result of an external attribution by third parties based on external physical characteristics. It is important to emphasise this very clearly: Gender is not disposable, but the subject of self-determination of each individual person who - theologically speaking - is gifted freedom through the gift of justifying grace and called to live a life of free responsibility before God and their fellow human beings.
II.
People with variations in gender development have so far largely remained a blind spot for the church and theology. In church statements and theological publications, in which the binary gender model is a self-evident basic prerequisite, their existence represents an "irritating contingency" that breaks up familiar and established thought patterns and challenges us to change course in the theological debate on gender and sexuality. Such a departure from the traditional is difficult, but it is the task and strength of theological thinking not to close itself off to newer extra-theological knowledge, even and especially when this contradicts dogmatic theological statements about people and their lifeworld.
In order to be able to provide orientation for dealing with the tasks and challenges of the present, it is therefore necessary to develop the traditions of one's own faith in the context of modern thought and action and to justify them argumentatively in a modern society that is increasingly characterised by complexity and differentiation. The associated re-evaluation of previous traditions of interpretation of relevant biblical passages (think of Gen 1:27 with its references in Gen 5:2 and Mt 19:4, but also of remarkable narratives such as Acts 8:26-40 in comparison with Deut 23:2 on the one hand, Isa 56:4-5, Wis 3:14 and Mt 19,12 on the other hand) against the background and with the inclusion of the current state of scholarly knowledge - a return ad fontes, as it were, under changed auspices - requires a constant willingness to reconsider, including the associated revisions of traditional "correctness".
People with variations in gender development are not deficient deviations from a "norm" of bisexuality that is considered "natural" or "God-ordained". They are an expression of the diversity and variety of nature that God has created. If so many people do not conform to a norm, if there is "something wrong" with these people, could it not rather be the norm with which "something is wrong"? Or to put it in the words of Regina Ammicht Quinn: "Why are we so disturbed when God does not abide by man-made laws?" Seen in this light, any attempt to standardise gender appears to be human presumption to subject God's autonomous creative activity to human power of definition and to cut a swathe of uniformity through the diversity of his creation.
III.
The broad spectrum, the fullness of human reality must be valued and protected with all available forces in accordance with the biblical-Judeo-Christian commandment of love. Dealing with minorities shows how open a society - and also every church community - is and what it really stands for and stands up for. The community of Christians faces the challenge, not least in terms of pastoral care, of fundamentally redefining itself under the maxim that the diversity given by God includes all people in their own individuality. This means: overcoming divisions and marginalisation - valuing diversity to enable equal participation for all. It is important to take faith seriously as liberation by God by seeing "creation" and "creatures" under the primacy of God, which according to 1 John 4:16 is characterised as the inherent relational strength of "love".
