Further to your brief Notebook piece on Sally Gross (The Tablet, 17 May), your readers may be interested to know that an important aspect of Sally’s work was drawing attention to the spiritual and religious exclusion faced by many intersex people (whose bodies have a mixture of male and female characteristics). She believed that the Christian denominations had done too little to acknowledge the existence of, or provide appropriate pastoral care for, intersex people. However, Sally found important sustenance in the statement in Galatians 3:28 that in Christ there is “no longer male and female”.
Theologians including John Hare, Patricia Beattie Jung, Megan DeFranza, and Nathan Carlin; biblical scholars including Joseph Marchal; and sociologists of religion including Stephen Craig Kerry continue to undertake important work on what intersex means for theological anthropology, textual interpretation, and teachings about sex and gender in the Church. My own research has sought to explore further intersex's theological, ethical and pastoral implications – particularly for Church policy on sex, gender and sexuality. I have also conducted research on the experiences of intersex Christians from Britain, which has shown that pastoral responses from ministers and priests are mixed and often inadequately-informed.
With the above-named scholars, Sally Gross spoke at a conference on Intersex, Theology and the Bible at the University of Manchester’s Lincoln Theological Institute in 2013, at which she reflected on her belief that the Christian denominations’ inadequate pastoral responses to intersex had led to “social death” for intersex people and created climates inhospitable to intersex in her native South Africa and elsewhere; the proceedings of the conference will be published in 2015.
Dr Susannah Cornwall, Advanced Research Fellow in Theology and Religion, University of Exeter, Devon
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