When God chose to remake the world, he only preserved males and females because those two exhausted the gender categories of both humans and animals. The reason behind this decision seems consistent with the reason found in the initial creation of Genesis: The gender binary was directly tied to procreation. Only a male and female (no more and no less) are needed to be fruitful and multiply.

There’s a trendy new idea that denies God created only two genders (male and female). What’s the proof? Frogs. That’s right. Proponents of this view claim frogs are evidence that the gender binary of the Bible is a myth. If you’re puzzled by this, that’s understandable. Here’s how the argument works.

Defenders of this position point out that in Genesis 1, Scripture says God made creatures that live on the land and creatures that swim in the water. Frogs, however, are amphibians and aren’t exclusively land or water creatures. They don’t fit neatly in either of those creature classifications. So, although Genesis describes the creation of land and water creatures, it does not account for every kind of animal that God made.

In the same way, so the argument goes, even though Scripture says that God made humans “male and female” (Gen. 1:27), those two categories can’t account for every kind of human. God also created non-binary people—those who aren’t either male or female.

Now, there is some truth to what is being said. Many of the binary categories mentioned in the Genesis narrative don’t fully account for everything that’s created. For example, the Bible says God made day and night—allegedly the only two categories during a 24-hour period—but there’s also sunrise, sunset, dusk, and dawn that are neither day nor night.

Notice, however, in those cases (land/sea creatures, night/day), Scripture later references some of the natural variations between these binary extremes. For example, the Bible mentions frogs over a dozen times, acknowledging the existence of animals that are neither land nor sea creatures. Scripture also references dawn and twilight, even though they don’t fit the binary category of day and night.

This, however, is not the case with the binary category of male and female described in Genesis. There is never a later scriptural reference to another kind of human that falls outside the binary male-female gender category. If humans were made that were neither male nor female, why doesn’t Scripture say so?

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