There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:28

Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 

Romans 13:8

Christianity is perhaps the greatest purveyor of divisive theologies based in gender binarism.  It's also the tradition in which the most transgressive work has been done, from liberation theologies to Althaus-Reid's Indecent Theology.  Within a theologically-enforced binary system that only allows space for two genders and only limited expressions of those genders within each category, the recognized presence of God is restricted to that which conforms in belief, praxis and appearance to hierarchical categories.

The first thing we need to ask ourselves is, “What is the imago Dei?”  Technically, it means “the image of God.”  That technicality complexifies the issue a great deal; to image the essentially unimagable, to look for particular examples of what that image might be, brings an array of questions and issues, both sociohistorical and theological, into play.  Do we create a new image?  Do we use extant images--something already rooted in human life--from which to begin looking at this image? 

We must ask and encourage others to ask, “What does God look like?”  If we’re all created in the image of God and none of us look the same, then how is it possible that we are all made in the same image, unless that source image is infinitely diverse and constantly shifting into new forms, images as yet unseen or unwitnessed? We may not look the same on the outside, but on the inside we share similarities.  We are all some form of life force (or spirit, for convenience of discussion) in a fleshy body.  We are all animated by some vivifying principle, no matter what each person or tradition chooses to call it. 

Another shared aspect of being human is that we all have a “heart,” an emotional center by which we are moved and from which we move.  Does that mean that God creates us from the inside out?  Most humans share physical similarities in assembly of the parts; if that is imago Dei, then a transhermeneutic would mean not only that God has arms, legs, a torso, a head but that God also has a vagina and a penis and maybe one large breast and one flat one, as well as every other configuration of physiological characteristics that has ever manifested in flesh.