 Scheman draws on her own lack of clarity about Jewish identity, as a secular Jew, in order to help trouble the unproblematic status of her own gender. She sees a Jewish people conceptually required by Christianormativity, and yet rendered unintelligible by its representation of all religions as entirely conversion-based (1997, 128). Under such conditions, it becomes hard to explain what it is to identify as a secular Jew. Likewise, she sees transsexuality as involving a required incoherence. Since heteronormativity requires a “natural” binary of women and men, transsexuals are paradoxically defined by an insistence of having always been the other sex all along and thereby required to deny their own histories (as Stone argues) (138–9). In this respect, Scheman notes, Christianormativity and heteronormativity are contrasting: The former represents all religions as driven by choice and conversion, the latter represents all gender as naturally determined at birth (142).