Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Julius Cassianus, the founder of Docetism, also attempts arguments of this sort. In his work On Continence, or On Being a Eunuch, he says, word for word: "And let no one say that, since we have such parts as these — the female fashioned in this way, the male in that, the one for receiving, the other for sowing — intercourse has been granted by God. For if such an arrangement were from the God to whom we hasten, he would not have called the eunuchs blessed, nor would the prophet have said that they are not a fruitless tree, transferring the image from the tree to the man who by his own choice makes himself a eunuch to this way of thinking."
And still contending further for his godless opinion, he adds: "And how could one not reasonably blame the Savior, if he reshaped us and freed us from error and from the fellowship of the private parts and their appendages and shameful members?" In this he lays down teaching much like that of Tatian, who indeed went out from the school of Valentinus. It is for this reason, then, that Cassianus says: when Salome asked when the things about which she inquired would be known, the Lord said, "When you have trampled underfoot the garment of shame, and when the two become one, and the male with the female is neither male nor female."
Now in the first place, in the four Gospels handed down to us we do not have this saying, but it occurs in the Gospel according to the Egyptians. And in the second place, he seems to me not to understand that by "male" is meant, in a riddling way, wrath, which is an impulse, and by "female" desire — passions which, once acted upon, are followed by repentance and shame. When, then, a man indulges neither wrath nor desire — passions which, nourished by habit and by bad rearing, overshadow and veil the reasoning faculty — but rather, having stripped off the mist that comes from these, being made ashamed through repentance, unites spirit and soul in obedience to the word, then, as Paul also says, "there is among you neither male nor female." For the soul, standing apart from this fashioning by which male and female are distinguished, passes over into union, being neither the one nor the other. But this noble fellow, in a rather more Platonic vein, holds that the soul, being divine, having been made female by desire, has come down from above into becoming and decay.
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