I’ve studied this issue for the last few years, reading several books on the topic, scouring the Internet etc., and I’ve come up with only one physiological reason for why Gender Identity Activists insist that Gender is on a spectrum. And, counter-intuitively for most people, that Sex is ASSIGNED at birth, as opposed to recognized at birth. Which leads a growing number of Activists to claim that Sex, too, is on a spectrum. Because since sex is ‘assigned’ it is therefore a social construct that can be reconstructed, thus leading activists to claim you can change your sex. And even more radically some say there are more than two sexes. Yep. That’s what many are now saying. [See video in my next post.]
But before looking at the physiological reason, let’s look briefly at the philosophy and some real world consequences of what I’m going to call Gender Ideology.
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Gender Ideologues have philosophical reasons for pushing Gender Identity and Expression as valid categories not only for civil rights protection but also because many of them seek a fundamental restructuring of society. That philosophy, with its desire to restructure society, is usually joined at the hip with a Critical Theory offshoot called Queer Theory (I should explore that theory in more detail at another time, but fair warning, by design, QT is virtually an incomprehensible, convoluted mess.) For now let me briefly quote a satisfactory summary of QT from Wikipedia:
Queer theory and politics necessarily celebrate transgression in the form of visible difference from norms. These 'Norms' are then exposed to be norms, not natures or inevitabilities. Gender and sexual identities are seen, in much of this work, to be demonstrably defiant definitions and configurations.
Because this definition of queerness does not have a fixed reference point, Judith Butler has described the subject of queer theory as a site of ‘collective contestation’. She suggests that ‘queer’ as a term should never be ‘fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes’.
Fundamentally, queer theory does not construct or defend any particular identity, but instead, grounded in post-structuralism and deconstruction, it works to actively critique heteronormativity, exposing and breaking down traditional assumptions that sexual and gender identities are presumed to be heterosexual or cisgender. [emphasis mine]
Queerness in this sense is a very fluid way of assessing the world around us and interacting with it. Judith Butler, QT’s most prominent theoretician, says, ‘Queerness’ ought to be characterized by “collective contestation.” This is all very much like other 20th Century Critical Theories, deriving as they do from a Marxist analysis of society and its ills. For example, Critical Race Theory like Queer Theory seeks to collectively overthrow “oppressive” narratives or discourses. In CRT racism is opposed. In Queer Theory that “oppressive” narrative is “heteronormativity.” (Remember Ms. Barnes?) All this fluidity has as its goal the destabilization of cultural norms, especially Western Capitalist and Religious cultural norms. Astute observers can see how a variety of philosophical motivations, social, economic, anti-religious, etc., energize their “critical” efforts.
If you’ve been following the recent social movements energized by the various Critical Theories, and after reading the Judith Butler quote above about “collective contestation,” you will understand why these various movements are so relentless to shutdown, shout down, and outright cancel, or “deplatform” any dissent. For many, fighting “oppression,” by any means necessary, is the animating dogma.
Previously relegated to feminist and gender studies departments of academia, QT has now “hit the big time.” In the Western world, QT is reforming cultural consciousness and shaping public policy. Let me give just one example of the in-roads that Queer Theory has made in our popular culture by linking to the following 2016 CNN story “What It Means To Be Gender-fluid.”
CNN starts off the report by writing that gender identity and expression “can change every day or even every few hours,” and this fluidity “can be displayed in how we dress, express and describe ourselves.” Moreover, it added, “Everyone’s gender exists on a spectrum.”
Of course, as all of us recognize, “expression” is variable. But I want to highlight “identity” here. This view of humanity explicitly states that our subjective mental state is the overriding determining factor of identity. And this mental state, as mental states do, can change as often as our shifting moods or needs dictate. If adopted, this point of view renders any effort to form rational public policy hopelessly problematic.
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Here’s one example of the practical consequence of aligning society with a movement that idealizes radical disembodiment.
Public safe spaces for biological women, spaces that were constructed so that men and women could work and recreate together outside the home will be threatened if today’s radical disembody movement proceeds unhindered. Those safe spaces were constructed with full recognition of the specific biological differences, privacy concerns, AND, most importantly, differences in vulnerability between men & women. If the radical disembody movement wins the argument public spaces like sex-specific intimate facilities such as restrooms, locker rooms, etc., could be entered by a biological male identifying as a female on Tuesday morning, and then by Tuesday afternoon that same male could revert back to a male identity and access the nearest male restroom “in an emergency.”
Under this logic, saying you are a ‘trans-woman,’ with the right to enter female spaces, is a totally unfalsifiable assertion.
Real world safety concerns and Law Enforcement problems proliferate under these “Gender-Identity-Based Access Policies” (GIBAPs). Kenneth Lanning, who for 20 years worked in the Behavioral Science Unit and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy in Quantico, describes this real-world problem:
Law enforcement officers and prosecutors will be less likely to record, investigate, or charge indecent exposure or peeping offenses in a GIBAP environment, because there is no objective standard for determining whether someone born a male can lawfully be present in a women-only facility. It would be more difficult to prove lascivious intent when self-reported gender identity drives access rights, and easier to accuse law enforcement personnel of discrimination. This is made even more difficult when that self-reporting need not be corroborated in any way whatsoever.1Expert Declaration and Report of Kenneth V. Lanning, Defendants’ and Intervenor-Defendants’ Brief, Exhibit M, 18.
Sometimes it is alleged that people like myself or detective Lanning are guilty of falsely ascribing impure motives to those who have actually gone through the transitioning process and truly identify as Transgender. Actually we are more concerned about the non-transgender male sex offenders who are “driving a truck” through this very real GIBAP loophole in public policy. The examples are multitude!
As every law enforcement official knows, public restrooms are crime attractors. Women and girls are especially at risk in a GIBAP world. You don’t need a PhD in Criminology to know this. Again, it is not necessarily the Transgender person committing crimes but the opportunistic male predator who will in a world with “Gender-Identity-Based Access Policies” (GIBAPs).
Establishing criminal intent will be much harder in a world where biological males can self-identify “at any time” with the opposite sex and legally enter the safe spaces of women and girls.
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Here is another real world example. During an LGBTQ Presidential Forum in 2019 Joe Biden said the following:
"In prison, the determination should be that your sexual identity is defined by what you say it is, not what in fact the prison says it is."
Today, in the British prison system at least 1 in 50 male prisoners identifies as transgender. Because of a similar prison policy, like the one Biden supported, a convicted rapist and child molester in the United Kingdom was placed in a women’s prison and subsequently sexually assaulted four female inmates.
Is this totally subjective gender fluid world, the world we want to live in?
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Apart from a Queer Theory saturated worldview, I can find only one physiological reason for why Gender Identity Activists propagandize in this way and why they say “sex is assigned” at birth. And that reason has to do with DSD’s or Disorders of Sexual Development (A categorization that Activists want to relabel “Differences of Sexual Development”).
Let’s look at those for a few minutes.
Sometimes these disorders (I refuse to call them differences) result in the formation of two sets of sex organs, or an incomplete development of reproductive organs. They are sometimes caused by genetic mutations and at other times by chromosomal or hormonal defects.
But because we have people with ambiguous genitalia and chromosomal irregularities this is considered grounds for throwing the whole classification system up in the air and dispensing altogether with the male – female binary. As I just outlined above there are real world consequences to going down this path of eliminating the male – female sex binary as the overriding identifier of sex.
Unbelievably some prominent Medical Associations are playing along too. I think they have become politicized by radical Queer Theory Subjectivism. More about that in future posts.
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I’m trying hard to be fair about this issue. So I don’t want to misrepresent Gender Ideologues. But in all my research I can find only one objective reason for why they say sex is assigned at birth. It’s the only reason why our grade school teachers were instructed to abandon the “biological sex” section of the Genderbread Person for the “sex assigned at birth” section of the Gender Unicorn. [See my post Our Schools and Gender Ideology.]
They hang their hat on DSD’s which occur in 1 out of 5000 births.2This figure is found in Peter A. Lee et al., “Global Disorders of Sex Development Update since 2006: Perceptions, Approach and Care,” Hormone Research in Paediatrics 85 (2016): 159.
That’s it! That’s the only thing that grounds their ideology in anything remotely biological and scientifically objective. Everything else in their ideology is about the totally subjective lived experiences of the “disembodied”individual. Individual perception and desire are sacrosanct. Not to mention free floating. In other words nothing more grounded than “my truth and your truth.”
Again, I repeat from my “What is Sex” post, since biological sex is grounded in an organism’s organization for reproduction, DSD’s are not mere differences.
Here are some Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD’s).
- Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) The most common DSD occurring in 1 out of 14,000 births is a recessive disorder caused by two parents who carry a faulty (mutated) gene which prevents the normal production of cortisol thus altering the development of primary and secondary sex characteristics of their child. This often leads to the virilization or masculinization of the female external genitalia producing obvious genital ambiguity. Internally these people develop and function as women.
- Klinefelter syndrome: Instead of 46 chromosomes, someone with this syndrome has 47. They develop as males but with abnormal body proportions and enlarged breasts, infertility is common.
- Turner syndrome: People with 45 chromosomes. Instead of having XX or XY they have only X chromosomes. They develop as infertile women because two X chromosomes are necessary for the normal development of ovaries. Causes numerous health and development problems, including but not limited to short stature, lymphedema, infertility, webbed neck, coarctation of the aorta, ADHD, amenorrhoea, and obesity.
- Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome: “People with androgen insensitivity syndrome develop as normal-appearing but sterile women, lacking a uterus and oviducts and having internal testes in the abdomen.”
- According to an article by Bonnie McCann-Crosby and V. Reid Sutton, “Disorders of Sexual Development,” in the journal Clinics in Perinatology 42 (June 2015): 403, a severe genetic mutation results in the testes never forming and therefore the body never masculinizes because of testosterone deficiency. These individuals develop as females who are infertile (because they lack a second X chromosome).
- Ovotesticular disorder (also called true hermaphroditism) – A condition where an individual has both testicular and ovary tissue.
- Mosaicism: People who develop from a single fertilized egg but because of a genetic mutation have a patchwork of genetically different cells. In other words two different sets of DNA, with some of the body’s cells being XX or a single X and some being XY. Klinefelter syndrome already mentioned is one kind of Mosaicism.
- Chimera: When two different embryos combine early in a pregnancy. Again, some cells are XX and some cells have XY chromosomes. Fewer than 100 cases documented worldwide.
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Okay, after having waded through that, what should we conclude? These are disorders. Not differences. My brother was born with a cardio-vascular disorder which is why he died at the age of 21. His cardio-vascular system was incapable of working as designed and gave out way before the normal “expiration date.” Disorders of Sexual Development in almost all cases result in a short-circuiting of our reproductive system. It is a disorder. We should stop using DSD’s as an excuse for saying the male-female binary is obsolete.
Finally, and here is where the “assigned at birth” label gets attached, in the past when doctors were confronted with an infant having one of these disorders they had to make a careful judgment as to which sex the child was most likely to be comfortable with as the child matured. Sometimes in the past, but not so much today, actual surgical intervention occurred to assist the infants future development. Occasionally the doctor would “assign” either a male or female path forward, depending on the doctor’s professional judgement. Birth certificate sex was therefore “assigned” in these exceptionally rare cases.
This is why Gender Activists use their “assigned at birth” “social construction” language, providing some of the rationale for their radical disembody movement. (Apart from their philosophical rationale of course.)
Does that sound rational to you? Throwing out the male – female binary because a relatively low number of humans have one of these disorders which occasionally necessitates a sex “assignment” by a medical professional is not reasonable to me. Does that non-binary world sound reasonable to you?
It does if you want to fundamentally restructure society by tossing out all sexual norms, norms born out of biology and religious Truth.
Now of course most people are not agenda driven in this way. They just want to be considerate of “difference.” That’s completely understandable and loving. And we can still do that. We can still love people and embrace those with these disorders without buying into the radical social agenda being pushed on their behalf. And we can love people who are genuinely confused, who think it is possible and advisable to reject their biological sex.
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