How do we handle the science of sex/gender

[brianna]

OK see I this that is getting to an idea that is because of sin that we have mutations and I quite frankly disprove of that idea. I think God makes each person how he wanted to make them. I see genetic mutilations like my albino-ism or someones down syndrome or even sex chromosomes mutations as something that God made. I mean you can disprove me but I don’t think a Church is against that idea. God made each person how they were meant to be I don’t think my albino-ism is gonna go away once we get glorified bodies I think the difficulties of being albino will go away but it is so much apart of me that is won’t just get “healed” because I don’t see it as something that needs to me “fixed”

 

[Angel_Gabriel]

We’re certainly free to disagree here. I don’t see it that way but to each his/her own. All my own genetic struggles are proof to me that I have a fallen body.

 

[RhodesianSon]

I’m sorry you don’t appreciate it but it is true none the less. It is an abnormal feature and a result of a genetic mutation.

And no, I’m not saying God makes mistakes. I am saying in our fallen world creation has been corrupted by sin and so genetic mistakes happen as a result of our fallen nature.

 

[Annie]

Just because they are mutations does mean that God messed up somehow.

No one is saying that God messed up somehow, only that in the physical world there are things that happen which are not usual.

does that mean that he ONLY created male and female

Yes, He created only male and female.

the mire existence of mutations support that idea that he made more that two because obviously he made those people.

First, the XY variations mostly result in sterility, so they do not get carried on in the species.

These problems are caused by something unusual happening to the genes but they end there. It is not a feature which will be carried on in humanity and become a feature of the species.

Thus these are not “new sexes.”

God does not make each of us “from scratch”, so to speak, the way He did Adam and Eve. Instead, He created Adam and Eve and left the physical procreating to us, right?

And because of original sin, in the physical world stuff happens: good stuff, bad stuff, neutral stuff. God is not pushing things around in the world to make things happen; the physical world works under physical laws and stuff just happens, including unusual genetic changes.

 

[brianna]

Look I reject the idea the genetic mutations are mistakes or signs of a fallen world. that is a protestant argument. I don’t see mutations as sign of our falleness perhaps the difficulty people face who have mutations but not the mutation itself. I think God made that mutation happen and for a reason. I think that mutilations is God works bout can see that all through create by the evolution of species.

 

[brianna]

God make every person according to his will and yes we are fallen but mutation in biology is not a sign that we are fall. Look at the deaf community for a moment you really think the their deafness was mistake of a fallen world because I can tell from experience they would not view it that way. I have one question it moves slightly away from sex but still relates. What make some one disabled?

 

[Wesrock]

Okay let try and better explain what I am saying.
Just because they are mutations does mean that God messed up somehow. The existence of the mutation itself proves that there are more than two sexes. The Church has always said that God created male and female (which is true) but does that mean that he ONLY created male and female because the mire existence of mutations support that idea that he made more that two because obviously he made those people.

Human nature is ordered to develop into one of two sexes, as it is ordered to developing two arms, two legs, ten figures, and a capable mind. Sometimes the nature does not manifest fully in every way, or something interferes in its development. A fertilized egg having too many or two chromosomes is an example of something in the development getting off track.

I disagree with the others about sex boiling down to genotype. Phenotype seems closer to the mark, and whether the person is more ordered to producing large gametes or small gametes.

The existence of people with a genotype different than XX or XY doesn’t show that there’s more sexes. It’s a cause for how one of the two sexes can fail to develop in some way due to an atypical genotype.

What is proper to the nature and what is atypical needs to be observed in a population.

It doesn’t make anyone less of a person.

Everything and everyone is created by God, but ot’s a bit delusional to believe God doesn’t let anything go wrong in the world or allow people to suffer or be born things that are atypical.

 

[Hodos]

So I recently learned that science has actually shown that there are more than just two sexes mean there is more than XY and XX. So how do us Catholics deal with this discovery’s when it comes to the whole one male and one female because there are plenty of people out there with XYX or XXX and so on. The science of sex is much more complicated than just male and female boxes so how do we view it now?

No there are not. There are two sexes or genders in the human species. There are in fact genetic anomalies that result in various genetic disorders, but is not the norm. And typically people suffering from such disorders are in fact sterile. When encountering such individuals we treat them as we would anyone with a medical disorder, with compassion and love. That doesn’t mean though that we change the normative definition of biology. God’s word on how he created sex and marriage before the fall still stands as the normative definition for God’s intended design for creation and procreation.

 

[redcatholic]

Nobody says they are less. Two of my kids And I have a deletion in the 1q21 gene. You can’t argue with the science. They have the deletion. That doesn’t make them less. It means there was a deletion or a mutation that caused something.

 

[redcatholic]

Yeah, the science of sex is one of the clearest easiest sciences you can have. Are there anomalies? Sure. But it’s pretty cut and dry as far as genetic science goes.

 

[Annie]

God make every person according to his will and yes we are fallen but mutation in biology is not a sign that we are fall.

I don’t think that is a Protestant idea as you mentioned above. (Link)

There are two kinds of God’s will: His permissive will and His actual (?) will. He permits things to happen because otherwise He would be running everything directly and everything would be continually jumbled.

He foresaw you, the you that you are in your entirety, but if we said that He directly created everyone, how would we be able to answer that some are born incredibly and painfully crippled?

That you do not see your unusualness as a serious problem, that the deaf do not see their unusualness as a serious problem may be because they are not; however, deaf people have died from the lack of their ability to hear. Albino people are maimed and killed in parts of Africa. In those circumstances, these features which are merely unusual in most situations become serious problems, right?

So this is all complicated, and you are trying to apply two different fields of study (biology and theology) to support each other without understanding what each field is saying or what the limits are of each field.

 

[Useless]

Except the trans movement doesn’t even use this argument. They claim that there is some mental/spiritual identifier of “gender” that you can belong to regardless of DNA profile.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

So how do us Catholics deal with this discovery’s

I don’t “deal with” them. I leave them to God and live my life.

If I were actually a person with an unusual genetic makeup, or the parent of one, I could consult my pastor and others in the Church for guidance. I am aware of at least two people who have done precisely that. It is their personal business. It is not necessary that I think about it at all.

 

[Thorolfr]

I’m sorry you don’t appreciate it but it is true none the less. It is an abnormal feature and a result of a genetic mutation.

And no, I’m not saying God makes mistakes. I am saying in our fallen world creation has been corrupted by sin and so genetic mistakes happen as a result of our fallen nature.

Genetic mutations are not just “genetic mistakes” that are “a result of our fallen nature.” Genetic mutations often occur spontaneously and there would be no evolution without them. Some mutations are probably neutral, some are harmful and some are beneficial. For example, the mutation that allowed some people and their descendants to digest milk and other dairy products has probably been a beneficial mutation. The mutation that occurred about 10,000 years ago so that some people now have blue eyes is probably neutral, i.e. neither harmful nor especially beneficial.

 

[Juvenal]

There are two sexes.
Sometimes biological anomalies happen.
I mean with all our technology and information in our pockets we are now a society that doesn’t know male or female.

Two sexes plus these other things adds up to more than two sexes, unless our theology gets in the way of our arithmetic.

 

[redcatholic]

No. They don’t. There are two sexes. Very rarely there are chromosomal anomalies and distortions. Just like there is one human race but a Down syndrome person is part of it.

 

[Juvenal]

Genetic mutations are not just “genetic mistakes” that are “a result of our fallen nature.” Genetic mutations often occur spontaneously and there would be no evolution without them. Some mutations are probably neutral, some are harmful and some are beneficial. For example, the mutation that allowed some people and their descendants to digest milk and other dairy products has probably been a beneficial mutation. The mutation that occurred about 10,000 years ago so that some people now have blue eyes is probably neutral, i.e. neither harmful nor especially beneficial.

I’d go considerably further.

Ascribing mutation to bad behavior is bad science. Yes, there are genetic defects that occur because a parent drank while pregnant, or abused drugs, but amongst the trillions of beings engaging in the imperfect replication we call reproduction, a vanishingly small proportion can be laid to any kind of human behavior.

Other than those very few “sins” we can speak of that lead to defects, there is no physical mechanism that can be said to cause mutations, and certainly not the sins Christian tradents considered most heinous, like murder, or blasphemy.

Next, ascribing mutation to sin is bad morality. It says that the punishment for sin falls on someone other than the sinner. That is the very definition of injustice. Jesus choice to take on another’s punishments is acclaimed exactly because of this, and is likewise negated if it’s merely a common consequence of a divine will toward humans.

More than either of these, it’s bad theology. When the interpretation of a divine text is made contingent on science, the text itself is made profane. These texts were created in language suited to the understanding of the original audience, including beliefs and legends familiar to their contemporaries. Neither Moses nor Paul knew anything about chromosomes, any more than the physical relationship between the sun and the stars in the sky. They wrote about what they knew about, their relationship to their god. That was their purpose. That should be enough.

 

[CaptainPrudeman]

I’m interested to see where this is stated.

 

[HomeschoolDad]

Boys have a… and girls have a …

Yes, so I’ve heard.

I know the Church maintains that there are two genders, and that everyone, regardless of their genetic or physical departure from the norm, is nevertheless either one or the other, male or female.

But I can foresee that there could be an anomalous situation where it really can’t be said “which one they are” — either “about half one and about half the other” (not only physiology or even chromosomes, but psychological makeup and “what they feel like they are” along with those factors, and possibly more important than those factors), or possibly “not really either one”. This would not vitiate the Church’s teaching, from Scripture, that “male and female He made them”, but rather, would acknowledge that, in some rare cases, there are people who don’t fit into either category to the exclusion of the other, nor even “some characteristics of one, but basically the other”. I’m afraid that the Church is trying to “shoehorn” the reality of these rare situations into a dichotomy that might not hold true for each and every member of the human race. I’m not at all clear, that it is an immutable doctrine of the Catholic Faith, that there is no such thing as a totally intersex person whose sexual identity is irresolvable. The exact nature of the Ethiopian’s “eunuchness” isn’t discussed in Acts chapter 8, though male pronouns are used.

Though played for laughs (and it would not be possible to do this in today’s world), the “Pat” character from Saturday Night Live is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. Thankfully, the question of “what, exactly, does Pat have?” never came up, and was never resolved.

 

[HomeschoolDad]

Because it was understood back then that a eunuch was a man who had their genitals removed.
[/quote]

Not necessarily.

Matthew 19:12 - “For there are eunuchs, who were born so from their mother’s womb: and there are eunuchs, who were made so by men: and there are eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. He that can take, let him take it.” (DRV)

Some might have had their genitals removed, while others might have been born with some sort of intersex deformity, for which “eunuch” would be a generic term — in the latter case, what else could it be? Even if they “presented as male”, to use the modern expression, in actual fact, the reality of the situation might be something quite different. Hard to say. My point is, if the only thing we know about the Ethiopian eunuch is what Scripture says, we don’t know any specifics about how he came to be a eunuch.