A man or woman is defined by their biological sex at birth.
So if they have 5ARD or 17BHDD syndromes and change sex - as some (not all) do… then even if they father children, they’re still female as they were at birth?
Thank you for your prayers, by the way. I don’t consider myself “unfortunate” though, rather I count my blessings. I’ve faced unusual challenges, but have been granted the strength to overcome them. Not all are so lucky. And as a reward for putting up with the ignorance, cruelty, spite, and all too often medically ridiculous policies put in place by well-meaning but hopelessly ill-informed people, I’ve been personally promised a special place in the hereafter according to Isaiah 56:3-5, as long as I do my best.
[BIBLEDRB]Isaiah 56:3-5[/BIBLEDRB]
My question was serious. Because the definition of “man” and “woman” is easy for 59 people out of 60, but for 1.7% of the population - and that means 5 million in America, not completely obvious. For something like 200,000, the question is fraught, and medical, legal, and theological opinions will differ.
Some examples:
The Guevedoces of the Dominican Republic.
In an isolated village of the southwestern Dominican Republic, 2% of the live births were in the 1970’s, guevedoces (actually male pseudohermaphrodites). These children appeared to be girls at birth, but at puberty these ‘girls’ sprout muscles, testes, and a penis. For the rest of their lives they are men in nearly all respects (see photograph 6 below). Their underlying pathology was found to be a deficiency of the enzyme, 5-alpha Reductase.
Otherwise knows as 5-alpha-reductase-2 deficiency syndrome, 5ARD for short.
I’m a female pseudohermaphrodite, by the way. Born looking male at birth, feminising later in life. When you have the brain of a cheerleader, but the rest of your body looks like that of a rugby footballer… it’s not very nice. Embarrassing to say the least. Heartbreaking too. But for those like me, we get a miraculous natural cure. Not all do. See what I mean about “counting my blessings”? “Unfortunate” is possibly the most inaccurate word possible to describe my escape from the Hell of Transsexuality. For that is what Transsexuality is, a mostly male brain in a mostly female body - as with Chaz Bono - or the reverse.
I make no claim about the gender of their souls. I’m not saying “spiritually” cross-sexed. Or “psychologically” cross-sexed. I’m saying they are anatomically cross-sexed, you can see this in autopsies and MRI imaging.
This has effects on their instincts, their reflexes, their emotional response, their sense of which sex they are, even the senses which are sexually dimorphic, and differ between men and women. As Professor of Urology Sidney Ecker wrote to me:
We showed how Transgender Brains think, smell, and hear like the opposite sex.
He really meant Transsexual - as I said, Transgender is sometimes used as a synonym; and by “opposite sex” he really meant
apparently opposite sex. But you get the idea.
So - what criteria do you use to define someone’s sex? Their chromosomes (XY=male, even if they’ve given birth, XX=female, even if they’ve fathered children, and XXY=what)? Their appearance at birth? Because that may change a lot, from natural causes or medical intervention? Their minds (due to the brain’s neuro-anatomy)? That doesn’t change from birth - but may match neither the chromosomes nor appearance?
It was a serious question. And to say “as for the intersexed, well, we’ll pray for them…” that doesn’t really help us when we apply for a marriage license, or even get arrested for wearing the “wrong” clothing or using the “wrong” restroom. Or get accused of being by definition both homosexual and lesbian, even if celibate.
Thistle - please have a look at these two videos. One a report from Gaza about another common cause of male pseudohermaphroditism, 17BHDD, less complete than caused by 5ARD. And another about two Intersexed women in Australia, one just out of her teens, and one over 50.
edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/12/17/gaza.gender.id/
youtube.com/watch?v=n_DeixA0Rsc