The Gender Revolution

By Patricia Weerakoon  The Bible says God created humanity male and female. But the Bible doesn’t give us detailed information about how our bodies develop as either male or female.  God did however give us the ability to carefully analyse the world and discover the processes whereby our sex development takes place. In terms of Christian theology, this ability to understand the world fits into the broad category of what the Bible calls ‘wisdom.’ King Solomon, the figurehead of Old Testament wisdom, analysed the world: he “spoke about plant life … animals and birds, reptiles and fish” (1 Kings 4:33).  In God’s kindness to humanity, discovering these processes does not require religious faith – Christian or any other. All it requires is the humility to pay attention to the external objective realities of the world.  That’s what science does. ‘Religious’ people interpret those realities as being established by God. Atheists don’t. But both accept the authority of t...

By Patricia Weerakoon   When we biologists say that sex in humans is binary, and there are two sexes, male and female, we are not talking about sexual intercourse, chromosomes, body types (body shape, breasts), behaviour (masculine or feminine) or personal identity (the so-called inner feeling that you are male or female). When biologists say that sex in humans is binary, we are making a statement about the number of distinct reproductive strategies the human species is capable of.  The term ‘reproductive strategy’ is a biological concept. It’s not something unique to humans. It simply means the system for propagating genes and forming a new individual organism. Different kinds of plants and animals have different reproductive strategies. For example, some plants reproduce asexually, through budding or fragmentation. The new plants are genetically identical to the parent, because no new DNA has been introduced.  Humans possess a binary reproductive strategy. I mentioned i...

By Patricia Weerakoon   As Kamal said in a previous post , “[t]he biological basis of binary sex should not be contentious” because our embodied biology “demonstrate[s] that there are only two sexes.”  But that invariably raises the question “what about people who are intersex?” Transgender ideology trains people to believe that the “I” in the LGBTQI acronym is evidence against binary sexuality.  The brief answer is: no, it’s not. I prefer the term ‘disorders of sex development’ (some use the term differences in sex development) because it better represents what happens to people’s bodies and is therefore less confusing.  There are two reasons why intersex isn’t evidence against binary gender, one scientific, the other to do with a proper description of people’s experiences.  The scientific understanding of male and female  The well-established, scientifically verified definition of man and woman is based on a person’s body structure – in particular, the pu...