I was using both deliberately since they do largely conform. I only meant to say the objectively verifiable existence of hardware (sexual development) irregularities should make us more open to the possibility that variation in software (gender development) might very well be subject to similar variability. The subjective nature of gender doesn’t mean everyone should find it equally easy to conform to expectations. That is an unfortunate but too common bias.
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I agree that “gender” is a fluid and hard-to-define term which seems to be subjective (based on personal perceptions and cultural expectations etc.). With respect to biological sex, despite rare chromosomal and developmental irregularities, people only ever produce eggs or sperm (or else are sterile). So, most biologists in the circles I hang around in would say there are only 2 biological sexes (one doesn’t observe gametes that are partial egg and partial sperm even in “intersex” XXY or XYY people). There are organisms (such as some fish) which actually may change biological sex throughout their lifetimes–their gonads change from producing sperm to producing eggs, but this is not the case in humans.
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If you check out that thread Mathew linked I think you’ll discover the situation is actually more complicated than that.
I think a main thing to remember is that sex and gender are not synonymous in today’s usage of the terms. Gender is socially constructed and has to do with what makes you a man or a woman in the eyes of your community. Biological sex is determined by a combination of factors including sex chromosomes, hormones, internal and external gonads, and secondary sex traits. These factors can fail to align neatly on a male/female binary for a number of reasons which lead to intersex conditions and differences or disorders of sexual development.
Biologos produced a high school curriculum that has a module on inclusion of individuals with intersex conditions in society and the church.
The majority of individuals with DSDs strongly identify with one gender identity or another, they do not consider themselves non-binary or transgender. The issue of non-binary or transgender gender identity most often applies to people who were assigned a gender based on unambiguous biological sex at birth and then they later reject that gender assignment.
I think the idea of sexual orientation and sexual ethics often gets conflated with discussions of gender identity, but they are separate issues. Gender identity and biological sex don’t cause sexual orientation and sexual orientation does not cause sexual behavior; they are correlates.
And just a reminder that everyone is welcome to discuss the science around gender and DSDs but discussion of the ethics and politics of same sex attraction, same-sex sexual behavior, and same-sex marriage are off limits on the public boards. You can message people privately if you want to hear people’s opinions on these topics. Since the BioLogos network includes people from both affirming and non-affirming Christian denominations, we want people of all persuasions to be able to post here in peace without having to debate or defend their positions or identity.
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With the sports I think it’s a easy solution. Get rid of man and female sports and combine them. Let the winners advance and the losers lose. If it turns out men dominate it then so be it. If it turns out it’s 50/50 that’s equally fantastic. Just do it by weight divisions like it’s already broken down for each side.
Thanks, I did read the link. I still think its not that complicated. Despite the wide variety of rare chromosomal and developmental irregularities cited in that article there are still no examples I can see of the regular production of gametes that are midway between eggs and sperm??? (let alone a “whole spectrum” of gamete types). Hence, the biologists I hang around with would still say there are only 2 biological sexes and not “a whole spectrum of biological sexes”. That doctors may have (legitimate) difficulty assigning a sex at birth to a few individuals based on their external morphology would not negate the concept of fundamentally only 2 biological sexes… but that’s because the biologists (zoologists) I interact with define biological sex based on the gametes (not on chromosome numbers, hormone levels or morphology).
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But it is possible for a single person to produce both. True hermaphrodites (with both gonads and ovaries) have been fertile. There may be no documented cases of producing both let alone both being fertile but that may only be a matter of time and investigation. After all, we usually only know they have ones which are fertile because they have children… we generally don’t simply experiment with such things to get an answer to the question.
Ah… the high handed approach…
While we are at it why don’t we get rid of handicap sports. And frankly there are sports which just seem stupid to me so why don’t we get rid of those altogether.
OR… we can just let people do as they choose with their time in whatever organizations they choose. Why we could even have sports teams which just have players from a company or from a church which play teams from other companies or churches. …wait… we do that already!
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As far as I can tell, the same things that don’t sit well with me (excessive conservativism and Campbellite tendencies, primarily). But I have noticed that essentially everyone greets essentially everyone every morning, and the only biases that I have noticed are “this person is closer to me” or “this person is a first-time visitor”.
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Not really a good option. Opportunities for women athletes would disappear. Few sports would have both women and men competing equally together, mostly individual sports like gymnastics that favor coordination over brute strength. Even weight limits would not be too effective, and for spectator sports, it would not be economically viable.
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Good discussion of a difficult subject. It seems that we do not do very well in church for many that are atypical, whether it be for sexual issues, marital status, or just how we dress. I think most churches have made good progress in some areas, less in others. Single adults are still excluded from the “inner circle” of many church groups regardless of gender. It is obviously not biblical, seeing as how few spouses are noted among New Testament characters, including Jesus. So, a great deal must be cultural. It is difficult to step back from cultural bias to see things.
That’s my point. It seems like often that’s not really understood in here. Looks like a biological reason to separating most sports and not dividing it over how you feel.
Editing this in.
To be clear I’m 100% ok with trans people as far as in I’m not creeped out, repulsed or whatever by them. I’m ok with calling a trans woman a woman and I’m ok with a random trans women using the woman’s bathroom at the store. None of it really affects me or anyone else. But the fact is, regardless of how amazing and how much “corrective” surgery they had done and how pretty some of them can turn out , and no matter how accommodating I am to their feelings such as what pronouns to use, in the end I still view them as a guy. I would never fall in love with a trans person as a potential romantic partner because I’m not gay and so ultimately, I think of them as guys even if I am calling them girls and hers or whatever.
I feel like often people act as if that fake aspect ( such ad me saying her when I still think of them as a him ) is a jerk move on my part. But it seems like often these issues , the same core issues of male vs female , pops up on issues such as sports and prisons. It’s why many young #1 girls get upset over losing a sports position to a trans girl.
There is obviously some aspects to. Just like most men and women, most trans people are not super athletes. I went and watched Noped with a friend yesterday who is a trans woman. I was slightly paranoid about people thinking we were dating. Enough that I called my fiancée in line just to talk to her for a minute to tell her I love her just so others could hear me say I love you babe on the phone to help eliminate the thought of them thinking me and my friend was dating. I felt , I guess insecure in perception of others , even when I bought the tickets and held the door open for them. I purposely waited another 10 seconds to hold the door for the couple who was after us.
I’ve ‘mentioned before, I’m 100% ok with the general basic freedoms that we all have being applied to trans women and men, but I still feel some home back when it comes to allowing trans women compete against cis women for scholarships, sports and how they get incarcerated.
I was just making a joke. We don’t erase biology from a wide range of sports because then it would basically just be guys. Even when you get the top female in her sport , let’s take football. Whoever the top church is in football would get crushed by the typical dude in football. The best women in MMA seem to never stand a chance against the average dude in her weight class who trains also.
We just need to expand this to life in general. More people need to stop pretending there is not a very clear biological aspect to it that goes beyond just simply how you feel. Same reason why some dude that sucks in his league should not just simply be able to say I’m a her and then outcompete every other woman in her new league. But it seems like when you point that out you’re just a bigoted idiot who does not understand.
Same reason why women , even a very liberal woman, does not typically want to be housed with violent trans women in prison.
From what I’d read, although the very rare human may develop both testes and ovaries, only one of the systems is functional or else (more commonly) the person is sterile. Do you know of a published case of a human successfully siring children by his/her sperm AND his/her egg? I don’t know of a case…I’d be really curious if there is one.
Even so, hermaphrodism in biology (not rare in invertebrates) is considered to be a strategy of reproducing through both sexes at once, but it is not considered to be a “third sex”. Hermaphrodites produce both eggs (female gametes) and sperm (male gametes) not a “hybrid gamete type”. Another way to think of it biologically is that every individual (of sexually reproducing species) has come into existence by the union of a sperm and an egg (irrespective of chromosomal mutations or DNA abnormalities that may give rise to variable phenotypes related to hormone titres or secondary sex characteristics).
I’m not familiar with this. Can you tell me about it?
It was a profound realization that egalitarianism is not believing everyone is the same, as some of the straw man arguments put forth, but rather that because we are different, we should strive for equality to reach our potential.
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Could it be that in the same way that the Bible reflects old world science when it comes to cosmology (suggestions of a flat earth cosmology in Genesis and psalms, for example), the Bible might simply be using descriptions and categories that were culturally recognized and understandable at the time when it comes to sex and gender? I always thought that the statement “male and female he created them” in Genesis 1:27 was more of a description than a prescription that there can only be two genders or that nothing is allowed beyond the male-female gender binary.
The way that I think about it is that the gender binary makes an important theological point about the nature the relationship between God and his creation (e.g., they belong together), but that it is not the only way to think about gender from a Christian perspective. I would argue that being non-binary or intersex also reflects the image of God in some way. I know this might be controversial to some people, but it is something to consider.
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Well In the article from Scientific American I linked in that thread is a case of a woman who had given birth twice already being found to have both XX and XY genetic material. That isn’t what you asked for but is pretty shocking.
A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby’s chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine—but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother’s womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male. “That’s kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says James.
Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions—known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs)—often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl.
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I agree with you and I’d link it to thoughts about nature being too red of tooth and claw to reflect the creation of a good God. As a non I’m content to say that life finds a way but it works just as well to say that God finds a way.
So as to this diminishing the perfection of creation I would think, at least for those who accept evolution, the occasional transcription error is actually essential, not a mistake. Life or God could find no way without the variation arising from the occasional transcription error. It is the price we pay to adjust to changing demands.
Yes, highly unusual for sure, but that’s why (most zoologists I interact with) don’t classify sex based on rare chromosome aberrations, but rather the type of gametes produced. For example, in humans, the following chromosome types would be classified based on the production of eggs or sperm as:
X – Female
XX – Female
XXY – Male
XY – Male
XYY – Male
XXXY – Male
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