And what should an intersex feel?
Now, let me tell you that even someone who isn’t intersex sometime can’t help but feel in a way that is disconnected from his/her biological reality, and even these persons can’t be blaimed for feeling like that, it’s not like they chose it or that they became that way after a life of depravity, they are born with this disposition, even if they are rare.
And if we talk about proper intersex conditions they are real and medically recognized, but in the strict clinical sense they are even rarer; and the subset of cases in which sex remains genuinely difficult to determine even after specialist evaluation is rarer still. Such cases call for compassion and humility, but rare hard cases cannot bear the weight of redefining an anthropology.
To use a purely logical analogy (the merely analogic nature of the example I’m going to make can’t be stressed enough, lest someone accuses me of lumping transgenders and intersex people with psychopaths), the existence of a small minority of people with absent empathy doesn’t prove that empathy is merely socially constructed (and psychopathy is, apparently, even more common than intersex conditions).
In other words, my point is: an atypical minority doesn’t redefine an anthropology, and from a Christian standpoint, we should remember that Christian anthropology teaches that human nature, though not destroyed, is wounded by the Fall and inclined to disorder. That woundedness appears in different ways in different people (one may be more prone to pride, another to lust, another to greed, another to anger, and in some people there can be a complete lack of empathy and in other people a more or less complete disconnection between what they feel and their biological reality, even if these cases are rarer than propensity to greed, lust etc).
Compassion for individual persons and the charity that must be shown to them individually (and I can personally attest that these persons are often very good persons, with a very high sensibility and very caring) doesn’t require us to call every specific wound “normal” in the broader sense, not even when something has a strong emotional appeal.
The same logic applies to age: people look younger than their years, function like younger people, and even have a “biological age” that appears younger than their chronological age. But that does not make age a mere social construct nor does it mean that one should be able to alter their own documents basing on how they feel about it.
If anti-essentialism were made consistent, it would start dissolving ordinary truths everywhere, but that isn’t how we reason in any other domain: we ordinarily distinguish between nature and privation, between the rule and the exception, between the given structure of a given being and the difficulties that sometimes afflict it.
The Daily Mail has only slightly more credibility than you.
https://law-school.open.ac.uk/blog/exploring-controversy-surrounding-teaching-gender-identity-uk-schools-balancing-legal , Gender ideology in Irish education , Gender Ideology Statement – Irish Education Alliance If you don’t have anything of value to say, do yourself a favor: shut up.
P.s: I have to admit that my knee-jerk reaction was to say that the Daily Mail is still ten times more credible than you; then it hit me that 0 × 10 = 0, and I realized it would’ve been an own goal…
- I note the care you’re taking to distinguish compassion from anthropology—that’s an important distinction, and too often people collapse one into the other. That said, I think your argument hinges on an assumption that needs more scrutiny: namely, that atypical cases (intersex conditions, or even gender incongruence) are best understood as privations of a clear underlying binary structure, rather than as evidence that the structure itself is more complex than a strict binary.
- Your analogy with psychopathy is rhetorically careful, but it doesn’t quite map. A lack of empathy is a functional deficit relative to a well-defined psychological capacity. Intersex conditions, however, are not simply “missing” something—they are variations in biological development. In other words, they are not analogous to blindness (privation of sight), but closer to variations like left-handedness or atypical chromosomal patterns. That weakens the “privation” framing.
- More importantly, biology itself is doing something interesting here. If sex were strictly binary in a hard, exceptionless sense, then edge cases would be reducible to clear classification upon deeper analysis. But in some intersex conditions, classification is not merely difficult—it becomes conceptually ambiguous depending on which biological markers you privilege (chromosomes, gonads, hormones, phenotype, etc.). That suggests we are not just dealing with “noise,” but with a multi-variable system that doesn’t collapse neatly into a single binary axis.
- So I would reframe the issue like this:
- Yes, there are strong statistical clusters we call “male” and “female.”
- But the existence of medically recognized intermediate or discordant cases suggests that sex, biologically, behaves more like a bimodal distribution than a strict binary.
- And once that is granted, the analogy to age breaks down—because age is a single scalar variable, whereas sex is a composite of multiple biological dimensions.
- From a Christian perspective, this doesn’t require abandoning anthropology—it may instead require refining it. If creation itself presents us with structured variation, then the question becomes whether our categories are descriptive of reality, or overly simplified abstractions imposed on it.
- So I’d put it this way: Rare cases don’t necessarily “redefine” anthropology—but they can reveal where our definitions were too rigid to begin with.
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Good post, I’ll reply to this either today or tomorrow. :))
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- I also have enough real-life exposure to know that sexual desire and partner preference are not distributed in some neat, identical way across all persons. Human experience is more variegated than tidy moral abstractions often allow.
- It is also striking that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus presses on anger, lust, hypocrisy, mercy, truthfulness, retaliation, love of enemies, almsgiving, prayer, and judgment. He does not build his moral teaching there around policing a taxonomy of sexes or genders.
- And I also want to register some unease with the idea—explicit or implicit—of a “Christian manosphere.” The manosphere, as a cultural phenomenon, is built around identity consolidation, grievance narratives, and often adversarial framing between men and women. Whatever its internal variations, it tends to operate on status, power, and resentment dynamics.
- That framework does not map well onto Christian moral teaching. Christianity does not organize people into competing identity blocs to be defended or advanced. It calls individuals—men and women alike—to repentance, self-giving love, humility, and truthfulness. The moral center of gravity is not “asserting one’s group,” but conforming oneself to Christ.
- So when discussions about sex, gender, or culture begin to sound like a baptized version of the manosphere, I think it’s worth stepping back. Even if some underlying concerns are legitimate, the conceptual framework itself may already be misaligned with the Gospel.
- In short: Christianity can speak about men, women, sex, and embodiment—but it should not do so by importing a subculture whose basic logic is at odds with its own. If we need the manosphere to explain or defend Christian anthropology, that’s already a sign something has gone off track.
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I agree.
I look at the question of sex/gender from the viewpoint of a biologist, with a MSc in ‘morphological and ecological zoology’. From that viewpoint, the main developmental trajectories are evident: we all start as female-type embryo, until the effects of the genes in the Y chromosome step into play and turn about half of the embryos to an alternative path (male-type fetus). During the development, there may happen deviations that affect the phenotype of the baby. Most are born as ‘normal‘ female vs. male phenotype but there are exceptions.
It is challenging to chose socially acceptable words for the deviating cases, especially as English is not my native language. I hope that people can give me some mercy if I select words that may unintentionally sound insulting. Anyhow, we have the majority that fits within the ‘norm’ and we have cases that could be called deviations from the ‘norm’.
I have not followed the research on this field so my knowledge may be outdated and is certainly limited. What I remember about the papers that I read, the most obvious deviations seem to happen before the birth, in the womb. The hormonal environment in the womb affects the developing embryo / fetus. The hormonal environment may vary both because of internal (related to the genes) and external (environmental) reasons. One example is a hypothesis about how male development may deviate from heterosexual to homosexual.
Natural selection may favour traits that increase the fertility of female offspring. One part of the mechanism is the quality of the hormonal environment the female fetus experiences in the womb. In some cases, there may happen a deviation where a male fetus experiences occasionally such an hormonal environment that was intended for female fetuses. If that deviation happens during the critical periods of brain development, the baby may be born with partly female-type brains within a male body. What we see is a male but the brains may function more or less as a female.
That hypothesis is just one possible mechanism of how that kind of deviations may happen. What seems to be meaningful is that these individuals are born as they are. Their sexual orientation is not something ‘chosen’ or deviating because of the social environment an older child is experiencing. When Jesus was speaking about marriage, one group he listed was those who were (what they were) since birth. Jesus did not condemn such persons, he just noted that all persons are not identical and some differences are present from birth. What kind of phenotype or characteristics we have from birth does affect our life - we do not all get identical opportunities in this life. Our ‘condition’ may even exclude some possibilities that the ‘typical’ persons have.
The question of gender is more problematic than sex. Especially two difficulties pop up.
One is that the subjective experience about myself changes throughout the life. What an adolescent or young adult feels is not necessarily what the same person feels twenty years later. Any radical changes done during the early years are risky in the sense that they may lead to another type of gender dysphoria later in life.
Another problem emerges when the mental image about myself does not agree with the reality. It is unlikely that a person can feel internal balance before s/he has admitted the facts. That can be seen in many areas of life, not just the gender/sex questions. For example, aging and approaching death can be difficult questions for some.
However we try to explain and cope with the diversity and deviations, two points need to be remembered:
First, we are all humans, created by God. That gives the same basic value for all humans in front of God.
Second, whatever our phenotype or conditions are, mortal life is a process of slowly dying. Young people may have an illusion of being almost immortal but later in life, the process of slowly dying becomes very real. What happens after our death is even more important than what happens during our short mortal life.
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- I appreciate both the tone and the substance of what you’ve written here. You’re doing something increasingly rare—holding together biological realism, personal compassion, and theological grounding without turning it into a tribal issue. I especially agree with your two closing points. If we lose sight of shared human dignity before God, or of the fact that all of us are living finite, fragile lives, then the entire discussion becomes distorted.
- A few thoughts that might refine (rather than challenge) your framework:
- First, on the language of “norm” and “deviation.” “Deviation” can sometimes sound stronger than intended, almost like “defect.” In biology, “typical” and “atypical” developmental pathways, or “common” and “less common” patterns keeps the descriptive point without implying anything about lesser worth.
- Second, on the idea of “female-type brains in male bodies.” There may well be developmental influences in utero, as you describe. But the neuroscience is probably less tidy than that model suggests. Sexual desire and behavior arise from interacting neural circuits, hormones, and learned associations, rather than from a single “male” or “female” brain template. So the reality we’re dealing with may be more multi-dimensional than binary language—whether biological or psychological—can easily capture.
- Third, I think your point about the need to face reality is an important one in general. But in this domain, one of the difficulties is that “reality” itself is not always reducible to a single clear axis. Sex involves chromosomes, gonads, hormones, phenotype, and development; these do not always align perfectly. In some cases, the tension may not simply be between truth and illusion, but between different aspects of a complex embodied reality.
- That said, I agree with your central emphasis: whatever the explanations or categories, we are dealing with persons who did not choose their starting point, and whose dignity does not depend on how neatly they fit our models. And I also appreciate your reminder about mortality—it has a way of relativizing many of our more heated disputes.
That’s about Ireland[1].
That’s about the UK.
A different country. Different laws. Different curricula.
Attempting to support your claim about the school curriculum in one country by citing an article about a different country is a novel approach, but perhaps also a futile one.
Those are about Ireland, which is an improvement on your previous attempt, but neither of them supports the claim of the daily mail item that the new curriculum “tells children that GENDER is not a biological fact but a FEELING.”
The second one does include a link to the actual curriculum though, which you could and should have found and cited yourself. You might even have read it instead of invoking the Daily Mail, and thus avoided embarrassing yourself by searching for more credible sources and posting something about a different country.
Pointing out that the second article you cited didn’t support the claims made in the first one because it was about a different country (suggesting that you didn’t bother to read it before citing it), citing the actual curriculum so that others can check what it really says, and pointing out that you are posting links to articles you either didn’t read or didn’t understand (and hence they and you aren’t worth wasting time on) are all far more valuable than parrotting sensationalist click-bait from the Daily Mail.
So shut up yourself.
Based on the quoted extract and the first glimpse of the article before it was replaced by an insistence that I either allow all cookies or purchase a subscription. ↩︎