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AR 28:20 - Legally distinguishing sex from gender identity
In this issue:
GENDER - "a good and precise definition of sex"
HUMANISM - battle of the reviewers
MORMONISM - 'poles apart from atheists' in America
Apologia Report 28:20 (1,617)
June 7, 2023
GENDER
"What Is a Man? What Is a Woman? How Our Laws Should Define Male and Female" by Justin Taylor (The Gospel Coalition, Apr 10 '23) begins: "The science behind sex determination in placental mammals (mammals, like humans, that have a placenta) is clear: In placental mammals, the presence of a Y chromosome determines sex. ...
"Gender activists are working hard these days to change federal laws and regulations (like Title IX), so that 'sex' includes the social construct or psychological perception of 'gender identity' - which guts the term 'sex' of its meaning." <www.bit.ly/3IVwxUc>
Taylor notes that "sometimes they do this in a way that is hasty and imprecise. They need the help of someone like analytic philosopher Jay Richards," who provides "a good and precise definition of sex" in his March 30 article on the Public Discourse site. <www.bit.ly/3oDuNYS>
Richards proposes that his "definitions don't say everything there is to say, but they say nothing false." His definitions specify that they apply to "normal development. ...
"So what do we do if a newborn lacks a secondary sex characteristic (like a penis) or has ambiguous genitalia or has a chromosomal anomaly?
Richards responds: "We would not, and should not, conclude that the child is not a human, or has no sex, or is some third sex. In most cases, we can with a bit more investigation determine that the child is male or female, and so would have the usual features of that sex except for a disorder that disrupted normal development.
"Even if we could not determine the sex of an individual, we would treat this as an epistemic limit. We would not, or at least should not, treat such a person as a member of a third sex, or of no sex."
"In short, Richards says: Current efforts to redefine sex to include 'gender identity' would dissolve sex as a stable legal category and create legal chaos.
"In response, public institutions must shore up their defenses. [And,] "One key way to do that is by defining sex - including male and female - precisely in law."
Taylor also recommends The Wall Street Journal essay "A Biologist Explains Why Sex Is Binary" (Apr 9 '23) by Colin Wright (evolutionary biologist; fellow, Manhattan Institute), which provides a touch more detail, summarized: "In an effort to confuse the issue, gender ideologues cite rare ambiguous 'intersex' cases."
Wright begins: "Are sex categories in humans empirically real, immutable and binary, or are they mere 'social constructs'? The question has public-policy implications related to sex-based legal protections and medicine, including whether males should be allowed in female sports, prisons and other spaces that have historically been segregated by sex for reasons of fairness and safety.
"Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union frequently claims that the binary concept of sex is a recent invention 'exclusively for the purposes of excluding trans people from legal protections.' ...
"When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism's sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. ...
"Intersex people, whose genitalia appear ambiguous or mixed, don't undermine the sex binary. Many gender ideologues, however, falsely claim the existence of intersex conditions renders the categories 'male' and 'female' arbitrary and meaningless. ...
"In reality, the existence of borderline cases no more raises questions about everyone else's sex than the existence of dawn and dusk casts doubt on day and night. ...
"Gender ideology seeks to portray sex as so incomprehensibly complex and multivariable that our traditional practice of classifying people as simply either male or female is grossly outdated and should be abandoned for a revolutionary concept of 'gender identity.' ...
"But 'intersex' and 'transgender' mean entirely different things. Intersex people have rare developmental conditions that result in apparent sex ambiguity. Most transgender people aren't sexually ambiguous at all but merely 'identify' as something other than their biological sex.
"Once you're conscious of this distinction, you will begin to notice gender ideologues attempting to steer discussions away from whether men who identify as women should be allowed to compete in female sports toward prominent intersex athletes.... Why? Because so long as they've got you on your heels making difficult judgment calls on a slew of complex intersex conditions, they've succeeded in drawing your attention away from easy calls.... They shift the focus to intersex to distract from transgender.
"Acknowledging the existence of rare difficult cases doesn't weaken the position or arguments against allowing males in female sports, prisons, restrooms and other female-only spaces. In fact, it's a much stronger approach because it makes a crucial distinction that the ideologues are at pains to obscure.
"Crafting policy to exclude males who identify as women, or 'trans women,' from female sports, prisons and other female-only spaces isn't complicated. ...
"Crafting effective intersex policies is more complicated, but the problem of intersex athletes in female sports is less pressing than that of males in female sports, and there seem to be no current concerns arising from intersex people using female spaces. It should be up to individual organizations to decide which criteria or cut-offs should be used to keep female spaces safe and, in the context of sports, safe and fair. It is imperative, however, that such policies be rooted in properties of bodies, not 'identity.' Identity alone is irrelevant to issues of fairness and safety. ...
"The biology of sex isn't quite as simple as common sense, but common sense will get you a long way in understanding it." <www.archive.ph/ioBPC>
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HUMANISM
"Sarah Bakewell's sweeping new survey <www.bit.ly/42rpj0Y> of the philosophical tradition, Humanly Possible, says that putting your faith in human behavior means confronting complacency and nihilism - but it can be worth it." With that, Jennifer Szalai begins her review for the New York Times (Mar 29 '23).
This is followed with a line from the Roman playwright Terence: "I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me," written more than two millennia ago.
But as Bakewell notes, "Terence wrote the line as a joke. It's said by a busybody character after being asked why he cannot seem to keep his nose out of everybody else's beeswax. This sly double meaning is what makes the line so fitting for the capacious tradition known as humanism that Bakewell writes about. ...
"She begins her story in earnest in the 1300s, during the early Renaissance, and ends with the present day. 'Understanding human life non-supernaturally,' as she puts it, was - even for those humanists who didn't reject religion outright - a startling rebuke to religious doctrine."
Szalai also observes that "the humanist tendency toward moderation has often turned out to be helpless against the anti-humanist forces of extermination. In 1935, as Nazism was ascendant, Thomas Mann noticed that in 'humanism there is an element of weakness,' which he predicted 'may be its ruin.' ...
"Bakewell concedes that the anti-humanist critique is important, so that humanists don't become too smug or complacent. But she identifies in anti-humanism a kind of complacency, too - a nihilism, or fatalism, which assumes that the impossibility of perfection should drive us into a quest for domination or else the depths of despair." In all of this, "rhetoric isn't a matter of wily persuasion but 'a moral activity,' she says. Writing about Frederick Douglass, whose skills as a writer and orator were a matter of life and death, Bakewell extols the power of language to connect us. ...
"Bakewell is such a companionable storyteller that it was only toward the end of the book, when she makes passing mention of the ecological destruction we humans have wrought, that I wondered what a satisfying humanist response to our current climate predicament might be."
Szalai closes: "Blandly optimistic statements about human potential sound less inspiring than an unflinching recognition of our limits. 'One is responsible to life,' James Baldwin wrote. 'It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.'" <www.bit.ly/3WGrkoP>
In his Wall Street Journal review (Mar 24 '23), Dominic Green observes: "Ms. Bakewell allows that humanists may believe in God, 'insofar as their focus remains mostly on the lives and experiences of people here on Earth, rather than on institutions or doctrines, or the theology of the Beyond.'"
Green offers this view of recent history: "Instead of a golden age of scientific humanism, the 20th century discredited both science and humanity with global wars, dystopian tyrannies, death camps and nuclear weapons. Ms. Bakewell calls fascism and communism 'anti-humanist' ideologies. They were certainly inhumane, but their theorists and practitioners believed in historical progress. They had no need of God, though their rituals resembled pagan revivals. Like it or not, they were humanists of a depraved and self-deluding type.
"Ms. Bakewell argues that blaming humanism for the previous century's horrors is like 'saying that car crashes still occur despite traffic lights, therefore the traffic lights are to blame.' But humanists helped build the vehicles and pave the road. Attacking the religious idea that humans are made in the divine image removed the ethical equivalent of speed limits. Humanists also ignored the findings of humanists ancient and modern. As the Romans said, Homo homini lupus est: 'Man is wolf to man.' Reason, Kant wrote, could not straighten the 'crooked timber of humanity.' Ms. Bakewell mentions the warnings of religious humanists such as Jacques Maritain, who said that nothing would go right for humanity until we accept that 'the center for man is God.'"
Green closes: "A history of humanism is a history of everything, or at least a history of the modern West. Every reader will have a list of humanists who should have made the cut [in Bakewell's book]. I offer mine not in complaint, but in the spirit of humanist debate: Shakespeare, Hegel, Emerson and Thoreau, the anti-imperial renunciations of Gandhi, the religious humanism of Martin Buber, Aldous Huxley ('Brave New World') and George Orwell ('Nineteen Eighty-Four'), and the sentimental puddle of John Lennon’s 'Imagine,' which The Humanist magazine placed at the top of its 'Humanist Anthems for Your iPod Playlist' in 2011." <www.bit.ly/42GoUZ3>
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MORMONISM
"Mormons probably like you. Atheists probably don’t" by Timothy P. Carney (Washington Examiner, Mar 30 '23) -- a response to the April 13 Pew Research Center survey on religion in America: "Americans Feel More Positive Than Negative About Jews, Mainline Protestants, Catholics" by Patricia Tevington. <www.bit.ly/45yPaXM>
Pew's results note that: "Most strikingly, atheists have overwhelmingly negative feelings toward Mormons, while Mormons have net positive feelings toward atheists."
Also, every group in the survey "had a net positive attitude toward Jews, who are often typically the most-targeted group in hate crimes in the United States. The single highest net approval in the whole survey was the Mormons' plus-58-percentage-point approval of Jews.
"The single greatest net negative was the atheists' minus-76-point rating of evangelicals.
"If we return to that first finding (that atheists don't really like people and Mormons do), we see an interesting correlation with family formation. The religious group in the U.S. with the highest birth rate is the Mormons, and the group with the fewest babies is the atheists."
Conclusion: In general, "the numbers all suggest that the more time you spend thinking about God, the fonder you are of his greatest creations." <www.bit.ly/42g8JkN>
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