GENDER AMBIGUITY
By Babette Francis
National Strategic Summit on Marriage, Family & Fatherhood
18th September 2007, 10.15 am Room 2R1, Parliament House, Canberra
There is a saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. With
four daughters and four sons, my husband and I were certainly mugged by reality. Our first
three children were girls, and when our fourth child, a boy, was born, our house was filled
with girl toys - dolls and tea sets. But we found that Nicholas did not play with these toys in
the same way as his sisters did. There was a crisis once when he got hold of a bride doll,
beautifully dressed in white lace, complete with veil and orange blossom, and unscrewed the
head because he wanted to see how it was made. His sister, to whom the doll belonged, was
shrieking in dismay.
Our first boys' birthday party was also a revelation - at his sisters' parties, the girls had
played co-operatively and kept their pretty dresses clean. One girl was even perturbed
because she got some mud on her white socks. At Nick's party, the boys were throwing jelly
at one another and making noises like trucks and aeroplanes. So we learnt the reality that
girls and boys are different, a reality that feminists and homosexual activists deny.
In all the debate about homosexual rights and same-sex marriage, pro-family
activists need to understand there is a far more destructive underlying agenda
promoted by the unholy alliance of gender feminists and homosexual lobbyists,
and that is the deconstruction of gender itself.
The 2007 UNICEF report, entitled "Women and Children: The Double
Dividend of Gender Equality," argues that the when women are given more
opportunities to succeed, children will prosper. Bernadette Corteses, in an article
posted on the Cardinal Van Thuan International Observatory's web site, said
that although the social doctrine of the Catholic Church would agree with
UNICEF's goal of "promoting equality and empowering women in the family,"
the report goes too far when it makes a distinction between sex and gender.
The UNICEF report makes this distinction by acknowledging that men and
women are physically different, but states that the behavior patterns of men and
women, what they refer to as gender roles, are merely cultural constructions.
Biologically, says the report, it is undeniable that "females have two X
chromosomes and males have one X and one Y chromosome. Gender roles,"
however, "are not inborn, but rather learned."
Corteses wrote that the Church believes empowering women "in work and in
politics is very important because it produces a double dividend: fulfilling the
rights of women and going along way towards realizing those of children as well." She
explained, however, that when a distinction is made between sex and gender,
dangerous ambiguities enter into society and an understanding of marriage. Separating
gender from
sex, continued Corteses, opens the door "for a purely historical, relative, artificial
vision of being male and female, which has a negative impact on children
themselves."
Corteses continued that according to Pope John Paul II's encyclical
"Centesimus Annus," children have the right "to a human ecology whose
fundamental structure is the family founded on marriage. To respect the sexual
humanity of man means 'to respect the natural and moral structure with which
he has been endowed.'" This cannot happen when sex and gender are viewed as
distinct realities. "The anthropological vision of UNICEF is undoubtedly
deficient."
Liberal feminists of the 60s or what Christina Hoff Sommers author of "Who
Stole Feminism" refers to as "equity feminists", believed that women should
have as much freedom and opportunity as men and that discriminatory laws
should be eliminated. However, within a decade, liberal feminism was overtaken
by the far more radical "gender feminism", which, building on Marxist ideology,
requires the elimination not only of economic classes but of sex classes, i.e. the
division of humans into male and female.
Hence the substitution of the word "gender" for sex. "Gender" is primarily a
grammatical term, which may be determined by a distinguishing characteristic,
i.e. sex, but gender can also be arbitrary like the gender of some nouns in
Spanish and French. This malleable view of gender and the expansion for two
sexes to five genders was most clearly expressed in the writings of Mexican
Marta Llama at the Regional Conference and Non-Government Organisations
Forum (prelude to the UN's 1995 Beijing Conference on Women) at Mar del
Plata, Argentina, in September 1994. According to Sra Llama:
"Biology shows that outwardly human beings can be divided into two sexes;
nevertheless, there are more combinations that result from the five physiological
areas which, in general and very simple terms, determine what is called the
biological sex of a person: genes, hormones, gonads, internal reproductive
organs and external reproductive organs. These areas control the five types of
biological processes in a continuum
According to Sra Llama, who describes a
series of congenital malformations, man/woman, masculine/feminine are merely
cultural constructions, and thinking that heterosexuality is the "natural" sexuality
is only another "example of a 'biological' social construction". As a further
development of Sra Llama's theme, at the UN Women's World Conference in
Beijing in 1995 feminists claimed that the sexuality of multiple genders found
expression as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, hermaphrodite,
transvestite and transgendered, the latter group being further sub-divided into
those who were awaiting surgery, those who had surgery, and those who had
surgery but were unhappy and now wished to revert back to their original
condition.
The views of Sra Llama and other gender feminists from New York has
dominated the United Nations agencies for the past decade, requiring the UN and
member States to "mainstream the gender perspective" in all documents and
Plans of Action. According to a booklet published by the UN International
Research & Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW):
"To adopt a gender perspective is ....to distinguish between what is natural and
biological and what is socially and culturally constructed, and in the process to
re-negotiate the boundaries between the natural - and hence relatively inflexible and the social - and hence relatively transformable". In a chapter from a book
by Kate Bornestein a man who underwent a "sex change" argues that the way to
liberate women is to deconstruct gender:
"Women couldn't be oppressed if there was no such thing as
'women'......doing away with gender is key to the doing away with
patriarchy........Gender fluidity is the ability to freely and knowingly become one
or many of a limitless number of genders, for any length of time, at any rate of
change. Gender fluidity recognizes no borders or rules of gender" (Bornestein p.
52).
The congenital malformations referred to by Sra Llama are comparatively rare,
and it is the contention of this paper that they do not prove there are more than
two sexes and do not prove that heterosexuality is not natural any more than the
fact that some babies are born blind proves that it isn't natural for human beings
to see. Biological sex is not determined by external organs but by genetic
structure. Every cell of the human body is clearly marked male or female, and
the human brain, which is the primary sex organ, is masculinized or feminized in
the fetal stage of development by the presence or absence of testosterone.
Furthermore, human beings do not exist on a continuum between male and
female. Those rare cases of infants born with anomalous genitals deserve
sympathy and treatment on the basis of their chromosomal sex, the presence of a
"Y" chromosome indicating a male, and its absence denoting a female. The
occurrence of some rare abnormalities do not require the re-assignment of the
entire human race.
Dr. John Money, a researcher at the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, is
credited with coining the term "gender identity" to describe a person's inner
sense of himself or herself as male or female, Money established the world's first
Gender Identity Clinic at John Hopkins, devoted solely to the practice of
converting adults from one sex to the other. . His theories on the psychosexual
flexibility at birth of humans forms the cornerstone of an entire medical specialty
- pediatric endocrinology. His most celebrated case, the Reimer twins, is
detailed in John Colapinto's book, "As Nature Made Him: The Boy who was
Raised as a Girl"
Bruce and Brian Reimer were normal identical twin boys . Bruce's penis was
was accidentally burnt and destroyed in a circumcision accident. Eventually the
parents were referred to Dr. John Money at John Hopkins. He gave the parents
reassurance that Bruce's sex re-assignment as a girl had every chance of success.
In July 1967, aged 22 months, Bruce was surgically castrated at John Hopkins
by surgeon Dr. Howard Jones, the co-founder of Money's Gender Identity Clinic.
The main procedure was a bilateral orchidectomy, removal of both testicles. Dr.
Jones fashioned a rudimentary vagina with the remains of the scrotal skin. The
baby was renamed "Brenda".
The experiment was a failure from the outset - Brenda showed no signs of
femininity and every sign of masculine behaviour, including rough and tumble
and fighting games, and standing up in the toilet to urinate. She failed to bond
with her female school mates, and despite several changes of school, and referral
to counselling and psychiatrists, had disciplinary and academic problems; she
just did not fit in. She was kept back in first grade; her identical twin was
promoted.
Despite all the indications that the experiment was a massive failure and that
Brenda was having major psychological and behavioural problems, Money
wrote that the case was a great success - he contrasted Brian's interest in "cars,
gas pumps and tools" with Brenda's avid interest in "dolls, a doll house and a
doll carriage", Brenda's cleanliness was characterised as different from Brian's
disregard for such matters, Brenda was interested in kitchen work, Brian
disdained it.
The importance of the twins' case cannot be underestimated. It was seized on
by the feminist movement which had been arguing for years against a biological
basis for sex differences. Kate Millet in her 1970 definitive feminist tome,
"Sexual Politics", had quoted Money's papers as scientific proof that the
differences between men and women reflect not biological imperatives but
societal expectations and prejudices. The twins' case offered apparently
irrefutable proof to support that view.
In May of 1980 when Brenda insisted to her Winnipeg endocrinologist and
psychiatrist that she did not want to be a girl, they advised her father to tell her
the truth about what had happened to her as an infant. Brenda's feelings were of
anger, amazement, but overwhelmingly of relief.
Although Money's views on psychosexual neutrality or the malleability of
gender identity was the established wisdom of the scientific community and
particularly of the feminist movement, he was challenged by a pioneering team
of endocrinologists at the University of Kansas led by Dr. Milton Diamond who
stated that prebirth factors set limits on how far culture, learning and
environment can direct gender in humans. Brenda, or as she was renamed
"David", having learned the truth, wasted no time in reclaiming his sexual
identity. By his fifteenth birthday he was living socially as a male. He began
receiving injections of testosterone, and in 1980 underwent an intensely painful
double mastectomy. In 1981 he had surgery to construct a rudimentary penis
from muscle and skin from the inside of his thighs. Before his twenty-second
birthday he had a second more successful phalloplasty in a 12-stage operation. In
September 1990 David Reimer married Jane Fontane, a single mother of three
children.
A few years ago Bruce Reimer committed suicide, as did David Reimer two
years later following the break-up of his marriage: a tragic epitaph to the
gender reassignment and sex abuse experiment by John Money.
The Gender Identity Clinic at John Hopkins was closed, and Money's
controversial evening course in human sexology was cancelled in the late
seventies. Dr. Paul McHugh, Chairman of the Psychiatry Department at John
Hopkins, criticized transsexual surgery as "the most radical therapy ever
encouraged by 20th century psychiatrists", and likened it to the once widespread
practice of frontal lobotomy. Dr. Jon Meyer, a Hopkins psychiatrist and former
director of the Gender Identity Clinic, produced a long-term follow-up of fifty
post-operative and pre-operative adult transsexuals treated at John Hopkins and
reported that none showed any measurable improvement in their lives and
concluded that "sex re-assignment surgery confers no objective advantage in
terms of social rehabilitation".
In the US urologist Dr. William Reiner has laid down his scalpel and has
retrained as a child psychiatrist specializing in intersexual conditions. He is
convinced that surgery steering intersexual babies at birth into one sex or the
other is wrong. My own view is that children should be reared, and adults
should live in the sex that matches their chromosomes - XX or XY. The brain is
the primary sex organ, and our brains are programmed before birth to be male or
female.
There is a determined push by the homosexual rights movement to legitimise
sex changes and also for the right for birth certificates to be altered to show
the "new" gender, even when there has been no hormone treatment or surgery,
i.e. individuals should have the right to be regarded as male or female regardless
of anatomy and based solely on their feelings of self-identification. This would
make arguments about same-sex marriage redundant and make a mockery of
marriage because any couple could define themselves as male and female and get
married under existing laws.
Some of the ideologues now trying to engineer a gender-neutral future for
America may find themselves running up against the ineluctable constraints
of biology. To understand the biological constraints on gender roles,
sociologist J. Richard Udry recently probed the effects of hormones on
male and female behavior. His findings-published in the American
Sociological Review--illumine the ways in which "sex differences in
hormone experience from gestation to adulthood shape gendered behavior."
Since Udry's data show that "prenatal hormone experience continues to
influence the trajectories of . . . gendered behavior during adulthood,"
it seems impossible to accept the view (promulgated by some feminists)
that gender roles reflect merely social conditioning. Rather, it would
appear that "gendered social structure is a universal accommodation to
this biological fact." And although Udry professes himself neutral as to
"whether it is morally good to reduce sex differences," he sees clear
evidence that such reduction can come only one way. Since their hormones
make men "highly immunized against feminine socialization," reducing sex
differences almost inevitably means "changing female behavior to more
closely coincide with the present behavior of males." However, Udry warns
that if any societies "depart too far from the underlying sex-dimorphism
of biological predispositions, they will generate social malaise and
social pressures to drift back toward closer alignment with biology. A
social engineering program to degender society would require a Maoist
approach: continuous renewal of revolutionary resolve and a tolerance for
conflict." (Source: J. Richard Udry, "Biological Limits of Gender Construction,"
American Sociological Review 65[2000]: 443-457; see also Eleanor M.
Miller et al., "Comments and Replies," American Sociological Review
66[2001]: 592-623.)
Udry's article provoked not one, not two, but three hostile critiques
from furious feminists who poured scorn on the notion
that biology places limits on gender-role engineering and impugned the
judgment of the editors of the American Sociological Review for allowing
Udry to publish such a claim in their pages. It would appear that a
Maoist crusade is already well under way to suppress all views not in
harmony with the orthodoxy of complete gender plasticity.
The National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH),
published in their bulletin Vol, 8, No. 2, August 2000 reported that in Boulder, Colorado, a
law has been passed extending legal protection to transsexuals (known as 'gender-variants') so
that they will not be discriminated against in housing, public accommodations or
employment. Transsexuals may have full access to public bathrooms which
serve the sex of their choice.
"At work, employees can change gender identity and dress as the opposite sex without fear
of being fired -- but only three times within every year-and-a-half. After that, their employer
is permitted to fire them on the grounds of 'gender inconsistency.'"
In 2004 in a "Letter to the Bishops on the Collaboration of Men and Women",
Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, wrote: ".....The obscuring of the
difference or duality of the sexes has enormous consequences on a variety of
levels. This theory of the human person intended to promote prospects for the
equality of women through liberation from biological determinism, has in reality
inspired ideologies which call into question the family in its natural two-parent
structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality
virtually equivalent in a new model of polymorphous sexuality...."
"Genesis 1: 26 says: 'and then God created man in His own image, in the image
of God He created him, male and female He created them'. >From the very
beginning therefore humanity is described as articulated in the male-female
relationship...."
The Almighty brought order out of the void, and then there was light. But
activists demanding same-sex marriage, and the creation of IVF children without fathers,
require us to reject the form of human nature itself and ultimately to regard human beings
as if they were things without form. This encroaching darkness goes beyond
perversion to cosmological disorder. I hope that the booklet "21 Reasons why Gender Matters
will be one step towards helping prevent this descent into chaos.
Babette Francis
National & Overseas Co-ordinator
Endeavour Forum Inc.
28 April 2007