LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX
The old definition of sex as biologically determined, innate and unchanging (as compared with gender which is allegedly learned and subject to variation between cultures) has taken a battering recently from many sources.
The first question is, how are we to we define and distinguish between individuals of the “opposite” sex. By their internal reproductive organs, their external reproductive organs, their chromosomes, their ability to reproduce, their sexual preference, their adoption of “correct” gender behaviour? What if these different markers are not all giving the same message? (In this respect the recent case in the United States concerning a woman who ‘became a man’ but kept her/his reproductive organs and recently gave birth to a child is a real category-breaker and will no doubt continue to be so. There can be few cases in the world where a child’s mother is also its father).
Most people are surprised to learn that each year a large numbers of babies are born with indeterminate or ambiguous external and internal sexual organs, and are therefore medically assigned to one sex or the other. For this substantial number of individuals their sex is in a very real sense “socially defined” at a very early stage in their lives, with varying degrees of success.
Others may choose at a later stage of their lives to “change sex” being convinced that they have been born in the wrong body in this case aligning their physical form with their gender ‘identity’. People who face this situation contribute to the growing numbers of health tourists to countries which specialize in this procedure.
The belief in the biologically determined two- sex/two gender model logically involves an assumption about the ‘unnaturalness’ of homosexuality; and that it is learned behaviour that can be unlearned. For many people convinced of the rightness and sufficiency of what one might call the Noah’s Ark configuration, homosexuality is a sin against nature. Increasingly however scientists are throwing doubt that nature exists in such a state of polar innocence citing that homosexuality exists amongst monkeys and other species less closely related to us and cannot therefore be considered ‘unnatural’ and may also be biologically determined from the outset rather than learned.