What is the relationship between body and gender? Does anatomy determine gender?
Modern brain research suggests that
the brains of men and women have some crucial differences. But the
essential biological gender identity is established by physiological
realities that are, in the vast majority of human beings, immediately
identifiable upon birth.
When a baby is born, physically identified, and
declared to be a boy or a girl, this is an affirmation of God's lifelong purpose
for that individual.
The Bible tells us the body reveals identity to us in
that respect and in others as well. For a very small portion of people,
only about one in every fifteen hundred births, the birth gender is
indeterminate. These individuals are now most often medically referred to
as inter-sex.
This
birth anomaly which is identified by medical science as an
anomaly-requires the parents first and the individual later
to make some essential choices.
These choices are matters not of
obedience versus disobedience, but of wisdom and mercy. In such cases, we
must always strive for the good of the individual. This issue is not
the same as rejecting one's clear biological sex. These are different issues and
call for a different pattern of response.
