On Gender, Etc

[This is from my forum post today.   Kinda proud of it.]

For example, what is male and what is female? Simple to decide, huh? Except not always. 

There are those infants born with unclear gender. Look at the prof's pictures above.

There are adult women who look like they have small penises, because of heredity or hormone exposure during gestation or later steroid use. Many women bodybuilders and athletes have enlarged clitorises to the point where you would not be sure what they were. "Is that a, uh, mouse under your skirt?"

Biologically, a male is a specially developed female. All the differences develop from the same structures. In a sense we are all females. And males and females both have an X chromosome. To an extent, gender is decided by whether one has one X chromosome or two. The "Y" chromosome doesn't seem to do much. So men have very little to brag about. When you add in the fact that extrachromosomal inheritance is through the mother and that includes the mitochondria that are critically involved in the cell's energy and in athletic performance, it truly is a woman's world. (The Bible got it wrong; man would have been formed from woman.)

Things can go wrong when a male is formed from a female. And so there are intersexes and those of indeterminate gender.

In the Olympics -- again we talked abut this -- it was at one point decided to do a chromosome test, a barr-body test, to determine if an athlete was male or female. Did you ever think deciding that would be so much trouble?

When the Bible says that we are male or female, it simply was not comprehended by the writer that gender is not always clear. Understand? As I said, in biblical times infants born intersex or with what were seen as malformations did not live long. If you were a mid-wife, what would you do? A monster, a sign of the displeasure of the gods or the work of the devil. For the good of society you'd remove the kid as quickly as possible and leave it somewhere to die. That's what they did. That's what everybody did. That's what is still done many places.

We are kinder and gentler with better surgery and we take care of such cases with some strokes of a scalpel, humanely, or what we mean to be humanely.

What happens if the coin flip is wrong, and a child surgically altered into a girl thinks she is a man? Happens. One of the dirty little scandals of modern medicine. YOU would forbid to him/her the option of marriage. Is that fair?

Is it fair to require that a doc make a prospective bride or groom get nekked and poke around in their innards in order to decide if they are the proper gender to get married?

I say [screw] that; let whomever marry whomever without some judge or lawyer or government official worrying about whether they are really male and female.

Lemme make it clear: real life can be ambiguous. The Bible and religious authority doesn't deal with ambuguity but fictional absolutes. Pi = 3, the Bible says, except that it isn't so.