Volume. XXXVIII, No. 75
Sunday, 03 December 2023


Man, woman, and what? (Part 4-Final)


We thought about differences between boys and girls in the previous article. Francis de Wall also gives us another interesting example: “Shortly after a human child is born, we have a window of time to catch them before they know anything about gender or our hang-ups in this regard. When one-year-old boys and girls watched videos of moving cars and talking faces, the boys looked more at the former and the girls more at the latter. But since these babies may already have been influenced by toy culture, a follow-up study looked at infants at the earliest possible age. It tested one-day-old neonates in the maternity ward of an English hospital right next to their exhausted mother. The babies saw either the experimenter’s face or a similarly colored object that was not a face. Coders who were blind to the babies’ sex noted that females looked more at the face and males more at the object, suggesting that from day one girls are more socially oriented (Connellan et al., 2000; Lutchmaya and Baron-Cohen, 2002). Toy preferences, too, appear so early in life and are so pervasive that a recent review covering 787 boys and 813 girls from mostly Western cultures concluded: ‘Despite methodological variation in the choice and number of toys offered, context of testing, and age of child, the consistency in finding sex differences in children’s preferences for toys typed to their own gender indicates the strength of this phenomenon and the likelihood that it has a biological origin’” (Todd et al., 2018).

The most dramatic sex difference is when it comes to play. “Found in a great variety of human cultures and in all primate studies, young males have an elevated level of energy and are more physically rambunctious than females of the same age” (Pellegrini, 1989; Fagen, 1993; Pellegrini and Smith, 1998). That boys are three times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) reflects the same sex difference (Sauver et al., 2004). When children are free to play alone in a room, boys typically engage in unrestrained roughhousing, whereas girls have less body contact and tend to structure their play into a storyline (DiPietro, 2981; Lafreniere, 2011; Different, p. 30). A review of more than one hundred different countries concluded that the greater physical mobility of boys is universal (Hallal et al., 2012). 

John Money gave a lecture entitled “Epidemic Antisexuality: From Onanism to Satanism.” He says that gender refers to “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively.” He set gender apart from biological sex. He also founded the world’s first Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in 1965. The terminology invented by Money gained immense popularity when feminism declared gender to be a social construct and when transgender people gained public recognition (Money et al., 1955). Money became a hero to the women’s movement. In 1973, Time praised his work as providing “strong support for a major contention of omen’s liberationists: that conventional patterns of masculine and feminine behaviour can be altered” (Time, January 8, 1973, p. 34). Whatever Money says or secular psychologists may say, we must understand that there are female behaviours (behaviours more likely found in women) and male behaviours (behaviours more likely found in men). However, female behavioural traits in a man does not make him a woman, or vice versa. The seventeenth-century French male nobility walked around perfumed, in high heels, wearing embroidered clothing and long-haired wigs. 

We may find some examples refuting the claims that biological sexes can be changed (transgender) or altered (homosexual). Again, we say that there are boys with feminine traits and girls with masculine traits. However, they do not change their sexes or gender. Rather, if we say that a boy may be a girl because he has feminine traits, then we are the ones constructing human genders. Why should we deny that boys can love flowers, cooking, or ballet, and girls love soccer, car races, or rough games? In this regard, even the World Health Organization’s definition of gender reflects only half truth, not whole truth. The WHO says, “the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl, or boy, as well as relationships with each other” (www.who.int/health-topics/gender). Some people say that gender is like a cultural coat that the sexes walk around in. It relates to our expectations of women and men, which vary from society to society and change through the age. Nonetheless, it is not the whole truth. It is true that women in history have been imposed to keep only certain traits and to exclude other traits. Thus, their equal rights for opportunities have been denied. However, it does not explain the difference between man and woman. Sex differences are inborn nature, and gender traits are not only products of culture but also products of God-given inborn nature. 

LGBTQA+ brought a story to counter the claim that sexual behaviour was inborn nature. the Bremerhaven Zoo in Germany wanted to breed Humboldt penguins in 2005. The Zoo decided to separate the male pairs and repair them with females for this purpose. The zoo declared that the male-male ties were too strong for its breeding program, because the males were kept too far away from the females. Then, some gay communities were upset and argued that the program attempted to change the penguins’ sexual orientation by “the organized and forced harassment through female seductresses” (Pinguin-Damen sollen schwule Artgenossen bezirzen, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, August 1, 2005 [German]). At the end of the day the breeding project was not successful. However, Heiner Klos, a biologist at Berlin’s Zoo, said, “The pairs show signs of courtship but they don’t actually get round to mating. So I don’t think that we can say that they are actually gay” (The Guardian, 15 Feb 2005, 13:45 AEDT). A similar story was reported from the Central Park Zoo in New York in 2004. Roy and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins, tried to hatch a rock as if it were an egg. The zoo offered them a fertile egg from another couple. They raised a female chick, named Tango. In the subsequent years, gay communities used them as an example of homosexual orientation. They did not stay together. Silo left his mate and took up with Scrappy, a female from California. 

There is a tragic story known as the David Remer case. It is about a boy who was supposed to become a girl who fiercely resisted his new gender. “Brenda was clothed like a girl and given dolls to play with, yet he walked and talked like a boy, tore off his frilly dresses, and stole his brother’s trucks. He wanted to play with boys, build forts, and engage in snowball fights (Diamond and Sigmundson, 1997; Colapinto, 2000). Lacking a [male sex organ], he had been taught to sit down on the toilet. Nevertheless, he felt an irrepressible urge to urinate standing up. This caused friction with his classmates at school. Girls called him “cave woman” and banned him from their bathroom. Boys did the same—since he was dressed like a girl—so he ended up urinating in a back alley. Only at the age of fourteen did Brenda finally learn the truth. It came as a relief since it explained so much, including why he had felt miserable for so many years. Under the new name of David, he returned to the identity of his birth. Later, he committed suicide at thirty-eight (Different, 41). Man and woman are born, not become. 


More Lively Hope

 

Announcements

  • Catered Fellowship Lunch today provided by one family, as thanksgiving for all participants and helpers of the Christmas Cantata.
  • Manpower needed to move furniture from the hall after lunch today.
  • Giving to IBPFM missionaries: Please designate offerings as “IBPFM” by today.
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