There continues to be a lot of discussion and controversy about providing special “protections” for persons who consider themselves, or whose parents may believe them, to be “transgender.”
School boards across the state have been encouraged by, among all things, an organization of school boards supported by tax money, and which lobbies the legislature for even more money, to adopt what is euphemistically called a “transgender policy” for bathrooms and other previously single-sex facilities such as athletic locker rooms.
The “model” policy contains some very interesting language in which a person’s sex is referred to as “the sex to which they are assigned at birth.”
The natural question that follows is Who “assigns” a person’s sex at birth?
Is it the doctor or midwife who delivers the baby? Is it the nurses who assist with the delivery? Is it the hospital in which the baby is born? Is it the health department officials who complete the birth certificates?
The factual answer is “None of the Above.”
A person’s sex is not “assigned at birth” by anyone. It is determined at conception, when life begins, when the father’s sperm, which may carry either an X or Y sex chromosome, fertilizes the mother’s ovum, which only carries an X sex chromosome. If an X comes from the sperm, the result is a female, while if a Y comes from the sperm, the result is a male. As scientifically advanced as modern medicine may be, it does not really know which of the sperm cells will actually fertilize the ovum and why.
So maybe the true answer is that a person’s sex is assigned at conception by God. A truly radical thought.
The normal fertilized egg cell contains 23 chromosomes from the mother and 23 from the father. Thus, there are normally 23 pairs of chromosomes in the fertilized egg. These include two sex chromosomes: XX for girls and XY for boys.
Sometimes something goes wrong in the natural process and in a small number of cases a baby may be born with chromosomes outside the normal model, and these individuals have for many decades been diagnosed as having some type of birth defect. Any learned text on embryology can expound on these types of chromosomal defects at length.
Chromosomal abnormalities are common causes of physical birth defects that can affect the brain and other parts of the body. Some chromosomal abnormalities occur when there is an extra chromosome, while others occur when a section of a chromosome is deleted or duplicated.
Examples of well-documented birth defects in the form of chromosomal abnormalities include Down’s syndrome; Trisomy 18 (“Edwards syndrome”); Trisomy 13 (“Patau syndrome”); Klinefelter syndrome; XYY syndrome; Turner syndrome; triple X syndrome; Cri-du-chat syndrome; Angelman syndrome; Prader-Willi syndrome; and Fragile X syndrome.
But having a birth defect does not make the person any less valuable or any less entitled to legal protection than others.
Persons with properly documented birth defects of any sort are already protected by law, and the current transgender bath and locker room debate does not focus on persons with actual chromosomal birth defects. Rather the current discussion seems to focus on the notion that a person’s sex or sexual “identity” is some type of fluid notion, subject to change at will from time to time.
But this is simply contrary to actual nature and science.
None of this scientific stuff relates to how an individual chooses to express and practice his or her sexuality. And as long as sexuality expressions are done behind closed doors between consenting adults, it should not be anyone’s business but theirs.
