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Overachievers Ellen and Portia Lee Degeneres contribute to society in a family relationship bond that does not involve reproduction |
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Overachievers Ellen and Portia Lee Degeneres contribute to society in a family relationship bond that does not involve reproduction |
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In 1859, Charles Darwin's book, "On the Origin of Species," expressed what has been called "the best idea anyone ever had." He claimed that all earthly living things have a common ancestor, and that the current diversity of life on earth is due to natural selection of competing species for compatibility with their environment, often referred to as "survival of the fittest." This discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences. It explains the origin and diversity of contemporary living things on earth.
A great many people, including my step-grandmother, observe that strictly literal interpretations of the Bible and the Koran contradict this idea, and indeed they do. Whoever the original author of Genesis is, when the fanciful oral folk tales and histories of the Torah were finally being committed to the permanence of writing, the Scriptural writers had only fragments of the original content, and no modern science at all!
Written many centuries later, Koran sura (chapter) Ha Mim mirrors these ancestral beliefs. Those religious scholars who believed that it was their moral duty to preserve, teach, learn, know and understand these beliefs, however, themselves evolved changes in understanding and replacement of old, unprovable ideas with new, verifiable ones. The common theme in scriptures of all the major religions is a recognition of the human need to understand their environment and a quest for whatever is the ultimate goal of human existence. This instinctive need appears to be expressed by the evolution of ancient into modern religions and ancient suppositions into modern scientific thought.
Evolution works on knowledge, too. The old fantasies and fables, based on observed phenomena of the time, evolved into the disciplines we know today as those of modern science. What is ultimately surprising is not that Genesis and Ha Mim get it so wrong, it is that they get it so right! Both are very much a reasonably observant ancient scholar's explanation, using available technology, of what we now know about the evolution of the universe, including the Big Bang. Based upon careful subsequent observation by increasingly educated people and increasingly sophisticated technology, it took science only 2600 years, 130 generations, more or less, to refine itself into modern cosmology, biology and other sciences. Incredibly rapidly, by evolutionary standards!
It helps if one remembers that ancient writings available to us today, including the Bible, are compendia of multiple politically motivated translations of the oral folklore of ancient people. They are likely to contain folk tales, poetry, anecdotal history, philosophical musings, vague predictions, personal letters and ethical exhortations from ancient history. Ancient views of biology, cosmology and other sciences are at best misleading, and at worst totally wrong. The entire text is usually vague, confusing, contradictory and obfuscatory, and careful analyses by the most learned scholars may be, and often are, violently contradictory. Content should be approached with an open mind and the realization that they can be, and frequently are, understood solely as the reader chooses.
Unlike the blazing speed of technological development, human biological evolution moves so slowly that the inherent characteristics, attitudes and abilities of our species have changed very little since our ancestors lived in caves and composed ancient fables to understand the world around them. The Bible, composed over about 600 years of human history, preserves more or less intact its contemporary popular understanding of the ideas of human identity, home, family, duty, obligation, social responsibility and nationality, along with ancillary assumptions and prejudices, only little different from the way we live today, with due allowance for the fact that we have modified earthly environment out of all recognition!
The Koran, written about 600 years afterward during the life of a single individual, the Prophet Mohammed, is a religiously motivated snapshot of the evolutionary changes in human natural and ethical philosophy that accompanied the rise of international trade and progress of science and technology up to that time. True to his intent, his ideas are essentially uncontaminated by the prejudiced parochialism imposed by the beliefs and civil authority of the Roman Church during what have come to be called the Dark Ages.
Feel free to discuss this with me if you like.
The plethora of plants and animals on earth is explained by modern science as resulting from minute mutations that normally take place during the process of reproduction. These mutations are caused by defects in the reproductive process due to natural background radiation and other factors. They make the surviving progeny slightly more or less compatible with their environment, so that over geologic time, individuals that are more compatible have a reproductive advantage over those that are less so. Eventually such mutations accrue to such an extent that a new species arises. This process is generally referred to as biological evolution.
All reproductive species are subject to this evolutionary pressure, but it is greatly enhanced by the process of sexual reproduction. Except for very simple organisms, reproduction without sex produces a new, viable, reproducible mutation of each species over a long period of time, sometimes thousands or even millions of years, whereas sex produces a brand new creature having new characteristics, a blend of each of the parents, every time! Like snowflakes, no two offspring of procreative parents are exactly alike. Until we humans started changing our environment, this kept our species finely in tune with it.
Today we are modifying our physical environment so rapidly that biological evolution has not had time to catch up. Modern humans are optimized for an earth at least 100,000 years or more younger than today. The ability to manipulate our surroundings in this way is, of course, one of the evolutionary advantages that our earlier ancestral species didn't have. We still retain some of the advantages they did have over their own extinct ancestors that helped them to survive and produce our own kind during that time in the world for which they were already evolved. We pass these on to our own children the same way they did, by means of fathers, mothers and babies.
Human babies don't seem destined for survival at all! Virtually all infants of the class mammalia, those animals whose mothers feed them with milk, are pathetically weak and vulnerable to predation. Most mammal parents have sharp claws and teeth, powerful muscles, quick reflexes, and even specialized weapons like horns, antlers and tusks to protect their young. Let's face it; we humans are slow, weak, clumsy, skinny omnivorous apes with chronic alopecia! Without defensive weapons, natural protection or evasive mechanisms, humans' only defense against predators is our intelligence, and the survival strategies we learn and employ by means of it. For all their helplessness, human babies' single, overwhelming protective advantage, refined and optimized by evolutionary pressure, lies in the parents' ability to learn from other adults what they need to know to become their children's defenders themselves. As adults, we are quite capable, in spite of our physical inferiority, to protect and nurture our young in a hostile world. This ability is enhanced by being naturally forced to associate with our own parents for an extended time to learn what they know and do what they do through observation and training. This characteristic is known as paedomorphosis, a deceleration of development into the final adult form. Think of it as evolution in action.
So, for the baby to survive, he requires the attention of parents who have learned how to enable him do that. Beneficial instinctive activity is an evolutionary survival factor, too, and after millions of years, modern humans have evolved a suite of natural behaviors specifically directed at production and protection of our young. Childhood development, courtship rituals, the mating process itself, intuitive activities of the pregnant and nursing mother, responses of the father, reactions of the immediate community, natural child rearing and nurturing protocols, and compulsive activities of the children themselves, all have evolved over the lifetime of our genus to enable us to survive and prosper in a world filled with predators that are faster, stronger, more aggressive, and naturally better equipped for hunting and killing than we are. That our species exists at all today is proof that we are better at other, and immeasurably more efficient, means of survival. As the result of evolutionary direction, we have become the most numerous animals of our size on this planet, by far!
Another evolutionary factor that contributes to our survival is that humans are relatively long-lived. We are almost uniquely likely to outlive our ability to provide for our own needs. This makes it evolutionarily attractive for our species to have acquired instincts that impel us to care for our elderly, so that we have time to learn from them and they have time to pass on their knowledge and wisdom to later generations. This encourages the production of children likely to be able to do that. For humans, bearing and rearing children to take care of us in our old age is definitely worth the investment!
Cultures that have separately evolved in isolation until relatively recently have developed means of coping with the problems of survival that are so similar to each other that I think they can be considered instinctive. Even initially unhealthy infants survive by virtue of the care and protection they receive during their formative years. They exercise, play, emulate the adults, learn skills from them, and refine the knowledge they have learned as they mature into physical adulthood. They are surrounded by other humans in uniquely human societies of mutually supportive and cooperative members, beginning with those their own age, and gradually expanding until they become members of society at large.
As they reach physical maturity, human adolescents typically undergo a psychological selection process by which those less fit to function adequately as adults are removed from the gene pool of prospective parents. The often strange, dangerous, obnoxious and irresponsible activities of adolescents are, in fact, a survival characteristic, a natural test of their fitness to function as socially contributing adults. Although modern society tends to protect them from the consequences of inappropriate behavior to a certain extent during this time, those who fail the test tend to be seriously disabled or to die tragically when removed from the moderating influence of their parents. Think of it as evolution in action!
At some point, adult humans usually meet, or are introduced to, one or more persons with whom they find they have a special interest or affection. They form a special pair bond that creates a family, by which the pair are personally united in a special way understood by them and, to a lesser extent, the society in which they live. This evolutionary strategy strongly favors pair bonding between persons of the opposite gender, so that the natural process of reproductive attraction produces another baby, and the cycle begins anew. In addition, we seem to have an unusually affectionate desire to maintain the leftovers, the elderly, unable to contribute materially to the activity of propagation. There seems to be strong evolutionary pressure in keeping the old folks around for the value of what they uniquely contribute otherwise.
The helplessness of the newborn and the resulting tremendous personal investment in time, effort and resources by human mothers in its survival also strongly favor physical, financial, social and psychological support by the father. Gender specific child care occurs in many modern species besides ours also. Human motherhood without a father at all is physically impossible. Motherhood with an absent father is only slightly less so, and only recently has come to be accepted by society. Thus, the original purpose of sexual reproduction, that of supercharging the rate of evolutionary diversity, has itself developed into a method by which each gender is specially equipped by form and behavior to make an essential and unique contribution to the survival of the young.
This situation encourages human families that are not only durable in their own right, but are recognized and supported by the community. The father, by hunting, gathering and other activities, typically supports the mother immobilized by childbearing, caring for the immobilized elderly, and rearing her juvenile children as well. The community, in turn, recognizes certain rights and duties between the family's individual members. In many cases, the community itself, such as the tribe or clan, is based on the relationships that originate in a single family unit.
The antiquity of this situation is demonstrated by the history implicit in the Bible, the most well known of which is probably the King James Version. Most notably in the Old Testament, it contains not only histories and legends about famous families, but also demonstrates by encouragement and prohibition those relevant ideas and behaviors that were valued or repudiated, respectively, during the times that its books were written, at least by the Semitic people whom it describes. Throughout, the production of children is seen as the main purpose of the family. Being unable to father or bear children is seen as dishonorable or punishment for sin. Being unwilling to do so is considered praiseworthy only as temporary condition.
The evolutionary establishment of the family, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one," is recorded four times in the Bible, Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:5, Mark 10:7-8, and Ephesians 5:31. Traditionally, the "wife" is considered to be a woman, like the "mother," which suggests that the "father" is the "man" in the newly established family. Nothing in the Biblical definition (or biological evolution) suggests that the man cannot legitimately "cleave unto" more than one wife, either at the same time or consecutively, or what, precisely, the term itself means.
The word "wife" suggests a special relationship that the community recognized as being inherently unique by the natural institution of marriage. The loyalty of father and mother to each other is essential for her survival and that of their children as well as their unproductive elderly relatives. Adultery, reproductive relationship between a wife or husband and somebody else, outside of marriage, is an alienation of family affection that is forbidden in the Old Testament. It was, in fact, a capital crime (Leviticus 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:21-24). The Koran requires that the couple that commits adultery "shall be punished," (by as much as 100 lashes!) unless they repent and reform. Fornication, activities liable to create a child without the supporting environment of a stable family, was only a slightly less serious a crime! Conviction requires the testimony of four witnesses in An-Nisa. The punishment for a woman was to be placed under house arrest for the rest of her life unless somebody chose to marry her. Even desiring one's neighbor's wife was forbidden (Exodus 20:17) in Jewish law!
Human nature being what it is, neither wives or husbands have always been faithful to each other. Therefore, all stable societies have evolved the recognition of divorce, by which this special relationship is publicly recognized as being terminated. Divorce was permitted in the Old Testament, but is condemned as equivalent to the capital crime of adultery in the New. (Matthew 19:9, and Mark 10:11) Divorce is considered an "evil practice", for which a four month "cooling off" period prior is prescribed Al-Baqara. There is a whole sura, Al-Talaaq, that prescribes rules to limit its repercussions.
Christians have been putting people to death just for being in the wrong place, as in the Crusades, or for suspicion of believing the wrong things, as in the Spanish Inquisition! But there do not appear to be any historical examples of Christian society regularly executing anybody for divorcing a spouse and marrying somebody else. One has to wonder why. Feel free to enlighten me on the subject.
So, from all we can learn from Scriptural recording of human history, Men and women old enough to become fathers and mothers have instinctively engaged in pair bonding and procreative behavior by entering into some kind of recognized marriage and thus becoming husbands and wives, to produce offspring slightly different from themselves. Mothers stayed home (in the cave?), bearing and raising the children conceived by the father, while the father left the security of the home to hunt, gather or otherwise obtain the necessities of life and bring them home for the family, themselves, the mothers and children, and the elderly. In a human society guided mainly by instinct, and few enforceable rules, there was no doubt a certain amount of abandonment, adultery and fornication going on, but the fact that we are here at all is proof positive that our ancestors, from long before the writing of human history, established customs of dedicated childbearing, rearing and family interaction that depended upon social and emotional bonds, recognized by the community, between the mother and the father of each human child. Think of it as evolution in action!
This results in some unique evolved human characteristics and activities that we sometimes do and do not share to any great extent with our non-human cousins:
For example, human females are fertile only at certain ages, and then only during certain times of the month. Since human gestation takes nine months on the average, this alone does not serve greatly to space out pregnancies. But it does temper, at least a little bit, the more active reproductive drive of the father. Days when mom is touchy, bitchy, or just "not interested," are excellent times for dad to spend more time, perhaps several days, going hunting and exploring over larger stretches of territory for more numerous, diverse or elusive game, new and potentially edible or medicinal plants, and useful serendipitous discoveries along the way. The evolution of reproduction among humans thus encourages periods of exploration and discovery that is beneficial not only to the family, but also to the community as a whole.
Fathers have an apparent instinctive desire to join the male hunting party as soon as they are physically able to do that. This is, unfortunately, when they are least experienced, unlikely to know what they are doing. The are therefore most in danger at that time of quickly meeting a violent end from something like being stomped by woolly mammoths! If they manage to avoid this unfortunate demise, Nature has a vested interest in passing on to future generations of hunters whatever genetic characteristics allowed them to do that. Even very old men are often interested in having sex with women of childbearing years. Helping them to do that has become a multi-billion dollar industry, even if they are not naturally capable of doing so. Thus, evolution preserves and encourages survival traits that are obvious only long after the fathers reach an age at which they cannot hope to raise any new children to maturity to become hunters or parents themselves.
The women potentially involved don't appear to have any biological reward for being impregnated by men too old to go hunting to support them. On the other hand, if one of them is a lonely widow, or has an impotent husband, grandpa may just get lucky! Regardless of how long that activity takes. being around the children would give grandpa the opportunity to play with them, give momma some free time, do minor chores, and pass on wisdom to the young.
The relative ages of father and child are relevant, also. A child likely to have a normal life span benefits from having a young father, who will be able to raise him to maturity before the father passes on. The potentially long-lived child of an elderly father, likely to die when the child is still young, benefits from having a step father young enough to care for him, and the mother, for the longer learning period the child is likely to have. Finding a suitable partner for her fatherless child is likely to be a priority for a single mother! Isn't nature clever?!
It might have been in their best interest for the old men involved to pursue potential mothers while their husbands are away, out hunting, thus avoiding uneven physical competition and whatever social onus is attached to known adultery. This behavior is enhanced by the commonality of the infirmities of age, including male pattern baldness, by which those afflicted are encouraged to stay inside the caves where the fertile women are, to avoid sunburn or having to go very far to seek them out. The gene for male pattern baldness is carried by their own mothers. By this means mothers provide for the reproductive advantage of their successful, long lived, sons, long after they themselves are gone! Nature's cleverness at work, again!
Elderly women also prepare for the reproductive advantage of their daughters by the peculiarity of menopause. They stop bearing children when they are too old to expect to raise them to maturity. Thus grandma can be available to teach, guide, help, and support the childbearing and rearing of her grandchildren with her superior knowledge and experience. By this characteristic, she is able actively to participate in their raising, perhaps better than she did with her own daughters and sons themselves.
This reproductive strategy involving elderly people interacting with fertile propagators has its most important impact in the association of the elderly with the children of the community. This may be their most valuable, and evolutionary attractive, contribution. By this means, their knowledge, wisdom and experiences can be passed on to future generations while learning is the children's primary activity. It is definitely a survival characteristic of our species that the elderly are great storytellers, and that this ability is retained long after physical prowess succumbs to the infirmity of age.
The best biological time for anyone to become a parent is shortly after the onset of puberty, when new adults have their maximum adolescent drive and remaining life span. For young women, this is the time that their own mothers have the best and longest chance of helping them in the duties of successful motherhood. The young mother's clocks are ticking, though, because eventually, if they are lucky, they will reach menopause and have the opportunity to become successful grandmothers themselves. It is therefore in their best reproductive interest for their procreative desire to arise with puberty and peak just before menopause, when it is literally their last chance to have a baby.
The opposite is true for young men. Their onset of puberty is likely to be the time they are most likely to be removed from the gene pool by hunting disasters. So they benefit from hitting their peak of procreative desire as soon as they are able to become fathers, when it may be their last and only chance to do that. Incidentally, this makes it advantageous for young women to be as appealing as possible to attract competition of the young men for their affection. Such a competition would tend to favor strong, agile young men who would be more likely to survive the rigors and dangers of hunting, and therefore to be around long enough to provide for their wives and raise their own children to maturity. Activities and displays between potential mothers and potential fathers of our species in art, entertainment, dress, social customs, and behavior suggest that evolution has selected the females of our species to be the attractive gender and for the males to be naturally susceptible to this attraction. A great deal of apparently irresponsible modern adolescent behavior derives from these inherent natural, valuable, evolutionary drives that, unfortunately, are often incompatible with the environment of modern life.
This strategy of evolution depends upon the genetic contribution of otherwise unrelated fathers and mothers, both in animals and plants. Incest, procreative relations between closely genetically related parents, tends to produce progeny poorly suited for competition for survival. In some animals, including humans, it often appears in various apparently instinctive behaviors that discourage impregnation of or by one's close biological relatives. There is some evidence, for example, that people tend not to be attracted to peers with whom they lived like siblings before age six, known as the Westermarck Effect. In addition, human societies have evolved rituals that strongly discourage reproductive activity between close relatives. Traditional rules for marriage establish prohibitions against marriage between close relatives. Incest is a capital crime in the Bible, and is forbidden (but without a specified punishment) in An-Nisa.
Evolutionary restrictions against incest don't apply, however, to foster children. Biologically unrelated foster children represent the addition of healthy genetic diversity to the family, making them attractive partners of their foster parents or siblings. An-Nisa forbids marriage to closely related women and those with whom reproductive relations would be socially awkward, such as wet nurses, former (widowed?) stepmothers and daughters in law, sisters, and stepdaughters, although marrying an unrelated mother and her daughter at the same time is specifically permitted.
The problems posed by otherwise eligible marriage partners who happen to be closely related by adoption is treated at length in Al-Ahzab.
Both fathers and mothers, young or old, and their children and grandchildren, benefit from the bond implicit in the marriage, and support by a community of people who know them and to whom they are related in the tribe or clan. Indeed, it is likely that early families were often the victims of calamities that left their children orphans or their elderly without a family member to care for them. In this case, it is absolutely essential for their survival that they be adopted, cared for, nurtured, and, in the case of the children, helped to successful maturity by the community in which they live. The Bible and Koran are full of stories these types of family tribulations and suggestions for their resolution, the necessity of responsible parenthood, the benefits of being respectful children, and the necessity of caring for widows, orphans, and the otherwise disadvantaged. St. James tells us that "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."
Since the time of St. James, the world has changed to accommodate
8 billion people, 27 times that number when he lived, increasing now at the rate of about 1 percent per year, twice that of James' time.
When I was born, the world population was only about 29 percent of what it is today. The "average" family differed little from those described in the Bible. The husbands went out hunting (well, "working") to bring home the necessities and luxuries of life, even though agriculture, ranching and business technology had made it possible to replace hunting and gathering with incredibly more efficient means of acquiring family necessities. It also permitted the means of acquiring wealth, over and above what was actually needed. The baggage of cave society gathered goods was replaced with the utility of a paycheck; American paper money had been invented eighty years before, and bank checks about ten years after that, Bank accounts could thus be established from which could be purchased the things families needed or wanted as convenient, while leaving to others the problem of acquisition, transportation and storage.
As soon as they were able, young men were expected to get a job good enough to support a growing family, or to provide trade skills to do that, or both. Apprenticeships were common, boys "on the job" and girls as domestic servants in their own or someone else's home. Schools replaced the education of children whose parents were distracted by the necessities of modern working and housekeeping. Most families I knew had more senior family members living close by or in the same house. Many people lived in homes passed down from generation to generation, occupied by a "clan" of children of all ages and their parents, uncles, aunts and cousins, some grandparents, and sometime a great-grandparent or two.
As noted, however, during my lifetime, the world population grew about 345 percent, an unprecedented growth spurt! This kind of evolution seems to have achieved its ultimate goal. It has enabled our species to have successfully been fruitful and multiplied and subdued the earth. The resources of our planet may not be able to sustain much more population growth, and it is becoming more and more apparent that even our present population may not be indefinitely sustainable due to depletion of natural resources, environmental pollution, and the social pressure that typically produces the uniquely human calamity of global war!
In my view, the gender strategy of evolution has hit a wall! It might not be a bad thing!
The events of the 20th century have fundamentally changed the dynamic between the family, society as a whole, and our current planetary environment. WWII removed many of the husbands from the workplace and substituted the wives, who found that technology could make them just as productive as the men and could, in addition, make it possible to engage in procreative activities without reproduction, an unprecedented liberation! Both men and women found it possible to "work" for the sake of working, to express themselves in new and creative ways, without linking it to supporting a spouse, a parent, or children. It became possible for hardworking, gifted, or simply fortunate people to acquire wealth as much as a million times that of the average family income. Science, art, communication, exploration, technology and invention flourished as never before! This has happened at the precise moment in history that we have finally acquired the option of using our unique intelligence in other previously unavailable ways. We can make our planet a better home for our children, colonize other worlds, or make our earth unfit for human habitation at all, instead of concentrating on simply making more and more people.
The goal of our species used to be to insure survival by being numerous enough to withstand catastrophe. It may well now have become that of preventing catastrophe in the first place if we direct our energies to do that! The times are changing, slowly to be sure, but surely nevertheless. Evolution in action again, this time in a different direction!
Social opinions of formerly taboo subjects such as birth control, abortion and romantic activities between individuals of the same gender have changed drastically in less than a century! Technology has now made it possible for women to choose when, and especially if, they become mothers, and to choose whom the fathers will be. Marriage for this purpose is mandatory only in a few modern societies. and the fathers can additionally remain anonymous through in vitro fertilization. Both childbirth and abortion have become almost risk-free for the mother. Child care programs have made it possible for even moderately skilled or educated women successfully to raise children without the support of a husband. Caring for the elderly is now seen in modern society to be a social instead of a family, obligation, and people who arrive at old age by themselves can expect, and in some cases demand, to be cared for by the community.
For centuries, the Catholic Church has been the leader of this revolution! Religious communities, monks and nuns, have long been established for the purpose of giving productive adults something socially acceptable to do besides become parents and family wage earners. Such societies have established rules that effectively suppress expression of normal, healthy, evolutionary instincts. These are: poverty, the forgoing of the acquisition of personal wealth and work for the good of others, chastity, the renunciation of reproductive relations, and obedience, by which control over the daily lives of the members is exercised by external authority. These are known as the evangelical counsels, the profession of which is believed to be a more perfect degree of Christian, and therefore "consecrated," life if they are actually practiced as claimed. Versions of this type of life are enjoined on Catholic priests in the Western Hemisphere, and have been observed occasionally by other religions as well, without, unfortunately, the same success. The latest (so far) is that of the Heaven's Gate religious cult, of which all but two of the members committed suicide. Fortunately, none of these people were reportedly indicted for expression of their reproductive instincts by child molestation.
Even outside of such unnatural societies, being single, or childless or both, today is not the stigma it was a century ago. Indeed, progressive societies have begun to recognize that the civil protections of family life, originally directed toward protection of the children, are now legitimately extended to families of same-sex couples, thus providing them with the benefits of family life without increasing the size of the family. This gives them the same civil rights, benefits and freedoms formerly extended only to actual or prospective parents, and the additional option of becoming parents by adopting orphaned children if they choose.
In addition, modern medical technology has made it possible to resolve previously intractable problems related to gender identity. Where reproduction is the major goal of human social activity, gender identity is an important, perhaps the important aspect of self awareness. Human boys and girls generally identify as male and female psychologically as well as physically even before they learn what the precise difference might be. External physical characteristics, augmented by social conventions involving clothing, hair styles and occupational interests, tend firmly to establish whether any individual is without doubt either a prospective mother or father.
On the other hand, there are individuals whose personal psychological identity is different from that generally associated with their physical gender, known as gender incongruence and a few individuals for whom such physical characteristics are essentially indeterminate. The often considerable distress related to these issues is known as gender dysphoria, and is currently recognized as a treatable medical condition. It is now possible in most cases medicinally or surgically to repair these anomalies to allow such individuals to resolve conflicts involving their self-identity and perceived physical attributes. The medical problems involved are not trivial, but they pale in comparison to social stigma still associated with these conditions.
In many cases, such conflicts are due mainly, or perhaps exclusively, to unreasonable social prejudice. Surgical repair or alteration of other debilitating birth defects, even to the extent of killing one conjoined twin to save her sister are socially acceptable. Yet saving the life of someone who is suicidally unhappy with who he or she is, is considered by many Americans, not afflicted with this problem themselves, to be repugnant and immoral. Resolution of these types of problems may relieve social disorder related to them as well.
At the moment, bills have been introduced, and in some cases signed into law, in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia severely to limit "gender affirming" health care to minors. My own state of Mississippi passed such a law on February 28
2023. Published discussions indicate that the legislators' goal in each case is to "protect" those not old enough to vote from "tampering" by their own parents or physicians. Yet they do not appear at all concerned about imposing the same prohibitions against resolution of non-life threatening conditions such as parasitic or conjoined twins. These lawmakers are therefore imposing on sufferers of gender dysphoria the misery of having to go through puberty in a body for which they are psychologically unsuited, without any hope of the medical relief that modern medical science could otherwise provide.
A law recently passed in Kentucky's Republican legislature, over the Democratic governor's veto:
Perhaps an indication of the misery these laws cause is that of Henry Berg-Brousseau, a 24-year-old transgender activist, and son of Democratic Kentucky state senator Dr. Karen Berg. He appeared at legislative hearings to lobby against such bills, and died by suicide in December of 2022. A similar tragedy happened across the border in Tennessee, where Audrey Hale, a transgender former student, murdered three students and three staff in a planned suicide attack as a means of "being seen" in a "Christian" school in Nashville.
Even for adults who have legally undergone gender reassignment treatment, there is still social and, in some cases, institutional prejudice. In many cases, this is due to a misunderstanding of what such treatment is and what the results are. A transgender person may be physically or psychologically non-binary, or have physical features different from gender identification at birth. It has nothing necessarily to do with personal or civic virtue or social responsibility.
Irrational bias against such people has often resulted in equally irrational reprisal, in which the people involved present themselves as strikingly different from the general population (such as the purposely distinctive appearance of monks and nuns). While this reaction is a common method of asserting identity as a perceived minority, such as racial discriminatees, it might be to the advantage of people who feel themselves marginalized simply to blend in with the general population. They can't do that if they are sought out targets of social discrimination.
Legislation and custom has yet successfully to have recognized what is in the best interests of all concerned. For example:
Legislative activities need to be wary of the motives of anyone who votes for or passes a law from which he or she is personally exempt, especially when it is justified essentially by religious bias. In the United States, this bias is revealed explicitly in pubic statements by many clergy of popular religious denominations. Most of them seem to see nothing wrong with large numbers of persons of the same gender living together in a commune, yet find families of two such people as "not living according to the Scriptures." In most cases, this censure does not include people divorced from a living person and being married to somebody else. This prejudice seems to me to be contrary to the Christian commandment, to love one another. Indeed, mutual, exclusive love of same gender couples is claimed by many "devout" people to be a grievous sin! In any case, the private lives or affections of such people do not appear to be anybody's business but their own, and chastity is chastity, whether one's thing is men, women, children, or goats!
There doesn't appear to be any justification for prejudice against the private lives of unmarried adults, regardless of gender identity, either. As long as they conform to public law, people who choose to have children in unconventional ways, or who choose other than traditional family arrangements, certainly have a right to exercise their civil rights in a free society. This includes the right to engage in activities and life styles they find rewarding and fulfilling as they please, without having to justify themselves to anybody. Individual freedoms benefit most when everybody minds his own business, especially about why somebody else is, or is not, engaged, married, living with somebody else or pregnant!
Modern organized religions have been woefully deficient in this regard. It is not faith that is important, it is truth! If one believes something that is demonstrably not true, he is either a fool or a bigot, and is a danger to humanity either way! The multiplicity of religious beliefs is proof that none of them have the prerogative, or should have the ability, to force anyone to conform to what they believe to be "right," or to refrain from doing anything just because other people, regardless of number, think it's "wrong!" No agency should be allowed to cause anyone to suffer because he is doing, or has done, anything, or failed to do something, the result of which harms no one else. This is particularly true for religions that profess to believe in individual freedom, intrinsic personal dignity, and unalienable human rights.
In many religions, including mine, marriage is a spiritual union, established by Jesus, in a way that the Evangelists somehow ignored, to provide blessings upon couples involved in, and for the purpose of, procreation. To others, it is something without definition, with characteristics and limits implied by Old and New Testaments of the Bible. There may be other religions that do not recognize any religious aspect of marriage at all. In the United States, law is not concerned with holy matrimony. Government deals with marriage as a civil status. But marriage itself is intrinsically a natural human activity, like breathing, that has nothing to do with the religious or civil affiliation of the partners. It is of much greater antiquity than anyone's church, or any other human institution, and is defined in each case between the partners involved, regardless of race, creed, color, number, gender, romantic orientation, educational level, or previous condition of servitude! If you are not one of the partners involved, it's just none of your business!
It is, of course, the business of religions and their clergy to teach their own adherents how to express their personal, reproductive identity, and for their missionaries, within appropriate limits, to teach, preach, exhort, urge, encourage, convince, convert, entreat, implore, beg, adjure and beseech others to do likewise. Perhaps they would be more successful if, instead of laying heavy burdens on them and not lifting a finger to move them, they would help others to achieve what they consider desirable goals. But it surely does not follow that such proselytization extends to discriminating against others, torturing people to death, or turning them over to the state for punishment, if they practice different moral codes.
As just one example, modern supposedly "Christian" legislative zeal has taken away the intrinsic right in many United States of pregnant mothers, previously guaranteed in Roe v. Wade, of autonomy over their own bodies on the grounds that "abortion is murder." Yet, not a single state has passed laws that would recognize the humanity of the unborn, including all those embryos in cryogenic storage, about whom my own clergy are remarkably silent! They can protest, demonstrate and promote the purchase of custom license plates all they want, but the fact is, what they are for is discouragement by punishment for the exercise of civil rights of the mother, as well as forcing her unwanted child to grow up in an environment of abject misery, in which he is an unloved "mistake." Moreover, they are against, by omission, granting civil rights to those who are not yet born or effectively promoting a national program for childless couples to adopt otherwise unwanted children.
Again, feel free to discuss this issue with me if you want, including the fact that almost all clergy, and most American legislators, are men!
Given our relatively recent ability to opt out of historically conventional gender identity and activity, it may be difficult for us to change our attitudes, let alone our behavior. Unfortunately, increasing danger from climate change, depletion of natural resources and social unrest caused by overpopulation do not give us much of a choice. We absolutely must find ways to avoid our species' eventual extinction while we still have that option!
We have fortunately reached the point in our evolutionary development that the unlimited room and resources of the rest of the solar system and beyond are now available to us all. The United States has announced that the first US astronauts to orbit the moon on Artemis II will be a woman (Mission Specialist Christina Koch), a person of color (Pilot Victor Glover) and two other men (Commander Reid Wiseman, and Canadian Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen). It is unlikely that a mission objective will be to conceive a child anytime soon. On the other hand, the possibility now exists that, with both genders present on other worlds, our species can turn the attention of propagators and non-propagators alike, working together, to making it possible for human beings to be fruitful and multiply and replenish other planets and subdue them, as happened for so many thousands of years on this one!
• Specifically bans surgeries, puberty blockers and hormone therapy for children under 18,
• Requires school districts to forbid trans students from using the bathroom tied to their gender identities.
• Forbids school districts from requiring or recommending that students be referred to by pronouns that do not conform to a student's biological sex as indicated on the student's original, unedited birth certificate,
• Compels doctors to cease treating patients who are undergoing gender-transition care,
• Requires setting a time frame "systematically" to phase out (but not complete) such treatment if physicians deem that abruptly ceasing treatment is likely to "harm the patient,"
• Puts limits on what relevant social issues can be discussed in schools,
• Requires schools to give notice to parents about any program on the subject of sexuality,
• Bars "teaching on sexuality" below the sixth-grade level,
• Bans lessons at any grade level about gender identity or sexual orientation.
• Social convention in clothing, grooming and deportment acknowledges an individual's physical characteristics, including those only rarely visible to others, such as in restrooms. If one is likely to be intimately exposed, it might be best if it were in the presence of those of the same physical gender, even if one "identifies" otherwise. Where this is a common problem, provision of "gender neutral" facilities might be appropriate.
• Individuals who identify as a different gender from that of their birth may have an obviously unfair advantage when competing in gender-specific sports. The World Anti-Doping Agency needs to address this problem, the most obvious means of which seems to be to consider transgender individuals to have been "artificially enhanced" and possibly allowing them to compete as an "unrestricted" gender.
• Federal legislation is necessary to encourage state and other legislatures formally to consider input from those most affected. Legislation regarding medical practice should be guided by medical practitioners and their patients. That pertaining to women's issues should be guided by input from women's organizations. Issues that would primarily affect religious practices should have input from representatives of those religions. This might save a lot of unnecessary judicial review of poorly worded, constitutionally vague, or just plain stupid legislation. Think of it as evolution in action!