Re: Court jails man over "female athlete" scam (Reuters)
Having only recently joined this website, I am still finding things I have not seen before. This article looked unusual so I went and read it. The last paragraph is quoted here:
"Sithole told the court at his first appearance that he had both female and male organs and that he lived as a woman after consulting a traditional healer. A medical examination showed that he was a man."
My comment is that in America both the medical and psychiatric professional communities agree that a medical examination is indequate to determine the gender of any individual. It can only deternine the "Sex" of the individual. "sex means the sex organ, testes, ovaries, uterus, breasts, vagina and {censored}. It is now well known among the professional, but not "on the street" that "Gender Identity" and "sex" can be two disparate things in human beings. This is nearly impossible for non-transgendered people to even begin to conceptualize because if one's gender identity results in behaviors and predispositions in line with those expected of someone with the type of sex organs of that person than that person has no sense of their gender and their sex as being distinct things - they are experienced as a single thing.
Say what? Most people can not really even tell you how
they know they are men or women except to point to their sex organs, but really the gender identity is rooted in the brain, not in the genitals. If one acts a lot like men and has male sex organs, then there is not any need to go beyond looking at one's organs to identify oneself. But when one is transgendered, one's inner experience and predispositions are those like people having the "other" kind of sex organs. Can you begin to get any glimpse of what that might be like? Probably not, but that is your limitation - not a limitation on what God can create or has created.
In spectroscopy two energy levels of electrons can be the same until the atom is placed in a magnetic field - at which points suddenly it is found that there are two distinct energy states. Non trans people are like the singlet and trangendered people are like a doublet spectral state situation, in which gender identity and body sex are distinct from one another. The capacity for that distinction is always present but is only detected when one is clearly transgendered. And at this point only the trans-person themself can know what their gender identity really is.
At this point in time the general consensus among psychiatrists and counselors and the American Medical Association that there is no way to determine the gender identity of an adult unless they tell you what they experience themselves to be. For children transgenderism can often be detected in the more extreme cases by behaviors which go far outside of those considered to be normal for one having the sex organs that child has.
All of this discussion completely omits the obvious cases of "intersexed" births, where both testes and ovaries might occur, or a uterus and a {censored}. There are 30 known ways to be born intersexed. In our cultures we have no way for these people to belong except to masquerade as one sex or the other - hopefully being more successful masquerading as the sex that is most consistant with the gender that they experience themselves to be. I know one person that has never felt clearly male of female identity, but has pretty much female body parts, so that person lives as a female, though is quite clearly very androgenous in character.
So, in the case of this athlete, the article and apparently the entire investigation is from done from a very unenlightened or dare I say ignorant and perjorative perspective. The person may indeed be a woman in the sense of gender identity. In that case the medical perspective taken is generally that we should regard this person as a woman. The AMA regards Transgenderism as a birth defect. That is progress compared to regarding it as purely as psychiatric diagnosis. But even this ignores the question of whether we are correct in second guessing what God's plans are for any such person. Transgendered people are most often extremely intelligent, creative and have experienced life in the role of one gender while feeling inside as the other gender. This gives them a vastly wider perspective on many social issues - a sort of "insiders" track.
Just my two cents worth!
Nam Hari Kaur, Eugene Oregon
