XX Ph.D.

In all the debate about homosexual rights and same-sex marriage, pro-family activists need to understand there is a far more destructive underlying agenda promoted by the unholy alliance of gender feminists and homosexual lobbyists, and that is the deconstruction of gender itself.

The 2007 UNICEF report, entitled "Women and Children: The Double Dividend of Gender Equality," argues that when women are given more opportunities to succeed, children will prosper. Bernadette Corteses, in an article posted on the Cardinal Van Thuan International Observatory's web site, said that although the social doctrine of the Catholic Church would agree with UNICEF's goal of "promoting equality and empowering women in the family," the report goes too far when it makes a distinction between sex and gender.

The UNICEF report makes this distinction by acknowledging that men and women are physically different, but states that the behavior patterns of men and women, what they refer to as gender roles, are merely cultural constructions. Biologically, says the report, it is undeniable that "females have two X chromosomes and males have one X and one Y chromosome. Gender roles," however, "are not inborn, but rather learned."

Corteses wrote that the Church believes empowering women "in work and in politics is very important because it produces a double dividend: fulfilling the rights of women and going a long way towards realizing those of children as well." She explained, however, that when a distinction is made between sex and gender, dangerous ambiguities enter into society and an understanding of marriage. Separating gender from sex, continued Corteses, opens the door "for a purely historical, relative, artificial vision of being male and female, which has a negative impact on children themselves."

Corteses continued that according to Pope John Paul II's encyclical "Centesimus Annus," children have the right "to a human ecology whose fundamental structure is the family founded on marriage. To respect the sexual humanity of man means 'to respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed.'" This cannot happen when sex and gender are viewed as distinct realities. "The anthropological vision of UNICEF is undoubtedly deficient."

Liberal feminists of the 60s or what Christina Hoff Sommers author of "Who Stole Feminism" refers to as "equity feminists", believed that women should have as much freedom and opportunity as men and that discriminatory laws should be eliminated. However, within a decade, liberal feminism was overtaken by the far more radical "gender feminism", which, building on Marxist ideology, requires the elimination not only of economic classes but of sex classes, i.e. the division of humans into male and female.

Hence the substitution of the word "gender" for sex . "Gender" is primarily a grammatical term, which may be determined by a distinguishing characteristic, i.e. sex, but gender can also be arbitrary like the gender of some nouns in Spanish and French..This malleable view of gender and the expansion of two sexes to five genders was most clearly expressed in the writings of Mexican Marta Llama at the Regional Conference and Non-Government Organisations Forum (prelude to the UN's 1995 Beijing Conference on Women) at Mar del Plata, Argentina, in September 1994. According to Sra Llama:

"Biology shows that outwardly human beings can be divided into two sexes; nevertheless, there are more combinations that result from the five physiological areas which, in general and very simple terms, determine what is called the biological sex of a person: genes, hormones, gonads, internal reproductive organs and external reproductive organs. These areas control the five types of biological processes in a continuum.

According to Sra Llama, who describes a series of congenital malformations,  man/woman, masculine/feminine are merely cultural constructions, and thinking that heterosexuality is the "natural" sexuality is only another "example of a 'biological' social construction". As a further development of Sra Llama's theme, at the UN Women's World Conference in Beijing in 1995 feminists claimed that the sexuality of multiple genders found expression as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, hermaphrodite, transvestite and transgendered, the latter group being further sub-divided into those who were awaiting surgery, those who had surgery, and those who had surgery but were unhappy and now wished to revert back to their original condition.

The views of Sra Llama and other gender feminists from New York has dominated the United Nations agencies for the past decade, requiring the UN and member States to "mainstream the gender perspective" in all documents and Plans of Action. According to a booklet published by the UN International Research & Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW):

"To adopt a gender perspective is ....to distinguish between what is natural and biological and what is socially and culturally constructed, and in the process to re-negotiate the boundaries between the natural - and hence relatively inflexible - and the social - and hence relatively transformable". 

In a chapter from a book by Kate Bornestein a man who underwent a "sex change" argues that the way to liberate women is to deconstruct gender:

"Women couldn't be oppressed if there was no such thing as  'women'......doing away with gender is key to the doing away with patriarchy........Gender fluidity is the ability to freely and knowingly become one or many of a limitless number of genders, for any length of time, at any rate of change. Gender fluidity recognizes no borders or rules of gender" (Bornestein p. 52).

The congenital malformations referred to by Sra Llama are comparatively rare,  and it is the contention of this paper that they do not prove there are more than two sexes and do not prove that heterosexuality is not natural any more than the fact that some babies are born blind proves that it isn't natural for human beings to see. Biological sex is not determined by external organs but by genetic structure. Every cell of the human body is clearly marked male or female, and the human brain, which is the primary sex organ, is masculinized or feminized in the fetal stage of development by the presence or absence of testosterone.

Furthermore, human beings do not exist on a continuum between male and female. Those rare cases of infants born with anomalous genitals deserve sympathy and treatment on the basis of their chromosomal sex, the presence of a "Y" chromosome indicating a male, and its absence denoting a female. The occurrence of some rare abnormalities does not require the re-assignment of the entire human race.

Dr. John Money, a researcher at the John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, is credited with coining the term "gender identity" to describe a person's inner sense of himself or herself as male or female, Money established the world's first Gender Identity Clinic at John Hopkins, devoted solely to the practice of converting adults from one sex to the other. His theories on the psychosexual flexibility at birth of humans forms the cornerstone of an entire medical specialty - pediatric endocrinology. His most celebrated case, the Reimer twins, is detailed in John Colapinto's book, "As Nature Made Him: The Boy who was Raised as a Girl".

Bruce and Brian Reimer were normal identical twin boys. Bruce's penis was accidentally burnt and destroyed in a circumcision accident.  Eventually the parents were referred to Dr. John Money at John Hopkins. He gave the parents reassurance that Bruce's sex re-assignment as a girl had every chance of success.

In July 1967, aged 22 months, Bruce was surgically castrated at John Hopkins by surgeon Dr. Howard Jones, the co-founder of Money's Gender Identity Clinic. The main procedure was a bilateral orchidectomy, removal of both testicles. Dr. Jones fashioned a rudimentary vagina with the remains of the scrotal skin. The baby was renamed "Brenda".

The experiment was a failure from the outset - Brenda showed no signs of femininity and every sign of masculine behaviour, including rough and tumble and fighting games, and standing up in the toilet to urinate. She failed to bond with her female school mates, and despite several changes of school, and referral to counselling and psychiatrists, had disciplinary and academic problems; she just did not fit in. She was kept back in first grade; her identical twin was promoted.

Despite all the indications that the experiment was a massive failure and that Brenda was having major psychological and behavioural problems, Money wrote that the case was a great success - he contrasted Brian's interest in "cars, gas pumps and tools" with Brenda's avid interest in "dolls, a doll house and a doll carriage", Brenda's cleanliness was characterised as different from Brian's disregard for such matters, Brenda was interested in kitchen work, Brian disdained it.

The importance of the twins' case cannot be underestimated. It was seized on by the feminist movement which had been arguing for years against a biological basis for sex differences. Kate Millet in her 1970 definitive feminist tome, "Sexual Politics", had quoted Money's papers as scientific proof that the differences between men and women reflect not biological imperatives but societal expectations and prejudices. The twins' case offered apparently irrefutable proof to support that view.

In May of 1980 when Brenda insisted to her Winnipeg endocrinologist and psychiatrist that she did not want to be a girl, they advised her father to tell her the truth about what had happened to her as an infant. Brenda's feelings were of anger, amazement, but overwhelmingly of relief. 

Although Money's views on psychosexual neutrality or the malleability of gender identity was the established wisdom of the scientific community and particularly of the feminist movement, he was challenged by a pioneering team of endocrinologists at the University of Kansas led by Dr. Milton Diamond. who stated that prebirth factors set limits on how far culture, learning and environment can direct gender in humans. Brenda, or as she was renamed "David", having learned the truth, wasted no time in reclaiming his sexual identity. By his fifteenth birthday he was living socially as a male. He began receiving injections of testosterone, and in 1980 underwent an intensely painful double mastectomy. In 1981 he had surgery to construct a rudimentary penis from muscle and skin from the inside of his thighs. Before his twenty-second birthday he had a second more successful phalloplasty in a 12-stage operation. In September 1990 David Reimer married Jane Fontane, a single mother of three children.

A few years ago Bruce Reimer committed suicide, as did David Reimer two years later following the break-up of his marriage: a tragic epitaph to the gender reassignment and sex abuse experiment by John Money.

The Gender Identity Clinic at John Hopkins was closed, and Money's controversial evening course in human sexology was cancelled in the late seventies. Dr. Paul McHugh, Chairman of the Psychiatry Department at John Hopkins, criticized transexual surgery as "the most radical therapy ever encouraged by 20th century psychiatrists", and likened it to the once widespread practice of frontal lobotomy. Dr. Jon Meyer, a Hopkins psychiatrist and former director of the Gender Identity Clinic, produced a long-term follow-up of fifty post-operative and pre-operative adult transexuals treated at John Hopkins and reported that none showed any measurable improvement in their lives and concluded that "sex re-assignment surgery confers no objective advantage in terms of social rehabilitation".

In the US urologist Dr. William Reiner has laid down his scalpel and has retrained as a child psychiatrist specializing in intersexual conditions. He is convinced that surgery steering intersexual babies at birth into one sex or the other is wrong.  My own view is that children should be reared, and adults should live in the sex that matches their chromosomes - XX or XY. The brain is the primary sex organ, and our brains are programmed before birth to be male or female.

There is a determined push by the homosexual rights movement to legitimise sex changes and and also for the right for birth certificates to be altered to show the "new" gender, even when there has been no hormone treatment or surgery, i.e. individuals should have the right to be regarded as male or female regardless of anatomy and based solely on their feelings of self-identification. This would make arguments about same-sex marriage redundant and make a mockery of marriage because any couple could define themselves as male and female and get married under existing laws.

In 2004 in a "Letter to the Bishops on the Collaboration of Men and Women", Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, wrote: ".....The obscuring of the difference or duality of the sexes has enormous consequences on a variety of levels. This theory of the human person intended to promote prospects for the equality of women through liberation from biological determinism, has in reality inspired ideologies which call into question the family in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent in a new model of polymorphous sexuality...."

"Genesis 1: 26 says: 'and then God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them'. From the very beginning therefore humanity is described as articulated in the male-female relationship...."

The Almighty brought order out of the void, and then there was light. But activists demanding same-sex marriage, and the creation of IVF children without fathers, require us to reject the form of human nature itself and ultimately to regard human beings as if they were things without form. This encroaching darkness goes beyond perversion to cosmological disorder. Our hope is that the World Congress of Families will help prevent this descent into chaos.