The Bible is not a good source on gender and sexuality, so look to science instead.

Much of the public discourse today deals with gender identities and sexual orientation. These are complicated issues that cannot be resolved by quoting Genesis 5:2, Male and female, created he them. If the Bible is a reliable medical text, how does it explain why male humans have nipples since they do not lactate or nurse babies? So much for intelligent design.

Insisting that the Bible identifies only male and female does not change the fact that every year, one out of every 83,000 births is a true hermaphrodite having the genitalia of both male and female. If God made only males and females, how can you explain these unfortunate individuals?

One of every one thousand humans displays Klinefelter’s syndrome, or XXY, where a person has two X chromosomes and one Y chromosome. People with Turner’s syndrome who are missing an X chromosome are identified as 45X0 individuals. One in every two thousand boys has a XYY genetic makeup. Each of these conditions presents a constellation of medical problems requiring complicated treatment because their genetic composition is hardwired into every cell.

The inconvenient truth is that gender and sexuality are very fluid. During the early stages of embryonic development, all human fetuses are female. For a short time, they have both male and female organs. The scrotal seam that appears nine weeks into pregnancy in males is the result of the fusion of the two separate halves of the external female genitalia.

Gender is even more variable in other vertebrates. If the temperature of the incubation mound of American alligators is 33° C, most of the brood will be males. If it is 30° C, most of the hatchlings will be females. Many kinds of fish undergo complete sexual transformation from males to females or vice versa. Dozens of amphibians, reptiles, and even domestic turkeys and chickens can be parthenogenetic and do not require fertilization by males at all.

Before the emergence of psychiatry, people assumed that people could be identified as male or female based solely on the genitalia they had at birth. The idea that gender identity might differ from anatomical gender was not proposed until the 1960’s.

The tragic story of David Reimer provided the first real evidence that gender identity was innate rather than learned. A surgical error caused medical experts to re-evaluate that possibility. On August 22, 1965, a fundamentalist Mennonite couple in Winnipeg, Canada, Janet and Ron Reimer, welcomed identical twin sons, Bruce and Brian. When the boys were seven months old, a doctor botched a routine circumcision on Bruce so badly that Brian was spared the surgery.

A doctor convinced the parents to agree to a sex change operation when the boy was 22 months old and raise the child as a girl named Brenda. Brenda struggled with depression and other psychological problems before undergoing a second operation to restore his male gender. But the long term damage was done and the child who had changed his name to David Reimer committed suicide at age 38.

The real problem is that people cannot accept the idea that complex behaviors have genetic bases. For example, for hundreds of years left- handed people were persecuted and even punished as deviants. They were forced to change to right-handedness. In our more enlightened times, we accept that handedness preference is innate occurring about ten percent of the time in all cultures worldwide. Similarly, researchers estimate that about ten percent of people worldwide are homosexual and about two to three percent identify as transsexual irrespective of the cultures in which they are raised.

Any parent knows there are genetic components to behavior because siblings can have very different personalities from birth. If people can accept that personality differences as natural, why can they not accept that children may identify with a gender different from the one assigned to their anatomy? Overwhelmingly, religious beliefs are used to condemn or even kill LGBTQ children.

The irony is that these narrow-minded people invoke the name of Jesus to rationalize their bigotry when Jesus himself never said one word to condemn LGBTQ people. Not. One.Word.

As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.’ The narrow-minded view that the Bible is the ultimate authority on all human endeavors obscures the truth and mystery of the universe in which we live.

If you still believe the Bible is the ultimate authority on everything, the next time you have car trouble, insist the mechanic use the Bible to repair it.

Roger Guffey of Lexington is a retired math teacher.