Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
As I listen to people talking and watch the media, there seems to be quite a lot of confusion over gender theory. And this can be quite an issue for christians. Indeed, it seems to be a growing issue in a number of western countries where the education system and government is embracing this gender theory.
So I thought it'd be good to have a look at the science, the science behind gender, and look at what's based on actual scientific evidence and what is based on dreamed up theories and philosophies. And there was quite a good article on the Creation Ministries International website. So if you just Google creation.com. And the title of the article was sex, abnormalities and transgender. It was written by Dr. Don Batten, a biologist, University of Sydney, I think, who's trained PhD biologist.
It looks at a number of these different conditions that are out there, and in particular, looks at two particular syndromes, the 46 X Y Swyer and the 46 XX de la Chapelle syndromes. Now, we generally know that humans have the chromosomes there, and the difference between the male and female is that the female last chromosome is an XX chromosome with a female and an XY chromosome for a male. And so they're the differentiations, but that is the genetic or chromosomal definition of males and females.
And so we find that there are people, about one in 20,000 births. There are defects in sexual development, so they're fairly rare. And so let's just have a look at these ones.
So for an XY Swyer person, so that's a person who would, according to their chromosomes, be a male. So they're a male in courier type. And the specific genes that are normally involved on the X or Y chromosome, and these are the chromosomes that are involved in conferring maleness in development, are either mutated or missing. For example, the SRY gene on the Y-chromosome. So this results in the person having female sexual anatomy, because this particular gene is missing. And more research needs to be done.
Understand the genetic basis of all these cases. And thus it's not entirely correct to say that this person has male chromosomes. Superficially, yes, but not in detail, as the important parts that confer maleness are missing, in other words, and as I said, so this person, just to clarify, they have the XY chromosomes, the X and Y, which normally they would be considered a male on the basis of their chromosomes, their DNA, but their actual sexual anatomy is female now, not.
It's interesting that with this syndrome, even though they have the female reproductive parts, physically the ovaries usually don't develop properly, and also, there's no hormonal trigger at the onset of puberty, and hence no periods. And it's usually at this point that the condition is diagnosed and noticed. So, with regard to morality, in this sort of situation, a Swyer person would be acting completely moral to behave as a woman.
And in fact, in times before the modern study of genetics, a Swyer person, for example, would have simply lived her life as a female. According to Dr. Batten's article, it is possible for a Swyer female with a full uterus, with full uterus development, to get pregnant with a donated egg and thus bear a child.
If we look at the opposite situation, the reverse situation, which is the de la Chappelle syndrome, this is where the karyotype is XX. In other words, according to the chromosomal genetics, they're a female. But in 80% of cases, the SRY gene, which is responsible for maleness, has inadvertently been transposed from the father's Y chromosome to an X chromosome during the production of sperm.
Thus, while there's no clear Y chromosome present, important parts of the Y chromosome that convert maleness are now on one of the X chromosomes. So this person is a male anatomically. So they have male genitalia, even though from the chromosome and the DNA analysis, they're XX, they're a female.
In these cases, particularly, the testes do not develop properly. And that's probably the first sign that somebody has this condition. It's interesting, some research into this syndrome was published in July 2019 in the journal Medicina, and it came out on July 12. It's volume 55, number seven from page 371. And it's interesting, what the researchers did was they did a systematic review of the studies of people with this XX female. So these are people who, from a chromosome, or from a DNA point of view, are females, but they have the male genitalia.
They appear to be a male. They reviewed 37 research papers that have been carried out, and they found that, for example, out of the 14 research papers that reported testes volume, there were none that reported normal testes volume. So, in other words, these people, they don't have normal development of the testes there.
However, they do have a normal penis size, they have pubic hair. So 81% had normal penicile. They have, in 90% of cases, normal erectile function.
And it's interesting, 100% of those studies had normal libido. So this is interesting. Now, when they looked at the structure of these people, what happened was the sex determining region Y, the SRY gene was detected in 51 of 57 cases. And this gene was on the XP chromosome in 97% of the cases. In other words, there was this mutation occurring on this particular gene.
So although they had the XX genes, XX chromosome, rather the part of the male genes was transferred to that X chromosome. So again, in the situation of a de la Chappelle person, they unfortunately are infertile. But from a relationship perspective, they would be, because they have the male reproductive system, in the past, they would have lived their life as a male. And I guess today that would apply. These conditions are conditions that are there due to genetic defects that are there.
So perhaps they have specific situations there and they perhaps have nothing to do with some of the claims of transgenderism, where the person says, I'm feeling like a female trapped in a male body in these situations. My understanding is, and also Dr. Batten writes this, that it is in the mind and we need to look at.
There are other factors that affect perhaps the mental development of sexuality. And it was interesting that back in the journal Science, on the 18 January 1980, there was a paper published, maternal stress alters plasma testosterone in foetal males. And what the researchers did was they studied the foetuses, the male rat foetuses of stressed and controlled mothers at certain days after conception and on the day of birth.
And they noticed that there were variations in the levels of testosterone compared to the mothers that had been stressed and those who had not been stressed. And one of the interesting things was that at a certain time, a certain critical time, the mothers that had been stressed, there was impaired masculine sexual behaviour in the male offspring of the stressed mothers. And research later showed that at a particular stage in the development of the male pups, the little testes begin to release testosterone.
And this testosterone dissolves some of the connections between the right and left hemisphere, which is responsible for maleness and male behaviour. And it's interesting that alcohol, for example, as well, is another factor that does the same thing. Back in the journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology, which is study of birth defects in volume 13, issue 3, May June 1991, pages 267 to 269, it looked at the sexual orientation of male rats prenatally exposed to ethanol.
There was quite an interesting paper, actually, that was published. Previous studies had shown that prenatal alcohol exposure causes feminization of the male offspring, as evidenced by the display of female sexual response, or law doses when mounted by a stud male. I'm just reading from the abstract here now.
So this is studies that have been previously reported and so in this study, they examined whether or not feminization induced by prenatal ethanol exposure also affected different aspects of sexually motivated behaviour, namely the approach towards a receptive female normally displayed by which is normally displayed by male rats. And so they described the experiment they did and they performed the experiments. And the results showed that the ethanol exposed males devoted as much time to the caged male as to the receptive female.
Normally a male offspring, say, in the control groups, would spend 29 of percent of their time near a receptive female, compared to only 13% near the male. So we can see that the ethanol exposed males devoted much more time to the other male rats. There's just interesting observations with.
And they go on to conclude, these authors, the observations suggest that the feminization induced in the male by such treatment is not only restricted to the display of lordotic reactions, but also affects sexual orientation. There are other papers, of course, quite a number of papers that were published or research was done. Of course, we need to remember that this work was done on rats.
But in the journal Hormones and Behaviour, volume 43, issue five in male tubidolo, two, three pages, 531 to 539, they again talk about the foetal testosterone surge and the influence of alcohol on this and how this can affect different behaviour.
Another paper, Early Human Development. This is an interesting one. That was volume 82, issue 12, December 2, six pages, 755 to 760 and they talk about foetal testosterone and sex differences. And the abstract talks about experiments in animals leave no doubt that androgens, that's including testosterone produced by the testes in foetal or neonatal life, act on the brain to induce sex difference in neural structure and function. In this article, we argue that prenatal and neonatal testosterone exposure are strong candidates for having a causal role in sexual nymorphism in human behaviour, including social development.
So we can see that there are these other factors that come in that certainly confuse the issue. But again, we know that alcohol is a tyratogen. The foetal alcohol syndrome, particularly in terms of facial features, is well established and we can see now the harm that potentially alcohol can do if a mother drinks, particularly at the critical time of the development of the testes in the male offspring, at least in rats, that's been demonstrated.
Of course, we don't do the experiments like this on humans. Of course there's a, a lot of work in this area that is being done and it's very difficult to sort of understand from a christian point of view how christians should relate to these. But we need to understand that these are either genetic defects or they're defects caused by environmental factors such as alcohol or stress.
And to me, it just emphasises the importance that taking care of our bodies, and particularly our reproductive system, is very, very important.
A book that deals with some of these gender issues came out a few years ago by Gabriel Kuby. Now, she was the, or Gabriel Kuby. She was the niece of Werner Heisenberg, interestingly enough, who's a Nobel Prize winner in physics, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. But her book is called The Global Sexual Revolution.
Destruction of freedom in the name of freedom. And she looks at some of the aspects of what this is doing. So when we look at these situation, we see that the actual genetic defects are fairly low.
About one in 20,000, or we would estimate perhaps one in about twelve or 13. Well, there's about 1200 or 1300 people in Australia, including young people and young children, who perhaps don't yet know that they have these genetic defects are there. And there's also the environmental factors where people have interfered with the natural development through taking drugs, such as alcohol, or being in a very stressful situation.
Of course, unfortunately, sometimes that can't be avoided, stressful situations. But it's interesting. Gabriel Kuby wrote, the pioneer of the postmodern gender ideology is Jude Butler, who was a member of the Rockefeller and Gungenheim foundations and an honorary doctor of the Swiss University of Freiburg.
And Kuby writes that Butler wrote in her book the gender trouble, feminism and the subversion of identity, which came out in 1990. And this is a foundational work on gender theory. But Kuby notes that if Butler's views had been expressed in simple words, they might have been dismissed as fanciful.
But because she clouded her destructive ideas with highly philosophical terminology that was hard to understand, her ideas were accepted. These are Kuby’s views, of course. In essence, Butler was saying that there was no such thing as men and women and that sex is a fantasy, we believe because we are told it is so.
Now, I think that's a pretty big claim, but that's essentially the basic claim that underpins this gender theory. I'll just read again. Butler was saying that there were no such thing as men and women, and that sex is a fantasy, we believe because we are told it is so.
For Butler, identity is solely a function of a gender and sexual orientation chosen by the individual and thus flexible, changeable and diverse. The illusion. This is Butler's views again, as interpreted by Kuby.
The illusion of two sexes is created by incestibu and the use of words like man and woman, and must be eliminated in favour of free self invention. The concepts of man and woman, marriage and family, father, mother, sexuality and fertility, and of heterosexuality as a norm must be destroyed. So we can see that that is clearly an anti biblical view.
Very, very clearly an anti biblical view. And it's interesting, a research article was published. You can see it on creation.com.
So if you google creation.com, it's an article titled a global antichristian totalitarian threat. So we can see from some of these gender issues that it's really migrated away from science to a whole view that wants to distort the christian, and indeed traditionally most cultures view that you have men and women based on the reproductive organs that you're born with.
And this would be the basis of marriage a person with male reproductive organs, marrying a person with female reproductive organs. And this would fit in with the biblical injunction as well. For example, Jesus, when he answered a question from the Pharisees as recorded in Matthew, chapter 19, verses 4 to 6, Jesus answered, have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female? And said, for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh, so they are no longer two, but one flesh? What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.
Another verse can be found in 1 Corinthians 6:13. And here Paul, who again, the apostle Paul was, we believe, inspired by God. He wrote, the body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord and the Lord for the body.
And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never. Do you not know that he who joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For as it is written, the two shall become one flesh.
But he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun immorality. Every other sin which a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body.
Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit within you which you have from God? You are not your own. You are bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
My understanding is from those verses then, that we choose to make a choice in life to honour God and follow his commandments, or we don't. And we need to understand that in our society today, so many people have been taught the theories of evolution and so forth, that they don't believe that there is a God. But we have overwhelming evidence that God does exist from evolution, from personal experiences and so forth, as we've talked about many times in this programme.
So it's an important issue. And if you found today's talk helpful, particularly with the references, feel free to put them up on your social media page. Tell other people about them.
It's indeed a very deep and personal and complicated issue, but the bottom line is for us all to know that there is a God who loves us and wants us to come to him. As Romans 10:9 says, if we confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord, in other words, we choose to honour and obey him and believe that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
You've been listening to Faith and Science and of course, to relisten to these programmes, just google 3abnaustralia.org.au that’s all. One word and click on the listen button.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
