Issue 17 - Institutional Capture and Honorable Conduct in Negative World
Cultural Understanding
This 2023 brief from the American Medical Association says that both gender and sex are social constructs, noting that “neither gender nor sex are stable, objective categories”. (“A social construct is a concept that exists not in objective reality but as a result of human interaction. Put another way, it exists because humans agree that it exists.”) The official position of the largest association of physicians in the US is that binary sex categories are something people made up.
Their argument seems to boil down to “the existence of intersex people who don’t definitively meet the criteria of either sex demonstrate that those criteria are subjective.”
Evolutionary Biologist Colin Wright likens this to claiming that because a coin can land on it’s side, that “heads” and “tails” are not objectively real descriptors of a coin. Also, the AMA claims that these exceptions occur at a rate of 1 in 50, when in reality they occur less than 1 in 5000.
These types of language games are dangerous because people appeal to the concept of biological sex as socially constructed to argue for things like including men in women’s sports or women’s prisons, or for children to mutilate their bodies to better align with perceived gender. Colin Wright’s article even cites the director of The Center for Gender-Based Biology at UCLA arguing that we should abandon sex classifications altogether in favor of one’s subjective perception of their gender.
In related news, The American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest professional association of pediatricians in the US, recently published an op-ed arguing that laws against “gender affirming care” amount to “state-sanctioned” child abuse. As documented in Issue 4, even progressive Europe is backing away from giving hormones to and performing surgery on minors, citing lack of evidence for benefits. But American physicians keep doubling down.
I know that I keep harping on the topic of sex and gender, but I want people to be aware of how influenced many of our institutions are by a false worldview that is actively harmful to some of the most vulnerable in our society, and which is inherently in opposition to orthodox Christian beliefs.
In this essay, professor and writer Carl Trueman admonishes Christians to be careful in our response to the current cultural moment, citing 1 Peter 2, and highlighting the apostle Peter’s response to the ”Negative World” Roman context in which First-century believers lived.