Anonymous Asks (255)

“Is there a biblical distinction between sex and gender?”

Despite the insistence of the trans lobby that sex and gender identity are two different things, nobody in the history of the world ever thought this until around 1950.

In 2021, journalist Tal Bachman wrote a powerful and well-researched 25-part series called “We Have Met the Enemy” (index here, trans expose commences with Part XIII) that laid bare the origins of this semantic fraud perpetrated by a failed musician from New Zealand who reinvented himself as a psychologist and “sexologist”.

His name was John Money.

A Troubled Man

Bachman paints John Money as an emotionally troubled man with a grudge against the world who took advantage of his professorship at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University to destroy all traditional conceptions of human sexuality and fill the void with his own dogma. Money introduced the notion that sexuality was about more than one’s biological packaging; that it was personal and cultural rather than fixed by nature (or God). The name Money chose for his expanded conception of sexual identity was “gender”, an existing term he freighted with new meaning in this 1955 article.

Bachman writes:

“The next segment of the wedge was Money’s follow-up claim that human beings are born sexually neutral in terms of their minds, instincts, and predispositions. What channels them into a masculine or feminine ‘gender role’ is only experience / environment / nurture, and eventually choice. There is nothing biological about it at all. Anyone can become anything.”

Needless to say, Money had no evidence for this whatsoever, and none has been produced since.

A Successful Con Job

Bachman goes on to chronicle the attempts of responsible writers and teachers to expose Money’s increasingly transparent lies, and the ways these efforts were successfully suppressed. If you have the slightest doubt about the vicious con modern medicine and the media are running on thousands of hurting young men and women in the West, read Bachman. He’s done the spadework, and it’s worth the hour it takes to browse his columns on Money’s life, work and tragic abuse of his patients.

At any rate, my point is this: the distinction between gender and sex is a sixty-five year old, totally unscientific fabrication. It would be a huge surprise to find the Bible addressing an idea nobody ever advanced during the period it was being written. Of all the major Bible versions, only the KJV uses the word “gender” at all. It appears twice, once in 2 Timothy as an antiquated way to say “produce”, and once in Leviticus as a verb, “to gender”, a synonym for sexual reproduction in cattle.

If cows have issues with expressing their sexuality that are shaped by culture and social pressure, it is news to me.

Expressing and Contradicting Biological Reality

Now, that’s not to say that dysphoria is not real. “Gender identity” may not actually exist on a spectrum, as Money claimed, but there have always been feminine men and masculine women. Some men are born with higher-than-average voices, lack of body hair and slight frames. Some women are stocky, hirsute and square jawed through no fault of their own. Moreover, regardless of physical packaging, some men adopt a feminine manner and some women adopt a masculine one. This may happen for a variety of reasons including lack of self-awareness, natural contrariness and unusual nurturing situations.

None of these exceptions to the societal norm necessarily struggle with dysphoric thinking or mental illness; a feminine man is still 100% biologically male, and a masculine woman is still 100% biologically female. Human society has not always been as kind as it might be to its physical and behavioral outliers, but the expression of biological reality has always clustered around two poles, and the rare exceptions were not encouraged to be deliberately or provocatively exceptional.

Follow the Money

That changed with John Money. Society now tells children unhappy with the physical package they received at birth and envious of those who were (undeservingly) gifted a more desirable perch in the socio-sexual hierarchy to pretend they are something they are not. Worse, it enables crazy, self-absorbed parents to virtue signal their progressive bona fides by surgically mutilating their own children with government approval.

Economists will tell you that you get more of whatever you incentivize, and we are seeing more and more socially dysfunctional people taking the opportunity to get attention (and awards) they would not get otherwise, especially men, who operate at a huge physical advantage in women’s sports. Some of these are cynics, trolls and opportunists. Some are genuinely and sadly delusional. Many are suicidal. Few would be doing what they are doing if it were not for John Money and for the media influencers who exploit his ideas in service of their own socially and personally destructive agendas.

Sexual Identity and the Law

The Law of Moses condemned men and women who rejected what God had given them and tried to pretend to be something else, and it discouraged the amputation or injury of sex organs for reasons discussed here. (I believe this was God’s way of minimizing self-injury for economic and political advantage, ritual castration and the mutilation of children in Israel.) In this the Law was historically successful; any expression of sexuality contrary to biological reality was prohibited by it, much to Israelite society’s benefit when they chose to follow it.

So, no, there is no biblical distinction between sex and gender because the whole notion of gender identity is an evil lie cooked up by one man who worked his way into a powerful and influential position. Christians who are not in a position to correct Money’s “identity delusion” are better off avoiding the term “gender” entirely. It helps no one.