Dear Editor,
I refer to the letter by Vicky Sawyer (SN, April 23) captioned ‘Sexual orientation and sexual attraction are different issues.’ Sawyer’s avoidance of objectivity is truly tragic to behold, and again, there is that eerie feeling that what the Bible tells us in one or two sentences is inevitably borne out by hundreds of years of secular research.
Stabroek News has not yet published our previous response which contains some of the truths Sawyer needs to hear. We had also previously alluded to the fact that glib GLBT pseudo-science would lead to legal chaos, and Sawyer’s talk of “gender variant” is a classic example of that confusion.
For the sanity of the legal system, these two facts remain inviolate: (1) Sex is determined by chromosomes. Sex is an immutable characteristic at the time of birth; and (2) a person’s gender is either male or female. We live in a binary world. Describing gender cannot be simply a ‘perception’ or a ‘feeling.’ “Subjective mental thoughts about sex/gender are too amorphous to use as a baseline to establish sex (http://www.pfox.org/Q&A-gender-identity-confusion.pdf )
See, in addition, ‘Transsexualism and the Binary Divide: Determining Sex Using Objective Criteria’ by Matt Staver
(http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8309&context=expresso), Liberty University School of Law. In addressing every decided case in the US prior to 2006, he concludes: “Sex must be determined by objective factors such as biology and physiology. A person’s sex is determined by chromosomes. When there is harmony between biology and physiology, surgery cannot alter a person’s sex merely because that person desires a different gender. If sex is primarily a state of mind and based on subjective mental desires, equal protection for sex-based classications becomes meaningless. To maintain any stability and meaning to sex-based classication, sex must (and can) be determined by objective factors…”
Yours faithfully,
Roger Williams