12 March 2023 — 0534 mdt
SB-458 is a brazen attempt to include the
Book of Genesis in the Montana Codes Annotated
By James Conner
In a theocracy — for example, Iran — the holy book of the dominant religion is also the law book for the state. Our nation’s founders, wise to the dangers of official religions, designed a nation in which all have the right to worship the god they choose while forbidding the nation the power to establish an official religion.
That’s worked out well, but there’s always been a vocal minority that asserts the United States should be a sectarian Christian nation instead of a secular nation that observes many of the values of enlightened Judo-Christian social philosophy. They seek official observances of the Christian religion, such as prayer in public schools and time released from schools for Bible studies.
And they seek to have the laws of our nation and states use the Biblical definition of sex.
A bill now before the Montana Legislature, SB-458, “An Act Generally Revising The Laws to Provide a Common Definition for the Word ‘Sex’ When Referring to a Human,” carried by Republican State Sen. Carl Glimm (SD-2, Columbia Falls), is based not on contemporary medical science but on the Old Testement book of Genesis, specifically Genesis Chapter 1, Verses 26 and 27:
26. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. [King James Bible Online]
Five hundred years later, Glimm’s bill posits the existence of two sexes, male and female, attempting to define them by their capacity for reproduction:
Section 1. (a) “Female” means a member of the human species that, under normal development, produces a relatively large, relatively immobile gamete, or egg, during her life cycle and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of that gamete.
(b) “Male” means a member of the human species that, under normal development, produces small, mobile gametes, or sperm, during his life cycle and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of that gamete.
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(f) “Sex” means the organization of the body and gametes for reproduction in human beings and other organisms. In human beings, there are exactly two sexes, male and female, with two corresponding gametes. The sexes are determined by the biological indication of male or female, including sex chromosomes, gonads, and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia present at birth, without regard to an individual’s psychological, chosen, or subjective experience of gender.
“There are exactly two sexes” is the human biology described in Genesis. Among fundamentalist Christians, this is an irrefutable truth that is not subject to modification by scientific investigation. God created man and woman, and no other species of human. In this manichean view, there is no room for gender dysphoria, for transgender men and women, for nonbinary and two or three spirit people, or for homosexuals. God made just two sexes, male and female, and in the view of those supporting SB-458, he made no mistakes.
In the view of SB-458’s supporters, the mistakes are being made by the sinners who are blaspheming the Almighty by rejecting his binary creation of a humankind comprised only of male and female members.
This absolutist view of binary humankind is at variance with modern biological science, which recognizes male and female, and intersex, which is a person whose biology is somewhere between classic male and classic female. It’s what happens when nature departs from standard practice. It may have been recognized in the early 17th century when the King James Bible was commissioned, but if it was it was not included in the Bible’s story of humankind’s divine creation.
Nor was it included in my education in the fifties and sixties. Like millions of my contemporaries, I was taught that there were two sexes, male and female, who were equipped with XY and XX sets of chromosomes. In those days, one in ten high school students went to college, and general education level college biology classes didn’t always improve on the oversimplified description of human genealogy that high schools presented. Not until well after college did I learn that in addition to the XY and XX combinations there were others, in particular XYY, which was associated with greater than normal height and, some argued, a greater propensity for violence.
In a long and expert thread, pediatrician Lauren Wilson explains just how complicated human biology is, and why SB-458 would set in law ideas that are at variance with the biological facts.
By falsely asserting that there are only two sexes, SB-458 legislates gender dysphoria and the people who suffer from it out of existence. It casts live human beings with human and legal rights beyond the protection of the law because the bill’s supporters believe all but certified heterosexuals are beyond the pale, beyond God’s grace, and must not be recognized as legitimate lest God’s will be defied. It’s an attempt to bend secular law to sectarian purposes.
Complicating the debate are two legitimate issues associated with transgender people.
One concerns the fairness of athletic competition. Because men are bigger, stronger, and faster than women, we have a system of single sex sports to ensure fair competition. It works well. And because it does, women athletes and their families are understandably concerned that a man who transitions to a woman may retain sufficient strength to be an unfair competitor in women’s sports. There are so few such competitors that the issue seldom arises in practice, but when it does, it’s not solved easily. And in my opinion, it’s not solved well when legislatures get involved.
The other is whether gender dysphoric minors are being provided medical treatment that cannot be reversed and that they may regret. I don’t believe the legislature is competent to prescribe medical treatment for gender dysphoria, but I do believe it can be appropriate for a legislature to express, in a no-binding way, its concerns about the issue.
In both cases, passing laws is the wrong approach. Legislators who try to practice medicine always practice it badly. A better approach is passing a non-binding resolution expressing concern. That gets the attention of medical professionals while not constraining their options for treating gender dysphoria.
Neither the United States nor the state of Montana is or should be a theocracy. No part of the Book of Genesis should be inserted into Montana’s body of secular law.Ask your legislators to kill SB-458. Use the legislature’s Have Your Say portal.