Gender -- My Proclamation to the World

I didn't really start this blog to take a querulous approach to things, but lately it seems like a lot of people are almost deliberately misinterpreting the Church's Proclamation on Family.

What does it say in there on Gender?

I'll tell you several things I don't see it saying:

• Nowhere does it say that Machiavelli's philosophies on gender roles are any more correct than his example.
• Nowhere does it say that the 1830s social attitude towards gender roles were correct.
  
  • Nor the 1860s attitudes, 1880s attitudes, 1930s attitudes, 1960s attitudes, etc.
  • In fact, nowhere does it condone any of the world's philosophies that would make one gender subservient to the other, or one superior to the other.
  • On the contrary, it says husband and wife should be equal partners. You know, as in neither gets to lord it over the other kind of equal.
• Nowhere does it excuse one partner in abusing the other, or in abusing their children.
  • On the contrary, it says individuals who abuse spouse or children will have to answer to God.
  • Answering to God is something you would prefer to do as little of as possible. It's not big and scary God threatening you that you're going to hell so much as it is the pavements of hell finally meeting you in the face -- and you realize you've been there all this time, and even death doesn't let you out. 
  • And the only way out is talking it out with God (thinking, praying, listening) and finally doing what your conscience tells you you should have been doing all along -- no matter how much it hurts.
  • By the way, it does hurt, but getting it done with is a clean feeling that helps heal your hurt and might even help you undo some of the pain you've caused others.
• Nowhere does it say men can't like pink -- or fashionable clothes, or dancing, or just about anything that social customs or philosophies have tried to reserve to women.
• Neither does it say anywhere that women can't like hiking boots or power tools or running around in camouflage fatigues, etc.
• Nowhere does it say that men can't cry. (Women either.)
• Nowhere does it say that a woman should not care deeply for any man except the man she is married to. Nor does it say that a man should not care deeply for any woman other than the woman he is married to.
  • Caring deeply is not the same as sexual intercourse.
  • Caring deeply may sometimes feel as good as sex, but it is not sex.
  • Caring deeply is not tantamount to sex.
  • Caring deeply for each other is also something that can and should happen when people marry each other, even if they are of opposite gender.
• Nowhere does it say that men should not like men, or even love men deeply. (See above about caring deeply.)
• Nowhere does it say that women should not like women, or even love women deeply. (See above about caring deeply.)
• Nowhere does it say that a person should reject his or her inborn traits or talents.
  • Gender is one of those inborn traits/talents.
  • All traits or talents are neither inherently good nor inherently evil. They are good and evil only in how you use them. 
  • Inborn traits and talents are not binary.
• Nowhere does it say that the battle between the sexes is a good thing;
  • nowhere does it say that we should support that war,
  • nowhere does it say we should prolong that war,
  • nowhere does it say we should participate in that war.

It does say that a man's role is to preside. Perhaps it should have been more explicit and said, "preside as Jesus Christ presides over the Church", because that is exactly what the Church teaches. (The proclamation does, however, mention in several places that parents should follow the principles Jesus Christ taught.)

But that could also be misunderstood. Many who have never really read the New Testament or the Book of Mormon still seem to think that Jesus was an arbitrary tyrant or something.

He was not. He healed. Sometimes he called to repentance. He miraculously fed large crowds on at least two recorded occasions. He forgave people. He helped people understand truth.

He helped people.

But He did not force people to accept His help.

Even now, He waits for us to exercise faith in Him, to ask for His help, and to be willing to receive it.

Even trying to force us to be happy is something He doesn't do.

Ultimately, He died for us.

He rejected political authority. Sure, we can say He doesn't need it from us, but if you can see that far, look at how He rules over the world. Does He come down here with angels and big magic guns and force us all to do right?

Admitted, He has and does allow certain evil men to exercise their freedom to choose in setting up tyrannies and in trying to force us to be their version of happy, but that is not what He wants them to do.

(Hitler and those who urged him on used their freedom to try to force other people in this way. So did Lenin and those who came after him. Likewise those who lead certain modern religious and political extremist sects, which they usually confuse with political entities. So did many of the Crusaders, acting under a falsely claimed Christian banner that was anything but Christian. So have many others done throughout history. This is the Roman Empire. This is Babylon in all her glory. This is Cain's children.)

Understanding this does require us to trust that it is not what He wants them to do. And it requires us to trust that, in the worlds to come, He will make that up to those who are, who have been, and who will be so oppressed and aggressed against in our present world. In this world, He does ensure that every such tyranny is ultimately destroyed when it goes too far.

We, in our limited wisdom, would stop it before anyone got killed, or even hurt, but that would prevent us, as well, from making making the mistakes we must make before we can learn that such is not the path to happiness.

But He gives the tyrants also the opportunity to repent, if they will. (And He allows those who believe in Him to be tried, to see if we really are willing to follow His example. It hurts. I know. But, just because He lets things happen doesn't mean He wants us to be hurt. He wants us to be healed, and that means we must become able to see where we hurt.

We usually don't act until we feel the pain. When we have not learned to seek to change ourselves to be more like Jesus, we do not act until we feel the pain. That's why He lets us feel the pain. It moves us to learn that repenting hurts less than remaining anti-functional.)

He helped the Allies in World Wars I and II because the other side wanted to set up even more of those tyrannies. He was the ultimate relentless motivating influence that led to tearing down the wall between the two Berlins. His was the influence that enabled dissolution of the Soviet Union, and is now the influence that holds the tyrants among extremists in Russia, China, North Korea, Japan, the Arab countries, the USA, and elsewhere all over the world in check.

Jesus is not a tyrant, even though, for the sake of the individual freedom to choose wrong, He does allow people to make wrong choices that hurt other people.

As Elder Uchtdorf explained, Jesus Himself said that he was sent to be a servant to all. (For example, see Mark 10: 45, but start reading from verse 35 and think deeply about verse 45 when you get there.) This principle is echoed many places in the scriptures. Elder Uchtdorf was not being a loose cannon when he gave the talk I link at the beginning of this paragraph. This is orthodox Christian doctrine, and essential for both men and women to understand their priesthoods.

The proper presiding role is one of service, not of arbitrary posturing and decreeing what is to be.

Back to topics more obviously gender-oriented, it might be wondered how the Church can justify itself in asserting that our gender here is connected to our spiritual nature in the pre-birth state. Doesn't the evidence point to gender being a somewhat random result of genetics and environment?

I'm going to be a little truculent and offer a little personal opinion here.

Show me a truly successful sex change operation. I'm not interested in successful corrective surgery for this question, only a sex change operation in which a formerly functional male becomes able to conceive naturally, gestate, and carry a fetus to term and live birth.

And if you actually do succeed in that which has not yet been done, I'll shrug and say you've only succeeded in proving that the female characteristic is ostensibly the ability to conceive, gestate, and carry a fetus to term and live birth, and that you've succeeded in changing a male body to a female state.

If you could succeed in this, you wouldn't have proven what you think you would have.

Our gender is based on our personalities and other traits that we bring with us, although it usually gets modified somewhat by the environment we are born into and the environment we live in. These things are not for us to argue about here, they are between the individual and God. They are not for trying to embarrass people with. They are not for trying to force people about, one way or another.

They are especially not to be used as an excuse for sex outside marriage. And they are especially not for using to make political power with.

It has been this way from the beginning, but some have (again) made it a political topic in the last century, which has made it hard for a lot of people to let alone.

As far as corrective surgey goes, I think parents should limit their pursuit of corrective surgery to clear cases of serious danger to the health of the child (and should ignore perceived future threats to social well-being). The health dangers of corrective surgery appear to be greater than many would admit, greater, in fact than the possible benefits in most cases.

Doctors should not have been so anxious to perform surgery in the past, and they should not be so anxious now. Even when it is pursued for purposes of health, it should be as minimal as possible.

We should not worry ourselves about ambiguous sexual organs. Sex really isn't binary.

And we should especially not worry each other about ambiguous sexuality. We hang far too many social expectations on something that should be private, should not be expressed in the general social context.

About adults seeking correctve surger for themselves, they really need to weigh the costs carefully, and not depend on the opinions of any single group. I'd also suggest they make it a matter of prayer if they have any belief in God and prayer.

It makes much more sense, especially in our modern society, to assert the right of people to hold some physiological ambiguities derived from their birth.

I'd say likewise psychological, but we need to just completely quit trying to attribute non-physiological characteristics specifically to gender. Such things are statistical phenomena, and statistics are not proof of anything about individual cases. Individuals have a right to vary from the statistical mean by wide margins.

It makes far much more sense to assert the individual's right to be and do
things that some people might believe are typical of the other gender.

Now, as far as I know, there has never been a true hermaphrodite born, that is, someone who is able to both get pregnant by a man and get a woman pregnant. (I'm deliberately ignoring the question of impregnating self. It's a distracting flight of fancy.) If such a thing should happen, I'll still suggest that we should not ask that person to be any other than he/she is.

If we ever need to cross that bridge, if there ever is a true hermaphrodite, I think I would suggest allowing such a person to find her/his own solution to the question of mating.

Biologists, being forbidden by the scientistic requirement to ignore things not currently observable, can do nothing but talk about random mutations to explain certain genetic incidents. But I'm going to be a really bad boy and tell you a mystery.

The spirit of a child, while preparing for birth, has a certain range of freedom in influencing the growth of the fetus. The genes of the parents and certain mutation inducing external influences provide some limiting parameters, but the spirit of each child has some permission or ability to work within those parameters, to adjust the DNA to the traits that person brings from the spirit world.

Almost every mother knows this in her subconscious thoughts.

We ought to be a lot more careful about how we meddle with people's personal traits/affairs.

That said, why would I recommend against a person deciding, after birth he or she is an exception to the binary male/female principle?

Good question. Depends on how he or she wants to be an exception.

(We used to refrain from talking about these things, because even just talking about them could induce sexual excitement and cause people problems they didn't ask for. Culturally, we needed to find ways to talk about them that were not random songs, performances, books, movies, rants on blogs, etc. We have not yet found such ways, but we talk anyway now.)

Sexual intercourse is not safe. No matter how much people sell prophylaxis, it is not as safe as abstinence. And the dangers are not small.

Sexually transmitted diseases can be very debillitating, not to mention life-threatening. The treatments are not without side-effects, and the side-effects can be so bad that the only thing worse is the disease itself. You can't just take a pill and make it all better.

Sex also makes us subject to psychological and emotional intimacy issues. Sex just is not something to be safely enjoyed.

That's not the way nature built us -- to make sex safe. Maybe it seems unfair, but that's the way it is. (There is a reason sex is dangerous, if you care to think deeply about it, research it, and, if you believe in God, ask God about it.)

Sex is not an appropriate expression of love outside of the marriage relationship.

Even if marriage is not 100% effective, even if it is barely 70% effective or so, a social environment in which most people mostly limit their sexual intercourse to within marriage relationships is a lot more effective than any other means of preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Likewise, pregnancy is not a small responsibility you can simply choose to prevent, undo, or ignore. Socially acknowledgint the expedient of limiting sex to within marriage is a good first step to reducing the incidence of uncared-for children.

More must be done after that first step, but encouraging random sex is not nearly as good a social position to start from.

Condoms and other latex prophylactic gadgets, and the spermicides that help them achieve better than 90% reliability, are not 100% reliable. They slip. They get pinprick holes. They are better than no protection, but they are not perfect.

And they cause health problems of their own. Everyone has at least a little latex sensitivity, and the genitals are rather susceptible to the effects. Spermicide also causes reactions.

Contraceptive pills muck with the hormones, among other things. That alone messes your health around and influences your thinking and your emotional states.

Abortion may need to be available for women when there is severe and unusual danger to the health of the woman or the fetus she is carrying, or in cases of rape or other sexual abuse. (And, while we need to be careful not to encourage unnecessary resort to abortion, we also need to be careful to let a woman decide for herself how willing she was, and also when and whether she is willing to raise the question of her own consent.)

No. We can't just outlaw it. Abortion should be an available alternative for cases where it is necessary, and it shouldn't be so hard to get that women who need the option are afraid to ask for it.

(Even a hundred years ago, the dangers of a woman receiving a mortal or permanently disabling wound in the procedures were great enough that trying to keep women, and especially the men who abuse women, from considering it as an option was not exactly unreasonable. The procedures are enough safer now that we can allow qualified doctors to present it as an option when there is need. I is still not safe, but we can consider it to be an acceptable alternative for many cases when the pregnancy is a significant danger to the mother's health, or is the result of rape.

But we still need to avoid encouraging men to think of it as an alternative for them. It must be the woman's choice, not the man's.)

It is still not a solution. Abortion still is often very hard on a woman's health, not to mention the unborn child's health. Usually, a woman can eventually recover, and we can hope a spirit can try again after an abortion, but, either way, it is not a thing to be done lightly.

We must not build the walls too high around obtaining an abortion, but we must also not build a slippy-slide into abortion clinics.

(Yes, it is tricky. But not nearly so tricky if both sides of the argument will trust the woman to make up her own mind. No propoganda against, no propoganda for; sufficient information available about obtaining an abortion, about the alternatives, and the consequences/risks of the various paths. And we need to develop a culture of family and friends respecting a woman's decisions about her body.

If we had that culture, there would be much less need for abortion.

But the illusion of free sex is not the way to change our culture for the better. It is not the way to achieve that culture.)

From the male point of view, admit it guys:

Men are not entirely unaffected by the ambiguities of what the woman does, either. There is something within us that wants to be happy at the prospect of cooperating with a woman to raise a child, especially a child that shares our genetic makeup. The responsibility is scary, but it there is something within us that wants to brave the responsibility -- in a permanent relationship with a woman who agrees to it.

We men have to get our collective act together and learn how to negotiate, how to wait until we find someone more-or-less compatible, and how to stick with it when we make the commitments. It's hard. It's supposed to be. It teaches us to grow up, to be real men. Not Machiavellian men, not macho men, real men who accept their responsibilities and do the work nature (or God, if you will) puts on us, to cooperate with a woman in raising children.

The macho image of the strong man is wrong. A real man cares enough to admit his involvement, to admit his hopes and fears, to talk about plans, and to negotiate for the future; but, in the end, to avoid coercion and to let the woman decide for herself. A real man supports the decisions of the woman.

(We need to learn how to train men better in how to be real men.)

Neither prophylaxis nor abortion is a solution to the apparent unfairness that sex is only an appropriate expression of love within a marriage relationship.

Sexual intercourse is, in a practical sense, tantamount to marriage. Wait. Let me translate that:

Sexual intercourse is an attempt to mate.

Mating, for sensient beings with any conscience, implies the assumption of mutual responsibilities, for both parties -- based on consent.

Put another way, in spite of legalistic theories to the contrary, consent is not really possible without invoking the responsibilities.

Nature is not happy when we attempt to do what is natural and then try to undo it. Wait. Let me translate that.

We can't folow one nature and then refuse to follow the natural consequences and expect to be happy. It is against our own nature.

It's far better to do things related to making babies within an admitted, acknowledged marriage relationship.

No, we are not justified in insulting or behaving meanly or abusively towards people who for any reason are not able to engage in the ordinary act of bringing children into this world and raising them within an ideal family.

But trying to alter the social and legal meaning of sex until it is just another way to get high is wrong, too.

I've referred to it above, but sex is not the only way to feel good about ourselves.

If we could, as a society, get our focus off of sex, we would find that there are other ways to get the endorphins and other natural drugs we have in our bodies to flow.

Time spent with people we care about is one. We don't need to be having sex or using drugs to feel good, if we will learn to let ourselves and each other feel good without the crutch of drugs.

Love doesn't have to be sexual.

Time spent helping others is another.

Time spent with people we care about, cooperating to help yet others is especially great.

Love doesn't have to be sexual. (Can we make this a meme?)

Time spent working on personal projects that matter to us, if we can accept that progress may be slower (or faster) than we want, is yet another way.

There are many good, often small ways to get small natural highs. A lot of small natural highs are much better than a few big unnatural highs that always bring you crashing down afterwards.

If we are busy using artificial drugs and engaging in artificial (including any outside-of-mutual-commitment) sex, we prevent the best effects of the natural drugs. We burn them up, we frustrate the purposes, our nervous and hormonal systems give the feedback, and we shut down the production of the natural drugs.

Attempting to prevent the shutdown, while we continue the self-frustrating attempts to have sex without consequences, just screws our programming up.

We don't need that, if we will choose to risk our hearts on what's real, instead.

And if we are busy trying to force others to be happy our way, that shuts down the natural ways to feel good about ourselves, too. Even if the other person is a close friend and we feel betrayed by his or her choices, we will be much happier if we satisfy ourselves with admitting to that person that we are disappointed, and then let them continue to go their path and ask them to let us continue to go ours.

If we can learn to be happy ourselves, we will find much less bad excuse to try to interfere with other people's attempts to be happy making choices that vary from our own. And, frankly, they will be much more likely to find happiness if we don't try to force them to do so our way.

Being open-minded about what other people do is essential for our own happiness.

And that's a good thing, because being around happy people actually helps everybody be happy.

These things are taught, really, in the scriptures. They are part of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

It's only if you read the Church's Proclamation on Families with your mind colored by false, mostly spurious social and cultural concepts of gender and sex that it seems to promote intolerance.

[JMR20200629: I have ranted in a somewhat more general, more philosophical vein on this, about gender here: https://reiisi.blogspot.com/2020/02/what-is-gender.html, and about sexuality here: https://reiisi.blogspot.com/2020/02/what-is-sexuality.html.]