OPINION: Trump's executive order ignores the continuum between male and female

Is a person born with both a vagina and a penis a male or a female?

Or how about a person born with a penis inside of a vagina?

The answer, of course, is that they are neither.

They are intersex.

On the day of his inauguration, our president signed many executive orders.

One of the most outrageous was “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government.”

The order proclaims that, “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”

Trump then goes on to demonstrate that he doesn’t know the difference between sex (the biological term) and gender (the social term).

Male and female are the biological terms. Man and woman are the social terms, and the difference is critical.

Binary classification of sex (the biological term) and gender (the social term) cannot properly classify millions of people who are born intersexed; people who may have one or more of potentially a hundred or more variations of physiological sex.

Walking a Miami street decades ago, to get out the kinks from a coast-to-coast flight, I happened upon a sidewalk newsstand. A magazine’s large, bold headline, “The Five Sexes” snatched my eyeballs.

I thought: “There are only two!” and quickly bought a copy.

Anne Fausto-Sterling wrote the amazing biological story of Levi Suydam, an intersexual resident of Salisbury, Conn. In 1843, Suydam applied to vote. His eligibility was challenged because he looked effeminate.

Women then were not allowed to vote, so a doctor was called to determine Suydam’s sex.

Suydam dropped his pants and, viola! The physician beheld a penis and the election board allowed him to vote. It is assumed that Suydam’s ballot was the winning vote.

Within days, however, Suydam began to menstruate. He was examined again and there was a vagina, presumably behind the penis.

In the 19th century, Herculine Adélaïde Barbin was born in France, declared a female at birth, and raised as a female in a convent. In 1860, a doctor examining her found what he described as a tiny penis, a masculine body and testicles in a small vagina. That certainly defies binary (either/or) classification.

Fetuses begin life with the same genital anatomy. Then a process called sexual differentiation produces sexual organs, which most often result in a male or female body. Sometimes, however, it produces something in between, something that laymen may best understand as ambiguous or atypical sex. Think of it as a continuum with male at one pole and female at the other, with myriad variations in between.

Intersex is the term applied to this “something else” sex.

My two examples of intersex are pretty extreme. Most intersex physiology isn’t so dramatic, but it nonetheless has serious consequences for intersexed persons.

Much of the hubbub about sexual physiology has to do with what, if anything, should be done to “correct” the physiology.

The correction, whether by hormones, surgery, or both is properly called transexual.

Theologically speaking, the issue is whether mere mortals should tinker with what God hath wrought.

Interestingly, religious folks seem to get their dander up if surgery is applied to correct sexual organs, but few churches are frazzled by surgery on a cleft palate, or intrauterine surgery on a fetal heart.

Trump’s order, if activated, will adversely affect potentially 5.6 million Americans, depending on how the term intersex is defined.

A great deal of ignorance is encapsulated in President Trump’s “Defending Women” executive order.

Terence L. Day and wife, Ruth, have lived in Pullman since 1972. In 2004, he retired after 32 years as a science communicator on the Washington State University faculty. His interests and reading are catholic (small c) and peripatetic. He welcomes email (pro and con) at terence@moscow.com. Give him a piece of your mind.