Human Diversity: Physiogamy & Development: Hermaphroditism - no miracle, just creation doing what God intended, I'd say

Yes, indeed. A South African online newsource put me onto this story out of Hlang Thar Yar, Myanmar (dated July 13, so it's aging nicely, but the reported event seems to have taken place on June 21). A person who had grown up regarding herself as a woman, had been appropriately socialized in that genderal-direction (we may presume), and was regarded by her milieu, the society around her, to be just that - a woman - suddenly had to face another reality.

Thin Sandar, a chicken seller in Myanmar, had always dreamed of being a man. When she inexplicably grew a penis last month, the 21-year-old treated it as an awe-inspiring omen - as have the thousands of stunned villagers who have traveled to a pagoda to see him.

"On the morning of the full moon day of June 21, I noticed my thing (sex organ) was not the same as before," Thin Sandar, who now goes by the male name Than Sein, told AFP in an interview at his home.

I had read of such cases before. One out of the Caribbean was reported in a story in the Toronto press (the Star, if I recall correctly), in a remote community where the clan had previously had individuals with experiences similar to Monk-in-waiting Than Sein (formerly Thin Sandar). In the Caribean case, the young woman dropped her hidden but maturing testes in a relatively rapid way also, acquired manhood as a result - and easily transitioned in that society from the daily rounds and duties assigned to females to those assigned to males, and with little performance deficit. There was apparently little psychological disturbance either, as the community accepted the transition and change. Now, the young man was expected to find a bride and marry, which if I recall correctly, happened in due course.

In the meantime, specialists at Johns Hopkins Medical School became involved, because of the intense curiosity of profession in regard to hermaphroditic existence (there are many varieties, and it is at term that covers many varied human developmental variations of development of sexual/reproductive physogomy and physiology). The famous Dr John Money was one of the Johns Hopkins specialists. And for an orientation to the these variations in sexual/genderal development of physiogamy, I recommend his attempt at a systematic study,Gay, Straight, and In-between, which is now some years old. One lamentable thing about Dr Money's career with hermaphrodite's is that he and his students and colleagues early-on felt that an infant should be medically classified as soon as possible, an education program conducted with parents of the physiognomically-variant children in these regards, and a program of operation/s should begin as soon as possible. This was understood as "gender assignment." A child just could not grow up healthily without that determination made by doctors and parents as early in the child's life as possible.

Now, however, with years of experience of children so assigned having grown up to realize that they were dsenabled from waiting for such a time as they mite make a determination of their sexual identity for themselves. One may wish to counter that sometimes bitter after-consideration of the person affected, as an inevitable complaint from someone who had the all-important choice made early and graciously so, for them. In any case, it seems that the surgical processes are no longer rushed; more discussion between parents and doctors, more options, and more maturation of the child is the rule now.

Many people want to substitute a strictly binomial absolute rule of a person being born either a female or a male. This is just not the case, altho the numbers of the general population who express this inherent variation according to biological-mathematical rules that can be somewhat traced and the results quantiified are a very small minority. Such people do exist.
Now, one of the major ideological approaches backing up strict binomialism in regard to human physiogamy of sexual-organic and genderal development hoooks itself onto the Biblical account of Adam and Eve. Especially nowadays, we hear often from the likes of Jerry Falwell that God didn't intend intimate unions of Adam and Steve. It's become a cultural cliché of far wider than the issue of the public-legal order's affirming the uniqueness and difference of the intimate union of 1woman1man in comparison to other kinds of intimate unions.

Entirely aside from what the law should recognize in regard to the three (main) types of intimate union, it does no one any good to bury one's head in the sand of strict binomialism of human physiogomy and psychology too, for that matter, regarding sexual-organic and genderal development. The Bible should not be exploited as a book of science, here particularly noting it is not a textbook of the philosophy of sex or the science of human sexuality in its stages of development. But, it certainly remains the Good Book, in that it gives us the vision of God's creation of humanity, of all humans being created in the image of God - exemplifying that, in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, by focusing on the most usual and reproductively necessary two-sexed 1woman1man couple, who we may assume achieved orgasm together, but who we can not be so sure ever achieved intimate union of mutual and reciprocal love. That detail is held back from us by the Genesis story, interestingly enuff. In the story's parameters, of course, there's no indicatoin that they had any other options of other potentianl partners to choose from in regard to procreation.

So, in the Good Book's great story, there they were, and here we are - created in the image of God, hermaphrodites so created too, and all too well acquainted with sin, tho some more sinned against than sinning, and all in need of liberation and salvation, freeing from unequal bondage and gaining forgiveness of sins. At least that's the Christian conception. That is, the Christian conception when the community gets its head up out of the sands of biblicism to a truer appreciation of the Bible, read without imposing anti-scientific theories upon what kinds of human diversity come with the creation order in all of its glory, terror, mystery. and variety. - Owlb


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