No place like home
In yesterday’s blog post I wrote about the struggles that those students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning (LGBTQ+) have in school. Many experience bullying and other forms of harassment. What happens when that student is no longer welcome in their home?
Some years ago, I was working in a social service program and we had a brown bag lunch session organized to hear from co-workers who agreed to speak about their experiences as LGBTQ+ in the workplace. One unforgettable young man spoke about his reaction to those who said being gay was a choice he made. He asked, “Why would anyone CHOOSE to be something that meant being rejected by his family, his relatives, his community?” He went on to talk about a time when he and his partner were simply sitting on a blanket in a park having a picnic. They weren’t doing anything overtly sexual, yet a woman passing by with two children pulled the children closer and said, “Don’t look at those monsters!”
According to the National Network for Youth, LGBTQ+ children have a 120% higher risk of experiencing some form of homelessness. With up to 40% of the 4.2 million unhoused youth identifying in this group while only 9.5% of the U.S. population identify as such, LGBTQ+ youth disproportionately experience homelessness compared to their straight and cisgender peers. They are also more likely to experience assault, trauma, depression and suicide while also being homeless. These statistics are even worse for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) as they also suffer from racial inequities and discrimination.
When I was young, I was taught that those with the XX chromosomal pairs were male and those with XY were female. As scientists are unlocking what makes up our genetic composition, they are finding that that simple explanation determining one’s gender is far from the complete story.
Scientific American * relates the story of a 46-year-old woman whose amniocentesis test to screen her baby’s chromosomes for abnormality found that the mother’s own body was built from cells of two individuals, likely from twin embryos that merged in her own mother’s womb. One set of cells carried two XX chromosomes and the other had an X and a Y. Her body was chromosomally more male than female.
Doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary in other ways. Their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions or differences often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between sexes becomes even blurrier. Other variations have subtle effects on a person’s anatomical or physiological sex. New technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behavior through a complicated network of molecular interactions.
“I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health.
These discoveries don’t sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms.
For those Christians whose beliefs are supported by the Old Testament of the Bible condemning homosexuality, I would ask that they also look to the Gospels for clues about what Jesus said on the subject. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
