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Inquiring minds want to know: Who is Adam-and Eve’s daughter-in-law?  

In the 2009 Olympics held in Berlin I watched 18-year-old Black South African Caster Semenya win the gold medal in the 800-meter run. I have been intrigued by her life ever since. In the starting blocks she looked like a male with strong upper body and long powerful legs.

Before she was allowed to participate, she was examined by a group of German doctors of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAFF). She was approved to run, but she and the world didn’t find out about her unusual case until after the Olympics. She was intersex.

Caster had been born with a vagina but had no uterus. She does have XY chromosomes and higher levels of testosterone than people with XX and has always thought of herself as female.

At age 33 she says, “To be honest, I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now what the medical findings are. I was born a girl and raised as a girl. That was and is the end of the argument for me.”

Caster is writing a book about her battles to compete at Olympic and other world-class track events as a member of the LBGTQIA+ community. After the 2009 Olympics the IAAF demanded she have an operation to remove the undescended gonads she hadn’t known she had. She proved to be a fascinating case of an intersex baby born with only partial genitals and private parts of both sexes. She refused the testicle operation but did agree to take estrogen to lower her rather high testosterone to 10 nanomoles per liter of blood. However, those hormones made her feel like she was taking a poison, giving her panic attacks, night sweats and nausea. But Caster kept running and fighting to run.

I watched her run the 800 meters in the 2011 World Championships and the 2012 Olympics where she won gold medals after the Russian runner won both races but was found guilty of “doping” for each race. Casper ran a very close second in each event.

The sexual characteristics of intersex people may include chromosome differences, both male and female genitalia, hormone qualities, and do not fit the typical binary notions of male or female bodies. The rate of intersex births ranges from 1:4,500 to 1:2,000 births.

There are other characteristics too numerous to cover now, but, in general, for every 5,500 babies born, they may not have sex chromosomes that do not match their appearance, or the appearance is so ambiguous that it is not clear whether the baby is male or female. The physical biology of sex is as complicated as the mysteries of sex experienced by Homo sapiens.  

What does lesbian-gay-bisexual-trans-queer-intersex-asexual stand for?

I have been writing about sex for more than 30 years and claiming that the men in the Vatican have virtually learned nothing about sex in 2,000 years. They have never listened to women, never really knew that gays Michelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci were Catholic world-class artists and engineers, and a majority still think 10% of the human race is “intrinsically disordered” instead of being members of the LBGTQIA+ community.

Medieval Catholic priests, bishops, cardinals and popes came up with some really weird stuff. Bishop Burchard of Worms thought that women (even if he had a mother!) were lustily insatiable. He directed his priests to ask female parishioners if they had inserted live fish into their vaginas and kept them there for a while before they died. Then they were to cook the fish and feed them to their husbands to stimulate their passions.

From a rich family heavily involved with the church, he was known for his Decretum containing 20 books about personal behavior, canon law and other church policies. Should make for lusty reading.  

What does LBGTQIA+ stand for?

“L” is for lesbian, or women who are attracted to women.

“B” is for a person who is attracted to more than one gender or gender identity. Ultimately, bisexual people are attracted to multiple genders, simple but confusing at times.

“G” usually describes men who are attracted to men, but is also used to describe both men and women.

“T” stands for transgender. A trans is a person whose gender identity or gender expression is not the same as the sex when they were born. A trans person does not necessarily want or experience a “transition” in physicality or dress to carry this term.

“Q” is a broadly used term to express and encompass a variety of gender identities and sexual orientations outside of cishet (cisgender and heterosexual) molds. Q also stands for people who are exploring their orientation or gender identity. The rainbow is the symbol for gay people and the fact that their identity may evolve or change over time.

“I” is for intersex (as described by Casper) and there are many variations that may include chromosomes, genitalia, internal sex organs, and hormone production. Intersex and cisgender may be too complicated for the men in the Vatican to understand. About one out of 1,500 babies born in the Divided States of America have some form of intersex.

“A” stands for asexual and “forget it.” Believe it or not, in a culture beholden to a tsunami of sex even to sell cars, we have a few people who experience a partial or total lack of sexual attraction or disinterest in sexual activity. Evidently, very few are priests, bishops, cardinals or popes.

“+” is for limitless possibility.

A couple of years ago gender identity experts had accounted for 106 different gender identities. If we follow the exhortations of our Christian God in his Bible story Genesis that he created a perfect Adam and a perfect Eve, we would have four billion males looking like Tom Cruise of all ages and four billion females looking like Marilyn Monroe of all ages.

The + gender category is huge, containing Agenders who have no gender identity or are gender neutral, Pansexuals who can be attracted to anyone, and Nonbinaries who identity as not having a gender, not having a fixed gender, or are between genders. Ever hear of gender fluidity? If we ever can put everyone into a sexual category, the + category will be the place for many.  

Are you an evangelical or Catholic believer, or Darwinian evolutionary?

Sex is a very complex and perplexing subject with us every second of the day. (The Paris Olympic committee is distributing 300,000 condoms in Olympic participant housing this summer.) Our genetics experts say 1% of the population is asexual and 1% is transgender – and that’s only the beginning. Polls indicate about 9% to 11% of the population are members of the LBGTQIA+ community. 

Out of 100 members, 11 would be lesbians, 19 would be gays, 54 would be bisexual, 10 would be transgender, and 6% would be other (queer, pansexual, etc.). Bisexuals are more likely to marry spouses or live with partners of a different sex than with someone of the same sex.

Using those poll figures, North Dakota with a population of 775,000 has about 77,500 LBGTQIA+ members, and about 20,000 K-12 students within that number.

This column is only Introductory Sex 101. As we evolve and study, no one knows where we will end up. If you are a theologian or politician, this subject is just as important as economics and constitutional law.

Speaking of economics, I did not see a sign in 2023 abortion protests stating the holder would write a check for $286,000 to anyone who would change her mind about getting an abortion. That sum was the average cost of raising a child to 18 years of age in 2023.

Because of the Roe V. Wade decision made by a Trumplican Supreme Court, we now have the major political battle of 2024 between pro-choice and pro-life organizations. If you believe that life begins at conception, please call your insurance agent after sex and insure the lives of your twins to be born. And don’t forget your new dependents on the IRS forms.

Actually, the Republican Party should not be called the “pro-life” party. It is the pro-fetus anti-baby party because the minute the fetus breathes its first breath, Republicans vote against SNAP (food stamps), WIC (nutrition) programs, and parental leaves.  

The 2024 election is about what century you want to live in

Conservative Roman Catholics, White evangelicals and White nationalist Christians scream “murder!” at abortion clinic protests and protest the use of contraceptives, all while Catholic women have abortions and use contraceptives at the same rate as the general population.

They also seem to think that Satan grabs all gays at the birth canal and makes them “intrinsically disordered.” Remember, the Bible says God examines all of us in the womb.

The Vatican is still rejecting the idea that individuals can choose their gender or are in a gender they cannot reject. A document released by their education department it said: “calls for public recognition of the right to choose one’s gender is in direct contradiction of the model of marriage as being between one man and one woman, which is portrayed as a vestige of patriarchal societies.”

Liberal Catholics and Protestants break with their old churches and establish new denominations to accept the LBGTQIA+ community rejected by Rome and the Methodists in the Divided States of America. German bishops, once led by a conservative Pope Benedict called Cardinal Ratzinger at one stage in his life, have threatened to break with the Vatican and establish a more progressive church.

It has come to pass that many churches and pews are empty because science has rooted out many old beliefs that are not biblically possible, many cities are suggesting that empty churches be used to house the ever-growing homeless population. The U.S. is currently short 7.3 million affordable housing units. We also have a record 22,4 million renter households that are spending more than 30% of their income on rent which has caused evictions and a homelessness surge.

There is no question that Darwin’s theory about evolutionary biology is questioning Genesis and the failure of the Grand Intelligent Designer to make a perfect man, woman, or universe. About 20% of “personhood” fertilized embryos never take a Homo sapiens breath because of thousands of reasons often recorded by OB-GYNs. The possibility of life is ended by miscarriages, physical and mental abnormalities, and abortions. The number of abortions is based on economics and the failure or non-use of contraceptives, not religion. Most abortions is the choice made by married women who already have two children.

Ken Koehler, a conservative Catholic, often writes letters to The Forum about abortion. In his letter, he wrote: “Abortion has nothing to do with limiting ‘reproduction’.”

Ken, assume you are a woman and have sex once a year from ages 9 to 49 and have 40 pregnancies. In that “active” time you have 8 miscarriages, 4 LBGTQIA+ members, and one fetus die of a physical abnormality. Then describe your life with 31 children. In addition, do you believe God has decreed that men must play football while women prepare snacks?