By Francis Ewherido
Recently, I came across the story of a 14-year-old American “girl”, Jazz Jennings, who was born a boy, but did a sex change to transmute to a girl. According to the story, Jazz started “leaning toward a feminine side at only 15 months old (hmmm).
By age two, Jazz started to verbalize her feelings that ‘she was a girl,’ and by five she was one of the youngest people ever to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria a persistent unease with the characteristics of one’s gender, accompanied by a strong identification with the opposite gender.” Jazz’s parents allowed her transition to a girl while he was still in kindergarten.
After reading the story, many questions came to my mind: Does God make mistakes? If He does, what then differentiates Him from sinful man, since many sins actually result from mistakes? Why did God encase a girl’s behavior and tendencies in a boy’s body, as the diagnosis seems to suggest? Were the parents not too hasty in allowing the transition? Are there no other remedies? Is there even such a thing as gender dysphoria?
The writer of the story did not help me in my quest for answers, for she asks, “What defines gender?” I would simply have answered biology, but she continues: Is it biology, the heart and mind or a combination of both?” One even needs to be cautious when using the term “gender” as it is not necessarily interchangeable with “sex” in describing male and female. Oxford Dictionary says that “although the words gender and sex both have the sense, ‘the state of being male or female’, they are typically used in different ways: sex tends to refer to biological differences, while gender tends to refer to cultural or social ones”.
