The tension between body and mind in defining sex and personal identity

“ It will thus be seen that in the varieties of degradation of our sexual powers, as well as in their use and ennoblement, it is the predominance of the mental or spiritual element in our nature which is the characteristic fact of human sex. The inventions and abuses of lust, as well as the use and guidance of love, alike prove the striking and important distinction which exists between the sexual organization of man and that of the lower animals. ”

“ It is therefore not the simple physical aspect of the reproductive powers which is remarkable in humanity. The physical instinct is shared with the rest of the animal creation. It is the unique and powerful mental and moral element, the principle that moulds [Pg 13] and governs human sex, which produces such striking results in the life of our race. ”

“ But if we look at the matter from a wider biological standpoint of development, our conclusion must be very different.
So far from being animal-like, the human impulses of sex are among the least animal-like acquisitions of man. The human sphere of sex differs from the animal sphere of sex to a singularly great extent. [59] Breathing is an animal function and here we cannot compete with birds; locomotion is an animal function and here we cannot equal quadrupeds; we have made no notable advance in our circulatory, digestive, renal, or hepatic functions. ”

“ Personality rights are the rights enjoyed by persons of the civil law, such as the right to life, the right to corporeal integrity, the right to health, the right to name, the right to trade name, the right to likeness, the right to reputation, the right to honor, the right to privacy, and the like. In addition to the personality rights provided in the preceding paragraph, a natural person enjoys other personality rights and interests arising from personal liberty and human dignity. ”

“ The sheer numbers in our lives, the anonymity of urban living and the inability to influence things that are important are depersonalizing and dehumanizing factors of modern life. To penetrate the last refuge of the individual, the precious little privacy that remains, the basis of individual dignity, can have meaning to the quality of our lives that we cannot foresee. ”

“ For them woman is the female of Homo sapiens, differentiated from all other living beings, and occupying the same position with regard to the human male that the females of other species occupy with regard to their males. And he will not allow the philosopher to say, "What has the anatomist to do with me? ”

“ What is sex? A sexual and mixed reproduction. Origin of sexual reproduction. Advantage of sex in chance of survival. Germ and body cells. Limitations of biology in social problems. Sex always present in higher animals. Sex in mammals—the problem in the human species. Application of the laboratory method.
II. SEX IN TERMS OF INTERNAL SECRETIONS
Continuity of germ plasm. The sex chromosome. The internal secretions and the sex complex. The male and the female type of body. How removal of sex glands affects body type. Sex determination. Share of the egg and sperm in inheritance. ”

“ Affirming the district court’s conclusion that “the meaning of ‘sex’ in Title IX includes ‘gender identity’” would open the door to eroding Title IX’s beneficial legacy for girls and women in sports. And removing distinctions based on biological sex from sports, particularly for girls in middle school and high school, harms not only girls’ and women’s prospects in sports, but also hinders their development and opportunities beyond the realm of sports—a significant harm to society as a whole. ”

“ The clue to a true knowledge of sexual functions in man and woman is found in this striking peculiarity of the human race, viz., that these functions are largely dominated by mental action, and that sex in the human being does not mean simply the action of the physical organs, but also the conjoined mental principle directing those organs. ”

“ The right kind of a book, a series of clear, scientific lectures, or a common-sense talk with either the man or woman will often do away with most of the repugnance to physical union. When the repugnance is gone, the way is open to that upliftment through sex idealism which is the birthright of all women and men. ”

“ As creative energy becomes understood and applied, men and women will grow in strength of character and in strength of love, and will naturally devote these powers to the interests and development of the human race.
THE PRACTICE. Each of these theories involves sedular absorption through intercourse without culmination. No discharge is allowed, but by a superior control is retained, thereby making the act an amative (love) act, and uplifting it from an exhaustive, abrupt fertilising function into a quiet magnetic charm, producing health and increased happiness. ”

“ Personal identity. This being premised, to find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what person stands for ; – which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places ; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it : it being impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. ”

“ What then gives us so great a propension to ascribe an identity to these successive perceptions, and to suppose ourselves possest of an invariable and uninterrupted existence thro' the whole course of our lives? In order to answer this question, we must distinguish betwixt personal identity, as it regards our thought or imagination, and as it regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves. ”

“ Understanding the cause of disease wholly mental, a scientist will never for a moment admit general opinions regarding it, or take physical symptoms into account, except as mental conditions or beliefs to be destroyed through mind.
Personal sense and science clash, of course, in this statement, for they are opposites and without affinity, and this quarrel will wax warmer until it is over, and sense yields to science. Pride, ignorance, prejudice or passion will close the door on science until future centuries open it wide to man, and he regains the harmony of being. ”

“ Through the by-ways of physiology and materia medica to lead man into temptation in every direction is pitiful. To victimize the race with prescriptions of liquors for the sick, until mortal mind acquires this educated appetite for strong drinks, and men and women are made loathsome sots, is not only unchristian but heathen.
The physical affirmative to disease should always be met with the mental negative, and whatever the mind desires to produce on the body it should state mentally, and abide by this statement. ”

“ The silence of Christian Science and Love is eloquent. It is powerful to unclasp the hold of disease, and reduce its cause to nothingness.
To prevent disease or to cure it mentally, let Spirit destroy this dream of sense. If you wish to heal by Insistence. argument, find the type of the ailment, get its name, and array your mental plea against the physical. Argue with the patient (mentally, not audibly) that he has no disease, and conform the argument to the evidence. Mentally insist that health is the everlasting fact, and sickness the temporal falsity. ”

“ Parents, nurses, and doctors, not perceiving these vital points in science, throw their mental weight in the wrong scale, and injure those they would bless. Pursuing an opposite course, and ruling out all mental admissions of disease, they would save the sickness they now occasion. We should recollect suffering is no less a mental condition, than enjoying. When an accident happens, you think, or exclaim, “he is hurt ;” but to prevent the result you fear, you should oppose your own, and the frightened one's admission he is harmed. ”

“ Is it skilful or scientific surgery to take no heed of mental conditions and to treat the patient as if she were so Mental conditions to be heeded much mindless matter, and as if matter were the only factor to be consulted? Had these unscientific surgeons understood metaphysics, they would have considered the woman's state of mind, and not have risked such treatment. ”

“ The identity of man. This also shows wherein the identity of the same man consists ; viz. in nothing but a participation of the same continued life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized body. ”

“ Thus, the limbs of his body are to every one a part of Himself ; he sympathizes and is concerned for them. Cut off a hand, and thereby separate it from that consciousness he had of its heat, cold, and other affections, and it is then no longer a part of that which is himself, any more than the remotest part of matter. Thus, we see the substance whereof personal self consisted at one time may be varied at another, without the change of personal identity ; there being no question about the same person, though the limbs which but now were a part of it, be cut off. ”

“ Which, however reasonable or unreasonable, concerns not personal identity at all. The question being what makes the same person ; and not whether it be the same identical substance, which always thinks in the same person, which, in this case, matters not at all : different substances, by the same consciousness (where they do partake in it) being united into one person, as well as different bodies by the same life are united into one animal, whose identity is preserved in that change of substances by the unity of one continued life. ”

“ The effect of so strong a relation is, that tho’ every one must allow, that in a very few years both vegetables and animals endure a total change, yet we still attribute identity to them, while their form, size, and substance are entirely alter’d. An oak, that grows from a small plant to a large tree, is still the same oak; tho’ there be not one particle of matter, or figure of its parts the same. An infant becomes a man-, and is sometimes fat, sometimes lean, without any change in his identity. ”

“ It is also this same intensity of the mental form and power of sex, possessed by mankind alone, which allows of the perversion and extreme degradation of sex which is observable only in the human race. It is the degradation of this mental power when running riot in unchecked license that converts men and women into selfish and cruel devils—monsters, quite without parallel in the brute creation. ”

“ It is the mental element dominating the physical impulse in man, for evil, which produces that monstrous creation, cold, selfish, and cruel, which is seen only in the man or woman abusing the creative powers of sex. ”

“ In the case of a human embryo of less than five weeks, for instance, the sex to which it would afterwards belong cannot be recognised. In the fifth week of fœtal life processes begin which, by the end of the fifth month of pregnancy, have turned the genital rudiments, at first alike in the sexes, into one sex and have determined the sex of the whole organism. ”

“ When you take man out of the bloody, brutal, but beneficient, hand of natural selection, you place him in the soft, perfumed, daintily gloved, but far more dangerous, hand of artificial selection.
The second warning of biology is brief and simple: that heredity, and not environment, is the maker of men;...that the differences among men are due to the differences in the germ-cells from which they are born; that social classes, which you seek to abolish, are ordained by nature; that it is not the slums that make slum-people, but slum-people that make the slums. ”

“ The withdrawn majority opinion’s other contention—that believing “one’s gender identity and expression should align with one’s birth sex” is an unconstitutional stereotype—fares no better. The Supreme Court has long grounded its sex-discrimination jurisprudence in reproductive biology. ”

“ Yet, sexual preferences, genitalia and even secondary sex characteristics, such as facial and pubic hair are first order phenomena. Can genetics and biology account for male and female behavior patterns and social interactions ("gender identity") ? Can the multi-tiered complexity and richness of human masculinity and femininity arise from simpler, deterministic, building blocks?
Sociobiologists would have us think so.
For instance: the fact that we are mammals is astonishingly often overlooked. Most mammalian families are composed of mother and offspring. Males are peripatetic absentees. ”

“ In the segregation thus arising, there is usually discoverable a certain tendency toward grouping by sex.
Whether the mental and moral traits of women are inherent and therefore permanent, or whether they are but passing effects of circumscribed experience and therefore possibly destined to be modified, is immaterial for my present purpose. It is not certain that either the biologist or the psychologist is prepared to answer the question. It is certain that the sociologist is not. ”

“ I thought this was a little fortress against the eternal feminine."
"What rubbish!" said Father Payne. "The worst of using ridiculous words like feminine is that it blinds people to the truth. Masculine and feminine have nothing to do with sex. In the first place, intellectual people are all rather apt to be sexless; in the next place, all sensible people, men and women alike, are what is meant by masculine—that is to say, spirited, generous, tolerant, good-natured, frank. Thirdly, all suspicious, scheming, sensitive, theatrical, irritable, vain people are what is meant by feminine. ”

“ Physical features of one sex, instincts and mental attitudes of the other co-exist in the same individual by reason of an excess in one direction or a deficiency in another of the internal secretions. ”

“ Effemination and viraginity with psychical perversion only.—In the third degree of homosexuality, the so-called effemination or viraginity, where the entire mental existence is altered, the man of this type resembles in his mental qualities a woman, “anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa.” But his body is still that of a perfect man. The woman, on the other hand, resembles in her mental qualities a man, while her bodily characteristics remain still feminine. ”

“ We know, in fact, that there are unwomanly women, man-like women, and unmanly, womanish, womanlike men. We assign sex to human beings from their birth on one character only, and so come to add contradictory ideas to our conceptions. ”

“ My conception will also be of great service in helping us to discriminate between the different mental qualities, and to throw some light into what has always been a dark corner for psychologists—the differences between different individuals. A great step will be made if we are able to supply graded categories for the mental diathesis of individuals; if it shall cease to be scientific to say that the character of an individual is merely male or female; but if we can make a measured judgment and say that such and such an one is so many parts male and so many parts female. ”

“ In fact, we have discovered for ourselves that this is the very element that constitutes the real problem of boyhood; for until the idea of sex enters into the boy's consciousness we are only dealing with an infant. It is the gift and power of self-reproduction that changes the selfish, individual existence into the larger, altruistic life. It is this that compels gangs and team-work and the instinctive desire to negate self in service for others. It is this that forms the basis for the tribal or community desire ”

“ Her share of the processes which sex distinction serves is by far the greater. To be feminine—if one were nothing else, is a far more extensive and dignified office than to be masculine—and nothing else.
But as a matter of humanity the male of our species is at present far ahead of the female. By this superior humanness, his knowledge, his skill, his experience, his organization and specialization, he makes and manages the world. All this is human, not male. All this is as open to the woman as the man by nature, but has been denied her during our androcentric culture. ”

“ It is a most healthy state, 158and marks the development of race-distinction in women with a corresponding lowering of sex-distinction to its normal place.
In body and brain, wherever she touches life, woman is changing gloriously from the mere creature of sex, all her race-functions held in abeyance, to the fully developed human being, none the less true woman for being more truly human. What alarms and displeases us in seeing these things is our funny misconception that race-functions are masculine. ”

“ Standing on the ground of common sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. ”

“ The entire individual—structures and functions, body and mind—develops as a single indivisible unity, but for the sake of clarity it is desirable to deal with one aspect of the individual at a time. For this reason we shall consider first the development of the body, and then the development of the mind.
1. The Germ Cells.—In practically all animals and plants individual development begins with the fertilization of a female sex cell, or egg, by a male sex cell, or spermatozoon. ”

“ That the distinction of sex extends to mind as well as to bodily organization we think highly probable; but precisely how the distinction operates in the mental region can not be dogmatically affirmed; and the best thing to do under the circumstances is to let the distinction, if there is one, establish itself in practice. ”

“ I hope that in the early stages of the counter-revolution our sophisticated sons and daughters will scrutinize ‘the idea of sex,’ coolly extract from it the part that belongs to physiology and pathology; and then disuse the word as synonym for every other element in the complex human relationship which sometimes makes human beings paradisiacally happy in their blossoming season and content enough with each other even into wintry old age. ”

“ In order to attain the end — the development of man in body and spirit — human institutions must represent all parts of human nature, both the masculine and the feminine element: For the well-being of the human race, we need the joint action of man and woman, in the family, the community, the Church. ”

“ Ideality is the faculty by which we conceive of and long for perfection; and at a glance it will be seen, that, so far from being an evil ingredient of human nature, it is the one element of progress that distinguishes man's nature from that of the brute. While animals go on from generation to generation, learning nothing and forgetting nothing, practising their small circle of the arts of life no better and no worse from year to year, man is driven by ideality to constant invention and alteration, whence come arts, sciences, and the whole progress of society. ”