Jonathan Lange: Talk Of 'Secondary Sex Characteristics' Endangers Children By Avoiding The Primary Fact

Last year Wyoming passed Chloe’s law  to prevent Wyoming doctors from harming minors through surgeries and prescription drugs “for the purposes of transitioning a child’s biological sex.”

Wednesday, the Biden administration took the state of Tennessee to the U.S. Supreme Court in a bid to overturn its version of Chloe’s law (SB1). Elizabeth Prelogar, Biden’s solicitor general, argued that such laws discriminate on the “basis of sex.”

If the Biden administration prevails, it will create a new constitutional right that would trump any rational law that might protect minors from the bodily harm inherent in gender ideology,

This case touches Wyoming in two ways.

First, and most obviously, it would overturn Chloe’s law and leave our children vulnerable to the irrational and harmful treatments defended by the Wyoming Medical Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Second, like Teton County District Court Judge Melissa Owens’ recent ruling that overturned the protection of unborn children, it would strip Wyoming of authority to protect other citizens through laws that have a “rational basis.” It would replace that standard with the quasi-religious protections of “strict scrutiny" or the tough test of "intermediate scrutiny."

Wednesday’s oral arguments were mind-numbing. The tortured language and twisted logic necessary to turn a law against child abuse and medical malpractice into a case of “sex discrimination” assaulted my brain. It felt so physical that I had to stop listening and find a written transcript, instead.

Not surprisingly, Prelogar avoided any talk about the surgical side of Chloe’s law. While euphemisms and medical sleights of hand can make discussion of “puberty blockers” and “cross-sex hormones” seem almost normal, even the most radical ideologues can’t defend putting children under the knife and cutting off perfectly healthy and normally functioning sex organs.

Prelogar focused, instead, on the hormones that produce “secondary sex characteristics.” During an exchange with Justice Kavanaugh, she characterized Tennessee’s law like this: “So, essentially, what this law is doing is saying we're going to make all adolescents in the state develop the physical secondary sex characteristics consistent with their gender…”

Did I say this was mind-numbing? Only a government lawyer could conflate a body’s natural function with the application of government force. It’s the same mindset that considers the progression of a healthy pregnancy to be violent government overreach. It’s irrational.

But we should think about her words, nonetheless.

Perhaps it was my college Latin classes that made my ears perk up at the phrase, “secondary sex characteristics.” Secundus is Latin for “what follows.” In English, “second” means “next to the first place,” and “secondary” means ”immediately derived from something primary.”

Secondary sex characteristics aren’t like random ornaments that you can hang on a body like decorating a tree. They can only come about if a person already has primary sex characteristics—testes or ovaries.

Secondary sex characteristics come about when the primary sex organs are working properly. When children reach the age of puberty, their primary sex organs act like the maturing organs that they are. Hormones produced by one of those healthy organs flow into the bloodstream. These tell every other organ in the body to develop in support of that primary sex organ. These developments are called “secondary sex characteristics.”

Pardon me for the tedious detour into mammalian biology. But I thought it worth pointing out that, despite what anyone might think or feel, these primary sex organs have existed in that person’s body all along. A boy’s testes began to form after six weeks of gestation. And a woman has ovaries and the eggs of her unborn children by her 12th week of prenatal life.

The hormones that the gender ideologues want to block and replace are no less a part of you than your developing brain or growing bones.

But my point is more than that. Since secondary sex characteristics “derive immediately” from the primary sex organs, the most natural and thorough way to prevent the onset of puberty is by surgically removing the primary sex organ.

But these are precisely the surgeries that nobody wants to talk about. That’s dishonest.

Wednesday, Prelogar preferred to talk about “secondary sex characteristics” rather than surgical procedures. But she offered no reasons whatsoever why her new “constitutional right” to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones should not also keep states from preventing barbaric surgeries on minors.

Sex is not “assigned at birth.” Primary sex organs form long before birth. Chloe’s law protects children from having them impaired or destroyed before they are old enough to consent to anything. Tortured language and twisted logic notwithstanding, let us pray that the Supreme Court understands this fact.

Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.