The night after our consultation with Dr. Yarhouse about our first twin’s gender dysphoria diagnosis, I had trouble sleeping. We had flown from Virginia across the country to visit colleges early that day, and had checked in to the third hotel of our spring break excursion. We were trying to be at peace with each other and have a good trip, while underneath there was plenty of turmoil in each of our hearts and minds.

After attempting sleep for quite a while, I moved from the bed to the couch in our little hotel suite. I didn’t want my restlessness to keep others awake, and my every move felt overwhelmingly loud to me. I wrapped up in a small, extra blanket from the hotel room closet. I was still cold, but eventually fitful sleep came. There were lots of thoughts spiraling through my brain, but ultimately one floated down through the swirling mass and settled gently at the bottom of my mind.

The truth is always true.

That was it. It was profound and peaceful, but also enigmatic and incomplete. The thought seemed a gift to me, not one I had consciously created, but one I had watched travel through the haze of my brain and come to rest as if summoned. That thought has provided moments of peace for me along the road of this journey. Though I can’t tell you exactly what the truth is, I believe it exists. And wherever and however it exists, it never contradicts itself.

One place I have sought truth is in scientific study and research. Since one of the likely contributors to gender dysphoria is genetics, my study brought me to read The Gene: An Intimate History. I wanted to understand our nature and how we come to be. How much of who we are is due to our genes and heredity?

The history of the gene begins long before 1909 when the term “gene” was coined to describe a “unit of heredity.” All the way back to Pythagoras and Aristotle, people wanted to understand the question of likeness. Pythagoras proposed one of the earliest theories of heredity, eventually called spermism. It stated that the father provided the essential information to create a fetus through his sperm, while the mother’s womb provided nutrition so that this data could be transformed into a child.

Aristotle dismantled Pythagoras’s theory of spermism through analytical and evidentiary research, coming to a more egalitarian conclusion that females also contribute actual information into the equation of heredity. Though he was off in what information was contributed by each sex, he captured one of the essential truths about the nature of heredity, the transfer of information.

From the 4th to the 18th centuries, debate continued over theories of heredity. Then enter Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel in the early 1800s. Darwin studied both theology and natural philosophy at Cambridge, though his pursuit of the mechanistic view of nature was seen as a threat to the church. This troubled Darwin because he felt that “a natural historian should be able to describe the state of the natural world in terms of causes and effects.” He saw nature not as static fact, but as a process or progression, as history.

Since evolution is a deep and controversial topic for many Christians, and it is not the focus of my blog, I refer you to a couple of great resources: The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions (2011) and The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006). Francis Collins, the current director of the National Institutes of Health, a Christian, well-educated, and well-respected scientist, wrote or collaborated on both.

Darwin also attempted to figure out a theory of heredity, but came up short. He reverted to Aristotle’s old idea that instructions from both the male and female simply met in the growing embryo and blended together. But this theory couldn’t explain the fixing of altered traits. There could still be mutations in a single generation, but those changes would eventually be blended away, just like you get brown when you blend all the colors of paint.

It was Gregor Mendel, a scientist and a monk, who came upon the concept of a unit of heredity as he bred pea plants in the monastery garden. He noted that the true-bred pea plants possessed distinct traits that were hereditary and variant. From there, he created hybrids to truly reveal the nature of heredity, by creating a point of comparison between the “pure” and the “bastard” plants. Suffice it to say, he is the father of modern genetics because he was able to discover the patterns of dominant and recessive traits and their relationship to one another. Visit his page on biography.com to find out more.

Mendel’s work was lost from science for years and only after his death was it rediscovered and found to be the missing link in the puzzle of heredity. As his influence spread throughout all fields of biology, it became a priority to discover where variations come from that then are able to be selected due to their fit with the environment and therefore are perpetuated through reproduction and survival.

To describe the process, one can use an equation using the terms genotype (an organism’s genetic composition) and phenotype (an organism’s physical or biological attributes).

Genotype = phenotype

However, there are two important modifications to this rule. First, the environment that is around an organism impacts its physical attributes, so:

Genotype + environment = phenotype

Second, “some genes are activated by external triggers or by random chance….For such genes, neither the genotype nor the environment is the sole predictor of outcome: it is the intersection of genes, environment, and chance.”

Genotype + environment + triggers + chance = phenotype

Who knew this was where my search for truth would go? Who knows where it will take me? But I think there’s foundational stuff here, and I believe the truth is always true.