The rolling revolution in sex and gender: a history
by Scott Yenor, The Public Discourse.
In today’s culture wars, yesterday’s common sense is often tomorrow’s bigotry. No one thirty years ago imagined same-sex marriage; now opposition to it may be officially proscribed. Yesterday every kindergartener knew that boys have a penis and girls have a vagina, but the ascendancy of transgender rights seems to render questionable—even demeaning—some of the most familiar aspects of life, like sex-specific bathrooms and showers.
How could such obvious elements of reality come into question? How could the essentials of marriage and family life—and even human life in general—become such subjects of such controversy and invective?
I argue in a new report entitled “Sex, Gender, and the Origins of the Culture War” that controversies over transgender rights result from the widespread adoption of radical feminist assumptions. Radical feminists rejected the prevailing idea that social expectations about men and women’s roles (which would come to be known as “gender”) were grounded in anatomy and sex. Their critique claimed to show how those elements of womanly identity were neither necessary nor healthy, and posited a future where women would be free to define their identities without any reference to their bodies or to social expectations. A world of complete freedom would be a world “beyond gender”—where no members of society would make any assumptions about individuals based on sex. Attempts to divorce identity from sex put in motion a rolling revolution in marriage and family life whose latest turn is toward transgender rights.
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