Say “No” to the New Binary

Jun 10, 2022 by

by Margaret Harper McCarthy, Public Discourse:

The contemporary distinction between sex and gender downgrades human beings to “biological” males or females with detached “identities.” We should reject this, and insist instead that sexual difference is a fundamental component of personality, one of its modes of being.

With all the pushback against awarding a man a gold in the Women’s 500 Free, and against the new executive order that would ensure more such “victories,” one senses a springtime of common sense. But when one hears the objection—that it isn’t right for a “biological male” to enter (then win) a women’s swimming event—one wonders. What other kind of male is there? A spiritual one? That is, of course, exactly what “gender” strives to manufacture: a spiritual sex, arbitrarily related to our bodies in a way that may or may not “align” with them. To the extent that we allow such a fictitious sex to take up space in our thoughts and words, we are still in the mental haze of winter.

The Roots of “Gender Identity”

Before the 1950s when psychologists like John Money began experimenting on children with congenital disorders of sexual development, the terms “sex” and “gender” were synonymous. In fact, so much was “gender” not the disembodied counterpart to “sex,” its etymological roots gave us words like “generation,” “engender,” and “progeny.” Generation, of course is made possible by sex, the word for which refers to the “division” within a species between male and female individuals.

But beginning with Money, the idea of a spiritual sex distinct from the actual sex of the child was officially hatched, when he suggested that a “gender identity” could be impressed upon a child with the proper upbringing. But that meant that sex itself had to be redefined. Sex had to become merely “biological sex.” “Gender” was the tool for the mastery of sex. By downgrading sex, it made “sex” available to whatever “assignment” the will would give it.

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