You may have noticed feminists use the word ‘gender’ instead of the word ‘sex.’ They say ‘transgender’ instead of ‘transsexual,’ ‘transvestite,’ ‘hermaphrodite,’ or ‘misfit.’ ‘Gendered identity.’ ‘Gender roles.’ ‘Gender queer.’ Up until the middle of the 20th century, the word gender was rarely used. Except in occasional casual use, its use was limited to grammar – to say whether a word was feminine or masculine for instance. In many languages, such as French and Portuguese, a word has a masculine or feminine form – and the speaker must know which one to use to speak properly. In English, the distinction rarely matters – only a few words are gendered, like aviatrix and waitress, senatrix and mayoress. And nowadays, most such words are obscure and archaic.
A Brief History
Recently, gender has come to mean a lot more than a matter of grammar. It wasn’t always so. In a journal article, David Haig analyzes the rise of the use of gender, and finds that its use has grown dramatically. It is more prevalent now than its rival, ‘sex.’ Haig credits the theorist John Money with minting this new meaning of gender. Money wrote in 1955:
The term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to, sexuality in the sense of eroticism.
This meaning of gender didn’t become prevalent until the 1980’s, where it was widely adopted by feminists and eventually the greater academic community. Haig mentions how in 1993, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) required that all new drug applications had to include studies of ‘gender differences.’ Of course this mangles the meaning that Money coined and feminists adopted – the FDA was concerned with differences between the sexes. English speakers the world round went on to make the same mistake, and now use gender when they mean biological sex – usually out of prudishness or ignorance.
The Need For A New Word
You wouldn’t eat a potato like you would an apple – potatoes must be steamed, boiled, baked or otherwise prepared, while an apple doesn’t. Some would argue that an apple and a potato should always be treated the same, that an apple and a potato are in fact identical, and it’s only our imagination which says otherwise. These people are called feminists.
Feminism is the belief that men and women should have political, economic and social equality. Before feminism, people believed that men and women are different, and so they should have different roles, different rights, and different duties.
To change the role of men and women, feminists argued that these different roles were based on imaginary or imposed differences – that women were every bit the same as men in all the ways that mattered. It was only because society imposed behaviors on men and women that the sexes seemed different.
The feminist had to claim that these differences were not biologically rooted – if they were, the feminist project would sink under the weight of human nature. The feminist had to deny that observed differences between men and women were biological – instead, they were the fruit of a society that arbitrarily divided the sexes into different roles.
Feminists & Sex
But the word sex was too tied up with biology. Just as they would assert that differences between men and women were purely environmental, the immutable overtone of ‘sex’ was damning them. It implied those sexual differences were permanent. They couldn’t say ‘sex’ without undermining their own argument. Your genitalia were happenstance – it was your gender that mattered. Your identity, your interests, your comportment – those were all things you chose or were imprinted upon you by your environment – it had nothing to do with your biological sex. That say, women are more expensive to medically insure than men has nothing to do with the fact that they were born a female. Instead, it is the legacy of a sexist society that imposed needless division.
They needed ‘gender’ because the historical meaning of ‘sex’ was too reminiscent of the idea that men and women are different. ‘Gender’ came to be a code word that signified you believed that sex differences were fabricated; they were the fruit of patriarchal norms. It wasn’t enough for feminists to disagree – they had to speak in such a way that made it impossible to disagree with them. Propaganda of all stripes invoke this abuse of language. Proponents of open borders call an illegal alien an ‘undocumented immigrant’ to obscure the immigrant’s original crime of trespassing.
‘Gender’ Bespeaks Confusion Of The Soul
The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.
Deuteronomy 22:5
On its face, the feminist meaning of ‘gender’ is useful. More than ever before, men identify as women, and women as men. Their sex differs from their sexuality – a man may be biologically male, but he identifies as a woman. And ‘gender’ refers to what he identifies as, not what he was born as.
Plainly speaking, they are misfits, abominations of biblical proportion. It is they who have given life to the feminist concept of gender. Sexual equality is the ideal in Western society, so we celebrate androgyny. The more confused someone is about their sex, the greater their virtue – because they are even closer to being sexless. No surprise then that the numbers of sexual misfits have multiplied in a bid for attention and pity. And occasionally, the egalitarians and the misfits come to blows!
To use the word gender is to sow the feminist lie that our sexuality, our inherent maleness or femaleness can be ignored and discarded. It is to say that our sexuality can be made not to matter, that we are as pliable as our hearts’ contend. Those very sexual differences that excite and arouse us in our private lives – we can change them as if they were channels on a television. The same woman who campaigns for equality lusts for inequality, for domination and aggression behind closed doors.
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