The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), whose two Brobdingnagian volumes and accompanying magnifying glass grace the bookshelves of many homes, states that “gender” as a synonym for “sex” is “now only jocular”. It identifies “gender” as a grammatical term, a classification employed in inflected languages to determine what forms of adjectives go with which nouns.
According to Aristotle (Rhetoric III:5:5), the pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras was the first to classify nouns as “masculine”, “feminine” or “inanimate”. The terms were inspired by the fact that nouns that refer to males or to females tend to fall into the same classes. The Greek words for “father”, “son” and “brother” are in one class (“masculine”), for “mother”, “daughter” and “sister” in another (“feminine”).
When one gets beyond the obvious cases, however, any correspondence between sex and grammatical gender quickly breaks down. The ancient grammarian and hyper-skeptic Sextus Empiricus pointed out that the same objects may change genders not only between languages but even between different dialects of the same language. It is easy to find examples of linguistic “gender confusion”. In Latin, for instance, an army may be an exercitus (masculine), an acies (feminine) or an agmen (neuter). What’s more, the principal subdivision of the Roman army, the cohors, is feminine, even though no women served in their ranks.
Sometimes a noun’s gender depends on whether its referent is masculine or feminine. A Roman would call his male dog “bonus canis” and his bitch “bona canis”. But that wasn’t the rule. A good horse, whether stallion or mare, was “bonus equus”. It’s possible, too, for a change in gender to result in a complete change of meaning. In French, “un livre” (masculine) is a book; “une livre” is a unit of weight (a “pound”).
In short, the relationship between sex and “gender”, as that word was used until the day before yesterday, is a paronomasia, a play on words, a mostly arbitrary and capricious product of the tangled, arational history of real-world tongues. As the OED said not so long ago, assigning gender to human beings was “jocular”. Or, as a friend of mine once put it, “Nouns have gender. Fruit flies have gender. Men and women have sex.”
Why, then, has the grammatical term recently been imported into human affairs and, indeed, edged out “sex”? The reason, I believe, is that sex is rooted in biological fact, while “gender” can be anything one wants it to be. Replacing “sex” with “gender” is thus a way to justify ignoring the constraints imposed by our physical natures in favor of self-absorbed fantasies. It is the childish idea that one has the right to have all desires fulfilled.
I would like to be a lead tenor at the Seattle Opera and the starting center fielder for the Mariners. The Woke Religion hasn’t yet furnished the means for my attaining those goals, but why shouldn’t it? They seem less formidable than making men pregnant.
A side benefit for the Woke who assume genders or invent strange new ones is the right, which the Woke Religion grants them, to demand that their self-characterizations be universally affirmed and that dissidents be punished for uttering the “wrong” pronouns or otherwise failing to go along with the game. That sense of power is a consolation for the fact that the fantasies aren’t reality. A man who wins a women’s swim meet is not a great female swimmer. A woman who declares herself to be male will never be a father.
There is nothing inherently wrong with fantasizing. There is something very wrong when the fantasizers try to coerce others into pretending that their unfulfillable wishes are reality.
Non omnia possumus omnes (“We can’t do everything”), the greatest of Latin poets averred. The contemporary world would be a happier place if it heeded him.
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