Sorry Michael, but the fact that you think “race will be next” makes me very hesitant about where you stand with this. There is no parallel here with race and gender, except that they’re both social constructs (as are currencies, governments, morality, laws, etc.), as gender is a pattern of behavior, expression, ornamentation, and relationship to ones body, etc. Races are categories thrust upon individuals by society, whereas gender comes the opposite way about, constructed by society but expressed by individuals. Anyway, some other time maybe.
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I would say that that tendency to apply the word “gender” in place of “sex” in order to avoid the more jolting implications of the latter word still exists. I’ve even heard comedians exploit the ambiguity of that noun, such as on standard forms. (e.g., "I was filling out a tenant application for a new apartment building and it included the question: ‘Sex?’ So I wrote ‘Yes! Absolutely!’)
POSTSCRIPT AFTERTHOUGHT
If one tracks the word “gender” further back in history, the source word has much wider meanings. The Norman invasion gradually brought the Old French word genre into the English language with the broader meaning of a “category” or “class” of things. (Yes, we often use the word genre when referring to types of literature, such as when describing carious kinds of writings in the Bible.) That French word genre—as I understand it—was an elided form of the prior word gendre, and I assume the English derivative preserves that additional dental consonant to this day. All of these words can be tracked back to the Latin word genus, which referred to a nation, tribe, family identity, or birth status. [NOTE: I am not a trained historical linguist. I’ve only dabbled in this academic specialty.]
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Well, you may have misunderstood me, but maybe not. What I was referring to was the self-selection aspect. If people are able to self-select gender there may be certain implications. We have already seen instances of people self-selecting for race / ethnicity, which has another layer of complexity, especially in the enforcement of affirmative action and EEO laws. This is what I meant. I don’t see how that should exclude me from conversation. I have a very real concern that there will be unintended consequences in the employment realm if people are able to assign their own gender or ethnicity. The ability to calculate for adverse impact or to determine disparate impact is based upon the local population (the workforce for a certain position) as compared to the availability. By messing with either one of these factors (gender or ethnicity), the ability to determine that an HR department is intentionally or unintentionally prejudiced against any particular group is lost.
This is a real, tangible issue that needs to be understood up front, else changes that began in the 1960’s that have continued to this day may be lost and not ever recovered. Your academic view is vital. My practical view is also. Failure to engage because I said “race will be next” is silly, in my opinion. I’m not conflating the two as social constructs… I’m doing so as EEO constructs.
While we are discussing gender, it is worth mentioning that grammatical gender in the history of linguistics has brought more confusion than light. Yes, many languages have words and inflections/forms which are associated with males versus females versus “neuter.” This led medieval western academics (such as monks in monasteries) who were steeped in Latin to start applying the same kinds of gender paradigms and labels to every language they encountered. This has caused much confusion ever since. Every student learning a foreign language soon realizes that not every word classified as a “masculine form” applies to a creature with male anatomy, and conversely words and inflections classified as “feminine.” For example, in Hebrew the word for breasts is masculine. In Spanish, all nouns are either masculine or feminine in form even when the words apply to inanimate, sex-less things. And to make things even more complicated, there is a neuter article in Spanish but it can’t be applied to a noun (because no noun is neuter)–but it can be applied to singular adjectives functioning substantivally (as if they were nouns.)
That is probably as clear as mud but my main point is that grammatical gender might make more sense if we could convince English speakers that the Old French and Latin words behind the English word gender were more about categories and classes of things rather than strict male versus female distinctions. So even though some words which are masculine and feminine (e.g., him and her) apply exclusively to males versus females, that is not always the case with words and inflections which are labelled as masculine gender or feminine gender in the grammatical sense. Indeed, if I could rewrite the history of linguistics and language description, I could wish that alternative labels like “masculine genre”, “feminine genre”, and “neuter genre” had become standard—or even much less “loaded” terms like “alpha genre”, “beta genre”, and “gamma genre” to emphasize that each is simply a category of words and paradigms that share commonalities which are not necessarily linked to reproductive anatomy and identification at all.
POSTSCRIPT:
By the way, another noteworthy grammatical gender issue which arises in translating New Testament Greek into English comes with the Greek words referring to the Holy Spirit. In Greek the definite article in the phrase is grammatically neuter as are the suffixes of the adjective and noun. English speakers are unsurprised by this because the Holy Spirit is not a biological entity and thereby has no gender in that sense. Yet, the Holy Spirit is also considered a person of the Trinity and therefore “animate” (living.) Nevertheless, the problem comes when translated to English where there is no pronoun which is neuter and yet referring to a person (i.e., an animate agent.) So an overly rigid translation of a Greek NT passage referring to the Holy Spirit with a neuter pronoun in English (just as a neuter pronoun is used to refer to the Holy Spirit in Greek) would be jarring and confusing to most English readers. Calling the Holy Spirit an “it” would be—in a sense—faithful to the original Greek text but it would baffle a lot of people.
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Yes, it seems so.
I’ve heard the idea that some people are born into the wrong body. I can accept that as a possibility. But the number of such cases should be quite small. We are seeing too many trans people for that to be the explanation.
I’m suspecting that we are seeing a fad. Perhaps its a contageous fad, spread by social media.
Yes, people are all different. We don’t easily fit into stereotypical male or stereotypical female. But why can’t we all be ourselves without having to go to trans-mania?
Just my two cents.
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Yes - that’s an interesting angle, with which I have problems theological, philosophical AND scientific! It seems to require a Cartesian kind of “ghost in the machine” soul, which is gendered, and that seems to imply not only a God creating them, but a God making mistakes in allocating them. Once you get to a body with only two sexes for 63 genders, there’s a serious design fault (and maybe some strange evolutionary processes to understand, too).
It also exposes one of the anomalies of the subject, which is that (like sexuality) on the one hand it’s said to be intrinsic and fixed, and on the other to be a question of freedom to be whatever you want to be: David Bowie was celebrated for his gender creativity, rather than for being doomed to an unusual gender at birth.
According to some researchers, that dichotomy is one reason for the tensions between feminists and the trans lobby: if gender is deterministic (“born in the wrong body”), then there appears to be no way for a female born in the right body to claim interchangeability with men by choice. On the other hand, if gender-roles are malleable, why shouldn’t trans people simply exercise the freedom to match their biology? There’s an unresolved conflict in the issue, it seems.
Over-rigid gender roles certainly have something to answer for, but whether the proliferation of genders is the best solution to that is, as you suggest, questionable.
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This is purely a rhetorical question because I don’t want to start a new sub-topic tangent on a subject which has potential for inflammatory flash-overs: Why shouldn’t a person who is uncomfortable with his/her sexual orientation—having decided that there is a “mismatch” between his/her brain and his/her sexual orientation and his/her body—be allowed to go to a psychiatrist for conversion therapy without that psychiatrist risking loss of professional licensing (or even being in violation of law in many jurisdictions around the world)? Should society deny that person the freedom and autonomous right to pursue their desired path to happiness?
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Meanwhile, as to “How many genders are there?”, anyone familiar with the fact that a particular noun can have multiple dictionary definitions will recognize that anatomical gender and cultural expectations/assumptions of gender categories are two different ideas which are related and yet not to be confused or used interchangeably (yet often are.) When two concepts are forced to share the same word in a language, conflicts are virtually inevitable. (I could give another example of such lexical confusion: The Bible’s definition of the marriage ideal is not the same thing as a legal system’s definition of marriage—and yet the history of the English language has led to them sharing the same word in common usage. This was not necessarily inevitable. Had the semantic domains diverged, there might be much less conflict today. For example, if the word marriage had fallen out of general use in western society at large and became strictly associated with marital religious vow observances sanctioned by a church or other religious authority, and civil union had become the pervasive legal term appearing on all licenses and government documents, then there might have been far less political conflict and media frenzy over “same-sex marriage.” “Same sex civil union” entailing the exact same legal privileges might have been far less controversial. Words matter.
On the topic of gender categories, it is important to recognize that intersex biology among humans is far more common than even many non-specialist doctors realize. Outdated statistics which claimed that intersex conditions arose in only one out of 2000 humans tended to assume that the only intersex condition was ambiguity of external anatomy. Yet, when one includes all other types of intersex phenomena including the various kinds of andrenal hyperplasia (which may only become apparent much later in life), estimates run as high as one out of sixty and even one of fifty humans. Should the many different types of intersex conditions be classified as separate genders? Ultimately that is a labeling question where lexicographers can only do their best to examine, summarize, and record word usage trends in a population of language speakers.
Yes, as always I tend to approach these topics from a linguistic vantage point. Words are powerful and their usages change over time. It can be a messy and chaotic process. Our society is changing the standard definition of marriage, and it is not so surprising that the meaning of the word gender is also evolving—regardless of whether a given individual thinks it a good or bad development. Words will mean what a population of language speakers decides they mean.
By the way, years ago I recall reading of a village in Central America or perhaps South America where a particular genetic mutation rampant in the population of a remote village had led to many instances of a type of adrenal hyperplasia (??) where the local culture routinely spoke of three genders: man, woman, and a type which can be paraphrased as roughly “super-sexy females.” The latter appeared to be women with exceptionally feminine bodies but they never bore any children. One such individual visited an infertility doctor in a major city and the physician was shocked to find that “she” (or is it wrong to put the pronoun in quotation marks?) had normal male XY chromosomes. Further tests revealed that a mutation caused the body to be “immune” to androgenizing hormones. So, what is the gender of an XY human who by all outward appearances looks like she is probably a fertile woman in the prime of life? (The main point of the article was the physician’s internal ethical and professional struggle trying to decide just how honest she should be with the patient. The doctor feared that the patient and extended family would be ill-equipped to deal with such a complex and disappointing medical reality. The physician even feared that the patient might be ostracized and abruptly divorced. She eventually decided simply to inform the patient that there was nothing known by medical science which could help her to bear children and that adoption might be a happy alternative.)
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I’m not at all convinced that SSA (same sex attraction) is ‘convertible’. It may be hardwired to one degree or another. It could be at least partially epigenetic, since in identical twins, one may be gay and the other straight. In any case, it is an affliction (but that does not automatically bestow the right to homosexual behavior in mind or body to Christians), and varying in severity. So ‘conversion therapy’ may likely do more harm than good.
A praiseworthy obedience:
The obedience of faith only works when it’s rooted in a person, not a rule.
There is no biblical command to be heterosexual.
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I’m not either. But my rhetorical question was purely one of analogy.
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Your opinion is noted.
Having read the full thread and looked at some of the links, I’m going to pass on this one. Apologies to anyone hoping for a different result. Peace.
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I think this has been an important conversation. We shouldn’t be surprised that it’s going to bechatged when personal identity is at stake, even when conversation is polite. For now, I’m closing the thread. Every one, thanks for participating.
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