Cav's Place

Since it would appear that Ami decided yesterday (or two days ago, considering the time) to stop talking to me for good over our disagreement on this matter, as opposed to just ignoring me for weeks or even more than a month whenever the issue came up and I expressed said disagreement in any way, I thought it’d be a good time to post my take on it here. She’s the reason why I even have a detailed opinion about this, after all, since all I had to say about it before we started talking was that gender roles should not exist.

Let’s start from there, shall we? There are, of course, physical differences between the males and females of pretty much all animal species that reproduce sexually, and when those result in different hormone levels and brain makeup there will be mental differences as well. If those differences are noticeable, it may indeed mean that one sex is better suited for certain activities and the other is better suited for others. However, while the males and females of a pretty large number of species differ significantly, there are few true physical differences between the average human male and the average human female, at least when it comes to the things that could influence the ability to perform any activity that is not purely sexual in nature. What’s more, that only applies on average, as there are individuals whose bodies bridge that gap without their sex being questioned in any way.
Sure, some differences do exist and, on average, can make certain activities that rely very strongly on purely physical attributes slightly more difficult for individuals of one sex than for those of the other sex. However, such small differences tend to only be relevant for professional athletes, as even a slight variation in perceived difficulty can result in a noticeable difference in peak performance. In other words, while true that they are not quite equals in every aspect, the tremendous majority of perceived differences between men and women are in fact created solely by society. The way boys and girls are raised, taught, even fed, the environment they’re brought up in, the way they’re told they should look like… All these things conspire to, on the one hand, greatly exaggerate the few existing differences and, on the other, create a whole slew of others that have no basis in physiology. Bottom line is that there’s not a damn thing that a person could be unable to do well simply because of their sex. Not one damn thing!
Quite frankly, a person’s sex is only truly relevant when it comes to two things: Personal relationships and medical matters. I don’t think I need to point out that the sex of those involved is crucial when it comes to sexual and romantic relationships, but it can also be a very important aspect when it comes to friendships for those who tend to rely on physical contact to express affection, especially if they’re either heterosexual or homosexual. As for medical matters, it is well known that every little detail can be important, so in some situations taking note of these slight variations generated by a person’s sex may even mean the difference between life and death. Other than that, a person’s sex is also used in order to determine how to refer to said person, but that is strictly a matter of linguistics and has no other relevance whatsoever. Or at least it shouldn’t…

So far so good, right? But what do you do when some people take the fact that there is no real connection between a person’s physical sex and their personality, turn it on its head and pretty much shoot any efforts to abolish gender roles in the foot with their attitude, while at the same time making languages far more complicated than they need to be? Yes, I’m talking about those who came up with and are enforcing the idea that there is such a thing as a person’s gender, which may well be different from their sex, that there may be a very large number of such genders and even that people should be referred to according to the gender they feel they are as opposed to their sex.
The first problem with that is that it’s an incorrect use of the term. Gender is in fact a linguistic concept that refers to a method of separating words into groups that are seen as being somehow related to each other for the purpose of creating grammatically correct sentences. Now there are languages that have well over a dozen genders and languages that basically have no concept of gender whatsoever, just like there are languages that use genders for very many words and others that only use this concept for a few, but something that a significant number of the languages spoken by a large number of people have in common is that they use the masculine gender to refer to, among other things, male humans and the feminine gender to refer to, among other things, female humans. As a result, the term gained another meaning when people whose societies were going through a puritanical phase decided to make use of this fact, taking the term out of its usual context and starting to use it as a synonym for a certain meaning of sex, cloaking this word that they were so afraid of uttering. (And I got this last part from Ami, mind you.)
Now we could have solved that little issue by reinstating sex as the only proper term to use when referring to a person’s sex and kicking gender back into grammar where it belongs, so we could then quickly get back to the truly important matter, which is that of abolishing gender roles. (Notice the word gender in that term as well…) Yet the people I mentioned above decided to go the other way, having a stance that could perhaps be summarized as: “Gender roles seem to be here to stay, so let’s accept the fact that a gender implies a gender role, but let’s make that work for us by dissociating it completely from physical sex, basically ignoring sex altogether, coming up with enough genders to suit everyone’s chosen gender role and demanding to be seen as defined by said gender role.”
Such a view clearly goes against any fight to abolish gender roles, instead fully supporting the idea that there need to be boxes and labels for people according to social behavior patterns, appearance, preferences, interests and other hard to define and subjective criteria. That, of course, actually enforces the argument of those who support traditional gender roles, allowing them to, for example, tell a woman who has no problem being and looking like a woman but does not desire to take on the gender role that society says should be associated with her sex something like: “Now listen here! Those people who don’t act like proper women should say they’re not women, so you make up your mind and either act like you damn well should or pick something else to be and look like and stop messing with us!” Therefore, this stance actually risks forcing a large number of people, many more than those who could in some weird way be aided by this, to choose between the body and appearance they desire and the behavior and thought patterns they’re comfortable with. Which I thought was just what these people claimed to want to avoid… But maybe it was just me thinking that.
This attitude would appear to prove that such people only care for their own interests, demanding their individual rights to be recognized and throwing aside any larger goals and any larger groups they could be fighting with and for. That would seem to imply that they’re either misguided or selfish, but in many cases this behavior is actually a result of being desperate for an escape from the torment society heaps upon them. While it’s true that some truly are selfish and don’t care about anyone else and some others simply don’t know any better, a large part of the people that take this path are actually very intelligent, rather caring and, no matter what they think of themselves, strong individuals. They’re simply forgetting the bigger picture at times due to being desperate, frightened and insecure, which is under no circumstances their fault, but simply how society usually makes those who dare to be different feel. Saying that, all I ask of them is to stop for a moment every so often, take a deep breath and remember that, for example, the suffragettes didn’t earn the right to vote by saying “we want to vote and women aren’t allowed to vote, so we demand to be recognized as something other than women”, nor did Blacks earn the right to ride in the front of the bus by saying “we want to ride in front and Blacks aren’t allowed to ride in front, so we demand to be recognized as something other than Black”! We either fight together or die alone people. Remember that…

To clarify some matters, a person’s sex is very easy to determine through the kind of science that uses clear definitions and specific methods to reach exact conclusions that leave little room for error. The only thing that could perhaps confuse some people is that, even though so far I tried to keep things simple and only refer to males and females, there are in fact four possible sexes. Defining male organs as penis and testicles and female organs as vagina and ovaries, an individual with at least one male organ and no female organs is male, one with at least one female organ and no male organs is female, one with at least one organ of each kind is a hermaphrodite and one with no organs of either kind is neuter. Transsexuals who have made the switch completely, by going through with the operation and being on the full hormonal treatment, obviously need to be seen as being the sex they currently are and not the one they used to be.
That’s all there is to it when it comes to personal relationships and medical matters, and the linguistic issue is also settled very clearly for males and females through those same definitions. The only issue left is that of referring to hermaphrodites and neuters, as that can be a little tricky in languages that don’t have a clear neutral gender that can apply to humans as well without making things confusing or complicated. That can usually be solved by referring to neuters who weren’t born that way according to the sex they had before losing their sexual organs and to hermaphrodites either according to which type of sexual organs are more developed or simply as either male or female, according to what the person referring to them thinks is more appropriate. However, if something more scientific is desired, it is possible to choose how to refer to them according, in order, to which secondary sex characteristics, such as breasts, facial hair, to some extent tone of voice and so on, are more developed, which sex hormones are present in higher concentrations in their bodies, either naturally or as a result of hormonal treatments, and finally according to their sex chromosomes, where XY or XYY means male and XX or XXX female.
That’s quite simply all there is to it and all the meaning it has. Having a certain sex isn’t supposed to feel a certain way any more than being a certain race or nationality is supposed to feel a certain way. While this information may tell you something about the average person, it tells you nothing about any specific individual. Having a certain sex doesn’t mean that you need to think, act or look a certain way, just like it doesn’t mean you need to have certain skills or interests. It’s simply an easily proven fact about you that, except in the couple of situations presented above, has no meaning other than the one people choose to give it. And from this point of view those who support traditional gender roles and those who push for this newer concept of gender are equally wrong and equally harmful. Keep in mind that the more you struggle to deny something, the more important and meaningful it becomes, and usually not in the way you want…

(PS: I had to write this twice, because it somehow vanished when I was just about finished and I found out that the autosave hadn’t worked ever since I finished the first paragraph…)