Gender is a grammatical construct…

It is not a social construct

Until about 15 minutes ago. gender was something that was spoken about with respect to learning languages. In most languages other than English, words have declensions based on voice (active, passive, etc), tense (past, present, etc), number (singular/plural), person (first/second/third), and gender (masculine/feminine/neuter) - English is not a gendered language. Now, people talk about gender and gender identity as the way in which someone expresses his- or herself. This would be all well and good if we were talking about someone having masculine traits, or feminine traits, or even traits that are neither (neuter). Certainly there are men who display feminine characteristics and women who display masculine characteristics, whether physically or personality-wise, but that doesn’t make such a man a woman, nor does it make such a woman a man. Unfortunately, however, when people now discuss gender and gender identity, they conflate these terms with a person’s sex, even to the point that people refuse to define the word “woman” (which had, until recently, the dictionary definition of “a female human adult”).

Granted, if you mention that conflation to them, they will argue that they are not talking about sex, or the “sex someone is assigned at birth,” but rather, what they feel like they are or should be. In other words, what their brains are telling they are is not what their bodies say they are. This is why we often hear that gender has nothing to do with sexual organs.

Inasmuch as people do not wish any longer to see it as such, the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases, now in it’s eleventh edition (ICD-11), classifies the feeling that one’s gender does not match one’s “assigned sex” as a psychological disorder called Gender Incongruence: https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en#/http%3a%2f%2fid.who.int%2ficd%2fentity%2f90875286 . In the previous edition (ICD-10), it was classified as Gender Identity Disorder: https://icd.who.int/browse10/2019/en#/F64 . In each of these, there are several subheadings for different variations of the disorder. The fact is, a person who believes his or her gender identity is not in line with the sex he or she was assigned at birth (that is such odd terminology - who assigned it?) is suffering from a disconnect with reality. Such a person’s brain is unable to cope with the reality of the body in which it resides.

It’s gotten to the point that even the Assistant Secretary for Health at HHS (pictured above, left) thinks it is criminal to not provide “gender affirming services” to adolescents. But what does that mean? Anorexics believe they are fat, despite the fact they are not, and so have a tendency to self-induce vomiting. This is a similar disorder, as the brain is unable to handle the reality of the body. Would “affirming care” for anorexics involve helping them put their finger down their throats? That is not care - that would be considered abuse, as is trying to change someone’s body to match a self-misperception of the body’s sex.

I don't watch a lot of TV (frankly, I don't have time), but occasionally I like to stream things on my phone. Lately, I've taken to streaming some older shows (some from my childhood, some that predate me) on frndly.tv. Recently, while I had it streaming in the background, I heard a bit of wisdom, from the show Rawhide, that obliterates the transgender argument with a single statement: "If a bull could give milk, it'd be a cow."

So simple, yet so profound. Clearly a bull can't give milk - and no amount of surgery can make it so. A bull can never be a cow. Likewise, a man can never be a woman.

This idea that surgery which was once called a "sex change operation" can now somehow magically affirm a person's emotional "gender" is akin to believing a random rabbit is going to leave colored candy-filled eggs hidden on your lawn on a Sunday morning. No amount of mutilation can cause a male to produce ova nor to lactate, just as no added appendages or injected hormones will make a female produce sperm. It just won't happen. Even when it was called a "sex change operation," the surgery only changed the outward appearance of the sexual organs, not the reality that lies underneath. No adjustments in terminology will change this truth.

Perhaps more befuddling is the cognitive dissonance that argues that gender is a social construct that has nothing to do with one's genitals, then also argues that taking a scalpel to those same genitals will affirm one's gender.

I feel compassion, not disdain, for the people who believe these things. As already stated, they obviously suffer from a disorder, whether it be psychological or spiritual (or both). It is unfortunate that in this age, people view truth as disdain, and they view the encouragement of further fantasy and delusion as compassion. Such addled thought prevents those who truly need it from receiving proper care and instead leads them to irreversible solutions that can only cause additional harm.