What is "gender?"

It began as something else...

• In the 14th c. “gender”—from the Latin “genus,” meaning “family,” or “type”—was first used by language scholarship to describe the presence, in a great many languages, of nouns requiring “gendered” i.e., “female” or “male,”pronouns

• It was from this linguistic distinction that the term began thereafter to be used also to describe the biological difference of being born female or male

• It’s this classification of biological difference that’s been captured by political speech and turned into a moral distinction claiming that the condition of being born with two X-chromosomes (female) or an XY-chromosome (male) is a biological necessity

• Yet it not: genes were unknown until late in the 19th c. (owing to the work of Gregor Mendel [1822-1884]) but it is now known that there are many genetic & hormonal conditions that complicate the simple-minded picture of “two sexes”

• So the historical notion of “biological sex” is inaccurate

• This picture is further complicated by the experience of one’s “sexuality:” that is, both the awareness each of us experiences as characteristic of my self and of my sexual attraction to others

• These two traits—“sexuality” & sexual “attraction”—are distinct but also determined by factors other than biological

• They are experienced, however, as essential to my self; no doubt it has always been so: we have ample historical documentation of social & moral conflict around the varied experience & expression of sexuality

• Why should there be moral judgment about an individuals sexuality?

• The answer is simple: because humans invent moral standards

• For there are no standards in nature: every thing takes place simply as it does

• Because of this, it’s clear that the contemporary rage directed at people who seek surgery (itself a recent development) to manifest their experienced sexuality will one day pass away, just as so many former moral beliefs have been abandoned…