The Gender Conundrum

This will teach you not to take psychologists too seriously. OK, I imagine that you did not do so anyway, so this is more evidence that you have been correct.

Now, the American Psychological Association has weighed in on the subject of gender differences. In truth, you would not normally think that psychologists, whose domain is the psyche, by definition, would have much to say about sexual identity, but they must be looking for new business.

As the APA so astutely notes, sex is based in biology. It is based on chromosomes and anatomy. That is, there is a real basis for sexual identity. That does not mean, as the APA remarks, that everyone falls neatly into one or the other categories. And yet, anomalies do not make the rule and no one is going to say that a human being does not have two arms, because some number of humans have one arm. Genital anomalies do not make for sexual identity, and society is not organized to provide pride of place to every curiosity.

Besides, society is constructed through binaries, and not just sexual binaries. These need to be immediately knowable to members of the society. If someone has decided to change sex and to appear as something that he or she is not, you are more likely to ignore him or her.

And then there is gender, an absurd category that places mind ahead of reality. According to the APA,

Everyone has a gender identity, defined as a person’s deeply felt inherent sense of being a girl, woman or female, a boy, man or male, a blend of male and female, or an alternative gender.

Here we have entered into the realm of belief, and specifically of delusional belief. That is, a belief that does not correlate with any reality but that you insist is real.

Not only that, people who are transgendered now believe that they can force you to see them the way they think they are. This is tyrannical and it forces people to deny the evidence of their senses in order to placate someone’s delusional belief. It’s about mind over reality.

Of course, all societies have a stake in reproduction of the species and even of the community. This requires human beings of opposite sexes performing a certain act. Similarly, family structure involves two parents and their offspring.

To be more specific, human society is a network of alliances between families. Members of one family are joined together by blood, but society cannot merely be a blood tie. The primary social alliance is of course marriage. A member of one family joins with a member of another family, for the purpose of procreation. One notes that a child born of this alliance belongs to two families. It is what the Bible called “one flesh.” It manifests the unity of a social group, one that is based on something other than a blood tie.

Need we say that there is only one way to procreate and that it involves two individuals of different sexes. When these people procreate they are not just doing it to affirm their sexual identity. They are doing it to perpetuate society, to embody social unity, to overcome social discord and even to continue the species.