Wednesday, May 20, 2020

"The Tide Is Turning Back To Biological Definitions Of Gender"

   'Gender' is ambiguous, sometimes meaning sex (maleness/femaleness) and sometimes meaning, well, gender (masculinity/femininity). It's also sometimes assigned a range of other meanings ad hoc, depending on what feminists and progressives want it to mean to accomplish different ends at different times. Which is a major reason transgender ideology is a conceptual train wreck. It's virtually impossible to make heads or tails of it. 
   What the author ought to say is: people are starting to stand up against the patently and provably false claim that 'man,' 'woman,' 'boy' and 'girl' are gender terms at all. Unless, of course, 'gender' means sex. All four of those are species/sex/age terms that mark species-sex-and-age categories. They're analogous to 'buck,' 'doe' and 'fawn' or 'stallion,' 'mare,' 'colt' and 'filly.'  A man is an adult, male human, a girl is a juvenile female human, etc. There's simply no doubt about that. If, somehow, you doubt it (perhaps because you're not a native English speaker) you can check the definitions of the terms in the OED. Transgender ideology, to the extent it makes any sense at all, is an attempt to pretend that words mean things they don't mean. 'Man,' 'woman', etc. have never meant Person who believes himself/herself to be a man nor Person who believes himself/herself to be a woman. For one thing, those are self-referential definitions. You'd have to know what a man was before you know when someone things of himself or herself as a man. It'd be like defining zlorg as: anything that's a picture of a zlorg. Since we have no idea what a zlorg is, we can't distinguish pictures of zlorgs from pictures of non-zlorgs. 
   Well, I've said this all before. 

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