Make Gender Sex Again

Come the next Dominion election, which must come by October, is likely to be called shortly after Parliament sits again which is currently scheduled to occur on the eve of Lady Day, and cannot come soon enough in my opinion, the Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre will almost certainly form the next government with what is looking to be the largest majority win in Canadian history.  Now I am a Tory, not a conservative, big or little c.  My temporal political allegiance is to King Charles III and his heirs, not to a party in Parliament and, indeed, I consider parties to be a necessary evil that we must put up with in order to enjoy the benefits of the Westminster parliamentary system.  This allegiance comes second to my higher spiritual allegiance to the King of kings, Jesus Christ, and to the earthly manifestation of His Kingdom in His Body the Church, and unlike those small-c conservatives worshipping at the altar of business, the market, and trade I remember that He warned that allegiance to Him excludes service to Mammon.  That is said preliminary to saying that while Poilievre falls short in many ways of what I would like to see in His Majesty’s next Prime Minister, I do look forward to his filling that office as a vast improvement over Captain Airhead and whichever of the abominable choices seeking to fill his place the Liberal Party ultimately chooses.

 

Poilievre was interviewed by CP24 news on Wednesday.  He was asked for his take on the subject of an executive order that Donald the Orange signed on Monday.  This was one of many executive orders that Donald the Orange signed that day, which was the day of his second inauguration as American president.  Now most of these, including the one in question which I will return to shortly, are, as far as their content is concerned, measures that I would consider to be good and would like to see similarly implemented in the other countries of the civilization formerly known as Christendom.  This includes the one abolishing automatic citizenship for the children of non-citizens born in American territory that a US Federal Court blocked as “blatantly unconstitutional” yesterday.  What will come of that will be interesting to watch because the basis of the ruling is an amendment to the American Constitution the legitimacy of the ratification of which has been begging to be challenged for a century and a half and which, incidentally, is the reason American progressives have been able to use the American courts as the means of cultural revolution in their country for so long.  I hate to applaud these orders, because the man signing them is the world’s biggest horse’s patoot, a fact I am no longer willing to overlook since he started threatening my country, but, as Sawyer Brown sang, “I got to give credit where credit is due” even if that means including the devil among the recipients.

 

The executive order in question is entitled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”  I might quibble that women are not the only ones who need defending from gender ideology extremism the rhetoric of which attacks masculinity as “toxic” but that is a small point.  The first section of the order concludes with Donald the Orange declaring that his administration “will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”  The remainder of the order spells out what this will look like in practice.  This is one of the things that got the dander of the woman pretending to be a bishop whose remarks to Donald the Orange in her homily at the National Cathedral on the Tuesday after his inauguration have so offended him and his followers. I say “woman pretending to be a bishop” because the Apostolic Succession cannot legitimately descend to a woman, let alone a woman who has clearly substituted left-wing politics for the Creed, and so women are ontologically incapable of being true bishops.  Naturally, someone like that objects to things that Donald the Orange is doing that are in themselves right more than to his actual bad behaviour.

 

The exchange between Poilievre and the interviewer about this executive order occurs about two thirds of the way into the interview and takes up only a small fraction of it but is being treated in some circles as if it were the whole of the interview.  Asked if he agreed with what Donald the Orange was saying and if he would be “lockstep” with him in this Poilievre answered “well I’m not aware of any other genders then men and women, if you have any other you want me to consider you’re welcome to tell me right now.”  The interviewer pushed a bit more, but Poilievre returned to this answer and to the position that government should mind its own business and let people make their own decisions on such matters and that he had other priorities.

 

I don’t disagree that the other things he mentioned – homelessness, poverty, rising costs, crime – should be higher priorities.  With regards to his classic liberal or libertarian position that government should mind its own business on this I would say that this position would only be defensible if the government were already minding its own business.  The government has not been minding its own business, however.  Captain Airhead has spent much of the last ten years doing the exact opposite of minding his own business on this matter and rather than letting people make their own decisions he has done everything he could think of to do to write left-wing extremist gender ideology into law and policy and shove it down everyone’s throats.  It will take government action to fix this and return the government to minding its own business.

 

Oddly enough, where I found myself shaking my head at his answer was on the “I’m not aware of any other genders than men and women” statement.  It shows that Poilievre has not been educated in the classical languages although he is bilingual which rather detracts from that as an excuse for not knowing better.  The problem with the statement is the word “genders.” Poilievre and his interviewer consistently used this word in this portion of the interview but it is the wrong word.  “Men” and “women” are not genders, they are sexes.  There are only two sexes.  There are three genders.  The third gender is called neuter.  While anybody who has studied Greek or Latin or, for that matter, any other highly inflected language, would know this, there are three genders in English as well.  Think of the third person singular pronoun.  He.  She.  It.  It is the neuter gender form.

 

My point is that sex and gender are not the same thing.  People and beasts come in sexes – male and female.  Words, specifically nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, come in genders – masculine, feminine, and neuter.  Masculine corresponds to male and feminine to female, there is no corresponding sex to the neuter gender because this gender is only used for words that denote things that have no sex.  The correspondence is not absolute because some things that have no biological sex are identified by nouns that have genders other than neuter.  In English, for example, we use female pronouns rather than neuter when talking about cars or boats.  Countries are treated as feminine in most languages.  This is true even when the root of the word for country is derived from the word for father as with the Latin patria.  It is traditionally considered very rude under most circumstances to use the neuter gender when speaking of a person, which in English would be done by calling that person an “it”.

 

Am I being pedantic in insisting on this?

 

This may seem to be the case but the distinct usage of the two words, gender for the grammatical category, sex for the biological, was fairly consistent until the late 1960s to early 1970s.  Then progressive academics started using the grammatical term to refer to the idea of a socially constructed identity imposed upon people in accordance to their biological sex.  Second-wave feminists who argued that these socially constructed identities served the purposes of a conspiracy on the part of all males to oppress all females that they cooked up in their fevered brains played a large part in this but this was a period in which academic progressives in general were exploring ways in which to weaponize the building blocks of language for use in their cultural revolution.

Jacques Derrida’s doctoral thesis Of Grammatology had been published in 1967.  Rather than attempt to summarize it I will quote one sentence from it that illustrates the point “This coherent reversal, submitting semiology to a “translinguistics,” leads to its full explication a linguistics historically dominated by logocentric metaphysics, for which in fact there is not and there should not be ‘any meaning except as named’ (ibid.).” This can be found on pages 51-52 in the 1997 John Hopkins corrected English edition.  The “grammatology” in the title of the book is his proposed substitute for “semiology” (Saussure’s word for the branch of linguistics ordinarily called semiotics), an expression of his desire to emancipate the written language from subservience to the spoken.  Derrida, who believed that the hierarchical structure of language upheld what he regarded as an oppressive hierarchical structure in society, saw language about language about language as his weapon for attacking the latter through undermining the former.  Radical feminist Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, published four years later showed that she had been drinking from the same tainted spring as Derrida, although it was third-wave feminist literary critic Judith Butler who most directly drew from Derrida as a source.  Her best known book was Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).  Note the switch from sex to gender in the titles from Millett to Butler.

 Another factor in the switch from talking about sex with regards to people to “gender” in its new sense was the publication in 1972 John Money and Anke Ehrhardt’s Man & Woman, Boy & Girl: Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity.  Money’s quack research, which played pretty much the same role in providing a cloak of scientific respectability to the idea of a gender identity that can be separated from biological sex – Money was the “scientist” involved in the infamous David Reimer case in which reassignment surgery was performed after a botched circumcision with seemingly initial success that later went south badly – as Alfred Kinsey’s quack research was in providing scientific respectability to the sexual revolution, has long since been shown to be quackery (see John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl, 2000) but the mischief it helped unleash continued unabated to the present day.

 

The point, of course, is that it was essential to the development of gender identity ideology that the term gender was borrowed from grammar where it belongs, attached to a pseudo-scientific concept rooted in liberal and left-wing crackpottery, then inappropriately substituted for the word sex when speaking of the difference between males and females.

 

A better response on the part of Poilievre would have been to say “You are using the wrong word.  Only words have genders, of which there are three, masculine, feminine and neuter.  People have sexes, male and female.”  Interestingly, whoever wrote the executive order for Donald the Orange, seems to have understood this.  In Section 2 of the order it says “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.  These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”  Poilievre should not allow the impression to be created that the loud-mouthed jackass and ignoramus who thinks that a plumber who buys more groceries from the grocery store each year than what he gets for selling the same store his plumbing services is somehow “subsidizing” the store, knows more than him about anything.  Although I did say “whoever wrote the executive order.”

 

So in conclusion, we really need to go back to teaching people Latin and Greek, at least if they want to be anything other than hewers of wood and drawers of water, before stuffing their heads with anything else.  It is very hard to mistake gender and sex, or to mistake the number of the latter (2) for the number of the former (3), when you are made to learn a long list of adjectives and pronouns with the alternate endings of –us –a –um (or –os –e –on)  in their lexical forms.  Although knowing what the difference between he, she, and it is in English really ought to suffice.