|| last word ||
Cunning linguists
By Norah Vincent
From The Advocate, June 20, 2000
Nowadays it’s fashionable to pretend that sex and gender mean the same thing. They don’t. It’s just that language has been hijacked by politics.
To show you how far down that slick slope we’ve slid, lexicologically speaking, consider that quaint contraction ain’t. When I was a kid we used to say, “Ain’t ain’t in the dictionary.” Well, ain’t is in the dictionary now (Random House, second edition, unabridged). What’s worse, it’s defined as “nonstandard except in some dialects.” So you see, the euphemisms of multiculturalism (itself a euphemism) have made bad English into a dialect.
Similarly, queer theorists have conveniently blurred sex and gender. After giving the grammatical definition of gender, especially as it is used in European languages, Random House follows the zeitgeist, conceding that gender can also mean sex—as in “the feminine gender.” Notice, though, it doesn’t say “the female gender.” Why? Because sexes are male and female. Genders are masculine and feminine. That’s also why the form on the clipboard at your doctor’s office doesn’t ask you which gender you are. It asks you which sex you are, because you’re a mammal—not a noun.
This oily word gender—which so many pious postmodernists utter as sanctimoniously as if it were Yahweh’s maiden name—doesn’t apply when you’re talking about what British comedian Dawn French called a person’s “dangly toilet parts.” The proper word is sex. If he’s got a pinga, a johnson, a Tootsie Roll—his sex is male. If a pudendum, she’s female. As for gender, well, that could be masculine, feminine, or neuter depending on whether you’re talking about a gym boy, a drag queen, or the epicene copy editor who carries a PBS tote bag. Since a person’s gender is determined by what she wears and how he carries himself and has nothing to do with what’s between his or her legs, you can be a masculine female or a feminine male. But, whatever your sex, your gender can’t be female or male. There’s no such thing. Got it?
Naturally, many transsexuals, the most draconian arm of the PC language police, are fond of misusing the word gender—mostly because, unlike the word sex, there’s no biological imperative attached to it. This is where the postmodernists are right. Gender in humans is socially constructed and therefore fungible. Coiffed wigs and makeup are feminine now, but our oh-so-butch founding fathers wore them once.
Sex, however, much to every transsexual’s chagrin, is not socially constructed. It can be cosmetically constructed or reconstructed, but this doesn’t change the fact that though some people are born hermaphrodites, the vast majority of people are born male or female. Regardless, society has no say in the matter except in neonatal surgery. For purposes of procreation there are two sexes. Anything else is a genetic/biochemical anomaly that we correct to save kids humiliation in the locker room.
Transsexual activists are always telling us that it’s a crime to surgically reassign hermaphrodites at birth. I agree. If I’m born doubly blessed in the south 40, then the doctors should let me be—even if I get teased—until I’m old enough to decide my own fate.
So why, as adults, do transsexuals mutilate their bodies in order to make them conform to the fashionable version of the opposite sex and gender? That only reinforces oppressive stereotypes every bit as much as liposuction or a bimbo’s boob job. If you’re a man in a woman’s body, then live androgynously if you’re such a revolutionary. Don’t conform. I do it every day, and it isn’t particularly easy. Half the time I’m sir, and half the time I’m ma’am, and that’s how it should be when sex and gender don’t matter.
If you truly want to thwart gender norms, don’t pull a fast one on the dictionary or your poor blameless privates. Live with all the polymorphy God gave you, body and soul. It’s a lot more radical.
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