If you aim, in my direction, some cockamamie rap about “the myth of the gender binary,” be assured: I’m not interested. Your gender is none of my business. And keeping track of pseudo-science is not my avocation.
Indeed, I have yet to be convinced that there is much of anything in Gender Theory worth considering at length. I know the definition of “gender,” as a stand-in for “sex role.” More importantly, I know the open secret of the notion: even its adherents keep confusing “gender” with sex.
I am interested in sex. That’s biological. And I am interested in the roles that people make from their sex, and the norms they advance regarding sex and sexual behavior. But when I meet you, I can only guess what weight you give to “masculinity” and what weight you give to “femininity” and any other kind of sex-role “inity.” But I have little incentive to spend much time on the subject. I engage in a parsimony of attention. So I have no real interest in whatever cooked-up alt-pronoun you are pushing to honor your conception of “gender.”
There is indeed a sex binary. This is incontestable. Anyone who says otherwise is a fool of such proportions that I would not talk to that person if I could help it. I avoid crazy people. Besides, I am not a “science denier.” The biology is very clear.
As for “there is no gender binary,” my response is, at best: “Yeah, right, Goober.” Tautological truths about uninteresting fantasies are not my bag.
If you are a boy, and want to pretend to be a girl (or vice versa) that’s fine by me. But I am under no obligation to cater to your delusions or your frauds. I will call you what seems reasonable at the time, but not make much of it. If you make much of it, you can go screw yourself.
That is, unless you have gelded yourself.
My cat, Bene: he is a neutered male.
Which brings up an interesting point: though we hear much of “gender reassignment surgery”* and “trans-” this and that, I haven’t heard of a rush to create eunuchs. But such operations were once widely performed on men, and are even now routinely performed on pets of either sex.
But we still call neutered males “he” and “him” and spayed females “she” and “her” out of convenience.
So, your pronoun trouble is yours and not mine.
It’s true, as a wordsmith by trade, I have indeed experimented with constructing a set of non-sex-specific pronouns and possessives, but it’s a Sisyphean task to get a new word shoved into a language. And it would be Orwellian to try to do such a thing through the State’s police power, as the collegiate social justice crowd is indeed trying to do in Canada and on some U.S. campuses.
Yes, when it comes to sexing humans, it remains what it always has been: a matter of cox and kunz. If you lack either the referred-to penis or vagina, or have both, then you are indeed a special case, and I will no doubt pity you. If you once had one, and now have the other, I’ll try to humor you, but I feel no obligation. And if you try to oblige me, I will take that as a threat upon my person and my liberty, and swear you are my enemy. And reach for a weapon or a lawyer.
And if you are merely pretending to have something between your legs that you don’t, or are “treating yourself” with the opposite sex’s hormones, I’ll likely avoid dealing with you, and if I cannot, your respect for me means that you must forgive my smirk.
But be assured, the only respect you are owed is the same as the respect I am owed; respect for our rights. And your rights to dress as you want, call yourself whatever you want, talk with whatever inflection you prefer, and generally behave in any peaceful manner are all the respect I feel I owe you. I may give you more than that, but you may not demand more.
Notice what I have not talked about: your interests in other people via-à-vis sexual desire and gratification. Unless we are friends, I have no interest at all in your sexual orientation(s), unless you are an attractive woman who finds me attractive in return.
All others may . . . Well, let us just say that it is none of my business.
And if you ask me for my gender, I will tell you my sex.
twv
* Of course, “gender-reassignment surgery” is a self-contradiction. Surgeries are biological procedures, manipulations of the body, and gender is supposed to be about socially constructed roles, so surgeons could have nothing to do with “gender.” Their purview is entirely limited to sex. This is just one of those terms that show the whole Gender Hooey to be just that, hooey.
Wirkman Comment 
I’m not sure how or even whether to respond to this entry, as you seem to threaten to dismiss out-of-hand responses that exhibit properties that any from me would.
Indeed, the people who speak and write most vociferously about gender theory themselves confuse the distinction between “sex” and “gender”; but some of those of us who write less vociferously are also consistently careful to recognize the difference between physiological states and rôles that have been associated with those states by psychological factors, some idiosyncratic and some involving interaction with other persons.
While gender is plainly associated with sex, I don’t know that gender can be reduced to a sex rôle, in-so-far as there may be more than one gender associated with a sex, and I believe that there may me more than one sex associated with a gender. We now see the latter, at least as a sub-cultural phenomenon, in our own nation.
Whatever we may conclude about gender, there are plainly people who are intersexed, having more traits of the male sex and of the female sex in combination than we find in “textbook” models. These people were once simply concluded to be in some way defective, but defects only exist relative to purposes of some sorts. It seems to me that if these people are content as they are, then there is no defect to be corrected. And if the only source of discontent associated with their physical states is that society treats them as defective, then they have a prima facie case for social change. If we pity them, it should be as we pity anyone treated badly by society. Likewise for those born sexless.
In any case, so long as there are some people both with less in the way of male traits than others and with less in the way of female traits than others, sex isn’t dichotomous, which is what I would mean were I to call sex “binary”. I am not sure what to do in a world that has both people born hermaphroditic and others born without sex organs.
It’s baldly true that what is called “sexual reässignment surgery” cannot turn men into women nor women into men; at present, surgery cannot even give a genuine new breast to a woman who has lost one! But that doesn’t established that sexual reässignment surgery is always a bad idea. Surgery can be used to counterfeit various sorts of changes, to good effect — for example, a counterfeit breast for the aforementioned woman. It seems to me that sexual reässignment surgery may be in the same category.
I don’t think that anyone born of one sex can somehow know by introspection that he or she has the brain of another sex. We’re not telepaths; even those of us who are content with our birth sexes know others of our sex only through the lens of gender! But if someone can be made significantly more comfortable as a counterfeited male or as a counterfeited female, taking hormones for the rest of his or her life, this seems to me to be fundamentally analogous to someone with, say, a face transplant, taking anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his or her life. I don’t see a reason to avoid the person, nor to smirk at the choice.
I guess I will have to take everyone of your points one by one, to clarify my meaning. And I guess I will have to do it in an actual post. For we are approaching all of this quite differently.
But I will now (at this late hour) mainly address your concern over my first sentence: I am (usually?) uninterested in talk of “the myth of the gender binary” because it is gargling with tautology. Once one has defined “gender” in the way Gender Theorists do, the lack of binary is obvious to anyone but dunderheads. I am not a dunderhead, so lectures on analytic truths as if these tautologies were revelations from The Goddess Herself strike me as less than … revelatory.
My objection to Gender Theory is partly its imposition over a perfectly good vocabulary prior to its introduction, and because its most vociferous advocates/abusers seem to be relentlessly pleased with themselves for marshaling their handy new vocab. I am reminded of Moliere’s Jourdain, much taken with his newly discovered lifelong mastery of prose.
Truth is, I am interested in persons’ individualities — or perhaps better said, individuals’ personalities — not their categorized, stamped, and shuffled roles as referenced against sex. “Gender” at root is a classification term, and its modish usage diverts our attention exclusively to socialization and away from individuation.
I belong, if to any cult, to the personhood cult, in which an individual does not require a tribe to deserve respect. To witness people contort themselves, as do SJWs and the young Tumblr feminists, to define themselves by their . . . fraught relations to sex, with the aid of fashionable and proliferating made-up categories? What to make of this? Mass men, last men, desperate for significance in a world that is itself fluid. They thus attach themselves to cultic dogma and gain their purchase on righteousness.
I shake my head at them. Not necessarily you.
But more later. I apparently have much more to say. Alas. On this subject. Hmmm.
This reminds me of having long conversations about Marxism, when I find Herbert Spencer or even Dunning Macleod more profitable a vein to explore. But supply must meet demand.
[…] time back I made a more lengthy and rhetorically loaded against the theory — “I do not care about your ‘gender’” — which was itself a reiteration of points I’d made earlier. And Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan […]