Politically correct manspreading:
I have made my position about “gender” about as clear as I can make it, on this blog: “gender” is inconsistently used even by its main proponents because it is mostly incoherent.
The obsession with gender-as-imposition of sex roles (“socially constructed”) has been countered with a liberatory concept of self-definition (“display as”) without specifying the range of possibilities from social convention to social conspiracy to individual assertion to individual accommodation. Because of this lack of multi-factor analysis, gender theorists turn their pet concept from a supposedly sociological theory (or schema) into a cult dogma.
But where “gender” really errs is by focusing on categorization (“gender” has roots in the concept of “genre”/“genera”) as an identity determinant — that is, as a theory of individual identity formation — instead of individuation as a prime component of personal self-definition. It is all very confused because the normative move from socially constructed (imposed) role identification to individually constructed (self-defined) role identification fixates in both cases on a group identifier. It denies that social identification of roles might be quite copacetic with vague ranges and that individual definition of role might not need a category to make common cause with similar persons.
A person might be satisfied merely to identify himself or herself or whatself without any direct competitors for a possible mate — or none — and cooperate with a found mate without heavy social identification.
Identity could be, in some cases, primarily an individual existentialist concern rather than a class essentialist concern.
Which means: sex remains the most convenient categorization criterion, with its standard biological binary, and “gender” mostly worthless.
Sex serves as a Schelling Point criterion, while gender is too complex to negotiate in any large society.
My anti-gender position is, of course, considered absurd by the recent college-grad crowd. But what is absurd is allowing “trans girls” into women’s sports where natural male physical superiority overwhelms female competitors — sometimes to the point of crushing a female skull.
Wirkman Comment 