Gender Identity: Disposed Of

Vincent J. Curtis

27 Mar 2017

The question of the reality of gender “identity” and whether or not gender identity is a social construct or not was raised again after University of Toronto Professor of Psychology Jordan Peterson was heckled out of a lecture at McMaster University the other week.  Peterson is locally famous for denying the existence of gender identity as a social construct and refuses to call self-identifying transgendered by ‘zir’, ‘zhe’ and the like.

Let’s quickly dispose of the matter of using nonsense words as English pronouns for the transgendered.  It is sheer bullying and a sheer dominance play to insist that a mature, highly educated grown-up use nonsense words in the course of their speaking with others.  I am reminded of the tactics of the Chinese Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, who seized and put dunce caps on their university professors for the crime of being insufficiently enthusiastic about the latest communist thing.

As a matter of politeness, it should be left up to the individual to decide whether or not they are going to speak in English, or to babble in deference to the person before them.  If bullying as such is bad, one shouldn’t bully oneself.  If some kinds of bullying are okay, then let’s hear when it is okay and the air-tight logical defence for those occasions.  Otherwise, STFU.

Now, let’s quickly dispose of the matter of gender identity as a social construct.  Let’s begin with the definition of man: he is a rational animal.  Man belongs to the genus animal, and the essential and radical quality that differentiates man from any other kind of animal is that he is rational.

Animals lower than man on the evolutionary scale exhibit distinct identities of male and female.  These are facts of biology.  For the lower animals, gender is a reality.  Gender cannot be a social construct in the lower animals for two reasons: (1) animals, especially those lacking a herd instinct, have no society, and so no ‘social’ construct is possible; and (2) lacking rational powers, animals are incapable of abstract ‘constructs’, they are what they are and behave as they behave on account of the instinctual endowments they were given by nature.  Hence, gender is an inescapable reality among the lower animals.

Man, in virtue of his rational powers, is radically distinct from animals.  Being an animal capable of reproduction, there still must be the reality of gender, male and female, in man.  Male and female are still biological necessities in man, and gender is still a physical reality in humans.

It is in virtue of his rational powers that man is capable of having a society, and of possessing ‘constructs’ in the mind.  It is also the faculty which enables individual humans to become confused, since intellect has largely replaced instinct in humans.

Hence, there must be an underlying reality of male and female in the human species.  It is this underlying reality that enables ‘social constructs’ concerning gender to be built around.  If gender was not an underlying reality, then why social constructs concerning gender should even come into existence is a complete mystery.

Because of man’s intellect, it is possible to construct social norms around the things that men and women tend to do distinctively.  One could go so far as to assign responsibility for cooking, cleaning, doing the dishes, driving, and bringing home the bacon as tending to belong to one gender over another, so long as one understood that there were large exceptions.  One could formulate such constructs as typical gender behaviors, so long as one understood that these typical gender behaviors were reflective of an underlying reality and not definitive of it.

The problem with gender-identity theory is that it takes a set of behaviors and holds that collection as definitive of a gender, and not as merely a sign of it.  If behaviors rather than biology were definitive of gender, then gender-identity theorists need to explain: (1) how this business of gender came into being in the first place, since the categorization of behaviors is completely arbitrary, (2) why are there universally only two genders and not more, (3) why the categories of gender are universally recognized while the behaviors that are arbitrarily assigned to one gender or another is arbitrary.

Hence, gender is a physical reality, and it must be so in man because man is an animal.  It is uniquely the power of man that some individuals can get confused about gender.  And those individuals include not only the gender-confused per se, but the theorists that justify such an abnormal condition.

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