Using our words properly

One of the reasons people have such stupid takes about sex and gender these days is that we are misclassifying what’s going on and using the wrong words.

My wasband got as far as E-4 promotable (I think he was promotable — until he got in trouble, anyway) during his time in the Army. One of the things you had to do to go from E-4 to E-5, meaning sergeant, was attend the Primary Leadership Development Course (PLDC). One of the first things PLDC taught its students is that the first step in solving a problem is identifying the problem.

It is so obvious that everyone reading that last sentence is now thinking some variation on “Well, DUH!” and marveling about how clueless the government is, but you would be surprised how many people forget this when actually faced with solving a problem. That number likely including you. It definitely includes me.

A lot of the gender-identity argument boils down to category error. An obvious example of this is putting a man who likes pink into the woman category. There are less obvious errors as well. One of those is confusing sex and gender, believing that the latter is merely a polite word for the former.

Here is how the categories actually work.

SEX: female, male (“intersex” people are also female or male)
SEX CLASS: woman, man (“intersex” people are also either women or men)
GENDER: sex-based stereotyping, expressed in the terms feminine and masculine, and especially when used to establish and maintain female subordination to male dominance (though androgynous is a gender word too)

“Sex class?” you’re asking. “That sounds like a weird liberal university course that probably should be banned.” No. The word class in this context is related to the word classification: it means a group of things or a group of people who share one or more traits in common. So the woman sex class means a group of adult humans who all share being female in common.

The bit about gender is easier to understand if you have ever learned one of the Romance languages (languages heavily influenced by Latin), such as French or Spanish. In English, nouns are… just nouns. In Romance languages, most nouns and their associated pronouns and adjectives are considered feminine, masculine, or neuter (neutral). In short, those nouns (and associated words) are gendered — stereotyped in a way that reminds speakers and listeners of the respective sex classes.

I’ll elaborate further. I took French for a year and learned that house is a feminine noun, la maison. Pencil is a masculine noun, le crayon. A house encloses people much as a pregnant woman encloses a fetus; the house is also culturally associated with women because of housework and cooking which both take place there. A pencil has a vaguely phallic shape, meaning it reminds us of dicks. Interestingly, books are also masculine (le livre) and, together with pencils (and pens: le stylo) being masculine, makes me think the French associate education with masculinity. It’s France. I’m probably right.

One more point: at least in French, neutral nouns are far outnumbered by gendered nouns (and associated words), and when you use an article (English: a/an/the; French: un/une, la/le) with a neutral noun, you use the masculine article. So, as with public restrooms in the Anglophone world, the “gender-neutral” still belongs to men.

So we do assign gender in the sense that we declare this thing or that thing feminine or masculine (or androgynous), but when we say a baby is a girl or a boy, we’re observing what their sex and sex class are (girl and boy are the juvenile human sex classes). When we assign gender to children we’re deciding that the girls should have dolls and the boys should have toy trucks. They’re already girls and boys. Which are not genders.

Ironically, feminine means “of or pertaining to the female” and masculine means “of or pertaining to the male.” Gender wouldn’t be such a problem if we stopped labeling things “of or pertaining to” sex when they have nothing to do with sex. This is what feminists meant when we said boys should be able to play with dolls. As the popular meme puts it, if you can operate a toy with your genitals, it is not a toy for children; if you don’t operate a toy with your genitals, it’s for everyone.

And here’s the other problem with saying gender when you mean sex or sex class:

Sex comes from a Latin word meaning something like “to divide into two.” The concept of two is definitely involved in the word.

Gender means “type or category.” (The French word for this is genre, and it means the same thing.) There are more than two types or categories for most things in the world. It was the appropriation of the word in linguistics (the study of language) to label what Romance languages do to nouns which connected it to sex at all.

I don’t know if it was deliberate, but it might as well have been: if we stop saying sex in favor of saying gender then we are opening ourselves to the idea that there might be more than two.

“But mushrooms”

We are not mushrooms. There are two sexes. Use the type of language that reflects that.

And it goes without saying that women are not a gender identity any more than we are a gender. We are not a gender identity, we don’t have gender identities, and gender identity has nada to do with us.

George Lakoff, who with my luck is probably pro-trans, has famously spent his career exhorting liberals to stop letting conservatives control the language. It is good general advice as far as it goes. Most of the conflict between feminists and gender identitarians boils down to who controls the language.

Resist. Do not comply. Use language correctly.

(“But this radical feminist in 1970 said gender all the time.” I’m sure she did. I am not that radical feminist and this is not 1970 and no one is perfect and political writings are not scripture and I wouldn’t trust them even if they were. Take what works and leave the rest. Referring to sex as gender does not work. The end.)