As I have noted in previous essays and blog entries, gender refers to genotypes in a sexually dimorphic species. For all animal species gender is binary. For mammals, reptiles, and birds gender is unchangeable. There are females and males, their respective sex determinable by chromosomes and gametes. In our species, adult females are called “women” and adult males are called “men.” In swine, the analogs are “sow” and “hog.” In horses, “mare” and “stallion.” Etcetera. Pronouns refer to these realities. Crucially, gender is not subjective, However/whatever a man might think of himself or believe himself to be, he is objectively a gender—and only one gender. To claim otherwise, to refer to him by his imagined gender, is to deny scientific reality. Gender is not subjective. Truth has its own integrity. An honest society proceeds on the basis of truth.
In a news item from the Yale School of Medicine, dated September 19, 2021, Carolyn Mazure, Professor in Women’s Health Research, and Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, writes, “Perhaps at some point in time [gender and sex] were used as synonyms, but this is no longer true in science.” Not “perhaps.” Gender and sex were synonyms in science for centuries (see, e.g., Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms). Mazure is engaged here in a classic propaganda technique called “mystification,” which involves distorting or obscuring history to make certain facts appear uncertain. The facts are no uncertain. The synonymous character of gender/sex still holds in material science.
The “authority” Mazure cites, now under the umbrella of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), is the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which organized the Committee on Understanding the Biology of Sex and Gender Differences in 2001. “The committee advised that scientists use these definitions in the following ways: In the study of human subjects, the term sex should be used as a classification, generally as male or female, according to the reproductive organs and functions that derive from the chromosomal complement [generally XX for female and XY for male]. In the study of human subjects, the term gender should be used to refer to a person’s self-representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions on the basis of the individual’s gender presentation. In most studies of nonhuman animals, the term sex should be used.”
The committee “concluded there was more than sufficient evidence that, beyond reproductive biology, there were major differences in the biology of women and men that greatly affected their health and influenced treatment and prevention strategies.” Notice that the terms “women” and “men” are used here. It’s a binary. Despite the slogan “Trans women are women,” one would hope that the medical industry would continue treating trans women as a men and vice-versa in light of these major differences. Perhaps now the document would be rewritten to substitute “women” and “men” with “female” and “male,” but clearly these terms are synonyms, merely different words indicating the same reality, and clearly there is a binary. It is difficult to wriggle out of the truth.
Focus on recommendation that medical science drop the term “gender” when referring to “nonhuman animals.” As I have shown, scientists have referred to gender in nonhuman animals—and plants—for centuries and there is no justification from a scientific materialist standpoint for jettisoning the term gender with respect to nonhuman animals or for repurposing the term for human animals to convey “self-representation as male or female,” or to describe how social institutions respond to that person on the basis of the individual’s self-presentation, the human animals. Anthropologists, historians, and sociologists have had no problem conveying human subjectivity or cultural and historical variation in sex roles.
Why gender is dropped for nonhuman animals and repurposed for human animals is because humans can be confused about their gender and this confusion comes with great benefits to the medical-industrial complex. In other words, the redefinition is for commercial purposes (as well as for normalizing paraphilias). The Yale School of Medicine news item is an instantiation of corporate propaganda produced by a functionary of the medical-industrial complex, disinformation designed to market “life-saving gender-affirming health care,” a multibillion dollar transnational enterprise integrating biotech, chemical manufacturers, and pharmaceutical industries with medical firms and health insurance companies. The more people who are confused about gender the more customers for the industry.
At the bottom of the article is a brief glossary which includes the construction “cisgender,” defined as a term used to describe “an individual whose gender identity aligns with the one typically associated with the sex assigned to them at birth.” The entry tells readers that this term that is preferable to “non-trans,” “biological,” or “natal” man or woman. This neologism is preferred because it is paradoxical and thus furthers the mystification. Consider once more the slogan “trans women are women.” If one accepts that trans women are women, i.e., that some men are women, then the category women no longer refers to all women, as only some women are women. Women become defined as a subclass of a greater class of women, which means that there really is no such thing as a woman in gender ideology. One might object that a woman is “a person who identifies as a woman,” but that is merely a circular definition with no meaningful content (see Scientific Materialism and the Necessity of Noncircular Conceptual Definitions). It is true that non of these terms—“non-trans,” “biological,” or “natal” man or woman—are desirable. That’s because we already have a term exclusive of men. The term is woman.
freedom and reason 
Two questions:
1) what is the Marxist analysis for why a Democracy politicizes something as non-political as the male/female binary? I’d think it would be that the ruling class generates power by creating new divisions and voting blocks out of thin air, but I don’t see how that would be different from the critique of Democracy from the throne-and-altar style authority structures that Marxism overthrew.
2) How is it distinct from the Marxist tendency to politicize other things that were formerly seen as non-political, like the patriarchal authority structures above? I am sure there is an answer, but I can’t think of it.
Marx and Engels observed that family structure and culture are tied to a given mode of production, changing over time with the development of the productive modality. In the beginning, in what they call “primitive communism” (today we say “gatherer and hunter”), there was only a natural sexual division of labor organized around the gender binary. Domestic work was the domain of women; hunting, long range foraging, and warfare the man’s domain. These societies were not politically organized because there was no state and law or other formal institutions. The normative structure was informal.
When private property and social class emerge, these associated with the rise of the state and law (and organized religion), the sex roles become subject to all the political dynamics inherent in these new social forces. Because these things are intrinsically political, even if ideology treats them as natural, aspects of sexual life become politicized, not by Marx and Engels, but by social system and its institutions, for example in laws regulating sexuality and marriage and in reckoning lines of inheritance. What Marx and Engels wanted was a return to original order but at a higher level of technological development. They never described what this would look like, but it would operate on the original principle: from each according to ability, to each according to need. The administration of people, which is what state and law are designed to do for the ruling elite, would be replaced with an administration of things, which would be under the democratic control of the people.
As for the second question, some of those advocating gender ideology see their arguments as rooted in Marxism, but I don’t see the connection. Marx and Engels wrote quite a bit on the family, I don’t find in those writings any support for such notions as “gender identity.” Marx and Engels accepted the Darwinian evolutionary model. Darwin used the terms gender and sex interchangeably. The gender ideologists, whose core is anarchism, a political philosophy Marx and Engels vociferously rejected, politicize things as a method of transgressing the normative system, for example sexual relations between adults and children, something I suspect would horrify Marx and Engels. Engels was a lady’s man who never married. Marx was a traditionalist when it came to love and marriage.
OK, thanks for the excellent summary.
You bet!
“In other words, the redefinition is for commercial purposes (as well as for normalizing paraphilias).”
This is simply your opinion. Similar to that of Ray Blanchard, a discredited quack. Your virtue signalling and moral superiority complex are not very well disguised.
I am providing an institutional analysis, here with attention to the ideological rationalization of commercial medical procedures. I am deconstructing the narrative. The sentence you selected contains a parenthetical reference to movement politics. Is not a key part of the queer movement the project to normalize paraphilias? For a fact it is. Does it trouble you that I said what should be the quiet part out loud? I am not with this movement. I am at liberty to speak. Virtue signaling flows in the opposite direction.