“Dr. Charnock had only one observation to make on Mr. Harris’s paper. The latter made a distinction between plants and the genus homo, that in the former both sexes are sometimes found in the same plant. Now, it had never been proved that the human spermatozoon was any gender, and the gender of the ovum depended upon the time fecundation; i. e., upon chance. Dr. Charnock spoke on the authority of Pouchet, Hofaeker, Lucas, Huber, and others.” —J. McGrigor Allan, “On the Real Differences in the Minds of Men and Women,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London (1869)
In an essay I published earlier this week (Gender and the English Language), I documented the use of the word “gender” to denote reproductive anatomy in the natural science literature over the course of several centuries. As the reader can see in the above quote, anthropologists used “gender” in the same way. Indeed, in the passage, the subject is reproductive anatomy. The same is true for sociology. The concept of “gender role” appears later on, but as a concept it was available long before its appearance; the concept of the “sex role” appears in the anthropological and sociological literature well before John Money’s alleged coining of the term “gender role.” Since I have established that gender and sex are synonyms, either construction is appropriate for denoting the societal roles organized around gender and the expectations and values that attach to those roles.
By way of example, in a 1942 issue of the American Sociological Review, “The Adjustment of the Individual to his Age and Sex Roles,” Leonard Correll, Jr. writes, “By way of further clarification it is necessary to call attention to the distinction between the use of the term role to refer to a modal system of responses which constitutes the culturally expected behavior and the particular system of responses with which a specific individual operates. Thus, when we speak of the individual’s ability to perform in his sex role, we refer to the relation which his behavior, in situations in which sex classification is relevant, bears to some modal pattern expected in a given cultural or subcultural group.” The concept of role is as basic to sociology as the concept of status.
The sociologist most famously associated with the concept of “sex roles” is Talcott Parsons. In his work, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, Parsons discussed the division of labor based on gender within the family and society. Parsons introduces his concept of “sex roles” in his book The Structure of Social Action, published in 1937. Parsons argued that in traditional societies, there is a clear division of labor between men (instrumental roles) and women (expressive roles), and this division is functional to the stability of the family and the reproduction of society as a whole. His ideas were highly influential in shaping discussions around gender roles and social expectations.
The historical materialists understood this long before Parsons. Friedrich Engels, building on Lewis Henry Morgan’s work in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) and Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877), as well as his collaboration with Karl Marx, argued in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), that in primitive societies, there existed a form of social organization he and Marx called “primitive communism,” what today’s anthropologists call “hunter-gatherer,” characterized by communal ownership of property, egalitarian social relations, and a natural gendered division of labor. Engels theorizes the transition from primitive communism to class-based societies, particularly focusing on the emergence of private property and the patriarchal family structure.
Engels posits that, in early human history, societies were organized around maternal kinship and inheritance, with descent traced through the mother’s line (matrilineage). He argues that the development of agriculture led to the accumulation of surplus resources and the rise of private property, which, in turn, gave rise to class divisions and the oppression of one group by another. With the development of private property, men sought to ensure the paternity of their offspring to pass down property and thus instituted patriarchal family structures. This shift, according to Engels, involved the overthrow or subjugation of matriarchal systems by patriarchal ones, leading to the rise of male dominance in family and societal affairs. Thus we see the existence of gender roles in primitive societies and the transformation of those roles over time. Gender is not a social construct but an objective matter of natural history around which humans have always organized social roles.
Engels writes in the preface to the first edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: “According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.”
He continues: “The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of its products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups. However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval. In the collision of the newly-developed social classes, the old society founded on kinship groups is broken up; in its place appears a new society, with its control centered in the state, the subordinate units of which are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which the system of the family is completely dominated by the system of property, and in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles that have hitherto formed the content of all written history.”
The Internet will tell you that Money introduced the term in 1955 as if the history of the concept begins there. In reality, Money, a psychiatrist by training, lifted the concept from anthropology and sociology, substituted for “sex” the synonym “gender,” and passed himself off as the originator of an insight that already basic to social science. Another trick played is the reification of Robert Stoller’s invention of “gender identity,” which the psychiatrist used to denote an individual’s internal and individual experience of gender. In Stoller’s formulation, “gender identity” is a subjective thing to the person who “experiences” it—a sense of being a man, a woman, both, neither, or anywhere along the spectrum said to comprise gender (in fact, gender is binary and you can be neither both nor neither)—that others are told they must treat as if it is real. That’s a trick in itself; however, between 1968 and today, the words “role” and “identity” were dropped, and the word “gender” elevated to a socially constructed and subjective category of being.
Knowing these linguistic tricks allows the rational among us to expose the agenda at work here. There is nothing complex about any of this; it only requires we use the English language accurately and precisely. When somebody tells you that sex refers to reproductive anatomy and gender refers to cultural values and societal norms, they are simply saying that there are social roles associated with gender. It has always been true that gender in our species, and in many others species, as well, has been socially organized. Another way of saying this is that there is sex (reproductive anatomy) and sex roles (the cultural values and societal norms). It is important in conversation that you make that clear for everyone participating. Don’t accept the propaganda purpose of these terms; instead, insist on the important of using scientific terms to convey reality not ideology.
As for the identity piece of this, it is enough to observe that the gender of the organism, whether it is female or male, is the identity of the organism. Identity is the fact of being who or what a person or thing is—not who or what a person says he is. In the preface to his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx writes, “Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.” I use this quote to emphasize the importance of grounding knowledge in scientific materialism and realism. We don’t judge an individual by what he thinks about himself because what he thinks of himself may be the product of delusion or indoctrination. We judge the individual on the basis of what he is—that is, his identity—in the same way we judge historical epochs in terms of themselves, not by the distorted ways in which those epochs are represented by ideology (religion, etc.).
If an individual genuinely believes that his gender is what it isn’t, then he is either delusional or indoctrinated (he is possessed of an illusion, as Sigmund Freud put it). Those who affirm his subjectivity are either themselves delusional or indoctrinated, or they are exploiting the man. If he is mentally ill, which is possible, then the treatment for his delusion is to be found in psychotherapy. But this is not the approach of gender affirming care. Delusional individuals or those possessed of an illusion are referred to the gender clinic. Without mystifying gender, feminism sought to escape the constraints of the social roles and stereotypes that attach to gender in a given cultural space and historical period. By untethering gender from gender role, trans activists and the medical industry mystify gender to suppose individuals can escape the constraints of biology, which in turn justifies the use of chemicals and surgeries to produce simulated gender identities—and compel others to act in bad faith by affirming the validity of all this.
The constructs “gender identity” and “gender dysphoria” play vital roles in this, as well. With gender identity, shorthanded to simply “gender,” the mystification is totalized; gender is now not a cultural or social thing, i.e., an observable thing conceptualized by social science rooted in natural science, but an essential thing without any empirical indicators—that is, something like a soul or thetan. Gender dysphoria, which indicates a psychiatric disorder where a man or a woman is confused about his or her identity, again, a thing that is objectively determinable, is then reduced to the distress felt by a person when their subjective experience is at odds with reality, albeit the same thing but with different treatment options, options that generates large and sustainable profits for corporate firms and their stockholders.
In my blog on gender and the English language, I cited an article by David Haig who reviewed more than thirty million academic articles from the years 1945-2001 to determine the occurrences of the words “sex” and “gender.” Haig found that, at the beginning of the period, the usages of the word “sex” were more frequent than usages of the word “gender,” but flipped with the emergence of feminism. This shift is reflected in my discipline of sociology, which is to say that the sociology of today is quite different fro the sociology of yesteryear.
Testifying to the sorry state of contemporary sociology is this op-ed by Finn Mackay in a January 2024 issue of The Guardian. Mackay is senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England in Bristol. “Gender ideology is real,” she writes, “but it wasn’t invented by trans men or trans women, and it doesn’t just apply to trans or transgender people. The real gender ideology is the binary sex and gender system that requires all of us to be either male-masculine-heterosexual or female-feminine-heterosexual; and which attaches harsh penalties to those who deviate from this script. Almost all of us will have been socialised on to pink or blue paths from birth, if not by our immediate family, then by the books, TV, toys, clothes and adverts that surrounded us in wider society. This socially prescribed gender informs our gender identity.”
“Trans people didn’t create ‘gender ideology’,” she writes, “and should not be blamed for somehow making gender visible. Rather than pathologising a stigmatised minority, we need to focus instead on the gendered majority. Gender criticism should start at home.”
Make it make sense, the reader may be asking at this point. I can do that. Gender ideology does not rest on the fact of the gender binary; quite the contrary. What is strictly true is not ideological (although ideology may conceal or obscure truths nonetheless embedded in it). The gender system, by which Mackay means gender roles, at least not in enlightened Western society, carries no harsh penalties for deviation from stereotypes associated with those roles. For the most part and without consequence, girls and women wear pants and eschew makeup, and many of them cut short their hair. It is not true that almost all of us were put on paths of blue and pink (ironically the colors that comprise the trans flag). Boys have appetites for things that trans ideologues identify as blue (an arbitrary designation) because it is the nature of boys to have such appetites. The gender role is rooted in gender, which is the result of natural history. Whatever the concrete expressions of masculinity over space and time, and whatever the variable frequency of masculine and feminine traits in the overlaying distributions of the gender binary, boys and girls today are more like the boys and girls that came before them than they are different, and this will be true in the future presuming that the project to confuse children about gender fails in its totalitarian desire.
As we see, she doesn’t quite pull it off, but Mackay is performing the postmodernist trick of treating the eternal one of many possible narratives, this one prevailing because of the power arrayed against the trans identifying individual. The natural is recast as a form of social oppression, liberation from which requires consciousness raising that comes about by turning schools into indoctrination centers where children are gaslighted over gender and their gender-detection modules disrupted. Mackay writes that “in its guidance, the Department for Education states that gender identity is a contested belief, and that many people don’t consider themselves to have one at all. They define gender identity as a person’s sense of their own gender, which may or may not be linked to their biological sex. In the document’s explanation of pupils’ ‘social transition,’ this is described as using different names, pronouns, clothing or facilities from those provided for their biological sex.” This is indeed the queer project formula.
However, Mackay sabotages her own magic trick by finding in this “the bizarre claim that things like this have a biological sex in the first place. How can names, the fabric of clothes, or the porcelain of toilets possibly have a biological sex?” By her own lights, she regards these matters as gender not sex. Much of the essay is disjointed in this way. However, this immediately follows: “The fact is that all children should be ‘gender questioning’ and this is the natural state of children—it is something to be encouraged. If only adults could unlearn the lessons of gender ourselves, rather than subjecting our children to it.” Here is the agenda. This is grooming.
For Mackay, the queer project is not just another narrative, but the true view of the world, a world in which gender is learned along blue and pink paths constructed by the gender tyrants. It is not queer theory that’s ideological. The ideology is found in the practice of gender roles. The natural state of children, she supposes, is to question their gender. In this view, conservative ideas of gender roles suppress the natural proclivities of children. But for gender role socialization, children could have no predictable response that would align with gender as it is now constructed by the patriarchal heteronormative, cisgendered oppressors. This is John Money’s argument. The boy Money used to prove his case committed suicide. He is not the only won in the meantime. (See Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy.)
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In looking up a fact about Money, I ran across a story concerning Janet Frame, an author who attended some of Money’s classes at the University of Otago. Money was, like a lot of psychopaths, a charming man, and Frame found herself drawn to him and was eager to please him. In October 1945, following an essay in which Frame mentioned her thoughts of suicide, Money persuaded her to admit herself to the psychiatric ward at Dunedin Public Hospital, where she was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic. She spend eight years in psychiatric institutions, undergoing electroshock and insulin shock therapy. She narrowly escaped a lobotomy. See An Angel at My Table. The man was a monster.
freedom and reason 