By Rob Meyne
- Feb. 9, 2023
- 3-min read
If twenty-five years ago you had been able to peer into the future and see what we would be debating in 2023, you probably would not have believed it. Today we are divided on questions for which there are clear, logical, scientific, and common-sense answers. Yet for reasons of woke ideology and political correctness, we pretend there are not.
Anyone who says we have lost our collective minds can make a decent case for it.
A concomitant problem is that we do ourselves, and our progeny, a disservice by spending so much time talking about things that are manifestly less important to our collective future than many other issues that go unattended. No wonder so many younger people think they are justified in focusing on their personal problems — is someone using the wrong pronoun? — rather than concentrating on building knowledge and skills that will help them become happy and successful.
We spend scarce time and resources quibbling about what is the right pronoun to use for a specific individual, but surprisingly little collective attention is devoted to an open southern border, skyrocketing fentanyl deaths, or crippling inflation.
One of the issues that seems to be a top priority for the federal leviathan, media, and the politically correct crowd is gender identification. If there were ever questions that have obvious answers, but millions bend over backwards to ignore them, it is them. Let us offer a few points.
“Gender” or “gender expression,” or some form of the word, can be a question of choice or preference; “sex” cannot. Period. Full stop. That is all you need to know. You’re welcome!
But we have been told that men can have babies. Nonsense. They cannot. Again…. Period. Full stop.
A person is male if they have a Y chromosome. A person who has two X chromosomes is female. That’s it. There is no room for equivocation. It is that simple. And we are not doing anyone any favors by pretending it is not.
A separate question can be, if it helps, what is gender? It might be reasonable to define gender as how one identifies. The options are unlimited. You can identify as gay, straight, bi, trans, or an alien life form for that matter. Good luck and good for you. If it makes you happy it makes us happy. But choosing to view yourself as something doesn’t make it so. I can think of myself as a 7-foot Black female basketball prodigy, but it won’t make my WNBA tryout any more successful.
If we define sex and gender in different ways, then we can sort out which societal problems, regulations, laws, and mores are applied using one definition and which use the other. At least this would get us on a path to sensible policies. If that were even the goal. One suspects it is not.
If this is the general foundation for a discussion, one can change one’s gender but not one’s sex. A person born with a Y chromosome is a man, period. They can have any and all medical or surgical treatments they want, but they will still be a man, albeit one that has altered their bodies in a way that makes it easier for them to live a happier life. They can even live as a woman. Or as a goat. Go for it.
From one perspective, questions of gender – around which today thousands of discussions revolve – is one of the things that affects the person in question dramatically but affects no one else at all. Why do we obsess with it?
It is hard to imagine a question that affects others less than what kind of genitals the person sitting next to them happens to have. Or how they perceive themselves. In almost all cases, you don’t know, and nor does it concern you, unless you have plans to get up close and personal and see for yourself. At some point, you would notice and presumably care.
But, increasingly, it is not “enough” to accept that people can identify as different genders. We are asked to agree that sex itself can actually change based on a person’s thoughts. So you have nonsense like politicians and regulators saying men can have babies and periods. This just in: no,they can’t.
