The end of gender (and good riddance)

On Tuesday, college swimming champion Riley Gaines attended President Biden’s State of the Union address as a guest of Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.). Gaines is the former University of Kentucky swimmer who has been vocal about the necessity of female athletic spaces that do not include people that identify as female but have experienced male puberty.

Gaines is calling for those who privately show appreciation for her advocacy on behalf of female athletes to publicly support her as well. Among the majority of Americans who disagree with the rationally insupportable idea that a person’s sex is determined by ambiguous identification rather than by objective biology, there are likely two reasons for hesitance to agree publicly with Gaines.

First, there is fear of being called bigoted for speaking truths that virtually every human being in history found uncontroversial until five minutes ago, and that most people still understand despite the cultural cache of saying otherwise: Nearly all people are born either female or male; we call adult females of the human species women and adult males of the human species men.

Second and more importantly, there is widespread confusion around the concepts of sex and gender, and around these words themselves. That is because both the left and the right have, over time, projected their respective understandings of the social construct that we call gender onto the biological reality that we call sex.

If we want to enable more people to speak the truth – that is, that biological sex would, in a healthy modern society, necessarily determine which swim team one is on (per Gaines’s point) but not necessarily have any bearing on, say, whether one pursues a demanding career – it is no longer enough to merely emphasize biological sex over gender identity, as many of the heterodox among us have been trying to do.

It is time, instead, to move past the inherently regressive concept of gender altogether. To bring language in line with reality, “gender” – the word and the idea – have got to go.

When I was in my early 20s, more than a decade ago, I was in a doctoral program in the humanities. I was a political moderate and a practicing Catholic wearing an engagement ring just after my 24th birthday. I mostly resisted rolling my eyes when I heard it taken as gospel truth among my professors and classmates that gender was merely a “social construct.”  

To academics’ way of thinking then, the word “woman” meant no more and no less than the word “hen.” No way of dressing, talking, thinking or relating to others would be normative among women, they believed, were it not for the oppressive power of our patriarchal society.

Meanwhile, as I thumbed through bridal magazines, looked for wedding dresses and completed Catholic marriage preparation, I noticed that mainstream American culture was more aligned with cultural conservatives than not in its conception of what it means to be a woman.

Far from being synonymous with the word “female,” womanhood was ostensibly freighted with a host of cultural characteristics that complemented those deemed constitutive of manhood. A woman wore makeup, was prone to nurture and would presumptively prefer a white gown to the white pantsuits that some women had worn to be married in the 1970s, when feminism was about what women could do, not about what women are.

It began to dawn on me that my graduate school professors and classmates had a point about gender being a social construct. Their blind spot, of course, was failing to anticipate and accept that norms would in fact continue to exist among most women and most men even if the prescription of social differences between the sexes were eliminated.

This blind spot was shared from the other side by social conservatives, who resisted the elimination of prescriptive norms for women and men for fear that, if we freed people from societal expectations based on sex, traditional women’s and men’s roles would disappear altogether.

So, we all – left and right together – own the social construction of this mess called “gender identity.”

Today, cultural progressives have mostly adopted the erstwhile conservative position that womanhood and manhood are not merely biological realities but sets of social identifications and norms so self-evident as to be ends in themselves (the old-school feminist rhetoric that still pops up in discussions about abortion notwithstanding).

Meanwhile, many cultural conservatives have come around, at long last, to the erstwhile radical position that biological sex is no more and no less than any other biological reality, such that gay men are no less male than straight ones and career women are no less female than stay-at-home mothers.

There simply is no mediating categorical gender identity between “sex” and “the individual,” and it is long past time that conservatives, moderates and reasonable liberals explicitly said so, relegating the word “gender” to the dustbin of history.

Cultural progressives, in their turn, would then be forced to accept that social norms and averages among most (though not all) women are different from social norms and averages among most (though not all) men. And that this reality is the result of biology and of individual choice, not the proscribed roles of some antiquated thing that we used to call gender.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about culture, politics and religion for various publications, including America magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow her on Twitter @ElizabethGMat.