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NEW YORK (LifeSiteNews) — Ghanian Member of Parliament (MP) Sam George’s powerful speech before the United Nations (UN) last month made an important observation about a tactic of today’s cultural Marxists: that their attack on the family is aided by their hijacking of the term “sex” with the idea of “gender,” which were once held to be synonymous terms.
Before the UN Transatlantic Summit in New York, George highlighted an important problem apparent to many conservatives — that the idea of a social construct of “gender identity,” independent of one’s biological sex, is being used to replace the identity conferred by biological sex.
He outlined the difference between the terms in his address to the UN:
Sex is a biological construct that transcends race, ethnicity, religion, and jurisdictional jurisprudence. Sex is binary. You are either male or female. God determines this at the moment of conception. A fetus carries either the XX or XY chromosomes determining whether it is female or male.
Gender or gender identity, on the other hand, is a social construct … We see different recognitions of gender today across the world. There is no universality in the concept of gender or gender identity, and it is highly fluid.
And as such, gender identity cannot form the basis for any rights accruing in a covenant, a convention or international treaty which seeks to be globally and acceptable binding, because we have different interpretations.
Indeed, attempts at the local, national, and even international level are being made to establish “rights” founded on this subjective construct, such as the so-called “right” to be referred to by one’s “preferred pronouns;” or the “right” for a man to compete against a woman in sports, who is at a physical disadvantage; or the “right” for boys to use girls’ bathrooms, even if it enables the rape of the girls!
Such efforts are especially concerning because of the level of money and influence behind this gender ideology. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which is supported by the world’s largest and most powerful corporations, including Amazon, Google, Disney, JP Morgan Chase, Apple, and Pfizer, insists that one should also “always” refer to another by their “preferred pronouns.” These can include, according to the organization, “xe,” “ey,” “ae,” “fae,” “ve,” “ne,” and “per.” In fact, HRC has admitted that “the number and types of (neo)pronouns a person may use is limitless.”
As absurd as “preferred pronouns” are, refusing to use them could potentially land you in jail. This is the case in Canada: Bill C-16, passed in June 2017, added the terms “gender identity or expression” in the Canadian Human Rights Act as well as its Criminal Code so that repeatedly refusing a person’s preferred pronouns could be interpreted as “discrimination” and lead to mandated “sensitivity training,” if not jail, University of Toronto Brenda Cossman law professor has admitted.
“Gender identity” language distorts reality, and so people who accept such language will likewise entertain and accept absurd attempts to live out such distortions.
This has resulted in an epidemic of schools and other institutions treating males like females, or vice versa, even in intimate settings, leading to wildly inappropriate situations. For example, last year, male counselors were castigated by parents for sleeping in the same rooms with fifth-grade girls at a California school-organized science camp, under the pretext that the counselors were “non-binary.”
Even more dangerous, the concept of “gender,” as in “gender identity,” is being wielded in the war against the family itself, George noted. We can see that cultural Marxists are doing this effectively, because even prominent so-called “conservatives” are supporting same-sex couples’ efforts to raise children in deprivation of either a mother or a father. People support this because, whether they realize it or not, they have relinquished a meaningful understanding of the sexes.
A recognition of the reality of biological sex accounts for both physical and psychological differences between the sexes that are directly ordered to their role and capacity as a mother or a father. This is why the statistics are so clear about the damage that, say, lack of a father figure can have on children.
Extraordinary damage was inflicted on the family even immediately following the genesis of “constructed” gender during the feminist movement (mentioned below). Once the feminine maternal ideal was seen as an arbitrary construct, women could readily shrug off expectations regarding the service of their husbands and children.
In other words, replacing the concept of the biological sexes with a mere “gender” construct undermines the very foundations of the family. And so, George stressed in his speech that “the family must remain respected and recognized as the union between natural born men and women of full age … ”
But how did cultural Marxists come to hijack the idea of “sex” in the first place? George says something interesting in his speech that deserves examination:
“The pseudo-war being waged by some against the family is premised on [the] obfuscation and literal obliteration of the distinction between sex and gender.”
The effective eclipse of the idea of biological sex with the idea of the “social construct” of gender is indeed a problem, one that we wouldn’t have to begin with if they hadn’t begun to be used interchangeably.
This may not have become more common until the early 20th century, when the word “sex” became more associated with sexual intercourse, according to Merriam-Webster. The Oxford English Dictionary of 1899 reportedly described “gender” as being then only used as a synonym for “sex” in jest.
According to the Heritage Foundation, the idea that there is a distinction between sex and gender arose during the mid-20th century from feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, who argued that “gender is merely an idea constructed to keep women in a subordinate position.” The journal Nature Genetics likewise attributes the concept to feminists.
This idea of socially constructed “gender” in turn opened the door to a more recent conception of “gender identity,” which Merriam-Webster defines as a “person’s internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female.”
The Merriam-Webster dictionary now accounts for all of these understandings with several possible definitions of gender, one being “sex” as it was long understood; another being “the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex;” and a third meaning signifying “gender identity,” to recognize so-called “genders” beyond the male-female binary.
It seems then that the real problem to be addressed is not that Marxists have obliterated a distinction between “sex” and “gender” but that a distinction between the two was created in the first place. As soon as one differentiates between the two, one grants the premise of the cultural Marxists: that it is possible to have a “gender” distinct from one’s biological sex.
In this sense, many conservatives have unwittingly accepted the foundation for this cultural Marxist attack on the family.
What can we do about the language problem? Some have stopped using the term “gender” altogether. A few months ago, Alan Shlemon wrote a piece for the Christian publication Stand to Reason explaining that when discussing transgenderism he will only use the term “biological sex” or “gender identity,” the latter in reference to a person’s “perception of whether they are a man or a woman (or something else).”
That is, his norm is to use the word “sex,” and he is otherwise intentional about clarifying terms in conversation if someone attempts to use the word “gender” to refer to what is really mere perception, rather than reality.
Perhaps this is what is needed to begin to take back ground in the culture war and work toward a society that, like George, holds the family “extremely sacred.”
Send an urgent message to Canadian legislators and courts telling them to uphold parental rights