The two sexes have suddenly given rise to a gender explosion — the big bang of the sexual universe. Well, that’s what the gender mongers would have us think. However, everything is the same as always. There aren’t any new genders, only new definitions for old words. Words are the atoms of thought so when definitions get mangled, everything gets confused.

But nothing has changed in human reproduction and sexuality: the same genes, the same chromosomes, the same gametes, the same DNA, the same ova and sperm to get babies. We have the same organs and are reminded several times a day what our gender is. None of that has changed. Neither has the way we relate to each other, the way we react, they way we think, the way we feel, and the way we behave. All these have been happening for millions of years. Likewise for the way people see themselves and others: tom boy, mama’s baby, sissy, teacher’s pet, and so on. It’s another very long list of pretty standard stuff.

What’s new is a fad of confused excitement created out of thin air by messing around with definitions and by multiplying new labels for the same old things.

It’s Gender Semantics

Words are the lifeblood of human communication, and accurate communication is vital to civility, so this is a serious matter.

You can destroy the value of a currency by flooding the market with it. We are watching the destruction of gender by the explosion of new names for ancient human feelings.  One website has “identified” sixty-three genders. This is semantic mayhem. And Julie Mencher, a psychotherapist, has already said “gender doesn’t even exist.”

The gender mongers argue that we are in a new era of tolerance, and a celebration of gender diversity. But these “genders” aren’t genders. What they are is —

Sexual Preferences

The word “gender” is a much more powerful word than “preference” so the gender mongers love to use it. It feels so powerful because gender goes deep. Gender is about what and who we are while preferences can change with the circumstances of the moment. Even “gender surgery” is really an expression in sexual preference.

New York City published an official list of 31 “genders” approved by the New York City Commission on Human Rights. They include “drag king”, “drag queen”, “butch”, “femme queen”, “gender fluid”, “gender gifted,” and ”gender bender”. These are personal preferences for how people would like to be perceived. Not genders.

Sixty-three Genders?

[Editor update of June 2, 2020: The somewhat bazaar article about 63 genders has been taken down for reasons only you and I can surmise. I leave my comments about that article here for the sake of history.]

The unidentified writer who fueled the gender explosion created sixty-three genders by defining three types of “gender” and three more physical classes. Then he creates all the possible combinations of these to get his 63 genders. He begins by confessing his atypical approach.

To examine Gender (as opposed to Sex) I use a more specific definition than is typically used.  Gender is broken down into three aspects based on the Physical, Personality and Preferences that the individual person exhibits.  Each of these categories is then further broken down into three options:  Male, Female and Androgynous.  From these combinations of attributes, a persons gender can be identified with much more precision than previously available.

Notice that his three types of gender includes not only the physical organs (proper genders) but personality and preferences, neither of which has much to do with gender. Then his second classification includes the physical genders again and he adds a third class, “androgynous” (meaning a mixture of female and male organs that occurs in about 0.05% of births). Then he rolls out all the possible combinations. Clearly there will be a lot of redundancy because he is making combinations of classes both of which include classical genders.

Notably, his descriptions of the sixty-three “genders” use “man” and “woman” as the anchor from which he defines these supposed genders. Again we see that sexual preferences are being mislabeled as genders.

Abstraction Gone Berserk

The gender mongers, in their excitement over the sexual nature of their enterprise, have separated gender from the physical reality that gave rise to it in the first place. They have dragged it off into a corner where they, by comparison to the sexual nature of the lower life forms, have made man into a lower life form also. With religious devotion, they revel in their “new understanding”, proselyte disciples, celebrate their ministers and missionaries all the while denying any religiosity. So they deceive themselves and all who will cast themselves under their exciting but destructive spell.

This process is called abstraction, where one concept is drawn out of another and moves perception one more step away from physical reality. Legislation that defines sexual preferences as genders is a dangerous semantic exercise similar to writing legislation based on abstract justifications. Unfortunately, many recent laws are using “gender” with its new muddled meanings. Among other problems, this will confuse existing laws that already use the word.

On the Other Hand

Except for the new agenda to introduce sexuality to children who can only be demeaned by trying to recognize something they can hardly experience, there can be no reason to thwart a growing recognition and public discussion of human behaviors and attitudes. If that helps us communicate then it helps us understand. That can only be a good thing. There is quite a variety of hoes in our gardens and to give them individual names is good. But to call a hoe a spade raises anxieties, and unsettles our entire culture.

On the other other-hand, this process of categorizing and labeling is itself counterproductive, even destructive.

One of my engineering professors once said, “If you can’t put a number on it, you don’t really know what you’re talking about.” This was in the middle of a little discussion comparing the physical and social sciences. And then I remember when my oldest child was a few weeks into her first psychology class in high school. She began to talk about all the psychological disorders found in our family. And so it is, we can find symptoms of all the psychological diseases in our own minds if we just watch for them. Becoming fixated on that leads to paranoia and baseless worry. Without numbers to measure the amount of anxiety, doubt, love, distaste, aversion, attraction, hunger, fatigue, et cetera, we are left to wonder and doubt and fear. It is a fool’s errand into self-psychiatry.

Self-Psychiatry

The idea that a person can search their feelings and “discover their true gender” borders on mental suicide. It is about as productive as plotting the flight of a butterfly in order to understand its goal in life. Yet that is precisely what the gender explosion fad is all about. The whole world has suddenly found it necessary to look deeply inward in search of clues as to what their “true gender” might be. It is a hopeless, fearsome, and counterproductive waste of time. It’s actually worse than that.

Psychiatry exists because it is difficult for a person to self-diagnose in the midst of the normal vagaries of the human mind. Now the gender wags want us to search out our deepest inclinations and discover our true gender. That’s a hopeless task for a mature adult let alone a youth trying to keep his head above the rising flood of hormones in his body.

Here is the story of the beginnings of the transgender movement. It reveals interesting insights about the instincts that come with gender and perhaps more important, the suicidal tale of how the transgender fad began.

The Insidious Gender Explosion Game

Nothing has changed except the new dialog. The existence of that dialog depends on redefining words in order to create a gender explosion. But to change the definition of our words is to corrupt our language, disrupt our understanding of one another, instill suspicion, and establish conflict.

That’s what’s confusing us. And that’s what’s dividing conservatives and liberals. The profound irony of it is that this war was fabricated out of thin air. It is a game made of artificial game pieces played on an imaginary board. Ironically, the outcomes are real, divisive, and often destructive.