This Is Not About Pronouns

An epistolary exchange about identity and science

This exchange comes from author Robert Saltzman and one of his readers.

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Hi Robert.

As a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother of children with Haitian, Puerto Rican, African American, Irish, Italian and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry (yes, A NYC melting-pot), I love your chapter about the fallacy of racial identity and how you backed that up with genetic science.

As I was reading, I wondered what you would say about sexual differences? My sense is that just as there is no race, there is no sex. We are told from the time we are born what our sex is and we either identify appropriately or we are in conflict with it. I don't see why we need to have any identity--racial or sexual. How do you see this?

Abrazos! Ellen
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Hi, Ellen.
Race, as I have pointed out, has historical and social implications, but is not easily defined scientifically. Take skin color for example, which is a common way of judging someone’s so-called "race." A pigment called melanin is produced in the skin in response to ultraviolet radiation from the sun. In human evolution, the closer a particular group lived to the equator, the more melanin would be produced on average, and following Darwin's theory, offspring with better protection against radiation would be more likely to thrive and reproduce. Hence, equatorial groups tended towards darker skin with more melanin while those groups far from the equator tended towards lighter skin. But regardless of skin color, all those humans belong to the same race--the human race.

Sex is a different matter. It is easily defined scientifically. Like many other animals, we humans reproduce sexually. One individual carries the egg that will, when fertilized, develop into a new individual, and another carries the sperm cells that fertilize the egg. This distinction is entirely binary with no middle ground.

There are only two sexes, female and male, and the sex of a newborn baby is almost always immediately apparent. In rare cases, the sex of a newborn is ambiguous, usually because the genitals appear abnormal in one way or another, but this does not mean that sex is nonbinary or nonexistent, nor does it mean that there are more than two sexes. The rare cases of intersex births are genetic defects, exceptions that prove the binary rule.

Many transsexual activists attempt to muddy these waters, not to inform, but to baffle. Their agenda aims at replacing the word "sex," which is an either/or, with the word "gender" that can mean whatever anyone says it means, and to sell the idea that someone born male can, through chemicals and surgery become female, or visa versa. This is hot air. A male human cannot become female, nor a female become male.

Conflating the words "sex" and  "gender" is an underhanded word game--a kind of manipulation that has particular power because there was a period in all our lives when the words sex and gender were used interchangeably to mean male or female.

That is no longer the case. Nowadays, gender means the personal feelings, psychological tendencies, and behaviors that women, men, girls, and boys can identify with or perform. Unlike sex which is binary, in this new meaning, gender is fluid, and can be expressed in countless ways.

This is a complex subject that has been politicized so systematically that speaking about it clearly carries social and professional risks. Since my days of caring about such risks (if I ever did) have come to an end, I feel free to speak factually without regard to political agendas and will have more to say about this.

In particular, I would like to suggest that what needs alteration is not bodies and pronouns, but antiquated ideas about how men and women differ and what roles they are expected to assume. But that is deep water. For now, Ellen, sex is a basic fact of animal existence, while gender, in its revised meaning, is a matter of feelings and social mores, not a basic fact.

A human female can express her humanity in countless ways but she will always be a human female just as a human male will always be a human male regardless of behavior or how he feels about it.

A male human who with surgery and chemicals has altered his appearance and then performs or enacts being a woman using dress and other social cues is not a woman, but a transwoman. To say that a human male can become a woman is nonsense. The trans activist mantra--"a trans woman is a woman"--is Orwellian doublespeak, an outright lie posing as so-called "inclusivity."

Further, the claim that any identity I want to adopt must be accepted without question is entirely new and completely outrageous. If I say that I identify as Jesus Christ, does that mean you must worship me? Until lately, one’s identity was part of an intersubjective process, partly in the mind of the one asserting the identity and partly in the eye of the beholder. Now, according to trans dogma, the beholder no longer counts. I am whatever I say I am, and anyone who won’t buy it is “phobic.”

I hope I have made this clear.

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But, Robert, if you identify with your race or culture or sex, isn’t that all the same mechanism. Identification and differentiation may at times be needed for functioning, but at a certain point, they are not really necessary. I don't care what pronoun people use for me.

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This is not about pronouns, Ellen. For reasons of civility, I will probably call you whatever you ask me to, but sex is not an identity one chooses, but a biological fact comes into being soon after conception. A human primate body is either male or female and that cannot change no matter how one feels about it or what language is demanded.  

Identification comes into play when considering how one fits into a system of gender roles. If you are a man, you might feel more comfortable in roles that are more typically occupied by women and you may go as far as using chemicals and surgery as an aid to "performing" what you consider a typical female identity so as to be regarded as if you were female, but that does not make you a woman. Nothing can make a man into a woman or a boy into a girl.

The word woman means a mature human female who was once a girl. If you are born male, you cannot become a woman. The word man means a mature human male who was once a boy. If you are born female, you cannot become a man. All the weasel words in the world cannot change that because biology is not a matter of language or opinion.

Many trans activists use deceitful language to attack biological reality. Through threats and intimidation, they have managed to coerce medical institutions into substituting the deceitful phrase "pregnant people" for the factual phrase "pregnant women," which implies that a human male could somehow be pregnant. That is simply a lie. No man has ever been pregnant, and no man ever will be. Only women can be pregnant.

Another case of trans doublespeak alleges that sex is “assigned” at birth. More flimflam. Sex has to be assigned only in rare cases of ambiguity when efforts are made to choose the best outcome for an intersex infant. Otherwise, sex is clearly present in utero and is not “assigned,” but observed at birth, and can be observed much earlier if desired via ultrasound around the eighteenth week of pregnancy. And speaking of deceitful language, babies are nursed by breastfeeding, not “chestfeeding.”

Another nasty bit of language manipulation is the word "cisgendered." I am not cisgendered. I am a man—end of story. If I prefer sex with women, I am a straight man, and so-called “gender” has nothing to do with it. If I prefer sex with men, I am equally a man, but then I am a gay man and “gender” has nothing to do with it. If I like sex with both men and women, I am still equally a man, but a bisexual one and “gender” has nothing to do with it.. Straight, gay, and bi are not “genders,”, as the trans activists want us to believe, but the various sexual preferences of women and men.

That is an important distinction. One's status as a man or a woman does not depend on actions in bed or otherwise but on the body’s inborn role in human reproduction. That is why I think it is time to reject the concept of gender entirely and just understand that a man can wear a dress and lipstick if he likes, but will still be a man. He can submit to castration and have his penis converted into a simulated vagina and he will still be a male human being, but now, aiming at being regarded as a woman, can accurately be called a transwoman--not a woman, but a transwoman.

I know some people will disagree with this view, and some may even see it as "transphobic," a preposterous word that was created to besmirch and damage anyone who will not at least pretend to accept the assertions of the trans activists. By that standard, even examining those assertions and considering their implications will be called transphobia. But objecting to insincere distortions of biological facts and the intentional destruction of natural language is not a phobia. It’s a sane and informed refusal to kowtow to disingenuous political interest groups with money and power agendas but no commitment to factual discourse.