WHY KETANJI BROWN JACKSON COULD NOT DEFINE WHAT A WOMAN IS
Gender Ideology or gender confusion
Up until five minutes ago, everybody understood what gender was, what sex was and what being a man or a woman was, even five-year-old kids understood this in a sense and could accurately tell a woman apart from a man. But times and things have changed so fast, words have evolved so quickly that a Supreme Court nominee would not define what a woman is. Ironically, she happened to be a woman and one of the reasons she was nominated in the first place was because she is a woman.
The conversation surrounding gender, sex and sexual identity has taken on a life of its own, it is no longer centred on reality, science, tradition, or plain common sense, it has transcended all that into the realm of delusion.
When we hear terms like believe all women, the gender pay gap, gender-based violence, what objective meaning do these terms have in the current discourse? How can any of this make any sense when gender is believed today to be as fluid and variant as the number of people on the planet. What is a woman for me to believe them?
Most people understood gender and sex to be interchangeable if not inextricably linked. Even before the advent of modern science, by mere observations, it was known that there is a biological binary in humans, sexual dimorphism has been known for the whole of human history.
One sex had typically distinct anatomical and physiological features from the other and this binary was and is still true for the majority of humans. However, there is current thinking that proposes that these perceived differences between the sexes has no objective basis in reality, but are ultimately socially constructed.
Some argue that sex and gender are two different things and that sex is biological and only goes as far as the reproductive organs while gender on the other hand is how people interact with their biological sex or the social norms constructed around biological sex.
One can be gracious enough and accept these (re)definitions of sex and gender as they are being given, however, both terms are readily conflated in the same breath as they are being defined apart.
Statements like, a baby was assigned such and such sex at birth, a baby’s sex at birth cannot be known until the child grows up to tell what sex they are— are a common follow up to the definitions earlier given. What I think, they are referring to here is gender, because sex—by their admission as biological structure—is present at birth, distinguishable and observable. Parents do not tell doctors what sex they want for their baby and doctors do not assign and consequently attach a vagina or a penis to the baby depending on the choice of its parents, that’s not how that works.
It would make more sense to say, at birth, even though we know the sex of a child, we cannot tell its gender—how it will choose to relate with and express that sex. If both are unlinked, then the identifier for one should not be dependent on the other, yet, they seem to argue for it being linked and unlinked at the same time.
Biological sex goes deeper than just anatomical structures, the function and development of these biological structures are dependent on hormones, hormones that also reflect sexual dimorphism, for example, humans who have a vagina have more oestrogen, progesterone and other female sex hormones than humans who have a penis. These hormones not only affect the functions of the sex organs but also heavily and measurably influence and shape personality, attitudes, interests and so on.
A prime example is testosterone, the male sex hormone, which has been linked to higher levels of aggression in men, especially physical aggression, even though aggression is not exclusive to males, there are statistically significant differences in the levels of expressed physical aggression between men and women, and these levels of aggression cannot be attributable to socialization or social construction to any reasonable degree.
Very rarely can organisms be socially influenced into acting in a way that they are not biologically susceptible to, take the hen, for example, she has all the anatomical structures to crow like a cock, but she lacks the psychological incentive to do so, hence she doesn’t crow. Could this behaviour be hormonally regulated? if so, it shows that hormones are very powerful in shaping personality, actions and attitudes even in the presence of similar anatomical structures.
Male animals are typically castrated to make them less aggressive, it isn’t the cutting off of the testis—the anatomical structure—that makes them less aggressive, rather it is the loss of production of testosterone that occasioned the removal of the testis that makes them less aggressive.
If sex is biological, then there must be an objective term for referring to a group of people who share similar biological sexual organs as distinguished from others, and if that’s the case, what are those terms?
Are the terms male, female, man, woman, sex descriptors or gender descriptors. If they are sex descriptors, then it’s easy to say a woman is a human being who has such and such sexual characteristics as distinct from a man who has such and such sexual characteristics. Most people are born with either of—or in minuscule cases—both sexual organs, there is no fluidity in those biological structures, they are fixed, distinguishable and identifiable and can thus be classified in a binary fashion.
But if the terms, male, female, man, woman are gender descriptors, they immediately convey a gender binary, which undermines the whole gender is a social construct theory. If people can choose to relate with their sex in ways that would be distinct for every person on the planet, that would make gender into something not shared by people across the board, but just as unique as a person’s fingerprint, in that instance, there wouldn’t be two genders or twenty genders or even a hundred genders, there would be as many genders as there are people on the planet.
This finiteness of gender even when considering the current redefinition of it, undermines that gender is unique to the individual. If gender is truly unique and fluid, there won’t be anything like a woman or a man as no two individuals would be similar enough gender-wise to be classified as either male or female, so which is it? Is gender fixed or is it fluid? Both cannot be true at the same time.
I believe there is a certain level of performance and theatrics surrounding this gender discourse, people don’t believe in these things, they only do that to seem politically correct or to not offend a fringe and minuscule group of people.
The inability of a female Supreme Court nominee to define what a woman is even though one criterion for her selection was that she is a woman shows just how much this has crossed into the realm of performance. I do not believe for a second that Ketanji Brown doesn’t know what a woman is or that she thinks a biologist is required to be able to define one. It’s all a show, a virtue-signalling show to those she is beholden to.
It is a shame that part of what it means to function in society today is to be fake, inauthentic, to lie about things that are glaring so as not to offend the sensibilities of people. Perhaps this is the natural progression of the evolution of man, maybe it’s the life cycle of humanity, you evolve from simple-minded creatures and keep improving in intelligence until the zenith of such evolution is reached, and from there devolution—a downward trajectory—is the only way left to go.
Excerpt from Hotel Shendam
He looked lost and fatigued; the sweat breaking out at his brow a testament to that. His arms, numb from the weighted bags extending from them, lay limp at his side as he trudged along the dirt road to the destination unknown. Brown dust, coated his leather shoes—which in turn left their prints embedded on the face of the sandy road. He caught a glimpse of the lighted signboard of what appeared to be a hotel, its name undecipherable. It was some minutes away by foot and his legs protested an estimation of the distance—he couldn’t find any means of transportation to take him down to the hotel, so he settled for walking the distance. A passerby he approached for directions, confirmed to him that there was indeed a hotel in the direction he was headed.
The sky was coloured crimson by the sun in its late stages of descent, painting a mural of fiery patterns—splashed about like tentacles, engulfing patches of white-blue sky in a reddish web—as it made its way to the underworld, to rise again with dawn. Nightfall was imminent. The dry northern wind agitated dead leaves, strewn about on the street. The dead leaves coloured a dark brown, danced about to the rhythm of entropy……
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Charles Ekokotu (Pharm. D.) is a bibliophile, prose fiction writer, poet, and playwright. His first self-published novel, Hotel Shendam—a crime fiction novel featuring a debate on race and colonialism—is available on Amazon. A very fun read! Grab a copy now!
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Sex, for most people, is a binary and most Trans people acknowledge this fact. It is where gender comes into play, the manifestation of how they feel inside, that belies the confusion we experience when attempting to understand that which we will most likely never experience.
It is with compassion, in my humble opinion, that we must make a good faith effort to sympathize in our shared humanity and the right of the sovereign individual to cast forth their destiny into the world as a human right.
Great article Charles. As always, I enjoy your perspective and writing style. Thank you for writing this.
Thought provoking read. Long write up but very engaging. This gender issue, we are yet to hear the last of it.