Gender And Sex

Conservatives and liberals wage ideological warfare against each other over their claims about gender, and, unsurprisingly, both are wrong!  A great deal of the disparities between their two general stances (as well as their fallacies) center on how both sides frame gender in terms of metaphysics.  The two philosophical factions attach irrelevant or illegitimate concepts to their definitions of gender and sex, two words that must be properly understood in order to see how extensive conservative and liberal fallacies are (even though not all conservatives and liberals subscribe to the following ideas associated with them).

To be female is to be a woman; to be male is to be a man.  One's sex is determined by one's body.  On an outward level, the genitalia a person is born with is the best indicator that they are a male or a female.  Mental traits are wholly irrelevant to this classification, having no logical connection to a body with particular genitalia or chromosomes.  There is not a single psychological characteristic, talent, or personality trait that a person has because of their sex, contrary to the position of many vocal conservatives.  This is a vital fact in the face of the controversy around gender that has engulfed the West.

Liberals, on the other hand, might treat the words gender and sex as if they refer to separate things, the former referring to one's alignment with social norms for men or women and the latter classifying the physical body.  While it is correct to say that the male and female bodies are scientifically observable and gender roles/stereotypes are social constructs, gender is not distinct from sex.  Gender stereotypes and the pressure for men and women to behave in certain ways are rooted in false assumptions, but gender and sex are interchangeable words for categories of the body.

It is common for liberals to not only try to separate gender and sex, but it is also common for some of them to claim that there are far more than two genders and that people can change their gender identity at any time by subjectively experiencing different mental states.  This only compounds the logical errors, as there is not a large number of observable genders, and willpower and personal experiences cannot change one's gender because it is synonymous with one's body.

Of course, it is both logically and scientifically possible for someone to be born an "intersex" person: that is, someone could be born with an abnormal mixture of male and female genitalia.  It is likewise entirely possible that an undiscovered species, either extraterrestrial or terrestrial, has three or more distinct genders, but to say that there is a plethora of human genders is downright fallacious.  There are numerous conflicting claims about how men and women should live, but, the relatively small number of intersex people aside, there are only two genders one can find in a given group of humans.

In light of this collective information, it is the case that both conservatives and liberals cling to deeply illogical ideas about gender.  Conservatives err when they pretend that gender dictates psychological traits, but liberals err when they posit that there are more than two known human genders and that gender is different from sex.  Neither predominant ideology of gender has any validity.  A culture adrift in irrationalism is still likely to be divided between these two stances, even though refuting either is a simple matter.