Postscript: The Correct View of Sex and Gender

For avoidance of ambiguity, and because modern language has regressed into incomprehensibility and incoherence, here are ordinary definitions of sex and gender in the slides below.

Sex

Gender

Biological sex and psychosocial gender are often considered distinct components of identity in modern parlance.

However, the belief that they can be entirely decoupled is an anti-scientific view of human anthropology. The truth is that sex and gender are intrinsically linked – they do not vary independently.

While one can be a more masculine/feminine man or woman, one cannot be a man born in a woman’s body or vice versa because human beings are unitary wholes – a perfect integration of mind and body. The cartesian mind-body dualism demanded by transgender activists is a mere fiction, and a mere assertion when they tell you that’s how it works.

When a person deviates from this set pattern of human identity regardless of the sincerity, immutability, and persistence of their belief, they are mistaken. These individuals have a mental illness formerly called “Gender Identity Disorder” and now renamed “Gender Dysphoria”.

It was depathologised and re-named both in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and in the International Classification of Diseases (known as ICD-11) in 2019, to “Gender dysphoria” and “Gender incongruence” respectively.

This was not because of scientific breakthroughs which indicated that being transgender was an ordinary feature of human identity, but rather, because lobby groups were able to persuade the APA and the World Health Organisation that referring to the condition with a medical label was stigmatising and not reflective of how they saw themselves – not as people with mental illness, but rather, as people genuinely born in the wrong body.

In other words, it was political pressure, not science.

It’s also important to remember that people suffering from this illness deserve our compassion and assistance to reconcile with their physical realities. Those experiencing gender dysphoria should not be misled by gender ideology to believe that they are ontologically members of the opposite sex.

Gender Ideology

Gender ideology, according to Dr Jay W. Richards, is the opinion that the sex binary doesn’t capture the complexity of the human species, and that human individuals are properly described in terms of an “internal sense of gender” called “Gender identity” that may be incongruent with their “sex assigned at birth.”