Sex, Gender, Confusion and Distraction

Sex and gender are serious subjects, but academics, pundits and the pop media have so stretched their meanings to use as weapons of political persuasion that the words sometimes don’t mean very much. Communication becomes confusion and distraction.

The worst is when we’re told to be blind to the obvious differences of the sexes because “identity,” not biology, determines who we are… We can accept how biology determines who we are if we understand that common humanity includes variations on a theme. Tolerance of others is required.

But the culture is so polarized; the politics have become so fierce; and we’ve become so accustomed to the mean and ugly in the Age of Trump that common sense is banished to the margins, and beyond.

In the transgender debates, arguments usually focus on the so-called prejudice of young girls (and their parents) and young women who resist sharing a restroom or locker room with someone who now “identifies” as female but has kept what my 4-year-old grandson calls his “dingle.” The natural modesty of the female of the species doesn’t make such girls and women bigots, as they are frequently called. Choosing modesty over exposure in a restroom with men is, after all, one of the most private experiences of biological determination.

Legal protections are important, and so is respect for those who suffer through a sex change, but 99 percent of the population shouldn’t have to adjust morality and manners that flow from our basic understanding of sexuality to accommodate the less than 1 percent who want to sample a new identity.

More From Right & Free: