Genealogy of Gender and the Degeneration of a Woke World
Part I: Before Modern Times
[We begin to examine “gender” - a term with a long history, which seems to suddenly have become omnipresent, and constitutes more than what meets the eye. Part I is below and it sets the scene with a description of origins and history. Consequent parts will study its transformation and ramifications into what we experience today - being mainstreamed via policy and law reform]
“Of the fair Sex.. my only Consolation for being of that Gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being marry'd to any one amongst them.”
Lady Mary Montagu, 1723[1]
Academic Epidemic
The interchange of words and the distinguishing of concepts via the coining of words – whether suited or not and whether new terms were required or not, and the generalisation of ideas applicable to particular contexts onto stages where such application is absurd, could have remained an entertainment in academia. However, when unleased, often driven and facilitated by unseen manipulation, onto a universal theatre, it may harm even those who are deaf, and those who haven’t begun to speak.
Unlike in science and mathematics, in their noble and traditional form, philosopho-sociological terms emanating from the humanities – or rather anti-humanities, through pseudo-science into culture, are fluid [sic] and often depend on who is describing and defining them, and when it is done.
In this day it appears that men and women have transitioned [sic] from being of male and female sex, to having manliness and womanliness socially imposed on them, to behaving, being aware of and feeling genderally masculine and feminine, on to claiming identities sundered from biology and even reality and engaging in hedonistic behaviour named by a gender chosen from among a rainbow of hues. And thereby hangs a tale.
Germination
Gender is derived from genre, and suggests a type, kind, or sort. That is, a class of persons or even things – be it words, sharing certain traits. Genre, or gendre in Old French, itself comes from the latin genus (plural genera) with its sense of kind with reference to stock, race, family. Genus, γένος in ancient Greek, is itself believed to be derived from the root genh- which means to beget or give birth, and hence the words engender, hydrogen and generate - and the meaning of genesis as origin, creation, descent.
As evident from extant literature from the 14th century onwards, gender in English has meant product or offspring or the populace at large, all as begotten, and also in relation to stock and generation thereof, the groups of humanity as distinguished by their sex as male and female, and groups of nouns distinguished as masculine and feminine.
Linguistics
Mature languages were gendered by their poets and practitioners long before the descriptor was coined, as discovered in tongues used in millennia past. Indeed, in many languages, nouns are classified based on a meaningful sexual distinction or on semantic or formal properties, as masculine or feminine. Linguists described this as a classification by gender on account of this masculinity and femininity. It is believed that the initial classification in proto-Indo-European languages was between the masculine and the neuter, with the consequent rise of the feminine[3]. Ancient languages such as that of the Hittites, were gendered, and Aristotle in the fifth century before Christ in his third book of Rhetoric ascribed the laying down of three distinct genders in Greek to Protogoras. In sex-based three gender systems, nouns were classed as possessing the masculine feminine and neuter (here meaning neither, rather than sterilise) gender.
Other systems of noun classification such as animate and inanimate, noble and ignoble, rational and irrational, or based on size or number, as found in languages spoken worldwide and over the ages, were also referred to – perhaps unfortunately in hindsight, as genders by extension and for lack of a more general term, or a negligence to supply or apply one. That is, the term gender was used to describe a grammatical morphosyntactic feature, which was a member in a family with person, number and case[5], where for a gendered noun the defining property is agreement often with articles, pronouns, adjectives and verbs or other grammatical forms associated with it.
In harmony with its broader applications over the centuries in taxonomy particularly of groups engendered, gender retained its synonymity with sex – that is a set whose sub-sets are males and females, and a property of human beings that could be distinguished as such. However, the word was increasingly employed preferentially in its grammatical sense and nearly exclusively so by the end of the 19th century. This continued to be the popular anglophone understanding until the 1980’s, although a chilly wind had already begun to stir in bleak environments inside miasmic towers of cracked ivory, and which would simmer and intensify exponentially and pervade into souls and numb the earth.
Ontological Expansion
Thrice-married New York American amateur architect, vegetarian, slavery abolitionist, and women’s children’s and animal welfare campaigner Orson Fowler - who even founded a town that possesses his name, was a phrenologist who wrote extensively in the 1800’s on, inter alia, love and matrimony, family and parenting, manhood womanhood and their mutual relationships. He described Part I of his book “Sexual Science” (1870) as constituting his definition of gender - and entitled it “Sexuality”.
Fowler contended that gender was “to marriage and offspring what seed and soil are to crops” - and the “origin and soul of everything sexual”: “manhood, womanhood, and childhood, together with all their interlacing affections and mutual interrelations, emanate” from sexuality “the great motive-wheel” whose “sole instrumentality” is gender.
Fowler did adhere to the traditional conception of gender in elaborating on its sense of the engendering of progeny, and on masculinity and femininity in quality and in manners, mentalities, attractions, admirations, desires and behaviours. Gender was however magnified to “an all-pervading entity, and as necessary an appurtenance of life throughout all its emanations” - a multi-faceted essence of humanity, admitting “spiritual and material elements” which was the “foundation of whatever appertains to men and women as such, to love and marriage, parents and children, family and home, and to all.. domestic joys and virtues”.
Fowler’s gender-centred “sexual science” also proposed cures, inter alia, for perversions and broken hearts. Moreover, phrenology required every mental faculty to have a corresponding cerebral organ, and gender - considered to be “more of the mind than of body”, was believed to express itself via a locus in the cerebellum.
Fowler thereby for good or ill, as time has told, opened a window in his side of the pond, which facilitated the absorption of the word gender into psychological and psycho-therapeutical discourse, into sociology and even psychiatry and neuroscience, (the more apt term neurology being highjacked by the physicians).
A Lexical Interlude
Sex
Sex is veritably best reserved as the descriptor for the male and the female, since two halves make a whole. It may apply to the individual male or female, or to males or females as groups. In human beings, sex is determined chromosomally, and anything ambiguous is due to disorders of sex or of sexual development[7].
A fashion arose in the 20th century to apply gender to people not as an alternative but as a substitute for sex. The application was justifiable on account of historic synonymity, but the substitution was motivated by a novelty in the understanding of sex as a verb on the basis that it is a truncated form of “sexual intercourse” - where one has it rather than is of it. Indeed the most intimate and self-giving life-giving communion between spouses has been vulgarised to mere “having of sex” as if a man might have his maleness and a women her femaleness, and thereby make a family.
Fowler’s (not Orson Squire) Modern English Usage of 1926 condemned this abuse as being a jocularity or a blunder - and insisted on gender’s exclusive employment on the grammatical application. Likewise the abusive description of matters pertaining to amorous congress between the sexes had already begun to be described indolently or lazily as sexuality, with the elevation of the adjective sexual at the expense of the intercourse.
Sexual
The proper term for matters pertaining to sex or the sexes, is sexual, and it would be felicitous not only appropriate that sexual retains its association with sex and the sexes.
Sexuality
Masculinity and femininity are qualities or features characteristic of males and females respectively. In consideration of nouns that are gendered as masculine and feminine, it is arguably not unreasonable to expand the use of gender as a descriptor for masculinity and femininity – if not for the fact of the multiplicity of genders in linguistics, and the temptation inherent to carry the analogy into human ontology. Yet it would be fitting if the sexualities were masculine and feminine as the sexes are male and female.
While the marital act does take place authentically between two members of the two sexes, ideally in a nuptial context where human beings are concerned, this and other forms of carnal intercourse and related activity, attractions and emotions, while undoubtedly sexual if a male and a female are together involved - have been mis-described as sexuality per se. Although sexual and sexuality are applicable in the terminology related to making feet for the stockings, it cannot be made exclusively so - but needs to be qualified with the context, since there are other facets of sexuality where men and women are concerned. Conjugal sexuality might fit here. Conjugality alone may suffice in the face of unnatural conjugations increasingly prevalent in male homosexual relationships, which conjugations are questionably called sexual; and conjugality is perhaps absent among corresponding females, let alone sexuality.
Appropriate terminology must be used for other needs, for the sake of precision in articulation, and clarity in minds, particularly in this postmodern era where fog rules. The physical complementary coupling may be associated with terms such as conjugal or copular, the reproductive organs and their functions with genital or reproductive, the emotional connotations persevered with erotic, the sensory with erogeneous and the appetite with libidinal. Romantic still has a place in human relationships. Aspects of sexuality related to the procreative instinct might collectively be called amativity, in distinction to and also in indebtedness to the creativity if not accuracy of Franz Gall at the turn of the eighteenth century.
The adjective reproductive has been loaded with connotations pertaining to the killing of a child in utero and the alleged right to do so on the basis of liberty and equality. However the term needs to be reclaimed for matters reproductive, and homicidal, foeticidal and embryocidal might be adjectives suitably employed to describe the alleged rights associated with willful destruction of innocent vulnerable little human beings.
[1] Lady M. W. Montagu, Letter 7, The Complete Letters, vol. II. 33
[3] Luraghi, S., 2011, Folia Linguistica 45/2
[5] Audring, J., 2016, Gender, Linguistics
[7] Intersexual Humanity, https://dreshandias.substack.com/p/intersexual-humanity-a-critique, and Part II thereof.
While in Sri Lanka, gender ideology is being groomed into ascendance, and the parliamentary elections on November 14th 2024 will determine its future in a manner deeply significant - and unrealised by most citizens. Will this be the year that the Family dies?
