The Myth of Gender

the origin story of gender identity

Let’s talk about gender. What do we mean when we use that word gender?

In the early 90s, when it was cool to be a young woman who called herself a feminist, gender was a thing we fought against because we knew it motivated Andre Lepine to murder 13 women in cold blood at point blank range. The thinking of the time held that gender devalued humans by projecting limiting + moralistic narratives about sex-based roles onto humans.

I was there in the 90s, I remember we fought against gender stereotyping. We watched our sisters get chased down busy streets in heavy rush hour traffic by men trying to kill them—this was gender. We watched our sisters get shot waiting for the bus by incel stalkers they tried to get away from and could not because the police could afford women no protection from these men—this was gender. We watched with horror as our sisters got crushed by gender, in domestic violence situations that devolved into no-win situations all around.

Some of us, like me and my siblings, carry the horror of gender in our hearts because we are the children of a woman who suffered abuse at the hands of her husband and then further abuse from the religious community who watched + did nothing—that was gender. This was not my father, (I feel the need to always emphasise this point because my father is the angel in this story of my mother’s) though the physical violence + psychological abuse of my mother’s first marriage + family does live in me through placental exchange. Trauma, a teratogen, crosses the placental wall.

My (living mitochondrial) sisters, like I, have each suffered at the hands of gender in their lives—our circumstance differ and when you strip them away what we share between us remains—we are female people, and the most painful things to ever have happened to us happened because of gender. Yes, take your pick—rape | partner abuse | sexual harassment | infidelity—it is gender and it harms female people and therefore it harms society.

Gender caused our brothers to suffer too, I will add. Machismo + hyper masculinity kept them up at night with nightmares—any boy who grew up with a violent dad will tell you gender did him no favours. A gay man in a catholic world will tell you gender did him no favours. A mama’s boy who’s father beat him will tell you gender did him no favours. A sensitive polymath genius dude who watched his father whom he loves beat his mother and who does not himself jive with machismo culture will tell you gender did him no favours. Our brothers might be somewhat sexists d1ckbags (blokes of their generations, boomers if you will) however that doesn’t mean they benefited from gender, I think every human is somewhat sexist. Just so we are clear that gender harms ALL humans (ie does not favour one sex) because it devalues all humans.

Now, 30 years later, we are all watching in horror as the gender monster reaches in, captures the education + legal + medical systems + dominates all levels of government + their service delivery to the public and thusly, violates the constitution. Now 30 years later we are all watching as left-wing progressives have the unmitigated gall to, with a straight face and all the seriousness of a firebrand Catholic Monseigneur on the pulpit, accuse anyone who challenges gender stereotyping of committing genocide. We have the entire of academia, the education, legal and medical systems, as well as the government service delivery system ALL agreeing that human reproductive class is a colonial construct invented by the British which subjective and fluid gender identity feelings can override. Welcome to Gender-Lysenkoism in Canada.

So what I’m saying is that in 3 decades we went from being called cool + edgy for fighting gender stereotyping in schools + acknowledging there are many ways to be a boy and many ways to be a girl to being called a genocidal religious extremist for fighting gender stereotyping in schools + acknowledging there are many ways to be a boy and many ways to be a girl.

My head is spinning—how the fcuk did we get to this place??

Also, still my question stands—what do we mean when we use that word gender?

---

Oxford Languages on the Google search page tells me the following definitions.

Gender:

1. either of the two sexes, especially when considered with reference to social + cultural differences rather than biological ones. The term is also used more broadly to denote a range of identities that do not correspond to established ideas of male + female.

2. each of the classes of nouns + pronouns distinguished by the different inflections that they require in words syntactically associated with them. Grammatical gender is only very loosely associated with natural distinction of sex.

So, when we use that word gender we use it as a placeholder for a set of human characteristics founded in a particular society’s cultural normative structure. Gender projects the American progressive secular vision of humans onto humanity. The progressives have thrown that pejorative word queer into the fold to underscore their contempt for human sexual boundaries—the visible contempt embedded within American Progressive Political Activism plays a vital role in the coercive control exerted by the Wokerati, my affectionate pet name for this segment of society.