Throughout the culture, the tide is turning on transgenderism, as shown in how Donald Trump successfully utilized the issue to a resounding election victory. Yet, much like how the church capitulated to MeToo even after the culture turned against this feminist movement, see Johnny Depp, the in the church MeToo is still a dominant force. Similarly, a Mid Eva figure advocates Christians cede the term gender to the liberals in what would be a major blunder at this time.
Darrell Harrison is a Mid Eva pastor and cohost of the Just Thinking Podcast with Virgil Walker. And he advocates a major linguistic compromise.
Darrell Harrison argues that gender and sex are not interchangeable, a liberal premise. He then argues that gender is a social construct and therefore nonexistent, this too is a liberal premise.
Gender is a biological reality and no amount of social construction can make a man a woman if he is transplanted to a perverse culture. Rather, when liberals say that gender is a social construct, what they actually mean is that gender is a personal construct.
However, we know from history that gender and sex were synonymous terms.
According to the 1828 Webster’s Dictionary:
GEN’DER, noun [Latin genus, from geno, gigno; Gr.to beget, or to be born; Eng. kind. Gr. a woman, a wife; Sans. gena, a wife, and genaga, a father. We have begin from the same root. See Begin and Can.]
1. Properly, kind; sort.
2. A sex, male or female. Hence,
3. In grammar, a difference in words to express distinction of sex; usually a difference of termination in nouns, adjectives and participles, to express the distinction of male and female. But although this was the original design of different terminations, yet in the progress of language, other words having no relation to one sex or the other, came to have genders assigned them by custom. Words expressing males are said to be of the masculine gender; those expressing females, of the feminine gender; and in some languages, words expressing things having no sex, are of the neuter or neither gender
GEN’DER, verb transitive To beget; but engender is more generally used.
GEN’DER, verb intransitive To copulate; to breed. Leviticus 19:19.
Clearly, sex and gender are synonymous with gender having an expanded scope. The flexibility of this word does not deny the biological reality, as the usage has traditionally been agricultural. Harrison’s argument that gender is a myth is a myth in itself, one first created in our culture by John Money who played a pivotal role in advancing transgenderism in American psychology.
Of all the times to cave on definitions, when transgenderism is losing cultural headwinds is not the time to cede ground. Rather this is the time to reclaim the logical ground ceded that led to transgenderism’s brief cultural hegemony. Part of the ground that was ceded was the separation of gender from sex.
A major criticism of Mid Eva is that they can’t or don’t actually want to win in the culture, that they would rather lose pretty than win ugly, and Darrell Harrison’s compromise is the latest example.
3 Responses
While the dictionary may favor them meaning the same thing, I am old enough to remember them being distinct in their common usage. I also remember gender being introduced in journalistic rags to replace sex when referring to men and women. For example, forms used to ask your sex, not your gender.
This pastor is correct in that sex is immutable and gender is mutable. That is the very reason the word sex is no longer used to distinguish the sexes. That said, in no way is a person’s “gender identity” fungible. It is as immutable as their sex, and only psychological derangement can cause a person to think otherwise.
Maybe if we quit using the word gender when referring to a person’s sex can society return to sanity in this area.
I’m old enough to remember when “sex” was a dirty word and adults spelled it out around kids rather than say it. “Gender” only ever become a popular term for that reason, that it was less dirty to put “gender” on a form someone had to fill out than to put “sex.” Anyone saying otherwise is simply a pervert of had their memory wiped and replaced by the CIA. Whatever the mechanism of the Mandela Effect whereby the government has gaslighted people, and the mechanism of convincing people that vaccines never meant they prevented an illness but only slightly lessened it, that mechanism has been used to wipe people’s memories of the fact I have herein stated.
“Maybe if we quit using the word gender when referring to a person’s sex can society return to sanity in this area.”
Of course not, because I am also old enough to remember that what is now called a transgender used to be called a transexual and also transvestite. So if we drop the word gender, they’ll just go back to using transexual rather than transgender. We can’t give an inch.