Sex and the Single Cell

 

Can you spot the difference? Need a minute?

The gospel reading last Sunday was this one:

“Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.”

King James has the colourful “not one jot nor tittle.”

This is because the Law is the Logos, Christ himself, the order on which the cosmos is formed. Pseudo-Chrysostom comments:

“…since all things which should befall from the very beginning of the world to the end of it, were in type and figure foreshown in the Law, …, He therefore here declares, that heaven and earth should not pass till all things thus foreshown in the Law should have their actual accomplishment.”

There is a Law, a Logos, to the universe.

I have not been inclined to comment on the whole gender thing, because there is little to say, and saying it gets you in trouble. 

But here goes:

Gender is a grammatical concept. People do not have gender. Nouns do. People have sex.

There are only two sexes. This is a binary system.

If you are male, every cell is identifiably male. If you are female, every cell is identifiably female. But for the rare anomaly of an XXY in the 23rd chromosome pair, there is no ambiguity.

Women and men differ in many more ways that the visible shape of their sex organs. Women’s bodies are different from men’s in many appealing details. Their brains are also different.

It is a denial of reality for a man to declare himself a woman, or a woman to declare herself a man.

Denial of reality is delusional by definition. It is insanity.

It is not helpful to anyone to encourage a delusion. This is like encouraging an alcoholic to stay drunk. It is usually a way for people to avoid their problems.

Why do people want to deny the two genders? Because they want to deny binary systems as such. All binary systems are limiting to the human will. Each is a line you cannot cross. Gravity is annoying. Not being able to stay 18 forever is annoying. Not being able to eat some given apple is annoying. As a graffito seen during the Paris uprising of 1968 had it, “Be careful: even the ears have walls!” The border between life and death, human and non-human, self and other, is annoying. It prohibits abortion. Not to mention offing your inconvenient grandparents or Republican neighbour.

But the ultimate binaries are true and false, yes and no, Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction; and good and evil. These are the enemies that the non-binary really want to destroy.

No surprise that Biden’s transgender appointee as undersecretary of state for whatever turns out to steal other people’s luggage; or that transgender swimmer Lia Thomas worships Satan. Or that more men in prisons declare themselves transgender women than in the general population.

Vive la difference. 

“La difference”: there’s an example of gander.