"Gender" Doesn't Exist
"Gender" Doesn't Exist How a dubious concept took over the academy Written by Steven Gussman. The reason that “transgender healthcare” — from “social transition” (in which the people in your life pretend that you are the opposite sex by using the wrong pronouns) to surgery — was always doomed to failure is that “gender dysphoria” doesn’t exist. And “gender dysphoria” doesn’t exist because “gender” doesn’t exist. It is worth peeling back this onion of confusion one layer at a time to understand just how we got here. As with so much of postmodernism, which accords language an almost supernatural role in worldly causation, the story of “transgenderism” begins with etymology. Whereas ‘sex’ had always denoted the biologically immutable reality of males and females, and was eventually understood to be defined by gametes (many small, mobile sperm versus few large, sedentary ova), “gender” began as a grammatical offshoot. Early on (a...