March 11, 2004, 9:30 a.m.
The Abolition of Sex
Don’t worry — only in the law. Only!

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article appears in the March 22, 2004, issue of National Review.

With recent events in Massachusetts and California, homosexual marriage — an idea that seems not to have occurred to anyone at all in the entire span of human history until about five years ago — is now a daily topic in our newspapers and TV programs. While there is certainly a great deal to be said about homosexual marriage, I have come to believe that this issue is merely an epiphenomenon, the visible manifestation of some deeper trend. To be precise, I think that what is under way here is a program to purge the very notion of sex from all our laws. This is not just a campaign to permit men to marry men, and women women; it is a campaign for the abolition of sex. Nor is it the homosexualists who are in the vanguard here, but the transsexualists — persons who wish to be not the sex Nature, in forming their bodies, intended them to be, but the other one.

I had better clarify my usage. I don't mean that we are witnessing an attempt to stamp out the intimate act. Probably nothing could be further from the minds of the activists promoting this revolution. No: Here I am using "sex" in the first of the senses offered by Merriam-Webster's Third: "one of the two divisions of organic, especially human, beings respectively designated male or female." In what passes for academic literature in this field, the word "gender" is now commonly used with this denotation. If I were more modern-minded I would say "the abolition of gender." However, when I have used "gender" in this sense in the past, I have got angry letters and e-mails from fellow conservatives. After reading through several dozen of these, I have concluded that my correspondents are correct. Furthermore, if you read much of the propaganda of transsexualist agitators, you realize that there is, for them, a key distinction between "sex" and "gender." "Sex" is what someone else thinks you are, based on some objective criterion (visual inspection, chromosome count, biochemical analysis); "gender" is what you feel yourself to be, tests and evidences notwithstanding. The latter notion, being subjective, is of course good; the former is correspondingly bad. See how the wheel has turned: "Sex" is once again a dirty word!

So my argument is that these recent shenanigans at top right and bottom left of our country are the first battles in a much broader war, a war to expunge sex from the public sphere altogether.

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