By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, May 12, 2025
“There are only two genders!” Up goes the battle cry from
certain quarters of the right and from
the president whose line they toe with such perfect servility. Over at
Facebook, it was 54 genders before it was 72 before it was … whatever it is
today.
In reality, the number of genders is neither two nor 72
nor anything in between: The number of genders, outside of grammar textbooks,
is zero. “Gender” is a grammatical term that became, over time, a figure of
speech masquerading as an indelible (for purposes of discrimination law) yet
infinitely fluid (for other rhetorical purposes) personal trait, one that is
conflated—often intentionally, with its less malleable non-synonym, sex.
As George Orwell observed in his famous essay “Politics
and the English Language,” the corruption of language goes hand-in-hand with
the corruption of thought. One of the reasons we have such an excruciating time
talking our way through sensitive questions about sex and about what we call
“gender” is simple linguistic imprecision. The activists on the progressive
side of this issue never cease shouting that sex and gender are not the same
thing, and, in that much at least, they are correct–and we should start acting
like it.
For example, there is a great debate about gender
separation in sports and, in particular, how this affects women’s sports; but,
historically speaking, we have not segregated sports by gender at all—we
have segregated sports by sex. Gender had nothing to do with it, and the
existence—in some contexts, the prevalence—of gender-nonconforming athletes in
women’s sports has been such an obvious and observable phenomenon for so long
that jokes about Bulgarian shot putters were a Cold War cliché well before many
of the people reading this column were born. If the requirement to participate
in women’s sports were sex, as it was from the beginning of women’s
sports until the day before yesterday, then the exclusion of males of any and
every gender sensibility follows obviously enough; but when the requirement is gender,
you end up with the mess we have today. No one has elected me to speak on
behalf of the proud and generations-long butch-lesbian athletic tradition, but
my impression is that anybody who went back to 1978 and suggested that some of
those golfers and pro bowlers and Olympians that might in fact be in some
metaphysical way men might get punched in the face, hard. Which is not
to suggest that the condition we describe with the adjective “transgender” is a
fiction or that we should sneer at it—what we should try to do is to speak and
write about it more intelligently and lucidly.
Sex is, for contemporary rhetorical purposes,
excruciatingly boring. Rare abnormalities notwithstanding, sex is an
observable, empirically verifiable characteristic, and, in human beings, there
are two of them. The existence of intersex people and people with ambiguous
genitalia, while a fruitful
literary theme, is no more relevant to the fact of sexual dimorphism in H. sap.
than the fact that people sometimes are born without a limb negates the bipedal
nature of the species. A set of two sexes is by far the most common arrangement
when it comes to species that reproduce sexually, though sometimes things get a
little complicated with land snails (which mostly are hermaphrodites) and
certain fungi that would need a few dozen pronouns, if fungi had pronouns
indicating mating type. Such ambiguity is not an issue for our species. You can
build whatever kind of philosophy you like on the foundation of that fact—from
Christian “complementarianism” to the classical
radical feminism of the 1970s—but the fact of sex is one of those “stubborn
things” John Adams talked about.
Linguistically speaking, sex and gender have
(in the Anglophone world) been getting in each other’s business for a few
centuries. Gender, from the Latin genus and a twin sister of genre,
has been used to refer to the sexes from time to time since Richard III was on
the English throne. It had been a term from grammar, naming the categories in
gender-inflected languages such as Latin. Grammatical gender in the languages
that have it is only very loosely and vaguely associated with sex, but the
analogy suggested itself, and the conflation of the words became common. It
seems to me significant that the use of gender for sex, which had been
relatively rare, became much more common and, eventually predominant, beginning
around the same time that the meaning of sex began to shift from indicating
male and female to indicating sexual intercourse. My pet theory is that the
Anglophone world, culturally dominated by the prissy WASP sensibility of the
British diaspora, began to rely on gender when saying sex began
to make pale Anglo-Saxon complexions go a little bit red: “No Sex
Please, We’re British!”
The more contemporary uses of gender are recent
neologisms: Gender meaning the “behavioral, cultural, or psychological
traits typically associated with one sex, as in ‘gender roles,’” as our friends
at Merriam Webster
put it, dates from the second half of the 20th century. “Gender
identity” and “gender expression” were unknown expressions before the 1960s and
1970s, respectively.
Sex therapist Jackie Golob put
it the way one most often hears it described: “Gender identity is how you
feel about yourself and the ways you express your gender and biological sex. …
Biological sex is physical, while gender is feeling.” That is a common view,
and it seems to me that it gets it about right. But if gender is a feeling,
then there are as many genders as there are people—human beings are unique,
individualistic, and idiosyncratic in how they understand themselves as members
of sexes—and, hence, meaningless: Words that describe everything describe
nothing.
One of the things we are talking about when we talk about
gender expression is social convention—community expectations related to
one’s membership in one sex or the other, expectations that vary radically from
place to place, culture to culture, and time to time. To take an obvious
example: skirts. In the United States and most of the Western world in
Anno Domini 2025, skirts are considered attire appropriate to women. Of course,
this is arbitrary—or, more precisely, it is a matter of custom and tradition
rather than something that is or could be logically arrived at—and one need not
think very hard to come up with examples of skirts and skirt-like garments that
not only are considered perfectly masculine (the Scottish kilt, obviously) but
that are ritually reserved to men, as in the case of a Catholic
priest’s cassock. So, skirts and dresses are feminine garments … except when
explicitly restricted to men and to male-only occupations.
The fact that this is only convention and not some kind
of existentially necessary fact of sexual difference does not mean that it is
unimportant: When high-fashion designers such as Rick Owens and Yohji Yamamoto
play with these sexual conventions in menswear, the aesthetic effect relies in
part on the fact that their garments create some tension
with our expectations of what men’s clothes are supposed to look like. (It
is of interest that unlike the famous skirts-for-men
enthusiast Thom Browne, neither Owens nor Yamamoto typically has chosen
especially androgynous models for these garments and the overall effect is in
many ways traditionally masculine, a kind of sci-fi hero look—or “arty
ninjas,” as Simon Doonan called them.) Those conventions don’t have to be
explained to anybody, any more than one needed footnotes to see that the
punk-rock outfits of the 1970s or the androgynous glam-rock look of the 1980s
were not pure sartorial abstractions but intentional experiments with (and
mocking of) social conventions related, respectively, to class and sex.
St. Paul instructs the Corinthians: “Doth not even nature
itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory
to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.” But, of course, we have all
sorts of long-haired manly archetypes in the Christian world, from traditional
depictions of Jesus to Charlemagne to the Cavaliers—and even many of the
Puritans who detested the Cavaliers’ flowing locks had what we would consider,
in our own place and time, hair that was long for men. What mattered wasn’t how
long men’s hair was–it was how long men’s hair was relative to norms about the
length of men’s hair and women’s hair. It isn’t a matter of absolutes but one
of expectations. A gold wedding ring might denote a defining masculine role for
a man (that of husband) in much of the world, while conservative
interpretations of Islam regard any wearing of gold by men as haram,
because such adornment (along with the wearing of silk) is considered
essentially feminine. It is not that anybody is going to mistake Mr. T for a
woman, however many gold chains were in his stack, or that Pete Davidson looks
like a woman when he wears a dress—only that, in certain contexts, these modes
of dress push people’s sex-role buttons. These things change: Only a few years
ago, it was extraordinarily rare to see a heterosexual man wearing pearls
unless, perhaps, he was a pirate; today, Joe Rogan’s protestations
notwithstanding, pearl jewelry is routinely marketed to, and worn by, men,
including professional athletes and other thoroughly non-androgynous types. Go
tell Garrett Wilson he looks like a girl in that pearl
necklace.
Americans traditionally are hysterical about this stuff
as a matter of political rhetoric and social posturing while being
extraordinarily tolerant—and curious, and even celebratory—as a matter of fact.
There was a time in the assertively conservative Reagan years (right around
1983-84) when people made a very big deal about Boy George and how he looked,
but the controversy (largely a recreational controversy) did not stop Culture
Club’s “Karma Chameleon” from being the bestselling record in 20 countries while
spending three weeks atop the Billboard chart in the supposedly puritanical
United States. More recently, a figure such as Lil Nas X can do a duet with
Billy Ray Cyrus on one day and perform in a gold bustier on another, arguably
with less controversy than Boy George generated in his day.
I have, in the foregoing, intentionally avoided taking up
people who identify as trans as my examples. But I will get to that issue here.
The American creed of “live and let live” is a two-way
street, an expression of reciprocal obligation. And it is here, I think, that
trans issues necessarily run into controversy. While I am not naïve enough to
believe that violations of sexual norms in our society would be generally
uncontroversial—or even necessarily safe—I suspect that most people of goodwill
in these United States are capable of making a great deal of social room for
people who wish to dress in a way that is at variance with sexual convention,
to use a name associated with the opposite sex, and generally to live his or
her life in the way that seems best to him or her. The tensions begin when
others are expected to participate in this. Some accommodations are relatively
easy, straightforward issues of courtesy and good manners—for example,
addressing people as they prefer to be addressed. Other accommodations are not
as easy, and some of those accommodations, such as the participation of men in
women’s sports, probably should not be made at all, at least as a general
matter. And this gets us back to the question of gender vs. sex: It is one
thing to expect courtesy and social accommodation, and another thing to ask—to
demand, including at times as a condition of employment or other kinds of
social participation—that people pretend to believe something that they do not
believe and that is not true: that people who are members of one sex are
members of the other sex. “Live and let live” is either a duty of both parties
or a duty of neither party—the proposition is conditional.
Conservatives complain, and not without reason, that the
left is the traditional aggressor in the culture wars. And it is, of course,
possible to be a person of goodwill and to act in a spirit of generous
liberality without also signing up for radical and in some cases
nonsensical theories about sex and gender, without taking upon oneself an
obligation to participate, however politely, in a fiction. But is that how
conservatives have been conducting themselves of late? It would be very
difficult to argue that this is true. The Trump administration has recently
decided to revisit these questions as they relate to military service,
publishing an executive order that reads, in part:
Consistent with the military
mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false “gender identity”
divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards
necessary for military service. Beyond
the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender
identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s
commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s
personal life. A man’s assertion that he
is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not
consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.
Set aside the poor grammar and the hilarious hypocrisy
(Donald Trump cares a lot about an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined
lifestyle, even in one’s personal life”?) and the necessarily relevant issue of
Trump’s own remarkable personal cowardice vis-à-vis military service,
which did, in the matter of the imaginary bone spurs that kept his out of the
Vietnam draft, involve a “requirement that others honor this falsehood”—the
administration naturally is proceeding with maximum stupidity, cruelty, and
incompetence, among other things by documenting in its own words sufficient
evidence of its sheer imbecilic malice to put the order on shaky legal ground
from the beginning.
There is a much more direct way to deal with this
question, which is to maintain that a soldier’s gender sensibility is of no
particular interest to military managers where it does not interfere with the
performance of ordinary military duties, but that we do not organize military
units according to gender identity—we organize them, in part, according to sex.
The role of the military is not to serve as a vehicle for social justice
projects, however well-intentioned—the role of the military is to kill people
and destroy property, and, presumably, there are some men and women who are
good at that kind of thing who do not have a traditional sense of themselves
when it comes to the sex-role conventions. It is not very difficult to imagine
situations—which would depend largely on the character of the people
involved—in which this would present no problem at all, while other kinds of
situations, particularly those involving men and women more interested in
social activism than in soldiering, in which the obstacles would be
insurmountable, or not worth surmounting. Unfortunately, a sensible modus
vivendi would require a Trump administration that is less aggressively
stupid and a trans-activist community that is more “live and let live” than “do
as you’re told.”
The existence of people who strongly identify with the
opposite sex is a longstanding phenomenon, familiar across many different
historical periods and cultures. Men who wish to present themselves as women
and to be perceived and treated as women are more familiar to us than the
opposite case, but this may simply be another example of the fact that the
historians have for a long time written a lot more about men than women. For
example: We do not know enough to necessarily credit the legends surrounding
Elagabalus, the teenaged third-century Roman emperor reported to have presented
himself as a woman and who supposedly sought to undergo a kind of primitive
sex-reassignment surgery, but we can surmise that his enemies (and his
biography was written by an enemy, Cassius Dio) did not concoct their libels
(if they are libels) out of pure imagination, that such stories and experiences
were familiar enough to those late-empire Romans to be used as part of the
arsenal of political narrative. This kind of thing has been around for a long
time, and there are many different versions of it. The transgender phenomenon
as we understand it and talk about it today is about five minutes old,
historically speaking, and it probably will be a very different thing in 20
years, just as gay life in 2025 is very different from what it was in 1975 and
is very different in Paris than it is in Karachi, just as the patterns of
behavior that could be described as “homosexual” were so different in, say,
Rome 2,200 years ago and in Atlanta today as to hardly qualify as being
examples of the same thing.
In that sense, the people who talk about a “spectrum” of
gender expression have it more right than wrong—so right, it seems to me, as to
leave many of our efforts at categorization more or less useless. But, as with
sexual orientation—which is a crude and simplistic way of trying to categorize
the bewildering variety of observed real-world human sexual behavior—our
categorical approach to what I guess we’re stuck calling “gender” is shaped by
a few distinctly American—and frequently destructive—habits. One of these is
the effort to medicalize or science-ize everything under the sun, especially
social differences. This is really only a variation on the old “appeal to
authority” rhetorical stratagem. And that is related, in part, to a second bad
American habit: trying to make every question involving marginalized groups
into the civil rights movement. For years, activist researchers worked
diligently in search of a genetic explanation for homosexuality—the mythical
“gay gene”—not because this offered a useful account of real-world sexual
behavior (there are 10,000 different patterns of sexual life that could all be
lumped together under the heading “homosexual”) but because it would have been
useful to certain activists to be able to present the condition of being gay as
morally and biologically equivalent to the condition of being black, so that
those who had reservations about this or that change to sexual mores and norms
could be denounced as the equivalents of Bull Connor or Senator Byrd or Orval
Faubus. But sexuality and race are not equivalent things, the respective social
situations of gay Americans and black Americans are not and never have been
equivalent, and opposition to same-sex marriage is not and never has been the
equivalent of opposition to interracial marriage. Trying to make social
questions into scientific questions—as though the effort, even if successful,
would somehow eliminate the underlying social question—is mainly a rhetorical
exercise rather than a scientific one. As is trying to make every agonized out
group of the 2020s into the viciously oppressed African Americans of the 1940s.
I wish it were not necessary to state explicitly here my
conviction that we should proceed in this with kindness, courtesy, decency, and
no ill will—but also with clear eyes and intellectual integrity. People who
identify as trans have relatively high rates of suicide as well as other
troubles such as drug
abuse. Some of this is a result of the fact that the world can be cruel and
lonely for many of them; some of it isn’t at all the result of that fact. I
myself have a relatively broad tolerance for variety and experimentation in the
private sphere but take a relatively narrow view of what finally leads to a
genuinely good life. Being a conservative, I also have a tragic view: that the
kind of happiness we all want for ourselves and others is not fully possible
for any of us in this fallen world and may be far out of reach for others, not
necessarily through any fault of their own or any decision of their own making.
There are wounds that do not heal and obstacles that cannot be overcome. Of
course this is to be experienced in particularly profound ways in our lives as
men and women, husbands and wives, and fathers and mothers—it is these
elemental things that makes the fact of sex so much more powerful than the
shifting rhetoric—and fashion—of gender.
Working through this should be possible for intelligent
people of goodwill—but, as Adlai Steveson lamented when a supporter told him he
had the support of every thinking person in America: “I’m afraid that won’t
do—I need a majority.”
Words About Words
Having run quite long in the above, I will keep the rest
brief. From the New York Times, which at times has almost enough trouble
with capitalization to be running Donald Trump’s social media:
Especially because Anna Wintour,
the Met Gala’s mastermind, a powerful democratic fund-raiser and the chief
content officer of Condé Nast, said on “The Late Late Show” in
2017 that the one person she would never invite back to the fete was Mr. Trump.
Anna Wintour is a fund-raiser for the capital-D
Democratic Party. (De gustibus, etc.) I have never met her, but I think
I would like her (which is not to say I think she would like me) because she
is, by many accounts, the least democratic woman in the United States of
America, one who never has been shy about her enjoyment of her power, position,
and wealth. Don’t we need a few of those around?
Democracy? Sure, on Election Day. But not at Vogue.
Let’s not let it get out of hand.
In Closing
Upon learning that an American cardinal has been elected
pope, President Trump wrote: “[W]hat a Great Honor for our Country.”
Capitalization issues being the least among the relevant concerns, you can see
much of what is wrong with Donald Trump in those few words. The elevation of
Robert Prevost to the papacy is not a great honor for our country—or for him.
The papacy is a position of service—to the poor, to the despised, even to
illegal immigrants and criminals. Donald Trump loves the idea of a “Great
Honor,” wouldn’t know service if it sued him in bankruptcy court, and
hates the sort of people the pope serves—and Jesus served. Trump is from the
camp of Herod and Pilate, the sort of man who would have complained that the
Romans should have tortured Jesus more—and should have gone after Mary,
too: “When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out
their families.”
It is not the pope’s honor—or America’s honor, or the
honor that Donald Trump would have if he were a better sort of man—that is
relevant here. It is a different kind of honor entirely.
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