By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, June 09, 2022
At the barber recently, I noticed a little
rainbow-colored sign bearing the slogan: “Haircuts have no gender.” Mine does,
unless we are no longer allowed to call it “male-pattern baldness,” and I
missed that memo.
Could be — I miss a lot of those memos, thank goodness.
Of course haircuts have genders. Everybody knows
this even if our current moment of mass sexual psychosis obliges some people to
pretend not to know it. There isn’t any law that says a retro-minded man can’t
rock “the Rachel” or (speaking of Rachels) Rachel Maddow and Chris
Hayes can’t have the same haircut, but that sort of thing stands out because
haircuts have genders. Same with Harry Styles and those dresses and pearls. The
whole gender-subverting thing can work out really well, especially if you
happen to be traffic-stoppingly good-looking to begin with: Sinead O’Connor
looked great with that buzzcut in 1989. I imagine that there
were a fair number of women and a statistically non-negligible number of men
who liked seeing Brad Pitt dressed up like Jan Brady in Troy.
De gustibus and all that.
Gender is, of course, a grammatical term, a
way of classifying nouns in some languages. The idea that there are more than
two genders is very old news — about 2,700 years old — to students of Latin.
The intellectual history here is convoluted and almost unbelievable, but the
idea of gender as a superseding replacement for sex made
its way out of grammar and into the current pop ideology mostly via literary
theory. Ideas matter — in the long run, they matter more than anything else in
community life.
In one of the great little ironies of linguistic history,
the word gender got wrecked because we first wrecked the
word sex, which until the day before yesterday meant what people
and government forms generally mean by gender today. Sex stopped
meaning what it had meant before because we didn’t have a word everybody felt
comfortable with for what we use sex to mean today: Coitus,
borrowed from Latin, was simultaneously clinical and comical, while sexual
congress put together two words that nobody wants to think of at the
same time.
Before there was gender, there were sex
roles, which is how we described the social expectations associated with
one’s sex. The elevation of gender above sex was,
of course, programmatic and intentional, a kind of lexical battering ram for
the feminist project of denying that there was any biological basis for the
different and distinct social expectations of men and women. In this, gender is
a little like sexual orientation: Before there was sexual
orientation, there was behavior and there was inclination — preference, proclivity, taste,
etc. Homosexual described a class of acts rather
than a class of people — though gay-rights activists sometimes
point to the indulgent attitude toward homosexual relations in the ancient
world as an example to be followed, the Romans would have been flabbergasted
and horrified by the very, very recent innovation that we call “being gay.” But
the gay-rights movement wanted to pattern its crusade on the civil-rights
movement, and so it became very invested in the idea that homosexuality is
analogous to race, because if it is, then having a negative feeling about
homosexuality is like having a negative feeling about African Americans or short
people or people with brown eyes — mindless bigotry. Of course, some attitudes
toward homosexuality are mindless bigotry, and some are not —
ironically, we modern people have a hard time thinking about these questions in
non-binary terms, as though “pro-gay” and “anti-gay” were the only meaningful
categories relevant to the issue.
Of course, that line of thinking is pretextual, a post
hoc justification for the conclusion that already has been reached.
Nobody really believes a word of it, of course. There is pretty good reason to
believe that pedophilia has a biological basis and that it may even be in some
part hereditary, but nobody thinks that this really tells us anything about
whether pedophilia is something that should be tolerated. “How dare you!” will
come the content-free rejoinder. Of course homosexuality is not directly
comparable to pedophilia — it also isn’t directly comparable to being black.
Comparisons assume that things that may be similar in some aspects are
different in other aspects — that is how comparisons work.
I suspect — and hope — that a century from now, we will
look back on this moment as one of breathtaking stupidity and intellectual
crudity. There is a lot more to human sexual behavior and the social expression
of sexual sensibilities than is accounted for in the three or four folders in
which we expect to file everything.
But there are some things that do not have to be
complicated. We have never segregated sports by gender — we
have historically segregated sports by sex. The history of women’s
sports is full of gender-non-conforming women, and there has never been any
real feeling that they should be made to participate in men’s sports, instead.
We can take a humane and kind attitude toward people who wish to present
themselves socially in some way that is at odds with traditional expectations
of their sex without becoming delusional or fanatical. And while our current
gender madness is very much à la mode, there are a few genuinely
desperately unhappy people who find themselves radically alienated from their
sex, and they deserve both our sympathy and the best care that can be given
them. None of this obliges us to pretend that sex isn’t a real thing or that
people are not the sex they are, nor does it oblige us to behave as though
elective genital amputation and other forms of ritual mutilation were
self-evidently legitimate as a therapeutic strategy. Still less does any of
this oblige us to accept the surgical or chemical mutilation of children as
medically or parentally ethical.
Because we aren’t just talking about haircuts here.
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