Gender dysphoria, or gender self-identity, is the feeling of severe discomfort about one’s biological and physiological sex. While this may be a pretense by some to game the system, for most others this condition is very real, but also very rare; estimated at less than one-tenth of one percent of the adult population, most of whom are male. That’s not counting impressionable, disturbed adolescents who are being drawn into this movement by progressive caretakers.
Biologically, except in very rare cases, a male is born with XY chromosomes, a female with XX chromosomes. Anatomically, men and women have decidedly different sex organs, and a woman has a uterus; a man doesn’t. It takes two sexes to make babies. Some men have low testosterone, some women have low estrogen. Because some people would rather be a different gender, that doesn’t objectively make them one. Transgderism is a state of mind.
Abraham Lincoln once remarked, “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
If transgendered folks imagine, perceive or prefer a gender different from the one they were born with, and it makes them happier, that’s fine with me. It doesn’t affect my life. But there are limits to what they can impose on others. For example, it’s simply unfair to allow physiological males who declare themselves to be “transwomen” to compete with physiological females in sports that have a decided strength advantage to males, like track and field, weight lifting, boxing, wrestling, football, basketball, baseball, tennis, etc.
This isn’t unlawful, arbitrary discrimination. It’s justifiable discrimination, as well as common sense. On the other hand, if physiological women want to compete with physiological men, go right ahead.
In 1973, Billie Jean King, a 29-year-old female at the top of her professional tennis career defeated 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in a hyped-up, theatrical “grudge match” watched by 90 million people worldwide. Babe Didrikson Zaharias was arguably as good as a few male golfers on the pro tour. In a debate on PBS years ago, radical feminist Gloria Steinham argued to William F. Buckley, Jr. that “some women are stronger then some men.” To which, Buckley replied, “Some apes are smarter than some people,” by way of explaining that rare exceptions aren’t the rule.
As for workplace discrimination, it may be unlawful to discriminate against the transgendered if gender isn’t relevant to the job. But there are reasonable exceptions there, too. The proprietors of so-called “Gentlemen’s Clubs,” like Shotgun Willie’s or the Diamond Cabaret in Denver, cater to heterosexual men. It might be off-putting to their core customers if those clubs were forced to hire transwomen still bearing their original male equipment. And transwomen who’ve been surgically altered could be regarded as false advertising.
Those who reject the forced-choice between male or female, claim that gender isn’t binary; that there are many more variations. Those include “intergendered” who are somewhere in between, “agender” who have no gender identity, “genderfluid” who move between two or more gender identities depending on how they feel, and others.
To anticipate the extremes to which this could go, consider the upcoming 2024 Olympics in Paris. Will a genderfluid physiological male sprinter who wins Gold in the Men’s 100 Meters also compete, when feeling like a woman, and win Gold while shattering the world record in the Women’s 100?
To accommodate all their categories, non-binary advocates have created scores of personal pronouns like ey, em, emself, xe, xem, xemself, ze, zir, zirself. They, and the increasingly authoritarian progressive culture, demand that the rest of us adopt those terms and discard the singular “he” and “she” in favor of “they” when referring to non-binaries in person and in print.
Since I’m not a student compelled to comply with politically-correct progressive speech codes, no one can force me to abandon my grammatical preference for traditional personal pronouns like “him” or “her” rather than “they.” I reserve “they” for use exclusively as a plural personal pronoun. When referring to a non-binary individual, I just can’t bring myself to say something like, “Just who do they think they is?”
The gender-diversity movement has labeled all but their tiny fraction of humanity as “cisgendered,” challenging the biological sex, as they put it, “assigned to us at birth.” Those who disagree believe gender is assigned at birth by nature, biology and God. I have a tough enough time recalling people’s names these days. Remembering the preferred personal pronouns of scores of gender identities is too much to ask.
Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for CompleteColorado.com.
