The big, block headline in the “Nation & World” section
of my local newspaper read: “How To Decide A Person’s Sex?”
Well,
that certainly is a puzzler, a nearly
existential poser that has baffled and buffaloed the best and brightest of us
over many millennia. Philosophers and sages have spent countless ages
attempting to unravel this riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But
perhaps there is a key: our species’ self- interest. It cannot be in accordance with
natural law and our survival that we don’t readily know nor take our sexes
seriously and believe them to be ephemeral and irrelevant.
I’ve
got an idea. How about we agree that a female is deemed so because she has
breasts and a vagina and therefore can potentially bear and feed children? A
male would then be one who has the potential to fertilize the female’s eggs so
that she can potentially bear and feed children. Radical, I know, but surely my
progressive reputation proceeds me.
If this
is not, in fact, the case, then words- and concepts- have no meaning. Why do we
call a horse a horse? What differentiates
plants from animals? Why do we even try to do so? Is everything solely an artificial
construct? How could that be? Why
do we distinguish between the elderly and pre-teens? Who does it benefit? (You
can bet it is the evil white male capitalists!).
What
should it matter if an adult has sex with a child- or a horse? Surely
proscriptions against these love choices are just more forms of sexual discrimination perpetrated by
uptight, conservative Republican traditionalists.
Fortunately,
in the past, our ancestors somehow puzzled out the mystery of male and female
and the yin and the yang of the (then only) two
sexes. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here.
Progressive?
In light of our apparent difficulty distinguishing bad from good and male from
female, and in our refusal to recognize these terms as “real” concepts, I
suggest that we have regressed.
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