We have entered the Fourth Turning - the inevitable Crisis of our society has arrived. Social mores are being reimagined with a vengeance. It's easy for those of us who have never lived through this before (most of us) to be in a bit of a panic about it, as if this has never happened before, or not to the same degree, or not in the same way... But really, each Crisis has the same effect on those generations who are middle aged and older when it hits.
For us, it means racism is being reimagined and redefined. It means that gender is being eliminated from the public sphere. It means that the economic and political status quo is being uprooted with vocal neo-hippies who want to start from scratch no matter the cost.
And it's easy for us look at the seemingly sudden uproar and freak out. But really, any honest student of history did see it coming, as William Strauss and Neil Howe's "The Fourth Turning" illustrates. And therefore, there is no sense in trying to force the genie back in the bottle.
The Crisis is at hand. We can fight it and exhaust ourselves, or we can accept it and reimagine our new role in relation to the new world order (and I don't mean this necessarily politically, but just in general).
In particular, I'm thinking here of gender ideology. It makes very little sense to me to take a mental disorder and normalize it to the point of gaslighting the rest of us into thinking we have been fooling ourselves all these millennia thinking species come in two sexes. But that's the first problem - semantics.
Sex and gender, as I learned back in my undergrad days, are not interchangeable terms. Therefore, as long as we think they are, we will be talking past each other.
Sex is the biological fact of our physical bodies, including our chromosomal makeup (XY or XX, or some abnormality thereof), our genital makeup (egg-production or sperm-production, or some abnormality thereof), and our secondary sex characteristics (musculature, body hair, voice). This last section is where the overlap with gender begins.
While it is true that males tend to be more muscular, more hairy, and have deeper voices, while females tend to be less muscular, less hairy, and have higher voices, this is not universally so and varies by ethnicity. What's more, it is often exaggerated by socio-cultural efforts to highlight stereotyped beliefs and expectations about the sexes.
Gender is the set of those stereotypes that are associate with a given sex in a specific culture and historical period. Clothing is a starting point. Only modern times have allowed the rather extreme differences in acceptable dress for females and males. Historically speaking, most people wore some variation of a tunic that more or less draped male and female bodies in very comparable ways. In those times, we generally see women demarcate themselves with an additional head covering, though often males also wore these for practical reasons.
Outside of clothing, hair has historically been used to accentuate a person's sex/gender, especially when clothing didn't always do the job. Males often sported facial hair, while females wore their head hair long. Although with certain cultures, hair was traditionally long universally.
So really: hair, clothing, as well as various adornments like makeup and jewelry are completely arbitrary gender markers, meaning they are socio-cultural ways of signaling the sex of the individual, but they are not what makes the individual the sex that they are. As such, those things can and do change from culture to culture and between time periods.
With that said, it is important to note that what gives those markers any meaning at all is that society agrees on those meanings. Once society starts to question the association of facial hair with masculinity or makeup with femininity, we enter chaos, because people no longer know what to expect. This is where we find ourselves today with gender bender ideology.
Twenty years ago, I was on the bandwagon of gender neutrality to a point, before I had realized the logical conclusion of such a world-view. I was outspoken against sexist language, I refused sex-based social titles ("Mrs") and names (husband's surname), and I entered motherhood insisting on what I thought was a gender-neutral babyhood for my children.
By today's standards, I was mild. For me, being gender-neutral just meant wearing neutrally-colored and decorated onsies and outfits that looked equally cute on a little girl or a little boy. I never once thought to undermine the idea that underneath it all, there actually WAS a little girl OR a little boy. I also didn't push stereotypical toys onto my children, instead focusing on things I deemed educational and useful for a human child, regardless of sex. So I got cars for my daughter and dolls for my son. I thought I was a rebel.
Today, parents are no longer allowing society to even try to force their gendered stereotypes onto their children by... simply not revealing to anyone which sex their child is. They choose gender-neutral names and use the third person plural pronoun to refer to the child, so that people simply cannot stereotype them according to sex. In my generation, we did what we could, but there were still people who, knowing we had a daughter or a son, would nonetheless come at us with color-coded gifts and assumptions about their temperament or future careers. Technically, we were still at the mercy of well-meaning, or not-so-well-meaning others.
Today's gender-neutral parents have found a way to take that risk completely out of the equation. I can't say that I blame them. I get so up in arms about nonsense I hear about my daughter's physically attractiveness but my son's temperament, as if they don't both have both qualities.
Yet I'm not exactly on board with the new gender bender world-view. I believe the sexes ought to have equal opportunities and be treated with equal respect, but I do not believe they should become indistinguishable from each other. I believe it is something beautiful to be feminine as a female, and to be masculine as a male. God made us male and female and said it was very good, and I for one have no reason to argue. There are things about being female that are wonderful precisely because they are not universal to all humans. Part of what makes us human, in fact, is actually our sex and the associated life experiences that differentiate us from the opposite sex.
I do honor each individual's right to identify how they want to identify - on one hand. On the other hand, what bothers me is the lack of understanding why such a seismic shift in worldview is being thrust upon us oldtimers with such fury and so little comprehension for why it may take us time - a lot of time - to wrap our minds around it. Accusing us of being bigotted hardly opens up the lines of communication.
When I call a biological female "she", it's not to be disrespectful, but it's because that is what four decades of living on this planet has taught me. Expecting an overnight change is simply unrealistic, and yes, we're going to push back against being forced to change.
But there's more. We also learned how to be respectful, and interestingly, respect is not expressed in universal ways. I remember people thinking they were being "respectful" when they referred to me as "Mrs. Husband's First Name". It absolutely infuriated me! I come from a culture where thank God this type of "etiquette" never took root, and so I did not find it respectful in the least to have my own name erased from the public square simply because I was married. I never stopped to consider that the people offending me were not doing so intentionally. They were operating according to the rules they had been taught. Their world view had not had a chance to upgrade.
And so here we are again, this time with me being the inadvertent disrespector when I "misgender" someone. Back when, I sighed with annoyance when someone assumed I went by "Mrs. Man" but I absolutely went berserk when someone called me that even after I let them know that was not how I wanted to be addressed.
Today, people are having the exact same reaction to us calling them "she" or "he" based on our cultural programming, which tells us that 1) we can make gender assumptions based on people's external markers such as physical features or name, and that 2) sex and gender are essentially the same thing. I'm trying to be respectful, because the idea of calling someone "it" - that is, ungendered, is downright dehumanizing. And yet that is what people thought they were doing if they didn't acknowledge my affiliation with my husband - as if my existence as a human being was somehow diminished because I was married yet not being acknowledged as such. Married status was seen as more important for a woman than a man.
Today's youth are doing away with gender as a concept altogether, and while I grew up with gender as a fact of life, if I want to maintain integrity in respecting the wishes of individuals even when I do not understand said wishes, I will need to readjust how I think about people without the lens of gender.
My gut reaction is that to take away gender is to take away the humanity of a person. But for the youth of today, who are simply not "married" to their sex the way I was not "married" to my... well, being married, one of us is going to need to adjust our world-view. I, being of an older generation, claim to have more wisdom, which includes the ability to compare current situations with previous ones and to draw similarities between them. I cannot expect the same from the youth. They are making their demands not to be difficult, althought their demands are indeed very difficult for us old-timers. They are making their demands in the same spirit as I made my demands 20 years ago. I simply wanted the right to define myself by my own standards. I did not want to be told who I was. Once I was allowed to do so, with time and experience, I came around to the idea of being called "Mrs.". Albeit, I still will not go by my husband's given name. But I would happily respond if someone simply called my by his surname. That is the compromise that could have only come through time.
And so I can hope for as much to get worked out with this new demand of genderlessness. God willing, with enough time and life experience, the pendulum will swing again in the direction of balance, and as people stop pushing gender on others, those others will stop insisting on avoiding gender, and eventually we will arrive in a place of compromise where we can all agree that life makes sense again.
But this won't happen any time soon. And so, I embark on a new phase in my life - acknowledging that I am now part of the middle-aged generation, and that our ideas are no longer the new thing. I have to make way for the even newer ideas, and practice patience, humility, and understanding.
I trust that this new attitude will be much more healthy and useful than digging my heels in and rolling my eyes at each new mention of gender. I don't have to understand it or even embrace it for myself to respect that it matters to other people. If I am to see others the way God sees them, that starts with making an effort to try to see them the way they see themselves.
