I was in Ikea several months ago with several other families, some of whom were very familiar with the modern debates about what is commonly called "Gender and Sexuality." I made the mistake of referring to the two Genders, and one of them said that people are not Gendered, they are Sexed, that words (not people) are gendered as masculine and feminine, and that the use of "gender" to refer to a person's sex is really part of a rhetorical strategy to make masculinity and femininity a fluid and arbitrary thing.
I don't really know the history of this topic very well. Perhaps I should. I certainly have my own thoughts on this that I've developed over years of experience (and reflection on that experience) both of myself and others who are close to me.
So I got to reading an article in the March 2011 issue of First Things, which I don't often read anymore because I find myself less and less resonating with it affectively, and I found an article on this.
Douglass Farrow, who teaches at McGill in Canada together with Charles Taylor and some others, wrote a 3-page piece titled "Blurring Sexual Boundaries." His argument has several elements to it:
1) "Gender Identity" and "Gender Expression" are not like the other protected terms (race, religion, sex, nationality, disability, etc.). They do not represent objective conditions (whether biological or institutional), but subjectively determined ones, attitudes toward oneself.
2) To allow the law to venture into the realm of the subjective is dangerous. We do not want the law to absorb us altogether. Neither is it good for it to be meaningless, which it may become if such protected categories of the subjective begin to proliferate. The subjective realm is very important, but questions about it are extra-legal questions, to be dealt with in civil society.
3) He argues that to add sexual behaviors and orientations to the list of protected statuses is dangerous legally: he claims that it does not add another category, but instead attacks and melts down the older protected category of sex, which is really there to protect women, and so is dangerous to them, denying that there is any notion of woman that is anything other than a social construct and a personal preference.
4) He argues that the newer legislation is not really about protecting anyone, but really about enshrining in public policy a notion of sex that makes it "essentially a social construct, based not in the natural order but in more or less arbitrary acts of human self-interpretation."
These are, I think, the highlights. He notes that the psychiatric team at Johns Hopkins stopped sex-reassignment therapy for transgendering individuals after coming to the conclusion that it did more damage than healing, and, in the words of the psychiatric team, "collaborate[d] with a mental disorder rathan than [treating] it."
In the end, he argues that it ultimately proffers a neo-Gnostic Hegelian understanding of nature as something to be overcome. In the end, this entry is simply my attempt to summarize his argument.