Are gender categories biological?

For school I had to answer this question: Are gender categories biological?



Answer: Sex which is biological, is a physical manifestation of a deeper reality. I think we English speakers tend to lose sight of it since our ancestors got rid of the gendered word endings in our language centuries ago. Perhaps, French, Portuguese, and German speakers have a better grasp of this than do English speaking people.

But even though our language is benighted, if only in this one regard, we nevertheless have access to ancient literatures that can help us understand gender as a deeper, more elemental property in reality. For example, Wisdom, is always feminine in literature. But it is not the weak femininity Rosalind Coward portrays in her book “Female Desires”. Nor is it the passive and objectified femininity decried by Sandra Lee Bartky (And while I am mentioning her I’d like to point out that, of course Calvin Klein’s female models look like 14 year old boys. He is a homosexual man. Duh!) and the Marxist John Berger. It is strong and confident. It is supplicant but also austere. It seeks to help but upon being rejected becomes an enemy.

Wisdom is a spirit, a friend to man, though she will not pardon the words of a blasphemer... (Wisdom 1:6)

Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets: She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, [saying], How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge? Turn you at my reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you. Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you. (Proverbs 1:20)


But the feminine is also erotic. Though the haters of humanity such as Berger, and Bartkey and Coward seem to despise femininity for this attribute, I do not even want to begin to contemplate the joylessness life would hold if the feminine were shorn of her eroticism.

Returning to the Book of Wisdom, we read “Wisdom is bright, and does not grow dim. By those who love her, she is readily seen, and found by those who look for her. Quick to anticipate those who desire her, she makes herself known to them.” (Wisdom 6:12-13) This is precisely the woman described in the selection by Bartkey. As she sits waiting for the train, she does not show herself to strangers. Her face is bright. She is not hiding. She is noticed. But she does not spread out like a man when she sits because the vision of her beauty is reserved for her lover…

“I am my Beloved’s,
and his desire is for me.
Come, my Beloved,
Let us go to the fields.
We will spend all night in the villages,
And in the morning we will go the vineyards.
We will see the vines budding,
If their blossoms are opening,
If the pomegranate trees are in flower.
Then I shall give you my love.”

What do we see here? We see the same femininity in this woman (in the poem she is called the bride) that we saw in Wisdom. Here is the opposite of being scorned. Here the feminine is embraced and both the beloved and the bride find joy. The war between masculinity and femininity seen (or imagined for their own nefarious purposes) by the feminists is not necessary. But gender is necessary.

“Both bodies were naked,and both free from any sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. That, one would have expected. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try – Ransom had tried a hundred times – to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Peralandra like an accentual, melody. He thinks that the first held something in his lands like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms turned toward him. But I don’t know that any of these attempts has helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is the reality, and more fundamental than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of he things that have feminine gender, there are many others. And masculine and feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic cratures arerather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine.” == C.S. Lewis, Peralandra