How To Practice Sex Equality
on breaking through the next barrier
The Three Principles of Practicing Sex Equality
Treat everyone the same…
…until you learn how they like to be treated, then treat them as they like.A person’s sex is none of your business…
…except relating to some types of medical care, or when seeking a partner for procreation. ……. and maybe sports?Not everyone will agree, and even when they do agree, this can be difficult. Be nice.
No exceptions to being nice
Principle #1: Treat everyone the same…
Treat every new person you meet the same, whether they are female or male and whether you are female or male, until you learn they want to be treated in a particular way.
It’s simple to say, “treat everyone the same”, but it’s difficult to demonstrate that principle except by many examples of getting it wrong.
For example:
Don’t shake hands with men you’ve just met and then hug women you’ve just met, or vice versa. If you’re a hugger then hug new people of either sex, if you’re a shaker then shake their hand, if you're a fist-bumper then fist bump, and so on. You shouldn’t assume what greeting they prefer based on some correlation between their sex and yours, so do what you prefer.
However, if they’re sticking out their hand or first, or leaning in for a hug, then they have clearly telegraphed their preference, so follow their lead. Once they are a friend of yours, you will learn which greating they prefer, and greet accordingly.1Ladies first? Nope. Open doors for women but not for men? Nope. Pink and flowery for girls and blue and sporty for boys (unless you know that’s what the child likes)? Nope? Send women to the kitchen and men to the smoking room? Nope.
Compliment the hair or clothing of one sex but not the other? Nope. Accept compliments from one sex but not the other? Nope. Tell a joke to one sex that you would not tell the other? Nope. Be offended by a joke or any statement or action from one sex but not by the other? Nope.2
For someone you know nothing about, other than you can probably guess their sex, it’s nice to avoid using works like “sir”, “ma’am”, “miss”, “mister”, “lady”, “that dude over there”, etc… Even words like “he” or “she” are not ideal.
But if you do use these sexed titles, don’t worry about it. They’re just small words with smaller meaning. A worse mistake, for a practicer of sex equality, would be to care which of these terms someone uses for you. Whether someone calls you “sir” or “miss” shouldn’t bother an equalist at all.3Don’t invite people to your book club or poker night based on their sex. Invite them because you enjoy time with them (or because they always pay for drinks, or they are lousy at poker and you want to get all their money).
Don’t get angry at someone for peaking down your loose shirt when you bend down in front of their desk, just because they’re one sex and not the other. Everyone is going to peak down your shirt in this situation.
Sex Equality Quiz: Did you assume the one in the loose shirt was one sex and not the other?
The #1 most important person in “treat everyone the same, whether male or female” is yourself.
There is a lot of pervasive pressure to behave in certain ways based on your sex. So much pressure, and it is so common, that it’s difficult to even notice. It takes time to get to know yourself independent of expectations. The clothes you wear, the education and career (or non-career) you pursue, the language you use, the games you play, should not be dictated by your sex, but by what interests you and what feels good.
At the end of the day, don’t judge yourself on sex-based values. A woman who focuses on pursuing monetary gain is just as worthwhile as a man who does the same, and a man who focuses on looking beautiful has just as much intrinsic value as a woman who does the same.
Principle #2: A person’s sex is none of your business…
A person’s sex is none of your business. If you practice sex equality it doesn’t matter what their sex is, because it won’t alter how you treat them, so why even ask? Why even care?
Consider this common question to new parents: “girl or boy?” Does it matter what the answer is? If they give one answer, and not the other, are you going to follow up with “That’s too bad. Better luck next time”? No, of course not. Whatever answer they give to the “boy or girl” question, you’re going to follow up with “congratulations”. So why bother asking?4 <weather> If the parents want you to know the sex of their child, boy oh boy will they tell you!
What applies to the baby (“boy or girl?”) applies to the rest of the lifespan. As a practicer of sex equality, you are not going to treat someone differently based on their sex, so don’t bother asking—it’s none of your business.
If you’re creating a form, and have no reason to know a person’s sex (which is true in nearly all cases), why would you bother to put a “sex” checkbox there? Do you actually have some reason to use that data? Just don’t do it.5
If you’re assigning seating around a dining table, don’t purposely alternate male and female. Stick to the old rule of seat assignments based on encouraging lively conversation--but not too lively.
In employee relations, are you going to base pay, promotions, assignments, or termination based on sex? Of course not (anyway, none of that is legal). Don’t ask about sex before calling them in for an interview, or deciding whether to hire them, or where to seat them. Don’t enact a dress code, whether formal or informal, that differs by sex. In fact, just never ever ask for any employee’s sex because it’s none of your business’s business.6
For nearly every rule, there are exceptions. In some cases, you actually do need to care about sex:
In some types of medical care, it is important to know the sex of the patient. For example: interpretation of some blood values7, calculating risks of some medications or procedures to potential fetuses or even whether current or future pregnancy is a consideration, whether to bother testing for cervical cancer or prostate cancer, whether or where to place shielding during x-rays, calculating risk and cost-benefit ratio of certain treatments (e.g., testing for breast cancer8), and so on—all of these are valid reasons to know a patient’s sex.
Related to medical care might be “identification of a body”. If you’re in an occupation that must identify a body (e.g., Quincy, Medical Examiner or any of a dozen beautiful investigators on any of a dozen CSI or NCIS shows), knowing peoples’ sex can simplify the corpse identification, so it is part of your business. For this reason of identification, I have no objection to “sex” remaining alongside footprints on birth records (it also makes it easy to quickly catch 50% of the cases of babies going home with the wrong parents).Human procreation still requires that at least one male and one female be involved. So, for the purposes of procreation, whether it be via syringes and tubes, or via old-fashioned bow chicka wow wow, it is important to know the sex of your potential procreation partner. It is perfectly acceptable for a practicer of sex equality to inquire from the outset as to the sex of the party of the second part in considering a procreative partnership, but it is not acceptable that whoever pays for dinner on that first date be based on the sex of that payer.
Sports is a tricky subject for me (I almost decided not to write about it), because I don’t spend much time playing or watching them and I have difficulty fathoming why entire bars, TV channels, or news sections are devoted to sports. But I know enough to understand that there is much more excitement in a close game than in a mismatched competition where the outcome is certain—I’ve been at baseball parks where the half the spectators leave, innings before the end, if the score is too unbalanced. I also know, because I’m not an idiot, that in many sports males have a clear advantage over females. So, for the purpose of keeping competitions interesting, it makes sense to segregate the top ranks by sex. Let the top males compete against the top males, and top females compete against the top females (and keep those beers and spicy-hot wings a-comin’).
It’s clear that a practicer of sex equality should not be asking people’s sex, absent the above exceptions. But what should you do when other people are asking your sex? It depends on what kind of mood you’re in and whether you want to cause tension (see principle #3 below). But if you have the energy for a teaching moment and are feeling ornery, you might try this:
Q: Are you male or female?
A: Are you taking medical care of me?
Q: No.
A: Am I about to compete in an Olympic weightlifting competition?
Q: No.
A: Are you hoping to make a baby with me?
Q: No.
A: Then it’s none of your business whether I am male or female.Principle #3: Not everyone will agree, and even when they do agree, this can be difficult. Be nice.
I’m being overly generous in saying that not everyone agrees that we should practice sex equality. The truth that a whole lot of people do not agree. Even if they say they’re a proponent of sex equality, they will at best mean that we should treat males and females “separate but equal”; and at worst mean that they have an axe to grind, perceive one sex as having the short end of the stick, and want to beat the other sex with the rest of that stick.
It's perfectly understandable that most people aren’t comfortable with practicing sex equality. We come from two billion years of sex diversion among living organisms on this planet, and it is extremely common that sexually reproducing animals have very different roles based on their sex.
You wouldn’t expect an enlightened beehive to elect a male as their queen, or a male black widow to bite of the head of its female mate, or a female peacock to spread its tail and dance for a partner in reproduction, or female dogs to raise one leg while peeing while the males dogs squat (actually, this happens a lot), or a male grizzly bear to raise its cubs, or a female seahorse to raise its fry.
Sex-based stereotyping is strong in most mammalian species such as ours. So, you might argue, practicing sex equality is unnatural. And you’d be right, it is unnatural, as are so many things we humans have learned to do that are unnatural: we wear clothing, we go to school, we treat illnesses with medicine, we use money and we voluntarily provide some of that money to charitable organizations to help people we’ll never meet, we settle arguments through contract and litigation (and more of that money), we sit on couches writing essays on our computer while a cat scratches our leg demanding attention.
Which is all to say that the practice of sex equality is unnatural and difficult for most people, and sex equality goes against many traditions, religious beliefs, social mores, current laws, and even rules of grammar. I’ll argue later in this essay for why sex equality is worth practicing and promoting, despite these many barriers, but for now just know that billions of people are not yet ready to practice what I preach.
So, BE NICE:
Don’t “correct” every time you witness common sex-differentiated treatment.
Be an example, not an ass
Why Sex Equality is a Worthwhile Practice
I believe that every person deserves an equal opportunity to flourish as their best, unique, self. If you treat a person based on a learned template of differences for how someone of their sex should be treated, then you are pruning their possible branches of growth. You are stuffing them into a mold that may not fit them.
Let everyone flourish as their best, unique, self. Leave no opportunity off the table for anyone.
But perhaps that sex stereotype does fit them closely (because they don’t practice sex equality or maybe it just plain fits). Does treating them in sex-neutral ways diminish their choice? No. They remain free to behave in whatever ways suit them. You’ve taken nothing away from them.
You may think, “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Surely, I’m not putting someone in shackles simply for following a social nicety.” Yes, but every time you default to those “social niceties” you are adding support to stereotypes. For example, if you expect a man to pay for a meal simply because he’s a man and not a woman, you are are supporting not only the idea that men should support women, but that men should earn more money. Likewise for expectations on opening a door, who makes the coffee, who holds the baby, who orders dinner first, etc…
Ultimately, it comes down this: What are your values? Do you think there should be equality between the sexes? Your practice must match your values.
Historical Case Study
Problems of sex inequality have been around for a long long time. Let’s take a page right out of history and examine the case of one modern stone-age family, the Flintstones. Perhaps you’ve watched one of the many documentaries about this happy couple:
But they weren’t always this happy. Often there were serious problems:
Let’s examine how sex inequality made them both unhappy and simmering with resentment, thinking they’ve been treated unfairly.
Yes, they were both comfortable wearing miniskirts, which is a great start, but that’s where social equality norms ended:
What might they be thinking in the angry picture:
Wilma:
Why must I stay home all day, cleaning, making meals, taking care of Pebbles, relying on Fred for any money with no income of my own, trapped in this house all day and no appreciation for all my hard, unpaid, work! And this damn string of stones around my neck, like I’m a slave. Oh to have the privileges Fred has, as a man, out in the world each day, getting all that money, those long three-rocktini lunches, cruising home in the car (and getting exercise while he’s at it). He says it’s hard work at the quarry, but I know the brontosaurus is really doing all the work. A career, a paycheck, he’s got it all. I wish I got to have the career while and he had to slave away at home all day.
Fred:
Why must I go to work every day, taking the long running drive through traffic, sucking up to the boss, risking life and limb on a brontosaurus for a measly paycheck that all goes for her to spend (no money of my own), just praying for the end-of-day. And this damn tie around my neck, like a slave. Oh to have the privileges Wilma has, as a women, who gets to stay home all day, playing with Pebbles, relaxing with bon bons while watching soap operas. She says housework is hard but the modern household dinosaur-appliances do all the work. Lounging around the house, getting my paycheck, she’s got it all. I wish I got to stay home and she had to slave away at work all day. Yaba Daba Poo!
I don’t know if Wilma or Fred would be any happier if they switched roles. But I do feel they should have equal opportunities, if only so they could understand how much the other’s life sucks, and commiserate, and grow closer.
But males and females are different! Don’t pretend they’re not.
Males and females are different, on average, that is true. We’ll use the example of children, dolls, and balls. Girls are more likely to enjoy playing with dolls, and boys are more likely to enjoy throwing balls. Again, this is on overage (some preferences are reversed, and most children will like both and dolls, just in varying amounts).
Are these differences a result of nature or nurture? I don’t know. I have plenty of theories, but they’re just theories and in any case it doesn’t matter. As a practicer of sex equality, even if it turns out that 95% of girls are natural doll players and 95% of boys are natural ball throwers, I will give them equal opportunity to do either, because then 100% of the children will get the amount of doll playing and ball throwing (and doll throwing and ball playing) that suits them.
Right now we see a lot of differences, on average, between girls and boys, and women and men, in how they act, what education (e.g. HEAL vs STEM) and careers they pursue or don’t, their hobbies, interests, books, their levels of achievement and failure, and so much. When practicing sex equality catches on will we still see these same differences? Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it will be great progress to know each individual is free to pursue their own path.
Why don’t more people support sex equality, part 1.
The Reachable Normies:
The majority of people in modern society aren’t particular opposed to sex equality, they just haven’t really thought enough about it to notice the issues. They’ve got other things on their mind. I’ll call them the Normy Majority.
Our civilization has a long tradition of assigning people, from birth, into different roles, based on their sex. Who does the hunting, who does the foraging, who watches the children, who fights off the bears, who moves into who’s cave… I’m quite sure that traditional roles arose partly pattern matching: boys tend to throw rocks more than girls, so boys are painted with a broad brush as “rock throwers”, so when there’s a boy playing with a rock as if it’s a baby they reflexively say “boy, stop that, treating rocks like babies is girls’ play, you must throw rocks instead”. Some traditional expectation also arose from historically-relevant physical limits (women, who were pregnant again and again, were not the best in the tribe to run 50 miles exhausting their prey).
Fast forward 10,000 years, and even though society’s needs are vastly different, we’ve carried on imposing those old sex roles. It’s a tradition. Most Normies don’t bother to question tradition. But I believe that when sex-based traditions are questioned, or just calmly violated, the Normy Majority aren’t too opposed to switching. Traditions change all the time (when’s the last time the family gathered around the radio for that special 7 show). There is hope for Normies.
The Unpersuadable Extremes:
There are two groups, on opposite ends of the spectrum, where we may be wasting our time talking about sex equality. These groups don’t tend to agree on much of anything except that sex equality is a bad thing, and they do think about this a lot. I will call them the Sexist Right and the Sexist Left.
The Sexist Right, mostly Traditional Religious, believe that God designed men to be one way and women to be the other, with men having one set of rights and responsibilities, and women another set of rights and responsibilities, and that’s just that natural God-given order of things. Women behave like this, men behave like that. Men are to bring home the bacon, women are to fry it up in a pan. Women’s job is to protect the children; men’s job is to protect the women. The sexes aren’t equal because that’s how God made it. End of story!
The Sexist Left, mostly Radical Feminists9, believe that society is designed, by men, to benefit men and to oppress women, with men having all the rights. Women are the victims, men are the perpetrators. In this view there is no equality and to act like there can be equality is just to perpetuate the inequality. The only way to even get close to equality in such an unequal system is to give women additional rights and support, but without taking away their role of protecting the children. Society’s job is to protect the women (mostly from men).
On both extremities, these groups agree that women are superior in morality and purity, but fragile and need protection.
How to change their minds?
The two extremes, Religious Right and Radical Feminists, are not going to change—they have ideological convictions impervious to questioning. As a proponent of sex equality, you should continue the practice yourself, but you’re wasting your breath trying to sway those on these ideological extremes.
Save your gentle persuasion for the Normy Majority in the middle, who don't practice sex equality because they’ve never bothered to really think about it.
Why I maintain hope
I believe (paraphrasing paraphrasers who have come before me) that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward equality.
Consider who had rights (whether via law or norms) historically, and how that has advanced over time so more and more of us are treated equally.
Looking back far enough, hundreds of thousands of years, our small societies weren’t that much different than mountain gorillas, where only one person (the alpha male) had real rights (along with a whole lot of responsibilities). Maybe a couple of male lieutenant males assisted. This was followed by a lot of females who had almost no rights except to be protected by that alpha. The rest of the adult males had zero rights, were killed or exiled form the community, and unlikely to ever procreate.10
Fast forward to later civilizations when a single king (occasionally a queen stand-in) was the only person with rights. Then came things like The Magna Carta to extend rights to nobility, the Bill of Rights to extend some basic rights to many (especially landowners and not to slaves), the Rights of Man, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which in 1948 at the United Nations set to define a large set of rights to everyone.11
Not all of these rights were given equally to both men and women, either legally or via social norms. For example, voting and property rights were often given to men before women, and women had rights to be cared for that were not extended to men. It’s been good to see these rights (and responsibilities) progressively extend closer and closer to equality.
I maintain hope that the long arc, which went from all rights taken by just a few to more and more rights extended equally to many, will continue in this direction.
The achievement for sex equality is not just hopeful, it is expected… eventually.
Why don’t more people support sex equality, part 2. We hate it when women get hurt.
In the previous section I spoke optimistically that societies will come around to supporting sex equality, eventually. But, to be honest, there’s one issue that may prove to be insurmountable. People, all people, Left, Right, and Normie, simply hate it when women get hurt. I don’t know if it’s wired into our nature, or just a very strong social norm, but we feel a special sorrow when harm comes to women, and we take extra measures to prevent such harm.
Consider, the outcry for justice when a woman is killed walking in a park--the marches, the editorials, the cries for men to do better--when 10 men may have been killed in the same park with nary a peep. Consider the silence when boys were killed again and again by Boko Haram versus the international outrage when they switched to kidnapping girls. Consider crisis after crisis when we hear tragic reports of “women and children killed” even as the number of men killed is almost always larger than either women or children--why is it not reported as “men and children killed” or just “people killed”? Consider the number of government and charitable causes dedicated to women’s health.12 Consider conscription of men into wars. Consider just about every movie or show you’ve ever watched where a woman hitting or throwing things at a man is played for humor, while the man doing the same to a woman, even in response, is a sudden moment of dread as the soundtrack shifts to a minor keys and dissonance.
I’m so pleased that more and more I know husbands who stay home and take care of the kids while their wives go to work all day. But even in those cases they are much more protective of their daughters, and worried that their daughters will get hurt, when away from home, than they are about their sons getting hurt, despite any statistical comparisons showing the opposite.
But women are smaller. Why not care more about women getting hurt?
First, empathy for suffering should not depend on size. Pain is pain whether you’re 4 feet tall or 7 feet. Second, we’re not living in times of lions and rocks, or clubs and spears, where the only chance to survive is brute strength. Instead, while we’re treating women as less-able adults physically we’re also treating them as less-able adults mentally, economically, and psychologically (outrage over women getting physically hurt, compared to men getting physically hurt, also applies to the unbalanced response concerning mental and psychological mistreatment).
We’re treating women like children! Children haven’t yet developed the full skills to care for themselves, and so we don’t treat children equal to adults and we should and do provide extra protection. If you think women cannot develop skills equal to men, then it does makes sense to treat women with kid gloves. But then you can never expect sex equality. Those kid gloves do protect a person from harm, and from suffering failure, but they also hinder the person from achieving their full potential (because of the risks inherent in striving).
To practice sex equality, you must believe that women are as capable as men. Believe that women are strong (really strong, not feminist-slogan strong). Believe that women can do the dangerous jobs, get the hazard pay, and sometimes die as a result. These beliefs are not compatible with the belief that women need extra help, or that a woman harmed is any worse than a man harmed. 13
Consider “don’t hit girls”. Then try, instead, to consider “don’t hit anyone”. Is it possible?
My history, my bias
To understand my viewpoint, especially if it is much different than yours, it may be useful to know my background. We’re all develop biases based on the particular circumstances we live through. These are some of my circumstances and moments that shaped my views on sex equality.
My first defining sex-equality moment was in first grade, when there was a girl “Brenda” whose name was too close to mine, “Brent”, for my developing mind. When the teacher would call out “Brenda” I would sometimes respond and then I felt that everyone was laughing at me. I was so embarrassed to be mistaking my name for a girl’s name that I asked that my name be changed to “Architect”, because that would leave no room for mis-hearing (and because I was a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright due to my understanding that Wright had dropped out of school in 2nd grade and that seemed like something to aspire to). Being called “Architect” never caught on and was even more a source of embarrassment. Then I had an a-ha moment where I realized it was silly to care if a name was for girls or boys, names were just sounds and didn’t really mean anything. Furthermore, girls and boys weren’t all that different and so why should I care.
My childhood was in the USA during the 1960s and 1970s, a time and place of “the women’s movement” and rapid changes removing barriers (both legal and social) restricting women. This gibed really well with my post-“Architect” way of sex-equality thinking. I made a point from very young to try to treat everyone the same and to remove barriers wherever I found them, with some successes give me pride. Some examples: In fourth grade I personally worked to de-segregate the playground by taking the bold step of standing in the four-square line. Everyone knew that foursquare was only for girls (as we all knew that dodge ball was only for boys) but there were no actual rules against it. We had influential “Ms” teachers by then who supported me, and so soon there were a lot of boys playing foursquare with the girls and soon a lot of girls playing dodge ball with the boys (to be honest, I liked dodge ball better, but it was the principle of the thing). By middle school I was in the first small group of boys to take a cooking class, while one of my friends was in the first group of girls to take shop. In high school I dared to wear flip flops at school, where before only girls wore open-toed shoes. My flip-flops, turned out not to violate any written rules so soon lots of boys were doing it. In college I worked to get our student coop to stop setting aside room assignments as either “male” or “female”. And when I was newly married, and my wife was annoyed that she had to wear a skirt instead of pants to work, I encourage her to wear pants one day if she wanted to and it turned out to be just another sexist barrier that needed someone to break just one time for it to catch on. These were all wins for sex equality.
I didn’t always win. For example, one time in elementary school I walked into the girls bathroom, without thinking about it, until I looked around and noticed something was different. I didn’t notice the lack of urinals, at first, but I did notice that it was clean, oh so clean, and the bathroom stalls all had doors. Doors! Imagine, a school bathroom with doors on the stalls. Glorious! When I brought this discrepancy to the school’s attention (multiple times and probably in a very whiney manner) they said that the boys’ room was dirty because boys were just dirtier and that the girls’ room had door stalls because girls need their privacy. Sex equality was already something we heard a lot about, but that’s when I first started to understand that it was in the sense of “giving women equal rights to men” and not in the sense of “giving men equal rights to women”. You may say that these two phrases technically say the same thing, but do they really? It also could be that if I were a female I would not be biased toward noticing the problem between those two phrases.
Another loss that irks me even to this day was from when the Equal Rights Amendment was close to being passed, and our teacher (in a religious-based classroom) was passionately advocating against its passage because with the ERA her four daughters (she had only daughters) would be drafted into the military and might be killed. Neither the girls in the class nor the boys (who ourselves were a year or two from being legally required to register for the draft) said a word against the teacher’s statement. Worst of all, I said nothing.
It isn’t just my history, my time and place of development, that gives me bias. Being a male (did I mention that I’m male?) surely gives me a bias. My male bias may explain why when I picture the history of sex-based oppression, I don’t just picture the boardroom of men, but also the elevator packed with coal miners.
Having acknowledged my bias, I hope to overcome it. For example, I feel equal empathy with every one of these characters, downtrodden by their various sex-based roles:
I’ve had two primary careers. My first, and longest, career was in computer technology, which was dominated primarily by men. In that career I learned that groups of men are sexist, objectifying pigs. When a small-waisted young woman walks by they will talk about her, to each other and sometimes flirtingly to her. When the men learn one of them is dating, they will ask first about her age and looks, and whether she has children—signs of her fertility.
My second career was as a nurse, which is dominated primarily by women, both in school14 and at work. In that career I learned that groups of women are sexist, objectifying pigs. When a tall man in a uniform walks by they will talk about her, to each other and sometimes flirtingly to him. When the women learn one of them is dating, they first ask about what job he has, car he drives, and where he took her to dinner--signs of his wealth.
Objection: neither clearly male nor female
Some people are born not clearly male or female. It’s pretty rare, but, if you’ve been following along, these intersex conditions are immaterial to someone practicing sex equality. You’ll treat them the same in any case.
In those exceptions listed under principle #2, it will be useful to know about this condition. For example, a doctor might see a note in the record about something that is not WNL (within normal limits), such as a rare gene variation, that could possibly be important in medical treatment.
It’s similar to a person born with one or three kidneys, or a heart on the right side instead of the left15, or has had their gallbladder removed, or can or cannot process lactose. None of these makes a person less human, or means you’ll treat them differently, except in the few cases where this difference is important.
Rights? Wrong!
I hear calls for Women’s Rights and Men’s Rights, but I reject them both.
If any right doesn’t apply to everybody, then it’s not a right, it’s a privilege.
The Equal Rights Amendment, which I mentioned earlier, failed because both sides, women and men, became aware of the privileges they could lose if ERA was passed. That saddens me.
Gender
Before about 10 years ago, “gender” was a synonym for “sex”, to avoid saying “sex” in polite company16. In the new definition, “gender” has become elevated to a critical aspect of a person’s identity, where that identity means that a person will conform to the sex-based stereotypes of their chosen gender (stereotypes of hair stye, clothing, voice, and even name).
This new gender way of promoting conformity to stereotypes is not progressive, as its proponents believe, but a regressive trend that is a step backward from sex equality. At best, new gender will be remembered as a small blip on the road to progress, because it at least it let’s people choose their conformity instead of being born into it. But gender, whether cis- or trans- or any other new creation, is still a confining identity instead of an unbounded opportunity.
I find it easiest to avoid using the term “gender” at all, anymore, until this trend peters out as a last gasp against sex equality.
The Pronoun Problem
English has gendered third person singular pronouns (e.g. “she” & “he”). Other languages, such as Finnish, do not17. Most conversations do not involve third person singular pronouns, but when they do it is a problem, I admit, because it breaks the practice of sex equality.
It’s impractical for us all to switch to Finnish, so other solutions have been promoted. New words, such as “ze”, have not caught on. Repurposing the third person plural pronouns (“they” and “them”) have become surprisingly popular with the new gender crowd, so it’s OK to thank them for that imperfect solution and move on.
Personally, I prefer you use my name (everybody does) but if you can’t remember my name (I probably have trouble remembering yours, too), then any filler will do (“he”, “she”, “them”, “it”, “it’s-it”, “customer”, “ma’am”, “sir”, “nurse”18, “patient”), just please don’t call me late for dinner (ha ha ha ha ha I am soooooo funny).
Segregated Spaces
I sometimes think about how space aliens would view humans, because they would come with no preconceptions. When observing differences in the sexes19, I think the thing that would confuse space aliens most would be that we have separate rooms for defecation. They would examine our different anatomies (it’s always anal probes with cheeky aliens, isn’t it), and scratch their heads (or their antennae or their thought-tentacles or whatever it is they scratch when their confused) and wonder why we would need separate rooms.
I find it weird, too, but this isn’t a fight I want to have yet. I invoke my right to The Serenity Prayer and accept this, along with changing rooms, as things I cannot change (yet). Still, if they’re going to be separate, could someone go back to my elementary school and put doors on the boys’ bathroom stalls to make them separate but equal?
Clothing
Dress to suit the weather—layers if you’re unsure. Too much constriction is bad for digestion. Polyester feels gross. Pockets are good for carrying things. Avoid skirts and dresses if you think you might be in a battle and haven’t learned to gird your loins. Hats and sunglasses can protect you in bright sun. If clothing has a designer name or a logo promoting any product, they should be paying you to wear it. Multi-colored clothes are great for hiding spilled food; you can wear them for days without anyone noticing they’re dirty. If your clothes smell gross, you’ve worn them too long.
What does any of this have to do with sex equality? Nothing.
Finally, have fun
This essay has been kind of a downer for me, and it makes practicing sex equality sound like a bummer. But it can be fun, which just a little effort. Theorists say that humor results when you put a little twist on what’s expected and provide a small tension that is quickly released with no real harm done (doesn’t sound funny when we spell it out, but these are the small ingredients of a big laugh riot).
Challenging sex norms, without being a d-bag about it, has all these ingredients of humor, and so can be fun. Wear some clothes not stereotyped to your sex. If you're a man then speak right up when the waiter says “ladies first”. If you’re a woman, rush around the car to open a man’s door. Compliment people on their “woman-bun” or “man-beard”. Talk about the nice “female nurse” and inspire people by saying “well-behaved men rarely make history”. When Scattergories asks for a boy’s name starting with “B” say “Beth” and challenge any challengers. Finally, there’s no end of fun answers when someone asks for your preferred pronouns (e.g. “I’m old fashioned. I prefer thee, thou, and thine.”).
Try it. You just might nudge a mind a tiny bit in the right direction. The worst that could happen is people stop hanging out with you and you get more alone time to write essays. Like this one.
Footnotes
Thanks to markbaland for the Yin-Yang Smiley
For a while tried out a stance that let the other person choose their own greeting. My right hand would be extended for a shake, left hand for a fist bump, both arms curved out for a hug, head slight raised for a head-bob, hips slightly bent for a bow, and lips pursed for a kiss. Whatever greeting they preferred, I was ready. I called it the shaka-bumpa-huga-bowsa-bobba-smooch. I thought it was funny. Few others agreed.
And so I was delighted by this video of a teacher standing outside the classroom door with a picture of greeting options. When a kid points to one of the pictures that’s the greeting they get. This doesn’t mean I’m going to walk around with this chart in my pocket, but don’t think I haven’t thought about it.
It is so easy to take offense. Social media was recently filled with a video of a woman in a big fancy hat and scant clothing (surely inadequate for the cold weather) walking down the street. Every comment I saw was of the sort “why can’t a woman enjoy a walk in a nice outfit without every man staring at her?”. No comments, except the one I wrote (of course I wrote a comment) mentioned that every women was also staring at her.
Likewise, it’s fair to take offense at being called a “dick” or “twat” or other sex-based pejorative, but an equalist would not use either term, preferring instead the universal “asshole”. Better still, have some fun and make a term your own. For myself, I usually fall back on the classic, sex-agnostic “D-bag”.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” is the equivalent of “how about that weather?” or “how was your flight?”. Nobody really cares about your weather or flight, but they have to say something. What something should be said to new parents, to replace “is it a boy or girl?”, is one of the great unresolved conundrums of practicing sex equality.
An increasing number of businesses and government agencies, and even laws, require knowing sex and/or gender. If it’s required but irrelevant (it’s usually irrelevant), you probably can usually get away leaving the field optional or having a “decline” option. Bonus points if you put “decline” as the first option. And if you absolutely must comply, you can still see to it that your organization ignores that information in it’s day to day activities unless it’s truly useful (see principle #2 exceptions).
There are valid reasons to want to know the ratio of males and females among your employees. Most importantly, if the ratio is very imbalanced, you might say to yourself: “I wonder if we’re doing something that keeps us from attracting candidates of the other sex? Fixing that would maximize the potential pool of excellent employees.”
But to make hiring decisions based on sex is immoral to anyone practicing sex equality (and is also illegal).
I am a male and worked for the last few years in the predominantly female field of nursing (after over 30 years in the predominantly male field of computer software). There were some shifts, when I was working nights, that I was the only male . If hiring were based on trying to balance the number of male and female nurses, most of the nurses in that hospital would not have been eligible for hiring, and so there would not have been enough nurses to care for all patients and surely some would have died unnecessarily. So making hiring decisions based on sex does not just violate sex-equality morality, it violates basic morality about the value of human life.
The nearby blood lab, where I go for blood tests, recently changed their online form to add “gender” in addition to the previous “sex” field. With the “sex” field they added a lot of commentary explaining why it matters to know whether you are male or female (because it really does affect the evaluation of your blood labs and sometimes which labs are done). I’m pretty sure that the “gender” field is only there to give the people who are gender fans something to check.
Breast cancer is more than 100 times more common in women than in men, but men with breast cancer have higher mortality rates after receiving the diagnosis (partly due to being diagnosed later). Mammograms have risks and cost money. If you're a doctor or insurance company, would you recommend that men and women both have the same mammogram schedule?
I puzzled over the term Radical Feminist, because there are so many branches of feminism and of post-modern labels. Most amusingly I considered the label Guardianistas, as in “like a writer for The Guardian”. This comes from the popular parlor game, The Guardian, in which one person gives information from a recent news event, and the other players compete to come up with a headline and summary for why this event is most harmful to women and/or People of Color (bonus points if you include both). For example, when it is announced that 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the recent war, The Guardian would (and did) write something like “Ukrainian war especially hard on women… because it is mostly women who have to live in mourning without their spouses”.
I often wonder how far we really have come from the comparison with mountain gorillas. Now, as then, the relatively few with the absolute most power and influence tend to be men (e.g. the silverback or top politicians and CEOs), and the relatively many with the least power also tend to be men (e.g. the incarcerated and homeless), with women in the middle of the power hierarchy (e.g. mothers in charge of the offspring). The differences aren’t as extreme as they used to be, but they still exist.
The UN Declaration on Human Rights is advanced in its equal treatment of the sexes. There is one carveout, though, mentioning special rights of “motherhood” that stands out. It is not clear if this only refers to the biological early phases of motherhood, or that through the life of a child the mothers have special rights. This interpretation might not have been too weird in 1948, but today it’s is an irritant to a practicer of equal rights. So it’s good to see that in more recent documents, such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (ratified by every nation except the USA), the term sex-neutral “parent” is used throughout, except for a small statement about pre-natal and post-natal health care for mothers, which is completely reasonable.
Halfway between the 1948 Declaration on Human Rights and the 1990 Convention on the Rights of this Child, was the 1974 Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict. Would the UN of 1990 have made such a declaration about the “need to provide special protection of women”? Would an advocate of sex equality declare that women need special protection?
I was recently in a group discussing whether we should direct our charitable giving to an organization whose goal was to provide excellent healthcare to everyone in a region, and who planned to attain the goal by providing health care for women and children. When I pointed out that their plan was antithetical to their goal, that “everyone” should not mean “everyone except one carved-out segment based on sex”, the rest of the group (all women, mostly recent college graduates) looked at me like I was a nutso looney tune speaking gibberish. I felt like an abolitionist must have felt, maybe 200 or 2,000 years ago, telling the neighbors “I don’t think it’s right to enslave someone just because their skin is a different color or because they happen to have been born in the tribe across the river” while they just stared as if the abolitionist was speaking nutso looney tune gibberish.
It's times like that when I think sex equality is a hopeless goal.
I’m writing this footnote more than four months after writing the essay.
The reason I write essays is not so much that I expect people to read them (thank you, one person who does, if you exist), but to help me solidify ideas. Usually, ideas are a hapless jumble littering my mind until I write them down, and then my mind becomes free to think about other things.
But an unusual thing happened in the middle of writing this essay: A new idea came into existence—new for me, anyway—that, possibly, the most fundamental barrier to achieving sex equality in society is that we hate it when women get hurt. What a delight to have a new idea!
In the four months since forming this new idea, it has taken a strong hold on me and I return to it again and again. Like anyone who has recently converted to a new belief, I’m starting to see its impact everywhere. We hate it when women get hurt starts to explain everything, from laws to wars; from crimes to punishments; from gaps in income, incarceration, lifespan, healthcare, and homelessness to why no early astronauts were women, why The Handmaid’s Tale and A Boy And His Dog evoke such different responses, and why Seinfeld gets a laugh every time Elaine hits a man.
I’m seeing this as such a deeply held belief across societies and times that I’m wondering now if it’s not just cultural, but locked into our DNA. In our distant past, when humans were few and life was nasty, brutish, and short, our species could survive and even multiply with just a few men and many women, but would have quickly gone extinct with only a few women and many men. Like many fellow primates today, the species could survive with a single male for many females. So every female was valuable but almost all males’ lives weren’t worth squat. Furthermore, those females were pregnant a lot, with all the dangers and need for extra protection that pregnancy requires. So it makes sense that a primary goal would have been to keep women safe. We would have otherwise gone extinct.
In our current world, the fundamental rules guiding our survival are very different, but the old instinct to keep females safe, above whatever happens to males, could be simply baked in to our genetic code.
There weren’t recordings made to prove this, but I’ll bet that when humans first began to talk, whether it was 100 thousand or a million years ago, the first word was probably “mama” and the first sentence was likely “don’t hit girls”.
I started taking classes more than 30 years after first graduating college (with a BS in Engineering Physics). A lot had changed in that time. For one example, about 10 elements had been added to the periodic table. For another example, words had taken on totally different meanings; words like equality, diversity, and sexism had new definitions in college classes, quite different than what they’d been my first time around. I’m the kind of student who reads the textbook thoroughly, including tables of data, and the lectures were not matching the data, which I pointed out a few times, until I stopped trying, because I also learned that objective truth had almost completely lost any meaning. Steps forward, steps backward…
One of the most interesting things I learned in anatomy, while studying cadavers, is that almost no body looks, from the inside, exactly like what you see in the anatomy book. It seems like most cadavers have most parts in the most-common places and orientations, but every cadaver has some things that are different.
“Gender” has other, less-common uses, too. “Gender” has long been used to classify nouns in some languages (aka grammatical gender; e.g. “el teléfono” versus “la mesa” in Spanish, because somehow telephones are male and tables are female); and it’s new meaning has been used in esoteric academic writing for a few decades, but that was virtually unknown among the general public. I located a Webster’s Standard Dictionary from 2006 and the word “gender” wasn’t even in that dictionary. Of course, with “gender” missing, it’s no wonder that “transgender” wasn’t there, either--but “transsexual” was.
A few years ago I played with Google Translate to unearth biases in English language, by translating a phrase to Finnish and translating Finnish back to English. Because Finnish has no gendered pronouns, and because Google Translate had learned from absorbing massive amounts of written language to predict what an English writer or speaker would say, it would translate the Finnish non-gendered pronoun into the most expected English gendered pronoun. For example, “she is my doctor” translated to Finnish and back again, became “he is my doctor”. “He is my nurse” became “she is my nurse”. “She robbed a bank” became “he robbed a bank”. “She hit her spouse” became “he hit his spouse”. And so on.
Google fixed this bias problem recently, and now returns two versions of the Finnish to English translation, one with “he” and one with “she”. Good for Google, but bad for this bias-uncovering technique.
Working as a nurse, in nursey scrubs, patients would often call me “sir”, which didn’t bother me much. They would also call me “ma’am” sometimes, which also didn’t bother me much, but usually embarrassed the patient who would then say “I mean, sir”.
We once used a patients bias in their favor. The charge nurse, who we’ll refer to as a “female nurse” for this retelling, said her patient wouldn’t follow the instructions she gave for preparing for morning surgery, and so asked me to give the same instructions because the very old patient would assume that, as a male, I must be a doctor and would take the instruction more seriously. It worked like a charm.
The last time I wrote on this substack was almost three years ago. It was a story about how aliens would view our sex differences. At the time I was experimenting with a sci-fi writing gimmick in which the controlling aliens had always been living among us, almost-invisible, as intelligent communities of web-weaving spiders. I was also thinking a lot at the time about sex differences. I don’t think the gimmick worked, but I feel good about the “MP” versus “BV” (or MoPey BiValve) theory of sex differences that I developed there, and that it can explain so much about the ways societies stereotype the sexes differently, and how each sex stereotypes itself.
In case you don’t want to read the whole post (and you probably shouldn’t), TL;DR: The inquisitive spiders realize humans wants, above all, to be loved. They convince us that males can be loved by demonstrating Money & Power (MP), and females can be loved by demonstrating Beauty and Virtue (BV). Then they sit back and watch their experiment play out to see which group, the MPs or the BVs, come out ahead. They count an equal number of ways in which the MPs come out ahead or the BVs come out ahead, and finally conclude (or at least the reader is meant to conclude) that, because of these rules, it sucks equally to be either.
BTW, why has it been three years since I wrote anything (I hear you asking)? I dunno. I’ve been puttering around. So, for 2025 I made the resolution that I would do one challenging project every month (an essay like this one, a math formulation, a computer program, learn a song on piano, etc…), and it wouldn’t have to be perfect but just something I could do in some spare time each month. It’s already early February and I’m not done with my January essay yet (excuses excuses), and so, so far, the resolution isn’t going great. I’m going to wrap this up and post it however shitty it may be because I need to get going on the February project.