Gender bender: why we would be better off talking only about "sex" and doing away with "gender"

Not all intellectual innovations come to aid knowledge. Not all academic jargon serves the cause of clarification. That much is widely known. However, once adopted by an unknown parcel of the intellectual community interested in the issue at hand, we’re stuck with inadequate jargon for life.

“Evolution” is an example of this bad choice of words in biology. Darwin called it “descent with modification,” while using the root of the term only as a verb (“evolve”) in his magnum opus On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s original phrase, of course, is not as marketable or catchy as “evolution,” so it’s not so surprising the latter term would have been chosen. Some other terms were available, such as marche de la nature from Lamarck, but this one was tainted by what Darwin called Lamarck’s “nonsense.” Many imagine the nonsensical part was the inheritance of contingent traits acquired by the previous generation, but Darwin accepted this part explicitly in the 5th chapter of the Origin. The nonsense, in fact, was a belief that such a march of nature was progressive, that it was steered (by God?) toward perfection and imbued with purpose, of which humanity was a prime example. It’s scientifically nonsensical because “progress” introduces moral, aesthetical norms that nature is not expected to care about. As we know now, evolution has no clear goal. All candidates fail. Complexity? Parasites, especially the ones living inside their hosts, tend to evolve toward simplicity. Survival? As a general case, yes, but natural selection can lead a species to an extremely specialised niche, making it dependent on a state of ecological affairs that can be transient and unstable. Sexual selection can produce ridiculously expensive traits that are gone with the species as soon as environmental conditions change slightly. Extinction is an expected outcome of natural selection, besides adaptation and survival. “Evolution” is a bad choice of terms precisely because the word occupies a semantic space that misleads students into thinking that descent with modification has a goal, and a progressive one. Biology teachers must undo this implication routinely in all languages that use “evolution” and its cognates for the changes biological populations go through as generations come and go.

But it’s done. The choice has been made. Language in general is not engineered, so maybe expecting jargon choice to be wiser is a tad too much. But it’s not too much to wise up about the contingency of the choice of terms.

In what follows I’ll defend that “gender” is a bad choice of terms. It’s worse than the case discussed above because experts themselves are misled by it, not only students. As shown by Craig Bielert and David C. Geary on Quillette, even experts who are studying sex apply “gender” wrongly in its place, and popular English-speaking culture is so enmeshed in this confusion that it looks like we’re returning to a Victorian world where “sex” is a dirty word. These analyses, while being apt at identifying the problem, don’t take the extra step that I’ll take here: to conclude that “gender” is, all things considered, a terrible choice of jargon, an empty vernacular innovation, a buzzword that promotes confusion and obscurity, something we should do away with if there’s still any hope left.

*** This is a teaser for the whole article. Stay tuned for more. ***