The Best American Essays 2023 by Vivian Gornick

Author:Vivian Gornick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Gender: A Melee

Laura Kipnis

from Liberties

The king was pregnant.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

It turns out the supply-side cheerleader George Gilder was more correct than not when he forecast, in the poignantly titled Sexual Suicide in 1973, that women playing at being men would spell the collapse of Western civilization and probably the social order itself. What he meant by sexual suicide was “the abolition of biological differences between men and women”—in his day, feminists demanding paychecks and forcing men to do housework, and thereby selfishly violating the pact they were supposed to be upholding with nature. Nature had endowed humankind with different sorts of bodies, from which different social roles followed: motherhood for some, breadwinning for others. Nature did not intend men to clean toilets! Or women to go to work, needless to say. It wasn’t just childbearing that society required from women; as the morally superior gender we were also meant to dragoon reluctant men into playing patres familias, according to Gilder, luring them into domestic cages like lion tamers at the circus, civilizing their beastly sex drives into socially productive ones. If we shirk the task, everything falls apart. Gay liberation was thus another sore spot in Gilder’s catalog of contemporary woe, a world where women’s charms held no sway and male carnality thus ran amuck.

How vulnerable the “primacy of the biological realm” would turn out to be, how tenuous its hold on the species if each of us had to pledge fealty to the gender binary to keep civilization afloat. How confident can nature’s defenders really be in the selling power of this story? After all, alarm bells aplenty have rung over the last half century yet have thus far failed to herd those renegade female factions back into their kitchens.

And look around now! Gender is more of a clusterfuck than ever, and yes, civilization’s destruction indeed looms nearer: birthrates have dropped below replacement rates around the globe, down four percent in the United States in 2020 alone. Male breadwinner families are on the extinction watch list. And the damned liberationists still aren’t happy. Today’s gender vanguards—trans activists, the “genderqueer”—want to sever the link between biology and gender entirely, letting men become women and women men, surgically acquiring penises and cooches, rebranding important body parts with gender neutral language (“front hole” for vagina), not to mention poisoning innocent children with cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers. (Far more patriotic to mow them down with assault weapons, at least according to the child welfare experts of the GOP.) Some members of the younger generation want to abolish gender entirely, demanding the whole English language be revised to accommodate them and their impossible-to-remember pronoun preferences.

Where gender distinctions blur, monsters seem to lurk, like those snarling creatures at the edge of the world on sixteenth-century maps warning sailors away from the abyss. I was thinking about the monster problem recently while reading an interesting history tracing the relation between the invention of endocrinology and the growing demand for gender reassignment treatments.

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