For many years now, I have pondered the use of the word “gender.” Before I began my work on same-sex attraction and wrote the book One Man, One Woman, I spent 9 years studying “gender” and wrote a book on the subject (The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality).
Originally, “sex” was an inclusive term, which referred not only to the biological reality of male and female, but to everything it meant to be a man and a woman. “Gender” was used to refer to words. It is interesting to note that Hebrew, the language chosen by God to first reveal himself, is a highly gendered language, every noun, pronoun, adjective, article, and even verbs in the 2nd and 3rd persons singular and plural are either masculine or feminine (there is no neuter). In Greek, nouns and adjectives are masculine, feminine, or neuter.
Controversial sexologist John Money introduced the idea that sex was composed of a number of factors, including genitals, hormones, orientation, and identity. He used the tragedy of birth defects which make it difficult to determine sex (disorders of sexual development—DSD) as an example of how sex could be differ from “gender.” He promoted the idea that a child who was genetically male, but had genital deformities could be surgically altered to appear female and be successfully raised as a girl. His great case—the twin David Reimer—was later proved a fraud. David never adjusted to a female gender identity. The practice of taking children with DSD (previously called Intersex or Hermaphrodite) and surgically treating the deformity without regard to their actual sex has been widely criticized—particularly by the victims—and has now been largely abandoned. (more...)
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