Certain issues in our lives are trivial, but triviality requests our attention from time to time. It is thus no fail that this highly cited and influential blog, The Order of Freedom, addresses such trivial questions as how many sexes and how many genders we have. The reason why questions like that, trivial in the beginning, reveals as not so trivial through more serious conceptualisation is an underlying reason for yet another challenge to my readers.
Sex
Regarding sex, two encyclopaedias agree, one top-down Brittanica and another bottom-up Wikipedia.
Sex, the sum of features by which members of species can be divided into two groups—male and female—that complement each other reproductively.
(‘Sex | Definition, Origin, Significance, & Facts | Britannica’ n.d.)
Sex is the trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing animal or plant produces male or female gametes.
(‘Sex, Wkipedia’ 2023)
While several species in nature are isomorphic or isogamous, this plays no role for dimorphic humans, not only in phenotypic appearance but even more on the level of chromosomes with the XY sex-determination system. XX pair defines a female, and XY depicts a male.
That some other chromosomal traits define how much testosterone is produced and thus how much masculinity is expressed in a particular individual only strengthens the scientifically, genetically proven fact stronger. Phenotypic characteristics do not always directly follow the genotype. That some people feel like women in a male body and some like men in women’s body is a necessary consequence of several natural complexities, among them one probably most important, namely that the interplay between genes and phenotypes does not go one direction only, that not only genes express in proteins, but that proteins also affect genes back. However, epigenetics is another proof of the complex play between the two sexes.
The confusion between two sexes that a particular human can experience is thus scientifically proven and recorded from ancient times. Different treatments for those suffering exist that all prove deviation from the principal law of the two sexes.
How, then, to understand the recent gender identity with 68 or even more genders and probably still rising?
Sex and gender
First, we have to acknowledge the difference between sex and gender. LGBT+++ activists try to avoid claiming that a human can have 68+ sex by naming its gender identity. As if genders can be as many as possible while preventing telling what they really mean, that they have different sexualities. They claim that they feel one of 68+ sexualities in their bodies. The confusion between the terms gender and sex is, for instance, amplified by the statement of The Council of Europe:
LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender/transsexual people. However, it is recognised that those four letters do not necessarily include all those whose sexuality is not heterosexual, or whose gender identity is not based on a traditional gender binary. (‘LGBT+ – Gender Matters – Publi.Coe.Int’ n.d.)
Note that sex and gender are here treated as if there is no difference between the two. By using »transgender«, they mask their claim that more than two sexes exist. They do not go against science directly but by linguistic charlatanism.
This linguistic charlatanism is even more despicable because the term gender covers three domains, grammatical, psychological and sociological/linguistic.
Grammatics
There are two prevailing grammatical genders across all known languages (‘List of Languages by Type of Grammatical Genders’ 2022), with the optional third, the neutral one. Some languages use more than three genders, but they apply mainly to a division between animate and inanimate objects, between humans and animals, or specify male and female gender further down. What is clear is that human history that is reflected in languages clearly distinguishes two genders that apply to humans and no more. To refer to this meaning of gender in the multiplication of the gender issue is wrong.
As a side curiosity, all grammatical divisions are divisions of two opposites that also amplify the Non-Overlapping Magisteria, NOMA hypothesis. (Gould 1997) Two genders do not overlap; two sexes do not overlap. They intertwine like Ying and Yang but do not overlap. The neutral grammatical gender is a symptom of a yet not developed mind. The confused expressions of the XY »sex chromosome« are a biological anomaly.
Identity and subjectivity
The above citation from the Council of Europe web page hides yet another fatal mistake, that about the identity. They want to say that each person can express his or her identity. They do not express this notion »with his or her« because, according to their ideology, they should use 86+ gender pronouns. Since grammar does not know more than two or three gender pronouns, they avoid this pitfall they ended in and hope no one would see that the king is naked.
Identity, when applied to humans, is a subjective entity. By being subjective, it means that it is inaccessible to others. It is accessible to others when expressed in words, when it is memetically exchanged. Issues related to subjective experiences are treated by psychology and psychiatry. Their challenge is to address a particular psychological experience precisely because it is not memetic. When it becomes memetic, when it is expressed, it ceases to be psychological and becomes sociological, intersubjective. Historically, various psychiatric methods have developed how to excavate personal experiences from a person in psychiatric treatment or psychological investigation. However, all have to rely on symptoms, words being one of them, that can then be intersubjectively (not subjectively anymore) understood and explained. To repeat: when personal identity is communicated, it is not a matter of psychology or personal experience but of memetics and sociology.
Memetics and sociology
To say (memetics) that I belong to a gender nr. 55 has the same validity as if I say that I belong to a martian species. Both exist on the same level.
Explanation:
When Peter Higgs proposed a Higgs particle back in 1964, this particle was first his subjective experience based on his scientific work in theoretical physics. He then memetically communicated this particle and soon became intersubjectively understood and accepted by a more significant part of the scientific community. Higgs particle became a truth for that part of humankind. A short after, the Higgs particle became a part of a popular press and was soon intersubjectively and symbolically accepted by a wider population. It became real, a truth even before it was scientifically proven in 2012.
Before 2012 Higgs particle was a symbolic truth as all memetic reality is symbolic, meaning that the meme »Higgs particle« enters different memetic fields and triggers different reactions (meanings). However, since it entered so many individual memetic fields, it became a memetic truth. It was and still is for all of us that are not trained in physics of the same memetic value as a God or Martians. That Higgs particle was falsifiable from the very beginning and that Martians and God are not falsifiable has no implications for the memetic reality of all three memes. Not only that I can only believe in the experiment that proved the Higgs particle since I do not understand the physics behind it (I can not personally disprove or prove the Higgs particle), but what is more important, the scientific memetic explanation of the experiment is still only a memetic explanation and thus subjected to a peer review that is just another expression of memetic intersubjectivity. Higgs particle is as much a memetic truth as it was before the experiment in 2012, only that it has higher memetic weight when entering particular individual subjective memetic fields. While the meme of God can not be scientifically proved, it has much larger memetic weight because it is intersubjectively shared by so many individuals daily, and it is thus a part of the large and significantly curved collective memetic field of all particular memetic fields of different cultures.
Back to the question of sex end gender. As long as an individual identity of human being of gender nr. 55 is his own experience, it has nothing to do with sociology, and it should not enter pages like that of the Council of Europe. It should stay the question of the personal pathology of an individual and for that reason to himself or psychiatry. It is not intersubjective, not only because it has no common ground in sexual reality nor in grammatical reality, but even more because it is intersubjectively inaccessible.
LGTB+++ as a virus
If so, how then not only is LGBT+++ ideology so omnipresent that it even entered the page of The Council of Europe? That personal identity can not be intersubjectively exchanged does not prevent the meme of LGTB+++ from spreading around. It spreads around despite being malicious to the fitness of human reproduction and despite going against grammatical rules. As such, it has all characteristics of a malicious virus (Blackmore 2000), (Boudry 2018), (Boudry and Hofhuis 2016), (Dennett 2017), (Heylighen 1999), Fields(Schlaile et al. 2018) like ebola or SARS-COV. It spreads around for the sake of its own fitness and against human fitness, destroying both human sexual reproduction and human memetic reproduction. How it harms human sexual reproduction is apparent. However, it also harms human memetic reproduction because it ruins the vital part of a structure on which memetic reproduction rests, Grammatics and Logic. If words lose their semantic value and relations to other semantic values, then the particular (individual) memetic field collapses, and the collective memetic field (the culture) collapses.
If ebola destroys human phenotype, then the LGTB+++ memetic virus destroys human phenotypes and human culture. Since it is highly virulent, it spreads fast around cultures that have lost immunity against it. Fortunately, its deadly effects are not immediate, but since it is consistent, they erode the phenotypic and memotypic (artefacts, culture) substrate of infected human cultures.
Citations and literature
Blackmore, Susan. 2000. The Meme Machine. 1., Issued as an Oxford Univ. Press paperback. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boudry, Maarten. 2018. ‘Invasion of the Mind Snatchers. On Memes and Cultural Parasites’. Teorema 37.
Boudry, Maarten, and Steije Hofhuis. 2016. ‘Attack of the Memes! How Cultural Parasites Can Subvert Human Interests’.
Dennett, Daniel C. 2017. From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. Reprint edition. W. W. Norton & Company.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1997. ‘Nonoverlapping Magisteria’. 1997. http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/449/Gould%20Nonoverlapping%20Magisteria.htm.
Heylighen, Francis. 1999. ‘What Makes a Meme Successful’. In Congress on Cybernetics.
‘LGBT+ – Gender Matters – Publi.Coe.Int’. n.d. Gender Matters. Accessed 14 January 2023. https://www.coe.int/en/web/gender-matters/lgbt-.
‘List of Languages by Type of Grammatical Genders’. 2022. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders&oldid=1127121254.
Schlaile, Michael P., Theresa Knausberg, Matthias Mueller, and Johannes Zeman. 2018. ‘Viral Ice Buckets: A Memetic Perspective on the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge’s Diffusion’. Cognitive Systems Research, no. 52: 947–69. https://www.academia.edu/37575483/Viral_ice_buckets_A_memetic_perspective_on_the_ALS_Ice_Bucket_Challenges_diffusion?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper.
‘Sex | Definition, Origin, Significance, & Facts | Britannica’. n.d. Accessed 14 January 2023. https://www.britannica.com/science/sex.
‘Sex, Wkipedia’. 2023. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sex&oldid=1132132583.
