Sex, Gender, and the Origin of the Culture Wars: An Intellectual History

In her book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir introduced the concept of gender into academic writing.  Unlike sex, whose binary physical nature was fixed, gender described the social and cultural norms society related to sex, and they were invariably oppressive to women.  By appealing to the arbitrariness of socially-assigned gender roles, de Beauvoir demanded the same autonomy that her male peers enjoyed, ‘a room of one’s own.’

Whereas first-wave feminism focused mainly on establishing women’s status as persons in the public square, i.e. in the suffrage movement, voting rights and property rights), second-wave feminism like de Beauvoir’s used this dynamic of the essentially fixed (sex) vs the essentially arbitrary (gender) to broaden the debate to a wide range of issues related to the private sphere: to sexuality, the family, the workplace, reproductive rights, legal inequalities, etc..

De Beauvoir’s notion of gender became more like today’s concept when it was combined with Martin Heidegger’s ‘linguistic turn’.  Heidegger argued that reality is ‘always already’ mediated by language.  “Where word breaks off no thing may be.”  We cannot even think outside of language.

If that is true, even what we had once accepted as fixed, such as natural sex, was not true without qualification.  It was in fact unknowable outside of its linguistic construction.  The fact that society had already determined that gender was (at least to a certain degree) socially assigned and malleable, led feminists following the French post-structuralists of the late-1960s to argue that even natural sex was merely a linguistic construct, a malleable ‘reality’ that society had constructed.

The final chapter is that of today, where the state, emboldened by political correctness and third-wave feminism, uses its role to oppose the social assignments of fixed biological sex (sex and gender now being essentially indistinguishable, and regularly conflated), and in the name of furthering ‘liberation’ opposes the natural goodness of sexual differences, and to promote sexual and gender ‘self-identification.’

Read the full article