Sex Ideology, Like Gender Ideology, Misses What Makes Us Men and Women

Forty years ago, my father returned from Dublin talking of having seen there a woman driving a bus.

“Imagine that,” he said. “Herself, at the wheel of a double-decker.”

My father grew up with women who did hard physical work. His mother milked six cows on the morning of the day he was born. At 45 years old and about to give birth to her sixth child, she sat on a low stool in a small shed squeezing milk from half-a-dozen beasts.

But a woman driving a double-decker – now there was a sight to behold.

What was it about her? Was it the size of the bus? Was it the posture required to steer it? Was it exposure to the public? Was it taking money from men as they boarded? Was it being charged with their safe passage in the metropolis?

We can only guess at the mysterious certainties of a way of life so established that everyone my father told about the woman in Dublin driving a bus shared his wonderment.

Certainties such as my father’s used to abound.

“From afar,” wrote Ivan Illich in 1982, “the native can tell whether women or men are at work, even if he cannot distinguish their figures. The time of year and day, the crop and the tools reveal to him who they are. … If he notices geese loose in the harvested field, he knows a girl must be nearby to tend them. If he comes across sheep, he knows he will find a boy. To belong means to know what befits our kind of woman, our kind of man. If someone does what we consider the other’s work, that person must be a stranger. Or a slave, deprived of all dignity.”

A change to guidance on the use of single-sex facilities is being widely reported this week in the UK media. The Equality Act of 2010 will from now on support the use of single-sex facilities only on grounds of biological sex and not on the basis of gender identity.

It’s a victory for the plain fact of sex over the disruptive proliferations of gender. Though the plain fact will have its quota of pomp and ceremony as 13,000 toilet facilities and at least as many changing rooms are refashioned across the land.

But the choice between sex and gender is a false choice.

Both sex and gender are artificial constructions aimed at the dissolution of fulsome ways of life, which are the only obstacle to technocracy.

Technocratic systems operate on uniform humans – undifferentiated humans. They do not care whether uniformity is produced by the elaborate genericism of gender or by the pared-back equivalence of sex.  

The gender ideology would denigrate the designators ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as old-fashioned and restrictive. The sex ideology would cleave to the designators ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as referring to biological realities. What neither ideology admits are men and women, through whose regionally variable make-up all ways of life have been refracted.

Men and women have about them the hard reality that those who promote the sex ideology are looking for as a stay upon the fluidity-utopia of the gender ideology.

But the hard reality of men and women does not derive from abstract determinations of the biochemical sciences. It derives from every tool they use, every garment they wear, every gesture, every posture, every task, every morsel, every word – every detail that made them for and by their culture. 

It is men and women who have been the subjects of human history – not males and females, whose essence lies between their legs. 

The gender ideology and the sex ideology each reduces men and women to standardised beings – defined either by identities so unconvincing as to leave everyone equally poorly-drawn, or by biological characteristics so base-layer as to imply very little that is human.

Both ideologies level out the regional distinctiveness of men and women. From this levelling follows the all-consuming project of equality – equality between the genders or equality between the sexes.

The project of equality is inconceivable in a way of life because the subjects of ways of life – men and women – are in complement not competition. Between them, there can be no metric for determining equality in any sphere. 

The project of equality is the mechanism for the exercise of technocratic control, which requires only that everyone is made equivalent, all the better for their endless administration by anonymous systems.

Men and women must be dismantled for technocracy to get going. This dismantling is achieved equally well by attributing to men and women an identity-soul to trump their native formation, or by defining men and women as scientifically-described body-parts that are the only essential thing about them.

As the gender and the sex camps fight it out between themselves, men and women die away and the only obstacle to technocracy dies with them.

It is called ‘Social Constructionism’ to argue that men and women are learned constellations of thoughts and actions, and not primarily biological. ‘Social Constructionism’ is held in contempt by those who promote the sex ideology.

But there is all the difference in the world between men and women constructed by a slowly evolved culture so that they are as steadfast as could be and not to be interfered with, and people constructed by wilful social engineering so that they fit into recently devised systems and can be interfered with without end.

When you are constructed by a way of life to be our kind of man or our kind of woman, you are more essentially who you are than ever you can be when you are constructed by government and corporate campaigns as either gendered or sexed.  

And you are infinitely more resistant to control.

Biological males and females can do anything, we are told. It’s what is called ‘sexist’ to be told otherwise.

But if you can do anything, you can be made to do anything. Especially now, with advertising so sophisticated and ubiquitous.

The women in the way of life in which my father was raised could not do just anything. They could not drive a double-decker bus. They could not give up their babies to impersonal state care. They could not win a weekend away. They could not submit their old people to the neglect and abuse of strangers. They could not social distance from their neighbours. They could not cook an aubergine sprayed to be shiny. They could not give birth in hospital wards. They could not go to mass with their head uncovered. They could not wear a device to monitor their sleep. They could not apply to the government to teach their children at home.

What they could do was bake bread on an open fire. Put an invisible hem on a woollen coat. Cook sausages for all who came through the door. Sing ‘Shenandoah’ late at night. Give advice on whether to stay or go. Light a fire with damp turf and old nylons. Make a bed for a roadman by the stove. Milk six cows by hand. Remake a dress to be two sizes smaller. Work three years in America to pay off their dowry. Kill a chicken. Heal a break. Play ‘45’ ‘til sunset. Grow turnips. Tend a neighbour’s child.  

As for the men:

What I couldn’t do. Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch. Ask a woman to go for a walk. Work with drains or with objects smaller than a nail. Drive a motor car. Eat tomatoes. Remember the routes of buses. Wear a collar in comfort. Win at cards. Acknowledge the Queen. Abide loud voices. Perform the manners of greeting and leaving. Save money. Take pleasure in work carried out in a factory. Drink coffee. Look into a wound. Follow cricket. Understand the speech of a man from west Kerry. Wear shoes or boots made from rubber. Best P.J. in an argument. Speak with men wearing collars. Stay afloat in water. Understand their jokes. Face the dentist. Kill a Sunday. Stop remembering. 

What I could do. I could mend nets. Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket from reeds. Splint the leg of a cow. Cut turf. Build a wall. Go three rounds with Joe in the ring Dad put up in the barn. I could dance sets. Read the sky. Make a barrel for mackerel. Mend roads. Make a boat. Stuff a saddle. Put a wheel on a cart. Strike a deal. Make a field. Work the swath turner, the float and the thresher. I could read the sea. Shoot straight. Make a shoe. Shear sheep. Remember poems. Set potatoes. Plough and harrow. Read the wind. Tend bees. Bind wyndes. Make a coffin. Take a drink. I could frighten you with stories. I knew the song to sing to a cow when milking. I could play 27 tunes on my accordion.

Timothy O’Grady, 1997

The men and women in the way of life my father was raised to were our kind of man, our kind of woman.

Not strangers to themselves and others.

Not slaves, deprived of all dignity.

This article is dedicated to the memory of David Cayley, who died in June of this year. Much of David’s lifework was given to disseminating the ideas of Ivan Illich, one of the most important and least popular of which was the vital importance of men and women, made for and by ways of life, for any hope of resistance to the advance of technocracy.

Dr Sinéad Murphy is an Associate Researcher in Philosophy at Newcastle University.