Search This Blog

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Gender Incompetence

My wife's friend thinks that today's twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings are gender confused. By this she of course means that society tells them through the marketing of gay activism, equality of the sexes, etc. that concept of gender is all in their minds and that they are whatever gender (or combination thereof) they imagine they might want to be. She reasons that these messages are confusing them.

Evidence of this can be seen today on virtually any social web site where there are much larger collections than expected of bisexual, androgynous and gay youths.

I respectfully disagree with my wife's friend. Instead, it seems to me that these youths suffer from gender incompetence. I define gender incompetence as "the act of functioning against ones biological gender." A simple example of this would be someone that sees a television story or reads a story or visits a web site glorifying some alternate gender choice and subsequently acts as if they themselves are now a person of that alternate gender.

(Note that I do not attempt to define "biological gender" and that one first has to have determined their biological gender in order to act against it.)

Confusion vs. Incompetence

The definitions of incompetence, according to Merriam-Webster is 1) not legally qualified, 2) inadequate or unsuitable for a particular purpose, 3) lacking qualities needed for effective action, and 4) unable to function properly. Confusion, on the other hand, is a mental state where one fails to make appropriate distinctions or differentiations (see Merriam-Webster here). So I argue that being confused about anything, much less gender, is a common human occurrence but that choosing to act in a confused manner regarding gender renders one incompetent.

Your biological gender is what you are. You may not like it but it is what you were endowed with by your creator.

No comments: