Sex

Long, long ago the word sex was used mainly to divide people, and mostly anything that was alive, even plants, into male or female.  On forms the word "sex" was used as a question, and the choices were man or woman.  Should one wonder if this is true, one can look up the word sex in the dictionary which will document that it is.  

Then people became more sensitive to the word sex, as an era of hyper prudishness swept the land.  At least the land where people spoke English.  As this prudishness swept the English speaking world, a substitute, more cultured and educated sounding word sprang up in its place, as the delicate subject of whether one was a man or a woman was reluctantly approached.  The new buzzword was "gender."  It sounded educated because it was only used in school, and even in school it was only used in language classes.  What did it mean?  It referred to masculine, feminine, and neuter words, curiously enough though, not in English, with extremely few exceptions.  In fact, the word gender referred EXCLUSIVELY to words.  To have a gender, one had to actually be a word.  

I am not a word.  

Parallel to this hyper prudish use of the word gender in the place of sex, a myriad of other long overdo corrections were made to the English language.  At the same time that people were uncomfortable with the word sex, they became much more comfortable with using the f-word.  As soon as it became frowned on to ever use the word sex, it also began to be considered to be ill bred to resort to describing people as men or women.  For a while, also along ago, some refined souls referred to le différence as "ladies and gentlemen."  And to refer to anyone as a man or a woman could be interpreted as insulting.  How so?  If you were a woman, and I called you a woman, and you connected the dots, you would see that I had failed to distinguish you as a "lady."  Did I think you were not a lady?  Well!!  But then wasn't that aristocratic?  Aristocracy is evil!  Therefore a new way of walking on linguistic eggshells that didn't actually exist had to be devised.  OK.  Use the words male and female.  For example, "There is a female in aisle 6 who needs an associate to help them."  But there was a problem there, too, since usually when one resorted to calling anything male or female there was the suggestion that we might be talking about plants or animals, not people, because men and women were only human.  If one said that there was a female in aisle 6, the question would arise in the mind of the listener about what form of female -  dog, cat, cedar tree?  In fact, it even approached the use of the ever so coarse word, bitch. No, not working.  OK, just use the word "person."  

People flocked to this solution, smugly imagining that the schoolteachers of the land would be delighted.  And may I just say, the schoolteachers of the land is where this all started.  Little dictators of a sort, drunken with power.  As we know, absolute power corrupts absolutely.  And so it was with the slippery slope we descended upon with the attempt to dance around any reference to one's sex, or even with being human, which could be extended to infer that one probably had a sex.   Bizarrely, corresponding with the schoolteachers of the land butchering the English language, literacy rates began to slide.  

But I digress.  Soon it was pointed out, sternly, that one should NOT ever say such things as "salesman," "stewardess," "mailman," "bag boy" and so on.  More new words must be invented.  "Salesperson," "mail carrier," "flight attendant", "associate."  If all these new pleasantries weren't obeyed, one would be corrected in no uncertain terms.  It was just plain rude not to adhere to the rules! Only the un-schoolteachered among us would say such vulgar, primitive things. 

Today we have come to the pinnacle of classy English by making it illegal in some states to use the personal pronouns he or she.  This is tantamount to hate speech.  And we all know that the whole land is a "safe space."  Or dare I say police state? 

And what about gender?  Does that even mean male or female?  Oh nooooooo!  Now we have evolved.  We have many genders.  Many, many genders.  To argue this point would go right back to the crassness of trying to define people as having a sex.  When we speak of sex, in terms of whether one is a man or a woman, or a boy or a girl, one is describing the genitalia!!  Good heavens!!  Besides that, defining the being as being human.  

And so we have progressed to the point that we have no sex, because we will not be categorized by either our genitalia or our species.  That's personal.  No one's business.  On forms we are now asked our gender, and provided with a multiple choice.  Beware though.  If you agree to respond that you are in fact any gender at all, you have agreed that you are a word, instead of a human being.  

STOP THE MADNESS