The draft National Gender Policy is based on the erroneous idea that a person's gender identity is only socially determined.The draft policy states: "In spite of increasing usage there still exists confusion over the term 'gender'. In modern times, gender is often used as another word for 'sex', but sex and gender are not interchangeable terms. 'Sex' refers to the biological (and physiological) differences between women and men, i.e. being male and female. 'Gender' refers to the social organisation of sexual difference."The "confusion" the document refers to is caused by the radical feminist social tinkerers in their effort to eliminate all distinctions based on sex. "Sex" and "gender" are interchangeable terms. The error comes in when they assume that you can ignore the biological and expect to allow everyone to be whatever "gender" they want: male, female and their new definitions of "gender": homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, transvestite and even others. Since there are only two "genders," this is psychologically damaging, especially to young children, each of whom is in the process of discovering their identity as male or female.
Human beings have two sex (gender) chromosomes, and 44 others. If your sex chromosomes are X and Y, you are male and if your two sex chromosomes are both X, you are female. The other "genders," erroneously so-called, are actually psychological disturbances or disorders arising from childhood experiences and should not be used to define a person. Such individuals deserve respect and the opportunity to receive treatment. Not to do so brings a tsunami of grief that the "gender agenda" can bring on our children and our society, as it already has on Western civilisation.The document goes on to describe the concept of gender:"We may be born male and female with certain biological characteristics, but we learn how to become men and women through the social expectations of the gender category into which we are placed from birth. Gender is discussed in terms of our 'masculinity' and the 'femininity'."
The error here is blatant: we do not learn how to become men and women; we are born either man or woman. Our masculinity or femininity is derived from the role that our reproductive organs assign to us as male or female. Yet, these distortions of reality are put forward by professors in universities and accepted by many of those they instruct. They are against gender (male or female) stereotypes such as father as provider and protector and mother as homemaker (in Eastern Europe, the UN's Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women attacked the Belarus government for holding Mother's Day celebrations because it promoted the stereotype of mother).Psychiatrists and psychologists in the West are now convinced that this reverse stereotyping is posing the greatest danger to the mental health of future generations. They are claiming that deliberate steering and often forcing little girls and boys, at the earliest ages, away from their instinctive natures, denying them their natural aptitudes, may induce new and incurable forms of schizophrenia, with the most serious consequences for society and for Western civilisation.
Yet the gender policy calls for "compulsory components on gender and gender socialisation" at all levels of early childhood education. To deliberately force children into unnatural modes of development would be creating unhappy, alienated, lonely and angry children who become unhappy, alienated, lonely and angry adults.This adds to an already conflicted society affected by family abuse, rising divorce rates, falling marriage rates and single-parent families. Many of these parents valiantly carry on the task of raising their children, but they still need a good spouse to help in reflecting to their children loving models of the differences in fatherhood and motherhood so necessary for a child's natural development and sense of security.
George Pritchett
