KLAVAN: For The Vast Majority, Gender Difference Is A Joy

 

What struck me — and I think a lot of people — about actress Ellen Page’s announcement that she was now a man named Elliot was the po-faced self-seriousness with which the media accepted the lunacy. She’s a man, but she’s queer, but she’s with a woman, because she’s a lesbian, only she’s a man lesbian. Right-ho! Let’s get to work changing the credits on her old films because this is leftism, after all, and history itself has to be erased and rewritten to reflect the current nonsense.Listen, when it comes to other people’s sex lives, I agree with Ebenezer Scrooge: “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly.” But this anti-gender stuff is truly bah, humbug.For the vast majority of us, the differences between the two genders are a source of pleasure, fascination, and consolation. The Left and their awful entertainment and news media have done everything they can to reduce these differences and these pleasures to one difference and one pleasure: the difference between our bodies and the pleasure our bodies feel during sex.

But no. The mesmeric attraction of the feminine for the masculine and vice versa is as deep and as wide as anything in nature. Speaking personally, my chief joy in a long happy marriage — above even sex, children, companionship, and meals that don’t come out of a box — has been the slow realization that, as a man, I was seeing only half the world. Loving a woman over time has been like putting on a pair of 3-D glasses, one lens blue, one pink. The world acquires dimension.

The joy of gender difference is written into every free civilization. Women don’t have to dress differently than men. We don’t have to use different bathrooms. We don’t have to allow society to reflect our different life choices. We do it because we like to. Because we are fearfully and wonderfully made and we want to live that out and celebrate it.

And yes, of course, nearly all men and women have traits usually attributed to the other sex. But that doesn’t change what they are. Men cannot be feminine, only effeminate. Women cannot be manly, only mannish. Possessing the traits of another gender doesn’t turn you into that gender, any more than possessing a cowboy hat turns a New Yorker into a Texan.

Are there features of gender that are unfair? You bet — which makes gender exactly like every other aspect of human life. There is only one thing in our experience that is equally distributed: death. Everything else — talent, beauty, intelligence, health, luck, even time — are doled out to us with arbitrary hilarity.

For most of us, though, the gender dynamic is a compelling, confusing, intoxicating, troubling, spectacular delight. It is at the very core of being alive. The Left’s attempt to vacuum this central pleasure out of existence in the name of faking equality tells us one thing: they are unhappy people at war with creation.

Somewhere between two to six percent of people are homosexual. Somewhere between two to six people are transgender (I’m joking — but the real numbers are vanishingly small). As with most things, these people have it harder than those in the norm. Being different leaves one open to exclusion and bigotry and other forms of cruelty.

I’m willing to risk my career and reputation here and come firmly down on the side of not being cruel to people. By golly, I’ll go further than that and say we ought to be as kind to one another as we can. There, I’ve said it, and I’m glad! But no, I’m not going to pretend to rewrite reality so that the sorrows of a few can vanish into the misery of everyone. I’m not going to pretend that the words man and woman should be redefined. I’m not going to call a woman he or a man she. Maybe one day you’ll be able to change everything down to your chromosomes, but as I write, women can’t become men, and men can’t become women, not even by mutilating their bodies to turn them into a flesh-costume of the opposite sex.

I know it is easy for comfortable people to say life is unfair — but life is unfair, nonetheless. You can’t make it fair in any way but by crushing the great to make them equal to the small. You cannot make the unhappy happy. You can only make all the world sad to accommodate them.

I won’t. Live your personal life out as you will, and God love you. But don’t ask me to lie about the nature of creation.