A he-said she-said dilemma
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in April 2026.
A young relative of mine is on a gender-change journey. I struggle with using the new name and the new pronouns, and while I desperately want to respect this teenager’s choice, I also feel the need to put it within a larger context.
How did choosing gender get on the developmental agenda of children, let alone achieve the priority it commands?
First, let’s clarify a few things. One: sex and gender are not the same thing. Sex is biological equipment and what we do with it; gender is behaviour that is culturally associated with sex, aka masculine or feminine behavior as defined by place and time.
Two: sex has always operated within a continuum of hetero- and homo-sexual preference, and gender has always been immensely malleable and required choices throughout the life cycle.
I want to add a third basic ‘truth’, although this will draw debate: sex has always been vulnerable to commodification for financial gain. The sale of sex for money, aka prostitution, is the world’s oldest profession. Wives have been bought, husbands have been purchased.
And on a lighter note, I recall from Sociology class eons ago looking for sex symbols in the ice cubes of drink commercials, secret sirens that whispered Buy Me into unsuspecting ears. And of course curvaceous women in body-sculpting dresses selling cars, and fawning over a modern washing machine or stove, in the post-war era when women were being lured back into the kitchen and factories needed to shift to producing peace-time products.
So choices about sex – what to do with the equipment we have, with whom, how – are as old as nature. Choices about gender are much more socially prescribed. Being ladylike was defined differently in my day than now; differently in the upper classes of British society than my rural Canadian environment, even in the same era; differently in my community than in a similar community in, say, India or Ghana.
So what is the social prescription of this time and place that has put a choice about what gender to be on every young teenager’s agenda?
My young relative has an army of paid professionals to guide them (thank god for a neutral pronoun) in their journey. So do their parents and their siblings. The school system is paying gaboodles for a thorough psychological assessment that will help them figure out how to unleash the intelligence and academic motivation of this pre-occupied youngster.
This puts me in mind of the upswelling of professional expertise that arose when we ‘discovered’ that sexual abuse happened in all echelons on our society, a multi-discipline specialization that attracted a clientele, purchased by personal or public funds. Not so much a solution to a problem, let alone the prevention of a problem, as an economic opportunity provided by a problem.
So if we let our minds wander to what might prevent what I am perhaps foolishly calling the problem of having to decide what gender one is before puberty declares it for us, where would that take us?
First, I think we would sharpen our perception of the boundary between sex and gender. We would allow people to be who and what they wanted to be regardless of their sexual equipment.
The argumentative might say we’ve already done that, by allowing women to work in the big world and men to undertake domestica and parenting.
They would also have to admit, however, that inequity continues in both spheres, certainly financially (the earning gap between men and women doing the same work, the systemic discounting of pay for ‘women’s work’, the refusal to put monetary value on the work of personal care), but also socially. Shoot me, but I insist that we still live in a patriarchal world, masquerading in the garb of capitalism. (Where being a man won’t get power, having money will.)
Second…oops, I don’t have a second suggestion. If we didn’t care what sexual equipment people had except when engaging in sexual activity, the business of transitioning from one sex to another in order to be the gender of choice would become irrelevant.
If I was pushed to articulate a second recommendation, it would go to learning to live with ambiguity, with uncertainty. Because in the ambivalence of gender lies its power.
Which may well be why it has come into the crosshairs of our world, a last frontier to dominate. And why we have made choosing gender, rather than livng it, the work of children.
My working hypothesis with respect to my young relative is that they are looking to become female because they can’t figure out how to be the male they want to be, largely because of a scarcity of good models, and a horde of bad models who ‘make it big’. Maybe I’m wrong.
