A lot of the controversy about gender today only makes sense in light of broad historical context. Gender was synonymous with biological sex until John Money i

A lot of the controversy about gender today only makes sense in light of broad historical context. Gender was synonymous with biological sex until John Money introduced a distinction in 1955. That distinction has been amplified across the decades to a the point where cultural consensus considers gender to be primary and biological sex irrelevant. We can and should ask why this is happening in Western Culture first. The reason is because it is part of a long cultural war that is being fought over the idea that inequalities can and should be fixed by culture and the idea that inequalities will inevitably persist due to our nature as humans. The progressive impulse has animated a lot of positive change in the West but it stumbles when it comes up against actual differences. It either pretends that they don't exist in order to maintain the narrative or it assumes that differences must be bad and opts toward a view that any difference that leaves a group with less perceived power must be eradicated by adopting the trappings of power. Transgenderism is ground zero for this cultural/biological clash. Boys/Men generate about 17x the amount of testosterone as women http://www.mayomedicallaboratories.com/test-catalog/Clinical+and+Interpretive/8508 http://www.mayomedicallaboratories.com/test-catalog/Clinical.... Estrogen and oxytocin have real effects on self-perception and behavior. When someone says "I feel like a man" or "I feel like a woman" we are hearing them through the filter of their biology (do I feel the urge to smash things or nurture?) along with cultural self-perception. In non-Western societies, without the overlay of our culture, hormones influence roles and sense of life without much mediation. In the West we struggle with this. Is the burka oppression or a choice? Is it a valid choice to forgo a career and feel fulfilled as a mother and then a grandmother if that feels right to you? Can you be oppressed if you don't feel oppressed? It's hard to escape our narrative and consider it something we impose on our nature.