Sex and Character

"There are two concepts belonging to the most ancient ones with which humanity has, from the very beginning, had to make do in its spiritual life. True, people often introduced minor changes to them, sent them for repair, made only patches—when it was time to fix either everything or parts. After setting aside something from them and adding something back, people would either limit their content or expand it again—just like an old, narrow, discriminatory electoral law, under pressure from new needs, is forced to untie its bonds one after another. But yet, overall, we still get along with these concepts to this day in exactly the same way as people used to in the old times. I mean the concepts: man and woman.

We speak of slender, thin, flat, muscular, energetic, brilliant “women,” of “women” with short hair and a low voice. We also speak of beardless, talkative “men.” We even recognize that there are “unfeminine women,” “manlike women,” and “unmanly,” “feminine” “men.” By focusing on just one particular feature that determines a person’s belonging to one sex or another at birth, we even venture to assign the concepts definitions that deny them. But such a state of affairs is logically unthinkable.

The old view has outlived its time and no longer satisfies us, and yet we simply can’t do without it. The inherited concepts don’t offer a satisfactory explanation of the question. Let’s then set ourselves the task of understanding them better."