Opinion: A Curmudgeonly Response to “Gender Ideology”: “E pur si muove!”

RIBEIRÃO PRETO, BRAZIL – President Bolsonaro’s radical-right administration has publicly stated that there is no difference between sex and gender; since the Garden of Eden, there have only been two sexes – “male and female created He them”.

Accordingly, Brazil’s Foreign Service officers have received instructions to resist any attempts to include phrases such as “gender equality”, “gender inequality”, “gender fluidity” or “gender identity” in official documents, and to resist any efforts by the UN or other international entities to bring gender differences into human rights discussions.

In parallel, within Brazil’s educational system, the administration has declared “gender ideology”, which it claims was imposed by teachers and other educators during the Lula/Dilma administrations, as the foremost threat faced by schoolchildren and adolescents today.

Most people attribute Bolsonaro’s fervor on this issue to his acceptance of the philosophizing of his “guru”, Olavo de Carvalho, a purveyor of the radical right “cultural Marxism” theory, rather than to the influence churches may have had on him. That is probably wrong.

Bolsonaro declares himself a nominal Roman Catholic, but is proud of having had himself baptized by a fervent “Evangelical” preacher a few years ago.

One of the few doctrinal matters that both Roman Catholic and “Evangelical” churches agree upon is the creation of humankind as described in Genesis: God created males and females, and nothing else. Further, human beings cannot change what God created, nor create anything different from God’s creation.

Section 56 of Pope Francis’ 2016 Papal Exhortation entitled “Amoris Laetitia” (the Joy of Love) precisely describes the “ideology of gender”, which “leads to educational programs and legislative enactments that promote a personal identity and emotional intimacy radically separated from the biological difference between male and female.”

In other words, biological sex determines gender, which remains fixed and immovable from birth.

Four hundred years ago, the Roman Catholic church insisted that God had created planet Earth as the center of the universe, fixed and immovable: the sun, moon, stars and all other celestial bodies moved, but Earth did not.

Galileo Galilei knew better, and promoted the Copernican theory, based on observations, that the Earth moved around the sun. The Inquisition imprisoned and tortured Galileo until he officially recanted and “admitted” that the Earth did not move.

Upon his release from the dungeons, however, he is said to have looked around and murmured: “E pur si muove”. (“And yet, it moves.”)

The existence of gender identity as a social construct or subjective feeling, which can and does differentiate it from biological sex, is today an almost universally accepted theory among scientists of the mind, notwithstanding church dogma to the contrary.

Even though no one can (yet?) point to genes, chromosomes, or any other specific biological determinants of gender, if you consider yourself gay, lesbian, bi, trans or queer, scientists say that’s what you are—your biological sex is not the determinant of your innermost nature.

Put another way, gender in humans is no more fixed and immovable than is Earth in the heavens. As Galileo might have said, were he alive today and asked about gender: “E pur, si muove.”