Gender: Who Decides?
A Debate on Transgenderism and Womanhood
The year is 2023. We claim to have progressed to the heights of technological innovation and advancements. We have conquered nature—or so we claim. We have only left to conquer ourselves—human nature. Our scientists and top scholars can tell us what occurs in space, how to combat disease, what the inner workings of DNA looks like, how to fuse atoms, and more, but what they can’t seem to agree on is what exactly is a woman.
What does it mean to be a man or a woman? What for thousands of years we thought we knew, we suddenly cannot agree upon anymore. Can you be born a man and actually become a woman? How deep of an identity does womanhood or manhood live within us? Is identity tangibly attached to something inherent in us, or is it intangible and subjective? Is it merely some social construct or is it embedded in our genes, in our biological identity itself? If so, can we actually conquer our human nature and identity in the same way we seemed to have conquered the other realms of nature? If we try, what are the consequences? If we fail, how do we clean up the mess? Even more so, should the government have a say in defining gender–or is it too fluid to ever capture and define, and thus to include in any encoding of laws or statutes?
Join the Intercollegiate Studies Institute this April as Michael Knowles and Deirdre McCloskey debate womanhood and transgenderism. The link to register can be found below.
