In this enlightening episode of Real Science Radio, Nicole and Doug McBurney tackle the complex subject of gender, tracing its origins from grammar to modern societal constructs. Listeners will learn about the etymological foundations of gender-related terms, the disappearance and evolution of gendered language structures, and the intricate relationships between language change and cultural shifts. Bridging historical insights with contemporary debates, this episode provides a critical perspective on how language influences perceptions of gender and societal norms. Tune in for an engaging analysis filled with historical examples and thought-provoking discussions.
Sexologist is just, I don’t know, I guess a scholarly term for deranged pervert. And, you know, anyone with the title of sexologist should be kept far away from children.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stay away from my daughter.
SPEAKER 02 :
And your family. You don’t even want to touch them with a six-foot pole. Any normal people.
SPEAKER 01 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in creation. Welcome to Real Science Radio. I’m Doug McBurney.
SPEAKER 02 :
And I’m Nicole McBurney. It’s good to be on the air talking about real science on Friday.
SPEAKER 01 :
That’s right. It’s Real Science Radio and Fred Williams is on assignment this week. And so we’re joined today by Real Science Radio contributing editor and producer Nicole McBurney with some analysis on one of the more important stories of the 21st century and to set it up. I want to look back to the 20th century briefly because I remember listening to a radio talk show in 1994. The talk show host was G. Gordon Liddy, and he was warning his listeners that the subtle replacement of the word sex with gender was happening, and he noticed it because he’s kind of a word geek. He noticed it, and he said, first of all, it’s grammatically incorrect. And second, he noted that this was not by accident. Now, Nicole, you don’t remember this, but the early 1990s were the full court press of the homosexual rights movement. The first full court press open out there everywhere. And G. Gordon Liddy noticed during this full court press to normalize. perversion, that the word sex was subtly and slowly being replaced in the media by the word gender. And he said it wasn’t an accident. And he said there were nefarious motives behind it. And so now fast forward 30 years, And we’re in the midst of what some have dubbed the collapse of Western civilization into gender insanity. Help us understand.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, so gender insanity, I’d rather just call it insanity. Because calling it gender insanity would be adopting the terminology that you have just said is incorrect. Or I guess as your radio talk show host had said… And I would completely agree with him that it wasn’t by accident. And we’ll get into the reasons why a little bit later on the show. I would just call it the ultimate manifestation of a century’s worth of rebellion against God’s design for family.
SPEAKER 01 :
Wow. Well, that’s putting quite a fine point on it. And now some people might think that talk of grammatical terms is going to be a dry and boring subject, but this is not dry and boring because this is an analysis of the corruption of our society. And we’re going to start in the area of grammar, and then we’re going to take it from there. Let’s talk about the grammar a little bit. What have you found out?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, so the word gender originally, and I realize that, you know, when people, if people ask me what my gender is, I’m not going to be confused by it because, and this is an argument that people give all the time is, well, language changes. So, you know, deal with it. And I recognize that. But the term gender, when used as a noun, was originally a grammatical term for a category or a class that a noun falls into. And the word itself, the word gender, comes from the Latin word genus, which means kind, family, or order. So you’re familiar with taxonomy. You know scientists will classify an animal by their genus. And genus also comes from an even earlier word, or the Proto-Indo-Perian Proto-Indo-European root gene, meaning to give birth or to beget. And this same root gives us our words generate, genetic, genealogy, or homogenous, for example. I mentioned the PIE languages. Are you familiar with the PIE languages?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, PI, I’m familiar with pie. And I mean, not just the kind you can eat. I’m familiar with 3.14. All right. So am I in the ballpark?
SPEAKER 02 :
No, not even close. But let me give you a third pie for you. This PIE is an acronym. It stands for Proto-Indo-European. And it’s a… The Proto-Indo-European is a reconstructed language. It’s not a real language, so you won’t be able to go out into an archaeological dig and find a potsherd that says Arfaxid was here in the Proto-Indo-European language. But based off of how language has, I guess, evolved over time and distinguished itself into many other distinct languages, linguists can use these patterns and go backwards and reconstruct this mother language, this common ancestor. And this common ancestor encompasses languages all the way from the Indo-Iranian, like Bengali and Hindi, to the Greek and the Germanic and Italic languages. So all the way from India to Europe, you will find a common ancestor for these languages here. And that’s a wide, broad area, which is pretty impressive.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, yeah, I wouldn’t have thought Hindi was related to German, but apparently the linguists do.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and so I had a graphic there of this family tree, and I’m putting up another graphic, kind of showing you how these words could be related. Here’s the word two, T-W-O, as in the number two. And if you look, if you compare it to many of these other PIE languages, you see like dos, duo two twa they’re all very similar and so linguists have linked this back to one word uh dwoh d-w-o-h and that’s what they guess the proto the original language for this family would have looked like so the number two all goes back to this one common word and there are other words not just the number two but this is a really good example of that um and so um
SPEAKER 01 :
Words can have a common ancestor, unlike proteins, which we learned from. We learned that on Real Science Radio recently in an interview with Sal Cordova on proteins.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, we will link to that, because that was a fantastic show. I recommend everybody go watch that. But languages do have a common ancestor, and I guess the earliest we can really go back is the Tower of Babel, and I think that’s about when you could have pinned the Proto-Indo-European languages would have existed. So I had just, out of curiosity, googled when the Proto-Indo-European languages, when linguists would have guessed that such a language would have existed, and they say probably around 1250, 2500 BC. And according to Answers in Genesis, Answers in Genesis has estimated that the Tower of Babel was around 2200 BC. So about that time frame would have been whenever God split the languages and Proto-Indo-European would have been one of those languages, it seems.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, okay, interesting.
SPEAKER 02 :
But going back to the word gender, the topic of today’s show, when we look at the Webster’s 1828 Dictionary, we can see that this word was also used as a verb, and it means to beget or to breed, which is why in the King James, we should give a warning.
SPEAKER 01 :
Warning, warning, warning, Will Robinson, there are Bible verses up ahead. For those in the audience who advocate pluralism and diversity, we know here at Real Science Radio that you would censor anyone who would dare quote a Bible verse in public, so this warning gives you fair notice. Raw, unadulterated truth is about to be uttered.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s right. So we go to Leviticus chapter 19, verse 19. It says, quote, Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind, unquote. And also in 2 Timothy 2.20, quote, But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing they do gender strifes, unquote. So we typically don’t use the word gender as a verb today, but it was prevalent in the past. King James is evidence for that. But we mostly use it as a noun today. So that brings us back to gender as a case system in grammar.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, now before we jump into gender as a case system, let me just see if I’m understanding here. So thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind. So in that phrase, gender has something to do with breeding. So one could say that it has something to do with Sex in the breeding sense, but it doesn’t have to do with sex in the male-female categorization sense. And then in the Apostle Paul’s instruction to Timothy, he’s saying avoid unlearned questions knowing that they do gender strifes, meaning they cause strifes. They cause something to happen.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
So neither of those have to do with a male-female sex construct.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right, not inherently. And as we get into this, the case systems, like I was saying, so the Proto-Indo-European languages, I’m just going to start calling them the Pi languages because that’s much easier to say. So a lot of the Pi-derived languages have a tooth case system, masculine-feminine, or a three-case system, masculine-feminine, and neuter. But if you go outside of the Pi languages, you have Zulu, for example, which has 17 genders. 17 17 oh the zoo zulus must be popular over at the u.n with 17 genders right well and this shows that gender does not is not distinctly male and female or it doesn’t have to be based off male and female as a category and i’m putting up a chart here and this is a category for people Not necessarily male and female, but you can see the word for boy, child, friend, parent, and person here all have a similar shape at the beginning. It all starts with um. So the word for boy is umfana, child umtwana, friend is umgane, parent umzali, and person umuntu. And for any of our Zulu speakers out there, I’m sorry if I pronounced that wrong. I tried. But you can see there that they…
SPEAKER 01 :
We invite any Zulu speakers to call with corrections.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, absolutely. But you can see my point is that they all have that first um distinguishing that the noun here is talking about a person, and then the ending differentiates, it specifies what kind of person are we talking about. So that’s how these nouns work in a gendered language. These are called inflections. The different shape is the inflection of the noun.
SPEAKER 01 :
Ah, okay. So… And none of the 17 genders in the Zulu language have to do with male, female, gender fluid, gender unconcerned, gender inconsiderate, gender confused, or any of that stuff.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, that whole thing came much later, long after Zulu was around. But then if we go back to the Pi languages, there are also some languages that don’t have gender systems like Turkish, Persian, and English. English does have gender for the pronouns, and the reason is that’s just leftover of the old English system that used to be gendered. for all of its nouns. So, like, if you’re familiar with Spanish, you would know that there’s masculine and feminine and neuter. So, like, la mesa, the table, is feminine. El tomate is masculine. The tomato is masculine in Spanish. But in English, we would just say the table, the tomato. It’s just… We use the same article, and the ending doesn’t really specify anything in our nouns. But we do… But in Old English, it used to be that we did have these masculine, feminine, and neuter genders. And we lost those between the 11th and 14th century as the language lost its inflection. And our… our sentence structure, English syntax became much more rigid, so now we typically use a subject-verb-object order. So, like, I would say, I ate the soup. I wouldn’t say… I could say, the soup I ate, but that sounds weird, and it’s… Maybe you might see that in poetry, but it’s not really standard English. Maybe an uneducated person might say something like that. But that was fairly common in Old English. It wouldn’t have sounded as weird because the different inflections in the noun would have been very clear what the subject and what the object was.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, okay. Interesting.
SPEAKER 02 :
And so in Old English, subject, verb, object was the most common word order, but you could switch them around. And In a highly inflected language like Greek, where the nouns have different endings and different articles depending on what part of speech they are, you can make a word salad and it still makes sense. It’s not confusing. It doesn’t sound weird. Whereas in English, you have to be very specific. You’d have to add more words to clarify what you mean.
SPEAKER 01 :
So you could put together word salads and basically be a speechwriter for any number of candidates for higher office these days. And so this does indicate that with English, there has been a devolution of the language. The language has become less sophisticated and I would say a little more legalistic, a little more rigid, right?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, we’ve definitely lost. And this happens just because of various influences. Like I had mentioned earlier, people say language changes. And really, the reason language changes is because of various influences, whether another country comes in, like… William the Conqueror came in in the 11th century, so we now have a lot of French loan words in our language. Or cultural influences might have affected language changes. So all these various influences have caused us to lose our inflection and make our sentences more rigid. And now we generally have to use more words to describe what we mean. So I have this here. This is a book, Beowulf. And Beowulf is the English language’s oldest epic, and I have it in parallel. So it has the Old English over here on this page and on the other page in Modern English. And if you just look at what I’m holding up, you can see that the Old English has, per line, fewer words than compared to the Modern English.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, wow.
SPEAKER 02 :
So where, you know, a sentence might have four words in the old English, you might need ten words in the modern English. So that just shows you over time. And I think that’s also a reflection of general laziness in people. We just, we start to break down. And so we need more information in order to pass on what we mean. Instead of using one or two words, now we need like ten.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right, right. And it’s sort of an algorithm that you can watch if you read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. You can see that more words are required to describe situations because the situations… just become more and more convoluted you know at the very beginning when god was in the garden with adam and eve he could speak in very simple terms with them yeah but by the time it came to to write the law down for the jews there’s like 613 different laws that had to be so i i see a similar algorithm in the bible and in language wow yeah
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, so I kind of want to talk a little bit about the origin of gendered and gendered languages, because not all languages are gendered. Like, Chinese, for example, has been around pretty much as far back as we can go, and it’s not a gendered language. So it’s not something that’s necessary for language, and I think that’s something that came out during the Tower of Babel. I have no other explanation. I think God’s just creative, and He’s just like, I’m going to do a little bit of this over here, and we’re not going to do that over here. So… That’s why we have some languages that do and some languages that don’t. So in English, whenever we think of gender, you know, we tend to think male and female. And whereas in another language that is gendered, like maybe Spanish, growing up learning that language, you wouldn’t really think of objects being male and female, they’re just masculine and feminine, that’s just how the language is. And so whenever I study a language, like Spanish, and they say, well, the genders are just kind of arbitrary, there’s no reason for the table to be spanned, the table to be feminine in spanish while the book is masculine and that confused me because i’m thinking how can you categorize something arbitrarily like that just didn’t make sense and as i was as i was studying this i realize it’s because i’m looking at it backwards So let me kind of try and walk through this to help you understand where I’m coming from. So if we go back in time to the Sumerian languages, which linguists say is the oldest known language, and they did not have the masculine-feminine distinction, but rather a human-non-human distinction. And then later on, the Hittite language, which branched off the Proto-Indo-European early on, had an animate and non-animate. So kind of going from human to non-human, now you have like animate, meaning you could include animals and maybe some plants. So you’re getting a little bit more specific. And then later on down the line, you get this from animate and non-animate. Now you have neuter, masculine, and feminine. And it’s attributed to a man named Protagoras, who was a Greek philosopher and rhetorician. Linguists say he was the first to label nouns as masculine, feminine, and neuter. So I think up until this time, you know, in history, peace is not very common. You’re almost always fighting some battle or some blight, just trying to survive. So I don’t think many people really had the time to sit down and analyze and categorize languages. But then in the 5th century BC, and we get this source from Aristotle, he says Protagoras was the one who kind of sat down and he was fascinated with grammar. And he’s like, I see a pattern. We have these three categories, and I’m going to classify them as male, female, and neuter. And I think the reason he classified it as male, female, and neuter was because that’s a concept anyone can grasp, right? Masculine, feminine… Male, female, and neuter are three very distinct categories. At least we knew that up until modern times. And so he would look at these words and say, you know, okay, the word for woman here has this ending and this article, and so do these words over here. I’m going to classify those as the female nouns. And then he did the same for the male nouns. And then… Maybe whatever else was the neuter nouns. And there are some, you know, exceptions to the rules. But generally speaking, words that have a similar ending will have the same article. Like in English, we have a and the as articles. Greek has a lot more depending on what part of speech the noun is. So depending on masculine, feminine, or neuter, those articles would change. And so because he was kind of the first to categorize these, he noticed that some of these feminine nouns, such as menace, which means wrath and frenzy, or pelex, meaning helmet, he said these female nouns have the same ending as a lot of these masculine nouns. So we should stop using the female articles for these and categorize this as masculine. So I guess he was… picking going through and he’s like you know some of these aren’t really matching up so anyway that I just found that really interesting and so he had he had some influence on the structure of the language going forward after his analysis yeah it seems like I’m not sure if they categorized it to his liking or not and like I said I’m not really familiar with Greek but it was interesting he noticed these patterns he’s like wait these don’t really fit so going back to I said it was confusing to me that masculine, feminine, and neuter were arbitrary. And the reason I was thinking that is because I was thinking someone just sat down and decided this word’s going to be masculine, this one’s going to be feminine, and that one’s neuter. But the language was already there. He was the one who just noticed the pattern and just categorized it by these masculine, feminine, neuter labels. He could have picked black, white, and gray. It didn’t really matter what he called them. So in my English-speaking mind, I’m thinking backwards, thinking someone picked these, but that’s just how language develops. So the arbitrariness comes into what words got what ending. That just kind of developed naturally. I don’t know exactly what influences went in there. Maybe that was just the way God made it. That’s the best I can say for that. So that’s the aspect of gender and the linguistics. And if there’s any linguists out there who want to correct me because I’m not a linguist, I’m just a word nerd, please reach out and I will make corrections in the KGov over at rsr.org in the show notes. But now I want to get into the science of sex, male and female. But before we do that, I do need to ask you the interesting fact of the week.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, that’s right. The interesting fact of the week. We can’t forget that. Everyone’s on the edge of their seat.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s right.
SPEAKER 01 :
Lay it on me. All right, so. Let’s hear it.
SPEAKER 02 :
What do you call an animal with both male and female characteristics?
SPEAKER 01 :
Animal with both male and female. David Bowie.
SPEAKER 02 :
No.
SPEAKER 01 :
No? Not quite. Okay, well, I have absolutely no idea what you would call that, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, the answer is genandromorph.
SPEAKER 01 :
Genandromorph. Okay, well, you know, if I would have taken a little bit more time and gone through my rudimentary understanding of Latin and English, I probably could have come up, because it sounds like someone just mashed that word together. Pretty much. Three or four different words.
SPEAKER 02 :
It might be pronounced genandromorph, actually. I’m not totally sure. But gyno, meaning woman, andro, man.
SPEAKER 01 :
Uh-huh, andro, genandromorph. So there you go. I get it. I mean, it makes sense to me. I could see how that word. Right. Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
So there you go. And I got some pictures up showing you it’s a butterfly, a lobster and a couple of birds. And these animals sometimes have something goes wrong in their genetics and they have 50 percent male, 50 percent female. And the internal organs reflect that as well, not just the outside. But I do want to point out that this is an anomaly. This is not something that is normal.
SPEAKER 01 :
Right, right. And I also want to be clear that I don’t want to imply that there’s anything like that going on with creativity. No, he’s without excuse for how strange he was. Anyway.
SPEAKER 02 :
No, yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so these anomalous, maybe you would even call them deformities?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, I would call them a deformity because it negatively impacts the organism. As far as I know, a genandromorph cannot reproduce. And like I showed in the picture, a lobster, a butterfly, and a bird, It really only affects birds, insects, and crustaceans. It doesn’t affect people. So some people will claim that there are intersex, but that’s not what this is. That’s not what a genandromorph is. An intersex person is just someone who had something go wrong developmentally to where their sex is not very clear. But they’re still one or the other. Just the developmental, the physical development went wrong somewhere. And it’s not just the reproductive organs that get affected. It’s also typically like the joints are misshapen or you have weak ligaments, other physical problems to organs. It’s not just one aspect. It’s bad for the entire body.
SPEAKER 01 :
I see. And I remember, by the way, back during the full court press in the early 90s, when the normalization of sexual perversion was just full blown. If you spoke in the public square with the advocates of perversion, they would act like there was one of these intersex people around every corner. They were everywhere and they were always a topic that they brought up in order to try to normalize what… we always knew was abnormal and sad, by the way.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, like I said, it impacts people negatively who have this deformity. So sex, and let’s just clarify, I’m talking about males and females, so we’re getting into biology. It’s a lot more cut and dry than the etymological origins of the word gender and gender categorizations and stuff. So explaining this will go by a lot quicker. But before we do that, a little bit of etymology. The word sex… comes from the pi root, the Proto-Indo-European root, sek, S-E-K, meaning to cut, which gives us words like section, dissection, insect, and even saw. And so that kind of reminds me of back in Genesis when God took woman from man, he cut her away from him. So that’s pretty interesting. And so people and most animals and many plants reproduce sexually. In humans, the gametes, which are the ova and the sperm, each have 23 chromosomes, but you need 46 to make a new human being. So the males get half and the females get the other half. And God designed these two gametes to come together to produce offspring. And so Genesis 2.24 says, So God did separate men and women, but He still created a mechanism for them to come back together to become one.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, and there’s an interesting word right there that I’ve always wondered about. Because the word cleave, so you know what a cleaver is, right? Yeah. chop something with a cleaver so cleave implies to to separate but in the in the text it also implies to join together which is just really sophisticated interesting little word yeah that i’ve always wondered about we’ll look further into that in fact we’ll have our crack staff look into that yeah we should we’ll put a little note on what we find over at uh rsr.org for
SPEAKER 02 :
Interested audience members.
SPEAKER 01 :
Cleave.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. But let’s get back to the show here. So chromosomes, I also want to clarify here, chromosomes are packets of DNA that give an individual Greetings out there, brightest audience.
SPEAKER 01 :
This is Doug McBurney jumping into our own show. We’ve run out of time on KLTT. To hear the rest of this broadcast, be sure to check in at the podcast at rsr.org.
In this enlightening episode of Real Science Radio, Nicole and Doug McBurney tackle the complex subject of gender, tracing its origins from grammar to modern societal constructs. Listeners will learn about the etymological foundations of gender-related terms, the disappearance and evolution of gendered language structures, and the intricate relationships between language change and cultural shifts. Bridging historical insights with contemporary debates, this episode provides a critical perspective on how language influences perceptions of gender and societal norms. Tune in for an engaging analysis filled with historical examples and thought-provoking discussions.
