Three? Masculine, feminine and neuter.

Pb,
  I think you’re looking at a grammatical aspect of languages, such
as Latin, Russian, German, etc. From a biological point of view, there
are only two genders, but hey, having pulled down A+ grades in
high school and college, I just could be wrong. Or seriously
misinformed.

Don’t joke about this, these people are deadly serious as nuts as it sounds.  This is the transgender portion of LBBT and they are pushing as hard as they can to have this bit of sexual dysfunction recognized and approved by the government.

Already it is being written into discrimination laws.

For example Chastity Bono is now considered to be a man and wants to marry her girlfriend.  Yet all she has done is have both breasts removed and is taking male hormones.  She has had no below the waist surgery, yet she wants to be accepted as a natural male.

These people are to be pitied and prayed for, but not underestimated in their drive to mold reality to their way of thinking.  And they will freely resort to government coercion to get their way.

From Wikipedia:

In 1967, John Money, a prominent sexologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, recommended that David Reimer, a boy who had lost his penis during a botched circumcision, be sexually reassigned and raised as a girl. Despite being raised as a girl from the age of 18 months, Reimer was never happy as a girl, and when he learned of his sex reassignment, he immediately reverted to living as a male. Money never reported on the negative outcome of Reimer’s case, but in 1997, Reimer went public with the story himself. His case, as well as several cases of intersexed infants with conditions such as cloacal exstrophy who have been reassigned and raised as females, suggest that gender identity is innate and immutable. Milton Diamond, the winner of the Norwegian Diversity Prize for his research efforts on behalf of transsexual and transgender people worldwide, had tracked down Reimer, discovered the failure of his sex reassignment, and exposed his case.
In 1979, when Paul McHugh became chairperson of the psychiatric department at Johns Hopkins, he ordered the department to conduct follow-up evaluations on as many of their former transsexual patients as possible. When the follow-ups were performed, they found that most of the patients stated that they were happy as members of their target sex, but that their overall level of psychological functioning had not improved. McHugh reasoned that to perform physical gender reassignment was to “cooperate with a mental illness rather than try to cure it.” At that time, Johns Hopkins closed its gender clinic and has not performed any sex reassignment surgeries since then.

Further follow-up, Reimer committed suicide in 2004, due to suffering years of severe depression, financial instability and a dissolving marriage. I heard him in an interview in the early 00s - what the scientific and medical establishment put him through in order to fit into their idea that sex was a purely cultural construct was criminal, in my opinion.

This has been a persistent trend in American culture since at least the 1960’s.  I think the broader questions are whether this will just be accepted by American main stream (like extra-marital sex and widespread divorce), whether this is part of a fundamental cultural divide (like the Reformation or the American Civil War) and whether American culture is irresistibly evolving/progressing (Marx) or unnecessarily being corrupted/declining (Isaiah/Livy).

As a believer, the main comfort is that God is still in His Heaven and this has no impact on His basic plan.

Another argument for home schooling.

Some people “feel” like poached eggs.  Should they be cracked and eaten?

#4 Branford,
Several years ago, I saw a very sad program about children who were born with ambiguous genitalia. The wisdom at the time dictated that definitive male or female genitalia should be constructed, based on what would be the easier and more successful surgery plus taking into account whether the child’s other physiology and tests indicated a dominance.

Many of these children later reported some severe psychological and social problems. They clearly weren’t in sync with the gender they were assigned. The purpose of the film seemed to be to advocate against selecting a gender for babies born with ambiguous genitalia. It would be better to wait and see how they developed for an indication of the gender they were meant to be.

I’m not understanding this whole “gender fluidity” mindset that the psychiatric community seems to be pushing these days.

Does this not undermine—and rather drastically—the entire biological determinism interpretation of homosexuality, so commonly used to define it as a “civil rights” issue?

If your gender is in you head and heart, then you choose it.

Choices can be reversed. Or healed.

Oookay. Just read this horrific new atrocity at The Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/8601488/Indians-pay-surgeons-to-turn-boys-into-girls.html

Madhya Pradesh state government is investigating claims that up to 300 girls were surgically turned into boys in one city after their parents paid about £2,000 each for the operations.

Women’s and children’s rights campaigners denounced the practice as a “social madness” that made a “mockery of women in India”.

India’s gender balance has already been tilted in favour of boys by female foeticide – sex selection abortions - by families who fear the high marriage costs and dowries they may have to pay. There are now seven million more boys than girls aged under six in the country.

Campaigners said the use of surgery meant that girls were no longer safe even after birth.

#8, good point -  that is the condition of ‘intergender’, which seems to get confused easily with the concept of transgendering.  Intergender people are real, born with some characteristics of each, and perhaps can fall victim to the designs of LGBT activists (not to mention some doctors) out of lack of understanding and compassion by those around them.  I don’t know much at all about it but suspect intergender may be more common in highly agrarian societies if a degree of inbreeding occurs.  Christians do need to learn compassion here if we don’t already have enough, and accept there is some role to play for the medical community and probably the mental health one if intergender persons want to be able to completely identify as one of the two main genders, though this may not be the case for all. 
Queen Christina of Sweden was an interesting person in this situation, IIRC.  It seems to me an intergender person is not transgendered if they do choose one or the other, as they did not originate as a person of unambiguous male or female characteristics.

The point I failed to make is that gender now means something different now that when I read Virgil. Anyone know how it is now defined? Is it all in your mind? How you feel about yourself? If so, the possibilities are endless.

9, it undermines it only if you expect consistency in logic.  The LBGT folks are masters at arguing out of both sides of their mouths and taking inconsistent positions depending on the agenda they want to advance.

“People can feel like girls, they can feel like boys, they can feel like both, and they can even feel like neither,”

I can feel like a mug of frosty root beer or a ‘57 Chevy, but it doesn’t make me either.

Good Lord, deliver us.
http://beta.news.yahoo.com/no-him-her-preschool-fights-gender-bias-122541829.html

STOCKHOLM (AP) — At the “Egalia” preschool, staff avoid using words like “him” or “her” and address the 33 kids as “friends” rather than girls and boys.

From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don’t fall into gender stereotypes.

Director Lotta Rajalin notes that Egalia places a special emphasis on fostering an environment tolerant of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. From a bookcase she pulls out a story about two male giraffes who are sad to be childless — until they come across an abandoned crocodile egg.

Nearly all the children’s books deal with homosexual couples, single parents or adopted children. There are no “Snow White,” ‘‘Cinderella” or other classic fairy tales seen as cementing stereotypes.

Rajalin, 52, says the staff also try to help the children discover new ideas when they play.

“A concrete example could be when they’re playing ‘house’ and the role of the mom already is taken and they start to squabble,” she says. “Then we suggest two moms or three moms and so on.”

This is nuts. “Brave New World” may be here in my lifetime. Children are already being “decanted.”

You cannot take hardware and pretend it is software.

Pb, to answer your question, the linguistic definition of gender as applied to nouns, adjectives, and in some languages, verbs, has been hijacked.  In common speech “gender” now replaces “sex” in speaking of what kind of humans we are.  Biologically we are male or female, with a few people born with birth defects making their sex ambiguous, as discussed above.  Homosexual agenda activists have replaced “sex” with “gender” to allow them to talk about all of the various combinations and permutations of biology and how people “feel.”  When we talk about a person’s “gender” we are playing by the LGBT lobby’s rules.

I might add the obvious to as a follow on to 17, that the sole purpose of sex, male and female, is to produce offspring to perpetuate the species.  That is why marriage between male and female makes logical and biological sense.  Those unions produce children and pass on their genes.  And in human society it takes a long time and plenty of resources to raise an infant to adulthood.  The male and female that produce a child have a lot of responsibility and are the primary institution to integrate the child into the larger society.  The fact that some males and females do not have children is beside the point.  By and large they can and do.

Homosexual unions does not have the inherent capability to do any of this.  They are 100% sterile.  The fact that they can raise other’s children is beside the point.  Even if there is a homosexual gene (and there is absolutely no scientific evidence for this) it cannot reproduce itself.  Likewise, even if there were such a thing as “homosexual orientation”, it cannot reproduce itself.  They can only exist as deviations from the heterosexual norm.

This is crazy. You can’t make this stuff up.
    But I guess the point is this, that perception has finally overtaken truth, if by truth we mean (as I do) that there is a one to one relationship between the perception and the thing perceived. The separation of the world-as-technology-imaged and the world as touched, tasted, smelled, seen has finally left the true world as a shadow of the technology world. This is Plato’s cave in reverse. A world of computers, i-pads and blue-tooths is steering itself into an unstable world, so shifting, so ambivalent, so relative, so ambiguous, that it will leave itself open at last to a Napoleon whose focus, concentration, and political integrity and unity will give such a despot the chemistry he needs to make a wandering society coalesce. We NEED to fear this possibility.
  I suspect this is the real reason the homophile world has advanced to far so fast, that the word “normal” e.g. has become a perception, not a truth. When it becomes a perception then its “meaning” disappears in a fog of intention and wish fulfillment. There is no fixed point against which one can brace one’s semantic feet.  Larry

Thanks Katherine. I thought so. We are playing by their rules.

If what is being done in Stockholm (#15) becomes widespread, I shudder to think of the confused and traumatized kids who will be produced - and who will probably become deviants of an even worse stripe than are common now.  That school and the mindset behind it are playing with fire.  They think it will result in a society that will accept people however they may want to express themselves sexually, so that there will calm acceptance and no “bullying,” etc.  What they may well get are kids that are so messed up that they will do anything sexually and think it is just fine - even things so depraved I cannot even think of them.

Of course, since reality and biology are resiliant, I hope that even in such a place as that nursery school there will be those who escape relatively safely, albeit with some confusion and pain along the way, and are able to live as the men and women in harmony with the bodies God gave them and they have accepted, in spite of efforts to the contrary.

#21—You know, the irony both floors and frightens me. Here are these people who often demean religion and religious values because they say teaching Christian moral values introduces “shame” to children.

Yes, conscience development does make people contemplate and regret ACTIONS for which one feels shame. But these people are inevitably making children feel shame over their gender, their biology! Don’t they see the harmful difference between rightfully feeling badly over how one chose to act and feeling conflicted and shamed over whom one biologically IS?!

You can give boys the most basic, stereotype-free articles to play with and it’s quite likely that they will fashion a sword or a gun out of them and engage in battles or other adventurous play. Likewise, you can give a girl the same and it is quite likely she will pretend it’s a doll to dress/decorate or a baby to rock. In this school’s environment, do they punish children for that very normal but gender-bound behavior?

Yes, biology is resilient but the mind can be effectively manipulated. What happens when you “manufacture” people whose biology and psychological conditioning are constantly at odds with each other?  I find this potential to be very frightening. In the past, this sort of thing has created deviant criminals. I can’t fathom the effects of a country at this point in time mandating that its children be raised this way.

Take it a bit easy on the Swedes. Some languages are structured that way from the git-go. In Hungarian, for example, there is no differentiation between “he” and “she”. They are the same word, ö, yet somehow the Hungarians still manage to have babies.

When done with intent it may be somewhat silly, or forced, but it isn’t fatal. As much as it bothers me grammatically, our growing English application of “they” as a neutral singular pronoun IS rather convenient in a number of situations.

I speak some Swedish, and their approach at least keeps it all in the singular. When I don’t know the sex of the person about whom I speak ... I use “hen”, not because it’s politically correct, but because it’s easier and less convoluted than “han eller hon”.

Chinese don’t differentiate in the spoken language between he and she. (They do have different characters.)