Sex? A gender matter

The issue is no longer sex. The issue is now gender. Fortunately, our society has advanced a lot regarding the sexual choices of each one: especially among young people, individual freedom to enjoy sex without the corsets and moral taboos of other times when Catholicism set the tone firmly is becoming normalised. Sex was only for procreation, only within marriage and of course only heterosexual. Despite the reminiscences, all this is beginning to be history.

The debate today is on another level, that of gender, that is, how one feels beyond one's biological sex, what one's self-perceived identity is. The male-female binarism is in question: there are people who do not identify with either of the two traditional and majority categories. Beyond the gender inequality that feminism has been fighting for decades, and which, despite the advances, continues to exist in many areas of work and family life, the need for non-binary gender, also called neutral, has arisen with strength: a third category that in turn includes a wide range of possibilities and nuances. Because sexual orientation is one thing and gender identity is another, i.e. how you feel is one thing and what you desire is another. If we start from respect for the decisions that affect each person's body, we will have to acknowledge as normal the different expressions that are opening up and that often break the patterns that have given many people security, but that do not go against anyone. The experience of sex and identity cannot be reduced to a transgression or seen in any case as an aggression, but as a natural and free act of personal affirmation in a globalised and constantly changing world.

That said, there is also no need to sacralise and identify new genders and identities as the panacea for self-realisation. What is important is the right to choose, nothing more and nothing less. Biology will continue to exist and to have a great weight. But the cultural or social approach we take will be more open. However, in order to make this open-mindedness possible, the way in which we integrate this into education (at home and at school) as well as into legality, medicine and language will be key. In none of these four areas is it an obvious or easy matter, as we are seeing, for example, with the so called trans law: Does it have to be linked to biological sex or is the will and self-perception of the individual sufficient? As with the division within feminism itself, PSOE and Unidas Podemos cannot agree. But the mere fact that they are legislating on the issue is already a step forward. Much more will have to be done, and it will have to be done with the maximum possible social consensus.