In my professional life, I have submitted more than one hundred articles for scientific publication. It was, for the most part, basic or clinical research submitted to foreign journals, with an impact factor, which had the English language as exclusive. used the word “gender”, which in the Anglo-Saxon language simultaneously encompasses gender and sex, in the methodology of my works, unambiguously distinguishing what was masculine and what was feminine.
The Portuguese language, one of the most used worldwide, distinguishes sex and gender in two different words, with sex being the biological construction and gender being the socio-cultural classification.
However, and as usual in Portugal, confusion, “fog” and, above all, ideology inhabit an elite that slides in parties and governance, thinking that the nation is made up of subjects in a herd and not of citizens.
Since, fortunately, the majority of Portuguese people do not have to write scientific articles, especially in Portuguese, confusion between sex and gender has been growing, obeying feminist pressures considered to be discriminatory against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, intersexuals, queers and others. There are still those who fight for gender neutral recognition, not considering themselves as male or female.
Gender, being a social construction, changes in space and time, riding on female “fragility”, mythologizing prejudices. However, especially in the social sciences and in some organizations, such as the WHO, the distinction between sex and gender is obvious, contradicting the progressive exchange osmosis observed in the conversations and actions of the Portuguese.
Having sex on the new moon or the full moon, gender, does not change the biology of a man or woman, sex. Confusion will always be external, perhaps uninteresting. Article 13 of the Constitution of the Republic, which lists non-discrimination, namely the possibility that sex causes arbitrary discrimination, is the current stage of leftist parties so that “equality between men and women” is replaced by “gender equality ”. However, if so, why do they claim the existence of female quotas in companies and governments, emphasizing the distinction of sex and not gender?
Sex is an objective fact, at least at birth. Gender, being a socio-cultural construction, is undone and remade in the beautiful pleasure of each one, multiplying itself in arrangements and constructions of the human imagination.
Unlike other languages, such as German or Finnish, the distinction between sex and gender must prevail in Portuguese, a language that should make us proud, not giving in to imaginations and ideologies that forget the history of Portugal, the respect we owe to those in of that story and were, for that very reason, better than us, like Fernando Pessoa who wrote “my homeland is the Portuguese language”.