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May I remind everyone that plants have gender, nouns have gender, but people have sex.

Stuart,

I would agree if you would have said people are identified by sex...

Hah. I have to remember that one.

It's important. He who controls the terminology controls the argument. Radical egalitarians have elevated "gender" in place of sex, because they believe all differences between the sexes are social constructs. Sex is biological and immutable; gender is socially conditioned and fluid. But if you believe "man and woman He created them", then all differences between the sexes are intentional, God's way of incarnating the masculine and feminine aspects of his nature in human nature; and of course, man and woman must unite as man and wife in order that the fullness of those aspects can be integrated in "one flesh".

A very good article on marriage from an Eastern Christian perspective can be found in "Let No Man Join Together: An Orthodox Christian View of a Beseiged Sacrament", by Vigen Guroian, in the January/February issue of Touchstone Magazine.

In the orthodox church there's also intelectual nuns

Mother Vassa is not at all atypical.

We will soon have the technology to change that.

Apparently sex has nothing to do with biology but is psychological. Otherwise how can we have transgender seven year olds? It is certainly not immutable. A few quick incisions and a pile of hormones and you have a different sex. The relationship between gender and sex has be completely and probably permanently altered in the current language.

Transgenderism is a psychological delusion that has nothing to do with sex. Gender is a property of plants and nouns, not mammals.

That is not true. Transgenderism is not a delusion. It is a disease which usually has absolutely nothing to do with psychology, but everything with anatomy and physiology.
And what would you say about true hermaphrodites - not that rare, btw. What gender you will assign to those people?

I find it quite peculiar that you associate "transgenderism" in its entirety with anatomy and physiology with no relationship to psychology. Maybe you meant to use a different term or label?

I agree.

One might accept 'gender' as an appropriate object of discourse and believe that it is culturally constructed and mediated, while at the same time insisting on irreducibility of biological sex.

At least I think I can. At any rate, I agree that you are right to point out the distinction between sex and gender, and I think that we should avoid using them as if they were interchangeable.

castration has been around for awhile. That just makes a castrated man, not a woman with XY chromosomes.