Why there are two sexes and why the two sexes seek partnership is intimately tied up with their innate differences. Those differences are the basis for the partnership. If they didn’t exist you wouldn’t need it. If men and women actually were the same we wouldn’t need each other, and we wouldn’t need to be men or women.

    It’s a popular theory, of course, that there aren’t any differences between the sexes. And as far as such things go there is more that unites us than what divides us. We share in the same species identity. We’re each individuals, but individuals cut from a common cloth. But a cloth with some very distinct patterns. 

  I understand the desire to eliminate any belief in differences between the sexes to help facilitate their partnership. But this approach actually undermines the basis for any partnership between them. What do you need it for, or why hold that pairing in any special esteem, if neither contributes anything structurally unique? What value is there in sex if the category contains no meaningful or unique content?

    By extension, then, if you believe there are no differences between the sexes, any emergent structural differences between the sexes must be pure distortions. How such differences were accomplished, if they are truly the same, is up for debate. How do two identical rubber ducks floating on the same stream end up in consistently radically different positions? 

    The theory may have pure ambitions, or it may not. But it lies to us in the service of its kind purposes, and it brings up some very difficult problems and questions that beg for explanation. That isn’t a kindness, and it isn’t productive or helpful. Accepting the reality of sex doesn’t mean accepting everything that has even been done as result of it, or in its name. If sex is real, and powerful, that means it’s subject to abuse and distortion. If the differences weren’t real, they couldn’t have had such terrible effects.

    Difference may be terrifying. But it’s also what makes union possible and desirable. We don’t need to seek what we already are, but we may desire something that shares a platform but runs a different program. That’s unity in diversity. That life. That’s what makes it possible. We won’t eliminate our need for one another by denying it exists, or denying that we are even the kind of thing that could need, or that anyone else is the kind of thing that need might be made for. We won’t save iursoevs with happy lies that hide the halves of humanity from us. Those patterns aren’t everything, but the cloth would be far less, maybe nothing, without them.