Hossam Badrawi Official Website
The new lobby and gender identity
Wednesday 12th July
I was conversing with young people who dream of tomorrow about cultural and national identity, but one of the young men interrupted the conversation after hesitation, and said: Doctor, what do you think of the controversy raging in political circles in the West about the sexual identity of children… What we read and hear these days is strange even to our generation.
I said: If this is strange to your generation, then it is terrifying to our generation.
She said: There is terrible media pressure to give children the right to change their gender from males to females and vice versa before they reach the age of permission to drive cars and before the age to vote in elections, and there is terrible pressure to recognize the third gender or genderlessness, and we do not understand the power that this lobby has in the Western media And between some political circles, and I fear more than I fear that this will inevitably come to us according to the experience of the years and what has happened and is happening around homosexuality, which has institutions to defend it.
I said: My children, I confess to you that I am also at a loss, as the owners of these cries, which claim to stem from belief in freedom of choice, are not even a majority in their Western societies. I see them deliberately confusing personal freedom of choice with advocacy, pressure, and even intellectual terrorism to spread their choices and make them normal, legitimate, and legal.
The theory they rely on is that a person is born neutral in terms of his social type, and that the manner of dealing with him in the first years of his life is what determines his identity, whether male or female. In my opinion, it is a very dangerous theory because it generalizes one type of influence on a part of the formation of identity, and ignores the fact that man, at the beginning of a two-celled creation, determines his sexual identity involuntarily but by the will of his creator, and that this is linked to the presence of the male “Y” chromosome from or not with a chromosome
The female “X”, otherwise the children would not have been born with different genitalia that distinguishes the male from the female and corresponds to the roles they are qualified for to continue a normal life.
It is illogical to set laws that protect the freedom of individuals’ choices against normal nature (without medical reasons) and protect abnormal departure from it, so we would be like those who set laws that protect humankind’s suicide and call for that on the grounds that it is a personal freedom for each individual.
Destroying social relations from within and demolishing the idea of the family of fathers, mothers and natural brothers, is what humanity has been based on throughout history and will have an unappreciated negative social impact, not only on the choice of sexual identity, but also on the collective identity of humanity with its linguistic, cultural, spatial and historical contents… It is an orientation To stop the natural development of human beings whose future impact is not calculated if this matter turns into the natural one, and the natural by which humanity has evolved becomes the one that must be protected by laws.
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A very dangerous assumption and interference in the evolution of humanity and the total will of creation. The balance between the sexes has existed since the beginning of history without human intervention, which is what some people are trying to control now, and I see it as the most dangerous thing facing our societies.
Another said: This is about sexual identity, and what about the manipulation of other identities? Does preserving the national identity, for example, conflict with the fact that there are different cultural and religious identities within the same country, and is it now being manipulated by others?
For example, we in Egypt have some differences in the nature and way of speaking of the Nubians in the south of Egypt, from the coastal people in the north of it, and the inhabitants of the oases, and even between some governorates and others, but they are united by one Egyptian national identity.
I said: A good question, and yes, there are those who want to obliterate existing identities out of a desire to unite everyone culturally, which is short-sighted and inability to fully see the beauty of diversity within the entity and the one. There are also, on a broader level and in a more violent way, those who want to obliterate the identities of entire peoples with everything in them, as Zionism does to the Palestinians, and as is the case with Ma’an, the Kurds and others, but these are cases, despite their importance, that fall within the colonial and settlement framework and the desire to impose power and deliverance from those they consider an enemy.
Throughout history, the leaders of every religion have tried to spread their religion and consider other religions obligatory to disappear by virtue of being the absolute right and others the absolute wrong, and they have caused wars and killing without the ability to coexist, tolerate and acknowledge that God created us as peoples and tribes to get to know one another, and if He willed, everyone on earth would have believed.
The beauty of humanity is the multiplicity of cultural identities of groups of people that gives humanity richness and vitality, and it is still our duty, with the maturity of knowledge, to learn how to live together, but rather enjoy and learn from each other.
A young philosopher said: It baffles me that we seek to create a global citizen on the one hand, and confine him to the borders of his country on the other hand, isn’t this a contradiction?
I said: The natural development of man does not contain a contradiction, rather it is the difference and plurality that expresses creativity and diversity and does not contradict, because all mankind shares the manner of its creation and the method of transmission of the genetic genes of individuals from one generation to the next, and the agreement of nations in many human values that differ in our places of existence They remain the values that we seek to instill in children, east and west, north and south, such as honesty, integrity, honesty, love, and others.
A fourth said: Basically, what is the definition of identity so that our dialogue has meaning?
I said: Identity is a term used to describe the concept of a person and his expression of his individuality and his relationship with the group surrounding him.
Identity is the totality of features that distinguish one thing from another, or a person from another, or a group from another, and each of them carries several elements in its identity.
Identity elements are a dynamic thing that can emerge one or some of them at a certain stage, and others at another.
A personal identity identifies a person by his appearance, name, attributes, gender, nationality, age, date of birth and place. As for the collective identity, it denotes basic common features for a group of people that distinguish them from other groups. The members of the group are similar in the basic features that formed them as a group, and they may differ in other elements, but they do not affect their being a coherent group.
The first young man said: I think, Doctor, that language has a role in confirming identity.
I said: You are right, language will remain an important component of identity from multiple components.
The goal of teaching any language, for example, is not only the eradication of illiteracy in form, but the content is the belief that language learning has a great impact on all aspects of life in any nation, it is the means that conveys to us our history, documents our present, and transmits to future generations our civilization, and not the goal as I said It is reading and writing only, so it is a narrow, short-term goal, but we have to understand that this language is the means for our understanding of each other, that we cannot understand ourselves or each other without thinking, and we do not think in a vacuum, but rather the mind thinks in a language, and depicts its thoughts For him and for others, using words, sentences, and images drawn by the language and transmitted from one individual to another, or kept in memory.. From all of this, identity is formed.
Language for the life of the individual is not only a tool for dealing in society, but rather it is his means of thinking and feeling, and it is his means of conveying his ideas and benefiting from the ideas of others.
The young man said: Does this mean that learning a second or third language becomes a threat to identity?
I said: The degree of mastery and melting of any language in the mind of a person makes him able to express his coherent identity in a plurality. Learning a second language or using foreign references does not threaten identity, nor does it threaten knowing the mother tongue in the first place, unless the teaching of the mother tongue is incomplete and weak from the ground up. A child can absorb multiple languages more than adults, and we must not be ashamed that teaching a second language will overcome his first language and make his thinking and identity linked to another nation. .
Identity, as I said, is linked to language, but it is also linked to coexistence in the surrounding milieu, with the knowledge, history, and geography taught to the child, with a conscience that is formed inside the school and at home with the family, and with the repetition of the consistent cultural expression of the creators of the conscience of societies.
A shrewd young woman said: What does all this have to do with belonging?
I said: A person by nature likes to belong to something, so he belongs to a family, a village or a city, a school, a university, a people, and a land. I believe that belonging to something is a human nature, and it may create a charge within it that pushes it to get emotional and proud of the success of the one to whom it belongs, as if it is an extension of his person, and he defends it and may die for it. There is no doubt that culture, education and the media have a great role in the accumulation of this love over time to become a constituent part of each one. from U.S.
The degrees of belonging to each person differ from the part to the whole, and the whole for all may be the homeland.
The young man said: Aren’t we drawing countries far from the geography of a particular country when we say the Arab world, the Islamic world, the Christian world, the West, and the East, and by that we mean linking the cultural and religious identity of groups of people with our personal identity… Don’t we need to separate identity from the homeland??
I said: Belonging to the homeland does not depend on abstract concepts, but rather on lived experience between the citizen and the homeland. When a citizen feels through living with him that his homeland protects him, provides him with his basic needs, and provides him with opportunities for growth and participation with appreciation and justice, the values of belonging to him become entrenched in him and he expresses them in constructive work. to raise it.
The smart young woman said: So, what is the challenge facing us, Doctor, regarding the issue of identity?? face it?
I said: You are right, there is a challenge facing all of humanity and not just before Egypt…a challenge in the next civilized human shift, for which technology and artificial intelligence have created a new stage, and even screenwriters and directors with unusual ideas, in which the good and the terrifying, they find in our generations The new ones perform specific roles for them. It is a development that the leaders of societies must seriously understand, with the realization that there is a new global lobby that is forming and using different means of influence to create a new form for the future man, which I cannot fully realize until now, and in fact I am afraid of it.
