From: Ramli
Subject: Equality and inequality
There are two genders found on Earth. Either you were a male or a female. Universally in all application forms, you are asked to tick for sex as ( ) male or ( ) female; nothing in between. Having agreed on this fact, we'll proceed to ask ourselves whether these two genders are equal.
Well, it depends on what. Equal right to vote - yes. Equal opportunity in education - yes. Equal authority in managing family - no. Equal skills , yes/no. Equal brawn - no. Woman obedience to husband - yes. Husband to exercise reason in treating wife - yes.
Then it will be a happy family, the building block of a happy community and country.
Ramli wrote the above in response to this.
Is it a "fact" that male and female are the only options? No, it's not -- there's more than one way for a person to have ambiguous gender and it's not nearly as uncommon as the average person might think. So the fact that Ramli is completely ignorant of this basic fact of biology immediately makes everything else he might have to say on biology and sexuality suspect at best.
If you don't have a solid grounding in even the most basic of relevant facts, then arriving at valid, sound conclusions will be more a matter of dumb luck than respectable reasoning. Curiously, those who seem to have the strongest, most dogmatic opinions about an issue also tend to have the weakest grasp of the relevant facts.
So, what about Ramli's conclusions? Actually we probably can't call them conclusions at all. A conclusion is something that follows from an argument and Ramli doesn't provide anything approaching an argument. He simply asserts (incorrectly) that there are two sexes then asserts that they are equal in some areas but unequal in other areas.
What is this basis for his differentiation? He doesn't say and I don't think could even if pressed to. I also don't think that it's a coincidence that all of the things women are unequal in are also the things which would require a woman to be subservient to a husband.
One thing that's noteworthy about his assertions about gender is how obviously social and cultural they are. He's not making an assertion about biology, he's making assertions about human culture -- specifically, application forms that are created for the convenience of human bureaucracies. I think he wants readers to take away conclusions about biology, though, because bureaucracies are changeable. The forms they use can be modified.
So if we ignore biology and focus only on the words Ramli uses, we find that his foundation is the malleable, changing nature of human social institutions. So why should we conclude from this the existence of permanent sex differences? We shouldn't. Any sex differences that proceed from human social institutions are as malleable and changeable as those institutions.
And what about the idea that families are happier when wives submit? That, too, is malleable. I'm sure some women are happier when they are submissive. Others aren't and people like Ramli shouldn't insist that they submit anyway just so that those women conform to social or cultural ideas that people like Ramli can't let go of.
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