|||| Patience Newbury
“A primeval, albeit universally intelligible language delivering the most rudimentary means of human communication upon which: social systems of order; divisions of labour; industry of culture; ways of perceiving the external world; and structures of spoken languages are founded.”
One supporting hypothesis advances that the language of gender was happened across or created as a technology for assuring the early survival and evolution of the Homo genus of primates, facilitating the evolution of complex social systems endemic to archaic H. sapiens and modern H. sapiens sapiens (and possibly H. neanderthalensis as well). Gender in this sense was foundational to the emergence (and geographic diversification) of more complex verbal and, later, written means of communication which were to follow. Those systems were strongly influenced by this primeval language of gender already in place.
Under this hypothesis, gender bears no relationship to biology or body morphologies, although certain biologies or body morphologies may arbitrarily be assigned contextual meanings using the grammatical rules of gender.
Gender is broken into cultural and/or social dialects apropos to systems of order: a di-gendered social order, for example, is structured into two principal dialects known as femininity and masculinity; a tri-gendered social order would include a third dialect; and so on. Expressions of dialects are accents; these vary according to, amongst others, conditions, situations, surrounding social company, relative social placement, age, and class.
The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is believed to be a mechanism in the human brain that is able to absorb, integrate, and synthesize any language to which one is exposed within a developmental window early in life (known as the “critical period hypothesis” (CPH)). If so, CPH helps to explain why the case studies of feral children lack the ability to fluently use a spoken or written language, and why they may lack the ability to socially integrate appropriate to how they are being presented to society (often with the help of other people to dress, groom, and place them into specific social contexts).
Separately, a living body lacking the means to communicate (e.g., a body in a permanent vegetative state) also lacks gender because it cannot be an interlocutor and thus cannot articulate cues or contexts required for gender to be received, parsed, or meaningful for other interlocutors.
A footnote on gender, to be unpacked later:
The working definition presented on this entry — and this framework of theory that I will explore on Cisnormativity — disagrees with the Butlerian premise that “gender is socially constructed”. On the contrary: social order is shaped by a precedent language of gender; societ(ies) followed after the basic building blocks of gender were formalized.