Commentary
Cultures vary in how they bring a boy or a girl to maturity as a man or a woman. But for all their variety, every culture until now has educated girls and boys, in the words of Margaret Harper McCarthy, “in how to behave, dress, and act in ways that foster their eventual union and common life together. That, of course, can go wrong in many ways, but it will always go wrong if the education of the sexes begins by denying the human significance of them, by downgrading them to ‘biological males or females.’”
Like other mammals, humans reproduce through the union of male and female. In some species, grizzly bears for instance, the mother is fiercely protective of her young until they are old enough to survive on their own, but the father’s role consists of impregnating the female, after which his work is done….