Sex without gender is a very bad engineering decision. Lamps have plugs and walls have sockets. If the sockets and plugs had to search for each other and could not tell each other apart except on very close inspection, a lot of rooms would be very dark.

Gender is an engineering solution to the problem that bread needs to be won and children need to be nursed, that dangers lurk outside and inside the house, that worthiness to play any of these roles is best proved by rehearsed and ritualized displays of readiness rather than by actual performance of duties. Against all of these Darwinian adaptations Mr. Anand’s myopic, Utopian drivel proposes to compete.

If I read Mr. Anand correctly, he believes that there should not be a “man box.” It is not possible for toxic masculinity to be replaced by something called “Man 2.0”; rather, gender must give way to “Human 2.0,” a species with sex but not gender. So, the answer to the question “What does it mean to be a man?” is simply “What is this “man” thing of which you speak?” Certain responsibilities come with adulthood and parenthood, but none with manhood or womanhood. There is no better way to be of a gender; there is only not to be of a gender.

I can see how elitists like Mr. Anand might benefit in the short run from a genderless world, but they would soon discover that the rest of the world, the people with fewer talents, need gender to survive. Most women and children need provider/protectors, and most men and children need homemakers. Any other arrangement consumes enormous resources inefficiently.

The anecdotal cases who can get along well without gender make the most noise, because the talent for making noise varies inversely with the need for gender. Those who need gender are too busy, as W. said, putting food on their families. That leaves the anti-gender crowd free to pretend that they are a majority, when they constitute a rather small minority. They are smarter than the average bear, but not quite smart enough to realize that being that smart disqualifies them as spokespersons for the average bear.