The ride down the slippery slope never seems to end.
It’s only been a matter of months since the transgender bathroom bill controversy. To recap those events: Leftists tried to convince everyone that the “bigots” in Raleigh, North Carolina were trying to pass a law that would prevent transsexuals from using the bathroom of their choice everywhere in the state, and they would have us believe that a bill specifically protecting the rights of transsexuals to use the bathroom of the sex that they identify with is the answer to that problem.
Both of these points are simply dead wrong.
In reality, the original bill passed in Raleigh, known either as HB2 or as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, applied only to government buildings, and stated that in government buildings, bathrooms (this part is important) would be designated for use by those with either male or female stamped on their birth certificate. The text of the bill then adds: “Nothing in this section shall prohibit public agencies from providing accommodations such as single occupancy bathroom or changing facilities upon a person’s request . . .” (You can read the full text of the bill here.)
It is important to note that when a transsexual successfully undergoes transition, the sex listed on their birth certificate actually changes. What this means is that the state was actually affirming that any transsexual person who has actually undergone transition belongs in the bathroom of the sex they now identify with. These facts didn’t stop Leftists from making histrionic, fearmongering videos of people being forced to “show ID to pee.” In reality, though there were a very small handful of cases of people whose presence in bathrooms was challenged after this controversy was forced onto the airwaves and came to the forefront of everyone’s mind, there was not a single reported case of anyone being prevented from using a bathroom in a government building in the United States before the controversy broke.
The Leftists’ response to this imaginary problem was to propose another bill, HB DRH10522-MMa-153B (also known as the “Equality for All” Act), which applied not just to government buildings, but to all “places of public accommodation” – literally any place which is “open to the public,” including restaurants, hotels, businesses, etc.; and stated that “a place of public accommodation shall provide access to such facilities [such as restrooms and changing stations] based on a person’s gender identity” (full text here). This is in fact much more radical than a bill that addresses transsexuals specifically. Because “gender identity” is subject to definition literally on a whim, in practice what this would actually do is abolish the idea of even designating bathrooms for men or women – by any definition of the terms – entirely, and it would do this in any business open to the public across the entirety of the state.
These bills, once again, therefore actually prohibit businesses from removing any man from the women’s restroom, or vice versa, at any time. And this is why the misdirected claim that opponents of these bills were afraid of “transsexual rapists” completely misses the point: far more people than the extremely small minority of genuinely transsexual individuals are effected by these rules. No less a bastion of left-wing experimentation than the University of Toronto actually cancelled their attempt at implementing gender-neutral restrooms after finding that they did in fact result in an increased number of peeping tom incidents. And lest the idea of transsexual predators be ruled impossible on principle, the story of Christopher Hambrook/“Jessica,” a biological man who claimed to be transsexual in order to gain access to women’s shelters to seek out abuse victims proves that this idea isn’t far-fetched.
For my part, I’m willing to accept that transsexuality is a biologically real thing, and unless and until some form of therapy is proven to work that eliminates this dysphoria, one which we know has physiological roots at least in part, I really don’t see any reason to care whether or not these individuals undergo surgery if they believe it will help them. A group that calls itself “gender-critical trans-women” express their desire to undergo surgical transition while avoiding all the usual trappings of transsexualist activism: they don’t care whether others think they’re “real women” or not, because they’re not certain that they think they are, either. But to them, it’s simply beside the point: they want an escape from the dysphoria they experience, and that’s all there is to it. If all transsexuals were like this, I’d have no complaints against them.
Interestingly enough, however, these people tend to state that they are “more afraid of [their] community harming [them] than of society harming [them].”
That community also seems really invested in getting everyone to believe you’re a bigot if you simply don’t want to have sex with them – even if “you” are a heterosexual and they still have the same genitalia as you. This is actually a legal battle that transsexual activists are just shy of guaranteed to lose. “Rape by fraud” is a well-recognized legal category worldwide; in Israel, for example, an Arab man was convicted of “rape by fraud” after portraying himself as a government employee and promising state benefits to a woman if she would sleep with him. Whenever the question of whether it is a form of deception to fail to disclose one’s trans status has come to court – from Scotland to the UK – the legal answer has been Yes.
And at the very least, the fact that there is widespread sentiment against the idea that “stealth-trans sex” is okay means that forcing this issue to the forefront weakens mainstream sympathy towards trans-people as a whole – which reveals a perverse set of priorities on behalf of those trans-activists who would pick this hill, of all hills, to die on. That some of these people are so desperate that they continue to see themselves as victims because they can’t be legally permitted to obtain sex from people by hiding something about themselves that would make those people feel as if they’d been raped or violated – even leaving the legal issues aside – is disturbing. And it’s a reasonable bet a lot of these very same people hop on Tumblr the next day to talk about how “rape culture” is fueled by white men spreading their legs too far apart on the subway.
Moving forward, however, further developments in Leftist “culture” are beginning to make transsexuality seem normal. MTV Voices has recently hired Dev Blair to be one of its voices for “gender non-binaryism.” In “Three Things Nobody Told Me About Being Gender Non–Binary” he says, “First thing is: pronouns are not easy. Literally, figuring out which pronouns to use to express the kind of gender I feel within myself? The longest and probably hardest part of this whole process. . . There is no guide to figuring out how to express the gender that you feel within you . . . I’m a strong believer that just by virtue of identifying with the label ‘non–binary,’ you have a non–binary body. But there is no right or wrong way to express that, so figuring that out can really mess you up.”
In light of this, it might be worth revisiting where the whole idea of thinking of gender as something you “feel within yourself” came from in the first place. A Harvard publication by David Haig, Ph.D, “The Inexorable Rise of Gender and the Decline of Sex: Social Change in Academic Titles, 1945–2001,” is extremely useful here. According to the abstract:
More than 30 million titles of “academic” articles, from the years 1945–2001, were surveyed for occurrences of the words sex and gender. At the beginning of this period, uses of gender were much rarer than uses of sex, and often used in the sense of a grammatical category. By the end of this period, uses of gender outnumbered uses of sex in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Within the natural sciences, there was now more than 1 use of gender for every 2 uses of sex. The beginnings of this change in usage can be traced to Money’s introduction of the concept of “gender role” in 1955 (J. Money, 1955). However, the major expansion in the use of gender followed its adoption by feminists to distinguish the social and cultural aspects of differences between men and women (gender) from biological differences (sex). [emphasis mine]
Who was John Money?
Money was a psychologist and sexologist, and as the abstract notes, he originated the modern feminist use of the words “gender” and “sex.” In order to give rise to the idea that gender is essentially nothing more than a social construct, John Money tested his theory on a young boy named Bruce Reimer. After a botched circumcision left the young Bruce without a functional penis, John Money’s solution was to use Bruce’s life as an experiment: he told his parents that since sexologists today know that gender is socially constructed, there would be no problem in taking the easy route by socially constructing Bruce into a girl.
As a result, Bruce was renamed Brenda. His testicles were converted into a vulva, and his parents began raising him as a girl. Milton Diamond later reported that Reimer had spontaneously stopped identifying as a girl by the time he reached the age of 11. When he was 15, he discovered what had happened to him, and he said that he suddenly understood why he had felt so alienated throughout his entire life thus far, and insisted on immediately transitioning back. He changed his name, once again, to David.
In As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, John Colapinto quotes David as claiming that Dr. Money forced him and his brother to rehearse “thrusting movements,” with David playing the bottom role. He described being told to get “down on all fours” with his brother Brian “up behind his butt,” and other times to have his “legs spread” with Brian on top. He described Dr. Money forcing the children to take their clothes off for “genital inspections,” and at least on “one occasion” noted that Dr. Money took a photograph of the activities. Dr. Money’s rationale for all this was his well-proven expert sexologist opinion that “childhood ‘sexual rehearsal play’ was important for a ‘healthy adult gender identity.’”
In the end, after years of severe depression, financial instability, and a troubled marriage, David Reimer’s life ended up in suicide at the age of 38. These are the twisted origins of the reinterpretation of the word “gender” – which originally referred exclusively to the grammatical inflection of nouns – into a counterpart to the word “sex.” And once these origins were in place, the fate we see unfolding before us today was basically sealed.
If I was told that it was a meaningful way to categorize my experiences, I could start to classify how “pig-like” or how “wolf-like” I feel on any given day. Some days I might feel more energetic and “naturally alpha” than others; some days I might be more gluttonous or greedy. Thus, I might eventually conclude that I must be “trans-species” because I shift from being primarily “pig-like” to being primarily “wolf-like” from day to day. The problem wouldn’t be that this reasoning was wrong – given my starting point, it actually would be accurate, and it would be a natural consequence of the way this exercise had started out.
The problem would have started the moment I began classifying how “pig-like” or “wolf-like” I felt in the first place, because feeling “alpha” doesn’t truly make anyone “wolf-like,” and acting gluttonous doesn’t truly make anyone “pig-like.” All of these emotions are perfectly human emotions, and there’s no reason to remove them from humanity, assign them to different animals, and then try to decide what animal you are today. You’re a human being. Human beings generally tend to feel gluttonous on some days, and “naturally alpha” others. Some feel one or the other more often than others, but they’re all still human beings. All of these things are human.
To view gluttony as essentially “pig-like,” or to view alpha behavior as essentially “wolf-like,” would oversimplify both what it means to be a pig or a wolf and what it means to be human. In the same way, it is liberals, who try to divide “gender” up into a fractured spectrum of a hundred shades, who are operating from an oversimplified caricature of what it means to be a man or a woman. Just as how our current concept of humanity already contains everything that was broken out of humanity and labeled “pig-like” or “wolf-like” in our above examples, the traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity likewise already contain the nuance liberals like to imagine they’re injecting back into it.
Masculinity and femininity have always been imagined as spectrums rather than as absolute binaries. In other words, no one in all of history has ever thought that all men were equally “masculine” or that all women were equally “feminine.”
Therefore, it does nothing to challenge this concept to point to men who are less masculine than others or women who are less feminine. The concepts of masculinity and femininity already acknowledge that. “Masculinity” is simply defined as the set of traits and behaviors which men exemplify more often than women. “Femininity” is defined as the set of traits and behaviors which women exemplify more often than men. If 75 percent of men do a thing 75 percent more often than 75 percent of women, then that thing is by definition “masculine.” If 75 percent of women do a thing 75 percent more often than 75 percent of men, then that thing is by definition “feminine.”
This definition of “masculinity”/“femininity” is neutral with respect to the extent to which nature versus nurture influences the things men and women do. Of course, it should be obvious to most rational people that both nature and nurture play a role. But the place for that debate is elsewhere. The point here is that no one has ever, in all of history, denied that many women have many “masculine” traits and behaviors, or that many men have many “feminine” traits and behaviors. They just accept that most men are mostly “masculine,” and most women are mostly “feminine,” on balance. And this much is simply true by definition, given the very meaning of the words “masculine” and “feminine.” Beards would still be a “masculine” feature even if only 75 percent of men had 75 percent more facial hair than 75 percent of women. Even if many men had little to no facial hair at all, and some women had more facial hair than some men, increasing the amount of facial hair a person has would still always be seen as making them look “more masculine.”
Furthermore, this much would hold true even if the differences between men and women were entirely the result of socialization. Of course, they aren’t; though there is no visible difference between girls with and without congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a condition that involves surging a female brain with male hormones at a certain point of their development in utero, girls with CAH still prefer to play with more “masculine” toys, despite the fact that parents encourage them to play with gender-typical toys just as much as they encourage their non-CAH siblings, as early as the age of three. But even if they were, the lay concepts of masculinity and femininity would still be perfectly valid.
In a sense, then, we are all “gender non–binary.”
We don’t fit on a binary when it comes to gender. But that’s not because there are a million subtle shades of gender we need to classify and create an aisle of paint color samples out of. It’s because there is no actual need to decide anyone’s “gender” at all. Knowing a person’s sex is empirically useful: it tells us which sex they’re capable of physically reproducing with. It tells us how they’ll metabolize various drugs. It gives us an idea of the way various diet and fitness strategies might impact them. (Yes, it also gives us a set of stereotypes of which we can be confident that 75 percent of people will meet about 75 percent of the criteria for them, which makes the process of understanding them more efficient even knowing that most people will fail 25 per cent of the criteria, and 25 percent of those people will fail even more criteria than that.)
But if Leftists are allowed to redefine “gender” as something that describes something purely psychological, then knowing a person’s gender will become nothing more than a drastically overconvoluted way of asking them what mood they’re in. Knowing what kind of mood a person is in is useful information. But pretending that our moods are a response to some amorphous inner essence changing form, as if our souls literally change sex while our bodies remain the same, is sheer nonsense. That is, unless we’re acknowledging that these peoples’ feelings of being masculine or feminine are fluctuating precisely because, for example, their testosterone levels are changing . . . which would only validate the traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity, anyway.
When people say “gender” is socially constructed, they’re right – but they’re only right because of the way the very concept of “gender” itself was socially constructed. The roots of the problem lie in the rotten origins of that very word – and that’s why the answer is to abandon it completely. Once we allowed horribly confused “experts” with weird perversions to ruin innocent peoples’ lives to test their pet theories and then distort the English language in service to that same end, these developments were inevitable. Hormones, chromosomes, and the biological systems (including both brain structures and, yes, genitalia) whose development is driven by those two features are real. The word “sex” was, for centuries, sufficient to refer to these real phenomena when necessary. “Sex” refers to an objective, biological fact about a human being. And gender refers to nouns. Our fight against “progressive” redefinitions of normalcy should stand against “progressive” redefinition of words. Our stand for traditionalism should involve a return to the traditional meaning of these appropriated words. The most concise way to cut through the nonsense of “gender non–binaryism” is to insist that the very idea of “gender,” itself, is nonsense that was artificially foisted on a spontaneously evolving, authentic culture in the first place. And when someone starts talking about how many genders there are—especially if their answer is more than two—catch their attention by telling them that, if they’re talking about genders of people, then the answer is zero.
How%20Many%20%E2%80%9CGenders%E2%80%9D%20Are%20There%3F%20Zero.
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7 comments
Slightly off-topic:
The horror of David Reimer’s life has haunted me somewhat since I first read about it. If the gentile USA had not succumbed to the cultural insanity of male infant genital mutilation (aka ‘circumcision’), Reimer would now (in all likelihood) be living a normal life as a 50 year old man, perhaps with grandchildren.
I think Camille Paglia would agree with you. Enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B553na_skKI
While reading this I remembered the following text (which is pretty hard to digest):
http://www.kevinalfredstrom.com/2016/04/real-child-abuse/
Do people really need to care about sex that much? It’s just the way people make babies. Why do they have to make their whole lives oriented around it? Don’t you think it’s kind of like an awkward spill over?
What’s more If your sexual nature is messed up then why focus so much on it? Why not focus on something else about yourself?
Cripples don’t jog. Blind people don’t fly airplanes. But they find other things to do. Why can’t these people that have problems with the firing of their sexual urges just not obsess over them?
I’m all for doing away with the concept of sex and gender. Maybe that would get people going based off physical appearance and existence rather than BS categories developed by Jews to make life less enjoyable.
Regarding gender theory, I recently learned of a book by Shira Tarrant, a Jewess, titled When Sex Became Gender (New York: Routledge, 2006). The publisher’s description states:
“When Sex Became Gender is a study of post-World War II feminist theory from the viewpoint of intellectual history. The key theme is that ideas about the social construction of gender have its origins in the feminist theorists of the postwar period, and that these early ideas about gender became a key foundational paradigm for both second and third wave feminist thought. These conceptual foundations were created by a cohort of extraordinarily imaginative and bold academic women.
“While discussing the famous feminist scholars — Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead — the book also hinges on the work of scholars who are lesser known to American audiences — Mirra Komarovsky, Viola Klein, and Ruth Herschberger. The postwar years have been an overlooked period in the development of feminist theory and philosophy and Tarrant makes a compelling case for this era being the turning point in the study of gender.”
Beauvoir was a mistress — one of many — of the communist Jean-Paul Sartre; Mead was a protégé — again, one of many — of the Jew Franz Boas; and Komarovsky, Klein, and Herschberger all just happened to be Jewesses — just like Judith Butler, who is perhaps the most prominent gender theorist today.
I had to smile when I read of these feminists being described as “extraordinarily imaginative.” In other words, they were delusional.
Tarrant’s book contains these remarkable references to the National Woman’s Party (NWP):
“Unfortunately, organized postwar feminism in America was marred by racial conflict and elitism, and some were repelled by the racist, anti-Semitic, and right-wing leanings of some members of the NWP.
“In contrast with the Women’s Bureau, which intermittently embraced eforts to combat racism, the National Woman’s Party had no interest in civil rights except to insist that women be included in government seats and decision-making roles involved with fighting racist politics. The NWP position on race was neither passive nor innocuous. By arguing that black men should not have rights denied to white women, the NWP used racist arguments to garner support for the Equal Rights Amendment. It was widely known that NWP leader Alice Paul was openly anti-Semitic. Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor wrote that working in isolation from a network of progressive causes, as the postwar women’s movement did, invited the risk of reflecting and perpetuating the elitism, anti-Semitism, racism, and anticommunism of the larger society, all in the name of advancing women’s rights.” (25)
“Ellen DuBois explained that American feminism in the 1950s was associated more closely with the political right than the left. For instance, the NWP, the only national organization at the time to openly embrace the term feminist, contained some staunchly conservative members and supporters of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Alice Paul, NWP founder, tried to get the NWP to join the red-baiting bandwagon and was suspicious to the point of wondering if the Communist Party was trying to infiltrate the group.” (30-31)
A science fiction hypothetical: suppose sometime in the future it was possible to transplant the brains of the dying into the bodies of people who had recently become brain-dead. And suppose you got into an accident and had to undergo this procedure, and the only available body was a female one. After the procedure, would you not want to alert people that you had “originally” lived your life as a male despite your current body, given that people tend to bring different expectations to social interactions with males vs. females? Or if not, would you at least find it understandable if others in a similar situation did, for example wanting others to address them by the pronoun of their brain’s original sex?
If so, suppose that science proves someday that there are a significant number of biological differences between male and female brains (more than just the ones scientists are currently most confident of, like the statistics of sexual preference and specialized talents like ability to rotate objects in one’s mind eye), even if these differences are more statistical than ironclad, and that transgender people, through some biological quirk, were born with brains that are atypically close to the sex they identify psychologically with, rather than the sex of the non-brain parts of their body. This would be at least somewhat analogous to the previous science fiction scenario about brain transplants, so I think there’d be more reason to sympathize with people’s desires to be addressed in a different way than their body’s sex would indicate if this desire was rooted in the actual biology of their brain. And science can’t say with any certainty whether or not something like this is true, but there is at least some preliminary evidence that makes it plausible.
Speaking for myself, I agree that in the hypothetical you’ve posed sympathy would be warranted. The question, of course, is whether transexuality really is like that. And there seems to be evidence of the “preliminary” sort that could point in either direction. For one thing, the fact that people have similar “trans” experiences with regards to things like their age and race — I’m thinking of the man who recently made news because he “identifies” and lives as a toddler — does prove that this kind of phenomena can occur for psychological, rather than biological, reasons. Even if some cases of transsexualism occur for biological reasons, others may still be psychological.
For another point, based on the statistics I’ve briefly seen, it looks like undergoing sex transition surgery doesn’t reduce the suicide rate among transsexuals, and apparently even increases it. Whether this is a response to transsexuals’ treatment by society, or evidence that transsexualism does indeed involve mental illness and that physical surgery fails to truly treat it, is an open question. If the latter case is true, it may be that empathy compels us to take their suffering and experiences seriously even as we refrain from indulging what would then in that case have turned out to be delusional beliefs.
In any case, there are several different criteria we could choose to decide the definition of what a person’s sex “really” is: what genitalia do they have? What chromosomes do they possess? What sex were they born as? What sex are they behaviorally more “like?” And so on. The fact is that transsexuals would qualify as belonging to one sex according to some of these criteria, and they would qualify as belonging to the opposite sex according to others. Whether one decides to consider them “real women” (or men) or not, then, is ultimately arbitrary even if transsexualism is fully caused by biology, because it completely depends on what criteria you decide to select. Precisely because sex is—in this sense—“socially constructed”, if there is no objective way to deny a MTF transexuals’ claim of being a “real woman” without stacking the deck with a question–begging definition of “real” womanhood,” so there is equally no objective way to deny a straight male’s claim that he would not consider himself to have had sex with a “real woman” were he to discover the person he had sex with was a MTF transsexual, without stacking the deck with an equally question–begging definition of “real” womanhood.
Thus, my single biggest issue with transsexual activism in its current form is the prevalent attitude that people holding a private preference to refrain from engaging in sexual interaction with transsexuals is inherently a form of bigotry. If egalitarians had any consistency whatsoever, they would see this claim as being exactly on par with accusing lesbians of bigotry for preferring not to have sex with straight cis–men: anyone who would dare make such a claim, or even raise the question, is crossing unacceptable lines. As it stands, the hypocrisy on this point is overwhelming.
In any case, I hope all this makes me stance clearer and helps elucidate why I said that my favorite group of trans–activists are those who simply don’t care whether anyone considers them “real (wo)men” or not, and actually do simply way to live their own lives the way they see fit. I can respect that sort of attitude infinitely more than I can an intolerant demand for “tolerance” that includes essentially demanding that people have sex with you. Much less while turning around and in the same breath claiming that a fundamental expression of patriarchy — a fundamental, Manichean force of evil in the world — is straight mens’ belief that they are “owed access to womens’ bodies.” If you want to frame socio–sexual dynamics in those terms, all I ask is for some basic consistency. Just accept that trans–people are not “owed access to cis–peoples’ bodies” either, and I should be able to find terms on which we can co-operate and get along. But rank hypocrisy is something people neither can nor should attempt fair negotiate with.
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