A slender gender mender render

So, in my quest to understand some of the gender ideology movement promoters (GIMPs) I’ve been reading some stuff. All of the websites for official health agencies, or official social support services (etc), that I’ve looked at say essentially the same thing and I have completely gone off gingerbread cookies. These GIMP resources have not clarified things for me very much.

I’ve also been reading a couple of more anti-GIMP books. Helen Joyce’s book Trans is really very good and I highly recommend it. I’m going to give it a 2nd read soon and take notes this time so that I can give it a review. Joyce makes lots of extremely pertinent observations and discusses the facts in a way you probably won’t see in the mainstream media. The other book is Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds which I’m currently reading for the 2nd time.

Murray, with his typical clarity and panache, has perhaps opened up a sliver of light for me on the gender issue. It is a slender opening which might allow me to render a better understanding of things and mend my confusion to some extent.

Before I get into that, let’s go back to that strange, but absolutely essential, sub-species of human known as the mathematician. Mathematicians are highly-developed entities and incredibly finely-honed by evolution to be a wonderful biological machine for converting alcohol into theorems.

It may seem strange to say it, but language is really important to mathematicians, just as it is for other technical disciplines. Maths isn’t, despite how it might look to an outside observer, just a case of farting about with largely incomprehensible hieroglyphics. If you say the world “field” to a mathematician they will most likely think of a particular structure in advanced algebra (and please forget what you might think of as ‘algebra’ in this context. Modern Algebra is really quite different from manipulating expressions like y = 1 /(1 - x) and such like).

Say the word “field” to a physicist and they will probably think of gravitational fields or electromagnetic fields, or something similar.

Say the word “field” to a Dutch farmer and they will immediately think of something that is about to be seized by their Government.

We have to call stuff something. And in technical disciplines it’s a bugger of a job giving things a half-decent name. Words often get re-used and mean different things in different contexts - like the word homogeneous in mathematics which can mean very different things depending on the context in which it is used. Also, it happens that everyday words get used that mean something different when applied in a technical setting. A lot of early confusion that was common around the technical meaning of information in Information Theory when it was first developed, for example, is because it doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘information’ in everyday usage.

Whatever word is chosen, appropriate or not, confusing or not, it is a kind of shorthand that does an awful lot of heavy-lifting. When a mathematician says that a matrix is invertible, for example, there’s a whole ton of other things that are understood.

The word invertible is actually a half-decent choice here. If you take a ruler, press down on one end to fix that end so that it becomes a pivot, and then rotate it by pushing on the non-fixed end, this whole process can be mathematically described by using a vector to represent the initial position of the ruler and a rotation matrix to describe the operation of rotating the ruler. The matrix ‘operates’ on the vector to produce a new vector - and this new vector describes the new position of the ruler.

The inverse, then, is just the rotation operation we would have to do to “undo” things, to get back to our starting position, to invert (or maybe in modern parlance to detransition).

That’s a mental picture that can be useful as a concrete example, but to a mathematician the very word invertible conjures up all sorts of other properties this rotation matrix must have. Its determinant must be non-zero, its null space must be the zero vector, the row and column vectors form a basis for the vector space, and lots more properties besides, which all follow and are equivalent properties to a matrix possessing an inverse. Start with any one of these and you can prove all of the others.

The word gender, then, is a bit like one of these technical words; it’s a kind of shorthand that is meant to do a fair bit of heavy-lifting.

It is, as far as I can determine, one of these basket words that is supposed to stand in for a range of ideas like social expectations and pressures, individual expectations and pressures, social roles and behaviours, individual roles and behaviours.

So when someone claims the ‘gender’ of woman, for example, they are claiming an ‘identity’ based on their conception of what all these various components are for the gender labelled as ‘woman’.

According to Murray, people like Judith Butler talked about ‘gender’ precisely so they could attack it. Why should girls, or boys for that matter, be limited by an arbitrary set of conditions, requirements and behaviours that were imposed either by society or by their own internalization of society’s expectations?

So, demolishing the gender ‘stereotype’ became a hugely important part of feminism. They could have said “sex-based expectations and roles and behaviours”, for example, but the word ‘gender’ was a convenient catch-all word that alluded to a variety of things in just one word.

The important idea was that the gender basket was socially constructed - it had no real validity in any objective sense - and that was the point stressed by Butler and other feminists. Maybe I like Butler a bit more today than I did yesterday. And whilst I have some very serious criticisms of the whole broad-brush application of the term “social construct” - we are, and always will be, driven by ancient evolutionary imperatives to some extent and we can’t ignore the powerful evolutionary nudges around sexual selection - I have to say that I wholeheartedly support the notion that we should not be limiting girls, or boys, by encouraging particular stereotypes.

The GIMPs today seem to be taking us along a regressive Autobahn with the pedal in the Merc pressed firmly to the metal. The hard-won gains of feminists in challenging gender stereotypes are being reversed as these stereotypes seem to be getting more and more baked in. It only looks like things are getting ‘freer’ with young people now able to pick and mix from a whole new exciting range of gender identities rather than just the boring old ‘man/boy’ and ‘woman/girl’.

You’re no longer a ‘tomboy’, a girl who likes activities stereotypically attributed to boys, you’re a different ‘gender’. If you happen to like the “wrong” kind of things, things that vaginx possessors don’t typically like, something terrible has happened to you and you’ve been assigned the wrong gender, or even the wrong sex!

We had no idea, until recently, just how shitty biology was and how often it goes drastically wrong.

But in the most stunning and thought-provoking words I’ve read this year, one psychologist points out

A childhood is not reversible

This is something we , as a society, need to reflect very deeply on - and we need to do it soon.

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