Cocknitive Dissonance

I haven’t written about Gender Woo for a while. I thought there wasn’t really anything much new to write about. The arguments seem to have all been made, countless times, and facts, logic, and science haven’t really shifted the needle for the die-hard wooists.

But woo-world was always going to collapse, eventually. You have to perform some degree of spectacular mental self-mutilation not to see the thing that sticks out a mile.

Is womanhood the thing that a wooist sees when faced with an uncircumcised transwoman in the locker room?

Wooists take great pains to deceive themselves. Normal people, outside of progressive bubbles, see the Frankenlumps¹ and don’t see a woman - they see a man pretending to be a woman, often in ways that seem to be more of a parody of women and womanhood. That awkward bulge, the Insta Trout Pout², the mince of mockery. Outside of these progressive circles, no-one is fooled by this act. And it’s somewhat unlikely that even the progressives are being fully honest with themselves when they describe the latest Lump in a Leotard as a “beautiful woman”.

Jamie Lee Curtis didn’t actually say this, as far as I know, but the point this meme is trying to convey is still valid.

Normal people, the majority by quite some way, have for some years now been forced to pretend, often on pain of cancellation or disciplinary action, that some men are, actually, women. They only keep schtum because the cost of speaking out is too great. This is not ‘acceptance’, it’s an order to fawn by fiat. Progressives (or rather the wooist-form of progressive), of course, see exactly the same things everyone else does, but they have to force themselves into a head-space where the evidence, the reality, takes a back seat to feelings and being seen to be virtuous. There has to be a continual suppression of reality to make it all ‘work’ in woo land.

It’s perhaps this aspect of what I’m going to call cocknitive dissonance that is one of the more fascinating requirements of being a wooist.

Róisín Michaux has penned an excellent, and I think important, piece outlining a significant factor in how it came to be that much of this silliness (dangerous and tragic, but also deeply silly) has taken such a hold.

Non-Binary Niece syndrome

It’s also hugely entertaining and beautifully written - well worth a read. Róisín has a quite magical turn of phrase.

The Feelings Commissariat™ would tell us it’s cruel and hateful to judge people by their appearance, but I’m not going to ditch a useful heuristic that has served the human race so well for hundreds of thousands of years. And neither, realistically, is anyone else. Sure, when we “judge a book by its cover” we sometimes get it wrong, but most often we actually don’t.

When I see some Frankenlump in a Frock I’m not going to try to pretend I’m seeing anything other than something that is brute fugly. That’s just the way it is guys. Sorry. If that is upsetting for you, then there’s not much I can do about that. We have eyes, we have discernment, and we use them all the time even if we sometimes have to suppress a comment or two. It’s just a miserable and brutal fact of life that most of us wouldn’t be asked to star in a commercial for jeans. Our genes have betrayed us.

Normally, of course, most of us would keep schtum - we don’t really want to offend anyone - although us guys tend to enjoy brutal honesty more than the gals.

But with ‘trans’ things are different. They’re different because we are coerced into a pretence that the Frankenlump we see before us is actually a woman. For many, myself included, that’s a step too far. Live your own life, be the star in your own drama, but you can fuck right off if you try to force me to part of your supporting cast.

You can play Meat-Lego³ with your body all you like⁴ - that’s on you. Good luck with it. But don’t try to get me to continually validate your fantasy. I may, or may not, occasionally play along but it will depend on the context and whether you’re being an arsehole about it or not. I’m not going to throw an ep at some trans barista, or randomly accost a Frankenlump in the street.

I will probably be kind and courteous and play along with their little game - and I know some of you will castigate me for that. But I wonder whether the transwomen who demand continual validation understand that the vast majority of people are only pretending to validate them, just as much as they are pretending to be women?

Is this satisfying for them? Perhaps it is, if a part of their game centres around power and domination - which it seems to in some cases.

Men and women, of course, need no such continual validation of their sex. We may need validation of other things - our feelings, our abilities, and so on - but we neither need nor require any validation of our own sex.

We might term this a healthy approach to one’s own body - and here’s where a new piece by the magnificent Helen Joyce surprised me. I thought it had all been said, that there was nothing really new to say about the trans-silliness, but she came at this from an entirely new and unexpected angle recently.

Why gender medicine isn’t science, and isn’t medicine, Part 1

She asks the question about what ‘health’ means in the context of ‘gender’. It’s clear in other areas of medicine what health means. Your liver’s fucked - stop drinking. You’ve been punched in the face by a trans-activist who claimed you were a TERF and now you need stitches. Joyce, as she so often does, rises like some Alexander faced with the mother of all Gordian knots, to state

gender medicine isn’t medicine, because nobody knows what it is to have a healthily functioning gender

She counters the obvious rebuttal that it’s about ‘gender dysphoria’, that’s where the ‘health’ aspect comes in, by re-casting this as meaning “suffering distress about something undefined”.

It’s a neat cut. The health aspect is the ‘distress’, not the gender. Gender ‘medicine’ takes the approach that to fix this distress, one must medically treat the ‘gender’. But that makes no sense, because how does one go about treating a ‘gender’? It’s not a real, objective, thing.

When a man decides he ‘is’ a woman, he is only ever ‘being’ what his male imaginings are telling him what a woman is.

Men and women need no such imagination - we live the reality of our own bodies everyday. We don’t have to imagine what it’s like to be the sex we are.

We’ve been forced to accept a society-wide cocknitive dissonance for no good reason, or at least no good medical reason. And women have borne the brunt of it. Guys (you’re 4 of the 5 fat people I know) are relatively unaffected by it all. Weird Frankenlump hitching up his skirt to piss in the urinal? Odd, but OK we’ll live with it. We might get a tiny bit cheesed off when the first transman nicks one of our gold medals, which will probably happen when Hell has turned into a popsicle. There’s a totally disproportionate impact on women, though.

1. There’s definitely an important element of appearance here. Some more androgynous males are able to ‘pass’ as ‘women’ more successfully - after a considerable amount of effort and/or modification. They’re the ‘lucky’ ones because most are not so fortunate. Sacks of potatoes in a dress look like sacks of potatoes in a dress. It’s cruel and unfair - but what are you gonna do? Get angry with God?

2. Credit to the brilliant Róisín Michaux for this term

3. And also this one

4. Provided you’re a mentally healthy adult