I do like a good “Doctor, Doctor” joke. One of my favourites is the delightfully silly variant which goes something like this :
Doctor : you appear to have a steering wheel in your trousers
Patient (male) : yeah, it’s driving me nuts!
If you’re not from the UK, you probably need a bit of background context. It’s fairly common, particularly Oop North in the UK, to replace the word ‘my’ with ‘me’. So you might introduce your mother as “this is me mam” which means this is my mother.
One of the greatest exponents of this kind of joke, in my view, was Tommy Cooper who represents the pinnacle of “Dad humour”.
Here’s just a couple more of his involving medics :
A woman told her doctor, “I've got a bad back”.
“It’s old age”, replied the doctor. The woman said, “I want a second opinion.”
“OK. You're ugly as well”.A man walked into the doctor’s, he said “I’ve hurt my arm in several places”. The doctor said “Well, don’t go there any more”.
There’s a lot about the modern world that drives me nuts, but the topic of “gender”, as you all know, is one of them.
I simply do not properly understand what this word means.
Why is it important?
It’s because our “western” societies are being re-shaped around this word. Our sex, our biology, is increasingly taking a back seat to this new “concept” of gender.
So it seems kind of important to be able to understand what this word actually means, don’t you think?
Go onto TwitterX1 these days and you’ll find any number of people telling somebody to stop confusing sex with gender.
I’ll be able to do that when somebody can actually provide me with a proper definition of the word gender.
Lots of people pretend to know what this word means, and speak about it confidently, or if your surname is Butler you’ll speak out it confoundingly, but nobody, however confident, can actually use this word to properly define what the recognized “gender” of woman is.
Remember the breath-taking inanity of all those who proudly proclaimed that “a woman is anyone who says they are a woman”?
It’d be bloody brilliant if reality worked that way. Why does it (almost) only “work” that way when it comes to “gender”? I mean, if I said that I was The Messiah, how many people would be falling over themselves to affirm that?
It’s somewhat ironic that the people who deride others for confusing sex and gender use the word woman - which has always (until about 5 minutes ago) only ever been used within its biological, sex-related, meaning.
No writer of the past was ever talking about a woman as being exclusively an “inner feeling”. Feelings might have a been a part of it, but what they meant, and what their readers understood, was that they were talking about people with a particular set of flesh and bones. And, yes, attached to those flesh and bones came a certain set of expected behaviours and attitudes which varied depending upon one’s geography and social status.
People with a different set of flesh and bones, who could beat the crap out of those with the other set of flesh and bones, largely set the rules. In Jane Austen’s time women (of a certain class) were expected to sit at home and fine-tune their “accomplishments” which included things like embroidery and piano-playing, but did not include things like accountancy or medicine. Those were things almost exclusively reserved for the male set of flesh and bones.
It’s little wonder that many women wanted to be able to contribute a little more to the world than a nice bit of embroidery, and felt rightly aggrieved they were not able to do so.
It must have driven some women of the day absolutely nuts.
But notice that social class has rather a significant part to play here. If you were Ezekiel Nobody from the village of Little Option, then your possibilities were also somewhat restricted. Your life would have been a bit crap - maybe a bit less crap than that of your missus, but crap nonetheless.
Also, I dare say that even back in Austen’s day, there were men who would much rather have sat at home in flouncy dresses doing a spot of embroidery, but the number of those who thought they were actually women inside would, I suggest, have been indistinguishable from zero.
But, of course, nobody had told them about “gender” - so they weren’t even aware of this possibility, or fantasy.
I can well imagine that a certain number of both men and women of the day would rather they had been born into the opposite sex. The problem wasn’t with their biology, as such; they were not “trans”. The problem was with how their biology was treated by the wider society.
And, despite the crushing weight of your inner feelings and the insistency of your claims, a doctor2 is not going to prescribe medicine they know to be harmful to your actual, biological, sex. There’s not much we can do about it - men and women have a different biology - and people with male biology do not get cervical cancer, for example.
Want to stop this confusion between sex and gender? Fine - then use a different word for man and woman when referring to gender. Mang and Womang, perhaps?
But they don’t want this, do they? No, the activists actually want this confusion to exist, because the confusion benefits their cause. They want you to hear the word woman and associate it with its biological meaning at a subconscious level.
It’s the same with the use of the word “racist”. They want you to associate the word with some wild-eyed, frothing at the mouth, crazy KKK nutjob, but then apply it to some really mild potential bias, or hypothetical “systemic” discrimination.
Words and definitions really do matter - and we need to ask who benefits from having some word only described in a vague way? Things like “hate speech”, for example, are really ambiguous terms that only serve to drive the agenda in one direction.
I appreciate there are words and ideas, particularly when it comes to people and society, that are somewhat difficult to define precisely. What is “love”, for example? But when it comes to far-reaching revisions of how we structure society, then I think we do need to insist on something more precise when it comes to terminology.
I’ve used this example before, but here’s a screenshot of the Cauchy Integral Theorem from Wikipedia.
Every word and squiggle here has a precise and well-defined meaning. Roughly speaking, what this says is that if we take some well-behaved function and think of some enclosed area (a circle, for example) that tells us where we get our inputs to this function from, then what’s happening inside the boundary (the values of the function inside the boundary) is completely determined by what’s happening at the boundary.
It’s a magical result - and a very important one - but we know exactly where it can and cannot be applied and what it means.
Society and people are not equations though, and so we shouldn’t expect the same degree of precision when it comes to concepts relevant to society and people. But, dear God, we need to do much better when it comes to woke terminology like gender.
If we don’t do this, we end up with all of this deliberate confusion where people can write this kind of thing in all seriousness
When it comes to the human species, it’s amazing just how bloody awful nature is at getting it right. All of those unfortunate people just born into the wrong bodies. Evolution worked for every other animal species, but failed miserably when it came to us it seems. It’s so bad that we needed to create an “infinite” number of structures that “push” people into being “cisgender”.
Me : I’m the Messiah
Me Mam : No you’re not, you’re a very naughty boy girl
Pronounced “Twittocks”
A proper doctor, not captured by ideology, if any of those still exist.
The trannies don’t seem to want to be real women at all, they fetishise a fantasy in pink and nail varnish and skyscraper heels whereas most women seek the comfort of trainers and jeans. It is clear by their naked aggression towards TERFS that they have no concept of the mental gymnastics that real women go through before opening their mouths, so as not to risk over-offending someone bigger and stronger, that is, men. As men, they are the big strong ones and loving the liberated role of trans-bully.
Oh, yes, I'm the great pregender
On the boundary I look like a chick
But Cauchy's Integral Theorem shows
I can't be holomorphic...