Engendering the Gender Agenda

I seem to be writing a lot about gender ideology recently. This is what happens when I don’t understand something. I worry at it until I’ve quietened the demons of WTF in my head, until I feel I’ve come to some resolution and understanding - which might only be temporary until new data, and new insights come along.

This happened with the response to covid too. The WTF demons (perhaps helped by the WEF demons) were banging away and causing one hell of a ruckus.

I’ve come to realise that despite using and seeing the word gender rather a lot, I don’t understand what it actually means. I’ve looked on scores of websites for a definition that makes sense to me and haven’t found one yet.

Einstein is famously credited with the following quote

I think a good deal of concern surrounding gender ideology these days is that explaining it to six year olds is precisely what they’re trying to do (along with other things). I’ve somewhat sarcastically and (obviously) in an over the top way produced a helpful graphic to explain what’s happening

Schools have always been criticised for promoting a certain degree of uniformity. They have been likened to factories churning out good little citizens. It was a central brick in the wall of Another Brick in the Wall and if you’re not a Pink Floyd fan you won’t understand the following

Schools are no less criticized today - and for the same thing. They’re all promoting the same set of ideologies based on CRT, gender theory, climate change and so on. What is striking these days, particularly in the case of gender theory, is that the kids are encouraged to be different, to stand out from the crowd, to ‘discover’ themselves and their alleged ‘gender identity’, and diversity, at least when it comes to skin tone and gender, is promoted as a wonderful thing.

What is not acceptable is any diversity whatsoever in how one is supposed to think about all of these various things.

I’m a big fan of diversity. I worked for a decade at a university in a country where I got to meet and talk with people from all over the world. It was bloody brilliant being able to interact with people from so many different cultures and with so many different perspectives. I loved it.

But if someone tries to restrict perspective, to tell me “this is the way you MUST think about this”, I’m going to tell them to fuck right off.

Could I explain gender to a six year old? Well, at the moment I can’t even explain it satisfactorily to myself, let alone anyone else.

I’m a huge “fan” of Einstein. Some of his original papers are simply breathtakingly brilliant. He was a worrier too - although he did it orders of magnitude better than me. He would ask seemingly simple questions and worry the hell out of them until he’d constructed a new insight that often had profound implications.

Most of us, however dimly, will probably remember Newton’s famous 2nd law which can be written as F = ma. Here the ‘F’ stands for force, the ‘m’ for mass, and the ‘a’ for acceleration. The idea is that if you ‘push’ on something it will ‘accelerate’. That sounds reasonable. The equation says that if you push 3 times harder on the same object you will increase the acceleration by a factor of 3, for example.

The ‘m’ part, the mass, is a measure of how much ‘resistance’ there is to the pushing force. If you push a heavy object, it’s harder to push - you need to exert more force to get the same amount of acceleration as you get when using the same amount of push on a lighter object. Mass, therefore, is a measure of the inertia.

Einstein asked a very simple question about this. Is that mass, m, the same thing for different kinds of forces? If it’s me doing the pushing, or gravity doing the pushing, is it the same ‘m’ that goes into the equation F = ma?

It sounds like a really dumb question doesn’t it? How can the mass of something, which is usually thought of as an intrinsic property of an object, change according to what’s doing the pushing?

Einstein decided it didn’t - in technical parlance he decided that inertial mass and gravitational mass were one and the same thing. He then worked out the consequence of that and the General Theory of Relativity was (eventually) born.

Asking simple questions can be a very powerful thing in the right hands.

The question “what is a woman?” is another very simple query. What gender ideologues would have us believe is that, like for Einstein, the answer points to something profound and very complex. Unlike for Einstein, however, for whom there very definitely was an answer, there appears to be no concrete gender-theory answer to the question “what is a woman?”

I don’t understand gender identities because I don’t understand gender. It seems to me to be an entirely superfluous concept that creates a wholly unnecessary degree of confusion. Or maybe if you’re a PoMo Pusher you would see it as an entirely necessary degree of confusion.

What’s extremely concerning is that any debate, any attempt to develop that understanding, is ruthlessly shut down. Or, rather, it is ruthlessly shut down if it appears that, as a result of one’s questioning, the “wrong” conclusion is arrived at.

Veronica Ivy, a transwoman cyclist, recently gave an interview with Trevor Noah in which she argues for the participation of transwomen in women’s sports. Colin Wright does an excellent job of demolishing the arrant nonsense that Ivy spouts in the course of that interview.

Debunking Veronica Ivy's False Claims About Trans Women in Female Sports

But one other thing really set the old bullshit meter into hyperdrive. In the introductory spiel Noah makes the following assertion

TREVOR NOAH: I’m gonna say from the top, because I’ve noticed this happens in every conversation. Every time you bring up trans rights, or if you have a discussion and you say “trans,” people tense up. I understand why. We live in a world where, now, there are people who are so transphobic that it makes it almost impossible for people who aren’t to ask any questions, to have any conversations, to have any discourse that doesn’t lump them in with transphobia. And so I’m really glad that you’re joining us on the show to talk about this, because it feels like one of the biggest issues in America, and yet no one can seem to talk about it.

So, according to Noah, the reason why people can’t discuss the issue is, surprise, surprise, because of those transphobes out there. People who are “so transphobic” they dominate the conversation.

He paints a picture of people genuinely questioning being hounded by a rabid “transphobic” mob and this, he suggests, is why no one can seem to talk about it.

Whilst I’m sure there are people (the so-called “transphobes”) who argue online against gender ideology as it applies to the trans issue what you won’t find online is any ‘official’ health body, psychology association, or social work/social resource promoting anything other than the standard gender-ideology perspective. At least I haven’t found any yet.

And we’ve seen what happened to JK Rowling for merely suggesting there was something fundamentally important about biology. She was denounced as a “transphobe”, or worse, for writing an extremely compassionate and well-reasoned piece on the issue. No deviation from the ideology ‘norm’ allowed here - despite celebrating and promoting ‘queer’ (the Q bit in the alphabet soup) which is all about deviating from the ‘norm’.

It’s the standard playbook - denounce your opponents as monsters, without addressing any of their concerns, however legitimate.

It’s very familiar. During a faculty meeting at Evergreen College when Bret Weinstein asked for evidence of the alleged systemic racism that was rampant on campus he was told that “even asking for evidence of racism is racist, with a capital R”.

Even asking for evidence of vaccine efficacy is anti-vaxx, perhaps?

It happens on both sides. The “woke” get denounced as idiots pushing an incoherent mess of nonsense in which feelings trump facts. The problem is that for gender ideology when I try to dig a bit deeper, to understand, to worry at the issue, all I see is, indeed, an incoherent mess of nonsense.

The term gender became popularized by feminists as a way of referring to the societal expectations placed on women as a result of their sex. It might have been something of an own goal.

The concreteness of biological sex, the reality, is being replaced by gender which is a subjective measure that is contextually dependent (according to the various definitions which describe it in terms of socially constructed roles and expectations). One would presume that if gender depends on social constructs, then by the simple expedient of crossing a border to a different society with different constructs, one can change one’s gender.

Whilst sex-based roles and sex-based expectations have been, and can be, damaging and restrictive and the initial use of gender was all about the male/female power dynamic as it played out in a given society, today we have a truly absurd number of ‘genders’ and more are being invented daily. And if we don’t accept someone’s gender identity we will be labelled as ‘hateful’. If I don’t accept someone’s self-declared “gaseous” gender identity I am, supposedly, some horrible monster.

What I would very much like to know is who is pushing this crap, and why?

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