For Whom the Balls Drop

I’ve written a reasonable amount about “gender” over the past couple of years. One of the questions I’ve been asked is why? I’ve even been asked this followed by the admonition that I shouldn’t be interested in the topic because it “doesn’t directly affect you”.

I’ve never read Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls even though it’s supposed to be a classic, but the title is taken from the thoughts and meditations of John Donne published in 1624. Here’s what Donne wrote :

No man is an Island, intire of it selfe; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee

John Donne, I assume, was white, and I’m guessing he wasn’t non-binary, and I’m pretty sure he’s dead. Hitting all three of the most important pieces of information about him we can, these days, exclude his writing as of no consequence.

400 years later, we still use the phrases For Whom the Bell Tolls and No Man is an Island - which is quite something. But as a ponk it is likely he stole the ideas from a pock¹.

It is my view that we should be interested in “gender” ideology, and in particular when it comes to kids, because it affects all of us. After all, no demigirl is an island².

I confess, however, that a large part of my interest stems from my inability to properly understand the various terminologies used. I’m a bit like that. I once stayed up for 3 whole days as a Uni student, trying to solve a problem the lecturer had set. The drive to ‘solve’, to understand, can become something of an obsession for me - although the urgency has waned as I’ve got older.

I still don’t know, for example, what the word gender actually means. I’ve pored over the official “definitions”, tried to take them apart, applied them to examples, and written (by now) thousands of words. All to no avail, because the precise meaning still eludes me. In terms of “gender”, I can’t answer the question “what is a woman?”, either.

The best I can come up with is that gender is a feeling that describes what label you want society to attach to you.

Gender is not an objective, measurable, thing. There’s no experiment we can do to properly determine someone’s gender. The only thing we can do is to ask someone what their gender “is”.

But if you ask someone what their gender is, it’s probably a reasonably good idea to actually understand what a gender is in the first place - and I don’t. So I can’t properly understand the question, and nor can I properly understand what a gender “identity” is. At best, I have only a partial understanding of these terms, but keep coming up with logical contradictions whenever I try to apply my understanding.

If my girlfriend were to be infected with GIV³ overnight and woke up declaring she was now a he, would that make me gay (or bi) if I still found “him” to be attractive?

Many of us, myself included, suspect that the confusion is deliberate. Part of the whole “postmodern” programme which spawned the Rosemary’s Baby of Queer Theory, is to undermine and destabilize the norms and normal meanings of words within a society. This kind of destabilization programme has been termed, by Pluckrose and Lindsay⁴, Applied Social Justice, or Applied Critical Theory.

The majority of people, the “normies”, come to believe through continual usage and promotion, that the various terms and re-definitions have some concrete meaning. Things like “white privilege” and “gender” are taken to be real, verifiable, objective things instead of the vague, subjective, and untestable ideas they actually are.

If someone walked into the office and proclaimed himself to be the Messiah (instead of a very naughty boy) you’d probably shake your head in pity and suspect the poor fella was deluded. If he walked into the office and proclaimed he was no longer Laurence but Loretta, you would have to affirm that self-perception - on threat of dismissal and/or prosecution.

When it comes to “gender”, self-perception is taken to be entirely an objective thing, but when it comes to religion we don’t view self-perception in quite the same way. Some “lived experiences” are different to others, I guess.

As I’ve noted before, the ‘official’ definitions of the term gender almost all⁵ critically depend upon the existence of the sex binary. Without an implicit sex binary these definitions become even more meaningless.

It starts “reasonably” enough by positing that some people feel their “gender” differs from the sex assigned to them by their biology. Although you’ll read such statements that sex and gender are often “related”, you’ll notice that the possibility is admitted that one’s sex and gender can be entirely unrelated.

What this means is that the feeling one has, one’s self-perception, can differ from the material reality of one’s biology. You can’t feel what it’s like to have the material reality of another body, you can only feel what you imagine it’s like to be a member of the opposite sex.

In order to get society to buy into all of this you have to sell the idea that this term you haven’t properly defined, gender, now supersedes the biological reality of sex. It doesn’t matter what you actually are; it only matters what you feel yourself to be.

Feelings are easily manipulable, bodies are not.

Loretta (née Laurence), I’m not denying your existence - I’m denying your existence as a woman. You’re a man who feels themselves to be a woman. And I’m OK with that, no harm to you, but I’m sorry that you can never be a woman in the fullest meaning of that word⁶. Biology is a bitch, but it is what it is.

I should say I’m OK with that in the vast majority of everyday interactions I might have with you. But when it comes to protecting the right of women to have single-sex spaces (and NOT single-gender spaces) I’m going to have to side with women (sex) on this one and not women (gender).

It’s a bit of a bugger because I understand that you’re no real danger to women yourself, but by relaxing the safeguards to allow self-ID, to allow the mere self-perception or desire to overrule biological reality, we increase the overall risk women face by eliminating single-sex spaces. And that’s all there is to it.

The simplest solution is to have male, female and ‘other’ spaces - but that will be taken to be cruel and bigoted because it will hurt your feelings.

But feelings, and the protection of them, seem, like gender, to have been afforded a degree of primacy that is unwarranted and, ultimately, damaging.

Take a paper written in 2021 as an example. It’s titled Perceptions and Motivations for Uterus Transplant in Transgender Women and you can see that it’s all about helping trans women feel better about themselves. Here’s a paragraph from the introduction so you can get a sense of the overall tenor and thrust of the article :

Rapid advancements in uterus transplant research, as well as considerations of fairness and equality in reproductive care, have now led to discussions of the possibility of uterus transplant in transgender women. Uterus transplant in transgender women seeks to align reproductive capacity with aspiration and alleviate the dysphoria. Significant additional psychological and social benefits following uterus transplant could also occur, particularly when considering that parenting has been identified as a protective factor in suicide risk for transgender women. Moreover, reproductive rights are recognized as human rights, and legislation in the UK means that it would be illegal to refuse to perform uterus transplant in transgender women on the basis of their gender identity.

I suspect the “advancements” are still somewhat aspirational themselves. I dread to think about the extensive and hideous cocktail of hormonal and other modifications that would be necessary to change a male body into one “capable” of sustaining a pregnancy. Evolution, eat your heart out. My drugs and scalpel can do in a few (expensive) surgeries what it took you millions of years to achieve.

When it comes to foisting all this gender crap onto kids - that’s another matter entirely. I’m not sure I entirely agree with Helen Joyce when she describes the phenomenon ‘trans’ as entirely socially constructed - but she does rather have a point there (or at least 98% of a point).

I recently watched the Korean drama See You in My 19th Life, which is about someone who can remember their past lives and the impact it has on them. I wondered whether a society with a belief in reincarnation would handle the trans issue better than we do. Someone who feels they are “in the wrong body” could be connecting with a past life in this perspective, and I wondered how that would change the whole dynamic?

If you read some of the accounts on PITT you can readily see that, at least in some cases, the thinking of some “professionals” is not significantly more sophisticated than “Your son plays with dolls? He must be a girl”

We really do need to stop worrying so much about the feelings of others. We shouldn’t entirely disregard them, either, but they should have nothing like the primacy they are afforded today.

I hurt your feelings? So fucking what?

This is the end of the sympathy spectrum we should be working at - and not the catastrophic “my feelings trump everything” end of the spectrum we’re at today.

I was always brought up to understand that my feelings were my responsibility - it was my own duty to manage them properly, and not the duty of everyone else to do this for me. We can’t always control our feelings, but we bloody well can control what we do about those feelings.

And so I’m going to finish by really hurting someone’s feelings. The British Army recently had an event celebrating women (which, of course, had to include the obligatory trans person) in the army during which they made an exciting announcement

1. PONC (pronounced “ponk”) : is a Person of No Colour and a POC (pronounced “pock”) is a Person of Colour. With thanks to William Briggs for this terminology.

2. A demigirl, according to The Centre for Sexuality and Gender Diversity, is “An identity that describes someone who identifies with both Female and Agender genders. They do not necessarily identify with both equally, but always identify with both and only Female and Agender.” One is always so grateful for these clarifications.

3. GIV : stands for Gender Ideology Virus. Those infected tend to talk givverish.

4. I love Wikipedia’s entry for Lindsay which describes him thus: “James Stephen Lindsay, known professionally as James A. Lindsay, is an American author, cultural critic, mathematician and conspiracy theorist.” They just couldn’t resist getting the pejorative “conspiracy theorist” in there, could they? Woke-ipedia is quite funny at times.

5. I can’t say they “all” do - but certainly all of the ones from the ‘official’ sites I’ve looked at do - and I’ve looked at quite a few by now.

6. Some would say in any sense of that word - but I’m actually on board with a sympathetic and tolerant approach, except where it has a significant impact on natural women (single-sex spaces like changing rooms and rape crisis centres, for example). Basically, anywhere where actual sex is an important consideration.