Gender's Game

Ender’s Game, written by Orson Scott Card, is one of my favourite SF books.

I re-read it at least once every couple of years. I’ve chosen it mostly because I can make a catchy title out of it. It deals with a war between two different galactic species; humans and the Buggers. It turns out that the Buggers are the ultimate ‘collectivists’ having a hive mind controlled by the queen. Each individual bugger is essentially no more than a toenail and so when they invade Earth they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong by wiping out millions of humans - they’re just clipping a few toenails.

It’s really all a horrible case of miscommunication.

It’s not a great parallel, but I do sometimes find myself wondering whether the ‘woke’ vs normal wars that are raging are akin to the bugger vs human war in Ender’s Game.

I am of course using the label ‘woke’ to describe a set of progressive ideologies that seemingly brook no dissent. There’s definitely a kind of breakdown of communication that is evident between the two ‘sides’ of this so-called culture war. Each side is trying to defend an ideology that it sees as being in danger of being annihilated by the opposing one.

What’s the end game here?

On the surface, the overarching ‘woke’ principles seem wonderful - they’re all about compassion and tolerance and being against discrimination and about justice and fairness for everyone regardless of their gender, sexuality, ethnicity or religious belief.

Who’s going to argue against that magnificent shopping list?

If you’re against these core ‘woke’ tenets you have to be some kind of bigot, right?

The core principles are framed this way to make it difficult to attack - we’re the side standing for all these good things and if you oppose us you have to be the bad guys, the fascists and the Nazis.

It’s a deliberate mis-framing because the vast majority of normal people are not against all of these wonderful things. Many do, however, very profoundly disagree with the methodologies and ideologies being promoted that purport to ‘achieve’ all these desirable goals.

Disagreeing with a proposed methodology to achieve a goal is not the same thing as disagreeing with the goal itself.

If you’re fortunate to be young enough not to remember what things were like at the turn of the millennium you may not appreciate that for many of us older folk (Schwab’s useless bug eaters) we’ve witnessed a rise in tension surrounding things like race and gender.

The argument could be made that the woke have woken us up to the unpleasant stuff that was actually there back then, just hidden, and have merely brought it to the light. I would argue that the woke have created the increase in tension.

Why has the rise of woke coincided with the rise of ugly? Things are a good deal ‘uglier’ now - there’s more aggression, more shouting, less understanding, less dialogue and less compassion - not to mention the fact that the notion of ‘forgiveness’ seems to have been forgotten. That mis-guided tweet you wrote 10 years ago is now forever indelibly attached to you. You will not be forgiven. You cannot redeem yourself. There is no sense of progression or self-improvement. You are, forever, on the naughty step.

I want to highlight some of this with the issue of gender, and in particular ‘trans’. It’s a difficult subject, and emotions run high these days, but it’s a desperately important subject because it touches on some very fundamental elements of who we are as human beings, and because of how, I believe, trans people themselves have been mis-used and abused by the GIMPS (gender ideology movement promoters).

Cast your mind back, if you will, a decade or so ago when things were noticeably calmer and less strident. Consider the plight of a trans individual back then. I can only dimly imagine what it must feel like to believe you have been “born in the wrong body”. I can only dimly imagine what it must have taken to go through the process of transforming your life and your body so that things better matched your perception of yourself. And it must have been more than a ‘perception’ - to have undergone what can only be described as an almost total rebuilding of one’s entire existence is not captured by words like ‘perception’.

I may not have the right words to describe what’s going on here, I may not fully understand it, but one thing I can say is that it feels authentic. It feels real. Someone who is doing all that is doing it for the very deepest and most essential of reasons to them.

There’s an acronym in physics that is occasionally used. The acronym is FAPP. It stands for: for all practical purposes. It’s a recognition that whilst something may not be 100% described by such and such a theory, for all practical purposes it is.

Still with our mind cast firmly back a decade or so ago I would like to suggest that, for example, a trans woman was, for all practical purposes, a woman. Obviously the fundamental biology cannot be fully changed, but as far as everyday interactions go, or legal status, etc, I’m going to suggest that the majority of people, and women in particular, would have had little difficulty with this notion of FAPP being applied.

I may be wrong in this perception, but I don’t think the majority of women, for example, would really have had much of an issue with a trans woman entering a woman’s bathroom. Recall that we’re in the mindset of a decade or so ago and not yet in gender ideology la-la-land.

So what has changed?

I’m going to draw a distinction here that may be offensive to some. It’s not a ‘perfect’ distinction by any means, but the authenticity (pre la-la) leads me to posit a category I want to call ‘genuine trans’. There are obviously some inherent difficulties with such a distinction, but let’s run with it, for now.

The very mischievous part of me wants to adopt the gender ideologue’s own terminology and cast it right back by calling this notion of a genuine trans individual cis-trans.

What has changed is the very devious ‘woke’ trick of re-definition. Without much fanfare, for example, the definition of racism was altered to mean ‘prejudice plus power’. It encompassed structural racism which is largely supposed to exist because there are inequalities. Whilst our conscious minds might be coping with the new flavours of racism, our subconscious minds hear the word ‘racism’ and associate it with the previous meaning of something very ugly.

It’s a neat trick - engender the same emotional response of disgust that you’d have to the old meaning, whilst talking about the expanded new meanings.

They’re playing the same trick with trans. It now has an extended meaning. It doesn’t just mean a genuine trans, it can mean a whole spectrum of things including someone who ‘transitions’ from being a man to being non-binary, for example.

They’re using the authentic experience of genuine trans individuals, and the very word ‘trans’, as a kind of Trojan Horse to usher in a large set of wholly different concepts that are nowhere near as authentic. As I said in yesterday’s post, I simply cannot take a concept like ‘gaseous gender’ remotely seriously.

In the case of ‘trans’, the prior emotion they want to evoke is the sympathy and compassion one would automatically have for someone who has undergone, or is undergoing, a genuine transition. They want to be able to call you ‘transphobic’ for having concerns about the eradication of women’s spaces by allowing self-identifying ‘women’ in.

I don’t think I’d have any concern whatsoever about a genuine trans person using the bathroom appropriate for their chosen gender. I do have a lot of problems with allowing some hulking great bloke to ‘identify’ as a woman and be able to use such spaces.

One feels authentic, the other does not.

There’s (obviously) something of a grey area in all of this, and I recognise that a lot depends on visual signals and interpretation of those signals and there’s a lot of stuff I still need to work through and understand better, but something is not right about modern gender ideology, and if I had to sum it up it’s this lack of authenticity. I should also, at this point, recognise the difficulties with the use of the word ‘genuine’. How do we know, and who am I to draw that distinction? I can only ask for forbearance as I struggle to hone in and clarify things better.

One other thing I should also mention is that, for example, if you undermine the meaning of the word woman, you’re not only impacting women, you’re also impacting genuine trans women who have fought for a goal that, it seems these days, is merely a semantic illusion - something that can’t even be properly defined.

At this stage in the game I kind of want to separate the world into two. On one side we have women, men, lesbian, gay, bi, genuine trans men and women; on the other side we have ‘weird woke shit’. Again, one side feels authentic, the other does not.

The question remains: why does so much of this modern ‘progressive’ ideology just seem to be making things worse for everyone? I suppose they would argue we’re just in the birthing pains of some wonderful utopia and once the useless bug eaters have died out we’ll be embracing the new rainbow-filled dawn of equitable wonder.

Have we just woefully misunderstood the collectivist Buggers?

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