Good Vibrations

I feel very sorry for Macy Gray. She tried to defend women and has faced an appalling backlash for doing so. She gave an interview to Piers Morgan - not, perhaps, the wisest thing to do - in which there was an exchange that went like this :

MG : Just because you go and change your parts, that doesn’t make you a woman
PM : You feel that?
MG : I know that for a fact

Macy Gray is 100% correct on this. The differences between men and women, biologically speaking, are so much more than which particular assortment of wobbly or dangly bits we have.

From the moment of conception your biological sex is determined. From the moment of conception the biology, microbiology and biochemistry start creating the processes and structures that support either the production of male gametes or female gametes.

Of course shit can go wrong. It’s biology. But the edge cases don’t invalidate the binary. Intersex conditions, which occur with varying degrees of severity in about 0.018% of the population, do exist.

But the question isn’t whether there exists some small group of people who are ‘in between’ in some sense. The question is whether one can change the sex that was determined at conception? And your sex is “assigned” by your biology - not by those who assisted at your birth.

She has pedalled back a bit after coming under a lot of fire and in a subsequent interview stated that “being a woman is a vibe”

The problems arise because there are a small percentage of people whose internal conception of what they are differs from the biological reality of what they actually are.

They have a vibe that doesn’t jibe with their biology.

It’s tragic and distressing for the individuals concerned. I can’t imagine why anyone would wish harm on such individuals and it is only right and proper that efforts are made to alleviate their suffering and ensure they do not face discrimination.

In order to accommodate this feeling of being in contradiction with your own biological reality the term gender was coined. In the words of everyone’s favourite international health body

Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed.  This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time

By describing gender as a “social construct” the idea here is that gender can be almost entirely divorced from biology - or to at least give that impression - the differences being merely performative and based upon which society one finds oneself to have been plonked in.

Note also that gender itself here is being described in terms of woman, man, girl or boy which is an example of the self-referential and circular definitions that seem to infest gender ideology.

“Gender” is also said to interact with sex, and gender itself is also stated to be different from one’s gender identity.

Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs. Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.

Such wonderful and inclusive sounding mush that is essentially devoid of any real meaning. What is meant by “interact”? So we have 3 things here sex, gender and gender identity which are related (in some unspecified way) and interact (in some unspecified way) to one another.

Of course it all gets linked into intersectionality and oppression and the rest because that’s how you have to write this shit in order to be seen to be correct and virtuous these days. In their zeal to appear virtuous and compassionate, fearless warriors for social justice and health, they make the following bizarre statement

Consequently, women and girls face greater risks of unintended pregnancies . . .

No shit, Sherlock. Women and girls are the ONLY people who face such risks. Being charitable, it is of course just a poorly-phrased description of what they actually mean.

I’m ragging on the WHO a bit too much here because the condition of women in some places in the world is indeed a matter of concern. My problem is really with the framing of this as a gender issue.

I’m still no clearer what is meant by gender. I’m going to agree there are sex-based roles and expectations that differ from society to society. These expectations and roles are, to some extent, shaped by the societies (socially “constructed”) but with more than a few hundred thousand years of evolution as apes behind us and over a billion years of evolution behind sexual dimorphism it’s not even remotely clear how to disentangle everything. Sure, societies have helped to ‘shape’ our attitudes, but societies themselves have been shaped by our biology and evolution. Unless you think animal societies and behaviours are entirely socially “constructed”?

Feminists spent decades fighting against gender stereotypes, and quite rightly so - but this was at a time when gender was pretty much synonymous with sex. Curiously, we appear to have wound back the clock to the point where gender is often defined in terms of those stereotypes.

If we use the WHO’s terminology we can have someone whose sex is woman, gender is man, and gender identity is woman.

If you have a spare couple of hours I highly recommend listening to Helen Joyce’s interview with Michael Shermer. In it she makes a rather salient point (actually she makes a large number of salient points). I will paraphrase it rather crudely for effect :

I’m a man. I have absolutely no fucking idea at all what it’s like to be a woman

And this, in a nutshell, sums things up rather well. You got that woman “vibe”? Good for you. How do you know it’s a woman’s vibe?

I’m off to listen to “More than a feeling” by Boston that famous all-woman rock band

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