I'll Have a Titless Latte, Please

I caught up with daughters 1 and 2 over the weekend. Dinner at a Thai restaurant which seemed to owe more to Fawlty Towers than a degree in catering management for its operation. But the food was excellent and the erratic and quirky nature of the rest of the evening only added to the charm. I hope this restaurant continues to keep striking a blow against bland corporate uniformity.

You don’t get much more bland corporate uniformity than at one of the large coffee chains. Same stuff, same lacklustre décor and service, same soulless experience. Everywhere. You could be in Manchester or Mogadishu and it wouldn’t matter. Places like Costa are the antithesis of cultural difference.

But at least they’re inclusive.

Here’s Costa’s recent campaign which is presumably trying to inform us that you can get almond milk in your coffee, but not human breast milk. Something like that anyway - I’m not quite sure.

Another interpretation of this graphic might be that blue-haired women who’ve had their tits cut off enjoy Costa coffee. I really have no idea what this image is trying to tell me.

Maybe they’re just trying to sell more flat whites?

If you’ve had a radical mastectomy you get free coffee?

Are they turning into some kind of anti-Hooters establishment that serves strange coffee concoctions and over-priced sandwiches?

The corporate promotion of all things trans is getting a bit weird.

Maybe the message is that only real men have a set of stitch scars under their nipples.

Who knows what message all this fuckwittery is trying to convey?

So I thought it high time I should have another go at understanding what gender is all about. I’ve been trying to understand this term for the last two years and I’m no closer to making any sense of it.

Let’s go see what the “big boys” (if that isn’t too sexist) have to say.

The World Health Organisation may not be able to correctly define what pandemics, herd immunity, or vaccines are, but let’s see what they have to say about gender.

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.

Gender is hierarchical and produces inequalities that intersect with other social and economic inequalities.  Gender-based discrimination intersects with other factors of discrimination, such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, age, geographic location, gender identity and sexual orientation, among others. This is referred to as intersectionality. 

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.

Well that just clarifies everything, doesn’t it?

You could write an entire thesis picking apart a crappy “definition” like that, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it makes some kind of coherent sense.

Maybe the WHO are a bit of an outlier, so let’s see what those sensible folk in the EU have to say.

The Council of Europe get their definition from The European Institute for Gender Equality (an autonomous body of the EU) which apparently

provides very extensive definitions of sex and gender

Here’s what they mean by a very extensive “definition”

“Gender refers to the social attributes and opportunities associated with being female and male and to the relationships between women and men and girls and boys, as well as to the relations between women and those between men. These attributes, opportunities and relationships are socially constructed and are learned through socialisation processes. They are context- and time-specific, and changeable. Gender determines what is expected, allowed and valued in a woman or a man in a given context. In most societies, there are differences and inequalities between women and men in responsibilities assigned, activities undertaken, access to and control over resources, as well as decision-making opportunities. Gender is part of the broader sociocultural context. Other important criteria for sociocultural analysis include class, race, poverty level, ethnic group and age.”

You might notice that in both of these, erm, definitions, they don’t tell you what gender actually IS.

They tell you what it “refers to”.

What in the name of Hunter Biden’s misplaced packet of coke is that supposed to mean?

The other thing to note is that gender is “defined” in the context of sex.

Without the existence of an already established sex binary, gender, in these “definitional” terms, would have no meaning at all!

Where does that leave us with all of these neo-genders?

How does the recognised gender of “non-binary” fit within these ‘definitions’?

You could probably indulge in some tortuous word play to make something like non-binary “fit” within these definitions, but what about someone who describes themselves as belonging to the Eunuch gender? This is a gender recognised by WPATH, the primary world body for health advice on all things trans.

What are the “socially constructed” attributes of a Eunuch-gendered person?

The definitions adopted by the WHO and the EU seem to be anything but “inclusive” of all of these newly-discovered ‘genders’.

Perhaps Costa could do a promotion for cake-gendered people? Although they might get a bit traumatized by seeing people eat one of their cake brethren.

We used to have different words for all of this stuff. We used to describe this impossible guff, this word salad of delirium, in a much cleaner and logically consistent way.

We’d talk about sex-based roles, expectations and stereotypes.

Well, that makes a whole fuckton¹ more sense now doesn’t it? And it’s pretty much what the “definitions” above are actually saying.

We’ve gone from a delicious black coffee of meaning to a whole new world of almond milk whipped frappuccino lattes of invention.

The only thing the use of the word gender achieves is to add a great big dollop of confusion into everything (would Sir like a huge dollop of creamed confusion on that simple and straightforward coffee?). This is probably why there’s such emphasis on describing things using gender rather than the terminology of sex-based.

When you hear the word transgender what do you immediately think of? I’m going to hazard a guess that the first thing that will occur to most people is that we’re talking about people who want to change their sex.

What does changing ones “gender” actually mean? You change your “socially constructed” roles, behaviours and expectations? In other words, you pick some stereotype and behave and present accordingly.

Fine - go ahead and be a girly boy, or a boyly girl. Don’t care.

But if this is “enough” to become a different gender, then why cut your tits off?

On the one hand they will tell us that sex and gender are two different things - and that gender is the really important one of the two - yet on the other they are encouraging people to attempt to change their physical sex characteristics.

The usual form of words is to say that sex and gender are different, but related. But note that this “relationship” is never properly specified, or quantified. It’s just some vague relation. How much are they related? To what extent does sex inform gender and vice versa?

The more you try to pick apart all of this “gender” stuff, the more you come to realise that it’s almost all dependent on word games.

There’s no beef on the bones, no caffeine in the coffee.

I find myself in a curious situation. I don’t want to attack trans people as such - god knows, if you’ve suffered with serious gender dysphoria then I hope you find some peace, even if that does involve having some pretty drastic surgical interventions. But the ideology that is being promoted in the name of “trans” is shittier than a stick of shit with shitty bits on it.

But above all we need clarity. If we’re going to be cutting up our kids, even if they’ve reached the age of majority, then I think we need to absolutely crystal clear about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. This much-needed clarity is almost non-existent when it comes to the ideas surrounding “gender”.

We need to be in the business of selling reality rather than dreams and, sadly, for many, the reality is not going to play nicely with them

This is, admittedly, a cruel and savage meme - but it makes a very important point. The reality is like the black coffee, but many are seduced by the apparent allure of the fantasy of some ghastly coffee creation, overloaded with sugar. Only to find that it doesn’t, in the long run, taste as good.

1. A recognised scientific unit of emphasis