Is it a Bird? Is it a Mansplane?

I was going to wait until I felt I had a better grasp of what the word gender means before commenting again on the gender wars. Any grasp at all, really, would be nice.

But I couldn’t let the post that popped up my Twitter feed go unremarked.

I’m beginning to feel that the acronym WTF has lost a degree of potency. We’re a few orders of magnitude beyond mere WTF at this point. Perhaps we’ve reached the WTMF stage : what the mega-fuck?

Or if you’re as confused as I am, lovers everywhere might be wondering what the fuck am I fucking?

Toby Rogers has just written a very interesting piece on all this in which he wonders about the sophistication and coordination of the messaging on the issue.

Trans messaging is too sophisticated to be the work of a small sexual minority dealing with severe health issues

I learned that Toby, who has written some brilliant stuff on covid (amongst other things), actually taught Gender Studies at one point. It’s a fascinating article and I highly recommend a read, but, alas, I am still none the wiser about what the word gender actually means, and much less wiser about what it means to say that one’s gender is male/man, for example.

Toby describes his fight for LGBT rights

By 2012-2013 we had won across the board. Equal rights to marriage, employment, housing, and hospital visitation rights were becoming the law of the land in the U.S. and throughout the world. We had achieved bipartisan consensus even on the fiercely divided U.S. Supreme Court. We had science, logic, and reason on our side. It was settled law and settled science.

I’m actually not sure precisely what Toby is referring to here, but I see nothing scientific about the whole concept of gender. Settled woo-woo it might be, but settled “science” it most definitely is not.

In the article gender is explained thus

For a century, progressives had fought to show that biological sex and gender were two different things. The argument was that sex is biological, given . . . Gender was/is seen as a social construct, theatre, performative. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique; Susan Faludi, Backlash; Anne Fausto Sterling, Sexing the Body; and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble all made the same point, sex is biological, gender is socially constructed. We won that argument in a rout.

Yes, I suppose sex and gender are two entirely different things - one is grounded in reality and the other is a vague, amorphous, subjective construct that could mean almost anything, being, as it is, “performative” and “theatre”.

I’m starting to reach the position that gender does not exist in any meaningful sense. There aren’t just two genders - there aren’t ANY genders.

That position may well change if the day comes when I finally have even the merest grasp of what the word gender means, but for now I cannot see its utility as a concept. It adds nothing except confusion.

Mathematicians spend their careers defining things and then proving some (hopefully) interesting stuff about the things they’ve just defined. Or they work with stuff that has already been defined and glean some new properties about it.

Everything a mathematician works on is a construct - an idea. Whether or not these ideas have some basis in actuality is an interesting debate. Is new mathematics discovered, or invented?

Take whole numbers (the integers), for example. Are they simply ideas, or do they have some basis in reality? As a physicist I might suggest they have some basis in reality - something like an electron is a singular entity. There’s no sense in which we can say “half an electron”.

When you start with just the integers you are quickly led into a new world of wonder. You can see how things like addition and subtraction came about. I used to have 3 cows in my field, but that bugger down the road has just nicked one. Even division comes about naturally. I’m going to divide my herd of cattle equally between my sons (or at least those of my offspring who identify as sons).

From there you very soon run into the idea of fractions. If you have two self-identified sons you’re not going to be able to divide your herd of 17 cattle equally without involving some butchery.

Doing this a bit more you realise there are certain sizes of herd that can’t be equally divided (without butchery) amongst any number of self-identified sons*. And we have the prime numbers. One of your self-identified daughters happens to be a bit of a whizz with all of these number things and realizes that these prime numbers are distributed amongst the numbers in a very special relationship

Where did this come from? Was this relationship just “there” waiting to be discovered, or is it just some construct we created?

The definition of what a prime number IS leads to all sorts of interesting things (and some extremely useful things - if you’re using some form of crypto, it’s odds on that prime numbers are playing a very crucial role in that security somewhere along the line).

All sorts of stuff gets defined by mathematicians - but only a small proportion of those definitions turn out to be useful.

This is where I am with the concept of gender at the moment. It doesn’t have a precise definition anyway - just some words thrown out around “social construct”, “roles” and “behaviours”. The definition does not help us to understand what the gender “man” actually IS.

So my position at the moment is that the concept of ‘gender’ should go the way of phlogiston - an interesting, but ultimately useless, notion that gets consigned to the massive pile of history’s crappy ideas.

*Edit : this is why I am not a mathematician. The correct statement would be that the herd cannot be divided amongst any number of sons, except 1 son or a number of sons equal to the number of cattle.

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