Is The Gender Pendulum Swinging Back?
If you’ve been reading these riggery ramblings over the last few years you’ll know that I struggle with understanding the concept of ‘gender’. It’s one of those ideas, like ‘love’, that seems to defy rigorous definition. It’s more of a philosophical concept than any scientific one.
Love certainly seems to be a useful concept that is ‘understood’, at least at an experiential level, but can the same thing be said of the concept of ‘gender’?
So the first thing we need to figure out is where the notion of gender sits in the framework of ideas with which we attempt to understand the world and the things that happen in it.
1. Models and Measurement
1.1 Physics
In physics we have various ‘models’ with which to build an understanding of the world. These models deal exclusively with physical things - stuff like mass and time and length and so on. One such model would be Newton’s Laws of Motion which tell us how physical objects move under the application of forces. If those forces are being generated by electric and magnetic phenomena then we need to extend our ‘model’ to include Maxwell’s equations which are the laws governing electric and magnetic fields. And so on.
As our understanding developed, as we discovered more and more things, we had to come up with new concepts. Indeed, the idea of a ‘force’ itself wasn’t properly described until Newton nailed it down. At each stage of this game, as we gained more experience points and increased our level, the concepts became more sophisticated and difficult to understand unless you’d worked through all the lower levels in the game.
But at each stage of the game the concepts were underpinned by measurement.
We could take the current ‘model’ and test it. We could do experiments to see if the model we had accurately described (and predicted) things. If the predictions didn’t work out we knew there was something wrong with our model.
Now, this does not necessarily mean that the model needed to be thrown out. It might mean that we have not included all the relevant factors in our model. Let’s have a look at a quick example.
You’ll probably remember at school having to ‘measure’ gravity using a pendulum. This is a fairly tedious experiment, but it’s useful training. You’d have a pendulum bob and a stopwatch and a length of string and using these things you’d attempt to measure the gravitational field strength (expressed in terms of the acceleration due to gravity).
You’d set the pendulum swinging and time how long it took to complete a number of oscillations back and forth. You’d measure the length of the pendulum and then you’d be able to relate this to the gravitational field strength through the equation
where T is the period of oscillation (time it takes to complete one cycle back and forth), L is the length of the pendulum and g is the acceleration due to gravity.
It’s a useful training experiment because you have to learn how to handle any measurement error involved. If you do the experiment you’ll typically find you end up with a lower value of g than the accepted value and that this accepted value even falls outside the error bars in your data (this is like the ‘confidence interval’ for your measurement).
Aha! Newton was a fool, you’ve proved him wrong! Not a bit of it. What’s happened here is one, and probably both, of two things. You’ve (a) not taken into account that the equation above is only a small angle approximation valid for when the pendulum is started at angles not more than around 10° and (b) the effect of friction has been entirely neglected when deriving the equation above.
This underlines an important thing. If you have some ‘model’ that has been broadly giving you the correct predictions but you find some discrepancy in a certain experiment, it’s vastly more likely that the model needs a bit of tinkering with (missing factors, some violation of initial assumption like the ‘small angle’ one, etc) than it is that the original model needs throwing out entirely.
The second thing to emphasize is that statement I made earlier.
If the predictions didn’t work out we knew there was something wrong with our model
This is not some kind of ‘your truth’ vs ‘my truth’ kind of thing. The knowledge here is absolute and objective. We know there’s something not quite right with our model, with our understanding. Edison, perhaps, expressed it best when asked why he’d failed with so many of his experiments
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work” (Thomas Edison)
This ability to falsify our ideas - to reject theories that don’t work, to revise theories that almost work, to realize we’ve left something out, etc - is absolutely central to what science is. It’s the generator of all knowledge in science. It’s an inbuilt self-correcting mechanism1 that pushes us relentlessly ever closer to an accurate description of physical reality.
As a methodology for getting us closer to the truth - and, yes, the truth really is out there - the scientific method has no parallel. It can even usefully be employed in other ‘softer’ disciplines that deal with more fluid, complex, and difficult phenomena.
1.2 Critical Theories
Just as physics attempts to build models of the physical world we should recognize that Critical Theories work on a postulated model of the ‘social’ world. The postulated model we might call The Oppression Hypothesis™ which attempts to explain the ‘social’ world in terms of various intersecting oppressions that act on identity groups.
How does one go about measuring this? How can we determine how much objective truth exists in such a model of the world? Is it predictive? Can it be falsified?
It is certainly not directly observable. We cannot ‘see’ this web of invisible intersecting forces of oppression. So how do we know it’s ‘really there’?
In physics there are also things that cannot be directly measured. The gravitational field is one such thing. We infer its existence from its effect on other things - like apples falling on the heads of scientists who are daft enough to sit under an apple tree.
People like Ibram X. Kendi infer the existence of such an “oppression field” by looking at where there are disparate outcomes for different identity groups. Any such disparity is taken to be ‘evidence’ for the existence of the oppressive field.
The problem here is that it is not universally applicable in the same way that, say, Newton’s Laws are. For example, would we take the fact that men are disproportionally represented (by a huge margin) in jail populations as ‘evidence’ of some form of Misandrist Oppression Field™ in operation?
No, of course we wouldn’t. It’s because men are far more likely than women to do stuff that lands them in jail.
In fact, in the case of men, it is assumed that we are lords and masters of the Patriarchal Field of Oppression™ that operates to keep women subservient and forever in their place - and so we might wonder why women are not more equally represented in the jail populations?
This ‘measurement’ difficulty extends to other kinds of fields that we routinely encounter in discussions. These invisible fields are also said to be real, objective, things. We have the Field of White Privilege™ which acts like some kind of binary thing that all white people are said to benefit from. It’s an either/or thing. If you’re white you have it irrespective of status, wealth, geography, disability, or any one of a myriad other factors. It is some kind of constant field value that applies to white people.
If you’re said to be white-adjacent you can also feel the benefit of the Field of White Privilege. It, apparently, works a bit like some kind of magnet. It’s an attractive force if you’re white (or white-adjacent) and a repulsive force if you’re not white.
There is no doubt whatsoever that black and non-white people in the US (and elsewhere) had it rough historically. All of the rights and freedoms had to be fought for and many people (whites included) sacrificed their lives to make it possible. Today, however, the entire system has been re-worked and re-written in order to reduce, if not eliminate, the legacy of past injustices and we might even say that there exists, through things like DEI and affirmative action policies, a Field of Black Privilege™ when it comes to things like employment.
All of which stuff and nonsense really goes to show how intellectually moribund and useless the entire hypothesis of the existence of Fields of Oppression™ really is. As soon as you try to apply the idea beyond any surface-level description it falls apart. Try answering a question along the lines of “If I introduce this new policy will it impact Oppression™ and by how much?”
1.3 Into the Gender-Blender We Go
I can’t tell you, properly, what ‘gender’ is, or what it means. The best I can formulate is that it’s some kind of internal feeling2 about whether one matches the expectations and behaviours of a particular sex in a given society.
You can’t be circular here. For example, it makes no sense to try to say that gender is the feeling about whether one is the male or female gender. For example, the Irish Government has just passed a revised version of its Hatred and Hate Offences Bill, now given a new name as the Criminal Justice (Hate Offences) Bill 2022, in which gender is ‘defined’ in the following way
“gender” means the gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female.
Good luck trying to understand what ‘gender’ actually is from this linguistic catastrophe.
How do we ‘know’ what someone’s ‘gender’ is? There is only one way to ‘measure’ this, and that’s to ask someone what they feel their gender to be.
Although there’s a broad correlation between sex (a real observable3 thing) and gender (an internal feeling) it is by no means perfect. This would be interesting if ‘gender’ was a real, objective, thing - but it isn’t.
However, just because something isn’t objective does not mean it isn’t real. We would not, for example, say that ‘love’ is not a real thing, but we would recognize the subjectivity it entails. For the people who (claim to) understand gender it can be a very real thing. For them.
People can choose to identify with a particular gender, or not. I don’t ‘identify’ with/as a gender because I do not understand what a ‘gender’ is - so there’s nothing there for me to identify ‘with’ or ‘as’. It would be like me identifying with/as an Ewok.
Technically I might be described, therefore, as being of the neutrois gender which is someone who doesn’t feel they have a ‘gender’ (except that of neutrois). Except that I reject the concept of ‘gender’ itself as being useful, relevant, or meaningful. It’s like the phlogiston for our times.
All of this self-indulgent frippery would be a nice way to while away the evening hours whilst getting seriously identified with several quality ales, but it has taken on a much more significant and impactful position in society. In many places this subjective self-identification, which cannot be independently measured, has legal force, and we’ve seen an example of that above with the recent bill passed in Ireland.
There is legislation to codify one’s gender identity as being a protected characteristic. A characteristic of what? It is not measurable like sex or race or ethnicity or disability or even one’s sexual orientation4. We have, therefore, legislated for the sanctity of a feeling, not a measurable thing5.
It is not even a static, fixed thing. It is said that throughout one’s life one’s gender can change. It can even change on an almost daily basis. There is even a ‘gender’ to describe this dynamic ‘characteristic’; the gender of being gender fluid. Someone of the gender gender fluid switches between genders. What, then, would be the gender of switching between gender fluid and some other gender?
And this, this, is supposedly some ‘characteristic’ that we need to describe as protected so that laws can be written about it?
At the moment the laws in most places effectively only really consider a binary view of gender. The laws are written to ‘cope’ with situations where a man (sex) feels he is a woman (gender) and vice versa. I don’t think legal systems have quite caught up with what do about genders like that of eunuch, which according to the world ‘authority’ on these issues, WPATH, is an actual bona fide gender.
We would do well to remember that, for example, women have historically been discriminated against in male-dominated societies because of their sex, not their ‘gender’.
The concept of gender adds nothing of any real value to our legal frameworks even when restricted to only a binary ‘understanding’ of gender as male or female. What kind of a ghoulish fustercluck awaits when legal systems catch up and start to include all the crazy ‘genders’ that have recently been invented? And if ‘gender’ is such a legitimate construct, of obvious value, why are we not legislating to protect the ‘characteristic’ of eunuch or pangender or demigirl or neutrois or any other one of the God knows how many ‘genders’ there are now said to be?
Gender first arose as a concept as a way to talk about sex-based stereotypical behaviours and stereotypical roles and stereotypical expectations. Back in the 1950’s when this term was first coined and applied as a shorthand for these sex-based things it (sort of) made much more sense than it does now because the various sex-based stereotypes were more dominant. It should also be noted that, at the time, there were only two of these ‘genders’; male or female.
The law, as someone once said, is an ass. Which, one presumes, is a more serious condition than merely identifying as an ass. My central problem here is not that people choose to live their lives with all sorts of fanciful ideas in their heads that make some kind of sense to them - good luck to them. My central problem is that the rest of us are being forced to play along with them and with concepts that have no real objective validity and that awful laws are being written about such vague and logically inconsistent ideas.
There is one more concern that overrides this more philosophical one, however, and that’s when it comes to the health and well-being of our children.
Demons Everywhere
My focus on models, and in particular with measurement, might seem a little abstract and with a bit too much flavour of ‘scientism’, but the scientific method is the best way to get at the ‘truth’ of a matter. Even in the ‘softer’ disciplines, where there are no universal laws like those of Newton (that we know of), we can to some extent test the hypotheses we come up with by examination of the data.
When it comes to scientific models that purport to describe some physical reality they can be good or bad models of that reality. We know that the various models used to describe covid or the climate, for example, are flawed because they did not and do not adequately describe (or predict) that reality.
We can run into big problems when we confuse the models with reality itself. It’s not such a big deal when we’re trying to describe pendulums, but when the model you’re working with tells you that CO₂ acts like some global temperature control knob and governments decide to implement policies that are going to cost trillions and trillions of taxpayer dollars in an effort to reduce CO₂ production, then we’re not in Kansas anymore Toto. We’re working in some Oz-like fantasy model world and not the real one.
And we know these models are flawed. We know they do not work properly.
Which means we have not sufficiently understood things - and certainly not sufficiently well to be embarking on a ruinous ‘green’ program that will create many more problems than any supposed problem the models say it will solve.
Models, therefore, are very important things. The ‘model’ we have in our heads about reality determines how we view things, how we interpret things.
If you’re working in The Oppression Hypothesis™ model, then that’s what you will see - oppression everywhere. Simple statements like “the best person should get the job” become part and parcel of the Oppressive Field™ instead of something that is just bloody good common sense.
If you’re taught that demons are everywhere and cause all the bad things you see, then that’s how you’ll interpret events. Illnesses, misfortunes, and the like arise from demonic influence requiring prayer and devotion to an ideology to overcome.
If you’ve conditioned yourself to view men in a certain way, for example, then if I held the door open for a woman it might be seen as some form of ‘benevolent sexism’. The actual truth is that if I’m aware of a human being behind me when I’m opening a door I will open it and let them through first. It’s just what I do. The strident radfem nutter will, however, see this single event as confirmation of her worldview about one of the (hopefully lesser) evils of man.
As that other nutter DiAngelo stated (paraphrase) : the question in any interaction isn’t to ask whether it was racist, but to ask where the racism occurred.
That’s one totally fucked-up model of the world DiAngelo has in her head.
These kinds of models of reality we carry in our heads can have serious consequences. If you teach your kids that cops can’t be trusted and that the whole system works against you, then how might they act in any potential arrest situation? With calm and respect, or with aggression and flight? The fear they’ve been taught to have might override any good sense appropriate for a given interaction - and we’ve seen far too many of these kinds of responses leading to tragedy.
So, what’s the model of the world that’s being taught to our kids when it comes to sex and sexuality?
Hey! Teacher! Leave us kids alone
The Pink Floyd song Another Brick in the Wall was an attack on an educational ‘system’ that was seen to be trying to program kids to be a good little soldier, a cog in the machine, a brick in the wall. The whole ‘woke’ ethos when it comes to education might even be seen as an attempt to break free of this stultifying and oppressive ‘production line’ (3m 18s)
But we do have to educate our kids. And it’s rather critical that we give them the benefit of models of the world, even if flawed, that do at least make some kind of sense. Perhaps more importantly we need to give them the tools and confidence to be able to question those models and to be able to figure out when they’re being sold a lie.
The whole approach to ‘gender’ in schools does not sit in splendid isolation but is an integral part of a new kind of philosophy that is being promoted in many places. In the past, schools were not really seen to be places where you would learn morality as such - except perhaps by a kind of osmosis, particularly when you did something wrong and faced punishment.
Of course conformity was part of the deal. One had to conform to the school rules. Which might sound bad, but we all need to learn to conform, don’t we? There are innumerable things we all learn to do and not to do in order to live in a functioning society. I do not view conformity, per se, as being an evil but as a necessary component of respect for others. It’s the kind of conformity we engender that can be a problem.
The main focus, however, was on learning subjects.
Today, there is at least some focus on getting kids to be activists. Teaching is seen more as a political role than as a neutral educational role. Not everywhere, to be sure, but it seems to be fairly common. In the past, teachers were supposed (and expected) to leave their political leanings, their sexualities, and their private lives firmly outside of the school gates. Not so much today.
One of the apparent aims with the new approach to viewing the world through a lens of gender is to let “kids be who they are”, but this pre-supposes there exists some “are” for them to be. Psychologists will tell you that we don’t always have an entirely fixed and stable sense of ourselves as adults, and nor are we always entirely accurate with our own self-assessments.
The idea has arisen that even though someone is born in a male body, for example, they are ‘actually’ female. This view implies there’s some sense of ‘us’ separate from our biology. If you’re religious then you might wonder why God has decided to stuff a soul with one sex into the physical body of the opposite sex.
If you don’t think in terms of a soul then, in the case of so-called gender confusion, what is ‘it’ that is purported to be ‘female’ within a male body? The only thing it can be is the mind. We must, therefore, imagine there exists something akin to a ‘female brain’. Now, this may actually be true. It is extremely unlikely that evolution applied to male and female bodies just stopped at the neck. Indeed, we can see throughout the animal kingdom differences in behaviour between male and female that can only have arisen from evolutionary processes acting on the body. One can hardly bring in vague notions of “social construction” to explain those differences.
If there is some difference (and I believe there is) in the actual biology of female vs male brains then this opens up a whole can of worms for those who push the primacy of gender over sex as a way to understand and regulate human interaction. It opens up the possibility of a kind of ‘test’, a measurement, that can be performed to see whether someone in a male body has a ‘female’ brain.
Even if there’s no strict binary here and there’s only a tendency for there to be a difference between male and female brains, it still opens up a line of enquiry that gender activists definitely don’t want anyone to go down.
But here’s the thing. Why are we trying to present a model of the world to kids in which there is supposed to exist this gendered mind or soul that can differ from the material reality of one’s sex? This is not presented as some sort of hypothesis, but as an actual fact.
Kids are even questioned about whether they might be ‘really’ female in a male body (and vice versa). They’re encouraged to think about this supposed possibility.
Here’s the big question, though. If kids were not even aware of this ‘possibility’ would they even be thinking they might be, in some sense, the opposite sex to that which they were born as?
Getting kids to even think about this ‘possibility’ is a kind of social construction in itself. The subsequent ‘gender’ confusion would not even exist in a society in which such ideas had never been entertained, in which such questions could not even be imagined.
There are plenty of historical records in which people of one sex expressed a kind of desire to be the opposite sex. In the case of women, for example, where the historical society they were in was very restrictive they might well have wished for the wider horizons and opportunities afforded to the male sex, but not to the female sex. They are not wishing to change sex, as such, but wishing for a fairer more equitable society.
What we don’t find are lots of examples of people claiming to actually be the opposite sex to that which they have been born as.
That’s a very big difference - and it’s clear that this notion of ‘being’ a different sex is something that is a very recent invention - a social construction, if you like.
And yet kids are being taught this notion, this possibility, of ‘being’ something different as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s even celebrated when it happens. It is not natural, and it is no cause for celebration.
I’m not going to re-hash all of the horror stories, the powerful cocktail of drugs that can result, the grotesque and traumatic surgeries that can happen. We know that this ‘tolerant’ and ‘innocent’ sounding question about one’s inner ‘reality’ can lead kids down a very unnatural and dark road6. I’m just going to leave things with one intervention that is seen as the least damaging. That’s the notion of social transition in which a kid is allowed to live as the other sex (whatever that means) for a while in order to ‘try it out’, to see if it’s right for them.
This is often seen as no big deal. But it is.
A childhood is not reversible.
Don’t fuck it up for them.
How Do We Know It’s a Socially Conditioned Thing?
Let’s just restrict ourselves to a binary notion of gender. Let’s not even try to figure out what ‘gender’ is in the context of all of the other weird genders that are said to exist.
What we have then is some gender function G which outputs a value of 1 or 0 (let’s say 1 for female and 0 for male). The inputs to this function are B, biology, which is also a binary variable (male or female body) and a set of variables, S, which include things like behaviours, expectations, roles etc which are to a large extent socially conditioned. We have then G(B,S) - which I suppose we might call the BS model.
You can see the problem here. If this thing we call ‘gender’ is dependent on input variables that are socially conditioned, then it cannot possibly be an entirely ‘innate’ thing, but must itself be partly a result of social conditioning.
One only need remind ourselves of statements like the following from Neil DeGrasse Tyson whom I have been told is a scientist
“My point is, apparently the XX/XY chromosomes are insufficient, because when we wake up in the morning, we exaggerate whatever feature we want to portray the gender of our choice, either the one you’re assigned, the one you choose to be, whatever it is. . . Suppose, no matter my chromosomes, today I feel 80% female, 20% male, I'm gonna put on makeup. Tomorrow I might feel 80% male, I’ll remove the makeup and I'll wear a muscle shirt. Why do you care? What business is it of yours to require that I fulfil your inability to think of gender on a spectrum?"
Notice here that the thing that constitutes feeling ‘female’ here is adherence to a stereotype. It’s not innate at all. It’s all about conformity with a particular set of societal expectations.
If it was just a matter of social convention regarding dress and behaviour then ‘gender-bending’ and gender nonconformity have been with us for decades (David Bowie, anyone?) - and no, Neil, nobody gives an air bound fornication about it.
But this isn’t what’s really happening is it? If it was just this then, yawn, like I said we’ve been there done that and it no longer shocks us like it did back in the 60’s.
What we have today is an entire sex class under attack. It’s particularly relevant for women because they’ve had to fight very hard for some kind of society in which their horizons weren’t severely limited simply because they happened to be of the female sex. It’s also particularly relevant for women because, all the nonsense written by some radfems aside, there’s a large gap in physical capability and aggression between men and women that makes women particularly vulnerable. It’s why we have women’s sports, and intimate spaces delineated by sex.
If some guy who feels, shall we say, 80% woman on a particular day is allowed to enter women’s spaces, then we have erased the necessary rights and protections afforded to women as a sex class.
Not to mention the extreme danger of getting kids ideologically possessed to the point of self-harm through grotesque surgical procedures.
This, Neil, is why we care. Why it’s a big deal.
I should also mention that my first grandchild, female, just turned 6 months old. I care very much about what sort of nonsense she’s going to be exposed to as she grows up. Why wouldn’t I?
The Good News
Whilst it’s still a problem and there are still many stories of heartbreak and damage, we can sense that the tide is finally turning. People are much less afraid about speaking up on this issue than they were a few years ago. If it hasn’t already reached a tipping point it will do very soon. When the ‘shame’ tactic stops working as a way of keeping people silent, the dam will burst. This is what were seeing more and more.
Ooh, I’ve done a transphobia. Naughty me. What’s the weather like today, love?
The Cass report has been utterly damning of the whole ‘trans’ thing and, by extension, the whole ‘gender’ thing. It might be seen in later years as the final blow that cracked open the prison door the gender activists had kept locked for a while.
So, yes, I think the pendulum has swung - and it’s heading back to normality. Let’s hope someone stops it in the middle and it doesn’t go veering off the other way.
Postscript
As I was writing this, Arty Morty published an absolutely fabulous piece which overlaps to some extent with this one. It’s a long piece, but definitely worth a read
This self-correction mechanism might take some years, even decades, before it kicks in - but it eventually does.
The word ‘internal’ here is a bit superfluous. It’s not like we can have an ‘external’ feeling is it? But it’s useful here to emphasize the internal, subjective, nature of this thing we call ‘gender’.
An observable in physics is a real thing that can be measured. I’m using the word here in this sense.
Show a gay man and a straight man a picture of an erect penis and there are likely to be measurable differences in response.
Current legal systems do that sort of thing. Try to define ‘hate’ as in ‘hate speech’ in any consistent way and you’ll very quickly run into serious trouble. This doesn’t stop them from writing up crappy legislation about it, though.
Which just so happens to be an extremely lucrative one for the medical professionals involved
From my simple viewpoint, all this transmania is just society indulging a sexual fetish based on stereotypes. I mean, there’s a trans bloke working in one of our local charity shops, he’s 6’5” tall and always kitted out in fishnet tights, stilettos, sequins and false eyelashes. The “real” women shoppers are sensibly dressed in jeans, trainers, big coats with pockets and not much make-up, because it’s Tuesday afternoon. If he genuinely feels he is a woman, why not dress like one? He wants to be a drag Queen really, nothing wrong with that but call it what it is.
I don’t think anybody owes it to the wokies and genderists to make a greater effort at defining gender rigorously than they have done themselves – and as can be seen in examples such as the new Irish law quoted in this post, they take no serious interest in the project whatsoever. Therefore the Riggerousness attempted in today’s Pokery leaves me a little cold.
But it’s RR’s time and title, so he can knock himself out trying, and I’ll await a future post with more than one lousy equation in it.
As for “gender” itself (if we’re not going to leave it in grammar and linguistics where it belongs), the fundamental reality is that genderism requires us to simultaneously see a “transwoman” as a man (whence the “trans”) and not a man (because of the Great Commandment). So there’s a 2 + 2 = 5 right at the base of the ideology (as with Ingsoc), and with a contradiction as a foundational axiom, anything can be pseudo-proved and nothing disproved.
What remains is the bullying, hypocrisy, diffidence, cruelty, despair, and hatred of life – and I think those merit the close examination, not the meaningless ostensible tenets of “gender.”