I was going to title this piece “My Favourite Christmas Song”, but we’ll get round to that a bit later.
I’ve been thinking about sex again.
Not about the act, although here I will plead the fifth on occasion, but about the classification of things by their biological sex.
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not really about our bodies.
You what? Mr Rigger, have you entirely lost your marbles?
If you’ve watched the excellent Natural History programming produced by the BBC (which, unlike their news content, is worth watching) you’ll realize that the animal kingdom has quite the array of male and female bodies. Yet, despite this variety, we are able to identify ‘male’ and female’. Sex is not linked, therefore, to a specific body type.
What the sexes of male and female are referring to are two different reproductive strategies - or reproductive roles. There are lots of ways to be ‘male’ in the animal kingdom, and lots of ways to be ‘female’, but each species has only two distinct reproductive roles.
The variety of bodies we see across the animal kingdom are a physical expression, a result, of how evolution has come up with two different developmental pathways in order to be able to fulfil these distinct roles in each case. In general, the reproductive role that results in a body that produces larger, less motile, gametes is designated ‘female’ and the role that results in a body that produces smaller, motile, gametes is designated ‘male’.
It’s very important to realise that when something goes wrong, as it sometimes does with any complicated biological entity such as an animal, and the intended developmental pathway gets a bit cock-eyed, this does not represent a new reproductive role. It is not a new ‘sex’.
When you reduce things, properly, down to the fundamental aspect of what sex is and remove the fixation on body type, it is very clear that sex is not a spectrum.
If you want to see a biologist explain this, rather than read my ham-fisted attempts, then this video (about 17m) is particularly clear on the issue
One thing that must also be emphasized is that the developmental pathway that leads to ‘male’ or ‘female’ is not exclusively about bodies. It also includes all the differences in behaviour that result (which in a reductionist perspective can only arise from physical differences in bodies).
Male and female across the animal kingdom are not just about the differences in bodies, but also about the various differences in behaviours, such as mating strategies. Any brief perusal of Natural History programmes will yield many such fascinating and complicated behavioural differences between male and female, all geared around survivability of the species. This is not a ‘designed’ thing, or a conscious thing, but the inevitable result of heritable mutations.
We can argue about the extent to which these different developmental pathways pertaining to the two distinct reproductive roles in humans have influenced the respective behaviours of ‘male’ and ‘female’, but to deny any such influence at all is patently absurd.
So, to recap, we have two (and only two) distinct reproductive roles (or strategies) and these lead to different developmental pathways leading to two distinct body types and behavioural influences.
When a man (or woman) undergoes transition they are not changing their underlying reproductive role that has been baked in since the winner of the few hundred million-strong sperm race took the gold - although many will no longer be able to perform a reproductive role as a result.
Thinking about sex as a reproductive role, rather than a specific body type, really clarifies the issue, I think.
So, what has this got to do with Christmas?
I watched an interview and read the associated articles (all linked below) and it got me thinking a bit about parenting and the development of kids. For reasons that (I hope) will shortly become clear, it reminded me of my favourite Christmas song (1m 40s)
The interview and articles tell the story of a lesbian couple with 2 sons. This progressive couple believed their 4-year old son (the eldest) was transgender. As time unfolded, they realised something was just not right - and it’s worth taking the time to read the articles and listen to the interview. They decided to try to lead their son back to what most of us would describe as ‘reality’.
One thing this parent said really hit me. When they started to change direction there was an initial pushback from their son, but then she describes the following
I felt him release a burden, lay this adult burden down, that he, as a child, was never meant to carry.
This hit me because this, in a nutshell, is what parenting is all about. Your job as a parent is to carry the burdens your child is not yet able to bear. It’s to provide the environment where they can develop and, in the fulness of time, to be able to carry those burdens.
Casting this in a more negative framing, your job as a parent is to
try not to fuck it up for your kids
When it comes to your kids and how they grow up - try not to be a cunt
As they grow and develop you can gradually, and appropriately, increase their responsibilities and their boundary of ‘freedom’. You won’t always get it right - but as long as you’re not a cunt, your kids will thrive.
My youngest was not best pleased when I laid down the law. No, sweetheart, you can’t try to play that peanut butter and jam sandwich in the video player. She had no real conception of the consequence her ‘in-the-moment’ desire would have. No real understanding that it would mean not being able to watch any video at all for the next several weeks (we were a bit strapped for cash at the time and so getting it fixed would have had to wait until we could budget for it).
No more Focking Hound (as she called one of her favourite movies, The Fox and Hound) for some time. But she didn’t really grasp that concept. Time is much more of the ‘now’ when you’re that age.
What the hell are we thinking when we lead our very young kids into believing that they can change sex? Even young, nearly ‘adult’, kids do not fully understand the consequences of their actions. Whilst they may have some inkling of the possible consequence of acting upon their sexual desires at that age, they cannot possibly properly comprehend the real consequences of pregnancy (whether allowed to mature to term, or not). Indeed, most adults do not have a full understanding.
I know that I wasn’t ‘prepared’ for fatherhood - not by a long, long way. I had to grow up real fast.
The notion that “kids know best” when it comes to gender, but about pretty much nothing else, is one we really need to fight - and fight aggressively1 and effectively.
It’s part of a worrying trend to afford kids a wholly inappropriate degree of agency. You’ll no doubt be aware of attempts to de-stigmatize paedophilia by using the terminology of Minor Attracted Person (MAP), but there’s another more pernicious trend to talk about Adult Attracted Minors (AAM) in which, it is argued, that it is not right to ‘discriminate’ against this group by preventing them acting upon their ‘desires’. Kids have agency, you see, when it comes to their gender and their sexual activity, according to these lunatics.
I used to eschew the terminology ‘groomer’, believing it to be an unwarranted slur against some people who were very genuine, but horrendously misguided and incorrect, about doing the best for kids.
I’m no longer so certain. Giving kids a distorted perspective of themselves and their place in the world, a perspective that denies the reality of the sex binary, is a kind of ‘grooming’ into a set of burdens they are simply not able to bear.
If you do this to your kids, however genuine your motives, you’re being a cunt. Stop it.
The links to the interview and articles
And the write-up that resulted in the interview
And the follow-up to True Believer
For the hard of comprehension, no, I’m not advocating physical violence here
The bulk of the "confusion" stems from the pervasive spread of infantile "adults".
I would suggest we do not have a gender confusion issue, we have a deliberate maturity supply chain issue.
To use terms from this piece, so many of today's problems would be solved if we would speak the truth and tell people to "grow the fuck up, and stop being a cunt".
We Americans don’t quite use that c word the same way you Brits do (she writes puritanically), but that made your commentary even better. Sometimes it might be worth letting our kids experience the natural consequences of their own choices (though honestly I’ve found they learn from these experiences much less than the parenting books* claim and are more prone to repeat mistakes and create bad habits than to declare, “Gee, wise adult, I should have listened to you. I’ll never do that again!”). In any case, permanent loss of sexual function and fertility (or even “just” the alteration of one’s voice, body fat distribution, moods, and hair growth) is entirely different than “why did you let me spend my allowance on this crap toy that broke after a day?” Or “you should have made me wear my hat!” It’s more along the lines of, “Thanks for letting me ride my bike out into traffic. I’m glad you respected my choice to become a paraplegic.” It is interesting though that it all stems from the kind of abdication of adult responsibility (and as you say, granting agency to kids) that is treated as “respect for children.”
* We need a Cunt Warning sticker for parenting books.