That Offensive 6-Letter Word

Regular readers of my riggery ramblings will know that I have long-struggled with the word ‘gender’. I’ve lost count of the various ‘official’ websites I’ve perused in an attempt to find a definition of the word that ‘does what it says on the tin’¹ - to actually define what ‘gender’ is.

Being the vaguely obsessive type that I am, it bothers me when I feel I haven’t understood something when it would seem that the whole world and his uncle, and the uncle’s dentist’s cousin’s next-door neighbour’s pet dog appear to do so.

It’s like an itch I can’t scratch. This desire to secure some sort of understanding is probably what drove me into the arms of physics - and she’s a harsh mistress. There’s no fudging the issue with Madame Physics. There’s no vague airy-fairy hand-wavery that leaves her satisfied.

So when I think about ‘social’ issues I tend to look for the ‘observables’. An observable in physics means something quite specific; it’s something that can be measured. Perhaps my biggest issue with the concept of something like ‘white privilege’, for example, something that is claimed to ‘exist’, is that it’s not in any meaningful sense a measurable quantity. How much of it does one possess? If we put in place measures to ‘reduce’ white privilege how can we determine when those measures are working? And by how much?

You can take any one of many such concepts beloved of the typical wokoid or rad-feminoid and ask similar questions. Patriarchy? Haven’t smashed it yet? How much of it is left? Do we still have the same degree of toxic masculinity as before, and how much rape culture is there left to get rid of? And haven’t we yet managed to reduce all of those intersecting oppressions that invisibly assail us²? And how many and how much of these things are left to deal with? Is the oppression felt by a black person the same strength as the oppression felt by a trans person? And if you’re black and trans are these oppressions combined additively or multiplicatively, or in some other non-linear way?

And when does a ‘microaggression’ turn into something more serious, like a milliaggression? Or, God forbid, a centiaggression?

When you think of these concepts in terms of measurability the questions become endless, and you quickly begin to realize there’s no real substance to them. They are working hypotheses that may, or may not, provide a degree of useful insight, but like a typical Freshman essay - much more work is needed.

We’ve ended up with ‘academic’ papers that trot out these hypotheses, usually concatenated together in a splendid display of allegedly-meaningful meaninglessness that is more akin to poetry than actual analysis.

This obsession of mine with ‘gender’ is, I like to tell myself, an important one. We’ve restructured society around this word in all sorts of minor and major ways. Shouldn’t we all kind of know what the bloody word actually means?

Yet it’s elusive, vague, and slippery. It is, I imagine³, like trying to prepare a meal of penis fish - hard to get hold of

Yet the word is everywhere. You can’t read an article on anything sex-related without the word gender cropping up. More often than not it’s simply used as a synonym for sex.

It’s a very dangerous word - or rather it’s used in a very dangerous way. You have to hand it to those driving ‘progressive’ culture - they’re really very good at ‘bait and switch’ type operations where they can use a word that they know will trigger all sorts of subconscious associations in a way that is quite different to any conventional meaning.

They will claim, for example, that all white people are inherently racist whilst black people can never be racist. They want you to associate the full meaning and implications of the word ‘racist’ with white people, and then claim black people can’t be it because they don’t have ‘power’.

It’s all deliberately deceptive plays on words to ‘construct’ an alternate reality as prescribed by the pedo PoMo originators who desperately needed to create some overarching philosophy to justify their perversions. This alternate reality doesn’t even need to be logically consistent because, as these academic kiddy-fiddlers asserted, requiring logical consistency is itself a kind of oppressive power game.

You can see this in full operation with the gender and ‘trans’ debates. Activists want you to associate ‘trans’ with a particular type of trans person designed to elicit our sympathy whilst ignoring things like autogynephilia or the prevalence of other mental health conditions. They want you to associate ‘gender’ with something concrete like male and female so they can assert, without any evidence, that it is possible to be a gender opposite to one’s sex. They want you to think synonym, whilst they mean something else.

I’m beginning to view ‘gender’ as a word as having caused untold amounts of damage. It obfuscates rather than clarifies and has directly led thousands of young men and women to opt for a life of medicalization in pursuit of some elusive goal as they are said to embark on some wonderful ‘gender journey’.

I mean, come on guys, what the hell is a ‘gender journey’?

I’m beginning to find this 6 letter word every bit as offensive and unacceptable as its more famous 6-letter relation⁴.

You can see this in schools where young kids are, wholly inappropriately, asked to think about what gender they ‘are’. Yes, I know this doesn’t happen in all schools, but it does happen in a worryingly large number. Just the question itself pre-supposes all sorts of ideological assumptions about ‘reality’.

If kids were never introduced to the concept of ‘gender’ in the first place, how many would subsequently end up as ‘trans’? That’s certainly a question to ponder and the answer will vary depending on which side of the delusion/nature line one is when it comes to trans.

Usually in science it is taken as a truism that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I will admit that things have gone a bit pear-shaped when it comes to particle physics/cosmology because we have lots of extraordinary claims - but precious little evidence in many cases. It’s not for want of trying - part of the problem is that the energies and conditions required to actually test some of these claims are beyond our current capability.

But, in general, if you’re the one making a claim that is at odds with the prevailing understanding of reality, the onus is upon you to provide evidence for that claim and not for those who are sceptical to disprove that claim.

Guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office and claims that he’s really a wolf. He feels like he is and he howls at the moon at night. It’s an extraordinary claim. Does the psychiatrist immediately start him on a program of ‘wolf affirming care’?

Of course not. Unless you’re actually bonkers, nobody would think this claim is anything but a delusion. It’s clearly at odds with reality.

Or what about the white guy who claims to be ‘really’ black inside? Would that claim be taken seriously and the patient immediately placed on a program of ‘race affirming care’?

Or the anorexic who claims to be overweight? Would an immediate program of ‘weight affirming care’ be recommended?

Or that guy who claimed he was ‘really’ an alien? Great - here’s our shiny, new (and expensive) program of ‘extra-terrestrial affirming care’ for you.

‘Trans’ appears to be the only claim, clearly at odds with material reality, that is taken seriously and treated as ‘fact’. In reality there’s no clear logical distinction between the man who claims he is a woman because he feels like one and wears lippy and high heels and the wolf-man howling at the moon.

Why is trans not treated as a delusion when almost every⁵ other condition that presents at odds with reality is?

It’s because we have concretized ‘gender’ as an actual thing - something (sort of) associated with one’s sex, but in practice for trans entirely divorced from it.

People are said to possess some sort of ‘innate’ sense of gender - known as their gender identity - which can be at odds with the material reality of their bodies.

Why do we instantly dismiss the notion of some innate sense of ‘wolfness’ but immediately accept there exists an innate sense of ‘gender’?

Gender has become, in the minds of progressives, every bit as concrete as sex - and yet outside of sex the question ‘what is a woman?’ presents an incredible level of difficulty.

I think the word ‘gender’ has done an inordinate amount of harm - real harm. In my view it needs to be treated like the n-word and consigned to the annals of history as a reflection of a time when we didn’t know better.

And that’s it for today - I’m off to prepare for a bit of howling at the moon later on

1. This phrase comes from a UK advert from some years ago. It was a DIY product where some ghastly toxic white man-thing oozed testosterone with the claim that the product ‘does what it says on the tin’

2. But not me, apparently. I’m the wrong sex, sexual orientation, and skin colour to be affected. I wasn’t born with the appropriate measuring equipment, obviously

3. I wasn’t even aware of these things until I recently watched a Korean comedy-drama in which they briefly featured. Please do leave me your favourite penis fish recipes in the comments

4. The Voldemort word - the one that cannot be spoken by a certain group

5. I’d like to say ‘every’ here without the qualifier ‘almost’ - but it’s possible there are some in this strange world we find ourselves in