Regular readers of the random ramblings of Rigger will know that I have a particular problem with the word “gender”.
The more I try to understand what it means, the less I do. It is, at best, so vague and subjective that it is not useful and, at worst, simply meaningless. I tend towards the latter here, with gender being the 21st century’s version of phlogiston.
Phlogiston was an idea to explain combustion. All substances were said to contain an amount of phlogiston (ranging from zero to a lot). The more phlogiston something had, the better it burned.
Every now and then, crazy ideas like phlogiston pop up in “science”. Like this one
This was the crazy, crazy, idea that a human body, upon infection, combats the infection and that this leads to the development of things that can last in the body that are able to prevent future infection.
This so-called natural “immunity”, as we now know, does not exist and only vaccines can save us from death, or worse, when we are infected.
What’s needed is unnatural immunity - which only comes from vaccines1.
The sex binary is another of those crazy ideas that popped up. What were we thinking? How on earth did we ever come to split the human race into man and woman? How crazy is that, eh?
It was obviously an idea conceived of by men to oppress women.
Erm, . . . hang on. I think I might have spotted a flaw there. Can’t quite put my finger on it.
But, they say, it’s bimodal. Most people are either male or female but a few exist all spectrummy somewhere in the middle. We’ve never actually discovered a third sex in humans - but we’ll just imagine it exists as some confused mix of the two we have discovered.
Gender is associated with things like social roles, expected behaviours, and even biology, and so on. To what extent, and how, these associations work is never specified. It’s some weird and wonderful varietal mix that you can shove together in various proportions and out the other end you will feel yourself to be a man or a woman, or something else entirely.
If you think all this gender stuff is some kind of mumbly jumbly voodoo magic with little to do with actual science then welcome to my world, as they say.
It’s more than a little weird that, here we are in 2024, unable to actually tell whether someone is a man or a woman (or some other thing entirely) without asking them.
This, apparently, is what passes for “science” these days.
But psychiatrists understand all this - it’s written down in their sacred books. It must be science! Much as I don’t want to be dismissive of the whole field of psychiatry, it must be recognized that they’re not really all that far beyond the level of stamp-collecting. They have reams of descriptions of things that they then attach a label to - but understanding what’s going on and why? Not so much.
We know a lot more than we did. We know that trauma for example, particularly in childhood, can have extremely serious consequences that affect the emotional and psychological state of an individual as an adult. We know some things that can help with navigating that difficult and painful road - not always, but things like CBT can result in huge improvements in an individual’s outlook and life.
We’ve got ideas about what might have gone wrong, why some individuals respond in the way they do to events, but I think it is fair to say that despite some progress the whole field of psychiatry and understanding the human mind and emotional states is still in its infancy.
Something like gender dysphoria, which used to be thought of as a mental ‘illness’, can be described - but it is not, currently, understood. At all.
We shouldn’t confuse a description with science. Accurately describing and characterizing some phenomenon is a vital first step on the scientific journey - but there’s quite a way to go before we have any idea where we’re going.
This is one of the problems with trying to define a word like gender. It’s not even a self-consistent description or characterization. It’s not even a first step. It’s a mish-mash of things thrown together and, hey presto, let’s call this witches brew something - I know, let’s call it gender.
The fact that no definition of gender exists without reference to the examples of gender of man and woman, should tell you something. It’s a word that cannot, currently, even be defined without some understanding of the sex binary.
The most obvious manifestation of this kind of circular reasoning is when one asks the question what is a woman? Anyone who ‘identifies’ (whatever that means) as a woman is a woman is a very typical answer. Well, OK, but what, precisely, are you ‘identifying’ as? And round and down the mixed metaphors of rabbit holes and merry-go-rounds you go.
There have been times in history when ‘identifying’ as the opposite sex has been advantageous. The classic documentary, The Life of Brian, explores one such situation in 1st century Judea (2m 30s).
So I was delighted to watch a recent interview of Helen Joyce. I won’t embed the video here because it’s over an hour long, but it’s well worth a watch.
Around the 22m 30s mark she asks a question which, I think, exposes the whole “social role” aspect of gender for the garbled gibberish that it is. Sex-based roles, absolutely. But gendered roles? She asks
What is there I could do, in my life, as a ‘social role’, that would constitute me living as a man?
Very good question. But she answers her own question in these majestic words :
Literally anything that I do, anything at all, is a thing that a woman does, because I’m a woman. So there’s literally nothing I could do that is living as a man. I can’t do it . . . Anything I can do is a thing that a woman does.
If you haven’t read Helen’s book, Trans, then I can thoroughly recommend it. Clear and incisive thinking on the issue can be found on every page. It’s a truly excellent dissection of all of the issues.
Those of us who know (not believe) that sex is real, immutable, and binary are cast into a particular social role; that of bigot.
The recent example of a fan of the football team Newcastle United in the UK is chilling. This person, who happened to be a woman and a lesbian (not that either of these thing are particularly relevant), made some remarks, as you do, on social media to the effect that you can’t change your sex and that transwomen are not women. The usual stuff.
This prompted an ‘investigation’ by the club, using some shadowy outfit established by the UK’s FA (Football’s governing body in the UK) which did a whole cyber-stalk of her and found out where she lived, where she went for walks, and probably what kind of toilet paper she used.
She has been banned from the ground because of her ‘transphobic’ views. It’s not a permanent ban. Presumably after 2 years, the length of her ban I think, if she can demonstrate she has been properly “re-educated” she will be allowed back in.
Now, of course, she’s living in daily fear in case one of those progressives turns up on her doorstep to “be kind” to her.
Newcastle United FC’s decision has been supported by some media morons who argue that her presence in the ground would make people feel “unsafe”.
We recall the famous incident of 2022 when the whole ground had emptied because a transphobe had been spotted :
What amazing power these ‘transphobes’ have, eh?
Just wandering around, blithely making everyone else feel unsafe.
How very dare they?
I’d like to get back to a world of some kind of reason, where we don’t need Helen to be The Joyce of Reason, but I don’t think we’ll get there in time.
Without the existence of “natural immunity” vaccines would not be effective at all, but shhhh - don’t tell ‘em that.
I think what is tragic to me is the desire to totally eliminate the challenges of being in a historically marginalized group (trans in this case) and to increase the challenges of being in a traditionally less marginalized group (even if it’s only minimally less marginalized, as is the case with lesbians).
Being trans is not good. It’s unfortunate and really messes with your chances of living a good and fulfilling life even if people affirm you to the moon and back. And yet if you can meet that challenge and find a way to live with it, you are actually a better human being than other people who have glided through life relatively easily.
But you can’t cheat the system. If you try to sail effortlessly on the very thing that deforms you— or convince others that it’s possible to do so— you end up as a malignancy, harming others. It’s like a one armed surfer giving the inspirational message that everyone should chop off an arm instead of talking about the importance of avoiding sharks.
There's this test that's used on two-year olds and four-year olds over here, where the kid is to place differently shaped objects into correspondingly shaped holes in the lid of a box. And the round peg doesn't fit into the square, and so on.
It is used as an early visual indication of intelligence and possible deviance or discrepancy re: brain development, and whether or not the kid's brain seems to think-work in a normal fashion.
I cannot help wonder what the overlap between trans-larpers and failing that test is.
(Then there's that odd kid that opens the box instead, and puts all the pieces in, then closes the box. Those kids usually have IQs in the 130+ range, when tested later in life.)