The Pride of Your Life (redux)
I’ve been a bit busy with family matters over the last few days, but my last piece “The Pride of Your Life” generated some interesting comments which I’d like to try and address here.
The purpose I envisioned behind the piece was to ask questions about whether the “queering” of society is a good thing or a bad thing. The increasing degeneracy1 of (some) Pride events has been an alarming trend over the last decade or so and many people, including lots of people in the gay community, are not at all happy with the direction Pride seems to have taken.
This includes one of the organizers of the first Pride marches from 1970 onwards, Fred Sargeant.
Andrew Doyle, himself a gay man2, in his recent video for Spiked makes the point that the original Pride marches in the US occurred at a time when sex between gay men was illegal in all but 1 of the states in the US. Same sex couplings were only decriminalised in the UK in 1967.
There is little doubt that the ‘norm’ landscape back in 1970 was hugely different to that of today. The discrimination faced by gay people back then was of a different order of magnitude3.
So, the original Pride marches helped to overthrow a particularly nasty ‘norm’ - and paved the way for gay people to become much more accepted in society and to have the same rights as straight people.
Some ‘norms’, like this one, definitely needed to go. Even as a young kid growing up in the 70’s I could not understand why it was wrong for two people to love one another, irrespective of their sex.
The ‘norms’ that are currently being bitterly fought over today centre around the difficult questions to do with sex, gender, and trans. It is all, I feel, a bit of a muddled mess.
Part of the problem lies, I think, in the widespread use of vague, almost quasi-religious, concepts. Some of these things are like cheap jewellery; they look all nice and shiny at first sight, but the merest scratch begins to tarnish everything.
An example from the comments is the notion of an “authentic self”. What’s that? And does the “authentic self” of a detransitioner change, for example? It’s part and parcel of the modern obsession with a quest for “identity”.
The whole “I identify as . . .” is such an alien construction to me and I simply don’t understand it. I don’t “identify” as a man, for example, I am one. The notion that I can be something by identifying as something is very strange. I can’t think of any instance in which I would use the “identify as” construction.
This notion of an “authentic self” probably originates back in those repressive days when gay men and women had to hide their sexuality. They had to live a kind of false life.
The main argument that won the day was that their sexuality was innate4 (authentic) and so it was cruel and wrong to make this group of people suffer, or to try to ‘convert’ that which could not be converted.
Then, around 2015, we had the unnatural coupling of the LGB with the rest (what I call the WTF part). The ideas surrounding innateness and conversion that had been applied to homosexuals (and bisexuals) became trans-planted to this new group.
It’s this new ‘community’ the LGBWTF community, the so-called alphabet people, that have been making the headlines ever since and trying to step into the shoes of the original gay rights movement.
Stonewall, an organisation named after the Stonewall riots that kicked off the whole Pride thing, was originally wholly focused on the pursuit and maintenance of gay rights. Around 2015, this hugely influential organisation declared that same-sex attraction was so passé and that, henceforth, the thing that really mattered was same-gender attraction.
Some will undoubtedly bridle at my use of the WTF moniker for this grafted on appendage, but I’m afraid it is, largely, composed of weird shit.
Weird does not, necessarily, mean bad.
Trans originally meant being a member of a very, very small group of people who struggled with their inner sense of ‘self’ as it applied to their actual sex. Transitioning was seen as a way of relieving this intense discomfort, this disconnect between biology and feeling.
Whilst we might not all agree that transitioning is the optimum ‘treatment’ for this condition, we acknowledge that such individuals exist and that they are entitled to dignity and to be free from discrimination on the basis of their trans status.
This minor amendment to social ‘norms’ to include the very tiny number of trans individuals could (probably) have been easily accommodated without much fuss.
But in another unnatural graft of an unwelcome appendage we now have something called the “trans umbrella” which encompasses many more flavours of ‘trans’ far wider than the original meaning of trans.
Someone who claims to be “non-binary”, for example, is now included in this trans umbrella.
So, included as ‘trans’ now are those for whom we might have a good deal of sympathy (those suffering from the condition of gender dysphoria) alongside those who pretend they are neither a man nor a woman as a kind of fashion statement. We are, in the typical TRA sleight-of-hand, expected to have an equal measure of sympathy for both. Anyone under the trans umbrella is to be afforded the sympathy reserved for those suffering from a mental health condition (gender dysphoria).
We’re in this unholy mess precisely because the meanings of sex and gender have become hopelessly entwined and muddled.
Regular readers will know my views here. Sex (in humans5) is well-defined, objective, fixed and immutable and, barring disorders of sexual development, determined at conception. Gender, however, is ill-defined being vague and subjective. Most6 of the ‘official’ definitions of gender actually rely, implicitly or explicitly, on the existence of a sex binary anyway.
The notion of gender is heavily dependent on the existence of sexual stereotypes, which means that gender, if it can be made sense of at all, is time-dependent and society-dependent.
This is not an adequate basis upon which to write far-reaching laws that might have a serious impact on society. But we write laws on similarly inadequate bases; the laws surrounding ‘hate’ speech spring to mind.
The whole ‘intersex’ debate is also almost entirely irrelevant. The vast, vast, majority of those under the trans umbrella are not intersex. The number of people who are classed as having a disorder of sexual development is about 1 in 5,000 and the majority of those do not present as sexually ‘ambiguous’.
The “Kindergarten Cop” approach of boys have penises, girls have vaginas is really an awfully good correlate with gamete size (the biological definition of sex in humans). It’s a pretty damn near perfect proxy for the actual biological definition.
Females, then, are the category of humans who produce one kind of gamete. Some (very few) biologists take the meaning of the word ‘produce’ here to mean that in order to be classed as female one should actually be producing (or possess) such gametes. This would mean that a young boy, for example, would be sexless until puberty. This is a highly controversial viewpoint, however.
It’s a semantic argument surrounding the precise meaning and use of the word ‘produce’.
One could define humans as the animals who write poetry, for example. It’s a perfectly adequate definition because no other animal writes poetry.
I’m a big fan of starting with evolution. Evolution cannot be decoupled from reproduction because without reproduction there is no evolution. Back in the distant past there was a coupling between two, presumably primitive, organisms that resulted in offspring. Thus the whole reproductive technique of sexual reproduction was born. For reasons that are still not clearly understood this turned out to be advantageous from an evolutionary perspective.
Evolution then worked its magic over deep time and we’ve ended up, as a result, as humans in which the 2 sexes (the 2 different entities that need to be involved in the reproductive process) are distinct and immutable.
In order to make reproduction happen those involved need to ‘want’ to make it happen. A species in which the common response is “not tonight, love, I have a headache” might not have all that much of a promising future. This is the evolutionary basis for sexual desire. Evolution has made sex pleasurable as one of the primary drivers to ensure continuation of the species.
Humans, being humans and the complex animals that we are, have run with this basic biological driver and it has played out in all sorts of wondrous and weird ways. There are those who can only become aroused, for example, when their partner is wearing Wellington boots7.
One wonders to what extent the people possessing such desires feel them to be ‘innate’?
But, innate or otherwise, provided you’re not harming anyone else, and those involved have given their full consent what, really, is the problem?
I would say “Fill yer boots”
Most of the time none of this matters. The person serving me coffee is trans? So effing what? Of what possible relevance or import is that? My accountant is non-binary? So effing what? Who, honestly, gives a shit? I know I don’t.
Where it matters is when these things have an impact on others.
It is, clearly, wrong to allow men into women-only spaces solely on the basis of self-ID. This is a safeguarding nightmare. Anyone who pretends otherwise is a moron. Does anyone think that housing convicted male rapists in the female prison estate on the basis of their proclaimed self-identified ‘gender’ is right?
But, they might say, these people are not ‘really’ women they’re just exploiting the system. Yes. Indeed. That’s the fucking point!
On the other hand we have individuals who have suffered with gender dysphoria, who have transitioned, who don’t want to harm anyone and who just want to quietly go about their lives as members of the sex they were not born as. It seems really cruel to exclude these people from women-only spaces, for example (in the case of a MTF transition).
I honestly don’t know how to ‘fix’ this in a way that’s fair and decent to everyone.
The huge rise in ‘trans’ individuals, or those who describe themselves as ‘queer’, is clearly a kind of social contagion and we’re a long, long way from that tiny, tiny, group who suffer from ‘genuine’ gender dysphoria.
One’s ‘queer’ or ‘trans’ identity, these days, is often more of a fashion accessory than any deeply-held conviction. And that’s OK - but we need to see it clearly for what it is. A lot of young people are rejecting the traditional ‘norms’, for a variety of reasons. Most will grow out of it - just as those who’ve been through the gender mill would have grown out of their confusion had they only been allowed to. After all, the whole ‘gender-affirming care’ model is itself a kind of gay conversion therapy - most, if only had they been allowed to, would have grown up to be happy and well-adjusted homosexuals.
Puberty, it turns out, is a really good cure for gender confusion.
The ‘trans’ movement has succeeded at gay conversion where the previous generation of religious fundamentalists utterly failed.
A lot of where this matters is when it comes to kids. I’ve no problem with teaching kids that some people are different and that’s not a good enough reason to be nasty to them. We’ve gone a considerable way past that point, though. In some schools kids are routinely, and repeatedly, asked to question their own ‘gender’.
This is crazy - especially when even adults can’t come up with a wholly self-consistent and objective definition of what ‘gender’ actually is.
I won’t post the picture again, but a while back I took a screenshot of a video from a Pride event in Spain. This was a parade, in front of adults, of very sexually provocatively dressed children in the name of ‘Pride’. Is this really what we want?
I know that this kind of thing is definitely not the ‘norm’, even for the more-degenerate version of Pride we have today, but for how much longer?
According to traditional ‘norms’
Who also questions the current manifestation of ‘Pride’
I have no doubt that discrimination still persists, but it’s hard to argue that it is anywhere near as bad at that faced 50 years ago
Douglas Murray, himself also a gay man, actually questions this ‘innate’ assumption in his book The Madness of Crowds. He says the research is less certain on that score. I think what he has in mind is more of a kind of ‘spectrum’ between what we might term ‘fully’ innate and ‘conditioned’, to some extent.
I couldn’t give a shit about the sex of clownfish. Utterly irrelevant for the question of sex in humans
All of the ones I’ve examined do - but there may be some I haven’t seen
Or coughing. That’s another weird one.
Accepting that there are things one cannot be or do is the way to "fair and decent" but as that requires modesty, humility, integrity of character and respect for others, the various personality disorders gathered under the alphabet-acronym will instead keep trying to force others into their psychotic world-view, and will always keep pushing to make their way of being not only legal but mandatory and sacred, because there's no limit to insanity.
I can't become a pilot, for several reasons. Should we therefore redesign planes, air traffic control systems, et cetera so that I can? Or should I accept that I can't become a pilot?
The right of society, of the collective, to have only the best and most suited become pilots by far trumps any kind of right of mine to pilot an attack helicopter.
It is the same with any other such right or privilege: be a flaming homo if you want to. At home, or at the club - not in the street. I no more tolerate normal people having sex in a parade than I do homos. Respect that others don't want to be exposed to it - same notion as to why gay clubs give themselves the right to bar normal people from entry. Well, then clubs for normal people have the right to ban homos.
It's called equal rights, equality before the law, and one law for all.
Which they won't accept, and since they won't, they can't be accepted.
I am troubled about the trans stuff, of course, but there is another aspect of the widespread acceptance of not just gay love but gay sex that troubles me. All people are created equal, but not all kinds of sex are not created equal. Ideally, we would never have to know or care what people who love each other are doing in private (although pregnancy is pretty strong evidence for one kind of behavior— but no longer definitive, I admit, thinking of my lesbian parent friends.) Not all gay men choose to practice sodomy, but may feel pressured to because of the way our cultural attitudes have changed. Not only that, but many young women are feeling the pressure to engage in it as well based upon our changing norms around sex. I don’t care what people do in private, but I find it sad that the gay rights movement, while it still has mottos like “love is love”, seems to have been hijacked by those who are more focused on sexual promiscuity and variety— on queering society— than merely enjoying the equal rights to marriage and parenting that are now with their reach (at least in my part of the world). Don’t you get it, people (gay or straight)— the very thing that makes your crazy sex stuff so exciting is that, if the rest of us knew about it, we would be utterly shocked? (Or would have been, 50 years ago…)