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.
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.
YES, YES, YES! Thanks, Rikard for saying exactly what I was thinking. Do whatever the heck you want in the privacy of your home or private club. Parading your perversion and debauchery in public only intensifies the idea that you are all bat shit crazy. And stay away from our children!
"Or should I accept that I can't become a pilot?". Yes, that was essentially my point in the previous RR post. If you are a homosexual you should be able to live your life in peace but you have no 'right' to try to bully the rest of humanity into falling into line with the bogus notion that there is no such thing as normal sexuality. If tv viewers find (as in almost all UK and European murder mystery tv dramas) that every episode must tick the 'gay couple included' script tick-box, they are entitled to feel irritated by this. If their town is annually invaded by a flag waving 'Pride' jamboree, they are entitled to feel irritated by that too. And if all this is something they dislike, it does not mean they have a 'phobia' about it.
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…)
> "... we would be utterly shocked? (Or would have been, 50 years ago…)"
🙂 Reminds me of a quip made by a friend of my ex -- both Catholics, more or less lapsed, from Quebec -- who had said that too many people these days are publicly "oversharing" details of their lives that 50 years ago they wouldn't have told their priests.
Good points Diana, but I think that ship sailed in the 1980s - not even AIDS could get homosexual men to stop having anonymous unprotected sex at sauna clubs, darkrooms, public parks and/or restrooms, or just behind a dumpster in an alley.
Working for four years as a cleaner/janitor in the inner city, the things you see. . .
Absolutely, young people are pressured into having sex the way pornography depicts it: everybody likes everything, really, if they just try it (or are coerced to try it), a theme that runs strong in internal homosexual/lesbian discourse - that almost everyone is a homo/dyke, but won't admit it.
Which is pure BS. Virtually no-one is. A common lament among lesbian women in Stockholm in the late 1980s/1990s was, "everybody had been with everybody else" which meant any newcomer was almost pounced upon physically by older bull dykes wanting to break in a virgin. It's the same with the men. A teenaged boy has to "climb the ranks" among the older men until he's old enough to be the one making demands.
Listening to the wife, the core problem is the conflation of the sexual act, with the sexual preference in itself.
Personally I find this childish prurience rather tedious. People whose horizons don’t extend much beyond, or are centered around, bodily functions seem to lead such limited, warped and pathetic lives. I don’t feel the need to pay attention to their views on what I should think, say or do.
I wouldn’t dream of making a public spectacle of myself over even what I think of as my noble and worthy endeavors, much less my body functions or, heaven forfend, any psychological disturbance I may endure. Nor would any other mature adult.
Self-restraint is not fashionable, but I can assure you: it’s a virtue with vast benefits that can only be understood through experience.
The hand of Soros and his ilk are all over the more recent trends in this area. Started heavily after the millenium. I had long stopped attending anything vaguely 'pride' like by then anyway, and came to loathe rainbows, lavender and leather more than I can possibly say.
Thanks for the redux. Rigger, I was quite befuddled and irritated by some of the comments to your last article. Apparently some folks just don’t “get it”. I agree with you, I’m all for do what you want in the privacy of your own home, but don’t try to throw this current woke crap down my throat and expect me to celebrate your excessive public displays of debauchery. My gay friends and family are thoroughly disgusted and embarrassed with the current mania.
"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."
The "identify as" is a sure sign of one of several things, or a combination of said things:
1) The person using the phrase is mentally ill, possibly schizophrenic or in other ways psychotic.
2) The person is weak-minded and has a slave/follower-personality, latching on to the latest thing to fit in with the collective.
3) The person is ignorant and hasn't thought about what the phrase means, but is using it anyway without understanding what the phrase's deeper meaning is.
4) The person is testing you to see if you dare stand your ground and object.
5) The person is testing you to see if you get the joke ("attack helicopter" f.e.).
What the phrase most often means is: "I claim this despite to being able to do so for real, and if you don't acquisce I'll hurt you or throw a tantrum".
It is the same with words such as "diversity" (race, sex, sexual fetish, et c - quotas), "inclusion" (hiring for trait instead of ability; i.e. practicing racism, sexism, et cetera), and "equity" (tall poppy syndrome* enforced as policy).
*In swedish, we don't call it "tall poppy syndrome", but instead say "nails sticking out/up are hammered down" .
But one can't reasonably say one "belongs to a particular category" unless one can pay the membership dues for it. For example, someone 35 years old can't say -- reasonably -- that they "identify as a teenager". Not without being thought barking mad. Which should be applicable to all of the transloonie nutcases floating about.
> “We’re in this unholy mess precisely because the meanings of sex and gender have become hopelessly entwined and muddled.”
Amen to that. Largely why I’ve tried to “steelman” the concept of gender, to try putting it on something of a more scientific footing:
> “Regular readers will know my views here. Sex (in humans [ I couldn’t give a shit about the sex of clownfish.]) is well-defined, objective, fixed and immutable ...”
LoL. You might consider the views of evolutionary biologist, and transwoman, Joan Roughgarden, quoted in Paul Griffiths’ “What are biological sexes?”, something you might want to try reading:
PG: “But no general definition of sexes can rely on these features [chromosomes, sex organs, hormones] because, as Roughgarden puts it, ‘the criteria for classifying an organism as male or female have to work with worms to whales, with red seaweed to redwood trees.’ ....”
That is biology’s claim to fame and fortune, one of them in any case – their definitions work with ALL anisogamous species, no exceptions. Your definitions DON’T; they ain’t biology, your protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
> “The notion of gender is heavily dependent on the existence of sexual stereotypes ...”
You might consider that those stereotypes aren’t cut from whole cloth, aren’t something that was hatched in the inner sanctums of “The Patriarchy!!11!!” for the sole purpose of “oppressing women” as too many “feminists” insist is the case. Many of them are solidly based on significant behavioural differences between the sexes:
> “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.”
Maybe there are only a few biologists sticking their necks out and explicitly endorsing that view, though there is an increasing number:
But that is more or less explicit in the large body of work that discusses the hundreds of species that actually change sex over the course of their lives -- it's not just clownfish:
Wikipedia: "If the female dies, the male gains weight and BECOMES the female for that group. The largest non-breeding fish then sexually matures and BECOMES the male of the group."
> “Evolution cannot be decoupled from reproduction because without reproduction there is no evolution.”
Amen to that. Though that is kind of the problem with the folk-biology definitions for the sexes – one doesn’t actually need to be able to reproduce to qualify as male or female. Though you might note that biologist Emma Hilton, of the University of Manchester, has repudiated her earlier folk-biology claptrap in favour of the standard biological definitions:
Hilton: “The definition of female is: of or denoting the sex that can produce large gametes. This not a matter of *observation*, this is a matter of *definition*.”
> “This is crazy - especially when even adults can’t come up with a wholly self-consistent and objective definition of what ‘gender’ actually ‘is’.”
Indeed. A great deal of bias and “motivated reasoning” in the definitions for both sex and gender. Though, as I put it in that Multidimensional post, the best bet seems to DEFINE "gender" as sets of "sexually dimorphic — i.e., feminine and masculine — behaviours, personalities, and stereotypes typical of, but not unique to, human males and females":
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.
YES, YES, YES! Thanks, Rikard for saying exactly what I was thinking. Do whatever the heck you want in the privacy of your home or private club. Parading your perversion and debauchery in public only intensifies the idea that you are all bat shit crazy. And stay away from our children!
"Or should I accept that I can't become a pilot?". Yes, that was essentially my point in the previous RR post. If you are a homosexual you should be able to live your life in peace but you have no 'right' to try to bully the rest of humanity into falling into line with the bogus notion that there is no such thing as normal sexuality. If tv viewers find (as in almost all UK and European murder mystery tv dramas) that every episode must tick the 'gay couple included' script tick-box, they are entitled to feel irritated by this. If their town is annually invaded by a flag waving 'Pride' jamboree, they are entitled to feel irritated by that too. And if all this is something they dislike, it does not mean they have a 'phobia' about it.
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…)
Worth remembering that it’s not an entrance, it’s an exit.
LoL. Medical procedures excepted? 🙂
> "... we would be utterly shocked? (Or would have been, 50 years ago…)"
🙂 Reminds me of a quip made by a friend of my ex -- both Catholics, more or less lapsed, from Quebec -- who had said that too many people these days are publicly "oversharing" details of their lives that 50 years ago they wouldn't have told their priests.
Good points Diana, but I think that ship sailed in the 1980s - not even AIDS could get homosexual men to stop having anonymous unprotected sex at sauna clubs, darkrooms, public parks and/or restrooms, or just behind a dumpster in an alley.
Working for four years as a cleaner/janitor in the inner city, the things you see. . .
Absolutely, young people are pressured into having sex the way pornography depicts it: everybody likes everything, really, if they just try it (or are coerced to try it), a theme that runs strong in internal homosexual/lesbian discourse - that almost everyone is a homo/dyke, but won't admit it.
Which is pure BS. Virtually no-one is. A common lament among lesbian women in Stockholm in the late 1980s/1990s was, "everybody had been with everybody else" which meant any newcomer was almost pounced upon physically by older bull dykes wanting to break in a virgin. It's the same with the men. A teenaged boy has to "climb the ranks" among the older men until he's old enough to be the one making demands.
Listening to the wife, the core problem is the conflation of the sexual act, with the sexual preference in itself.
Personally I find this childish prurience rather tedious. People whose horizons don’t extend much beyond, or are centered around, bodily functions seem to lead such limited, warped and pathetic lives. I don’t feel the need to pay attention to their views on what I should think, say or do.
I wouldn’t dream of making a public spectacle of myself over even what I think of as my noble and worthy endeavors, much less my body functions or, heaven forfend, any psychological disturbance I may endure. Nor would any other mature adult.
Self-restraint is not fashionable, but I can assure you: it’s a virtue with vast benefits that can only be understood through experience.
The hand of Soros and his ilk are all over the more recent trends in this area. Started heavily after the millenium. I had long stopped attending anything vaguely 'pride' like by then anyway, and came to loathe rainbows, lavender and leather more than I can possibly say.
Thanks for the redux. Rigger, I was quite befuddled and irritated by some of the comments to your last article. Apparently some folks just don’t “get it”. I agree with you, I’m all for do what you want in the privacy of your own home, but don’t try to throw this current woke crap down my throat and expect me to celebrate your excessive public displays of debauchery. My gay friends and family are thoroughly disgusted and embarrassed with the current mania.
Another point the professor points out is this:
"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."
The "identify as" is a sure sign of one of several things, or a combination of said things:
1) The person using the phrase is mentally ill, possibly schizophrenic or in other ways psychotic.
2) The person is weak-minded and has a slave/follower-personality, latching on to the latest thing to fit in with the collective.
3) The person is ignorant and hasn't thought about what the phrase means, but is using it anyway without understanding what the phrase's deeper meaning is.
4) The person is testing you to see if you dare stand your ground and object.
5) The person is testing you to see if you get the joke ("attack helicopter" f.e.).
What the phrase most often means is: "I claim this despite to being able to do so for real, and if you don't acquisce I'll hurt you or throw a tantrum".
It is the same with words such as "diversity" (race, sex, sexual fetish, et c - quotas), "inclusion" (hiring for trait instead of ability; i.e. practicing racism, sexism, et cetera), and "equity" (tall poppy syndrome* enforced as policy).
*In swedish, we don't call it "tall poppy syndrome", but instead say "nails sticking out/up are hammered down" .
> “The whole ‘I identify as . . .’ is such an alien construction to me and I simply don’t understand it. ....”
Rather pretentious, ain’t it? But being there in Jolly Old, you might enjoy the Oxford Learner definition for the phrase 😉🙂
"identify as; phrasal verb; identify as something: to recognize or decide that you belong to a particular category"
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/identify-as
But one can't reasonably say one "belongs to a particular category" unless one can pay the membership dues for it. For example, someone 35 years old can't say -- reasonably -- that they "identify as a teenager". Not without being thought barking mad. Which should be applicable to all of the transloonie nutcases floating about.
> “We’re in this unholy mess precisely because the meanings of sex and gender have become hopelessly entwined and muddled.”
Amen to that. Largely why I’ve tried to “steelman” the concept of gender, to try putting it on something of a more scientific footing:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/a-multi-dimensional-gender-spectrum
> “Regular readers will know my views here. Sex (in humans [ I couldn’t give a shit about the sex of clownfish.]) is well-defined, objective, fixed and immutable ...”
LoL. You might consider the views of evolutionary biologist, and transwoman, Joan Roughgarden, quoted in Paul Griffiths’ “What are biological sexes?”, something you might want to try reading:
PG: “But no general definition of sexes can rely on these features [chromosomes, sex organs, hormones] because, as Roughgarden puts it, ‘the criteria for classifying an organism as male or female have to work with worms to whales, with red seaweed to redwood trees.’ ....”
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
That is biology’s claim to fame and fortune, one of them in any case – their definitions work with ALL anisogamous species, no exceptions. Your definitions DON’T; they ain’t biology, your protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
> “The notion of gender is heavily dependent on the existence of sexual stereotypes ...”
You might consider that those stereotypes aren’t cut from whole cloth, aren’t something that was hatched in the inner sanctums of “The Patriarchy!!11!!” for the sole purpose of “oppressing women” as too many “feminists” insist is the case. Many of them are solidly based on significant behavioural differences between the sexes:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijop.12529
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092656600923079
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopy.12500
> “It [boys have penises, girls have vaginas”] is a pretty damn near perfect proxy for the actual biological definition. ...”
Sure. But correlation isn’t causation – some people with vaginas have XY karyotypes, and internal but non-functional testicles, ergo, sexless:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome
> “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.”
Maybe there are only a few biologists sticking their necks out and explicitly endorsing that view, though there is an increasing number:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202200173?af=R
https://x.com/pzmyers/status/1466458067491598342
But that is more or less explicit in the large body of work that discusses the hundreds of species that actually change sex over the course of their lives -- it's not just clownfish:
Wikipedia: "If the female dies, the male gains weight and BECOMES the female for that group. The largest non-breeding fish then sexually matures and BECOMES the male of the group."
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sequential_hermaphroditism&oldid=890717544
> “Evolution cannot be decoupled from reproduction because without reproduction there is no evolution.”
Amen to that. Though that is kind of the problem with the folk-biology definitions for the sexes – one doesn’t actually need to be able to reproduce to qualify as male or female. Though you might note that biologist Emma Hilton, of the University of Manchester, has repudiated her earlier folk-biology claptrap in favour of the standard biological definitions:
https://x.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554
https://x.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1488523777042432008
Do note her closing comment in the latter:
Hilton: “The definition of female is: of or denoting the sex that can produce large gametes. This not a matter of *observation*, this is a matter of *definition*.”
> “This is crazy - especially when even adults can’t come up with a wholly self-consistent and objective definition of what ‘gender’ actually ‘is’.”
Indeed. A great deal of bias and “motivated reasoning” in the definitions for both sex and gender. Though, as I put it in that Multidimensional post, the best bet seems to DEFINE "gender" as sets of "sexually dimorphic — i.e., feminine and masculine — behaviours, personalities, and stereotypes typical of, but not unique to, human males and females":
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/a-multi-dimensional-gender-spectrum