When Your Brain Has Been Fryed

There was a time when I thought Stephen Fry was awesome. He said things like this

Then the mass hysteria of covidiocy took over and he began to lose the plot a bit. It was an example of how even a very intelligent person could be taken in by relentless propaganda and ignore the workings of their own critical faculties.

It happened to a close colleague of mine. We’ve written quite a few papers together in the past and he is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Brain the size of a planet level of smart. His overall body of work dwarfs mine both in number and importance. Yet he was still able to claim that Bourla’s Brew ‘worked’ because he’d had covid, then got vaccinated, and when he subsequently got covid a 2nd time it wasn’t as bad as the first time.

Whilst we can begin to comprehend this phenomenon in the case of The Great Cough of Catastrophe™, fear does tend to short-circuit our capacities for proper reasoning at times, it is much harder to understand the whole ‘trans’ madness that has arisen over the last 10 years or so.

Humans have known what sex is for quite some time. Until about 10 years ago, when suddenly we didn’t. If we date ‘modern’ humans (Homo Sapiens) from around 300,000 years ago then we’ve only been confused about sex for about 0.0033% of that time.

The idea emerged that, alongside sex, humans also possessed something called a ‘gender’ which was different from sex, but related to it, or not, or maybe, but only in certain societies, or perhaps only on Tuesdays.

All of a sudden, everybody became convinced that they had one of these things that was, in some vague and largely undefinable way, different from the material reality of their sex.

Young boys and girls were drawn into a kind of belief system that told them that although their material bodies said one thing they ‘were’ actually something else. A boy who was drawn to behaviours more typically associated with that of girls was said to be ‘actually’ a girl, ‘inside’, in some unspecified genderish way.

And the boys were encouraged to believe this was so.

So-called gender non-conformity became seen as conformity to a different ‘gender’ and confirmation that they possessed some inner characteristic at odds with their material sex. Stereotypes came back into fashion with a vengeance after we’d spent the best part of the last half of the 20th century trying to get rid of the blasted things.

It is hard to overstate just how swift and radical this revision of our ‘understanding’ of sex has been. We forgot that it is a truism, particularly in science, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where was the evidence base for this extraordinary and massive radical transformation of our views on sex and how that material reality interacts with society? There was none. Let alone any extraordinary evidence.

It was an idea gestated in the hellish wombs of The University™ and if ever there was a case for abortion to be made, this was it. It came from academic departments not particularly well-known for their ability to construct coherent and falsifiable ideas from reality.

It came from the kind of people who can, with a perfectly straight face, talk about a feminist theory of glaciation and achieving justice in human-ice interactions.

Now, of course, our ‘academic’ journals are awash with this kind of drivel. We see broad claims about society made on the basis of a few short chats or ‘interviews’ where the responses are interpreted in some a priori framework. A recent paper, for example, interviewed some white students who wanted to take everyone as they found them regardless of their skin colour. This was, of course, interpreted as evidence of some kind of hideous racism.

And here in the UK, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, we have some TV drama (Adolescence) not based on a single instance of reality or evidence, that has been lauded as some kind of great general insight about young boys and men, in particular.

If you speak up about any of this - or some other issues like whether levels of net immigration orders of magnitude greater than we’ve had in the past is wise - you’re the one that gets classed as a “radical”.

And so when Stephen Fry recently described JK Rowling as having been “radicalised by TERF’s” we’re not surprised. It’s disappointing to see Fry descend to this level of evidence-free ‘thought’, but not wholly unexpected.

If for 99.67% of our history as humans we’ve not really known what sex is then perhaps we could say that, according to the brain-Fryed gender loons, history itself has been on the wrong side of history.

If we assume from this that Fry rejects the “TERF” argument that sex is a binary based in material reality and that this matters and women and men need to be, in certain circumstances, segregated based upon a sex category, then it is Fry who holds the radical belief. He’s the one who has been ‘radicalised’.

Of course, this isn’t just a “TERF” argument. I think I’m probably not at all TERFish (I’m not even a feminist¹, let alone a radical one) but I think it’s important that we construct our laws and societies around the material reality of sex. It is, after all, a reality and not some airy-fairy wishful thinking based only on subjective feelings.

The material reality of our sex is important in all sorts of ways, from societal pressures and ‘social constructs’ right through to differences in medical treatment. And, of course, to quote Reg in The Life of Brian

I'm not oppressing you, Stan. You haven't got a womb! Where's the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!

Monty Python were ahead of their time, but I doubt even they could have foreseen the depth of absurdity, the sheer insanity, of a gynaecologist in France being suspended for refusing to examine a man. A man who claimed to be a woman and who, therefore, did not quite possess the requisite parts that a gynaecologist specializes in.

I do not know how far the patient had gone in his ‘transition’ but, at best, he had only a surgically-constructed simulacrum of a vagina and, although I am but an ignorant and foolish man, I have been led to believe that a woman’s reproductive system is perhaps a tad more complicated than some hole that has been artificially gouged out of a man.

Perhaps this patient also brought along for examination the gestational box he was going to use?

A rare example, one might say. One would hope so

But . . .

Look at the ‘institutional’ response. Suspension. A committee, presumably comprised of people who possessed working brains, and probably quite good ones at that, decided that this doctor was in the wrong. I keep returning to this fascinating question of how intelligent people can take this freakish absurdity remotely seriously.

Of course, there is the strong suspicion that this patient was seeking that elusive goal of validation. He knew he didn’t have any of the requisite bits appropriate for a gynaecological examination but he presented himself for one nevertheless. He was exploiting the system, and this doctor, as a means to pursue validation for his dream of womanhood. There is never enough validation to be had because they know, we all know, that they’re not women in any biologically meaningful sense². Even if we went all genderish and pretended that being a woman was just about feelings there’s always going to be this mismatch, this unbridgeable chasm, between an actual woman and a man who claims to be one. There is no amount of validation to be had that can close that gap.

Instead of being critical of this man who was wasting precious time the medical authorities decided to penalize the doctor who did nothing professionally wrong.

How does one’s brain become so Fryed that you side with the man pretending to be a woman in this instance?

And then we leap straight out of the frying pan and into the fryer; the Goddess of Gobbledegook herself, the peerless Judith Butler. In a surprisingly intelligible response to the recent US Supreme Court ruling that upholds Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming medicines for trans youth she writes

. . . the Supreme Court sets aside the findings of every major medical association that to deny such care constitutes a harm to the health of young people

Erm, does anyone want to let her in on the secret? That’s just nonsense. That’s simply not true - not ‘every’ for one thing, but more importantly there are no such ‘findings’ merely claims that not doing the whole sex-lobotomy thing is harmful. As we now know, for example, the much-vaunted “suicide by GAC denial” is a signal so tiny, if it exists at all, as to be lost in the noise.

Going on to describe Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion Butler writes

After all, she points out, boys can take the same medications to become more masculine, and girls can receive the same treatments to appear more feminine.

I don’t even know what to say about this piece of arrant bullshit. Suffice it to say that no doctors are injecting stuff into boys in an attempt to transform them from being a Daisy Moonflower Twinkle and into a Tate-like brute.

She then goes on to claim that “no harm is done by hormonal therapy per se” which is part and parcel of the whole social transition and puberty blockers are ‘reversible’ myth. As one psychologist has pointed out, rather profoundly and poignantly, a childhood is not reversible.

Parents - try your best not to fuck it up for your kids. They only get one of these things.

Butler is, of course, enmeshed in the whole outlandish progressive view on sex and I believe that she has previously argued that sex itself is a “social construction”. Really? I distinctly remember telling a former girlfriend that her womb had been beautifully socially constructed. Perhaps the patriarchy gets some things right, eh?

She then goes on to say in the closing remarks of her response that

The fact that Trump’s executive order cites the “immutability” of sex, borrowing the language of the Vatican, over the research of developmental biology is but another case in point where an anti-science attitude prevails.

There has been no instance, ever, in the entire history of mankind where a human has changed their sex. I don’t know what “science” she’s been looking at, or what these claimed findings of ‘developmental biology’ are supposed to be - but that’s as clear-cut a case of immutability as we could possibly have.

Perhaps the most worrying part of her response is when she says

Indeed, the harm that the decision does by denying care to trans and gender nonconforming youth goes unremarked

I wasn’t aware that gender nonconformity required medical attention now! When did that happen?

The whole ghastly Frankentrans movement³ is not going away. The idea that we can ‘cure’ a mental condition in which someone believes themselves to be the opposite sex by various medical interventions such as hormonal therapy and brutal surgery is somewhat deranged in itself.

If you really cared about ‘trans’ people the very last thing you would want for them is to have to live a life full of drugs and dilation, not to mention the very high probability of some medical complication arising from their ‘treatment’. Any caring and compassionate person would be thinking “is this really the best we can do?”

But, there is often precious little real compassion or empathy to be had on the progressive side of things. It’s ‘compassion’ by diktat and consequences be damned, providing we’re moving forward to the promised Utopia.

But, hey, let’s take comfort in that those of us who uphold things like science and genuine care are now the ‘queer’ ones. After all, ‘queering’ is about breaking through the ‘norms’ and standing in opposition to the bland homogeneity imposed by society.

Well, we’re the radicals now! We’re the ones they see as ‘outside the norm’.

1. It’s not entirely clear to me what being a ‘feminist’ entails. Do I believe in equal rights and opportunities for men and women? Of course I do. Do I want everyone to be given fair and equitable treatment under the law regardless of their immutable characteristics or even their sexuality? You bet I do. Does that mean I’m a ‘feminist’? Dunno

2. The word ‘meaningful’ is somewhat superfluous here. A man is not a woman in ANY biological sense

3. This is the arm of the movement that believes the medicalization of minors who are confused about their ‘gender’ is the right thing to do