Quotulatiousness

February 20, 2024

Pronoun mandates – “It would be like being told to announce the colour of your aura every time you began a conversation”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Following up on Brendan O’Neill’s report from last week, Andrew Doyle explains why it’s essential for sensible people to resist compelled speech, which these mandatory pronoun declarations clearly are:

This is how it begins. “Why not add your pronouns to your email signature?” “Why not announce your pronouns at the beginning of meetings?” “Why not encourage your staff members to ask for pronouns in day-to-day conversation?” After all, it’s just about being compassionate and creating a more “inclusive” work environment. Only a bigot would object to that …

It’s this kind of skewed reasoning that has led to the firing of Fran Itkoff, a 90-year-old volunteer for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society in the USA, who simply expressed confusion when faced with a request that she add pronouns to her emails. “I had seen it on a couple of letters that had come in after the person’s name”, Itkoff said in an interview, “but I didn’t know what it meant”.

[…]

Like the vast majority of the population, I use pronouns to denote the biological sex of the person to whom I’m referring. And I certainly would not comply if commanded to declare my own due to my innate aversion to any form of compelled speech. The lessons of history are clear: when those in authority begin to demand the use of certain phrases, they have taken the first step on the pathway to tyranny. I do not wish to see a future in which we are forced to stand in lockstep and chant the approved slogans of the ruling class.

Of course, the declaration of pronouns is far removed from any such scenario, but the principle to me is sacrosanct. I will not be told what to say by anyone, least of all those who claim to know what is best for the good of society. Authoritarians have always couched their demands in faux-benevolence, and we have seen how gender ideologues have a particular tendency to viciousness and bullying. “Be kind … or else” is not a maxim to which I am willing to capitulate.

To ask for pronouns in the workplace is the equivalent of suggesting that employees pledge fealty to a deity they do not worship. It is a kind of test, a way to ensure that the tenets of Critical Social Justice – otherwise known as “wokeness” – are being observed. Spinoza argued that for any man to “be compelled to speak only according to the dictates of the supreme power” is a violation of his “indefeasible natural right” to be “the master of his own thoughts”. Once you agree to make statements in favour of a belief-system you do not hold, you are surrendering your agency to those who will exploit it.

While the declaration of pronouns remains a purely voluntary matter, it is fair to say that no-one’s free speech is being violated. But the consequences for non-compliance in the workplace are becoming increasingly severe. Members of staff are passed over for promotion, they are smeared as unreconstructed bigots and “transphobes”, and eventually shunned and isolated. I have written before about friends of mine in the acting profession who feel uncomfortable in stating pronouns at the beginning of rehearsals, but know that they are unlikely to be recast if they refuse. This may not be compulsion, but it is coercion.

February 17, 2024

The pronoun police claim another scalp

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Brendan O’Neill recounts the very sad tale of a 90-year-old woman who has been cancelled by the charity she’d volunteered for over 60 years for questioning mandatory “preferred pronouns”:

Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.

This strange case tells us so much about our times. It confirms that pronounology is tantamount to a religion among the godless new elites. Showy declarations of one’s pronouns play an entirely doctrinal role. They’re the means through which the new establishment – and those who aspire to enter its rarefied ranks – signal their fealty to the god of political correctness, and to that especially angry god of transgenderism. This is why anyone, like Mrs Itkoff, who questions the faddish mumbo jumbo of putting “he / him”, “she / her” or “they / them” after one’s name must be dealt with severely – because they’re not only querying a way of speaking; they’re blaspheming against the entire cult of correct-thought that the new elites have built in order that they might distinguish between good people and bad people, between in-group folk and out-group folk.

Ostentatious pronoun declaration serves no practical purpose. Consider that even Joe Biden has declared his pronouns. No one is going to mistake this 81-year-old fella for a she / her or they / them. We know dozy old Joe’s a bloke. No, he says “he / him” not to be helpful but to signal his unswerving allegiance to elite opinion, to demonstrate his devotion to the new ruling ideologies. This is why the political class, the corporate world and sharp-elbowed youths who want to get their hands on those levers of cultural power make such a big deal of declaring their pronouns – because they know this religious incantation is a door-opener par excellence.

The reason I never use “preferred pronouns” is simple: I don’t subscribe to the neo-religion of gender ideology, which would have us believe that there are two you’s – your mysterious inner gendered soul and your outward biological appearance. Every time we declare our pronouns, or genuflect to someone else’s “preferred pronouns”, we are implicitly buying into this very modern delusion, this woke hocus pocus. I’m with Mrs Itkoff – the idea that people can choose their pronouns, rather than being allocated pronouns that accord with the truth and reason of their biological sex, doesn’t “make sense to me”.

The Itkoff case also confirms how cavalierly despotic woke has become, especially its post-sex, post-truth trans wing. The trans ideology has enacted numerous cruelties on women. Rapists in women’s prisons, men in women’s domestic-violence shelters, women’s sports almost entirely upended by an invasion of mediocre blokes who’ve changed their name to Crystal or whatever – there is no female right, no basic tenet of decency, that cannot be sacrificed at the altar of gender validation. Now, even the charitable urges of an elderly lady can be thrown on to the bonfire of the cruelties – goodness erased in the name of never offending men who think they’re women. That so-called progressives back this sacrifice of women’s right to organise and speak as they see fit in the name of appeasing delusional men is concerning in the extreme.

Then there’s the ageism. We need to talk about the searing hostility of the woke towards older people, especially older women. You don’t even have to be 90. Witness the ceaseless haranguing of “Karens”, a derogatory term for middle-aged, mostly white women who dare to stand up for themselves in public. They’ve become the hate figures of our time. The author Victoria Smith refers to it as “hag hate”, an “ageist misogyny” aimed at women who are perceived not only to be past their supposed sell-by date, but also, even worse, to be possessed of “incorrect” beliefs. The old ducking of hags in open water has been replaced by the shaming of hags on open web forums.

Partly, it’s just old-world ageist sexism rehabilitated in PC lingo. It should not be surprising that the cult of transgenderism – an ideology that indulges men’s jealous coveting of the hyper-sexualised female body – should be so staggeringly hostile to older women. To women who have “sagged”, whether physically or morally, and thus put themselves beyond the cravings of trans activists who seem to value only the young, the pert, the sexualised. That women are human beings, who go through every stage of human existence, seems to be beyond the moral grasp of trans ideologues for whom womanhood is costume and little more.

But there’s something else going on, too. Today’s fashionable ageism is not only misogynistic – it’s Maoist. When I read about the case of Fran Itkoff, it was Maoism that came to mind. For wasn’t that also a crusade against “the old”? Those hotheaded cancellers of 1960s China openly declared war on the “Four Olds” – old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. They demonised and tortured those who gave voice to “old” ideals. Are we not witnessing something similar today? Statues of “problematic” historical figures are torn down, “offensive” old literature is rewritten, old people – like Fran – are sent into social oblivion. Wokeness is Maoism with better PR. We need to do something about it before we arrive in a world where people like Mrs Itkoff are not only cancelled but are also made to stand in public squares with placards around their necks identifying them as rancid old wrongthinkers. It is time to defend “the old” from the crazed young of the woke crusade.

February 7, 2024

QotD: Indoctrinating children into progressive worldviews

Filed under: Education, Health, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… As an analogy for the price of progressivism, it’s close to perfect. Authorities impose an ideology onto reality; reality slowly fights back. The question is simply how much damage is done by this kind of utopianism before it crumbles under its own weight. Simple solutions — like a separate, individual gender-neutral bathroom for the tiny minority with gender dysphoria or anyone else — are out of bounds. They are, after all, reinforcing the idea that girls and boys are different. And we cannot allow biology, evolution, reproductive strategy, hormones, chromosomes, and the customs of every single human culture since the beginning of time to interfere with “social justice.”

It’s also vital to expose children to the fact of their race as the core constituent of their identity. Here is an essay written by a woke teacher about the difficulty of teaching “White boys”:

    I spend a lot of my days worried about White boys. I worry about White boys who barely try and expect to be rewarded, who barely care and can’t stand being called on it, who imagine they can go through school without learning much without it impacting in any way the capacity for their future success, just because it never has before.

This sounds to me as if he is describing, well, boys of any race. And when boys are labeled as “White” (note the capital “W”) and this requires specific rules not applied to nonwhite boys, they often — surprise! — don’t like it:

    This week, a student spoke up in class to say that every time a particular writer talked about White people and their role in racism, he would start to feel really guilty, and it made him not want to listen … I try to keep an arm around the boys who most need it, but it’s hard, because I’m also not willing to give an inch on making my room safe for my students of color. It’s not their job to keep hurting while White boys figure it out.

Children, in other words, are being taught to think constantly about race, and to feel guilty if they are the wrong one. And, of course, if they resist, that merely proves the point. A boy who doesn’t think he is personally responsible for racism is merely reflecting “white fragility” which is a function of “white supremacy”. QED. No one seems to have thought through the implications of telling white boys that their core identity is their “whiteness”, or worried that indoctrinating kids into white identity might lead quite a few to, yes, become “white identitarians” of the far right.

One of the key aspects about social-justice theory is that it’s completely unfalsifiable (as well as unreadable); it’s a closed circle that refers only to itself and its own categories. (For a searing take down of this huge academic con, check out Douglas Murray’s superb new book, The Madness of Crowds.) The forces involved — “white supremacy”, “patriarchy”, “heterosexism” — are all invisible to the naked eye, like the Holy Spirit. Their philosophical origins — an attempt by structuralist French philosophers to rescue what was left of Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s — are generally obscured in any practical context. Like religion, you cannot prove any of its doctrines empirically, but children are being forced into believing them anyway. This is hard, of course, as this teacher explains: “I’m trying. I am. But you know how the saying goes: You can lead a White male to anti-racism, but you can’t make him think.”

The racism, sexism, and condescension in those sentences! (The teacher, by the way, is not some outlier. In 2014, he was named Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year!) Having taken one form of religion out of the public schools, the social-justice left is now replacing it with the doctrines of intersectionality.

Andrew Sullivan, “When the Ideologues Come for the Kids”, New York Magazine, 2019-09-20.

February 6, 2024

On gender issues, “Progressives may even find themselves — dare we say? — on the wrong side of history”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the portion of The Line‘s weekly dispatch that’s visible to freeloaders, the editors discover to their horror that they have to weigh in on the gender fracas:

So to be clear, we really don’t have any problem with Alberta restricting elective gender-related surgeries on minors under the age of 17. While we are rather concerned about the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones among minors, we also suspect that trying to ban these drugs for absolutely everyone under a certain age represents an overreach by the state.

Also, bluntly, we don’t think that in an ideal world, the state should be involving itself in most of this stuff at all. We want to exist in a country in which sports leagues, doctors, schools and teachers can be trusted to make sensible, evidence-based decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Take sports, for example: does a rec-league pickleball tournament need to have the same rules around trans participation as a competitive women’s rugby league? And do we really want any state regulation bulldozering over the people who are actually on the ground, and best understand the physical and cultural realities of that sport?

Or take puberty blockers.

Should we really be treating a 12-year-old who has displayed severe and crippling gender dysphoria since the age of three with the same treatment protocol as a depressed 14-year-old boy who comes into the gender clinic for the first time attached to a Munchausen-by-Proxy mom documenting every moment of her child’s transition for TikTok? Do we want politicians in Edmonton writing the precise rules that will be faithfully applied in both those situations?

Sigh.

We understand how we got here. Any discussion around trans issues is now highly insane; in a hyper-polarized, borderline hysterical moment, we actually can’t trust our institutions to possess the requisite reserve and dispassion needed to make credible and defensible decisions. These institutions are, or are perceived to be, too ideologically captured to be trustworthy.

For an example that just happened to cross our path today, take this quote from Dr. Simone Lebeuf, a pediatrician in Edmonton who specializes in gender-diverse youth. In it, she notes that restricting puberty blockers to children over the age of 15 effectively makes the treatment useless, as they would be administered at an age well past the onset of puberty.

“It’s done. The window has passed,” the doctor told City News. “And we really look at puberty blockers as an option for kids to have some space and time to make decisions about their future selves and who they might want to be as adults. Their puberty is not benign, it is not a nothing process to go through. The physical changes with puberty are permanent.”

Right off the bat, a statement like this ought to raise eyebrows, and not only because it’s a talking point we’ve already heard dozens of times on TikTok. This doctor — a physician who is actually treating children — is conflating the harms caused by artificially delaying a natural process with the apparent harms caused by the biological process itself. That logic is not sound. There is a clear difference between, say, permanent loss of sexual function and bone density caused by interfering in the natural course of puberty, and the harm of allowing a child’s body to grow an Adam’s apple despite that individual feeling like a woman.

Secondly, Dr. Lebeuf isn’t addressing the core concern with puberty blockers, above and beyond their physical side effects. The majority of children who present with gender dysphoria are not trans. Most of them turn out to be simply gay — a fact they discover via the process of growing up and sexually maturing. By delaying or denying a gender dysphoric child the opportunity to experience normal puberty, critics of these treatment protocols fear that a doctor may be preventing the very process by which gender dysphoria would resolve itself without medical intervention. Most — certainly not all, but most — gender dysphoric children would otherwise grow up to be at ease with their natal sex. But once kids start with the puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones, this process of medical transitioning may be psychologically self reinforcing, pushing physically healthy minors into pursuing more and more unnecessary and invasive interventions with serious lifelong consequences.

In short, puberty blockers are not magic cures for gender dysphoria. They might be appropriate for some kids with lots of supports and monitoring. But they could be disastrous for others, and we have no foolproof way to know in advance which kids will fall into what camp.

This stuff is complicated, and it’s made more so because it’s difficult to study objectively in ideologically captured environments dominated by activists on all sides who muddy the waters with emotionally charged rhetoric, and confuse good science with bad. If you want to understand why people are turning to Danielle Smith instead of the Alberta Medical Association to address their fears, quotes like the one above are a prime example.

And, by the way, we include “The Media” writ large as having failed on this file. The lack of skepticism and neutrality that the media has demonstrated on even the most maximalist and unpopular positions on gender and sexuality has — to our mind — significantly contributed to the radical decline in its collective credibility.

February 4, 2024

“[L]et’s face it head-on: you’re a social and political outlier, a dangerous extremist”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

You, yes you are exactly the kind of dangerous extremist that mature and sensible journalists at all the right media outlets have been warning us about for years:

You’re very weird.

In fact, let’s face it head-on: you’re a social and political outlier, a dangerous extremist. Your views put you firmly on the fringe, and that fringe is becoming a real problem. For example, the Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, has just embraced a bunch of radical fringe policies about parent notification and consent regarding schools and transgender children, simultaneously limiting the ability of young children to have their bodies medically altered to match their declared gender — and some pretty disturbing people are supporting this crazy stuff. Look how appalled normal Canadians are by these extremist maneuvers to keep parents involved in the lives of LGBT children:

See the whole poll here, if you can stand the disgust from seeing extremist material, or see a detailed report on a poll of Californians that offers similar results.

Fortunately, the responsible mainstream leaders of the Liberal Party and NDP are standing strong with the 14% in the majority who want parents out of the lives of transgender children, rejecting the fringe views of the 78% who live at the extremist edges.

At the same time, the New York Times has just published a remarkable opinion piece on the growing concern among longtime transgender advocates, including transgendered clinicians, about the casual and rushed process by which American pediatric gender clinics are pushing children into gender transition. The essay centers on detransitioners, trans youth who change their minds and accept their biological sex.

This being the New York Times, the author is compelled to mention the true danger: “The real threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections.” Ahh, but watch what comes next:

    But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.

    “I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”

    She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supported gender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

Democrats are doctrinally rigid, and a top health official in the Biden administration says proudly that there is no debate. See, everyone believes the same thing, except mean Republicans, but that’s also now understood to be a sign of excessive ideological rigidity. Then the same piece in the Times also says a whole bunch of things like this:

    Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

I’ve removed the links from the quoted paragraphs, because they don’t work well after cutting and pasting, but you can find them all at the link to the non-paywalled opinion piece.

Well, I guess the secret’s out:

January 27, 2024

Modern academics “were perfectly happy to accept that evolution explains the behaviour of every other species on earth, with the exception of humans”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Gad Saad offers an action plan to bring our universities back to a slightly more reality-based view of the world and prevent further postmodernist deterioration:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

This year, I am celebrating my 30th year as a professor. During those three decades, I have witnessed the proliferation of several parasitic ideas that are fully decoupled from reality, common sense, reason, logic and science, which led to my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. As George Orwell famously noted, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them”. Each of these ideas were spawned on university campuses, originally in the humanities and the social sciences, but as I predicted long ago, they have infiltrated the natural sciences, and now can be found in all areas of our culture.

These destructive ideas include, but are not limited to, postmodernism (there are no objective truths, which is a fundamental attack on the epistemology of science); cultural relativism (who are we to judge the cultural mores of another society, such as performing female genital mutilation on little girls?); the rejection of meritocracy in favour of identity politics (diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) as the basis for admitting, hiring and promoting individuals); and victimhood as the means by which one adjudicates between competing ideas (I am a greater victim therefore my truth is veridical).

I was first exposed to this pervasive academic lunacy via my scientific work at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and consumer behaviour. Central to this endeavour is the fact that the human mind has evolved via the dual processes of natural and sexual selection. Nothing could be clearer, and yet I was astonished early in my career to witness the extraordinary resistance that I faced from my colleagues, many of whom were perfectly happy to accept that evolution explains the behaviour of every other species on earth, with the exception of humans.

Apparently, human beings transcend their biological imperatives, as they are strictly cultural beings. This biophobia (fear of using biology to explain human phenomena) is the means by which transgender activists can argue with a straight face that “men too can menstruate and bear children”. Biology is apparently the means by which the patriarchy implements its nefarious misogyny, making us all “wrongly” believe that men can on average lift heavier weights and run faster than women, notwithstanding a litany of evolutionary-based anatomical, physiological, hormonal and morphological sex differences.

According to radical feminists, these differences are largely due to social construction. Hence, a man who stands 6-4 and weighs 285 pounds can wake up one day and declare himself to be a transgender woman. Anyone who disagrees with this notion is clearly a transphobe.

January 16, 2024

QotD: Children and transgenderism

Filed under: Education, Health, Politics, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

And then there is the disturbing “social justice” response to gender-nonconforming boys and girls. Increasingly, girly boys and tomboys are being told that gender trumps sex, and if a boy is effeminate or bookish or freaked out by team sports, he may actually be a girl, and if a girl is rough and tumble, sporty, and plays with boys, she may actually be a boy.

In the last few years in Western societies, as these notions have spread, the number of children identifying as trans has skyrocketed. In Sweden, the number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a phenomenon stable and rare for decades, has, from 2013 to 2016, increased almost tenfold. In New Zealand, the rate of girls identifying as boys has quadrupled in the same period of time; in Britain, where one NHS clinic is dedicated to trans kids, there were around a hundred girls being treated in 2011; by 2017, there were 1,400.

Possibly this sudden surge is a sign of pent-up demand, as trans kids emerge from the shadows, which, of course, is a great and overdue thing. The suffering of trans kids can be intense and has been ignored for far too long. But maybe it’s also some gender non-conforming kids falling prey to adult suggestions, or caused by social contagion. Almost certainly it’s both. But one reason to worry about the new explosion in gender dysphoria is that it seems recently to be driven by girls identifying as boys rather than the other way round. Female sexuality is more fluid and complex than male sexuality, so perhaps girls are more susceptible to ideological suggestion, especially when they are also taught that being a woman means being oppressed.

In the case of merely confused or less informed kids, the consequences of treatment can be permanent. Many of these prepubescent trans-identifying children are put on puberty blockers, drugs that suppress a child’s normal hormonal development, and were originally designed for prostate cancer and premature puberty. The use of these drugs for gender dysphoria is off-label, unapproved by the FDA; there have been no long-term trials to gauge the safety or effectiveness of them for gender dysphoria, and the evidence we have of the side effects of these drugs in FDA-approved treatment is horrifying. Among adults, the FDA has received 24,000 reports of adverse reactions, over half of which it deemed serious. Parents are pressured into giving these drugs to their kids on the grounds that the alternative could be their child’s suicide. Imagine the toll of making a decision about your child like that?

Eighty-five percent of gender-dysphoric children grow out of the condition — and most turn out to be gay. Yes, some are genuinely trans and can and should benefit from treatment. And social transition is fine. But children cannot know for certain who they are sexually or emotionally until they have matured past puberty. Fixing their “gender identity” when they’re 7 or 8, or even earlier, administering puberty blockers to kids as young as 12, is a huge leap in the dark in a short period of time. It cannot be transphobic to believe that no child’s body should be irreparably altered until they are of an age and a certainty to make that decision themselves.

I don’t have children, but I sure worry about gay kids in this context. I remember being taunted by some other kids when I was young — they suggested that because I was mildly gender-nonconforming, I must be a girl. If my teachers and parents and doctors had adopted this new ideology, I might never have found the happiness of being gay and comfort in being male. How many gay kids, I wonder, are now being led into permanent physical damage or surgery that may be life-saving for many, but catastrophic for others, who come to realize they made a mistake. And what are gay adults doing to protect them? Nothing. Only a few ornery feminists, God bless them, are querying this.

In some ways, the extremism of the new transgender ideology also risks becoming homophobic. Instead of seeing effeminate men as one kind of masculinity, as legitimate as any other, transgenderism insists that girliness requires being a biological girl. Similarly, a tomboy is not allowed to expand the bandwidth of what being female can mean, but must be put into the category of male. In my view, this is not progressive; it’s deeply regressive. There’s a reason why Iran is a world leader in sex-reassignment surgery, and why the mullahs pay for it. Homosexuality in Iran is so anathema that gay boys must be turned into girls, and lesbian girls into boys, to conform to heterosexual norms. Sound a little too familiar?

Adults are increasingly forced to obey the new norms of “social justice” or be fired, demoted, ostracized, or canceled. Many resist; many stay quiet; a few succumb and convert. Children have no such options.

Indoctrinate yourselves as much as you want to, guys. It’s a free country. But hey, teacher — leave those kids alone.

Andrew Sullivan, “When the Ideologues Come for the Kids”, New York Magazine, 2019-09-20.

January 3, 2024

“One of the oddities of trans healthcare is that it masquerades as progressive”

Filed under: Books, Health, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Critic, Victoria Smith outlines the history of medical misogyny from Aristotle to modern-day “trans healthcare”:

The neglect of female bodies in medicine has a long history. The male-default bias, writes Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women, “goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, who kicked off the trend of seeing the female body as a ‘mutilated male’ body (thanks, Aristotle)”:

    The female was the male ‘turned outside in’. Ovaries were female testicles (they were not given their own name until the seventeenth century) and the uterus was the female scrotum. […] The male body was an ideal women failed to live up to.

As Criado Perez notes, this bias lives on in male-centric medical research and undifferentiated treatment recommendations. “Women are dying,” she notes, “as a result of the gender data gap.” The belief that there is nothing specifically different about female people — cut a bit here, add a bit there, and we’re the same as men — has led to our symptoms being ignored and our pain dismissed.

Over the past few years, there have been a number of books — Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women, Cat Bohannon’s Eve, Leah Hazzard’s Womb, to name a few — which have aimed to correct the imbalance. This is important both to save lives and ease suffering, and because, on a very basic level, it is insulting for half the human race to have our bodies treated as lesser, imperfect versions of a male ideal. We are more than that. We exist in our own right.

There are many in medicine, however, who still seem to think that Aristotle was right. Last week, for instance, the World Health Organisation announced it would be developing new guidelines into “the health of trans and gender diverse people”. While this might sound positive, as Eliza Mondegreen notes, many of those leading the development group hold highly regressive views about sex, gender and bodies. It is only possible to believe that a person could change sex if you have not given much consideration to the “second” sex at all.

One of the oddities of trans healthcare is that it masquerades as progressive despite having evolved from — and continuing to rely on — an understanding of sex difference which is regressive, male-centric and superficial. Because no one wants to admit it, this has led to a plethora of articles along the lines of “Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary” and “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic“. While these claim to be adding extra detail and nuance to our understanding, what they do in practice is revert back to privileging the male default. Sex is all so varied, all so different, they tell us, we might as well not bother setting any standards for what counts as “femaleness”. We’re all just human, aren’t we? Only some bodies have tended to be considered more human than others. Rebranding “the male default” “the sex spectrum” is a sneaky way of insisting, once again, that female people are nothing more than males with a few minor tweaks.

This is the new medical misogyny, built on the back of the old version. Unfortunately, because it positions itself as anti-conservative and even pro-feminist, many writers of texts that address the old version feel obliged to go along with the new. It’s not difficult to see why. Who wants their work to be undermined by bad faith accusations of transphobia? Isn’t it easier just to say “it’s clear that trans women are women” — as Bohannon has done — on the basis that at least this will enable you to challenge the centring of male bodies elsewhere?

December 19, 2023

Behind enemy lines at the WPATH symposium

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Eliza Mondegreen reports her experiences at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health gathering in Montreal last year:

This was no ordinary medical conference. Over the course of three days, I learned a great many things. That eunuchs are one of the world’s oldest gender identities and that doctors should not judge their strange desires for castration but fulfil them. That, “ideally, patients wouldn’t be actively psychotic” when they initiated testosterone, but that psychotic patients consent to take medication like stool softeners and statins all the time and “people don’t pay that much attention”. That it would be “ableist” to question an autistic girl’s insistence on a double mastectomy. That patients who claim to have multiple personalities that disagree about which irreversible steps to take toward transition can find consensus — or at least obtain a quorum — using a smartphone app.

It is hard to shock me these days — but as I moved around the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s symposium in Montreal in September 2022, I often felt as if I’d slipped sideways into some strange universe that operated in accordance with other laws: where up is down and girls are boys and medicine has left its modest brief — healing — far behind in its breathless pursuit of transcendence.

I wasn’t really supposed to be there. I hadn’t misrepresented myself — I am what I claimed to be: a graduate student researching gender identity — but this was a convocation for believers and I’m a sceptic. When WPATH, the world’s most prestigious and influential gathering in transgender healthcare, came to Montreal, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see up close the people and ideas I had pursued through so many articles and books.

[…]

It’s difficult to imagine clinicians practising in other areas of medicine not asking such basic questions, especially when the basis for treatment is so murky. But a good gender clinician, looking at a patient, does not see what non-believers like you or I might see. A good clinician falls under the sway of the same fantasy as the patient and conspires with her to bring her transgender self into existence. Under this framework, there is no “really trans” or not. There is only what the patient says and the readiness of the clinician to put herself at the service of the patient’s vision.

A bad gender clinician, by contrast, feels an “entitlement to know” why a patient feels the way she does or why she seeks a particular intervention. She clings to a traditional conception of her role as a “gatekeeper” who evaluates and prescribes. She thinks she can “discern a ‘true’ gender identity beyond what is articulated by the patient”. She may believe she can “identify the ‘root cause’ of a transgender identity”, which is seen as pathologising. She may try to leave the door open to desistance — the most common outcome before gender clinicians started interfering with normal development by deploying puberty-blocking drugs — in which case she is guilty of “valuing cis lives over trans lives”.

A bad gender clinician is easily “intimidated” by complicated patients, while a good gender clinician knows how to secure consent even in the trickiest cases. Mental health difficulties become “mental health differences”. Severe autism or thinking you have multiple personalities living inside your head become empowering forms of “neurodiversity”. When it comes to assessment, “careful” and “comprehensive” have become dirty words: “The answer always seems to be more assessment and more time. That’s gatekeeping.”

During the Denver conference, presenters role-played how to secure informed consent for a hysterectomy and phalloplasty in the case of a schizophrenic, borderline autistic, intellectually disabled “demiboy” with a recent psychiatric hospitalisation. At no point do the role-players encounter any real barriers. Instead, they persevere. At first, the patient struggled to understand why a phalloplasty might require multiple surgeries, but then the clinicians “explained everything” and the patient understood. This is called “lean[ing] into the nuance of capacity”.

The moral of this story is clear: failure to achieve informed consent is a failure on the part of the clinician, a failure of imagination and flexibility, not a recognition that some patients — whether because of age or mental illness or intellectual disability — will simply not be able to consent.

December 3, 2023

Doctor What-are-your-pronouns

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t watch Doctor Who although I have fond childhood memories of watching William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton’s respective “Doctors” and I caught one or two episodes of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker in the role. That the show is still running on British TV is a wonder … but it got headlines for a recent installment that had the Doctor being told off for “assuming” an alien creature’s pronouns:

Remember when Doctor Who was fun? Watching it now is about as much fun as being publicly humiliated at work by some jumped-up nonbinary form-filler from HR who thinks he’s amazing because he’s painted one of his fingernails black.

A good example of this joylessness is a scene in the most recent special, “The Star Beast”, which has been treated by right-on broadsheet types as a moment of profound importance. Yet all that happened was a transwoman character – played by transwoman actor Yasmin Finney – lectured the Doctor about pronouns. In a moment of unforgivable Time Lord-cis privilege, the Doctor had assumed a diminutive alien called Beep the Meep used male pronouns. What was he thinking?

It is this sort of banal plot line that encapsulates the shrivelling ambition of science fiction. Once the genre dared to hold up a provocative mirror to contemporary society. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, sci-fi challenged lazy assumptions. Now it revels in groupthink that feeds the collective self-righteousness of indolent teenagers and adults with teenage imaginations.

This matters, because at its best sci-fi can dazzle and even inspire us with the potential strangeness of the imagined future. A few years ago I made a series presented by William Shatner tracing the cultural and technological influence of Star Trek. In one episode, the inventor of the mobile phone, Martin Cooper, told director Julian Jones how he had been inspired by the example of Captain Kirk’s hand-held “communicator”. Will anyone invent something inspired by the new Doctor Who? A new set of guidelines for pronoun use, perhaps?

You can tell how out of touch Doctor Who has now become by the fact its enormously pompous showrunner, Russell T Davies, seemed to think that the new series would shock viewers with its “progressive” radicalism. The only shock was the alien pronoun scene’s patent stupidity.

I mean, why on Earth would the Doctor assume the gender of any alien? He has been encountering aliens with no fixed gender since the 1960s. The Doctor has effectively been asking aliens for their pronouns for nigh on 60 years.

Davies may think he’s blazing a trail with the new series of Doctor Who. But the truth is that gender-bending in science fiction is as old as the frozen hills of Gallifrey. In The War of the Worlds, published 125 years ago, HG Wells regaled us with Martian invaders who reproduced asexually. And hermaphrodites pepper sci-fi, from the work of Philip K Dick to that of Ursula K Le Guin.

November 27, 2023

Elagabalus, the first queer or trans Roman emperor?

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I guess it was inevitable that the urge to “queer” the museum or “queer” history would eventually dig up Elagabalus as an icon, as his brief reign certainly drew a lot of slander in the years that followed his death (similar to what historians wrote about Caligula or Nero … once they were safely dead):

Bust of Elagabalus in the Palazzo Nuovo – Capitoline Museums – Rome.
Photo by José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 4.0.

It’s not such a stretch as it may sound. As well as throwing wild parties, Elagabalus was also said to have openly flouted contemporary gender roles. The emperor is said to have also dressed as a female sex worker, “married” a male slave and acted as his “wife”, asked to be referred to as “lady” rather than “lord” and even, according to one account, begged to have a surgical vagina made by a physician.

The stories led Keith Hoskins, executive member for arts at North Herts council, to say in a statement: “Elagabalus most definitely preferred the she pronoun, and as such this is something we reflect when discussing her in contemporary times … It is only polite and respectful. We know that Elagabalus identified as a woman and was explicit about which pronouns to use, which shows that pronouns are not a new thing.”

But do we know that? Thanks to a growing awareness of more complex ideas of gender in history, and a desire to reject historical prejudices, Elagabalus has been reclaimed in recent decades as a genderqueer icon.

However, many historians disagree that the evidence is as unambiguous as the museum says. Mary Beard, formerly professor of classics at Cambridge University, directed followers on X to her latest book, titled Emperor of Rome, which opens with a lengthy discussion of the “tall stories” told about Elagabalus.

The accounts of sexual unconventionality (and extravagant cruelty) largely originate with hostile historians who wanted to win the favour of Elegabalus’s successor, Severus Alexander, and so portrayed the emperor in the worst light possible, she says. “How seriously should we treat them? Not very is the usual answer,” Beard writes, calling the stories “untruths and flagrant exaggerations”.

The Romans may not have shared current understandings of trans identity, but several of the contested accounts about Elagabalus feel remarkably modern, points out Zachary Herz, assistant professor of classics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who has written about how we should approach the story of Elagabalus in the context of queer theory.

Asserting that Elagabalus requested female pronouns is an “astonishingly close translation” of a story written by the third-century historian Cassius Dio, says Herz. “Elagabalus is literally saying, ‘Don’t call me this word that ends in the masculine ending, call me this word that ends in the feminine’. So it’s unbelievably close to correcting someone’s pronouns.”

The problem, as he sees it, is that “I just don’t think it really happened”. “The quote-unquote biographies” written under Elagabalus’s successor are “hit pieces”, he says. “I would be inclined to read [them] as basically fictional.”

Martijn Icks, a lecturer in classics at the university of Amsterdam and author of a book about Elagabalus’s life and posthumous reputation, agrees that the stories about the emperor should be taken with “a large pinch of salt”. The same “effeminacy narrative” that has made Elagabalus a queer icon “was meant to character assassinate the Emperor, to show that he was completely unsuitable to occupy this position”, he says, adding that other so-called “bad emperors” including Nero and Caligula were described in very similar terms.

Racial prejudice also played a part, says Icks: before coming to Rome to rule it, Elagabalus was a priest in an obscure cult in Syria that venerated a black stone meteorite – a culture that would have been deeply strange to the Romans.

“And the stereotype that Romans had of Syrians … is that they were very effeminate and not real men like the Romans were.”

November 25, 2023

“It’s not called the gender empathy gap for nothing”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo on the blatant disregard for violence as long at that violence is not directed at women:

The news headline by the CBC, Canada’s state-funded broadcaster, could hardly have been more blatant: “Ottawa had 16 homicides in 2022—and nearly half of the victims were women or girls“. In other words, more than half of the victims, as is always the case, were boys and men, a state of affairs that no one at the CBC has ever found troubling enough to lament or even notice. Only when the female homicide rate approaches gender parity in one (unusual) year is it a “collective crisis”, as the subheading alleges.

It’s not called the gender empathy gap for nothing.

[Author’s note: Perhaps I should have stopped here. What more is there to say about the extraordinary indifference of most people, men and women, to violence against men and the craven desire to deny female culpability? There’s nothing new in this essay, no new angle or stats, no rousing call to action, nothing beyond the marshalling of dreary evidence and sadly sarcastic observations unlikely to change any mind or cause any gynocentric cheek to blush. I had intended to finish it in time for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Men, on November 18, but was stymied partly by a sense of helpless anger, the weight of which pressed down on every sentence. The section at the end, about the death of Benjamin Rain, was the last straw.]

Feminists have long touted their concern for victims, yet that is never in shorter supply than in their one-sided discussions of violence, in which the only deaths allowed to matter are female deaths, presented for readers’ contemplation with poignant circumstances, names, and expressions of horrified sadness, as in the above-mentioned article. Dead men remain largely anonymous, and few readers could guess from the typical reports of feminist organizations that women are ever lethally violent.

Indifference to male suffering and death are the norm all over the world, of course, but the Anglophone feminist movement has markedly increased it, fudging numbers and manipulating language to focus empathy exclusively on women and girls. The CBC article devotes significant space to discussing the risible concept of femicide, a relatively recent coinage that makes no secret of its female supremacism, purporting to highlight how women and girls are killed “simply for being women” and “primarily by […] men”, as if every woman, even one killed by accident (as we’ll see), is evidence of gender bias.

The idea that women are killed because they are women is preposterous, impossible to support with evidence, and obviously intended to solidify the impression that women outnumber men as victims of murderous violence. An organization called the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability provides an elaborate taxonomy of forms of femicide to drive the idea home, deliberately blurring the lines between intimate partner homicide, a favored focus, and other killings of women, which are collectively deplored as “brazen acts of hatred“.

Even a cursory reading of the details, however, exposes the vacuousness of the terminology as well as the sleight of hand by which men’s alleged misogyny is misleadingly linked to the totality of the women’s deaths. Only two of Ottawa’s seven murdered women were killed by current or former intimate partners. One of the dead women was attacked and killed by her two adult daughters (an act called “non-intimate femicide”), while another was the victim of a stray bullet that killed her by accident and was probably intended for a man (if you can believe it, the Canadian Femicide Observatory calls this type of death “associated/connected femicide”).

It is impossible to conclude that all or even most of these — certainly unfortunate — deaths can logically be said to have occurred, as the mantra holds, “due to the existence of gender norms and stereotypes, discrimination directed toward women and girls, and unequal power relations across genders“. The determination to find gender discrimination at the root of all female suffering — and thus to justify yet more programs, initiatives, and taxpayer dollars for feminist organizations, as well as more collective shaming of men — seems unstoppable.

October 27, 2023

Scientific Wokemerican

Filed under: Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, James Esses on the formerly respected magazine Scientific American (I’ve been calling it JunkScientific American since they published a story on the “Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity”):

When you come across the longstanding magazine, Scientific American, you could be forgiven for assuming that scientific truth would play a pivotal role in its output.

But not any more, it seems. Scientific American, founded in 1845, is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. It has previously featured work by Albert Einstein, among others. However, in recent years, it appears to have been taken over by contributors who consider themselves activists first and scientists second. The magazine’s ethos now includes the express aim of “sharing trustworthy knowledge, enhancing our understanding of the world, and advancing social justice” (my emphasis). It has also started to intervene in electoral politics, too. In 2020, Scientific American broke with a 175-year history of non-partisanship to endorse Joe Biden in the US presidential election.

Worst of all, when its articles touch on questions of gender and biological sex, Scientific American seems to have abandoned objective facts entirely, in favour of trans-activist pseudoscience.

In 2019, an article by Simón(e) D Sun, who identifies as a “transgender nonbinary woman”, tells us to “Stop using phoney science to justify transphobia”. The piece is, as you might expect, filled with ideologically driven language and easily disprovable claims. For instance, it asserts that sex is “assigned” at birth when it is not – it is observed and recorded. It also suggests that “scientific endeavour is quantifiably better when it is more inclusive”. But what if “being inclusive” requires us to deny the reality of biological sex? That would surely put inclusivity at odds with science.

A patronising, finger-wagging tone runs throughout, too. At one point, readers are told to “hold onto your parts, whatever they may be. It’s time for ‘the talk'”.

Ironically, the article undermines its own premise within the first few paragraphs, as it walks readers through the clear biological differences between males and females, ranging from chromosomes to sexual characteristics to brain development. And at the end of the article, having done nothing to challenge the status quo of human biology, we are told: “The science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary, transgender people are real”.

Of course, nobody has ever claimed “transgender people” are a figment of our imaginations. What gender-critical feminists have argued, however, is that sex is both binary and immutable – and that feeling uneasy about one’s sex is a symptom of mental distress, rather than proof of an innate gender identity that is at odds with one’s body.

And now, for its upcoming November issue, Scientific American has published another piece denying biological reality. Again, this article is peppered with ideological claims that purport to be scientific facts.

October 24, 2023

What is a man?

Filed under: Health, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rob Henderson recently gave a lecture at the University of Richmond as part of their “Masculinity in a Changing World” series. Part of the lecture involved exploring the question “what is a man?”

Of course, there are many ways of understanding what being man is about, and there are many valid ways to be a man. However, regardless of how it is expressed, it usually has something to do with strength and toughness and productivity.

In his cross-cultural research, the psychologist Martin J. Seager has found 3 consistent requirements to achieve the status of manhood in various societies around the world.

First, the individual must be a fighter and a winner.

Second, he must be a provider and protector.

And third, he must maintain mastery and control of himself at all times.

Across cultures, there seems to be an implicit understanding of what being a man is.

Indeed, in a widely-cited study of 25 cultures—including New Zealand, Finland, Zimbabwe, Malaysia, Pakistan, Bolivia, and Trinidad—definitions of masculinity and femininity hardly fluctuated at all. As a rule, participants in this study said they did not believe that men and women differed in all respects, and they did not view one sex as inherently superior to the other. But in every culture, men were seen as active, adventurous, dominant, forceful, independent, and strong.

Contemporary polemicists will rhetorically ask questions like, “What is a woman?” But seldom does anyone ask, “What is a man?” People seem to already know.

Indeed, many individuals resort to commonplace expressions such as, “Man up”, or “Be a man”, or, more crassly, “Grow some balls”. In polite society, people won’t publicly express such remarks, but many will still think them.

Men, of course, are responsive to these statements. In a famous literary illustration, Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth reinforces the conception of manhood as strength. Early on in this 17th century play, she receives a letter from her husband. The letter details an encounter with 3 witches and their prophecy that her husband Macbeth will take over the throne from King Duncan.

Lady Macbeth is eager for this power and insists that she and her husband must murder the King themselves in order for this prophecy to come true. Lady Macbeth expresses her concerns however, when she grows worried about whether her husband will be manly enough to follow through with this agreement. Her fears are confirmed when Macbeth, upon reflecting on the consequences of treason, subsequently backs out of the plan.

Lady Macbeth then persuades her husband when she proclaims that if he were to go through with the murder, then he would not only be a man, but “so much more.”

By dangling the enticing reputation of manliness over her husband, Lady Macbeth succeeds in getting him to kill the king, and subsequently setting in motion the chaotic events of the rest of the story.

Shakespeare was clearly a keen observer of human nature in general and of men’s anxieties about their masculinity in particular.

Such anxieties regarding the belief that manhood is something that must be achieved through action appear to be ubiquitous around the world.

I’ll offer a few brief examples.

On the Greek Aegean island of Kalymnos, many of the inhabitants make their living by commercial sponge fishing. The men dive into deep water without the aid of special equipment, which they scorn. Diving is a gamble because many men are stricken and injured. Young divers who take precautions are mocked as effeminate and ridiculed by their peers.

Halfway around the world, in the high mountains of Melanesia, young boys undergo intense trials before achieving the status of manhood. Young boys are torn from their mothers and forced to undergo a series of brutal masculinizing rituals. These include whippings, beatings, and other forms of terror from older men, which the boys must endure stoically and silently. This community believes that without such hazing, boys will never mature into men but remain weak and childlike. Real men are made, they insist, not born.

To this extent, the psychologist Roy Baumeister has pointed out that, “in many societies, any girl who grows up automatically becomes a woman … Meanwhile, a boy does not automatically become a man, and instead is often required to prove himself, usually by passing stringent tests or producing more than he consumes.”

In many non-industrialized small-scale societies, girls are believed to become women when they are physically able to produce children. The ability to have kids is considered a major contribution in itself to the community. Boys, in contrast, do not have a clear and visible biological indicator of manhood, and must often endure culturally sanctioned rituals and painful trials to become men.

Indeed, masculinity is widely considered to be an artificially induced status, achievable only through testing and careful instruction. Real men do not simply emerge like butterflies from their boyish cocoons. Rather, they must be carefully shaped, nurtured, counseled, and prodded into manhood.

The literary critic Alfred Habegger has remarked that masculinity “has an uncertain and ambiguous status. It is something to be acquired through a struggle, a painful initiation, or a long and sometimes humiliating apprenticeship.”

October 9, 2023

QotD: Roman views of sexual roles

Filed under: Europe, Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There is always a temptation to emphasise the way in which the Romans are like us, a mirror held up to our own civilisation. But what is far more interesting is the way in which they are nothing like us, because it gives you a sense of how various human cultures can be. You assume that ideas of sex and gender are pretty stable, and yet the Roman understanding of these concepts was very, very different to ours. For us, I think, it does revolve around gender — the idea that there are men and there are women — and, obviously, that can be contested, as is happening at the moment. But the fundamental idea is that you are defined by your gender. Are you heterosexual or homosexual? That’s probably the great binary today.

For the Romans, this is not a binary. There’s a description in Suetonius’s imperial biography of Claudius: “He only ever slept with women.” And this is seen as an interesting foible in the way that you might say of someone, he only ever slept with blondes. I mean, it’s kind of interesting, but it doesn’t define him sexually. Similarly, he says of Galba, an upright embodiment of ancient republican values: “He only ever slept with males.” And again, this is seen as an eccentricity, but it doesn’t absolutely define him. What does define a Roman in the opinion of Roman moralists is basically whether you are — and I apologise for the language I’m now going to use — using your penis as a kind of sword, to dominate, penetrate and subdue. And the people who were there to receive your terrifying, thrusting, Roman penis were, of course, women and slaves: anyone who is not a citizen, essentially. So the binary is between Roman citizens, who are all by definition men, and everybody else.

A Roman woman, if she’s of citizen status, can’t be used willy-nilly — but pretty much anyone else can. That means that if you’re a Roman householder, your family is not just your blood relatives: it’s everybody in your household. It’s your dependents; your slaves. You can use your slaves any way you want. And if you’re not doing it, then there’s something wrong with you. The Romans had the same word for “urinate” and “ejaculate”, so the orifices of slaves — and they could be men, women, boys or girls — were seen as the equivalent of urinals for Roman men. Of course, this is very hard for us to get our heads around today.

The most humiliating thing that could happen to a Roman male citizen was to be treated like a woman — even if it was involuntary. For them, the idea that being trans is something to be celebrated would seem the most depraved, lunatic thing that you could possibly argue. Vitellius, who ended up an emperor, was known his whole life as “sphincter”, because it was said that as a young man he had been used like a girl by Tiberius on Capri. It was a mark of shame that he could never get rid of. There was an assumption that the mere rumour of being treated in this way would stain you for life; and if you enjoy it, then you are absolutely the lowest of the low.

Tom Holland, “The depravity of the Roman Peace”, UnHerd, 2023-07-07.

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