Quotulatiousness

August 9, 2018

Scottish schools’ proposed gender initiative will encourage gender uncertainty in 5-year-olds

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Joanna Williams explains why authority figures actively undermining one of the few certainties in a young child’s world is bound to cause much more harm to many children:

Education Scotland, regional NHS boards and the Scottish government jointly came up with this new gender initiative’s daft – sorry, draft – guidelines, which are set to come into effect from 2019. The plan is to tell children: ‘Your sex is what you are told by a doctor when you are born. Most people are told they are a male child (a boy) or a female child (a girl).’ But this ridiculous statement contradicts everything children will later learn in biology lessons. Babies are not ‘told’ they are a particular sex in some odd conversation between parents and midwives on the labour ward. The overwhelming majority of babies actually are male or female, boys or girls. Sex is not a lottery. It doesn’t depend on how the doctor happens to be feeling at a certain point in time. It is there in the child’s genitals and in their chromosomes. Telling children that sex is simply something that is arbitrarily announced by a doctor is a lie.

But propagating this lie and encouraging children to believe that sex is a random declaration allows teachers to go on to tell children: ‘Your gender is what you decide.’ In other words, children will be told to ignore the evidence they see before them every time they go to the toilet or get undressed. Ignore what the nasty doctor said. And ignore what family members have wickedly led them to believe. Not only does this undermine parents, it also heaps a lot of pressure on to the shoulders of five-year-olds. Most find it difficult enough to decide what to have for breakfast. Their brains are full of Minecraft, superheroes or Friendship Fairies. They worry about dinosaurs coming back to life and unicorns not being real. It is hard to see how telling children this age that one of the few things they know for certain isn’t certain after all can do anything other than cause distress.

But the problematising continues. ‘People might think they know your gender because of the clothes you wear or the things you like to do’, children will be told. But, of course, these people are wrong: ‘You are a unique person, you know who you are.’ This confuses two separate issues – gender stereotypes and actually being a boy or a girl. It also seriously underestimates children. The youngest children distinguish between boy stuff and girl stuff; they know whether they are a boy or a girl and which clothes and toys they are supposed to like. But while some children might police gender stereotypes with enthusiasm, others do not. They know, better than the Scottish government it seems, that you can play football and still be a girl or dress up as a princess and still be a boy. Even those keen to enforce gender conformity at age five may well rebel by the time they are 15. And so what if they don’t? If a boy enjoys being a boy and wants to grow up into a man, is that really so bad?

August 2, 2018

The role of the gatekeepers for Trans youth

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

This is a debate that has been bullrushed by the sudden political success of Trans activists, but there are genuine medical and ethical issues that need to be taken into account:

I’m a transsexual woman in my thirties who transitioned in my early twenties, and I wish I could have done so earlier. Even so, I am wary of today’s Brave New World of transgender activism in which important safeguards of transition are under attack and any counter opinion, even if made by a trans woman such as myself, are labelled as an attack on trans rights. At first it was easier for me to not ruffle the trans activists’ feathers, but my conscience got the better of me, and now I am continuing to speak up in order to help those who deserve better in their own journey of transition.

Through talking to other trans people in my life, it has become apparent to me that transition surgeries are an answer but not the answer to the long-term health and well-being of gender dysphoria patients. Unfortunately, many trans people get so fixated on surgery for so long, that they may forget that there is more to life and transitioning than just surgery and other medical intervention. The fixation is often driven by the fantasy that surgery, and transition in general, will transform them into a new person, and that all the problems in life will go away.

I haven’t known a lot of trans people over the years, but of the few that I know, there did seem to be a powerful belief that if they could fix just this one thing — their gender — then their lives would be perfect forever. In at least two cases, having transitioned, they then discovered that they were just as miserable as they had been before despite having changed to their preferred gender. All the surgery in the world won’t fix mental problems, and the disappointment and anger seemed to be that much greater when the situation finally came home. I’m not claiming this is in any way universal, but of the small number of trans people I’ve known, it was true for half of them.

During my gender transition, I didn’t fixate on surgery even though I was highly dysphoric back then. I’ve had my ups and downs, but I’ve always done okay. To be honest, thinking about sex and gender a lot is unhealthy, particularly during high-conflict public debates on what it means to be transgender and what rights we have to get the help we need. As the debate grows more divisive, the media valorization and glamorization of trans people, especially trans children, is not helping but rather, it is pulling us away from the honest conversations we need to have.

Forty-one percent of transgender people [PDF] have experienced suicidal ideation or self-harm, though this statistic does not indicate to what extent the attempts were before or after transition, or at what stage of transition. Nevertheless, studies have shown high rates of suicide among (alleged) trans people post-medical transition. Why is this the case and can the quality of transition be a factor?

As I understand it, the overall success rate of transgender surgery is higher the earlier it is conducted … within reason. This is where the ethical issues are the most pressing:

The move away from the medical gatekeeping model for treating gender dysphoria is not only unfortunate, it is irresponsible. Over the past few decades, the strictness of the standards of healthcare used to determine suitability for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and related surgeries have been relaxed significantly. In 2008, the Endocrine Society endorsed puberty blockers as a treatment for trans teenagers. Then in 2011, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) issued new Standards of Care internationally for treating such patients via puberty suppression, while formalizing the ‘informed consent’ model. But it didn’t end there.

Last month here in Australia, new guidelines published in the Medical Journal of Australia gave the green light for potentially more trans children to go on HRT as young as 13, defying international guidelines. Specifically, “decisions about affirming a young person’s gender identity should be driven primarily by the child or adolescent, in conjunction with their family and health care providers.” While this experiment was hailed as world-leading, the minimum legal age for smoking, drinking and voting in Australia remains at 18, and it’s still 16 for consensual sex. So in Australia, a 15-year-old teen cannot consent to sexual activity but they can consent to life-altering medical treatments that they almost certainly cannot fully grasp at that age.

June 14, 2018

QotD: The gender-neutral child

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

The media is full of excited stories heralding the revolution in children’s play. This recent headline in Time is typical: “The Next Generation of Kids Will Play With Gender Neutral Toys.” But children are not gender-neutral, and they famously resist efforts to make them so. If 40 percent of millennials think otherwise, that’s probably because they haven’t had kids yet.

Parents and teachers should certainly expose their kids to a wide range of toys and play, and teach them to accept kids who enjoy gender non-conforming toys. When toy companies rigidly classify certain toys as girl-only or boy-only, that may create a stigma against those who cross the line. Overt signage is superfluous anyway. So let’s hope other retailers follow Target’s example.

But the crusade promoted by the White House is not about tolerance for non-conformers. Its goal is to re-socialize the majority of gender-typical children toward gender neutrality. Jarret is right that it won’t be easy. With few exceptions, children are powerfully drawn to sex-stereotyped play.

Parents who read too much Judith Butler in college and view gender as fluid and malleable may be startled by the counterevidence their three-year-olds provide. The usually eloquent Julia Turner, editor of Slate, became tongue-tied a few weeks ago when she tried to explain a mysterious development at home: Her little twin sons were obsessed with wheeled objects — particularly cement mixers. Parenthood, she confessed, had “complicated” her worldview. Turner kept affirming her loyalty to the gender-is-a-social-construct school. But then, referring to her sons’ insistent boyishness, she uttered four heretical words: “There’s a there there…”

Indeed there is. And it takes a liberal arts degree not to see it. A 2012 cross-cultural study on sex differences confirmed what most of us see: despite some exceptions, females tend to be more sensitive, esthetic, sentimental, intuitive, and tender-minded, while males tend to be more utilitarian, objective, unsentimental, and tough-minded.

The female penchant for nurturing play and the male propensity for rough-and-tumble hold cross-culturally and even cross-species. Among our close relatives such as rhesus and vervet monkeys, researchers have found that females play with dolls far more than do their brothers, who prefer balls and toy cars. It seems unlikely the monkeys are acting out a culturally manufactured gender binary. Something else is going on. Most scientists attribute typical male/female differences to some yet-to-be understood combination of biology and culture.

Christina Hoff Sommers, “Those Who Push For Toy Neutrality Don’t Get Little Girls At All”, The Federalist, 2016-09-11.

May 25, 2018

Progressives: “Gender is a social construct!” Science: “Wait just a second there…”

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

Toby Young wonders why a woman can’t be more like a man:

A fascinating paper about sex differences in the human brain was published last week in the scientific journal Cerebral Cortex. It’s the largest single-sample study of structural and functional sex differences in the human brain ever undertaken, involving over 5,000 participants (2,466 male and 2,750 female). The study has been attracting attention for more than a year (see this preview in Science, for instance), but only now has it been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

For those who believe that gender is a social construct, and there are no differences between men and women’s brains, this paper is something of a reality check. The team of researchers from Edinburgh University, led by Stuart Ritchie, author of Intelligence: All That Matters, found that men’s brains are generally larger in volume and surface area, while women’s brains, on average, have thicker cortices. ‘The differences were substantial: in some cases, such as total brain volume, more than a standard deviation,’ they write. This is not a new finding – it has been known for some time that the total volume of men’s brains is, in general, larger than that of women’s, even when adjusted for men’s larger average body size – but all the studies before now have involved much smaller sample sizes.

Does this paper have any implications when it comes to men and women’s intellectual abilities? The answer is yes, but they’re not clear cut.

February 25, 2018

Masculinity and homicidal violence (aka “Not all men…”)

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

In Quillette, William Buckner looks at the violence inherent in the (biological) system. “Help, help, we’re being repressed!”

Understanding patterns of lethal violence among humans requires understanding some important sex differences between males and females. Globally, men are 95 percent of homicide offenders and 79 percent of victims. Sex differences in lethal violence tend to be remarkably consistent, on every continent, across every type of society, from hunter-gatherers to large-scale nation states. In their 2013 study on lethal violence among hunter-gatherers, Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg’s data showed that males committed about 96 percent of homicides and were victims 84 percent of the time. In her study on violence in non-state societies, criminologist Amy Nivette shows that, across a number of small-scale pastoralist and agriculturalist societies, males make up 91-98 percent of killers. To illustrate the consistency of this relationship even further: we see the same pattern among chimpanzees, where males make up 92 percent of killers and 73 percent of victims.

To be sure, there is some cross-cultural variation. While I can find no well-studied population where women are known to commit more lethal violence than men, there are some societies where women make up an equal number, or even the majority, of homicide victims. These societies generally seem to have low rates of homicide overall, as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime mentions in their 2013 study on global homicide:

    Available data suggest that in countries with very low (and decreasing) homicide rates (less than 1 per 100,000 population), female victims constitute an increasing share of total victims and, in some of those countries, the share of male and female victims appears to be reaching parity.

Hong Kong, with a low homicide rate overall, has a comparatively smaller sex difference in homicide offending, and women make up a majority of homicide victims at 52 percent. Yet even in Hong Kong, males commit 78 percent of reported homicides. The world over, the majority of homicide offenders and victims tend to be reproductive-age males, between their late teens and early 40s.

To understand why this pattern is so consistent across a wide variety of culturally and geographically diverse societies, we need to start by looking at sex differences in reproductive biology.

[…]

Predictably, among humans, males engage in more direct, violent competition for mates than females do, and females provide more caregiving than males do. However, humans are unique in that some male participation in caregiving is ubiquitous across cultures. Human infants are particularly helpless during early development, requiring extensive provisioning and caregiving. Human males face the same tradeoff between securing mating opportunities and providing parental care that males of other species face, and the extent to which males utilize either of these strategies can vary significantly due to social and ecological factors.

Noting these sex differences in reproductive biology and parental investment is important because they help explain why males tend to engage in more violence than females. Aggressively engaging in violent conflict is more likely to reduce a female’s fitness, as it may bring unnecessary danger to her offspring, or cause an injury that may prevent her from reproducing in the future. For a male, however, violent conflict can potentially increase his reproductive success through increases in status, or by aggressively monopolizing access to key resources. Among the Yanomami of the Amazon, and the Nyangatom of East Africa, for example, males who participate in more violence and warfare have increased reproductive success. Even in the contemporary United States, there is evidence that more violent males have more sexual partners.

February 18, 2018

“The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all”

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Matt Ridley on the rising tide of neo-Victorian prudery in western society:

Is it so different here or are we slipping down the same slope? Pre-Raphaelite paintings that show the top halves of female nudes are temporarily removed from an art gallery’s walls; young girls are forced to wear headscarves in school; darts players and racing drivers may not be accompanied by women in short skirts; women are treated differently from men at universities, as if they were the weaker sex, and saved from seeing upsetting paragraphs in novels; sex is negotiated in advance with the help of chaperones. We have been here before.

In Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s novel of 1928, she portrayed the transition from the 18th century to the Victorian period thus: “Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practised on both sides.”

How we laughed at such absurdity in my youth. But even for making the point that some of the new feminism seems “retrograde” in promoting the view that women are fragile, the American academic Katie Roiphe suffered a vicious campaign to have her article in Harper’s magazine banned before publication. “I find the Stalinist tenor of this conversation shocking,” she told The Sunday Times. “The basic assumption of freedom of speech is imperilled in our culture right now.”

The sin of blasphemy is back. There are things you simply cannot say about Islam and increasingly about Christianity, about climate change, about gender, to mention a few from a very long and growing list, without being accused of, and possibly prosecuted for, “hate speech”. Is it hate speech to say that Muhammad “delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse”? That was Voltaire, one of my heroes. You may disagree with him but you should, in accordance with his principle, defend his right to say it. In demanding tolerance of minorities, many younger people seem to be remarkably intolerant.

There is an odd contradiction between the declared wish to live and let live — “diversity!”, “don’t judge!” — and the actual behaviour, which is ruthlessly and priggishly judgmental. They never stop drafting acts of uniformity, always in the name of the collective against the individual. The minority of one is the most oppressed minority of all.

November 27, 2017

QotD: The flight from maleness

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

I note there are some three times as many male-to-female transgenders as there are female-to-male [PDF]. So all that “gender fluidity” is a vast net transfer from the male brutalizer sector to the female victim sector. At some point it would seem likely to become a flood. After all, it’s not so difficult to imagine, a fake gang-rape story or three down the line, elite universities requiring gender reassignment as a condition of continued male admission. In some sense, the swollen ranks of the transgendered seem to have intuited that the jig is up for guys. Might as well check out of the guy business entirely. I’m thinking of pitching Marvel Comics a new superhero group featuring a transwoman, an ambigender, a pangender, an intergender, a bigender and a 2-spirited called Ex-Men.

Mark Steyn, “Emasculated and Enkindled”, Steyn Online, 2014-12-12.

August 7, 2017

Dutee Chand and the international sporting dilemma

Filed under: India, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Dutee Chand is a woman who competes for India in track and field events. Dutee Chand has elevated levels of testosterone in her body … this creates a problem for those who determine who is allowed to compete as a woman in international sporting events:

Dutee Chand won the bronze medal in 22nd Asian Athletics Championships in Bhubaneswar, 8 July 2017. (via Wikimedia)

For the past two years, Dutee Chand could be herself.

She could run and train and even compete in the Rio Olympics. She didn’t have to constantly remind people that, yes, of course, she is a woman and that, yes, of course, she qualifies to compete with other women despite her naturally high level of testosterone.

She didn’t have to feel pressure to change her body so it conformed to rules or contemplate quitting her sport — pressure placed on her after doctors subjected her to gender testing in 2013, humiliating her by doing so, when she was only 17.

For two years, she could just be Dutee Chand. That’s because, two years ago last month, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is the supreme court for global sports, temporarily suspended an international track and field rule that had barred her from competing as a woman.

Chand, a sprinter from India, and women like her were excluded because their bodies produced a high amount of testosterone. It was often so high it was classified as being within the male range, a situation the authorities considered an unfair advantage. The only way these women could compete, track and field officials ruled, was if they took hormone-suppressing drugs or had surgery to limit the amount of testosterone their bodies produced.

The problem for international sporting bodies is that they’re still stuck in the binary — only two genders — model of competition, which leaves them unable to cope with situations like this. They can either prevent athletes like Dutee Chand from competing against other women or accept that the old standards no longer apply. Pushed to the limit, this means there can no longer be any kind of binary division of sporting activities into the old “male” and “female” categories … which will, in all likelihood, be devastating to women hoping to compete internationally, nationally, or even regionally. There’s no easy answer, and any Solomonic decision is going to make the situation worse, not better.

At its core, the sports world — rigidly separating men and women — will perpetually struggle to adapt to increasingly nuanced gender distinctions. In June, the District of Columbia became the first jurisdiction in the United States to offer an “X” gender, signifying a neutral gender, on its driver’s licenses. In March, a transgender New Zealand woman crushed her competition in her first international weight-lifting meet, and a transgender boy won a Texas state championship in girls’ wrestling.

Not every governing body is equipped to rule on these kind of eligibility questions. Not every athlete fits into this box, or that one.

To Chand, though, the issue of hyperandrogenism in sports is clear cut. She grew up as a girl. At 21, she is a proud young woman. She wants to race as one.

On Saturday, she did. But in the coming months, the Court of Arbitration for Sport will decide whether letting her continue to do so is fair.

What if it gets it wrong?

June 3, 2017

QotD: Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual

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

Fascinating. This NYT article bears out a suspicion I’ve held for a long time about the plasticity of sexual orientation. The crude one-sentence summary is that, if you go by physiological arousal reactions, male bisexuality doesn’t exist, while female bisexuality is ubiquitous.

I’ve spent most of my social time for the last thirty years around science fiction fans, neopagans, and polyamorists — three overlapping groups of people not exactly noted for either sexual inhibitions or reluctance to explore sexual roles that don’t fit the neat typologies of the mainstream culture. And there are a couple of things it’s hard not to notice about them:

First, a huge majority of the women in these cultures are bisexual. To the point where I just assume any female I meet in these contexts is bi. This reality is only slightly obscured by the fact that many of these women describe themselves and are socially viewed by others as ‘straight’, even as they engage in sexual play with each other during group scenes with every evidence of enjoyment. In fact, in these cultures the operational definition of ‘straight female’ seems to be one who has recreational but not relational/romantic sex with other women.

Second, this pattern is absolutely not mirrored in their male peers. Even in these uninhibited subcultures, homoerotic behavior involving self-described ‘straight’ men is rare and surprising. Such homeoeroticism as does go on is almost all self-describedly gay men fucking other self-describedly gay men; bisexuality in men, while an accepted and un-tabooed orientation, is actually less common than gayness and not considered quite normal by anybody. The contrast with everybody’s matter-of-fact acceptance of female bisexual behavior is extreme.

It is also an observable fact that many women in these cultures change either their sexual orientation or their sexual presentation over time, but that this is seldom true of men. That is, a woman may move from being sexually involved mostly with other women to being mostly involved with men, and back, several times during her adolescent and adult lifetime; nobody considers this surprising and it doesn’t involve much of a change in either self-image or social identity. Not so for men in these cultures; they tend to start out as straight or gay and stay that way, and on the unusual occasions that this changes it tends to involve a significant break in both self-image and social identity.

Eric S. Raymond, “Gayness is hard, lesbianism soft”, Armed and Dangerous, 2005-07-06.

May 24, 2017

“I don’t know if Lou would be cracking up about this or crying because it’s just too stupid”

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

Reactions to the University of Guelph student association’s characterizing Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” as transphobic:

Friends of the late Lou Reed responded on Saturday with disbelief to a claim by a Canadian student body that the singer’s 1972 hit Walk on the Wild Side contains transphobic lyrics.

“I don’t know if Lou would be cracking up about this or crying because it’s just too stupid,” the singer’s longtime producer, Hal Willner, told the Guardian. “The song was a love song to all the people he knew and to New York City by a man who supported the community and the city his whole life.”

The Guelph Central Student Association, a group at the University of Guelph in Ontario, apologised for including the song on a playlist at a campus event.

In an apology published to Facebook and subsequently removed, the group said: “We now know the lyrics to this song are hurtful to our friends in the trans community and we’d like to unreservedly apologize for this error in judgement.”

The lyrics in question focus on Reed’s friends from Andy Warhol’s Factory, among them transgender “superstars” Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling.

“Holly came from Miami, FLA,” Reed sings. “Hitchhiked her way across the USA/ Plucked her eyebrows on the way/ Shaved her legs and then he was a she/ She says, ‘Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side.’”

Uploaded on 19 Nov 2009

***Rest in Peace to Holly [Woodlawn] who came from Miami, F-L-A, and who Lou first mentions in the opening lines of the song***

**Congratulations (a long overdue one at that) to the Newest Member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: Lou Reed!**

*So sad to hear about Lou’s passing today at the age of 71. There will never be another one like you Lou. A true original and pioneer. Like The Who said in their Facebook status: “Walk On the Peaceful Side”*

“Walk On The Wild Side” from Lou Reed’s 1972 second solo album, Transformer, (after leaving the Velvet Underground) did not chart in the top 10 on Billboard. Some of the songs that year that did chart in the top 10 were: Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally),” Mac Davis “Don’t Get Hooked On Me,” and Wayne Newton “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast.” I’d say “Walk On The Wild Side” is just as memorable, if not more so than those ones. My favorite part of the song is probably the saxophone solo at the end 3:44.

To say the least, this song was highly controversial when it came out considering it is about transvestites who come to NYC for prostitution. They would say to their potential customers, “Take a walk on the wild side!” Lou Reed once said about the song: “I always thought it would be fun to introduce people to characters they maybe hadn’t met before, or hadn’t wanted to meet.” What an amazing storyteller and lyrical genius Lou Reed was.

Try to find another song from this time period where the artist talks so openly about subjects such as oral sex, transvestites, and drug use, there weren’t very many others. He was writing about things in a style that, frankly, almost no other artist at that time would even consider writing or singing about. Lou was well before his time, and has inspired countless artists from all genres. What a classic, classic song! Still no song like it to this day. What artist other than Lou could get away with lyrics like: “And the colored girls go doo do doo, doo do doo, doo do doo”?! The lyrics are way too clever and fun not to post in the description so here they are:

Lyrics:

Holly came from Miami, F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She says, ‘Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side’
He said, ‘Hey honey, take a walk on the wild side’

Candy came from out on the island
In the backroom she was everybody’s darlin’
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
She says, ‘Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side’
He said, ‘Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side’

And the colored girls go
Doo do doo, doo do doo, doo do doo

Little Joe never once gave it away
Everybody had to pay and pay
A hustle here and a hustle there
New York City’s the place where they said
‘Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side’
I said, ‘Hey Joe, take a walk on the wild side’

Sugar plum fairy came and hit the streets
Lookin’ for soul food and a place to eat
Went to the Apollo, you should’ve seen ’em go go go
They said, ‘Hey sugar, take a walk on the wild side’
I said, ‘Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side’
Alright, huh

Jackie is just speeding away
Thought she was James Dean for a day
Then I guess she had to crash
Valium would have helped that bash
She said, ‘Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side’
I said, ‘Hey honey, take a walk on the wild side’

And the colored girls say
Doo do doo, doo do doo, doo do doo

May 21, 2017

“The conceptual penis as a social construct”

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

Getting a paper published is one of the regular measurements of academic life — usually expressed as “publish or perish” — so getting your latest work into print is a high priority for almost all academics. Some fields have rather … lower … standards for publishing than others. Peter Boghossian, Ed.D. (aka Peter Boyle, ED.D.) and James Lindsay, Ph.D. (aka Jamie Lindsay, Ph.D.) submitted a paper written in imitation of post-structuralist discursive gender theory and got it published in a peer-reviewed journal:

    The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.

That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.

This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, our should-never-have-been-published paper was published in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences. (In case the PDF is removed, we’ve archived it.)

Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.

This already damning characterization of our hoax understates our paper’s lack of fitness for academic publication by orders of magnitude. We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.

H/T to Amy Alkon for the link.

May 11, 2017

The transactional nature of “identity”

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

Eric S. Raymond on the rising chatter about “identity”:

These criticisms imply a theory of “identity” that is actually coherent and useful. Here it is:

Your “identity” is a set of predictive claims you assert about yourself, mostly (though not entirely) about what kinds of transactions other people can expect to engage in with you.

As an example of an exception to “mostly”, the claim “I am white” implies that I sunburn easily. But usually, an “identity” claim implies the ability and willingness to meet behavioral expectations held by other people. For example, if I describe my “identity” as “male, American, computer programmer, libertarian” I am in effect making an offer that others can expect me to need to shave daily, salute the Stars and Stripes, sling code, and argue for the Non-Aggression Principle as an ethical fundamental.

Thus, identity claims can be false (not cashed out in observed behavior) or fraudulent (intended to deceive). You don’t get to choose your identity; you get to make an offer and it’s up to others whether or not to accept.

[…]

I can anticipate several objections to this transactional account of identity. One is that is cruel and illiberal to reject an offer of “I claim identity X” if the person claiming feels that identity strongly enough. This is essentially the position of those journalists from The Hill.

To which I can only reply: you can feel an identity as a programmer as strongly as you want, but if you can’t either already sling code or are visibly working hard on repairing that deficiency, you simply don’t make the nut. Cruelty doesn’t enter into this; if I assent to your claim I assist your self-deceit, and if I repeat it I assist you in misleading or defrauding others.

It is pretty easy to see how this same analysis applies to “misgendering” people with the “wrong” pronouns. People who use the term “misgender” generally follow up with claims about the subject’s autonomy and feelings. Which is well enough, but such considerations do not justify being complicit in the deceit of others any more than they do with respect to “I am a programmer”.

A related objection is that I have stolen the concept of “identity” by transactionalizing it. That is, true “identity” is necessarily grounded not in public performance but private feelings – you are what you feel, and it’s somehow the responsibility of the rest of the world to keep up.

But…if I’m a delusional psychotic who feels I’m Napoleon, is it the world’s responsibility to keep up? If I, an overweight clumsy shortish white guy, feel that I’m a tall agile black guy under the skin, are you obligated to choose me to play basketball? Or, instead, are you justified in predicting that I can’t jump?

You can’t base “identity” on a person’s private self-beliefs and expect sane behavior to emerge any more than you can invite everyone to speak private languages and expect communication to happen.

February 24, 2017

QotD: Western culture is in decline

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Paglia: At first, I was very excited about the ethnic identity movement, because I feel very Italian-American and have always been in revolt against the WASP style that dominated academe — Leslie Fiedler himself was a victim of this, Harold Bloom was — there weren’t any Jews hired in the Yale English department in the mid-1950s, there were quotas on Jewish students admitted to Harvard, all things like that. But over time, what’s happened, I think, is that gender identity has become really almost fascist. It’s to me a very shrunk and miniaturized way of perceiving your position in the world and in the universe.

There [comes] a time when these fine gradations of gender identity — I’m a male trans doing this, etc. — this is a symbol of decadence, I’m sorry. Sexual Personae talks about this: That was in fact the inspiration for it, was that my overview of history and my noticing that in late phases, you all of a sudden get a proliferation of homosexuality, of sadomasochism, or gendered games, impersonations and masks, and so on. I think we’re in a really kind of late phase of culture.

reason: So that the proliferation of cultural identities, the proliferation of all sorts of possibilities is actually a sign that we’re…

Paglia: On the verge of collapse? Yes! Western culture is in decline. There’s absolutely no doubt about it, in my view, looking at the history of Egypt, of Babylon, of Byzantium, and so on. And so what’s happening is everyone’s so busy-busy-busy with themselves, with this narcissistic sense of who they are in terms of sexual orientation or gender, and this intense gender consciousness, woman consciousness at the same time, and meanwhile…

reason: Is that also racial or ethnic consciousness as well?

Paglia: Right now, to me, the real obsessions have to do with gender orientation. Although I think there’s been this flare-up [regarding race]. I voted for Obama, but I’ve been disappointed. I think we had hoped that he would inaugurate a period of racial harmony, and I think the situation has actually become even worse over recent years. It seems to be overt inflammatory actions by the administration to pit the races against each other, so I think there’s a lot of damage that needs to be healed.

But I think most of the problems as I perceive them in my students and so on, is that there’s this new obsession with where you are on this wide gender spectrum. That view of gender seems to me to be unrealistic because it’s so divorced from any biological referent. I do believe in biology, and I say in the first paragraph of Sexual Personae that sexuality is an intricate intersection of nature and culture. But what’s happened now is that the way the universities are teaching, it’s nothing but culture, and nothing’s from biology. It’s madness! It’s a form of madness, because women who want to marry and have children are going to have to encounter their own hormonal realities at a certain point.

Camille Paglia, “Everything’s Awesome and Camille Paglia Is Unhappy!”, Reason, 2015-05-30.

December 31, 2016

QotD: Political Correctness and “Big Gay”

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Well, I can’t speak for the massed ranks of conservatives, but I’m not the least “apoplectic with rage at the idea of a boy in a dress”. In what passed for a talent show in my last year at high school, me and the lads climbed into the fishnets and mini-skirts to do a truly terrible pop song and, as I generally do even in unpromising circumstances, I gave it my best. Afterwards, the ladies in attendance agreed that my legs were better than any of theirs. And they’re still pretty good, as you can see if you pre-order the Mann vs Steyn 2016 nude calendar.

Nor do I think it fair to take refuge in the old saw that conservatives are “terrified of their own sexuality”. Mine doesn’t scare me in the least, although it’s sent a date or two screaming for the exits. What “terrified” me and others about Caitlyn and her débutante’s balls was the ruthlessly enforced celebratory tone. When the Queen marks her Diamond Jubilee or the Duchess of Cambridge has a baby, you’re allowed to roll your eyes and say “God, aren’t you sick of these bloody royal parasites?” or “Who cares about one more sponger in the palace?” Even “state” media like the BBC and CBC accept that there are a wide range of views on the head of state. But if you watched the coverage of Caitlyn on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN et al you would have had no idea that there are people out there for whom this was not cause for joyous celebration. There was something not “terrifying” — not yet — but coercive and authoritarian in the uniformity of the mandatory jubilation. Even Fox News seemed to intuit that this was something that they had no choice but to cover in a life-affirming way.

I found that disturbing — because, at a stroke, everyone who matters from the Obamas to Hollywood seemed to have decided that this is one more area of discussion it’s safe to shut down, permanently. And there’s way too much of that. Look at it from your average imam’s point of view: Mike Huckabee is persona non grata because Big Gay didn’t like his dissing of Caitlyn, but when the Prophet Mo (PBUH) gets dissed Muslims are told tough, you gotta suck it up.

Mark Steyn, “The Moronization of the Republic”, SteynOnline, 2015-06-18.

December 3, 2016

QotD: Gender and transgender

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

The Oxford English Dictionary defines transgender as ‘[d]enoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex’. It is a relatively new term. According to equality-law professor and trans activist Stephen Whittle, the term ‘transvestite’ was first used in 1910 by the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who would later found the Berlin Institute where the very first sex-change operations took place. ‘Transsexual’ was not coined until 1949; ‘transgender’ not until 1971; and ‘trans’, which is a very British term, not until 1996.

The first reported sex-change operation may have taken place at Hirschfeld’s Berlin Institute in 1931, but the procedure only became widely known after American Christine (George) Jorgensen travelled to Denmark in 1952 to undergo sex-change surgery. In 1954, following Jorgensen’s transition, US endocrinologist Harry Benjamin began using the term ‘transsexualism’ to describe a unique condition of sex and gender role disorientation.

Throughout the 1960s, transsexualism, and the clinical response to it, remained a contentious issue. Medical professionals in the US were largely opposed to the idea of offering sex-change surgery. A 1965 survey showed that just three per cent of US surgeons would take seriously a request for a sex-change operation. And yet, by the early 1980s, thousands of sex-change operations had taken place.

The Hopkins Hospital, affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, became the most prominent institution to offer transsexual surgery during the 1970s. Under the guidance of psychologist John Money, psychiatrist Eugene Meyer and plastic surgeon Milton Edgerton, the Hopkins Hospital utilised the ‘single theme’ method for diagnosing transsexuals. This involved determining whether or not the patient had an intense conviction to be the other sex.

But, as the rate of referrals increased, by the late-1970s, some of the negative after-effects of sex-change surgery became apparent. These included: medical complications, demands for reverse surgery and suicide attempts. Moreover, it was discovered that, due to the self-diagnostic nature of the ‘single theme’ method for determining treatment, some patients had learned what kinds of things they needed to say in order to receive surgery.

Hopkins Hospital eventually stopped performing the operations in 1979, after Jon Meyer, the chair of the sexual behaviours unit, conducted a study comparing 29 patients who had the surgery and 21 who didn’t, and concluded that those who had the surgery were no more adjusted to society than those who did not have the surgery. As Meyer told the New York Times in 1979: ‘My personal feeling is that surgery is not proper treatment for a psychiatric disorder, and it’s clear to me that these patients have severe psychological problems that don’t go away following surgery.’

While physicians and commentators argued over whether or not medical intervention benefited the patient, for some of those who chose to undergo treatment, it was a lifeline.

Naomi Firsht, “The Rise of Transgender: In the space of a century, transgenderism has become a mainstream concern”, Spiked, 2016-10-28.

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