Quotulatiousness

March 4, 2024

“That’s the neoracist Google that Sundar Pichai has deliberately created”

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

The uproar over Google’s explicitly racist Gemini AI tool illustrates just how deeply DEI ideology has penetrated the core high-tech firms in the United States. The racism wasn’t accidental: it’s very carefully nurtured and targetted:

Gemini’s result when Cynical Publius asked it to “create images of Henry Ford”.

… imagine the kind of Google employee who can rise through the purged, mono-cultural woke ranks to run Gemini. Once upon a time, you might have thought of a pale-faced geek tapping diligently into a screen for months on end. But at woke Google, you get the senior director of product for Gemini Experiences, Jack Krawczyk. A sample of his tweets:

  • “White privilege is fucking real. Don’t be an asshole and act guilty about it — do your part in recognizing bias at all levels egregious.”
  • “This is America where racism is the #1 value for our populace seeks to uphold above all others.”

And the best thing about Biden’s inauguration speech, Krawczyk believed, was “acknowledging systemic racism”. He’s deep, deep, deep in the DEI cult, surrounded solely by people deep, deep, deep in the DEI cult.

That’s the neoracist Google that Sundar Pichai has deliberately created. From a leaked 2016 meeting he presided over, in the wake of Trump’s election victory, a Google staffer urged the entire staff to mobilize against white supremacy: “Speaking to white men, there’s an opportunity for you right now to understand your privilege [and] go through the bias-busting training, read about privilege, read about the real history of oppression in our country”. Every executive on stage — the CEO, CFO, two VPs, and the two co-founders — applauded the employee. The founder of Google’s “AI Responsibility” Initiative, Jen Gennai, said in a keynote address:

    It’s a myth that you’re not unfair if you treat everyone the same. There are groups that have been marginalized and excluded because of historic systems and structures that were intentionally designed to favor one group over another. So you need to account for that and mitigate against it.

This is pure CRT — blatant discrimination on the basis of race and sex — as corporate policy. Six years ago I pointed out that we all live on campus now. Now Google wants us all to live on their campus.

Gemini, like the Ivy League, is centered on hatred of “whiteness” and of Western civilization. Ask Gemini to provide an image of a “famous physicist of the 17th century“, it will give you an Indian woman, a black man, an Arab man, and a white chick with a woke dye job. Ask it to generate images of Singaporean women, and you get four Asian women; but ask for 12 English men, and the rules suddenly change: “I’m still unable to generate images that specify gender and ethnicity. This is a policy decision to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and potentially generating harmful or offensive content.” So it can lie now too — as long as it’s in the defense of racist double standards.

At some level, of course, the revelations of the past week have been hilarious. It would be hard to parody portraying a Founding Father as Asian, the Pope as female, or a Nazi soldier as black. But we’d be mistaken if we think this kind of funny historical inaccuracy is the core problem here. That’s what Pichai wants us to think. But the bias of men like him goes far deeper. For years now, Google has subtly rigged searches of the web to advance the leftism its woke staffers have adopted as an alternative to religion. It’s an invisible way to guide and direct public opinion and information — without having to make an argument or persuade people with evidence. The “emotional labor” that Gemini will save is exponential!

Because critical theory denies the existence of a reasoned individual, independent of his or her race, sex, or alleged power, it doesn’t deploy open reasoned arguments. That would pay liberalism too much respect. It’s why they won’t debate their opponents; because they believe debate is always rigged by power differentials in a white supremacist system. That’s why their preferred methods of advance are either pure power politics — canceling dissenters, demonizing heretics, firing anyone with a different view, shutting down the speech of others — or linguistic deception and manipulation.

Critical theorists, and their useful idiots, deconstruct the very basic words we use to communicate. Think of the word “racist” — how they quietly changed its meaning, deployed it against their opponents willy nilly, and then, when they met a challenge, told their opponents to “go read a book”. They do not bother arguing that the trans experience and the gay experience are exactly the same, because that would require some major intellectual labor; they just refuse ever to separate them as a single part of an “LGBTQIA+” identity, and guilt-trip journalists to copy them.

Woke activists cannot point to actual evidence that race relations in America have never improved in 400 years; so they just resurrect the term “white supremacy” to apply to the US in 2024. They cannot plausibly explain why someone with a vagina and female chromosomes who takes testosterone is exactly the same as a biological male, so they simply scream: “TRANS MEN ARE MEN”.

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 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 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?

January 1, 2024

QotD: The Panto

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

One of the worst things my parents ever did was force me to go to the panto. It was Angela’s Ashes levels of misery memoir fodder.

What made it worse was that I was about 14; I’d almost managed to get through childhood without experiencing this strange British tradition and then, just at the age when you’re most vulnerable to cringe, I got dragged in. Anyway, I think I’m over it now.

Pantomime is one of those very British things that makes me feel a strange sense of alienation from my countrymen, like celebrating the NHS or twee. I’m glad that other people enjoy it, and that it brings a lot of work to actors and to theatres during the Christmas period. I just personally don’t get it.

For those who don’t know about the ins and outs of our island culture, panto is a sort of farcical theatre featuring lots of sexual innuendo and contemporary pop culture references; I think when I watched it there must have been one or two ex-Neighbours stars because they all finished by singing the theme tune.

A key part of this British institution is drag, with men playing the roles of Widow Twankey and the Ugly Sisters. Drag is quite an established tradition in England, such a part of popular entertainment that there is even a photograph of British soldiers in dresses fighting in the Second World War.

Pantomime is thought to have evolved from the medieval Feast of Fools, a day of the year (around the Christmas/New Year period) when social norms would be inverted; laymen would be elected bishops, lords would serve their retainers drinks, and men and women would even swap roles. Social norms could be temporarily broken, which continues today in the often risqué humour incongruously aimed at family audiences (hilariously portrayed in the Les Dennis episode of Extras.)

This kind of drag is obviously humourous, the aim being for the men to look as ridiculous as possible; think of the ungainly Bernard Bresslaw in Carry on Doctor. It is very different to the later pop culture gender fluidity pioneered by David Bowie in which males might be presented as beautifully feminine, even alluring; that was aimed at challenging and disturbing the audience, while panto is aimed at amusing and reassuring. Indeed, the whole point of spending a day inverting social norms is that, by doing so, you are implicitly accepting and defending those social norms.

This form of drag is obviously quite different to the more modern drag queen, a form of entertainment that can be far more explicit and which has in the 21st century become yet another one-of-those-talking-points, chiefly because people seem so keen on letting children watch it.

Ed West, “The last conservative moral panic”, Wrong Side of History, 2023-02-08.

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 4, 2023

QotD: The “ivory gulag”

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

Looking at the cat ladies of both sexes and all 57 genders who ruined Trashcanistan, it seems obvious that they skipped sexual maturity – they jumped straight from “tween-ager” to “menopausal”. Even the young women in the “Social Justice” movement look – and, crucially, act – like they’re pushing fifty, while the young “men” are neotenous. Most of them are what bodybuilders call “skinny fat” – scrawny yet flabby, with no muscle tone – and the rest are morbidly obese. A crowd of college kids, again of both sexes and all however-many genders, looks like the mosh pit at the Lilith Fair. Without their exaggerated displays of secondary sex characteristics – ironic facial hair on the lads, pussy hats on the lassies – who could even tell them apart?

So, too, with their mentalities. I spent many years toiling in the groves of academe, so obviously my social life (such as it was) contained a lot of post-menopausal lesbians. No creature is more solipsistic than this. Whatever maternal instincts she once might’ve had, have curdled into general naggy truculence, and since they have all the money and free time in the world in which to indulge their narcissism, if they can’t find any actual wrongthink around they’ll simply invent some. Before the Deplorables were driven to organize themselves for gaudy, suicidal, IRA-style violence, post-Oranzhevvy Trashcanistan felt, I imagine, a lot like a college campus …

… which the few people with normal serum hormone levels who were stuck there often called “the ivory gulag”. Make of that what you will.

Severian, “Hormones, or Lack Thereof”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-20.

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 22, 2023

QotD: American universities, “sportsball”, and wealthy alumni

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

It is, or at least used to be, a truth universally acknowledged, that the Athletic Department was the only bastion of sanity left in higher “education”. I love watching Marxists squirm, so the start of football season was always my favorite time back in my professin’ days. Every year, the doofus Marxoid faculty would write their annual complaint about sportsball — “not germane to the purpose of a university”; “takes away too many resources from academics”; “toxic masculinity” and so forth — and every year, the President and Board of Trustees would tell the eggheads to go pound sand.

NOT, I hasten to add, because the Prez and the Trustees (hereafter: The Administration) were some kind of normal folks. Oh God no — quite the opposite, in fact. No open conservative has been hired to any position in academia for the past thirty, forty years; to make it into the ranks of The Administration, you have to be #woker than #woke. Rather, it was because The Administration were among the few mortals privy to the college’s balance sheet. Seriously, those things are more closely guarded than our nuclear launch codes … but The Administration sees them, and draws the only possible conclusion: Without sportsball, the whole university system is toast.

But alas for the bottom line, Intersectionality is a jealous god, and xzhey will have none before xzhem. The Administration knows — they must know, they can’t not know — that all the stuff that makes big league college football go comes from “boosters”, i.e. rich idiots with way more money than sense, and their corporations. But since The Administration is full of even dumber Marxists than the faculty — yeah yeah, I know, I didn’t think it was possible either — they’ve apparently decided to assume, in true Leftist style, that since the money has always just kinda, you know, been there, it will continue to, you know, somehow, someway, continue to be there.

I mean, what are those rich oilmen from Texas gonna do, not watch football?

Severian, “Ludicrous Speed Update: The NCAA”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-14.

November 14, 2023

The deep cognitive dissonance of “Queers for Palestine”

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

In Quillette, Armin Navabi points out the utter absurdity of a group of self-identified queers actively supporting the terror organization running the Gaza Strip, which would execute as many of them as came within its power:

Leftists in English-speaking nations tend to see Palestinians (including Hamas) as an oppressed, brown victim class, whose freedom-fighting “resistance” against their oppressive, white, US-backed colonizers in Israel is a righteous cause with which to stand in solidarity. This facile view of the long-standing conflict in the Middle East leads to confused and contradictory thinking, as seen in the incoherent slogan (and now meme) “Queers for Palestine“, emblazoned on banners brandished at anti-Israel rallies.

“Queers for Palestine” attempts to meld LGBT advocacy with Palestinian liberation, a juxtaposition that has precipitated a whirlwind of criticism and ridicule, since LGBT rights scarcely exist within the Muslim world; and the Palestinian territories are no exception. The slogan has been widely satirized. Variations like “Chickens for KFC” and “Blacks for the KKK” highlight its proponents’ basic lack of awareness of just how incompatible the values of the Western left are with those of the Islamic right they so readily champion.

The reality of the situation could not be starker. Though there is room for improvement in Israeli attitudes towards these issues, Israel is at the forefront of LGBT rights in the Middle East. In Israel, LGBT people are visible members of society with legal protections and civil rights, and are accepted by a plurality of its citizens.

Palestine is quite a different story. A 2021 report on LGBT acceptance by UCLA’s Williams Institute rated Israel 44th out of the 175 countries/territories they examined. Palestine came in at number 130, behind Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Georgetown University likewise placed Palestine 160th out of 170 countries on their women’s peace and security index, in company with most of the countries in that region. Amnesty International‘s 2020 report on human rights highlights the fact that, in Gaza, male same-sex relationships are punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment and points out the conspicuous absence of legal protections against anti-LGBT discrimination and harassment. This lack of civil rights has led hundreds of gay and bisexual Palestinians to flee to Israel to escape persecution. One such refugee, Ahmad Abu Marhia, a 25-year-old gay Palestinian man, was living under asylum in Israel when, in 2022, he was kidnapped and beheaded in the West Bank city of Hebron. His murderers uploaded footage of the killing to social media.

Every time these disparities are mentioned, critics are quick to lob accusations of “pinkwashing” — a concept invented to frame any discussion of Israel’s progressive stance on LGBT issues as a distraction from their mistreatment of Palestinians. But the fact remains that these “Queers for Palestine” could march in Pride parades in Israel if they wanted to. In Palestine, they’d be killed.

Another disconcerting element of “Queers for Palestine” is that the slogan popped up in prominent left-wing anti-Israel/pro-Palestine rallies in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s terrorist attacks, before Israel had even had the chance to respond. There is no way to interpret this slogan and the surrounding leftist fervor except as a signal of support not merely for Palestine, but specifically for Hamas, a jihadist movement with the explicit aim of eradicating the state of Israel. It’s imperative to understand that Hamas, as detailed in its 1988 Covenant, is propelled by a fundamentalist Islamist ideology whose goal is not only to eliminate all Jews but to conquer the world — just like ISIS. Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar has stated on record, “The entire planet will be under our law, there will be no more Jews or Christian traitors”.

Western support for Hamas, under the guise of support for Palestinian liberation, betrays an ignorance of the deep-seated radical Islamist ethos driving that organization, which, if left unchecked, would jeopardize the very freedoms cherished by LGBT people across the developed world. Anyone who doubts this should try being gay, bi, or trans in most of the Middle East and North Africa’s (MENA) Muslim-majority countries. Almost all these nations have laws that criminalize both homosexuality and transsexuality, some of which carry the death penalty. Human Rights Watch’s report “Everyone Wants Me Dead” succinctly encapsulates in its title alone the perilous environment faced by LGBT individuals in these regions.

November 13, 2023

QotD: The “queering-the-museum” movement

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

The so-called queering-the-museum movement, which was launched in Amsterdam in 2016, is all about contemporary identity politics. It rests on the assumption that museum curation is too “heteronormative”. By queering museum collections, activist curators claim they are including and representing gay and gender non-conforming people.

That at least is the objective. But the actual result is an exercise in narcissism. It turns the past into little more than a mirror reflecting the identitarian obsessions of the present back at us. It tells us less than nothing.

And no wonder. Understanding the past through a “queer” prism is profoundly ahistorical. In the 1500s, “queer” didn’t mean what it does today. It meant “strange, peculiar, odd or eccentric“, and had nothing to do with sexual or gender identity at all. Queer only started to be used as a term for gay men at the turn of the 20th century. And “queer studies” was not named as such until the mid-1990s. Viewing the Mary Rose collection through a “queer” lens is to obscure its historical specificity.

It’s not just the Mary Rose Museum that has succumbed to the cult of queer theory, either. Even more bizarrely, the British Library claimed during Pride month this year that the animal world can be viewed through a queer lens. And so Britain’s national centre of knowledge and learning staged events “celebrat[ing] nature in all its queerness”. In particular, it focussed on animals whose sexual behaviour breaks free from standard “gender roles”, from bisexual penguins and lesbian albatrosses to gender-bending fish. “[Researchers’] discoveries”, stated a press release, “show that animal sexuality is far more diverse than we once thought and has been limited by narrow human stereotypes of heterosexuality, monogamy and gender roles”.

This is obviously absurd. Animals do not experience or possess a sense of identity, sexuality or gender. For a fish to “bend” gender it would need to understand what gender is and how to subvert it – quite an achievement for a creature with a five-second memory recall.

Applying “queer” models to the animal world in this way does a disservice not just to our knowledge of animals, but also to our understanding of humans. Non-human animals aim to remain alive and comfortable and propagate their species. Human sex and sexual identity goes far beyond mere survival and comfort. While there may be many interesting reasons why two female penguins pair off, we can be certain that a sense of lesbian self-identity is not one of them.

As the cases of the Mary Rose Museum and the British Library show, queer methodology does not help us to understand history or nature. This is hardly a surprise. Applying a queer lens to species or epochs where it has no place simply exposes the banality of queer theory. It sees nothing but its own reflection. This narcissistic endeavour is now posing a threat to knowledge itself.

Ann Furedi, “The narcissism of queer theory”, Spiked, 2023-08-12.

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.

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