Some Texan childcare social workers are so “distraught” that a new law regulates their handling of trans kids that they say they will resign! (We’ll see if woke bureaucrats’ promises to resign are worth more than woke celebrities’ promises to quit the US if Reagan/Bush/Trump became president.)
If anything could be more where all is most in their self-revealingly woke article, it is the moment (about half-way through) where a social worker tells of their horror at the thought of having to investigate a report of a parent giving their child trans drugs. Previously any such report had instantly been marked ‘priority: none’ and the agency only ever investigated (vigorously, it would appear) any report of a parent hesitating to give their school-groomed child the woke-prescribed trans drugs.
The pipeline starts at school.
– The woke-about-everything school teaches the child that their white skin condemns them to a life of inherited racial sin – but don’t tell their parents. The school then offers a way out: pupils can escape their otherwise-ineradicable guilt by adopting a marginalised sexual identity – but don’t tell their parents.
– Instead or (usually) as well, the school can affirmatively teach the kids a lot of pornography:
To girls who are pressured into regurgitating how fantastic and progressive porn culture is, the very idea of being a “woman” becomes repulsive.
In these and other ways, a child’s un-parental-informed consent to being transitioned is obtained and puberty blockers are prescribed. The day after the kept-in-ignorance parents finally discover this is happening, the school questions the child and informs the social services of the parents’ insufficiently enthusiastic response. The social workers then ‘investigate’ – and that’s where we came in at the start of this post.
There are several things wrong with this. In the rest of this post, I’ll focus on just one.
“I do not for a moment regret the act of change. I could see no other way, and it has made me happy. In this I am one of the lucky few. There are people of many kinds who have set out on the same path, and by and large they are among the unhappiest people on the face of the earth.”
The quote is from ‘Conundrum’, a book written in 1974 by Anglo-Welsh writer, Jan Morris, who from birth to mid-forties was known as James Morris (and served with the British army in Italy in WWII), before undergoing surgery. In the pages of Conundrum, “the unhappiest people on the face of the earth” are joined by
“the poor castaways of intersex, the misguided homosexuals, the transvestites, the psychotic exhibitionists, who tumble through this half-mad world like painted clowns, pitiful to others and often horrible to themselves.”
In short, the odds of becoming “one of the lucky few” were not good even in the old days.
-
Back then, Jan Morris’ books on Oxford characters and the like were popular enough. That the dust-jacket often had a summary of the author’s unusual life and circumstances didn’t seem to prevent decent sales.
- Back then, the modern view that sexual identity was merely social was already being experimented with on children and the results lied about to preserve the narrative.
“It was like brainwashing … I’d give just about anything to go to a hypnotist to black out my whole past. Because it’s torture. What they did to you in the body is sometimes not near as bad as what they did to you in the mind – with the psychological warfare in your head.”
He is referring to the extraordinary medical treatment he received after suffering the complete loss of his penis to a botched circumcision when he was 8 months old. On the advice of experts at the renowned Johns Hopkins medical center, in Baltimore, a sex-change operation was performed on him, a process that involved clinical castration and other genital surgery when he was a baby, followed by a 12-year program of social, mental and hormonal conditioning to make the transformation take hold in his psyche. The case was reported as an unqualified success, and he became one of the most famous (though unnamed) patients in the annals of modern medicine.
[The sad story told by that (long) account is in some ways typical of today: the doctor with a ‘progressive’ agenda – and compliant colleagues; the easily-published papers boasting of a success that never was; the decades it took for the facts to emerge. But in other ways the woke of today are uglier than the progressives of half-a-century ago. The link is to a page on the wayback machine. The facts came out in the late ’90s but are now being forced back in again.]
But, along with all that, back then, those who were “pitiful to others and often horrible to themselves” did not have the encouragement of hate speech laws and ‘microaggression’ theory. The doctors in my link above felt elite because the common herd did not share their ‘advanced’ opinion that sex was socially conditioned, not innate – and, back then, the common herd were not at all afraid to say so. So those who nevertheless presented themselves for the procedure were much more likely to have tried something (or everything) else first. Their chance of joining Jan’s “lucky few” was therefore far better than today, now the group is swelled by propagandised schoolkids, by asbergers assured it will solve their problems, by people kept grossly ignorant of trans-regret and by many a “misguided homosexual, transvestite and/or exhibitionist” who back then would have chosen another way to express themselves. In that group, the proportion of Jan’s “lucky few” will be few indeed – meaning, the woke will have ruined many lives for each one of them.
Abuse of power is greatest where the laws fail to anticipate it. (Montesquieu)
Just as woke-trans cancel culture makes grooming more likely by forbidding you to expect it, so being forbidden to notice the immense improbabilities of woke-trans recruitment methods makes it more likely their targets will end up among “the unhappiest people on the face of the earth”.
The Left always wanted to build humans from zero, The New (Socialist) Man always have been a dream of Socialists (of all colors) so they have to deconstruct humans first and force them to be a tabula rasa. The Absolute Power that the Left are after implies every person will have to be created by them.
Meanwhile, today’s Sunday Times carries an approving book review (paywalled) in which this gem appears:
“In the chapter on Race and Responsibility he thinks it ‘atrocious’ to celebrate works of art that white people have produced, and when Rex says “I wish I was Black. Because White people do lots of mean things,” Hershovitz clearly sympathises.”
Rex is Hershovitz’s son, and clearly already thoroughly indoctrinated with CRT-sponsored self-loathing.
Rex is four years old.
The VAST majority of parents think this is all complete BS. With two years of “covid” learning, and constantly underperforming schools, and the utter bullshit they are jamming down out kiddos throats, it seems to me that this is a time that is absolutely ripe for a revolutionary transformation in public schooling. A radical transformation to a “government pays, private sector provides” model.
Who though will be bold enough to lead it? Because the vast majority of parents, if they understood, would support this. Minority parents in particular because there are few groups in the country more screwed over by the reprehensible state of some schools than the poorer sections of minority communities.
This weekend I was at a national math championship where the very best math students from all grades from all over the US competed against each other. One of the most successful schools is a magnet school right here in Chicago called Whitney Young. Predominantly the students are from poor black neighborhoods, but the school demands excellence from them (and can kick them out if they don’t get it.) Apparently being bad at math is not in the black genome, it is far more about the quality of education they get. Why is nobody rioting in the streets and burning down buildings about that? Now that is a riot I might even join in.
That is one of the problem, they don’t think it is fight for power over their children.
Jan Morris’s take is fascinating. Although I’ve been aware of her for a long time, I never bothered to look into what she had to say about her life. “The poor castaways of intersex, the misguided homosexuals, the transvestites, the psychotic exhibitionists, who tumble through this half-mad world like painted clowns, pitiful to others and often horrible to themselves” sounds horrifyingly familiar to anyone paying any attention to the current fad.
Black people, by contrast, are paragons of virtue.
When I was at UCSD, a fellow student lent me her copy of de Sade’s Juliette, or the Pleasures of Vice. I read the first few chapters, and saw a steady progression in the content of their scenarios. So I looked ahead to the end of the book, which had some of its characters suffering bizarre and cruel deaths. And I decided that I didn’t need to be persuaded that that sort of thing was erotic—and returned Juliette to its owner. Looking back, I don’t regret the decision.
I have to say that de Sade rather prefigures some of our current culture in his combination of the genres of pornography and the roman à thèse.
A radical transformation to a “government pays, private sector provides” model.
Sure but be VERY careful about how you do it. What you do not want is a private education system run by four large schools companies, which are owned by Google, Microsoft, Disney and Barclays Bank. I mention Barclays Bank not because they are famous for wokery (so far as I am aware) but because the evidence seems to be that even non woke large companies have decided that it’s safer to go along with the wokery than pay the price of appearing nightly on the BBC as an example of heartless pro-slavery fascism.
So certainly you have to give parents the direct power of the purse, but you also need some kind of competition rules to protect against Megacorp wokery takeover. And you also need to watch out for control-by-licensing/regulation. The idea that any organisation that has the care of our poor wee kiddies should be regulated is liable to appeal to the voting public. Cos it sounds warm, cuddly and moderate. So you need to think up some kind of regulatory / licensing system that it is difficult for the Leninists to capture.
My preferred, but incomplete, model is to have more than one licensing / regulatory agency. So you have some kind of PR vote to elect a local education authority in, say, Lincolnshire, which has say 20 members. But instead of 11 of them having to agree to authorise an agency to licence/regulate schools in the area, you only need to get, say, 3 members to do so. That way so long as 15% of parents are generally in favour of proper schools rather than agitprop, the commies can’t use licensing and regulation to close down that kind of school.
But obviousy none of this can even start until the BBC has been nuked from orbit.
I decided that I didn’t need to be persuaded that that sort of thing was erotic—and returned Juliette to its owner.
You don’t think she might just have been hinting that she wanted you to ask her out ?
“The poor castaways of intersex, the misguided homosexuals, the transvestites, the psychotic exhibitionists, who tumble through this half-mad world like painted clowns, pitiful to others and often horrible to themselves” sounds horrifyingly familiar to anyone paying any attention to the current fad.
Those small few genuinely suffering from these afflictions are likely to be pretty unhappy whatever “treatment” they seek. The current fad is more about evil people capturing children at an age when anybody may be a bit confused about pretty much anything, and converting them into a member of this cast of permanently miserable people by working irreparably on their minds and bodies.
As luckylady says, this is really about rebuilding humans from scratch. Keep Jame Gumb in mind and you won’t go far wrong.
Let me add some perspective here, from the days before “woke”. I was born five days before Pearl Harbor. Britain (and a lot of other people) were embroiled in WWII. The US was less than a week short of joining in. The world had other things to worry about. So did I, for that matter, but I wasn’t aware enough to realize it.
It didn’t take all that long, though. One of my earliest memories is of thinking wearing a kerchief over my head would make me a girl. This was before kindergarten, and I had little knowledge of the details of boy/girl. And I don’t plan on recounting my life history here, especially as I have related it before on Samizdata.
https://www.samizdata.net/2015/06/samizdata-quote-of-the-day-579/#comment-684160
The summary is this: I had sex-change surgery in my fifties. When my life started, almost nobody had any idea this kind of thing could happen. Christine Jorgenson happened. Books happened, and I’ve read quite a few – biographies, autobiographies, and medical theories. I liked Jan Morris’ book. I definitely did not like Renee Richards after reading her book. Only a few of the Medicine Men seemed to have a firm grasp upon my reality, though they held firmly to their own realities. Towards the end of the twentieth century I transitioned, and entered the twenty-first century as a woman, or something like it.
Or something like it. The politics and linguistics keep shifting around, and what I am depends upon who I’m among. But if asked to present my -credentials- I can. And I have the paperwork, too. My driver’s license and passport say I’m female, my social security and medicare say I’m male. (The legalities were uncertain back then, and we wanted to keep our marriage.) Medical folk occasionally question this. I tell them I have dual citizenship. These things work better if you maintain a sense of humor.
The world keeps changing. I’m glad I had to wait, because the state-of-the-art surgery was not very good back in the forties and fifties. And I’m glad I had a functional life going by the time I did have my sex change. As that goes, I have no idea what my life would have ended up like if I’d done it earlier. As it is, I am happy with my present situation
But one rock-solid certainty remains: I haven’t the faintest idea what is going on in schools and social work today. But I wouldn’t like it if somebody were trying to tell me what I had to be, or had not to be.
I had sex-change surgery in my fifties.
No you didn’t. You had some cosmetic surgery to adjust the appearance of some of your secondary sexual characteristics. More radical than having your hair dyed, but the same ball park (except that you can change your hair colour back, whereas with “sex change” surgery, not so much. And ditto for puberty blockers, claimed to be reversibile, as the BBC would say if it were a GOP election fraud claim, “without evidence.” Hence the wee concern with doing this “sex change” thing to children.
They may have advertised it as “sex-change” surgery, but it didn’t and never could have changed your sex.
When my life started, almost nobody had any idea this kind of thing could happen.
And thusly when your life ends. Humans are not clown fish. They can’t change sex. But they can get cosmetic surgery and be pumped full of hormones.
Towards the end of the twentieth century I transitioned, and entered the twenty-first century as a woman, or something like it.
Well, yeah. Men are something like women. Same species, and sexual dimorphism is relatively modest in humans compared to some other animals. And women come in all shapes and sizes, so there’s a wide variation in how women do their women thing. But a man can only do the woman thing as an actor does Julius Caesar, with make up and script. The actor does not become Julius Caesar – except when luvvies are gathered together with alcohol in hand, talking about their art.
As it is, I am happy with my present situation
Splendid
But I wouldn’t like it if somebody were trying to tell me what I had to be, or had not to be.
Entirely understandable. You be who you want to be, or at least try. Live and let live.
But the question for today is how this live and let live approach shoud apply to children, whether their current whims should be indulged or not, and who should be in charge of deciding which of their whims should be indulged during their childhood – their parents or the agenda-driven Nazgul of the Sate.
As Ellen writes almost nobody, I may not be disagreeing that much when I remark, for example, the 16th century Montaigne essay mentioning the French girl who became a boy in his neighbourhood (a case of retained genitals that abruptly descended upon making a great leap, to the surprise of their owner and others) or the occasional mediaeval male-inheritance baronial-will clause that stipulated “if he shall [i.e. still] be a man at age 21”, the contrary circumstance having occurred in the neighbourhood, just once or very very rarely no doubt, but the strange gets remembered because it is strange. In the past, when, one might say, the science about almost everything was generally not as ‘settled’ as the woke pretend now, to be normal and conventional was not PC-unfashionable, but the fact that things could very occasionally be very strange was known.
I (and my class) knew these things in high school, not because we were groomed by PC scum but because the head of the English department was intellectually curious, so apt to include occasional side-snippets of recherche information in his lessons when they were (sometimes distantly) relevant.
@Lee Moore
No you didn’t. You had some cosmetic surgery to adjust the appearance of some of your secondary sexual characteristics.
But it seems to me that you are assuming a lot. Do you define sex simply by the chromosome configuration? That isn’t the way we define most other characteristics of human (much as they might be the cause.) If, for example, I have a set of genes that gives me the propensity to obesity but I work very hard, and perhaps get surgical assistance, to not be obese, am I obese based on what my genes say? Or do we judge my obesity by the secondary characteristics of those genes, such as the size of pants I wear?
You can’t assume that your understanding of the word “man” and “woman” are universal. The meaning of words changes over time, and for sure we conventionally judge people’s sex by what they look like.
You mentioned clownfish, and I think you are thinking about the ability of such an organism to change from “functional” female to “functional” male. But does that mean that a woman who has had a hysterectomy is not a woman? Given that Ellen (bravely) shared her story about the transition in her fifties, even if she had been born with female “equipment” she would presumably at that point not be fertile anyway. not be a “functional female” in the sense that it is used in the context of sequential hermaphroditism.
One specific example is worth considering that she mentioned, namely her drivers license. Why do we put sex on drivers license? Well because it is an identifying characteristic. So, surely, in that context, the so called “secondary” sexual characteristics are far more important than genetic configuration.
My concern with the OP is that although I think people should be perfectly at liberty to transition to a different body and identity if they want to, I do not think children are at all capable of making a decision like that. And they sure as hell aren’t able to do it without the support and guidance of their parents. FFS, they can’t even get a tattoo without permission from their parent.
Moreover, it seems that there is massive pressure from the zealots to pressure them. So some little girl who is mad because she can’t play football with the boys says “I hate being a girl”. In the past it would be “well you are, so go play with your barbie”, which is by no means an ideal response, but now even the slightest hint like that the kid ends up on the “sex change” train with earnest teachers and state functionaries dumping them in brain washing programs and dumping them full of drugs without making any real attempt to truly understand if the kid is suffering from real sexual identity issues.[*] And most worrisome is that “transitioning” has become “cool” rather than an absolute last resort.
However, I appreciate Ellen being brave enough to share something so personal about herself, and I would very much like to hear her opinion as to how she sees the situation with kids.
[*] to be clear ALL kids suffer from identity issues. It is almost what childhood is for — forming your own identity — so ALL kids struggle with who they are, what they are and how the fit into the society they live in.
Do you define sex simply by the chromosome configuration?
No. The sex of an organism is defined by reference to gamete type. If you make sperm you’re male, if you make eggs, you’re female. If you make both, you’re both male and female, aka hermaphrodite. Sex – in this sense, ie not copulation, but the division of a species into two (and only two) sexes, – is a reproductive biological category. And the two categories are defined by the two (and only two) types of gamete. One gamete of each type is required for reproduction, in any anisogamous species. (Isogamous species do not have differentiated gametes, and so do not have sexes, and do not have any sex differentiation in phenotype.)
Defining sex, as nature does, by gamete type does leave us with categorisation questions when it comes to organisms that do not make gametes. Either because they have faulty gonads, or no gonads, or a developmental horlicks of gonads; or if they have gonads that are not yet functional because they are still developing, or because they have ceased to function. But except in the most extreme cases – eg entirely undifferentiated gonadal material – all of these cases are readily categorised by reference to the sex of the gamete that the gonads would make if they were functional, or if they have been lost, what they produced when they were functional.
To the nearest decimal point, 0% of transgender (or “transsexual”) folk have ambiguous sex. Indeed even the vast majority of people described as intersex are in fact unambiguously male or unambiguously female. They just have sexual development deficiencies.
It is perfectly true that there are loads of secondary sexual features that are used in human society for all sorts of non reproductive purposes. You could use your willy to stir your tea, though I wouldn’t recommend it. But none of these subsidiary purposes are at all relevant to the determination of sex. Developmentally, all these secondary features are downstream from the gonads and happen after sex has already been determined by the gonads.
Usually, because evolution works that way, the secondary features agree with the primary (which is why we use them as very accurate but not infallible proxies for identifying the sex of another human, rather than insisting on investigating their gonads- though see Crocodile Dundee.)
None of which is to say, of course, that sex is always and necessarily an appropriate categorisation for all forms of human activity. In sport, for example, a man with complete androgen insensitivity probably has no advantage over a woman, and so it’s probably fair to let him compete in the women’s events. Not because he IS a woman, but because he has no unfair avantage. Likewise he’s probably not going to scare anybody in the ladies loo.
And if you make neither?
(But you still have an appetite for sex…)
PS: what if you make sperm and/or eggs, but you don’t reproduce anyway?
🙂
I was hoping for a comment from Ellen, and she did not disappoint.
But i am disappointed that nobody here seems to be aware that gender dysphoria is not one thing.
Can biological sex be complicated, in a miniscule fraction of people? Sure.
Does that mean I am going to be fine with Desmond the 11-year-old drag queen dancing on a stage in a men’s club while the men throw money at him? Nope. Or a leering man dressed in a miniskirt and fishnets following my preteen daughter into a restroom? Nope. Or a school teacher telling 5-year-olds about the best positions for anal sex? Nope. Or that same teacher telling the kids that doctors make a guess about whether a newborn baby is a boy or a girl, because there isn’t any way to tell? Nope.
All the talk about rare congenital conditions is a smokescreen for a radical grooming agenda, to try to make those things seem normal and acceptable.
At this point, I am not even interested in hearing about the obscure biological complexities, because I already know they are being used as a wedge for this outrageous trans agenda. And I think lots of other people are increasingly taking that stance: “just go away with that nonsense.”
I too was hoping Ellen would be amongst my commenters, because it’s very basic to me to value information that comes from experience (and I value humour too). I note (for clarity in what follows) that it would not amaze me if that experience had sometimes required a degree of civil or even physical courage. (Of course, just deciding to go under a surgeon’s knife requires a bit of the latter.)
However when Fraser Orr (May 2, 2022 at 6:38 pm), dissenting from Lee Moore (May 2, 2022 at 5:15 pm), wrote
I could not help but smile, because I could not help but imagine someone writing
I trust no-one actually requires courage to share their experience and their opinions in this thread – though we may all at the same time feel almost insulted that the thought police seem to give so little attention to this blog. But the times they are a changing – and have already changed much from when Ellen was born, so much so that, were any commenter to discover a need for courage to stand by their comment, it might more likely be Lee (something that Ellen – who maybe recalls how it felt to find the courage to make a big decision – could justly resent the woke for).
There again, perhaps it might more likely be Ellen. As Islam hates apostates more than infidels, so the woke sometimes hate a ‘traitor to their identity group’ even more than a *phobic *ist.
moi : If you make sperm you’re male, if you make eggs, you’re female. If you make both, you’re both male and female, aka hermaphrodite.
Snorri : And if you make neither?
You need to read all the way down to …. the second paragraph.
Snorri : (But you still have an appetite for sex…)
Then by all means satisfy your appetite. But this is the copulatory meaning of sex. Not the same thing. Gay people, for example, can have all the sex (nookie sense) that they want. But from a biological point of view, this activity is much like stirring your tea with your willy. It’s not reproductive activity. Biological sex is about reproduction.
PS: what if you make sperm and/or eggs, but you don’t reproduce anyway?
Then you won’t be contributing to the next generation. You just aren’t using your reproductive kit for reproducing. That’s got nothing to do with whether you are one sex or the other. In the same way, your eyes are optical kit. If you keep em closed then you see nothing. But you’re not blind. You can still be correctly classified as a two eyed creature. You’re just not using your optical kit for seeing.
You don’t think she might just have been hinting that she wanted you to ask her out ?
I am quite sure that she was not. Naturally I explored that possibility. . . .
@Lee Moore
Defining sex, as nature does, by gamete type…
Nature does not define anything. Nature is a bunch of chemical reactions. Humans and human scientists interpret these in ways that suit them and that are useful in, for example, predictive analysis. Along these same lines I was struck by something that Niall said later:
However when Fraser Orr dissenting from Lee Moore wrote “I appreciate Ellen being brave enough to share something so personal”, I could not help but smile, because I could not help but imagine someone writing “I appreciate Lee being brave enough to express so unwoke an opinion.”
I think that what is missing here is the context. Certainly were Lee to express such an opinion in a faculty lounge it would indeed take bravery, and were Ellen to express her point in that same setting she’d more likely get a hug than a jeer. Yet Samizdata is not that setting. This is a setting that is very much aligned more with Lee’s thinking and less so with Ellen’s. So here it is clear that context not only matters but is the driving factor.
And it is the same when it comes to sex. Sex means many different things in different contexts, even though it has a general overarching theme. But to mistake the definitions that apply in microbiology with the definitions that apply in human society is a failure of recognizing the context. And the context is not just something conjured up for the convenience of the user, as per Humpty Dumpty but rather the meaning is driven by its different needs in the different contexts. Certainly the most important thing about sex with respect to reproduction is the reproductive capabilities of the organism. But, within a society, that is a very small part of what human life is about. If one is to think about which side of the reproductive equation a human is on, it affects them for only a few months out of their lifetime. Their physical shape, their hormonal balance, their role within the male-female social dynamic is vastly more significant than which part of baby making they do.
Having said that, my view is any adult has the right to present themselves however they wish, and modify their body however they wish. However, it is a very different matter when dealing with children. Children who we don’t trust with the most basic decisions about whether to eat their green beans or whether they should do their algebra homework, should not be making these sorts of life altering decisions, and predatory adults should not be manipulating them along the way.
Having said that, I am definitely curious as to Ellen’s point of view on this last paragraph.
Nature does not define anything. Nature is a bunch of chemical reactions
I think you are confusing design and conscious design. The latter requires intent,the former requires only function. We can deduce from its function that a stomach has been designed (by evolution) to digest food. That doesn’t mean that Mr Evolution sucked his pencil and tried to think through how best to organise a stomach. It simply means that stomachs have developed to be the way they are the way they are, because each change en route that produced a better answer to the digestion problem (without producing countervailing disadvantages elsewhere) tended to be preserved by evolution’s unconscious algorithmic action.
Why sexual reproduction evolved we don’t know, though there are conjectures. Why sexual reproduction largely became anisogamic we also don’t know, though again there are conjectures. But whatever the ancient reasons, the division of anisogamous species into two, and only two, sexes defined by gamete type exists as it exists because it serves a reproductive function.
We also know that all those interesting cultural and behavioural aspects of sex differentiation that you say take up so much more of our time than reproduction are consequences of the prior gametic differentation. They are not co-equal sex characteristics, they are ineluctably subsidiary to the gamete differentiation. We know this because isogamous organisms are not differentiated into sexes. Sexual differentiation is a consequence of anisogamy, not an autonomous thing.
Certainly the most important thing about sex with respect to reproduction is the reproductive capabilities of the organism. But, within a society, that is a very small part of what human life is about.
I beg to differ. Human life, like beetle life, is essentially about reproduction. Thanks to the 2nd law of Thermodynamics nixing immortality, reproduction is the central feature of all life, by definition. Survival itself is only a means to reproduction – it doesn’t matter if you get eaten by your mate if you’ve managed to unload in her first. I would also question whether, if you think reproduction is a minor part of human life, whether you are observing life too narrowly. Also do you have a TV ?
Reproducing humans spend a extraordinary amount of time and effort hunting for mates and mating opportunities, trying to impress potential mates with their mate value (consciously or unconsciously), copulating, trying to build stable mate pairs, and then rearing the products. Even when old they spend a long time cooing over their indirect products. And all those long hours spent in the office over a hot computer to earn the paycheck are not often conducted solely for love of the computer, but to provide for the family – not excluding darlig Leah’s party dresses which might put her in the way of a Duke.
And even humans unsuccessful at reproduction spend a lot of effort either trying (or at least hopin’)for some reproduction related activity. Even if it’s just with a computer. The internet was built from the search for porn. A Tory MP just lost his job for watching porn. Shirley being an MP is one of those important things that trump that minor thing, reproduction ? Nope, even sham-indulging a reproductive impulse with a mobile phone turns out to be more important.
Anything humans do consciously or unconsciously in pursuit* of sex (qua rubbing bodies) is engaging the evolved reproductive impulse, even when the perps are consciously, deliberately trying to avoid reproducing. The drive for achievement and status (in males particularly) serves a reproductive purpose. Women fancy successful men more than unsuccessful ones.
Und so weiter.
* there is of course waaaaay more pursuit than capture.
Actually, if we judge by reproduction, I decided long ago that there are three sexes.
Male, female, and ethanol.
I figured this out after reviewing our various impregnations and realizing that we were all three involved every time.
🙂
There’s a good SF novel by Isaac Asimov called The God Themselves which has three-sex aliens, and funnily enough one of the three sexes does seem to have an alcohol like role – it kinda warms the other two up.
Though on this alien planet the warming up role of this third sex is essential to reproduction. Not sure alcohol is quite there yet.
On a slightly more serious note, I think the boffins have now managed to implant the nuclear DNA of a woman with dodgy mitochondrial DNA into a donor egg, so that the resulting bairn has got DNA from three humans in it (Dad’s nuclear, Mom’s nuclear and donor Mom’s mitochondrial.)
Not quite three sexes yet, but three parents.
Just to further confuse the issue, a woman was born in Burma in 1955, who became a lesbian, and she has always maintained that she had been a Japanese soldier who had been killed in WW2 in her previous life- hence her male-like attitudes. So, should we allow people to change sex, or insist that their biological identity is paramount, and the soul chose this for a reason, so suck it up, snowflake!
The end-2017 article linked above by Snorri Godhi (May 2, 2022 at 9:26 pm) has a paragraph that is very relevant to my post (actually, it has several quotable remarks but I’ll reproduce just one):
The authors wrote that four and a half years ago. They mention the role of the internet, and mention school, but I suspect were underestimating the role of teachers and social workers (and therapists) even then. I wrote my post because their role is better known now, but also, I think, even bigger now.
That remark aside (and, as usual, with some Niall-pendant-Kilmartin caveats), the article is worth reading through for this whole topic. Among many other points, it compares the whole modern furore to the 80’s-90’s one over multiple-personalities/regressed-abuse-memories (my prior post on the subject briefly touched on the Cleveland abuse-diagnosis scandal that was one of the earlier products of that).
Lastly (on a secondary point), the philosophical “What is sex/gender” discussions in comments immediately above have their interest (and I my views 🙂 ), but the PC woke no more care about what is true there than they ever did about the true interests of the working class, or of negroes, or of any of their unconsulted proteges. Power is their only truth. In the article’s review of various forms of gender dysphoria, it is no accident that increasing references to the social and political claims of gender studies departments in a given form correlate with decreasing concessions to there being any such reality behind that form.
I liked the middle (alien-focussed) part of Asimov’s ‘The Gods Themselves’ (Lee Moore, May 3, 2022 at 7:25 am). It was well-envisioned and dramatic in its events and conclusion. By contrast, the first third seemed more pedestrian (but some bits of its unenthusiastic picture of bureaucratic scientific research seems prescient enough now). To me, the final “with one bound, humans and aliens alike are free” third seemed weak by comparison. The novel would have been better as a work of art, albeit grimmer as a tale, if it had ended at the conclusion of the alien part.
BTW, as regards the links in this paragraph of the article Snorri recommended,
I could not find either except on the wayback machine here and here. (Once you get there, the wayback machine is clever enough that the link in the first essay to the second essay still works, and vice versa.)
If anyone can reach them at their original locations (preserved in my blockquote text above), I invite them to write a comment with that information. Researching my post led me to a number of links in not-that-old articles that are now overtly dead, reachable only (AFAICS) via wayback or similar archives. Now I find two more in the article Snorri mentioned. Interesting!
1. I second Niall’s Lit Crit of The Gods Themselves. The heart of it is the alien middle section and the human bookends are pedestrian. Who wants to read tens of pages about a fictional Dr Fauci ?
2. The final part, with one exception which I’ll come to, reads like a male, late middle age, paunchy, wasn’t getting any even when young, scientist’s sex fantasy about nookie with a willowy moongirl. I’m looking at you, Isaac. And I will advance this in support of one of my earlier points – even when doing something apparently quite unrelated to reproduction, like churning out another novel for cash, the inner Asimov is on view – the conscious clever scientist/author is still being unconsciously dragged along by his willy.
3. The exception – spoiler alert – is that our middle aged dumpy hero who the moongirl unconvincingy falls for, solves everything with the brilliant insight that 2 is a ridiculous number. By which he means that it’s perfectly possible to believe that this is the only universe. It could be unique. But as soon as we discover a second universe, it’s absurd to believe there are only two. The uniqueness card has been trumped. Two is an absurd number.
4. That struck me as a most convincing argument when I was a teenager reading the book. When I later read about Louis de Broglie’s wave-particle duality notion (ie generalising from the already known duality of light particles (photons) I wondered whether he had had this “2 is an absurd number” idea – ie it’s not just light that diffracts, Xrays do it to. His big brother was an X Ray experimental physicist, so young Louie would have been all over X ray diffraction. So my question, for any actual physicists out there is – was it already known by 1923, that X Rays and photons are the same thing, just at different energy levels ? If so, then we can rule out the entertaining notion that de Broglie had hit on the idea that 2 is absurd.
5. And last but not least, there is something mildly amusing about the fact that I have meandered into discussing the absurdity of 2 in a thread about…..sex.
This ties in with quite a different argument I have frequently been in: books. Paper or e-book? They both have significant advantages, and disadvantages. Niall has mentioned the Achilles Heel of e-literature: link-rot and its many accomplices. You may think something is safe because you have downloaded it, but your hard drive may fail or even your backup. Books on paper? Their biggest drawback? Moving! Books are heavy, and unpacking them in any order makes re-shelving terrible.
Both, of course, are gone if your house burns down. Entropy never sleeps. I have come to my own decisions on the matter. I have argued with others who have different opinions. The science is not settled.
Just like all the rest of this discussion.
Well, actually, as I hinted above (Niall Kilmartin, May 3, 2022 at 12:20 pm, para begining ‘Lastly’), while I fully understand why the comments naturally include discussions about sex, that is not my post’s primary focus.
This post is first of all about power.
As Ellen remarks (May 3, 2022 at 4:12 pm), the mere power to check your memory when the PC would rather you couldn’t may need routine overcautious downloading and regular backups. Books are good – if what you don’t want to lose was ever in a book, but it maybe only ever was on the web.
Dalrymple’s quote is very Solzhenitsynesque
I solved that through the process of bookbinding. Download, proofread, lay out, print (I have a duplexing printer) and bind. I would bind multiple copies so the writer(s), and in one case the cover artist, could be sent copies. Oh, I can do a lovely job of it! I have a nice picture of a batch of them. How do I upload pictures here?
I donated them to one of the University of Minnesota libraries. Downsizing, or as we museum people call it, de-accessioning. But I still have the formatted files, the printer, and the binding equipment. Thus, I would have to suffer a twofold disaster to lose access to them.
Lee Moore
I beg to differ. Human life, like beetle life, is essentially about reproduction.
I neither think that is true nor do I think it answers the point. People really do try to be more than baby carriers, and, frankly, looking at the aforementioned TV, we can see that the technology that makes that TV is a great example of how people strive to achieve things beyond reproduction.
Moreover, Which type of sexual organs you have only determines where a baby resides for nine months. All other aspects of “reproduction” in the wider sense that you are using it of “seeing ones progeny to also reproduce” can be carried out by people irrespective of their gonads. It is actually pretty common for non-utero americans to raise children.
Fraser Orr (May 4, 2022 at 4:50 am), Lee’s point can perhaps be more usefully considered in the context of Mark Steyn’s lapidary remark.
When (one example from a thousand) the San Francisco gay male choir sing, “We will convert your children”, (We will convert your children), they are not just getting off on boasting that PC laws against ‘conversion therapy’ won’t be enforced on them. They are also whistling in the dark. A person might think lots of things more important than just having another baby, but there is an innate contradiction in thinking about anything philosophical or political or beyond the self in almost any way, and then saying, “I don’t care what happens about it after I’m dead; I don’t care if no-one shows up for its future.”
The recent Roe-Wade leak has seen a hilarious number of hard-left ‘libs’ rediscover that ‘woman’ has a meaning and the word can be most emphatically, indeed enragedly, used. Suddenly ‘birthing person’ is passe – at least in that context. Suddenly the inclusion of Lia and Caitlyn and Rachel goes unmentioned.
Because the PC woke destroy, they from time to time keep meeting this problem of how to reproduce and preserve themselves. Mao was very visibly unable to resolve the contradiction in his own mind (and seems to have ended in an “I don’t care after I am dead; please just wait till then” state). Hitler, running into problems even with eager-to-obey Nazi colonial bureaucrats because he was “in effect demanding the impossible – simultaneously to exploit and to destroy” (as one historian put it), met the same issue.
Lee is putting the issue in the immediate context of birth. I suggest that anyone who evades it there via philosophy, politics, whatever, will – if they are rigorous – find that, by those very means, the issue returns upon them.
Like I said above, that is secondary to my purpose in this post. My immediate libertarian concern is the woke’s interest in power and in moving all discussion of this into greater and greater unreality, ruthlessly voiding it of any fragments of fact exploited in the early days to get started.
People really do try to be more than baby carriers, and, frankly, looking at the aforementioned TV, we can see that the technology that makes that TV is a great example of how people strive to achieve things beyond reproduction.
The gentleman dung beetle who rolls a particularly juicy dung ball along, does not know that what he is doing will, like as not, attract an interested lady dung beetle, with prospects of baby dung beetles to follow. And yet it does. Likewise, if you invent a new and better TV, or even just a new and better TV show, you will likely reap a reward in nookieland. Even if nookie was the last thing on your mind. (Though even geeks think about nookie quite often.)
Moreover, Which type of sexual organs you have only determines where a baby resides for nine months. All other aspects of “reproduction” in the wider sense that you are using it of “seeing ones progeny to also reproduce” can be carried out by people irrespective of their gonads. It is actually pretty common for non-utero americans to raise children.
True. Some aspects of reproduction are capable of being performed, and are performed, by members of either sex. However other aspects cannot. The distinction between the sexes rests on the parts that cannot.
Moreover, in humans, the parts that cannot also have a fairly long tail into the parts that can. Thus, for example, until very recently, a pair-bonded woman was pregnant or nursing, all the time, until she was dead or forty. That rather rules out a career in TV design. She was not pregnant or nursing because of patriarchal cultural norms, but because having intercourse reliably generates pregnancy, and because men can’t breastfeed.
Likewise, the female of a human pairing has looked to the male for, inter alia, resources and protection from wild animals (human or otherwise.) This is not because women are incapable of useful labour, nor that they are incapable of weilding a large stick to advantage. It’s simply that their odds, and their child’s odds, are much better with help. This need having persisted in modern humans and their forbears for a couple of million years, the sexual division of labour is baked in to human psychology, even now, in t’modern world, there is less practical need for it.
And though the boffins have done wonders for allowing women to prevent pregnancy, they have as yet had much less success in the business of allowing women to postpone a family while they pursue a career. A career minded man can easily postpone reproduction to his mid forties. A woman, not so much. And it all comes down to those pesky gametes.
This – office unsafe – joke song would’t work with two guys :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-gfxjAaZg0
“The sex of an organism is defined by reference to gamete type”
Which is not usually what people are talking about in these conversations. It seems to me all arguers in these discussions could benefit from more of distinguishing between map and territory.
Rob’s point is too deep for me to comprehend, alas.
Unless it is shallower than I am supposing. So just for the avoidance of doubt, in
“The sex of an organism is defined by reference to gamete type”
“defined” does not refer simply to a preferred semantic meaning of the word “sex”, it refers to the functional biologial division of organisms by their gamete type. And denies, or as I should say refutes, the recent notion that this division is murky or subjective or a matter of balancing a number of variables acording to ones value system. It asserts that 2 + 2 = 4, and not 5 or 6. It does not claim that 5 or 6 are bad numbers in their own way, it merely claims that they are different notions from 4.
As to how people use the word “sex”, sure, ordinary usage is not so precise as I have described. But I maintain that “man” and “woman” have always been used in a reproductive sense. A man is the kind of object that a woman needs if she is to reproduce. And vice versa.
I maintain that even if you had asked a 12th century peasant, ignorant of gametes, whether Ellen is a man or a woman, providing the background information that Ellen can (or could) sire children but cannot (and could never) bear them, you would have got the same answer as I give, however Ellen otherwise dressed or behaved. Now we know that the sine qua non of reproduction is a functional gamete of your own, and its making the acquaintance of functional gamete of the opposite type. But, even in terms of semantics, this merely brings the essential concept of the divsion of the sexes into clearer focus. It doesn’t change it from what it always was.
I should add of course that I am not intending to have a pop at Ellen personally. I am merely refuting the claim that 2 + 2 = 5.
Why ? Lest unopposed, the contrary notion, which is vigorously advanced, should be believed.
Lee Moore
The video was hilarious, thanks for sharing.
The gentleman dung beetle who rolls a particularly juicy dung ball
If it is your contention that “everything we do, we do to get laid” I think you’ll need a bit more evidence than entomology examples. Our brains have quite a few more functional bits than a dung beetle, and presumably we use them for other higher level functions.
The distinction between the sexes rests on the parts that cannot.
Right but that is precisely my contention — those parts constitute a tiny part of life.
Moreover, in humans, the parts that cannot also have a fairly long tail into the parts that can. Thus, for example, until very recently, a pair-bonded woman was pregnant or nursing, all the time, until she was dead or forty.
Which is no longer true due to various technologies the “boffins” invented. So that rather defeats your contention that “boffins” are inventing technology as part of their evil plan to spread their seed. The simple fact is that modern societies are reproducing substantially less, and the more advanced your civilization the lower your birth rate generally speaking. Civilization, one might argue, is humans’ attempt to escape biology.
However, I do want to thank you for reviving the word “boffin”. It is a delightful word, which for me has an unfortunate history. Many years ago, a young lady, in whose pants I wished to get, described me as a boffin — which was a curious rebuff. “Yes I am attracted to intelligent resourceful men, but you are a ‘boffin’.” Which I think says a lot about how nuanced the meaning of words can be. FWIW, she ended up hooking up with my flatmate, got married and lived happily ever after — so that is a good thing.
(My last paragraph may entirely undermine my whole argument, but the word “boffin” brought up all sorts of neuroses for me, so I felt the need to share with the group… “Hi, my name is Fraser, and I am a boffin”.)
And you can’t escape from it even with a digression on boffins. The tubby and grand Tory MP Nicholas Soames was once heard to remark in the House of Commons, in a comment not captured by Hansard: “I wouldn’t mind boffing the Honourable Member for Peckham”
There’s no escape anywhere Fraser 🙂
It seems Colorado teachers and social services use a playbook similar to the Texan one.
After Amanda disobeyed the “first rule of gay (but call it ‘art’) club” as soon as she got out of it, leading her mother Lee
to be, well, not as affirming as today’s educational establishment expects such allies to be, then the same ‘health equity initiatives coordinator’ who had ‘diagnosed’ that Amanda was transgender urged
That this has, IIUC, not (yet) happened, is better than if it had, but when a school’s principal bluntly tells any parents whose kids disobey the first rule of gay (‘art’) club that
then it’s clear teachers have been trained not only to recruit but also to deprive the target kids of any parental alternative to what they are being taught – happy hunting ground for a groomer.