Month: February 2019

Let’s Talk About [Trans] Sex

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Male and Female

Humans are mammals and, like all mammals, propagate the species through a process known as sexual reproduction. Each human is of one of two sexes, male or female, and the sex of any given human is readily and unambiguously identifiable at birth based on obvious anatomical distinctions.

[I’ll say this once and then not mention it again: this is a discussion of normal humans. Just as one can say that humans are born with two arms and two legs, one can say that humans are born as one or the other of two sexes. A small number of humans are born without the normal number of arms or legs, and a small number are anatomically ambiguous as regards sex. But normal humans, and that’s the vast majority of humans, are as described.]

There are distinctive physiological characteristics associated with male and female humans. Males tend to be larger and stronger than females; only females can give birth to offspring; males tend to be more aggressive than females. These are traits that humans have in common with many other mammals, and derive from biology, from the effects of various hormones on the male and female bodies during development.

Males and females play distinctly different roles in reproduction. In particular, the physiological investments made by males and females is quite different: for males, reproduction has essentially no cost associated with it; for females, reproduction is costly both in terms of time and physical investment. It follows that the mating strategies of males and females will likely differ: because reproduction for them is inexpensive, males will seek to reproduce as often as practical and with a wide variety of females; females, for whom reproduction is costly, will of necessity reproduce less frequently, and will tend to be more selective in their choice of mates. This will inevitably lead to different and characteristic behavioral patterns for the sexes.

Beyond those characteristics attributable to physiology and evolutionary pressure, there are additional sexual traits that may be essentially random, not readily explained by biology. These so-called cultural distinctions may, unlike differences rooted in biology, vary from culture to culture and change over time.

There is a constellation of traits which we associate with sex. Those which we associate primarily with males are referred to as masculine traits; those associated primarily with females are referred to as feminine traits. While the sex of any given person is either male or female, the degree to which the person exhibits qualities considered masculine or feminine may vary quite a lot.

A male who exhibits qualities normally associated with femininity is still a male: no matter how feminine he may seem, he does not ovulate, and he can not give birth. Similarly, a female, no matter how masculine, remains a female: she does not produce sperm and can not fertilize an egg.

Gender Diversity and Trans Movements

Gender diversity is the idea that there are more than two sexual states for humans. Gender diversity attempts to assert a quasi-sexual dimension, “gender,” independent of, and not constrained by, biological reality. Humans are male or female, distinctions rooted in biology: other so-called genders are expressions of whim, fantasy, confusion, or sincere but mistaken belief in non-existent human variety.

The trans movement asserts that humans can change their sex, either through pure volition (whim), or as a result of drugs and surgery. In fact, people can alter, to some extent, the degree to which they express typical masculine and feminine traits, but they can not change their sex: males remain males; females remain females.

Identity Versus Quality

Both the gender diversity movement and the trans movement are sexual identity movements. That is, both are founded on the assertion that one can claim a sexual identity, and that making the claim is itself sufficient to assume the identity — and, importantly, that no challenge to the legitimacy of the claim is possible. In that sense, such claims are metaphysical, untestable, divorced from biological reality, divorced from qualities of masculinity and femininity.

It is important for these movements that they make claims of identity, and not of qualities. Claims of masculine and feminine qualities can be evaluated objectively. Claims of identity are essentially legal or political claims which, if left unchallenged, grant individuals status which their inherent qualities might preclude.

To pick a topical example: a man who declares himself to be a woman, and who is then given the same status as a woman and so allowed to compete against women in athletic events, will have an enormous advantage, because he possesses essential masculine qualities of bone size and density, connective tissue, muscular development, etc.

False claims of sexual identity — men claiming to be women, women claiming to be men, anyone claiming to be neither man nor woman — should be rejected. If we wish to accommodate claims of special status based on measurable physical traits, on objective qualities of masculinity and femininity, that is a different issue. But false claims of sexual identity are a way of assuming a status predicated on sexual qualities while precluding any evaluation of those qualities. This will inevitably lead to problems, including the kind of athletic cheating currently in the news, and to needless confusion and ambiguity.

Marching and Talking, Actions and Words

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My friend Susan Quinn wrote a post recently suggesting a Men’s and Women’s March as a way of re-acknowledging the differences between men and women and re-asserting support for a more traditional understanding of our respective roles. I commented on it, and rained on her parade more than I probably should have, since there’s absolutely nothing wrong with showing support for traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity — shoot, that’s a pet topic of mine. I let my general lack of enthusiasm for public events, and my suspicion that the press would be able to spin such an event in a way that makes it counter-productive, color my comments, and perhaps too much.

There’s room for all kinds of action, all kinds of ways of reaching people with a message. I’m a cantankerous old crank who doesn’t like joining things, but if this inspires you, by all means pursue it. We need everyone contributing in the way he or she feels is best. Go out, make a joyful noise, and spread the word. It’s a worthy cause, and I wish you well.

But that conversation got me thinking about the cultural clash between right and left, conservative and radical, and about the most productive way to meet our cultural opposition in the battle for ideas. It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that the left avoids debate and the discussion of ideas whenever possible. The left is most often about theater, about waving a sign and coining a slogan and drowning out the conversation.

The left thrives in environments where ideas flow in one direction: universities, the press, television, entertainment, protests and mass events. That makes sense: a lot of the left’s ideas don’t stand up to scrutiny and won’t survive a thoughtful challenge; many of their proponents barely understand their own ideas and can’t defend them. Cold facts and figures are not as important as feelings — and in particular as the strong feelings of anger, resentment, outrage, and fear.

Rallies are good for building moral, and sometimes they actually educate people. I was involved in the TEA Party movement in its early days, and I thought the rallies were uplifting and productive. The March for Life is a beautiful and inspirational event, and I applaud the many thousands who take part.

But I think we should focus our greatest attention on confronting the left in the realm of ideas. They own the protest space; they enjoy clashes and confrontation and the noise that silences their critics. That’s what they do best — indeed, it’s all they do well. They excel at loud and meaningless action, and the appearance of righteousness they think it gives them.

We own the battlefield of ideas, where substance matters more than slogans. Most of us step on to the battlefield every single day, and have opportunities to speak up — calmly, thoughtfully, politely — and present a new perspective, perhaps change a mind. We’re all competing for the same minds. We have the advantage that we can actually engage those minds in thoughtful conversation, and impress them with our reasonableness. We should press that advantage at every opportunity.

Fractal Pointillism and Random Thoughts

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More than half a century ago Andy Warhol posited that in the future we’d each get our fifteen minutes of fame. Andy never anticipated Moore’s law and the relentless increasing density of electronic circuitry, and so couldn’t imagine a future in which the sum of codified human knowledge and experience could circle the globe during that fifteen minutes. (Incidentally, Moore’s law predates Warhol’s dictum by a few years.)

More to the point, Andy never anticipated Twitter, social media, and the relentless shortening of attention and cheapening of discourse.

We’ve all seen pointillism, those pictures made of tiny dots that, up close, resemble nothing, but that are clear and vivid from a distance. We live in a pointillistic information space now, except that every dot is its own little microcosm of absorbing detail: fractal pointillism. We can obsess about one dot until the next catches our eye and we jump to that; we need never step back and look at the broader picture.

I think it leads to foolishness, to the very definition of foolishness, the combination of confidence and ignorance. We know so much about such little things, as our need for novelty and mental stimulation is met by ever more trivial events and people.

Stepping back, I wonder if we are at two inflection points.

I don’t have data, merely an impression, but it does feel like criticism of President Trump has changed in character over the past few months. It no longer seems that stories of chaos in the White House and his fundamental instability and incompetence dominate the criticism. Increasingly, criticism of this President feels like criticism of other Republican Presidents, which from the left takes the form of hyperbole and anger and accusations of reactionary excess. I admit that I don’t watch the news and so don’t know what his most strident foes are saying, but we all swim in the pop-cultural sea and it’s hard not to absorb some of it. Anyway, if Trump is becoming more of a mainstream Republican President in the eyes of his opponents on the left, that’s probably a good thing.

The other item is the press. I think it has finally lost the benefit of the doubt, and will find its influence diminished in the post-Trump political world. The willingness of previously respectable institutions to surrender any pretense of objectivity, however false and shallow it was, and become transparent organs of the Democratic Party will not be forgotten and, I suspect, can not easily be reversed — not when you consider the influence the new, ready to be triggered young employees have on every institution that makes the mistake of hiring them.

I think Trump is getting more normal and the press is getting more marginal. These things are probably not unrelated.

Waiting for Mueller

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At the beginning of this long investigation I wrote that if convincing evidence is presented that candidate Trump colluded with Russians — that is, that he knowingly participated in or otherwise facilitated illegal Russian interference in the 2016 election — then I would call for his impeachment.

I also wrote that I think the entire charge is a fabrication of the embarrassed and almost pathologically mendacious candidate Clinton, and that in fact it’s largely a projection of her campaign’s own shady dealings with Russia via the Steele dossier and related nonsense. That is still my belief.

However, if Mueller provides that convincing evidence, I will admit my mistake and call for the President’s resignation or removal.

But if he does not, then I will call for the resignation of most of the nation’s press, as these clowns will have, in typical print-first-ask-questions-never fashion, poisoned the national discourse for years with their relentless and baseless claims, and given comfort to the posse of corrupt and scheming apparatchiks who, until recently, ran much of our federal law enforcement.

So let’s wait and see.

PS No, I don’t expect the press to accept its responsibility. I don’t even expect them to significantly change their message, when and if Mueller’s report exonerates the President. Most of the press supports Democrats, the more left-leaning the better, and that isn’t about to change.

More Tolerance, Please

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The more significant the disagreement, the more important it is that something as easily settled as the meaning of the words we use not prevent us from having a civil discussion. There are many real and important things about which we differ; our words should not be counted among them.

The word “tolerance” implies disagreement. After all, we are never asked to tolerate something of which we approve. Rather, we’re asked to tolerate things that we don’t necessarily like. Approval and tolerance are two different things, and asking someone to approve of something is not the same as asking them to tolerate it.

For example, I don’t approve of people swearing in public, but I tolerate it.

What does it mean to tolerate something? I’ll offer this simple definition: tolerance means that you would allow something even if you had the practical authority to prevent it.

So, back to my example: even if I had the authority to prevent people from swearing in public, I wouldn’t use it. I am tolerant of swearing in public, even though I don’t like it.

Please note that I’m not talking about changing what people think, making them believe what I believe and so do what I’d like them to do. That isn’t something accomplished through authority, but rather through persuasion and the exchange of ideas and viewpoints. We must, of necessity, “tolerate” what people think and believe, because there is no authority, real or imagined, which can compel others to believe what we believe. Nor, I would argue, should there be, as that would violate our most private right of conscience.

I believe strongly that people should be free, free to express their ideas and to live their lives with a reasonable minimum of restriction, free to approve or disapprove of whatever they want. We all have opinions, and sometimes strong ones, about what makes sense, what is true, and what is good for people. We should be free to express our approval or disapproval. That isn’t the same as tolerating or not tolerating.

I tolerate expression of approval and disapproval, even when I don’t agree with them.

Smoking, swearing in public, yelling at your kids in Wal-Mart, self-identifying as the wrong sex, hooking up, Gender Studies departments, cross-country skiing, blue-grass music, white-supremacist talk, black-supremacist talk, made-up pronouns, anti-semitic talk, Islam, decaf coffee, omitting the Oxford comma — there are a lot of things of which I don’t approve, but which I will tolerate.

I would like to ask my friends on the left to name a few things which they tolerate, but of which they do not approve. I wonder what they would answer. Because my impression is that many on the left use “tolerance” as a synonym for “approval.” And, when you tolerate only those things of which you approve, you really tolerate nothing at all.

Shocking Ocasio-Cortez Scandal

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I just heard about this, and I am astounded that it could be true — and totally appalled by it.

Apparently, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has had her staff give her boyfriend a house.gov email address, claiming that he needed it for access to her calendar.

Yes, you read that correctly — and I suspect you are as surprised and shocked as I am.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a boyfriend!

A boyfriend. A boy. Male.

I mean, I just naturally assumed… you know. That she’d be more woke than that. Or something.

Smollett as Metaphor

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If you aren’t familiar with the purported assault on a young man named Jussie Smollett, you can read a pretty good account of it here. But, basically, this young gay black male actor (details which are relevant) claimed that he was attacked while walking in Chicago late at night at the end of January. He claimed his assailants were Trump supporters who committed various obviously racially-motivated offenses against him, and then fled the scene. His claims were met with expressions of outrage and support from celebrities and politicians, often accompanied by editorial comments about racism in America, the President, etc.

It now seems almost certain that Mr. Smollett staged the entire event, with the assistance of two friends whom he paid for their participation.

People do foolish and desperate things for all sorts of reasons. One rumor has it that Mr. Smollett was being dropped from a program he was on, and so was seeking some extra attention and visibility. I have no idea what else might have been going on in his life to prompt him to do something as ugly and dishonest as this, and I don’t care: he’s one individual among billions and, as I’ve said any number of times, there will always be someone doing something stupid — and, if it’s gaudy enough, someone will report it. People love drama when it doesn’t impact them.

Whatever his motivation, Mr. Smollett has done a disservice to those who are or will be victims of actual violence, and to everyone who cares about truth and justice.

But Mr. Smollett is hardly alone in fabricating injustice, nor even the worst offender. There is an entire industry in America devoted to promulgating the mistaken idea that America is a racist country — that is, that racism is a deep, widespread, and essential quality of our nation.

That’s nonsense. There are racist people; it could be argued that most people — black, white, brown, or otherwise — have some racial bias, preferences, or misconceptions. But to argue that America, a nation that has long demanded full legal equality regardless of race, that has elected all kinds of minorities to the highest offices, that is self-consciously obsessed with avoiding even the semblance of racism, and that considers a charge of “racist” to be the most damning epithet, is in any significant sense a “racist country” is both unfair and absurd.

Like Mr. Smollett, proponents of the racist America theory have had to fabricate evidence, misinterpret statistics, and impute bad intent where more prosaic explanations are readily available. And, like Mr. Smollett, they do injury both to the truth and to the victims of true racism — most significantly, victims of the racism they create with their misguided prescriptions for social justice: with their low expectations and preferential treatment, their outrage and their excuse-making.

Mr. Smollett sought to create division where there was none. Everyone who beats the racist America drum is doing the same, regardless of how well-intended, or not, their motives. Racism will diminish when, and not until, those most obsessed with it stop seeing it where it isn’t, in every disparity and imagined micro-aggression.

Slamming the “Overton Window”

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The Overton window, as most people probably know, is a term used to describe the range of ideas that are considered serious and worthy of, or acceptable for, public discussion and debate. As the window moves, ideas that would previously have been entertained become unacceptable, and ideas that previously would have seemed too outrageous for consideration enter the realm of legitimate discourse.

Slamming describes an illegitimate business practice that was popular after deregulation of the telecommunication industry in the 1980s. When competition was allowed in telephone service and new telephone companies began competing with AT&T, some customers would have their service switched from AT&T to a competitor without their knowledge or consent. This technique of stealing customers, known as slamming, was relatively easy to do given the procedures imposed by the government during the breakup.

The Overton window is being slammed. It is being pushed, by a hyper-activist progressive movement and an ideologically homogeneous press, far beyond anything the American people consider sensible or acceptable. The purpose of pushing the Overton window is to shift the public’s perception of which views are and aren’t legitimate and debatable. This strategy works, but it has its limits, and the new wave of recklessly progressive Democrats have gone beyond those limits, attempting to shift the public’s perceptions too far and too quickly.

We saw a bit of this excess during the Obama administration, when the President made demands about who could and couldn’t use the ladies’ room. That overreach garnered ridicule and outrage, and quite possibly contributed to a Republican presidential victory in 2016.

I think we are seeing the same kind of ideological overreach now on abortion, economic policy, environmental policy, and sexual identity. Moving the Overton window so far to the left that abortion-until-birth, socialism, the economic takeover of the United States required by the so-called Green New Deal, and the abolition of the concepts of man and woman are things that normal people are suddenly talking about strikes me as profoundly unwise, from a political standpoint. It’s too much, too fast, and too outrageous.

It’s also the consequence of a left that has given up any pretense of rigor or analysis in its thinking. When you are fueled by rage and obsessed with a fundamentally negative political ideology — one of identity/victimization, environmental apocalypse, economic envy, and an inexplicable but unquenchable passion for terminating pregnancies — it’s easy to believe that the nation will catch fire along with you — that revolution is afoot and nothing is too outrageous.

But the progressive bubble isn’t as big as the new hard-left thinks it is. They are introducing extremist ideas too fast, ideas that are not going to play well with a majority of Americans and that the left is going to somehow have to run from as we approach the 2020 elections. It will be interesting to watch the Democratic candidates try to distance themselves from an increasingly demanding and unhinged base.