Opinion
The brilliant Australian journalist Jack Marx once asked, “Since when did the love that dare not speak its name become the love that just can’t shut the fuck up?” We might similarly ask, why do a gaggle of lurid fetishists who insist on inserting themselves (metaphorically and, too often, literally) in women’s and children’s spaces, need a “day of visibility”?
In fact, I suspect most of us would rather welcome a Trans Day of Shut the Fuck Up for Once. Imagine the blessed peace of not having to endure screeching men in dresses for just one day!
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about transgenderism, though, is not that somehow we’ve given license to mentally ill fetishists to publicly brutalise women and creep on children. What’s truly dumbfounding is that anyone outside of academia takes the ludicrous ideology behind it seriously for even a second.
Like so much academic onanism, transgenderism is an ideology that simply does not endure the least brush with reality. Even as an academic folly, though, transgenderism collapses under the weight of its own self-contradictions faster than a Marxist still trying to defend Marx’s theory of history more than a century after the Soviet Union became such an embarrassing counter-example. (According to Marx’s theory, a communist revolution simply should and could not have happened in Russia, let alone China. Yet, they did.)
To fully expose the essential ludicrousness of transgenderism, we need only examine its most fundamental argument: “sex and gender are not the same thing”. From this fundamental conceit flows everything we’ve come to know and loathe about transgenderism, from the belief that one can change gender at will, to the furiously asserted “trans women are women”.
But is this fundamental tenet of transgenderism even true?
To pick it apart, we must first acknowledge that there are multiple levels to this belief: what I would call the Soft Claim, the Hard Claim, and the Weird Claim. As you would expect, each successive claim is more extreme and harder to defend than the last. Yet, in a classic motte-and-bailey gambit, transgenderists proceed as if the Soft Claim is the same as the Weird Claim. Successfully (as they think) arguing the first, means that the rest are thereby automatically proven.
In Philosophy of Mind, David Chalmers has divided the Problem of Consciousness – what is it? Does it exist? How does it work? – into what he calls the “easy problems” and the “hard problem”.
The “easy problems” are the essentially mechanistic biological processes that are correlated to consciousness: the neural processes that accompany the sort of behaviour we associate with consciousness. These are such things as how sensory systems work, how sensory data is processed in the brain, how that data influences behaviour or verbal reports, the neural basis of thought and emotion, and so on. Such things are, to some extent at least, analysable by scientific experiment.
The “hard problem” is on another level altogether. It is the problem of why and how those processes are accompanied by what we experience as consciousness. Why, for example, do the firings of c-fibres cause the experience of pain? How do the purely physical facts of colour, texture, and scent, produce the exquisite sensation of a rose?
Note, though, that fellow philosopher Steven Pinker qualifies this by pointing out that even the “easy” problems are “about as easy as going to Mars or curing cancer”. That is, they are fiendishly difficult, but still (theoretically at least) amenable to scientific investigation. The “hard” problem, though, appears to be all-but-unsolvable. Even solving the “easy” problems would not, it seems, suffice to explain the “hard” problem.
If only transgenderists were as epistemically humble.
The Soft Claim of transgenderism is that “sex” is a purely biological reality, while “gender” refers to the social roles and outward behaviours attending biological sex. “Gender”, therefore, is mutable: differing from culture to culture, and from time to time in the same culture. What is “masculine” in one era of, say, Western society, was not the same 500 years ago as it is today.
It follows from this, the argument goes, that people’s gender may not necessarily be the same as their sex. A biological male might behave and assume the outward appearances otherwise associated with biological femininity.
So far, so reasonable. Even demonstrably true: male dress of 15th century Europe appears decidedly effeminate by 20th century European standards. But even here, the claim runs into trouble. Scots men wear kilts, which to some other cultures might appear to be a feminine “skirt”. But a kilt is not a skirt. Just because it “looks like” one, doesn’t mean that it is. The transgenderists are confusing the outward appearance with the role.
Nonetheless, they are far from content with the Soft Claim. Because, almost seamlessly, like a back-alley huckster sliding a pea and shells, they proceed straight to the Hard Claim.
The Hard Claim is that not only are sex and gender two completely different and unrelated things, but that one is biologically determined, the other “socially constructed”. This argument may seem superficially plausible – after all, who can deny that one’s sex is determined by biology, most fundamentally, the sex chromosomes? But it quickly unravels into not only self-contradiction, but plain denial of reality.
Before we proceed, we must, as a first course, investigate the two words: “sex”, and “gender”. The Hard Claim is, after all, a primarily semantic argument: that the two words refer to two completely different things.
Do they, though?
“Sex”, meaning “males or females considered collectively”, entered the English lexicon in the late 14th century. It derives from the Latin word sexus, which referred to the state of being either male or female.
Its more modern connotation, “to have sexual relations”, “intercourse” is of surprisingly modern origin: recorded from 1906. Slightly earlier variants, such as “sex object”, are derived from the word referring to “the female sex”, i.e., the feminine gender.
Already, we can see that “sex” and “gender” are, in fact, synonyms. Indeed, both originated at roughly the same time, with gender being the slightly older word by some decades. Its derivation is from Old French (“kind, species; character”, hence genre), itself also derived from Latin, genus (meaning both “race, stock, family; kind, rank, order; species” and “male or female sex”).
There it rested for over half a millennium. Sex and gender remained synonyms, with sex the preferred word. But, as sex came to also mean “sexual relations” in the 20th century, its use as a synonym for gender began to slowly decline. Yet, well into the second half of the 20th century, it was still widely used. The 1959 movie Journey to the Center of the Earth has Professor Lindenbrook (James Mason) refer scornfully to Madam Goteborg’s (Arlene Dahl) “sex”. Its use as such in a family movie clearly indicates that sex was a perfectly acceptable synonym for gender.
Within a few years, though, this began to change. Not as a result of normal linguistic drift, but as a drearily typical exercise in leftist forced language. A characteristic of weak arguments is when they attempt to redefine the plainly understood meanings of words in order to bolster their contention. This is exactly what feminist and gender theorists did, from the middle 1960s on.
It was the likes of New Zealand-born psychologist John Money who first began to argue the Hard Claim proper. Money argued that gender roles were not just correlated with gender, but that they determined it, irrespective of biological sex. Money attempted to put his theory into practice via a horrific series of experiments.
When a botched medical circumcision damaged the infant David Reimer’s penis beyond repair, his distraught parents sought the aid of the pioneering “sex therapist” Money, at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Money’s “solution” was to perform a sex change on the seven-month-old baby boy, and “assign” him a female gender. (That gender is supposedly “assigned” at birth is now a standard transgender dogma.)
David was now “Brenda”, and raised in every respect as a girl. The boy (now “girl”) was an ideal experimental subject for the early gender theorists: his “transition” occurred in the earliest months of his life, and he had a twin brother (penis undamaged) who would act as a control. Reimer was addressed by his parents as a girl, dressed as a girl, given “girl” toys and “girl” roles in life.
It got much darker than even that. From about the age of six, Money began to force the twins to engage in what he euphemistically called “childhood sexual rehearsal play”. Which in practise meant that they were forced to strip, play with each other’s genitals, and simulate sexual intercourse — with David/“Brenda” assuming the “female” role, of course.
These sessions were conducted in strictest secrecy from the Reimer parents. Should the children when alone with Money resist, as they did, the outwardly mild-mannered therapist became furious. “He screamed, ‘Now!’… I thought he was going to give me a whupping. So I took my clothes off and stood there shaking”. Money filmed the children at “play” at least once.
These grotesque “experiments” (which sound more like fetish gratification) were not just, to say the least, the most horrifically unethical experiments since the Behaviourists tormented baby monkeys and human children; they should have been a death blow to the Hard Claim of transgenderism.
If, as the Claim goes, gender is separate from sex, and wholly “socially constructed”, then David Reimer should have been a girl in all respects. But he wasn’t. As young David finally worked up the courage to tell his parents, he was a boy; he’d known, inside, that he was a boy since at least nine years old. As soon as he was able, he “de-transitioned”, and lived the rest of his regrettably short life (David suicided at 38; his twin brother Brian had done so two years earlier) as a man.
That should have been the end of the Hard Claim. The most perfectly socially constructed gender was unable to survive the biological reality of sex. Gender, therefore, is not “constructed”, nor “assigned”: it just is. Just like biological sex. Because the two are indeed the same.
But the problems with the Hard Claim don’t end there. Not only does the theory fail in practice, but even in theory it’s riddled with self-contradictions.
Consider, for instance, the twin claims that gender is socially constructed and that one can “misgender” a person. That is, one can “assign” the “wrong gender” to a person. This is, supposedly, a particularly heinous act. Indeed, in some places, it’s now a criminal act. You’ve no doubt seen the infamous clip of a hulking male wearing a bit of makeup and going berserk in a store because the clerk addressed him as “sir”. It’s Ma’am!
Yet, if gender is socially constructed, it is literally impossible to “misgender” someone. A society, after all, is a group of individuals interacting with one another. If we call a man in a dress “Sir”, we are socially constructing their gender. The cross-dressing male erupting in unhinged fury is individually constructing his (or, supposedly, “her”) gender.
So, “gender is a social construct” fails on three grounds: linguistic, logical, and experimental.
Undeterred, though, transgender ideologues have gone on from the Hard Claim to the Weird Claim.
This is the claim, usually unstated it is true, but nonetheless implicit in many “transgender” arguments, that “gender” is not only distinct from sex, but is an independently-existing, apparently autonomous, “thing”. It’s the weirdest philosophical claim, perhaps, since Descartes’ “substance dualism”.
Descartes, of “I think, therefore I am” fame, proposed what came to be called “substance dualism”. In Descartes’ argument, there is the human body, the physical substance, and the mind, which is another “substance”. The mind is not just a collection of thoughts, it is that which thinks. Thinking is its property. Yet properties are the properties of objects. Therefore there is an object, immaterial it is true, but nonetheless real, which is the mind.
This is identical in form to the argument of transgenderism. Gender is not just a collection of behaviours and appearances, it is “the thing which is gender”. Allied to this is the equally weird claim that biological sex “doesn’t exist”. This claim is quite literally made. It’s also inherent in the vehemently defended assertion that “trans women are women”. It’s why transgenderists are so outraged when women such as Germaine Greer or J K Rowling assert the biological essentialism of womanhood.
As we see, though, the Weird Claim, the Hard Claim, and the Soft Claim, of transgenderism are not distinct, self-reliant arguments. Each is interdependent on the previous, in a tottering Jenga tower of obvious nonsense, only stopped from complete collapse by the cheating fingers of academics and activists propping up the whole silly edifice. Pull one out, and the rest come tumbling down. As we’ve also seen, each deserves to be not just pulled out of the tower, but hurled decisively back in the box – and the whole lot shut up and shoved back in the dark, spider-infested cupboard whence it came.