Cardinals and lobsters
Mary Wakefield on the gender birthrate:
It was announced last week that another gender has been added to the list: nominalgender. Most news sites reported this in the sort of proud way a zoo might announce the birth of an exciting animal, a baby Komodo dragon maybe – as if the gender had somehow hatched and was waiting to be adopted. You are nominalgender ‘if your gender is so much just you that no one else can even experience it’, I read.
In fact no news sites reported this at all, so Wakefield is apparently doing satire. (There are a few mentions of “nominal gender” – two words, not one – but they’re not new and the meaning is pretty self-evident.)
Every day the list of possible gender options grows – metastasizes is a better word: non-binary, genderfluid, bigender, demigender, catgender. On Monday it was reported that a drag queen on the Isle of Man had informed Year 7 pupils that there are exactly 73 genders. When one brave child insisted that there were only two, the drag queen allegedly responded ‘You’ve upset me’ and sent the child out.
That on the other hand was reported in the news. I saw it at the time, rolled my eyes, and moved on. Look at all the good I do.
What the drag queen might have said, if the rude child hadn’t interrupted, is that though it’s an article of trans faith that there are 73 genders, it’s also often said that the fastest-growing gender subset is xenogender. You’re xenogender if you feel more akin to animals or plants or foods than humans. It’s funny, but it’s also frightening. There’s a girl on TikTok who explains very seriously that her gender is bird – a cardinal specifically, ey/em pronouns.
It turns out this is what the internet is for – telling the world about your boutique idenniny and pronouns. The lion labored and brought forth a mouse.
What does it mean to ‘come out’ as a bird? What does it mean, for that matter, to ‘come out’ as non-binary, or even trans? Isn’t it an insult to gay men and women for the language of gay rights to be hijacked by children who think they’re cake? It’s dangerous too. The phrase implies that you’ve searched your soul and discovered something true about yourself, and that coming out will set you free. But the reality is the opposite. The phrase ‘coming out’ acts like a trap, a lobster pot. In crawl the children, cheered on by their rainbow friends, but the way out is much harder to find.
That’s a good metaphor. It goes on working, too – being trans is like being the proverbial lobster in the pot that gets hotter and hotter.
I’ve looked into the eyes of that cardinal bird, and she wouldn’t thank you for suggesting that her identity is a joke. It’s not that she believes she has feathers or can fly, but she does think she’s discovered her true inner being. ‘I didn’t decide this. My brain decided for me.’
So the brain is external to the self. Interesting.
I suppose “snowflake gender” (my gender is unique!) would have been too spot-on.
Is “Schroedinger’s gender” still available? “My gender is in a state of quantum indeterminance unless and until it is observed.”
Episode 3 of “The Witch Trials of JKRowling” was uploaded yesterday. Megan Phelps-Roper does a deep dive on the source of the multiplicity of genders and otherkins. I’m not going to spoil it, but it does explain much about where we are.
This reminds me of something I read a couple of years ago, that our brain makes our decision, we don’t. It makes our decision seconds before we make it. Huh? We are our brain – our brain is us. Now, I would accept someone saying we don’t make our decisions the way we think we do, or that we make our decisions before we are conscious of making our decisions, but to say we don’t make our decisions, our brain does, is to embrace Cartesian dualism.
It is possible the journalist got it wrong, not the researchers. Journalists are notorious for simplifying things and reporting them in the best click-bait way possible (though this was a print magazine, not something to click, I think the idea is the same – get people to buy/click).
I was extremely aggrieved.
By the way, my brain has decided (for me, of course) that my inner self is viscera.
I listened to Episode 3 of “The Witch Trials of JKRowling” on Tuesday. As Mike says, it’s very interesting indeed.
The three currently available episodes are here.
That business about decisions that precede our conscious awareness of them is a big item in free will debates, for obvious reasons – how free can our will really be if that’s the chronology? It’s interesting (and disconcerting).
I don’t believe we actually have a free will. But we should act as if we do and treat others as if we do. To pretend that we have absolutely no agency and to try to live as if we’re just carried along by events is as erroneous as believing we have free will.
How do we decide what we’ll decide? Why do we struggle with compulsions? Why can’t we master all of our fears?
There is a time-delay between what our eyes register and what we “see.” Some say that’s to sync up vision (light) with hearing (the slower speed of sound). Or it’s just the brain’s processing speed. Regardless, the brain makes up what we perceive based on past experiences and it’s usually pretty accurate.
But I notice that my brain is also trying to help me. I’m very depressed and I often wake up in the night from dreaming I’m with people I’ve lost, and my mind is racing trying to figure out how to make everything seem right. (It’s the reason I drink so much. To blot it all out.)
Another example: I’d lost a cellphone on a bus. I went to the lost and found and they held up a green cellphone (after I’d told them the one I’d lost was green) and it looked exactly like my cellphone. They handed it to me and I notice that aside from the colour it was a different size, model and the case was all bumpy (whereas my lost one was smooth). My brain knew I wanted and bent reality temporarily to make me feel better.
This past Valentine’s Day caused me to think about this time delay again. I was in love with someone (it didn’t work out) and and I saw her face on every slender woman with long straight brown hair until I’d do a double-take and realize most of them looked nothing like her. My brain knew that I wanted to see her and tried to accommodate until it couldn’t.
None of that validates any of that “gender” crapola.
“Isn’t it an insult to gay men and women for the language of gay rights to be hijacked by children who think they’re cake?” Amazing sentence.