Honestly legislators should not be this stupid. It’s an important job; they should not be this lost in the fog.

Thundering herds of bison that’s dumb. Of course people of any kind are not a theory or an ideology or a contested belief, and nobody says they are. The ideology/contested belief is that people can change sex, that people literally are the sex they are not, that people are what they say they are, that sex is determined by feelings and thoughts and not by the reality of the body.

The fact that there are children who say they are trans is indeed a fact. What’s not a fact is that “people [invariably] are who they say they are.” If that were the case there would never be long queues at airports while hundreds of people go through passport control. If that were the case people could empty other people’s bank accounts. If that were the case we could never be sure our doctor has any medical training.

Children who think they’re trans are a reality. Children who say they are trans are a reality. Children who are the opposite sex are a fiction.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on “Gender itself is a colonial introduction”.

That does not, of course, translate to “men are women if they say they are.” I suspect we’ll find that Butler relies on equivocating between the two – gender as The Rules and gender as “sexual dimorphism.”

I wouldn’t be at all surprised, as the entire genderist enterprise seems to be entirely dependent upon a combination of exactly that conflation, bait and switch (where a genderist will switch gears and meanings from one to the other mid-argument), and what Bjarte Foshaug has characterized as “bad puns,” such as TWAW. All heavily fortified with a generous heaping of “because SHUT UP!”

So much of this stems from questions about just how much of a window (if any) our limited, fallible senses offer on what we might call “the real world” external to our selves, and by extension, if there is any such “real world” at all. Maybe we’re just making stuff up as we go along, with various competing narratives vying for dominance, with an arbitrary, jury-rigged, threadbare, patchwork “reality” imposed by fiat on the rest of the universe by the most recent victor in the constant power-struggle for momentary, provisional, epistemic hegemony, and that any thoughts of a real world somehow underpinning anything are naive, mawkish, wishful thinking.

We are indeed fortunate that we live at a stage in our cultural and intellectual development that we can entertain such debates at all; for the vast majority of our lineage’s time on this Earth, an individual indulging in such esoteric cogitation for any length of time would have been soon eaten by a hungry lion unburdened by any such immobilizing doubts or second thoughts.

Onward!

Lugones describes the process this way, and I quote: “Sexual dimorphism has been an important characteristic of what I call [hand goes up for an air quote] ‘the light side’ of the colonial modern gender system. Those on the ‘dark’ side were not necessarily understood dimorphically. Sexual views of colonizers led them to imagine the indigenous people of the Americas as hermaphrodites, or intersex, with large penises and breasts with flowing milk.”

The claim seems to be that colonizers saw themselves as sexually dimorphic and indigenous people as not.

But as Paula Gunn Allen and others made clear, intersex individuals were recognized in many tribal societies prior to colonization, without assimilation to the sexual binary. It is important to consider the changes that colonization brought to understand the scope of the organization of sex and gender under colonialism and Eurocentered [sic] global capitalism.

In other words there was confusion about intersex people, therefore indigenous people knew all about trans people while the stupid Europeans were still droning on about the sexual binary.

Persuasive stuff!

If the latter did only recognize sexual dimorphism for white bourgeois males and females, it certainly does not follow that such a sexual division is based on biology. End quote.

Aw yeah, who would be stupid enough to think sexual dimorphism is based on biology?

Similarly, scholarship on East Africa and Uganda has demonstrated that gender inequality was introduced through Christian missionaries, suggesting that traditional social relations were in some ways more variable and free than those introduced through civilizational missions.

[skipping ahead a bit]

Let us be clear about the difference. The anti-gender position argues that gender is the colonizing force, and that getting rid of gender will reverse the course of colonization that it represents and enacts. De-colonial and anti-colonial perspectives [pause to stifle a bit of gas] argue that colonization imposed oppressive gender norms and new forms of identity classifications that intensified the subordination of women and the pathologization of non-gender-conforming queer and intersex people who had previously had a form of belonging in their communities.

So we mustn’t get rid of gender, we must cling to gender like grim death; what we need to do is get rid of oppressive gender norms.

Ok then my question becomes: what’s the difference between gender and gender norms?

I don’t think there is one; I think Butler is trying to sneak a trick past us. When we gender skeptics talk about getting rid of gender it’s the gender norms we mean. (Without the norms what even is gender?) We don’t think there’s some ghostly or Platonic essence called “gender” wandering around, separate from its norms. We think gender is the system that says men have to play football and women have to get their nails done.

She’s trying to grab the credit for resisting gender without actually doing it.

So who is Maria Lugones and who is Anibal Quijano and what do they say? Have a JSTOR preview:

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West.

That could all be about gender as the rules for how people of each sex are supposed to act, look, talk and all the rest of it. There certainly are such rules, and it’s highly likely that colonizers considered the rules of the colonized to be all wrong and in need of correction by the enlightened Europeans who wanted to exploit and enslave them. (Lugones seems to be saying the very idea of rules of any kind was a European invention, which seems highly unlikely.)

That does not, of course, translate to “men are women if they say they are.” I suspect we’ll find that Butler relies on equivocating between the two – gender as The Rules and gender as “sexual dimorphism.”

Stay tuned.

Source! It’s this talk:

So I’ll be on transcription duty for some time.

29:40:

…and that strong arguments have been made that it was actually colonialism and the kind of capitalism that it spawned that established the binary and heteronormative framework for thinking about and living gender for the first time. Indeed, if we consider the work of Maria Lugones, drawing on the work of Anibal Quijano, then colonial arrangements are the context and course of a wide range of issues that we think of as belonging to normative gender relations, including heteronormativity, dimorphic idealism, the patriarchal family, and the very norms that govern appearance. 30:24

So there we go, she does indeed say it. Now I’ll have to find out wtf “dimorphic idealism” is.

I suspect this project will take days. My Xmas present!

Furthermore, why is David Brooks a thing? I’ve been wondering that every time I’m reminded of him for twenty or thirty or a hundred years now. The latest reminder was accidentally seeing a few seconds of some pompous PBS chat show last night with him pompously saying words on it. Why? Who cares what he thinks? Why do the Approved Media keep asking for his input?

The Nation wondered the same thing last August.

Take heed, American reprobates! Your self-appointed spiritual doctor, David Brooks, is diagnosing your faults, sins, and self-serving moral evasions, and his findings are grim. In successive turns at the bully pulpits of The New York Times and The Atlantic, Brooks has detected a collective failure to grow up and lay aside the childish things that haunt our epoch: self-absorption, incivility, tribalism, and other just plain rude repudiations of character and virtue.

This line of argument has been a recurring theme in Brooks’s never-ending tenure as a commentator of mysteriously high profile.

Emphasis added. That. Why?? Why does he have such a high profile, and why has he had it for so long? He’s not another Christopher Hitchens now is he, so why?

Speaking of Christophers…

Brooks’s recent New York Times outburst—titled, of course, “Grow Up, America”—repeatedly cites [Christopher] Lasch’s best known work, the 1979 jeremiad The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch, as it happens, was my adviser in graduate school, and it’s been a grim intellectual crucible for me to see his work cited admiringly—and in predictably bowdlerized, stunted, and distorted fashion—on the American right. In his invocations of The Culture of Narcissism, Brooks carries on this appalling annexation project—and does so by once again excising all of the book’s many discussions of the central role that the capitalist political economy plays in the rise of a collective American narcissistic personality. Brooks approvingly quotes Lasch’s diagnosis of a debilitating brand of narcissism that leaves its sufferer doomed to seek “neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it,” while of course neglecting entirely to note Lasch’s own characterization of those conditions.

Brooks is a boring mediocre hack yet he’s a darling of public broadcasting and The New Atlantic York Times. It’s interesting that the same Major Media are all-in on trans ideology.

I should add, however, that I haven’t been able to confirm that Judith Butler did say that.

Here’s one talk that fits the description:

But searching the transcript turns up no hits for “imposition” or “sexual dimorphism” and the hit for “colonialist” doesn’t match the quotation. Maybe there are other talks where she does say that, but I have my doubts.

Ok then let’s see you pee standing up without soaking your shoes.

If sexual dimorphism is an observational imposition of Christian colonialism then how have people managed to reproduce all this time? How have animals known how to reproduce all this time? How have genitalia been different all this time? What are ovaries and what are they for? Why don’t babies emerge from men? Why can’t gay couples make babies without outside assistance?

Also why Christian colonialism but not Islamic colonialism? Was the Iberian peninsula packed full of people born via a miracle?

So many questions.

Oh you mean it’s malpractice? Huh.

fter Iowa lawmakers passed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in March, managers of an LGBTQ+ health clinic located just across the state line in Moline, Illinois, decided to start offering that care.

The added services would provide care to patients who live in largely rural eastern Iowa, including some of the hundreds previously treated at a University of Iowa clinic, saving them half-day drives to clinics in larger cities like Chicago and Minneapolis.

By June, The Project of the Quad Cities, as the Illinois clinic is called, had hired a provider who specializes in transgender health care. So, Andy Rowe, The Project’s health care operations director, called the clinic’s insurance broker to see about getting the new provider added to the nonprofit’s malpractice policy.

“I didn’t anticipate that it was going to be a big deal,” Rowe said. Then the insurance carriers’ quotes came. The first one specifically excluded gender-affirming care for minors. The next response was the same. And the one after that. By early November, more than a dozen malpractice insurers had declined to offer the clinic a policy.

Gee I wonder why.

Not really. The people whose job it is to think about risk and profit and lawsuits are not going to be bowled over by soaring rhetoric about “authentic selves” nor are they going to be intimidated by shouty “activists” on Twitter.

Nearly half the states have banned medication or surgical treatment for transgender youth. Independent clinics and medical practices located in states where such care is either allowed or protected have moved to fill that void for patients commuting or relocating across state lines. But as the risk of litigation rises for clinics, obtaining malpractice insurance on the commercial marketplace has become a quiet barrier to offering care, even in states with legal protections for health care for trans people.

See journalists are still as stupid about this as the activists they’re trying to impress. Actuaries are probably less likely to see mutilation as “health care” even for trans people.

In extreme cases, lawmakers have deployed malpractice insurance regulations against gender-affirming care in states where courts have slowed or blocked anti-trans legislation.

Is the legislation “anti-trans”? Or is it anti-reckless haste to mutilate teenagers in the belief that they were born in the wrong body?

Five months after starting his search for malpractice insurance, Rowe said, he received a quote for a policy that would allow The Project to treat trans youth. That’s when he realized finding a policy was only the first hurdle. He expected the coverage to cost $8,000 to $10,000 a year, but he was quoted $50,000.

Gee, just imagine, you have to pay a lot for insurance when you’re mutilating children on the grounds that they’re the opposite sex of their own bodies.

The Bridge to Total Freedom…

Dawn Butler v Mumsnet:

The founder of parenting message board Mumsnet has hit back at a Labour MP who has threatened to report the website to the Metropolitan Police after users on the site slammed her reaction to the Brianna Ghey murder trial verdict.

Dawn Butler told critics to ‘get a life’ after they hit out at her suggestion that the trans teenager’s death at the hands of two teenagers in Cheshire earlier this year had been driven by ‘hate towards the trans community’ from within the government.

They sure do love that “hit back slammed hit out at hit hit hit” trick at the Daily Mail, which I suppose is not surprising. Dawn Butler talked nonsense and people at Mumsnet said it was nonsense. No one hit anyone.

The Brent Central MP’s post was then shared on Mumsnet, and she claimed this prompted an influx of messages from ‘nasty, vicious, inhumane’ people on X, formerly Twitter. The MP then said she would report the message board to the Met.

In a statement to MailOnline, Mumsnet founder Justine Roberts said the website allowed ‘legal discussion’, adding: ‘(This) sometimes means people will make comments that individuals don’t agree with or like.’

Well then they will have to be reported to the Met. What else is there to do?

In a statement to MailOnline, Mumsnet founder and CEO Justine Roberts said: ‘Our forum guidelines are pretty clear. We allow legal discussion, which sometimes means people will make comments that individuals don’t agree with or like. We specifically disallow hate speech and deliberately inflammatory posts and we have an active moderation team who respond, on average in under an hour, to complaints about posts. 

‘It’s somewhat ironic that Ms Butler chose to post her attack on Mumsnet on X (formerly Twitter) which regularly hosts comments that wouldn’t last a moment on Mumsnet and where the moderation is light touch at best. We see this kind of double standard a lot and I’m beginning to wonder if it might be because Mumsnet is the only major platform dominated by women’s voices.’

‘Beginning to wonder’ – nice sarcasm.

Ah Joly. Never change. You’re comedy gold.

This headline, in The Times, is flatly untrue. I have not been questioned by the police. At the judges’ [sic] request, they contacted me with her question. There has never been, as this headline suggest [sic], any police investigation.

Got it. He has not been questioned by the police, the police have merely asked him a question. Glad we got that straightened out.

Originally a comment by Sastra on An innate sense of bulllshit.

It comes from the deepest knowledge and understanding of someone’s own identity, their heart, their soul, their brain, their being. Themself

And yet both gender — and sex — are supposed to be social constructs.

It’s quite a contradiction, this denial of objective categories consisting of the objectively true coupled with an intense belief in the innate and immutable truth of one’s own Identity. According to Yascha Mounk ( in his book The Identity Trap) this circle was squared by what’s called “strategic essentialism.”

While it is important to bear in mind the theoretical fact that identity groups are socially constructed, for practical purposes the strategic imperative to encourage the formation of identity groups that can become a locus for resistance against domination must take precedence. Over time, practice won out over theory, and the emphasis shifted from the idea that these concepts are socially constructed to the prescription that they should, to all intents and purposes, be treated as an objectively given fact.

Thus, the ability to believe two opposing things at once. We’re using metaphysical layers.

It would be a good idea I think for the Genderists to consider the distinct possibility that our deepest knowledge of our heart, soul, and being is also socially constructed, given how our nature was and is influenced and shaped from birth by our environment. All the talk of neural wiring causing transgender identities ignores the plasticity of the brain under different conditions. I am willing to entertain the idea that, given different circumstances in my upbringing and socialization, I might now be identifying as transgender. I might even be gay. If nothing is written in stone, fewer things were written in the prenatal brain than we can ourselves discern. Being extremely close doesn’t necessarily give us perspective.

At any rate, the contradiction between gender as social construct and gender as the inviolable Me-ness of Me gets to sit on the Science of Gender shelf next to the contradiction between wanting to eliminate strict binaries between the sexes while screaming that being referred to as one sex when you’re really the other strips away your humanity. Gender GP’s description of “the true nature of gender incongruence “ is nicely incongruent itself.

Gender GP explains the science of gender.

We at GenderGP understand the true nature of gender incongruence where someone’s true gender identity is different to the one that society expects them to have based on their genitals.

Being transgender is not a lifestyle choice, a preference or a cool thing to do. It is an innate sense of self.

Wait. How are those different things? How is “an innate sense of self” not a lifestyle choice or a cool thing to do or a preference? What exactly is “an innate sense of self”? How does Gender GP know? How does Gender GP distinguish between “an innate sense of self” and what people grow up being told about the self and their own selves?

There’s no such thing as “an innate sense of self.” There’s only growing up and being told things. A child raised by goats wouldn’t have any “innate sense of self.”

It comes from the deepest knowledge and understanding of someone’s own identity, their heart, their soul, their brain, their being. Themself.

Woofle woofle woofle. Pretty words that mean nothing. Get drunk on your own rhetoric all you want, but leave everyone else out of it.

People who are gender incongruent, transgender, trans, gender diverse – whatever we want to call it, are real. They exist, they are honest, they are telling us something simple. Society expects them to be male, but actually they are female. Society expects them to be female, but actually they are male. Society is saying they must label themselves as either male or female, when neither feels right. Society expects them to fit within a picture of gender that has been constructed over time, but does not match reality.

Simple and stupid. Simple and crude. Simple and wrong.

No one child deserves any better treatment than another child. White, cisgender, able children do not need to be protected from any child that is black, trans or less abled simply because that is what they are. All the children in your school need to be protected from harm – equally.

Notice what they carefully leave out. Of course they do. They leave out male and female, because that would remind everyone that being male is an advantage just as being white or able is an advantage. (“Cis” is just nonsense.) They mustn’t remind us of that because it makes it too obvious what a disaster their ideology is.

Chip chip chip slowly but steadily every gain women have made over the past 50 years or so is being taken back.

Canada rewards this disgusting pig of a man for defunding a rape shelter. A woman stands next to him while he gloats. He appears to be manipulating the levers on her back, probably trying to make her smile more energetically.

Good law guy apologizes to the court for potentially prejudicing a trial. What a genius.

Jolyon Maugham, the founder of the Good Law Project, has apologised after a judge castigated him for tweeting ­during the Brianna Ghey trial about the defendants’ supposed transphobia.

The barrister and staunch supporter of trans rights posted a series of tweets on November 27, the first day of the trial, in which he wrote that “the killers exchanged transphobic slurs”.

He’s not some random gossip on Twitter, he’s a barrister. He’s even a barrister who calls himself Good Law.

Following a complaint about the tweet from the prosecution, Mrs Justice Yip said that the comment was potentially in contempt of court, a crime that can result in a jail term for those judged to have prejudiced a trial.

Maugham was spoken to by police on behalf of the court and deleted the tweet, the court heard. He said he had later apologised to the judge.

How generous of him.

Yet another deliberate insult.

There are simply no women who could do that. Not one. It just has to be a man in girly makeup.

He says he’s incredibly proud. I bet he is – women are incredulous too.

Even a Catholic college.

Saint Mary’s College, a Catholic women’s college in Notre Dame, Indiana, has reversed a new policy that would consider transgender women for admission following public outcry.

In November, a local student newspaper, The Observer, reported that Saint Mary’s had notified students of an update to its non-discrimination policy, which was approved in June. Saint Mary’s would have considered cis women as well as individuals who “consistently live and identify as women,” for admission beginning in fall 2024, according to the college.

Classic, isn’t it? The Catholic church keeps women down in every way it can think of, but when it’s a matter of men pretending to be women (and taking what belongs to women) why then the church is delighted to give its approval. Heads women are screwed, tails women are screwed.

The LGBTQ+ community, especially the transgender community, has been targeted in recent years as they fight for inclusion and equal rights. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is currently tracking more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills across the U.S. While progressives push the LGBTQ+ community to be protected, conservatives see them as a threat to gender and sexuality norms.

Wrong. There are plenty of progressives who don’t want men invading and taking everything that belongs to women. It’s a split within the left as well as a split between left and right.

Originally a comment by Piglet on Could be.

There’s a theory that gender identity is more important than biological sex as a cause of gender disparities in outcomes? How could that be?

No, I’ve seen this being seriously argued. The idea is that men are faster, stronger etc than women because they have stronger encouragement to do sport, better coaches, more resources etc. Which is why it’s so important to let male people barge in and hog the meagre resources that female athletes DO have. /s

I read the paper and it’s actually quite funny in a way—it reads like an assignment given to undergraduates so that they can demonstrate statistical methods. What I think they’ve done in this paper is the gender equivalent of The Art of War.

A lot of people read that book (there’s this peculiar idea that it’s useful in business management) and come away thinking it’s all too bleeding obvious. Understand your enemy, focus on his weak points, big whoop. But Sun Tzu was specifically writing a how-to guide for inbred idiotic noblemen whose family connections meant they were leading an army with no idea what they were doing, and he needed a basic handbook to throw at them (possibly literally). There’s a definite sense of “FINE, I’ll actually codify these extremely basic and obvious principles so you don’t lose ANOTHER thousand men in another rout…”

Just fancy, being tethered to a phone all day every day isn’t good for the intellect.

PISA finds that students who spend less than one hour of “leisure” time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose eyes are glued to their screens more than five hours a day. This gap held even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors. For comparison, a 50-point decline in math scores is about four times larger than America’s pandemic-era learning loss in that subject.

Never mind. AI will do the math for us.

Screens seem to create a general distraction throughout school, even for students who aren’t always looking at them. Andreas Schleicher, the director of the PISA survey, wrote that students who reported feeling distracted by their classmates’ digital habits scored lower in math. Finally, nearly half of students across the OECD said that they felt “nervous” or “anxious” when they didn’t have their digital devices near them. (On average, these students also said they were less satisfied with life.) This phone anxiety was negatively correlated with math scores.

There are other surveys.

Studies have shown that students on their phone take fewer notes and retain less information from class, that “task-switching” between social media and homework is correlated with lower GPAs, that students who text a lot in class do worse on tests, and that students whose cellphones are taken away in experimental settings do better on tests. As Haidt, a psychologist, has written in The Atlantic, the mere presence of a smartphone in our field of vision is a drain on our focus. Even a locked phone in our pocket or on the table in front of us screams silently for the shattered fragments of our divided attention.

One could stop right at that “students who text a lot in class” – why are they even allowed to do that? Is it because they could be taking notes and the teachers can’t be checking everyone all the time? Or because everyone’s just given up?

Oh well. AI will do our thinking for us.