The two sexes are products of evolution and natural selection. Clearly a biological selective advantage that manifests in countless species. Unless the theist’s god is a biological being, it is absurd to say it is male or female. Some writer in the desert wrote about his imaginary being in the sky and said it was male like his tribal chief. How on earth are such things still believed?
The God of the Abrahamic traditions is conceived as transcendent, unembodied Being, yet at the same time as unambiguously male. Maleness and, transitively, Femaleness must therefore be metaphysical states, prior to and more foundational than the characteristics of mere physical embodiment. I wonder if our contemporary sexual confusion is the upshot of internalizing this paradox. Maybe twenty centuries of habituation to the idea were bound to influence our thinking and behavior.
I love this - peering through a philosophical lens to examine the loss of self and soul both in general and trans identity confusion. Well done.
- forcing children to fit into shapes that are wildly at odds with their true natures, indeed.
I found it most interesting that through clinical/scientific study of trans individuals, Sadjadi explains the merging of science and religion - I assume he meant both in literature and subject self-report? Regardless, my mind goes to a starving of a reliable ideal and purpose experienced by today's youth (and of people/society in general but as is obvious, we are most impressionable in our formative years. More susceptible to external (mis)guidance on how to fill our 'god-shaped hole' - so to speak).
Thank you for the shout out! Much appreciated. I've 'plugged' your essay in said-conversation on my page - I attempted tagging @humanuseofhumanbeings - doesn't seem to have worked. I suppose that is reserved for notes.
Nietzsche and Loyola in the same article! Dylan and Cohen too.
Nietzsche says that the soul is just a primitive belief that needs to be discarded. He wanted us to discard all that otherworldly metaphysical nonsense, such as god and afterlife. The scientific revolution had dynamited all that mental claptrap. But Nietzsche did worry about what would replace all that nonsense. He did warn us about that abyss. He knew also that science wasn’t all that free from irrationality and could become rationality gone mad. Careful about the abyss of nihilism he warned.
Well, as this article, spells out, we falling into that abyss. Scientific certainty is falling away and new priesthoods are arriving that are demanding the masses see black even though they see white, as Loyola said. The priesthoods arriving now are not capable of the total powers of those of the Catholic Middle Ages, since they are constantly redefining their ideology. Nothing has meaning and every is mutable and that is nihilism.
Well, alrighty now. It's always interesting to read your stuff.
This is how I see it. All them primitive people were close enough to reality to recognize the loony-time of puberty had to be managed to ensure the survival of "the people" {so many languages defined *us* as human and *them* maybe not so much). Hence painful and sometimes dangerous rituals and mutilations, of lesser to greater severity, to mark the passage to adulthood. I don't doubt that they understood, without having the concepts to explain why, that inflicting pain somehow opened the pressure-cooker valve.
But no society produces a 100% healthy crop. There's always the percentage that loves pain, whether to receive or to inflict or both or sometimes etc. etc. etc. When a society tilts towards the crazy standards and loses sight of the healthy ones, sees them as deficient in merit, as the boring vanilla that means there's nothing interesting about you--you get here, where we are right now. Not enough crazy people are burned away in wars. Medicine rescues a lot of Darwin Award candidates who used to just die of their self-caused misadventures.
So Western society right now is reeking of malignant boredom. You know those fretful OCD habits of picking at one's cuticles or pulling out strands of hair or picking the poxy things on one's skin? We got 'em ramped up with official approval and encouragement.
I keep asking. All these detransitioners with their sad stories all including "I had multiple mental health issues..."
Where did all these sick kids come from? How can so many children be that sick, pre-puberty?
There have always been bad parents. Literature and history are full of the stories of what sick parents do to kids. It's not new, but population density always exacerbates any social problem.
You're a stickler for terms and definitions. I think we need to stop ceding any ground to anyone discussing this issue, including the nice friendly ones like SIngal and Mondegreen who still can't stop being polite and wanting not to offend anyone (so they keep getting access, no doubt).
It's sex-obliterating treatment. It's mutilation. People do demented things to relieve distress. There's lancing a boil, and there's cutting off anything that might potentially develop a boil someday.
Allowing adults who obliterated their own sex to be the physicians, surgeons, therapists etc. for these kids is handing the chickens over to the foxes. We've got this at the top of government agencies now so it's official policy to obliterate the sex of children on demand--their demand or their parents.
But maybe this self-eugenicizing is necessary. IF they're that crazy maybe we want them out of the gene pool.
I've thought about this a lot--how much should society interfere with the way parents want to raise their kids? There's no shortage of horrors one reads about every day. Home schooling as the subterfuge for the imprisonment and torture of kids who never interact with anyone outside the dungeon-home. Can we send out squads knocking door-to-door to inspect the bedrooms and basements?
Evrey day we learn of some kid beaten and murdered and the family was known to the system but the system still let it happen.
In a free society you can't save everyone. I want to start at least with saving the kids always handed back to the drug-addict parents who eventually succeed in abusing them to death. The other kids--the sad victims of neurotic obsessed parents who want social credit for *affirming* their *identities*--
--well, if Republicans get back in full power, we can stop that, right? But we'll stop abortion everywhere too. They are equally determined to own the bodies of the citizenry.
This will have to burn through and burn out. The high-functioning autistic crowd and their enablers insisted on valorizing *neurodivergence* and calling it a superpower, and they've normalized dysfunction.
I know people with now-adult autistic kids who can never live without supervision, and of course parents age and die sooner than their adult kids, on average, and it's a horror of grief and terror they face. But the self-advocacy crowd is treating autism as some of the deaf community treat their disability--as something that's just an alternate way of being that doesn't need to be cured.
That's insanity. To be unable to function independently in the world without extreme accommodations and government-paid services is not an alternative lifestyle choice. It's the destruction of society.
So maybe definition of terms is a sort of elegant intellectual distraction. The practical effect is sex obliteration and lifetime tethering to big pharma and endless corrective surgeries. So let's maybe use the brutal words and drown out the "what is a woman" discourse with brutal reality.
A bit too meandering for me to follow the end point - but I loved the reference to Sounds of Silence and enjoyed all the quoting. More importantly, you brought up some good points. If “gender identity” were just the degree and specificity of feminine and masculine qualities, it might have some real usefulness in terms of being able to discuss differing personality traits - and maybe that was the origin of the term. However, it is not being used that way at all when people use the term to justify chemical and surgical alterations of young, healthy bodies. The degree or type of feminine and masculine qualities one possesses would not justify these medical interventions. Instead, the term is supposedly a sense of whether one IS a male or a female - which makes zero sense. Whether a person is male or female is strictly based upon biology. While the specifics of biology that determine one’s sex - male or female, or the very few people who are so ambiguous as to not be clearly one or the other because of a biological anomaly - can be debated and tweaked as science reveals more facts, there is no question that biology alone determines sex. Sex is not a state of mind, although experiencing life as a sex can affect one’s state of mind in different ways. The idea that a “gender identity” determines whether one is male or female and in turn whether one’s biology is “correct” is quite an insane notion. Even if there were a “gender identity” whereby a soul knows “I am really male/female despite my biology,” the only way it justifies medical interventions is if there is a component of this knowing that says “if you are male, you must have a male appearing body” and vice versa. That is something else entirely and leads to my “Noah’s Ark” idea. (Like Noah in the Bible story, who knew the ark had to be built and animals gathered. these people have a spiritual and unquestionable - unfalsifiable - knowledge that these medical interventions must be completed ASAP.). To me at least, there is no credibility to such a notion. You’re assessment that what children are being taught is bad “parenting” is correct. Telling children they have a magical “gender identity” that will determine whether they can inhabit their healthy bodies or must instead alter them in unhealthy ways is plainly wrong. Anyway. this made nice reading while a passenger on a long car ride.
The two sexes are products of evolution and natural selection. Clearly a biological selective advantage that manifests in countless species. Unless the theist’s god is a biological being, it is absurd to say it is male or female. Some writer in the desert wrote about his imaginary being in the sky and said it was male like his tribal chief. How on earth are such things still believed?
The God of the Abrahamic traditions is conceived as transcendent, unembodied Being, yet at the same time as unambiguously male. Maleness and, transitively, Femaleness must therefore be metaphysical states, prior to and more foundational than the characteristics of mere physical embodiment. I wonder if our contemporary sexual confusion is the upshot of internalizing this paradox. Maybe twenty centuries of habituation to the idea were bound to influence our thinking and behavior.
I love this - peering through a philosophical lens to examine the loss of self and soul both in general and trans identity confusion. Well done.
- forcing children to fit into shapes that are wildly at odds with their true natures, indeed.
I found it most interesting that through clinical/scientific study of trans individuals, Sadjadi explains the merging of science and religion - I assume he meant both in literature and subject self-report? Regardless, my mind goes to a starving of a reliable ideal and purpose experienced by today's youth (and of people/society in general but as is obvious, we are most impressionable in our formative years. More susceptible to external (mis)guidance on how to fill our 'god-shaped hole' - so to speak).
Thank you for the shout out! Much appreciated. I've 'plugged' your essay in said-conversation on my page - I attempted tagging @humanuseofhumanbeings - doesn't seem to have worked. I suppose that is reserved for notes.
Nietzsche and Loyola in the same article! Dylan and Cohen too.
Nietzsche says that the soul is just a primitive belief that needs to be discarded. He wanted us to discard all that otherworldly metaphysical nonsense, such as god and afterlife. The scientific revolution had dynamited all that mental claptrap. But Nietzsche did worry about what would replace all that nonsense. He did warn us about that abyss. He knew also that science wasn’t all that free from irrationality and could become rationality gone mad. Careful about the abyss of nihilism he warned.
Well, as this article, spells out, we falling into that abyss. Scientific certainty is falling away and new priesthoods are arriving that are demanding the masses see black even though they see white, as Loyola said. The priesthoods arriving now are not capable of the total powers of those of the Catholic Middle Ages, since they are constantly redefining their ideology. Nothing has meaning and every is mutable and that is nihilism.
Well, alrighty now. It's always interesting to read your stuff.
This is how I see it. All them primitive people were close enough to reality to recognize the loony-time of puberty had to be managed to ensure the survival of "the people" {so many languages defined *us* as human and *them* maybe not so much). Hence painful and sometimes dangerous rituals and mutilations, of lesser to greater severity, to mark the passage to adulthood. I don't doubt that they understood, without having the concepts to explain why, that inflicting pain somehow opened the pressure-cooker valve.
But no society produces a 100% healthy crop. There's always the percentage that loves pain, whether to receive or to inflict or both or sometimes etc. etc. etc. When a society tilts towards the crazy standards and loses sight of the healthy ones, sees them as deficient in merit, as the boring vanilla that means there's nothing interesting about you--you get here, where we are right now. Not enough crazy people are burned away in wars. Medicine rescues a lot of Darwin Award candidates who used to just die of their self-caused misadventures.
So Western society right now is reeking of malignant boredom. You know those fretful OCD habits of picking at one's cuticles or pulling out strands of hair or picking the poxy things on one's skin? We got 'em ramped up with official approval and encouragement.
I keep asking. All these detransitioners with their sad stories all including "I had multiple mental health issues..."
Where did all these sick kids come from? How can so many children be that sick, pre-puberty?
There have always been bad parents. Literature and history are full of the stories of what sick parents do to kids. It's not new, but population density always exacerbates any social problem.
You're a stickler for terms and definitions. I think we need to stop ceding any ground to anyone discussing this issue, including the nice friendly ones like SIngal and Mondegreen who still can't stop being polite and wanting not to offend anyone (so they keep getting access, no doubt).
It's sex-obliterating treatment. It's mutilation. People do demented things to relieve distress. There's lancing a boil, and there's cutting off anything that might potentially develop a boil someday.
Allowing adults who obliterated their own sex to be the physicians, surgeons, therapists etc. for these kids is handing the chickens over to the foxes. We've got this at the top of government agencies now so it's official policy to obliterate the sex of children on demand--their demand or their parents.
But maybe this self-eugenicizing is necessary. IF they're that crazy maybe we want them out of the gene pool.
I've thought about this a lot--how much should society interfere with the way parents want to raise their kids? There's no shortage of horrors one reads about every day. Home schooling as the subterfuge for the imprisonment and torture of kids who never interact with anyone outside the dungeon-home. Can we send out squads knocking door-to-door to inspect the bedrooms and basements?
Evrey day we learn of some kid beaten and murdered and the family was known to the system but the system still let it happen.
In a free society you can't save everyone. I want to start at least with saving the kids always handed back to the drug-addict parents who eventually succeed in abusing them to death. The other kids--the sad victims of neurotic obsessed parents who want social credit for *affirming* their *identities*--
--well, if Republicans get back in full power, we can stop that, right? But we'll stop abortion everywhere too. They are equally determined to own the bodies of the citizenry.
This will have to burn through and burn out. The high-functioning autistic crowd and their enablers insisted on valorizing *neurodivergence* and calling it a superpower, and they've normalized dysfunction.
I know people with now-adult autistic kids who can never live without supervision, and of course parents age and die sooner than their adult kids, on average, and it's a horror of grief and terror they face. But the self-advocacy crowd is treating autism as some of the deaf community treat their disability--as something that's just an alternate way of being that doesn't need to be cured.
That's insanity. To be unable to function independently in the world without extreme accommodations and government-paid services is not an alternative lifestyle choice. It's the destruction of society.
So maybe definition of terms is a sort of elegant intellectual distraction. The practical effect is sex obliteration and lifetime tethering to big pharma and endless corrective surgeries. So let's maybe use the brutal words and drown out the "what is a woman" discourse with brutal reality.
A bit too meandering for me to follow the end point - but I loved the reference to Sounds of Silence and enjoyed all the quoting. More importantly, you brought up some good points. If “gender identity” were just the degree and specificity of feminine and masculine qualities, it might have some real usefulness in terms of being able to discuss differing personality traits - and maybe that was the origin of the term. However, it is not being used that way at all when people use the term to justify chemical and surgical alterations of young, healthy bodies. The degree or type of feminine and masculine qualities one possesses would not justify these medical interventions. Instead, the term is supposedly a sense of whether one IS a male or a female - which makes zero sense. Whether a person is male or female is strictly based upon biology. While the specifics of biology that determine one’s sex - male or female, or the very few people who are so ambiguous as to not be clearly one or the other because of a biological anomaly - can be debated and tweaked as science reveals more facts, there is no question that biology alone determines sex. Sex is not a state of mind, although experiencing life as a sex can affect one’s state of mind in different ways. The idea that a “gender identity” determines whether one is male or female and in turn whether one’s biology is “correct” is quite an insane notion. Even if there were a “gender identity” whereby a soul knows “I am really male/female despite my biology,” the only way it justifies medical interventions is if there is a component of this knowing that says “if you are male, you must have a male appearing body” and vice versa. That is something else entirely and leads to my “Noah’s Ark” idea. (Like Noah in the Bible story, who knew the ark had to be built and animals gathered. these people have a spiritual and unquestionable - unfalsifiable - knowledge that these medical interventions must be completed ASAP.). To me at least, there is no credibility to such a notion. You’re assessment that what children are being taught is bad “parenting” is correct. Telling children they have a magical “gender identity” that will determine whether they can inhabit their healthy bodies or must instead alter them in unhealthy ways is plainly wrong. Anyway. this made nice reading while a passenger on a long car ride.