Good stuff, as usual. Although, I do have to have a smirk at your own contextual definitional fuzziness re: the Canadian 'hinterlands', which are a good 50 miles north of the U.S. border when addressing Slate, but a mere 10 miles northwards wrt the NYT. ;) Cheers! _Alan M
Thanks for reading, dropping in, and commenting. I had a fair amount of editing to do on those three letters, the originals of which I had cut-and-pasted from one to the other. 10 miles seemed a little light the first time around so changed it to 50, but didn't have the time -- it was late -- or inclination to correct the discrepancy in the Substack post.
Well, it's always fun to read your pieces. But I'd say what you're attempting to do is analogous to me writing to the Pope and observing the ridiculousness of a guy wearing a yarmulke and a dress in his role as the Supreme Leader of one of the three Middle Eastern blood sacrifice cults and expecting him to be persuaded by my argument.
Those "journalists" you wrote to are fully invested in being polite and respectful and willing to continue to promote the lie that it's a big complicated subject about which there are many perhaps equally valid viewpoints.
I'm fairly sure that the still small voice speaking up annoyingly from some metaphysical corner of their anatomies has already told them that this is all craziness and they hope to God to escape the rubble when the roof finally comes crashing down.
Any kindergartner whose classroom has contained a mating pair of hamsters understands what boys are and what girls are and what needs to happen to enable them to have offspring of the same species of mammal--and this even if the library shelves in that classroom also contain copies of "I am Jazz" and "Heather Has Two Mommies." Of course all of current education is determined to beat this basic knowledge out of the heads of our children and insert the precepts of a deranged cult into them.
Stern and Singal et al know what women are and what men are and that Caitlyn Jenner is one hell of a fucked-up guy and that Jenny Boylan et al betrayed their wives and kids and ought not to be allowed near other people's children under any circumstances.
They ought really to read the memoir published by one of Jan Morris's daughters that will give a brutal introduction to what happens to a family when the paterfamilias decides, some fine day, to become a sister-wife to his own now-careworn bride and demands that none of the kids he's the progenitor of should ever again refer to him as daddy.
This dreadful contagion must burn itself out as it eventually runs out of fuel. There's always a previous insane contagion and there will always be another one.
And perhaps, with grieved but clear eyes, we must recognize that this too is nature's way of removing the unfortunately defective from the breeding pool. It's never a clean operation.
Thanks for the comment and restack there SCA. Though I have to admit that my "battles" kinda feel like pissing into the wind, but there's still the view of Edmund Burke that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Battles for hearts and minds are won, or lost, in the trenches.
Still rather disappointed in both Stern and Singal, in particular -- I'm reminded of a photo from the aftermath of WW2 where American troops forced German townspeople to walk through various concentration camps to see what had been done "in their names". Similarly, a great many people need to have their noses rubbed in the rather odious consequences of "gender ideology"; whole bunch of "doctors" need to be strung up by their nuts and left to twist in the wind, figurately speaking, of course ... :
Something in the way of a resounding end of the beginning there, courtesy of DJT and company ...
Know you're not a big fan of "she who must not be named", but she and Helen Joyce quite reasonably argue that transgenderism is something in the way of a "civilization threatening/ending movement":
Rather moot where the roots of that movement start from, though they seem to go back some distance and rather deep, but your comment about Jan Morris led me to an old NY Times article (1974) which points to one proximate cause:
NYTimes: "... the autobiographical book in which she gives a blow by blow account of his change of sex ...
😮 "she" and "his change of sex"? 🙄 Absolutely no human changes sex, and people giving any credence at all to even the possibility of it -- like Singal and Stern -- are as much a part of the problem as are gender ideologues like Andrea Long Chu.
Why I tend to harp on the question of biological definitions. You may think they aren't necessary, that people, and mice, do what comes naturally, know the differences between males and females, without Judith Butler muddying the waters. But I wonder what sex you think these CAIS people are:
Most red-blooded Amurican boys, and Canadian ones too, would probably jump their bones at the drop of a hat, yet many so-called biologists would probably call them males since they have internal, though non-functional, testicles.
In my view nothing will be civilization-ending other than the giant asteroid hit if it comes.
I stand by the final two paragraphs of my first comment. We're not meant to live in what we now think of as "normal societies" since we're so far out from hunter-gathering. Excess stress in the environment macht crazy. The gene pools weeds itself out. It's horrible to see and any moral person would recoil from doing it deliberately in a human-imposed eugenics program but it will happen naturally regardless of our feelings about it.
I've said to you, before, and in threads elsewhere in the more general sense regarding the times we're in, that our most effective response is to gain control of governing bodies from the ground up. If we can fire the deranged librarians and get normal healthy age-appropriate books back in the hands of our little children; if we can get control of the school boards and the taxing and granting authorities, etc. etc.--we've a chance to let the normal people flourish for a generation or so until it goes haywire again.
And the thing is--it's not about sex. That's a distraction. Unhappy people are constantly seeking to escape themselves and enter into a new, imagined transformative identity. All of religious conversion is about washing oneself clean of the old self. I understand that painfully well and have seen that in others. All cults are the same and the desperation to be embraced by the members of the cult can be hard to survive.
The CAIS people--I can't imagine how distressing it is to seem like and be raised as a girl and discover that one is in fact not. But as we discussed these are disorders of normal development. They don't count in the argument about what a boy and girl are in the proper scheme of things.
Methinks some major parallels with transgenderism.
SCA: "The gene pools weeds itself out."
What happened to "no child left behind"? Even if there's some merit in abandoning the dysphoric to their fates, that still leaves the rather toxic ideology to destroy or decimate succeeding generations. It's nice that you champion some common cause against the ideological capture of schools -- even if it's somewhat inconsistent with your apparent rejection of Burke's call -- but it still seems the best way forward there is to steelman the concept of gender and to show the untenability of extremist interpretations.
Which is one of the faults of the so-called "gender-critical" crowd -- they rather dogmatically insist there's no merit in differentiating between traits that define the sexes and those that are merely typical of, but not unique to each sex, i.e., "gender".
But somewhat apropos of which:
"The Anti-Science Disaster of Gender Ideology in the Schools; Scientists Must Join the Resistance."
As for those "CAIS people", methinks that your "what a boy and girl are in the proper scheme of things" still leaves hanging the rather pregnant question as to exactly what it takes to qualify as such "proper boys and girls". Largely Hippiesq's point about definitions.
Trump's EO which specifies "produces gametes" is more or less just what standard biological definitions say, even if it leaves open to interpretation when that might take place, and whether those people before or after that state still qualify for sex category membership cards. But those CAIS people, and many of the intersex, are incapable of ever producing any gametes at all and thereby might reasonably be called sexless. That so many people balk at even that seems also to be a major part of the problem; it's not just the dysphoric who have turned the sexes into identities.
One can understand that a person who appears physically "normal" on the outside though the inside is scrambled would be highly distressed to be described as "sexless."
I think the naturally highly-distressed parents of kids butchering themselves for a delusion aren't necessarily a good reference point for definitions. They're feeling their way through a forest of thorns and trying to make sense of it as best will help them keep their sanity.
As for leaving any child behind--if wishes did come true I'd be The Vitamin Fairy and visit everyone in their fertile years, every day, and give them their multies. It is a great, great tragedy that so many conditions which can very easily be prevented or lessened in severity by being well-supplied with essential nutrients are nevertheless so prevalent.
I have considerable experience of the autistic--other people's children--and even in the more mildly afflicted the suffering is terrible. I hope always that a true cure or preventative can be found in our lifetime.
But even in our supposedly modern advanced times there are traits essential for healthy survival and those that are the opposite and if you're not well-built for survival you are likely to do poorly.
SCA: "... would be highly distressed to be described as 'sexless.' ...."
Lotta that goin' round these days ...😉🙂 Though largely only because many don't realize that, at least within mainstream biology, the definitions for "male" and "female" aren't designed to grant any participation trophies, aren't designed as status markers, but only to capture the "essences" of those categories. That "produces gametes" is a ubiquitous trait shared among literally millions of species, and which is what justifies that definition.
For example, see this archived tweet from one Zachary Elliott -- who's had several guest posts on Colin Wright's Reality's Last Stand -- which exhibits the same "distress" at the intersex being "deprived" of their sex category membership cards:
"Zachary Elliott; @zaelefty: Discrimination is not eliminated, and true acceptance is not shown, by embracing the scientifically incorrect and morally problematic claims that people who differ from the norm are both or neither sexes."
I've provided both an archive link and the tweet itself as ol' Zach is something of a jam-tart -- still wet behind the ears -- since he's apparently deleted the tweet -- probably because I've been giving him some grief on it for the last 3 years. You might ask him about that, or send him a link to this thread ... 😉🙂
But since when do "morally problematic claims" have any relevance to scientific principles, theories, and terminology? If he'd been alive at the time of Darwin he would have been saying the same thing about "morally problematic claims that we have descended from apes". Likewise with Galileo and "morally problematic claims" that the Earth isn't the center of the universe.
SCA: "... naturally highly-distressed parents of kids butchering themselves for a delusion aren't necessarily a good reference point for definitions."
Perfectly reasonable principle, going back at least to Voltaire, if not to Adam as the first taxonomist, the "real" "oldest profession" ... 😉🙂
That some parents are "highly-distressed" by the tasks thereof -- clearly not always a picnic -- doesn't necessarily mean they're unable to deal with difficult tasks in other areas of their lives. This old article from the Atlantic isn't entirely analogous, though "butchering themselves" has some parallels in people cutting off legs and arms because they "see" themselves, and want to be seen as amputees:
Not far removed from the many "transgendered", mostly transwomen, who have contributed significantly despite having "butchered themselves" -- Lynn Conway for example, one rather clever "lady":
Many people have some rather "odd" beliefs -- middle-eastern blood sacrifice cults for example ... 😉🙂 -- yet still manage to be more or less functioning members of society. Michael Shermer, in his Believing Brain, offered Kary Mullis as a case in point:
SCA: "I hope always that a true cure or preventative can be found in our lifetime."
I'm putting my money on a cure for Alzheimer's ... Or maybe just old age ... 🙂
SCA: "... if you're not well-built for survival you are likely to do poorly."
Kind of the nature of the beast. Probably millions of species, and hundreds of civilizations, have bitten the dust, been lost in the mists of time. Stark reminders of our mortality, species and individuals -- reminds me of the poem, probably first read somewhere in high school, about Ozymandias.
Good stuff, as usual. Although, I do have to have a smirk at your own contextual definitional fuzziness re: the Canadian 'hinterlands', which are a good 50 miles north of the U.S. border when addressing Slate, but a mere 10 miles northwards wrt the NYT. ;) Cheers! _Alan M
Busted! 😉🙂
Thanks for reading, dropping in, and commenting. I had a fair amount of editing to do on those three letters, the originals of which I had cut-and-pasted from one to the other. 10 miles seemed a little light the first time around so changed it to 50, but didn't have the time -- it was late -- or inclination to correct the discrepancy in the Substack post.
Well, it's always fun to read your pieces. But I'd say what you're attempting to do is analogous to me writing to the Pope and observing the ridiculousness of a guy wearing a yarmulke and a dress in his role as the Supreme Leader of one of the three Middle Eastern blood sacrifice cults and expecting him to be persuaded by my argument.
Those "journalists" you wrote to are fully invested in being polite and respectful and willing to continue to promote the lie that it's a big complicated subject about which there are many perhaps equally valid viewpoints.
I'm fairly sure that the still small voice speaking up annoyingly from some metaphysical corner of their anatomies has already told them that this is all craziness and they hope to God to escape the rubble when the roof finally comes crashing down.
Any kindergartner whose classroom has contained a mating pair of hamsters understands what boys are and what girls are and what needs to happen to enable them to have offspring of the same species of mammal--and this even if the library shelves in that classroom also contain copies of "I am Jazz" and "Heather Has Two Mommies." Of course all of current education is determined to beat this basic knowledge out of the heads of our children and insert the precepts of a deranged cult into them.
Stern and Singal et al know what women are and what men are and that Caitlyn Jenner is one hell of a fucked-up guy and that Jenny Boylan et al betrayed their wives and kids and ought not to be allowed near other people's children under any circumstances.
They ought really to read the memoir published by one of Jan Morris's daughters that will give a brutal introduction to what happens to a family when the paterfamilias decides, some fine day, to become a sister-wife to his own now-careworn bride and demands that none of the kids he's the progenitor of should ever again refer to him as daddy.
This dreadful contagion must burn itself out as it eventually runs out of fuel. There's always a previous insane contagion and there will always be another one.
And perhaps, with grieved but clear eyes, we must recognize that this too is nature's way of removing the unfortunately defective from the breeding pool. It's never a clean operation.
Thanks for the comment and restack there SCA. Though I have to admit that my "battles" kinda feel like pissing into the wind, but there's still the view of Edmund Burke that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Battles for hearts and minds are won, or lost, in the trenches.
Still rather disappointed in both Stern and Singal, in particular -- I'm reminded of a photo from the aftermath of WW2 where American troops forced German townspeople to walk through various concentration camps to see what had been done "in their names". Similarly, a great many people need to have their noses rubbed in the rather odious consequences of "gender ideology"; whole bunch of "doctors" need to be strung up by their nuts and left to twist in the wind, figurately speaking, of course ... :
https://www.thedistancemag.com/p/the-cult-of-the-trans-child-is-doomed
Something in the way of a resounding end of the beginning there, courtesy of DJT and company ...
Know you're not a big fan of "she who must not be named", but she and Helen Joyce quite reasonably argue that transgenderism is something in the way of a "civilization threatening/ending movement":
https://lawliberty.org/podcast/when-does-sex-matter/
Rather moot where the roots of that movement start from, though they seem to go back some distance and rather deep, but your comment about Jan Morris led me to an old NY Times article (1974) which points to one proximate cause:
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/04/14/archives/conundrum-by-jan-morris-a-helen-and-kurt-wolff-book-174-pp-new-york.html?unlocked_article_code=1.WE8.Pr5u.ZSBEHWEVex9H&smid=url-share
NYTimes: "... the autobiographical book in which she gives a blow by blow account of his change of sex ...
😮 "she" and "his change of sex"? 🙄 Absolutely no human changes sex, and people giving any credence at all to even the possibility of it -- like Singal and Stern -- are as much a part of the problem as are gender ideologues like Andrea Long Chu.
Why I tend to harp on the question of biological definitions. You may think they aren't necessary, that people, and mice, do what comes naturally, know the differences between males and females, without Judith Butler muddying the waters. But I wonder what sex you think these CAIS people are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome#Signs_and_symptoms
Most red-blooded Amurican boys, and Canadian ones too, would probably jump their bones at the drop of a hat, yet many so-called biologists would probably call them males since they have internal, though non-functional, testicles.
In my view nothing will be civilization-ending other than the giant asteroid hit if it comes.
I stand by the final two paragraphs of my first comment. We're not meant to live in what we now think of as "normal societies" since we're so far out from hunter-gathering. Excess stress in the environment macht crazy. The gene pools weeds itself out. It's horrible to see and any moral person would recoil from doing it deliberately in a human-imposed eugenics program but it will happen naturally regardless of our feelings about it.
I've said to you, before, and in threads elsewhere in the more general sense regarding the times we're in, that our most effective response is to gain control of governing bodies from the ground up. If we can fire the deranged librarians and get normal healthy age-appropriate books back in the hands of our little children; if we can get control of the school boards and the taxing and granting authorities, etc. etc.--we've a chance to let the normal people flourish for a generation or so until it goes haywire again.
And the thing is--it's not about sex. That's a distraction. Unhappy people are constantly seeking to escape themselves and enter into a new, imagined transformative identity. All of religious conversion is about washing oneself clean of the old self. I understand that painfully well and have seen that in others. All cults are the same and the desperation to be embraced by the members of the cult can be hard to survive.
The CAIS people--I can't imagine how distressing it is to seem like and be raised as a girl and discover that one is in fact not. But as we discussed these are disorders of normal development. They don't count in the argument about what a boy and girl are in the proper scheme of things.
SCA: "In my view nothing will be civilization-ending other than the giant asteroid hit if it comes."
Think I mentioned what happened when "the Arabic World Turned Away from Science; On the lost Golden Age and the rejection of reason":
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science
Methinks some major parallels with transgenderism.
SCA: "The gene pools weeds itself out."
What happened to "no child left behind"? Even if there's some merit in abandoning the dysphoric to their fates, that still leaves the rather toxic ideology to destroy or decimate succeeding generations. It's nice that you champion some common cause against the ideological capture of schools -- even if it's somewhat inconsistent with your apparent rejection of Burke's call -- but it still seems the best way forward there is to steelman the concept of gender and to show the untenability of extremist interpretations.
Which is one of the faults of the so-called "gender-critical" crowd -- they rather dogmatically insist there's no merit in differentiating between traits that define the sexes and those that are merely typical of, but not unique to each sex, i.e., "gender".
But somewhat apropos of which:
"The Anti-Science Disaster of Gender Ideology in the Schools; Scientists Must Join the Resistance."
https://caroldansereau.substack.com/p/the-anti-science-disaster-of-gender
As for those "CAIS people", methinks that your "what a boy and girl are in the proper scheme of things" still leaves hanging the rather pregnant question as to exactly what it takes to qualify as such "proper boys and girls". Largely Hippiesq's point about definitions.
Trump's EO which specifies "produces gametes" is more or less just what standard biological definitions say, even if it leaves open to interpretation when that might take place, and whether those people before or after that state still qualify for sex category membership cards. But those CAIS people, and many of the intersex, are incapable of ever producing any gametes at all and thereby might reasonably be called sexless. That so many people balk at even that seems also to be a major part of the problem; it's not just the dysphoric who have turned the sexes into identities.
One can understand that a person who appears physically "normal" on the outside though the inside is scrambled would be highly distressed to be described as "sexless."
I think the naturally highly-distressed parents of kids butchering themselves for a delusion aren't necessarily a good reference point for definitions. They're feeling their way through a forest of thorns and trying to make sense of it as best will help them keep their sanity.
As for leaving any child behind--if wishes did come true I'd be The Vitamin Fairy and visit everyone in their fertile years, every day, and give them their multies. It is a great, great tragedy that so many conditions which can very easily be prevented or lessened in severity by being well-supplied with essential nutrients are nevertheless so prevalent.
I have considerable experience of the autistic--other people's children--and even in the more mildly afflicted the suffering is terrible. I hope always that a true cure or preventative can be found in our lifetime.
But even in our supposedly modern advanced times there are traits essential for healthy survival and those that are the opposite and if you're not well-built for survival you are likely to do poorly.
SCA: "... would be highly distressed to be described as 'sexless.' ...."
Lotta that goin' round these days ...😉🙂 Though largely only because many don't realize that, at least within mainstream biology, the definitions for "male" and "female" aren't designed to grant any participation trophies, aren't designed as status markers, but only to capture the "essences" of those categories. That "produces gametes" is a ubiquitous trait shared among literally millions of species, and which is what justifies that definition.
For example, see this archived tweet from one Zachary Elliott -- who's had several guest posts on Colin Wright's Reality's Last Stand -- which exhibits the same "distress" at the intersex being "deprived" of their sex category membership cards:
"Zachary Elliott; @zaelefty: Discrimination is not eliminated, and true acceptance is not shown, by embracing the scientifically incorrect and morally problematic claims that people who differ from the norm are both or neither sexes."
https://archive.ph/ZbsN0
https://x.com/zaelefty/status/1592711689438662656
I've provided both an archive link and the tweet itself as ol' Zach is something of a jam-tart -- still wet behind the ears -- since he's apparently deleted the tweet -- probably because I've been giving him some grief on it for the last 3 years. You might ask him about that, or send him a link to this thread ... 😉🙂
But since when do "morally problematic claims" have any relevance to scientific principles, theories, and terminology? If he'd been alive at the time of Darwin he would have been saying the same thing about "morally problematic claims that we have descended from apes". Likewise with Galileo and "morally problematic claims" that the Earth isn't the center of the universe.
SCA: "... naturally highly-distressed parents of kids butchering themselves for a delusion aren't necessarily a good reference point for definitions."
Perfectly reasonable principle, going back at least to Voltaire, if not to Adam as the first taxonomist, the "real" "oldest profession" ... 😉🙂
https://quotefancy.com/quote/3001527/Will-Durant-If-you-wish-to-converse-with-me-said-Voltaire-define-your-terms-How-many-a
https://taxodiary.com/2013/07/is-taxonomy-the-oldest-profession/
That some parents are "highly-distressed" by the tasks thereof -- clearly not always a picnic -- doesn't necessarily mean they're unable to deal with difficult tasks in other areas of their lives. This old article from the Atlantic isn't entirely analogous, though "butchering themselves" has some parallels in people cutting off legs and arms because they "see" themselves, and want to be seen as amputees:
"A New Way to be Mad": https://archive.ph/OsvZ6; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/
Not far removed from the many "transgendered", mostly transwomen, who have contributed significantly despite having "butchered themselves" -- Lynn Conway for example, one rather clever "lady":
https://www.eejournal.com/article/lynn-conway-1938-2024-the-computer-architect-who-helped-to-revolutionize-digital-ic-design/
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/LynnsStory.html
Many people have some rather "odd" beliefs -- middle-eastern blood sacrifice cults for example ... 😉🙂 -- yet still manage to be more or less functioning members of society. Michael Shermer, in his Believing Brain, offered Kary Mullis as a case in point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis
SCA: "I hope always that a true cure or preventative can be found in our lifetime."
I'm putting my money on a cure for Alzheimer's ... Or maybe just old age ... 🙂
SCA: "... if you're not well-built for survival you are likely to do poorly."
Kind of the nature of the beast. Probably millions of species, and hundreds of civilizations, have bitten the dust, been lost in the mists of time. Stark reminders of our mortality, species and individuals -- reminds me of the poem, probably first read somewhere in high school, about Ozymandias.