The "Spergy" Letter Project

Or, "True Lies: Helen Is Having An Affair"

(Apologies to the “Clergy Letter Project” though there may be some illuminating parallels for later consideration.)

But there I was — minding my own business, i.e., comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable … — when Helen Dale took umbrage at me for doing so, threatened me with the infamous “banhammer”, and then made good on it:

So there that comment is gone — and apparently every last one I’ve ever posted there. Not terribly (much) bent out of shape by Helen’s rather imperious dicta — “so let it be (un)written, so let it be (un)done” — as it is her Substack, her echo-chamber, her call. Though deleting all of my comments seems rather “extreme” and rather like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face — whence the fond remembrance of the line from True Lies about ice cube trays; hell hath no fury, and all that …

However, rather more important is an aspect underlined by a famous quote by John Stuart Mill which I expect that at least Helen, as something of legal beagle, is, or should be, more than familiar with:

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

Rather amused, on reviewing my notes, to see that, in fact, Helen once discussed the idea in her Taking on the Offendotrons: a review of Russell Blackford’s ‘The Tyranny of Opinion’. Rather ironic given the many, not just among the Woke but among her tribe and the denizens of her Substack, who are rather clearly “offended” by the facts.

But I certainly can’t say that anything of what I’ve said there (see here, here, & here) qualifies as any sort of “deathless prose”. However, much of what Helen deigns to call my “hobby horse” is based on solid fact — some solid ground under “its” feet — which she and too many of her commentariat are clearly rather “reluctant’, and probably unable to even “entertain” for any length of time. But a common thread through much of it turns on the rather unscientific if not demented “idea” that “sex is immutable” — a mantra often parroted with the same glassy-eyed certainty that has been typical of the religious down through the centuries, and which was neatly expressed in an old Star Trek segment, “Not of the Body”. But for example, of many, see:

Likewise Maya Forstater, lo these many moons ago:

“Scientific”? Ha! Ha ha, in fact. They might just as well have followed that “sex is immutable” with a clarion call to “replenish our precious bodily fluids” …

Moot exactly what are the roots of that belief, that article of faith. Although there is some justification in arguing that it is based more or less on some “folk-biology”, even if the more basic “definition” from the Kindergarten Cop movie — “boys have penises and girls have vaginas” — is probably the outside limit of what many people can handle. Which has its own toxic consequences in the too-common currency of “sex-change operations” as discussed on

TransMuted

here.

But, as indicated above, those definitions are most certainly NOT what is stipulated in reputable biological journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. Despite the “best” efforts of various so-called biologists and philosophers — such as

Colin Wright

, Jerry Coyne, Luana Maroja, & Alex Byrne — to muddy the waters. For example, Byrne, in an article in Areo Magazine, at least genuflects to those standard biological definitions before attempting — rather imperiously — to replace it, to “refine” or “transmogrify” it with his own idiosyncratic and quite unscientific version:

One expert is the biologist—and, as it happens, transgender woman—Joan Roughgarden. Here’s how she puts it in her book Evolution’s Rainbow: “To a biologist, ‘male’ means making small gametes, and ‘female’ means making large gametes.” Gametes are sex cells—sperm and eggs. Roughgarden’s explanation could do with some refinement, mostly because some males and females don’t make gametes for a variety of reasons (prepubertal human males and postmenopausal human females are obvious examples), but it neatly captures the basic idea.

If organisms don’t make any gametes at all there Alex then they ain’t either male or female.

But likewise Coyne & Maroja:

“...nearly every human on earth falls into one of two distinct categories. Your biological sex is determined simply by whether your body is designed to make large, immobile gametes (eggs, characterizing females) or very small and mobile gametes (sperm, characterizing males).”

Bit of a hoot to see Jerry Coyne championing “design” when he’s made something of a career out of railing against it, at least the “intelligent” version.

But “nice” to see Wright and his merry band of scientism-ists following suit:

I’ve looked really closely there Emma and don’t see nuffin in the standard biological definitions about gonads of “past, present, or future functionality”. Somewhere between the lines, perchance? Though I’m somewhat amused to see that that particular tweet apparently no longer exists, even though many others from Emma still do. Beginning to think they may have bet the farm on the wrong horse? 🙄

And Helen’s partner in crime,

Lorenzo Warby

, does likewise (see here & here):

Nice to see that he at least concedes that some philosophy has some merit — in noticeable contradistinction to his host who has been anathematizing it, from her “bully pulpit”, far and wide. But I have yet to see anything in the way of a defense from any of them how they presume to even think that they can abrogate and repudiate definitions that are foundational to all of biology, ones that are published in dozens of reputable biological journals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. Bunch of clowns and charlatans; scientific illiterates as far as the eye can see.

But what seems to motivate many if not most of those parroting that “immutable” mantra is, in large part, women’s vanity: many have — rather sadly but somewhat understandably — turned the sexes into identities based on some “mythic essences” as UK “philosopher” Jane Clare Jones once suggested. And if memberships in the categories “woman” and “female” are just a matter of such ephemeral “essences” then it is maybe not surprising, nor to be gainsaid, that transwomen, in particular, can make pretty much the same claim. Hard not to get the impression that, at bottom, the worst of the transgender clusterfuck is no more than a battle royale between transwomen and women, between Envy and Vanity over who gets to claim the proverbial "golden apple for the fairest" — doncha think that the transwoman on the left looks rather like Dylan Mulvaney?:

DALL-E3 Image courtesy of Regan Arntz-Gray

Parenthetically, in discussions with the creator of the above DALL-E3 image,

Regan Arntz-Gray

, I’d asked her if if she could have ChatGPT make some changes to her original version to which “it” had responded with:

"I can certainly regenerate the image with a golden apple between the transwoman and the ancient Greek woman. However, I need to inform you that I cannot fulfill the specific request to add an Adam's apple to the transwoman or make the face on the apple more malevolent. These elements could be interpreted as sensitive or potentially disrespectful to certain individuals or groups.”

I gather that ChatGPT has some more or less reasonable restrictions on “offensive content”, but one might reasonably argue that that case is rather excessive and, in fact, contributes to the rather large and quite toxic lie that transwomen are actually females. Some reason to argue that AI in general, and ChatGPT in particular, is rather akin to ancient golems: “a mindless lunk or entity that serves a man under controlled conditions, but is hostile to him under other conditions”. “what rough beast” — the apotheosis of the collective.

However, I’m still quite impressed with the image, the golden apple in particular which is presumably being presented by Eris, the goddess of discord, and which is presumably reflecting Eris’ face. Given that Eris is a fictional goddess, it would seem an excess of “sensitivity” for ChatGPT to be overly concerned about being “disrespectful”.

In any case, it is maybe somewhat moot as to the import of that battle between Envy and Vanity, although a similar, if maybe apocryphal one some 3000 years ago precipitated the Trojan War and was maybe a turning point for the civilizations of that era. Helen herself — along with those she interviewed,

Helen Joyce

and Maya Forstater — gives some solid reasons to argue that the transgenderism is, in fact, a “civilization threatening/ending” movement. Even if

Freddie deBoer

, reprising the “can’t we all just get along” from Mars Attacks, tends to pooh-pooh that as starting at shadows, and insists on describing the “controversy” as a:

… paucity of basic coherence and even minimal sense of proportion in anti-trans rhetoric. People were in my inbox calling “the trans issue” the most important social divide of our time, apparently beating out crime and education and the collapse of the family etc., which is truly insane.

I expect a big part of the problem there is that he doesn’t have a particularly coherent and scientifically based idea at all about the difference between sex and gender, or the rot that transgenderism has wrought — so to speak — in many of our educational, legal, scientific, and governmental institutions, our statistics departments in particular. Though he may have a point in at least suggesting that better or legally more useful definitions for “man” and “woman” might be as “penis-haver and vagina-haver” — or reasonable facsimiles thereof — since reproductive status is largely irrelevant for many social objectives and policies.

But even apart from the maybe debatable contributions of that battle royale itself, the bigger and more pervasive problem is illustrated by an old post and comment by Scott Alexander at

Astral Codex Ten

:

Topics here tend to center vaguely around this meta-philosophical idea of how people evaluate arguments for their beliefs, and especially whether this process is spectacularly broken in a way that may or may not doom us all.

There’s the crux of the matter — a pervasive problem and “fatal flaw”, not just among “The Woke” but there on Helen’s Substack — bloggers and commentariat — and among various so-called philosophers and biologists. As Bertrand Russell once put it, “Most people would sooner die than think. And so they do.” Although the idea has been floating about at least since the 1850s. Part of which may have underwritten Mark Twain’s variation on the theme — and that of his “interpolator”, Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, and of How America Lost Its Mind (more or less a synopsis of ‘Haywire’):

“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.” — Mark Twain “Corn-Pone Opinions”

In many ways and in many posts both Helen &

Lorenzo Warby

over at Helen’s

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

make some good points. Though “Always Fair” is clearly something of a stretch … But a recent one is particularly relevant to the case at hand: Creating insular information bubbles. Of particular note therein is Helen’s “adumbration”:

Narratives are not about facts, they’re about making meaning. However, if they’re to continue to make meaning, they have to be protected from facts.

Though it’s often less a case of “making meaning” than of making money … But it would be something of a shame if in the promotion of her own “narrative” — and similarly with those of many in various other “anti-woke” tribes — the necessity to be “protected” from some “inconvenient facts” were to vitiate her and their best efforts. Unfortunately it’s something of a quite ubiquitous “fatal flaw” — cultures often have their “golden ages” cut short when their commitments to reason and logic conflict with bedrock dogma, arguably what happened with Islam. Although the Clergy Letter Project may be an exception or at least a hopeful sign.