"A transgender children’s charity is giving potentially dangerous chest-flattening devices to 14-year-olds against their parents’ wishes, an investigation by The Telegraph has found."
Sep 27, 2022·edited Sep 27, 2022Liked by Lee Patterson
It was good to see that the comments on the NYT article were overwhelmingly negative on the practice of radical double masectomy on children (I refuse to use the euphemisms like "top surgery" that the gender ideologues want to force on us), and that the Times is now publishing more extreme language. I wrote a comment that began "The mutilation of children is a crime against humanity." This got approved. Not that long ago, I had much milder comments on articles on "trans" issues routinely rejected.
Maybe the tide is turning after all and we can soon have adult conversations about this. As a society I mean, not the two of us or anyone else on this substack. We're here because we value sanity and expect a minimum of maturity in people.
Great bunch of articles again; particularly enjoyed the one by Lisa Davis. ICYMI, an archive that I had found of her Boston Globe article which that she had linked to in that one:
Nice that, as Davis had argued, its publication gives some cause to "celebrate a little opening in the mainstream/left media’s bulwark against nuance and accurate science reporting". However, for all the good points she makes in the Globe article, one can not help but get the impression that she's trying to have her cake and eat it too, that she's engaging in the same sort of "imposition of a belief system" that she justifiably decries.
For examples, she has said:
"... every culture we know of has gender — which I define as ideas about how women and men 'should' behave ....
While some male-typical and female-typical behavior has biological roots, much of gender as I and other feminists define it — culturally based expectations of how men and women should behave — 'is' socially constructed. And gender can indeed be used as an instrument of power. ...."
While it's nice that she acknowledges that "some ... behaviour has biological roots", she then more or less denies that fact and then goes on to insist - somewhat dogmatically, as an article of faith - that "gender IS socially constructed". Which flies in the face of arguments by others that how men (sex) and women (sex) DO behave is largely what they mean by gender. There's a fundamental sticking point there, a contradiction between SHOULD and DO which causes any number of problems - which she is contributing to.
Seems to me that far too many feminists - Davis for example - seem to think that "gender expectations of how people should behave" are cut from whole cloth - the result of the nefarious "Patriarchy!!11!!", that they aren't, to some significant degree, the result of how people DO behave. Which tends to motivate such feminists towards the "abolition of gender" - which is, as Kathleen Stock once pithily put it, "barking (mad)":
Might just as well try commanding the tide to not come in. No doubt there are many such behaviour patterns and tendencies that society might reasonably deprecate or anathematize. But there are many other such tendencies that are rather exemplary and that society would do, and generally does well to promote and endorse.
Failing to understand the biological roots of those "expectations", failing to understand that stereotypes - positive and negative - are often solidly based on brute facts, is probably one of the main reasons why the transgender issue is such a clusterfuck:
This is an extremely complicated issue and I tend to side with radical feminists on this one, for the most at least.
Now, most radical feminists, and most scientists, will argue that SOME behavioral differences in men and women have biological roots. Such as a propensity towards physical aggression in men.
Also, most radical feminists and most scholars and scientists will argue that societies have very different ways of coming to terms with that.
That partly explains gender but it does not sufficiently explain it. And that is, I am afraid, the point you seem to downplay a little.
Gender, clearly a social construct, is just much, much wider than just biologically grounded differences, and that's the key point. That goes for gender in matriarchal societies, which is often overlooked by feminists and denied outright by most in gender studies, as well as for gender in patriarchal societies.
(Actually gender studies were set up to a large degree to empirically study different gender concepts in different societies and so perhaps help out what's biologically grounded and what's not. They have just refused to do that for decades.)
From a philosophical or scientific point of view, this is a really, really tricky issue. We can not observe an unsocialized human being. So we can never really KNOW how much biologically grounded behavioral difference there is in the various gender concepts of societies all over the world.
We can take more or less educated guesses.
What we can say for certain is that only a part of gender - as a set of behavioral norms and perceptions we are socialized into based on our sex in our respective society - is grounded in biology and that of course the overall structure of a given society and the development of its means of production strongly influences whatever gender roles are around. Otherwise those gender roles would be much, much more similar than they actually are.
However, there seems to be a great deal of evidence that those "behavioural differences" with "biological roots" are substantially greater and more ubiquitous than most "rad fems" are willing to countenance - for largely politically motivated "reasons". For instance, you might take a gander at an article at "4th Wave Now" by a couple of biologists and a journalist:
Of particular note there is their "joint probability distribution" graph of a fairly large set of personality traits that show significant differences, on average, between men and women. Moot of course how much of those differences are due to nature, and how much are due to nurture. However, there's also discussion that those differences hold across a great many cultures which at least suggests a strong contribution from biology which is, of course, more or less identical in all of those cultures.
But while the authors - Malone, Wright, & Robertson - of that essay don't actually equate personalities to gender itself, many people justifiably argue that that is what gender, most rationally, boils down into. See this comment of theirs in particular:
"In fact, due to the significant overlap of personality traits between males and females, the personality traits of some females will be more 'masculine' than those exhibited by some, or even most males, and vice versa."
"masculine" and "feminine" are typically seen as two halves of the (multi-dimensional) gender spectrum. And the late Justice Scalia underlined that with his cogent and illuminating analogy:
"The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male."
Chris: "What we can say for certain is that only a part of gender - as a set of behavioral norms and perceptions we are socialized into based on our sex in our respective society - is grounded in biology ...."
Kind of think that you're missing my point that there is a substantial difference between the expectations of society - the norms that society may want to impose on its members, justifiably or not - and the actual behaviours and behaviours of individuals - which are partly the result of those norms, and partly the result of fundamental biological differences. To insist that gender is JUST those expectations makes it difficult to see how one can say that any individual HAS a gender, has those expectations which are just something in the way of abstractions - like population averages or stereotypes. Individuals can only have personalities that may or may not meet those expectations for a variety of reasons.
But for example, western society has, up until quite recently, more or less anathematized homosexuality. It is only recently that we've come to accept that that behaviour pattern is, for some individuals, more or less bred in the bone, and that it doesn't seriously conflict with any long-term objectives of society in general. Again, heterosexuality is something of an expectation; homosexuality, a brute fact of biology. Sexuality then - who one is sexually attracted to - might then be said to be one axis in the multidimensional spectrum of gender (personalities and personality types).
You may wish to take a gander at my Welcome post which elaborates on that idea of gender being a multidimensional spectrum, sexuality being one of those dimensions, "the Big Five Personality Traits" being others.
Kind of think it crucially important to be clear on the difference between the expectations of society, and the behaviour of individuals. Mashing them both into one concept tends to muddy the waters, and contributes to unnecessary levels of grief and animosity.
"Kind of think it crucially important to be clear on the difference between the expectations of society, and the behaviour of individuals. Mashing them both into one concept tends to muddy the waters, and contributes to unnecessary levels of grief and animosity. "
Which strikes me more as what you are doing, but let's leave that aside for a moment.
Gender is widely understood by classical feminism and in social sciences to be the set of expectations, norms and behaviors we are socialized into according to our sex. Individual behavior is irrelevant for that definition. Gender is not an individual category.
Gender is normative, not descriptive. Of course, in order for a society to function, and for its members to be sane, it must be partly rooted in actual behavior, and so has some basis in biologically grounded tendencies. But that of course goes for any other societal norm.
Gender changes over time. As a social construct it must reflect the material conditions of its society. We can see that clearly with what conservatives call the traditional family. It is a product of industrialization, so not a very old tradition. Having women do domestic work freed up the men to be workers. It became untowards even for working class women to perform heavy physical work (in public) - something that had not been the case and is not the case in agricultural societies. (Mind, the heaviest tasks are always reserved for men for obvious reasons, but the extent to which women in agricultural societes perform physical work is quite astounding and sometimes even alienating to our modern eyes.) This is also when we see mothers being charged with raising their offspring. Before, that tie had not been so close, even though most societies burden women with the bulk of the child rearing. If and when women had to make additional income, they were largely confined to a more or less domestic setting to do so. I.e. cleaning, washing, sewing mainly in upper class and upper middle class households.
Enter another wave of industrialization that expands the need for workers. Now it is seen as not as desirable to confine working class women to their homes. This was aided by the arrival of household appliances that sped up a lot of chores.
For today's economy, the "traditional" family has turned into shackles keeping it from expanding its means of production. It wants to devour its workforce, expand exploitation to every last second of our day. "Diversity management" is one way to ensure that. Now all of a sudden, employees do not just sell their labor but in essence their entire being to their employers. Now, their color of skin, sexuality, religion, sex, and what have you have become marketing tools for the companies that employ them - for free, of course. Needless to say that this also creates a lot of competition among employees as this approach fundamentally undermines job security entirely - as well as existing protections from discrimination. You don't need mothers who have to take care of their kids for a certain amount of time a day in this environment. Stable families are not essential anymore. Hence also the ideological dismantling of the "traditional" family along neoliberal necessities. I think we can not fully understand the emergence of transideology - and its calluous disregard for sexuality and fertility - if we do not take that into account.
Mind, this is not a plea for or defense of the "traditional" family. There is a long tradition of left critique of it, which I am merely summing up and which I agree with. Nor do I mean to downplay the achievements of feminism, labor unions and left politics in enabling women to become financially independent within the context of an industrialized society. Quite the contrary.
But here we clearly see how gender changes and why it does - and that little of it has to with individuals changing their behavior of their own free will, and that much of what is gender is only loosely based, if at all, on biologically grounded behavioral differences.
Chris: "Which strikes me more as what you are doing, but let's leave that aside for a moment. ...."
Crux of my whole argument, none of which you're addressing; bet you didn't read any of the links I posted. Cultural norms - i.e., gender expectations - are something that only society has or imposes, not individuals. But genders - as sets of behaviours determined, in part by biology - are what individuals have.
But you're just repeating feminist dogma. Some 21 different feminist "sects", all at swords' points with ear other over quite risibly unscientific claptrap:
Chris: "Gender is widely understood by classical feminism and in social sciences to be the set of expectations, norms and behaviors we are socialized into according to our sex. Individual behavior is irrelevant for that definition."
What a pile of horse feathers. See SEP to start with:
"But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues."
You still seem to think that biology has no bearing on our behaviours at all - blank slate feminism? But just because some feminist sects want to define "gender" that way doesn't meant that it holds much if any water at all. That's largely why Posie Parker quite justifiably laid much of the blame for the whole transgender clusterfuck at the doorstep of feminism itself.
Chris: "Gender is not an individual category."
More horse feathers. Even some feminists more or less recognize or define gender as having masculine or feminine personalities - of which there are billions and billions. Ergo, billions and billions of genders. From the SEP article:
"Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices."
Though the author's argument as to the source of those personalities doesn't hold much if any water - more blank slate feminism.
But Wikipedia underlines the same position:
"Most cultures use a gender binary, in which gender is divided into two categories, and people are considered part of one or the other (boys/men and girls/women);[4][5][6] those who exist outside these groups may fall under the umbrella term non-binary. Some societies have specific genders besides "man" and "woman", such as the hijras of South Asia; these are often referred to as third genders (and fourth genders, etc.)." [If four then four billion ...]
Some weaselly language there - "relates to"? Rather vague at best, but seems a clear endorsement of behaviours as genders - of which there are billions and billions.
The problem is that "gender" is almost entirely incoherent twaddle - largely because most feminists are scientifically illiterate, and are more interested in feminism as a political project than as a philosophy seeking the "truth".
Don't think the transgender clusterfuck is going to be resolved without a lot more intellectual honesty, without looking at the concept of gender from a scientific and logical, not emotional or political perspective.
It was good to see that the comments on the NYT article were overwhelmingly negative on the practice of radical double masectomy on children (I refuse to use the euphemisms like "top surgery" that the gender ideologues want to force on us), and that the Times is now publishing more extreme language. I wrote a comment that began "The mutilation of children is a crime against humanity." This got approved. Not that long ago, I had much milder comments on articles on "trans" issues routinely rejected.
Maybe the tide is turning after all and we can soon have adult conversations about this. As a society I mean, not the two of us or anyone else on this substack. We're here because we value sanity and expect a minimum of maturity in people.
Great bunch of articles again; particularly enjoyed the one by Lisa Davis. ICYMI, an archive that I had found of her Boston Globe article which that she had linked to in that one:
https://archive.ph/ifcVX
Nice that, as Davis had argued, its publication gives some cause to "celebrate a little opening in the mainstream/left media’s bulwark against nuance and accurate science reporting". However, for all the good points she makes in the Globe article, one can not help but get the impression that she's trying to have her cake and eat it too, that she's engaging in the same sort of "imposition of a belief system" that she justifiably decries.
For examples, she has said:
"... every culture we know of has gender — which I define as ideas about how women and men 'should' behave ....
While some male-typical and female-typical behavior has biological roots, much of gender as I and other feminists define it — culturally based expectations of how men and women should behave — 'is' socially constructed. And gender can indeed be used as an instrument of power. ...."
While it's nice that she acknowledges that "some ... behaviour has biological roots", she then more or less denies that fact and then goes on to insist - somewhat dogmatically, as an article of faith - that "gender IS socially constructed". Which flies in the face of arguments by others that how men (sex) and women (sex) DO behave is largely what they mean by gender. There's a fundamental sticking point there, a contradiction between SHOULD and DO which causes any number of problems - which she is contributing to.
Seems to me that far too many feminists - Davis for example - seem to think that "gender expectations of how people should behave" are cut from whole cloth - the result of the nefarious "Patriarchy!!11!!", that they aren't, to some significant degree, the result of how people DO behave. Which tends to motivate such feminists towards the "abolition of gender" - which is, as Kathleen Stock once pithily put it, "barking (mad)":
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender
Might just as well try commanding the tide to not come in. No doubt there are many such behaviour patterns and tendencies that society might reasonably deprecate or anathematize. But there are many other such tendencies that are rather exemplary and that society would do, and generally does well to promote and endorse.
Failing to understand the biological roots of those "expectations", failing to understand that stereotypes - positive and negative - are often solidly based on brute facts, is probably one of the main reasons why the transgender issue is such a clusterfuck:
https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereotype-accuracy-one-largest-and-most-replicable-effects-all
This is an extremely complicated issue and I tend to side with radical feminists on this one, for the most at least.
Now, most radical feminists, and most scientists, will argue that SOME behavioral differences in men and women have biological roots. Such as a propensity towards physical aggression in men.
Also, most radical feminists and most scholars and scientists will argue that societies have very different ways of coming to terms with that.
That partly explains gender but it does not sufficiently explain it. And that is, I am afraid, the point you seem to downplay a little.
Gender, clearly a social construct, is just much, much wider than just biologically grounded differences, and that's the key point. That goes for gender in matriarchal societies, which is often overlooked by feminists and denied outright by most in gender studies, as well as for gender in patriarchal societies.
(Actually gender studies were set up to a large degree to empirically study different gender concepts in different societies and so perhaps help out what's biologically grounded and what's not. They have just refused to do that for decades.)
From a philosophical or scientific point of view, this is a really, really tricky issue. We can not observe an unsocialized human being. So we can never really KNOW how much biologically grounded behavioral difference there is in the various gender concepts of societies all over the world.
We can take more or less educated guesses.
What we can say for certain is that only a part of gender - as a set of behavioral norms and perceptions we are socialized into based on our sex in our respective society - is grounded in biology and that of course the overall structure of a given society and the development of its means of production strongly influences whatever gender roles are around. Otherwise those gender roles would be much, much more similar than they actually are.
Chris: "... extremely complicated issue ... SOME behavioral differences in men and women have biological roots ..."
Complicated, indeed. Largely why I argue in favour of putting "gender" on a more scientific footing; see this section of my Welcome post:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/i/64264079/rationalized-gender
However, there seems to be a great deal of evidence that those "behavioural differences" with "biological roots" are substantially greater and more ubiquitous than most "rad fems" are willing to countenance - for largely politically motivated "reasons". For instance, you might take a gander at an article at "4th Wave Now" by a couple of biologists and a journalist:
https://4thwavenow.com/2019/08/19/no-child-is-born-in-the-wrong-body-and-other-thoughts-on-the-concept-of-gender-identity/
Of particular note there is their "joint probability distribution" graph of a fairly large set of personality traits that show significant differences, on average, between men and women. Moot of course how much of those differences are due to nature, and how much are due to nurture. However, there's also discussion that those differences hold across a great many cultures which at least suggests a strong contribution from biology which is, of course, more or less identical in all of those cultures.
But while the authors - Malone, Wright, & Robertson - of that essay don't actually equate personalities to gender itself, many people justifiably argue that that is what gender, most rationally, boils down into. See this comment of theirs in particular:
"In fact, due to the significant overlap of personality traits between males and females, the personality traits of some females will be more 'masculine' than those exhibited by some, or even most males, and vice versa."
"masculine" and "feminine" are typically seen as two halves of the (multi-dimensional) gender spectrum. And the late Justice Scalia underlined that with his cogent and illuminating analogy:
"The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male."
Chris: "What we can say for certain is that only a part of gender - as a set of behavioral norms and perceptions we are socialized into based on our sex in our respective society - is grounded in biology ...."
Kind of think that you're missing my point that there is a substantial difference between the expectations of society - the norms that society may want to impose on its members, justifiably or not - and the actual behaviours and behaviours of individuals - which are partly the result of those norms, and partly the result of fundamental biological differences. To insist that gender is JUST those expectations makes it difficult to see how one can say that any individual HAS a gender, has those expectations which are just something in the way of abstractions - like population averages or stereotypes. Individuals can only have personalities that may or may not meet those expectations for a variety of reasons.
But for example, western society has, up until quite recently, more or less anathematized homosexuality. It is only recently that we've come to accept that that behaviour pattern is, for some individuals, more or less bred in the bone, and that it doesn't seriously conflict with any long-term objectives of society in general. Again, heterosexuality is something of an expectation; homosexuality, a brute fact of biology. Sexuality then - who one is sexually attracted to - might then be said to be one axis in the multidimensional spectrum of gender (personalities and personality types).
You may wish to take a gander at my Welcome post which elaborates on that idea of gender being a multidimensional spectrum, sexuality being one of those dimensions, "the Big Five Personality Traits" being others.
Kind of think it crucially important to be clear on the difference between the expectations of society, and the behaviour of individuals. Mashing them both into one concept tends to muddy the waters, and contributes to unnecessary levels of grief and animosity.
"Kind of think it crucially important to be clear on the difference between the expectations of society, and the behaviour of individuals. Mashing them both into one concept tends to muddy the waters, and contributes to unnecessary levels of grief and animosity. "
Which strikes me more as what you are doing, but let's leave that aside for a moment.
Gender is widely understood by classical feminism and in social sciences to be the set of expectations, norms and behaviors we are socialized into according to our sex. Individual behavior is irrelevant for that definition. Gender is not an individual category.
Gender is normative, not descriptive. Of course, in order for a society to function, and for its members to be sane, it must be partly rooted in actual behavior, and so has some basis in biologically grounded tendencies. But that of course goes for any other societal norm.
Gender changes over time. As a social construct it must reflect the material conditions of its society. We can see that clearly with what conservatives call the traditional family. It is a product of industrialization, so not a very old tradition. Having women do domestic work freed up the men to be workers. It became untowards even for working class women to perform heavy physical work (in public) - something that had not been the case and is not the case in agricultural societies. (Mind, the heaviest tasks are always reserved for men for obvious reasons, but the extent to which women in agricultural societes perform physical work is quite astounding and sometimes even alienating to our modern eyes.) This is also when we see mothers being charged with raising their offspring. Before, that tie had not been so close, even though most societies burden women with the bulk of the child rearing. If and when women had to make additional income, they were largely confined to a more or less domestic setting to do so. I.e. cleaning, washing, sewing mainly in upper class and upper middle class households.
Enter another wave of industrialization that expands the need for workers. Now it is seen as not as desirable to confine working class women to their homes. This was aided by the arrival of household appliances that sped up a lot of chores.
For today's economy, the "traditional" family has turned into shackles keeping it from expanding its means of production. It wants to devour its workforce, expand exploitation to every last second of our day. "Diversity management" is one way to ensure that. Now all of a sudden, employees do not just sell their labor but in essence their entire being to their employers. Now, their color of skin, sexuality, religion, sex, and what have you have become marketing tools for the companies that employ them - for free, of course. Needless to say that this also creates a lot of competition among employees as this approach fundamentally undermines job security entirely - as well as existing protections from discrimination. You don't need mothers who have to take care of their kids for a certain amount of time a day in this environment. Stable families are not essential anymore. Hence also the ideological dismantling of the "traditional" family along neoliberal necessities. I think we can not fully understand the emergence of transideology - and its calluous disregard for sexuality and fertility - if we do not take that into account.
Mind, this is not a plea for or defense of the "traditional" family. There is a long tradition of left critique of it, which I am merely summing up and which I agree with. Nor do I mean to downplay the achievements of feminism, labor unions and left politics in enabling women to become financially independent within the context of an industrialized society. Quite the contrary.
But here we clearly see how gender changes and why it does - and that little of it has to with individuals changing their behavior of their own free will, and that much of what is gender is only loosely based, if at all, on biologically grounded behavioral differences.
Chris: "Which strikes me more as what you are doing, but let's leave that aside for a moment. ...."
Crux of my whole argument, none of which you're addressing; bet you didn't read any of the links I posted. Cultural norms - i.e., gender expectations - are something that only society has or imposes, not individuals. But genders - as sets of behaviours determined, in part by biology - are what individuals have.
But you're just repeating feminist dogma. Some 21 different feminist "sects", all at swords' points with ear other over quite risibly unscientific claptrap:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_movements_and_ideologies
Feminism is pretty much a joke from square one. A pile of "risible absurdities" as Kathleen Stock put it recently:
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/feminist-reboot-camp
Chris: "Gender is widely understood by classical feminism and in social sciences to be the set of expectations, norms and behaviors we are socialized into according to our sex. Individual behavior is irrelevant for that definition."
What a pile of horse feathers. See SEP to start with:
"But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues."
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/feminism-gender/#GenSocCon
You still seem to think that biology has no bearing on our behaviours at all - blank slate feminism? But just because some feminist sects want to define "gender" that way doesn't meant that it holds much if any water at all. That's largely why Posie Parker quite justifiably laid much of the blame for the whole transgender clusterfuck at the doorstep of feminism itself.
Chris: "Gender is not an individual category."
More horse feathers. Even some feminists more or less recognize or define gender as having masculine or feminine personalities - of which there are billions and billions. Ergo, billions and billions of genders. From the SEP article:
"Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices."
Though the author's argument as to the source of those personalities doesn't hold much if any water - more blank slate feminism.
But Wikipedia underlines the same position:
"Most cultures use a gender binary, in which gender is divided into two categories, and people are considered part of one or the other (boys/men and girls/women);[4][5][6] those who exist outside these groups may fall under the umbrella term non-binary. Some societies have specific genders besides "man" and "woman", such as the hijras of South Asia; these are often referred to as third genders (and fourth genders, etc.)." [If four then four billion ...]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
And all the hundreds if not thousands of "genders" that the transloonie nutcases peddle - all different genders that characterize individuals.
And the BMJ:
"Gender relates to societal roles, behaviours, and expectations that vary with time and place, historically and geographically."
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n735
Some weaselly language there - "relates to"? Rather vague at best, but seems a clear endorsement of behaviours as genders - of which there are billions and billions.
The problem is that "gender" is almost entirely incoherent twaddle - largely because most feminists are scientifically illiterate, and are more interested in feminism as a political project than as a philosophy seeking the "truth".
Don't think the transgender clusterfuck is going to be resolved without a lot more intellectual honesty, without looking at the concept of gender from a scientific and logical, not emotional or political perspective.