The distinction between “gender” and “sex,” with the latter strictly reduced to biology, is an invention of sexologists in the 1950s-60s. Queer theorists picked it up and pressed it into academic jargon. Activists picked it up from there. Doctors have used it to justify an industry. But the fact is that both words entered the English language centuries ago and were used for centuries to refer to the same thing. (See Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms.)
Gender is binary.
The earliest know use of the word gender refers to female and male humans. Botanists referred to the gender of plants. Darwin used gender and sex interchangeably. Yes, word was also used to describe feminine and masculine in language (grammatical subclass), and “sex” became the primary term to convey gender in science, including social science, but that doesn’t change the history of the primary meanings and uses of the words.
Swapping “sex” for “gender” in “sex role,” the standard term used by anthropology and sociology to convey the sociocultural features of sex, and then reducing sex to biology, saying gender is something else, that it is a “social construction,” is an ideological move. Manufacturing a new meaning for “gender” allows for the rhetoric of incongruity. The invention “gender identity” soon follows. The social construction is then reified, hypostatized, and essentialized and bodies modified to physically manifest gender identity in simulation. (See Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy.)
This is how authoritarians work. They grasp that thinking uses words, and that, by changing the meanings of words for ideological and political purposes, they can change the way people think and more readily manipulate them, using them for various projects. (See Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words.)
There are a lot of ideologies that cause significant psychological distress. Indeed, the history of religious experience is at once been ecstasy and torment—and alienation.
The angst Christians feel at having doubted the Holy Spirit is very real and terrifying. I saw it all…
There are a lot of ideologies that cause significant psychological distress. Indeed, the history of religious experience has at once been ecstasy and torment—and alienation. The angst Christians feel at having doubted the Holy Spirit is very real and terrifying. I saw it all around me growing up in the Bible Belt. I saw people getting baptized more than once because they’d had doubts. I saw terror in the face of a young Scientologist whose beliefs I blew up in class (criminology), exposing them as fraudulent, unaware that an L Ron Hubbard devotee was among my students (a highly unlikely occurrence in Northeast Wisconsin). Muslims will behead a man for challenging Islamic doctrine. Fact. That they don’t hesitate to do such a wicked thing tells us how damaged they are.
Gender Alienation (AI generated)
I have no doubt about the pain of those who don’t fit in and the terrible consequences of having been handed an explanation for their existential terror. Religion and religious-like belief causes people to sacrifice humans on an altar of lies. Queer theory is no different in kind. But it is different in excess. The consequences of queer theory are far worse than most religious belief; a horror show surpassed only by the antics of ancient Aztecs. Queer theory has broken more bodies than most religions we (righty and) routinely condemn.
It is not an “ideology”. Having gender incongruity causes significant psychological distress. Gender dysphoria is a very real and impactful aspect of many trans people’s lives. Why do you believe it so harmful that we want to live free from that distress?
Alongside queer theory stands Islam, its clerics and doctors subjecting gay boys to wrong-sex hormones and debilitating and disfiguring surgeries because Allah loathes homosexuality with such exceptional passion. Make the gay boy an artificial woman—a simulacrum—good enough for the Shi’ite. No wonder Foucault loved Islam as much as he loved boys. Maybe a little less (although he has his defenders).
Trans folx have been around forever. In the Talmud, rabbis wrote laws for men who had periods. They had to leave the community for ritual cleansing, but once done, they resumed living as men. It was done thousands of years ago, so nothing new under the sun.
“Trans folx have been around forever,” an X (Twitter) user said to me. “In the Talmud, rabbis wrote laws for men who had periods. They had to leave the community for ritual cleansing, but once done, they resumed living as men. It was done thousands of years ago, so nothing new under the sun.” Folx. That’s a sign. Of course, men don’t have periods because men can’t have periods. The Talmud must be wrong. Who’d have expected that?
Awesome. You’re rooting your truth in ancient religion.
Imagine a world wherein Muslim students don’t want to take a class from an atheist who is critical of Islam. Islam is an identity and criticisms of it are offensive to those who identify as such. The teacher is an Islamophobe. He makes Muslims feel unsafe. The university needs to train faculty to affirm Islamic beliefs. Students should not be required to take a class from an Islamophobe. The teacher should only teach non-required classes.
“St. Sebastian,” 15th-century painted terra cotta sculpture by Matteo Civitali at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Now imagine that a fundamentalist Christian student learns his teacher is a Darwinist. The teacher believes men and women are evolved creatures. He doesn’t subscribe to creationist ideology—to intelligent design. He’s a Christophobe. He makes the student feel unsafe. How can the university allow a man who believe in natural historical explanations teach required classes? Students should not be required to take a class from a Christophobe. The teacher should only teach non-required classes.
The second example is difficult to imagine given the anti-Christian bias in today’s academy. Indeed, it sounds like a ridiculous example. But the first example is not that hard to imagine. In fact, it has already happened.
There are other examples like the first one that could be made that are even easier to imagine. You’ve already thought of one of them.
Gender is a social construct but in reality human beings experience it on a spectrum, and it’s bullying to demand that someone lives by your definition, rather than their own lived in experience. https://t.co/VXnhw6Mtsb
Eddie Marsan’s objection is nonsense. Sex and gender are synonyms. The man Kay Burley interrogates can’t tell you why they’re not because he’d have to be well-versed in the jargon of an anti-scientific ideology (“gender identity” and all that) to appear to differentiate them, and then he’d either be a cultist or a liar. As it is, his thinking is muddled because he’s heard they’re different.
What he actually means to say, I think, is that a man can pretend to be a woman. To be rational, he’d have to be mean this because gender is objective, unchangeable, and binary. Rishi Sunak says a man is not a woman. That’s a statement of fact. A woman is an adult female human. She can’t be a man. If the law denies this fact, then it is an irrational law and must be changed. But surely, at least, the man can have an opinion. How would he otherwise convey an intent to negotiate an irrational law?
'Trans people have had legal protection to change sex for 20 years and protections in the equality act for 13 years, but in the last three years trans rights have been up for debate again', says NUS Scotland president Ellie Gommersall.https://t.co/PAiZ4D1jU3
How on earth did it ever come to pass that a government in the civilized world allowed people to legally change their sex in the face of the material reality that people can’t? Somebody came back at me with “Except the materially can and do,” to which I responded: “No they can’t and don’t. You’re making an argument against natural history. This is an unscientific belief you’re advancing. Queer theory is a quasi-religious standpoint. You can’t expect rational people with integrity to go down an ideological road.”
You are who you are, not who you say you are.
Sex and gender are synonyms. Gender is binary and unchangeable in our species (all mammals, in fact). There is no spectrum. Gender identity, the spectrum, and all the rest of it are constructs of a pseudoscience designed by crackpots seeking to normalize paraphilia.
Is the Gender Recognition Act on borrowed time? I hope so—and that this experience provides a lesson in the importance of fact and reason in making law and the peril of trying to legislate ideology. ***
A man chimed in on X to scold me for my “quasi-religious” characterization of queer theory, saying that psychology, sociology, etc., have validated gender ideology.
I know. I have degrees in psychology and sociology and taught college for thirty years. I have watched in real time as these and other disciplines fell prey to ideological corruption. The university has become a cathedral and the professoriate and administration a clergy.
It all started with poststructuralism and postmodernism bringing radical sexology into the sciences. Today, academic and professional conferences, journals, and publishing houses strictly gate-keep with queer theory their guide to prevent science from appearing in order to manufacture the perception of hegemony.
It’s heartbreaking to see. We are entering Dark Ages 2.0 where people believe there are gendered souls inhabiting wrong bodies. It’s batshit crazy time in academia. If there isn’t a revolt by scientists with integrity soon, I fear we will lose one of the great institutions of Western civilization.
In England, a male patient raped a woman in a women’s hospital ward by pretending to be a woman. The hospital denied the woman’s complaint for over a year because the rapist was a trans woman. The rape was the direct result of a National Health Service policy known as Annex B, which orders hospitals to place patients in single-sex wards according to their preferred gender identity not their actual gender. By the terms of Annex B, if there is a male as a trans person in a female ward, and a female patient or anyone complains, they must be told that there is no male there. In other words, hospital staff is required to gaslight those under their care. The policy prioritizes the manufactured needs of trans women, i.e., men, over the organic interests of women.
Health and Social Care Secretary Steve Barclay
The correct policy change is coming: no more male patients in the women’s ward (see Julie Bindel’s “Misogynistic Trans Activist Have Suffered a Huge Defeat”). Steve Barclay, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, is set to announce proposals that would see trans women banned from female wards. Makes total sense. But the crazies are out, for example India Willoughby, arguing that, since law and regulation allow men who pretend to be women to be classified as women in England, that means that, by definition, there was no man on the ward and therefore the rape never happened.
ITV reporter Jonathan Willoughby, who now identifies as a woman, is leading the campaign to gaslight the public over a rape that occurred on a women’s ward in a British hospital.
Have you got it yet? The people who wish away gender can also wish away an event in which a woman was raped. How many rapes have been covered up this way? A reminder, then: by definition, a woman is an adult female human being. It is an exclusive category. The slogan “Trans women are women,” is the slogan of a misogynistic cult that has wormed its way in the institutions of West. They are demanding not only that everybody adopt this ridiculous Orwellian slogan, but that the law stands in back of their demands. But the truth is that trans women are men. And while not all men are abusers and racists, enough men are that girls and women have a natural right to sex-exclusive spaces where they can reasonably expect that they only men they will be around are those they choose to be around.
This interview is useful to understanding the current situation, but you have to think correctly to extract from the discussion its usefulness. As you watch this, right from the beginning, mentally substitute “progressive” for “liberal.” Carlson is performing the mainstream media trick of conflating the terms. They are in fact opposites. The actual liberals are Carlson and Hanson. Hansen is more accurate in his terminology, and once the interview gets underway the terminology aligns. However, they do not use the term progressive enough, and it is important to do so so the public understands more fully the situation.
President Joe Biden delivers a primetime speech at Independence National Historical Park September 1, 2022 in Philadelphia. He spoke on “the continued battle for the Soul of the Nation.”
Both are correct to say that the current situation is totalitarian—and that totalitarianism is known as woke progressivism. Moreover, and Hanson alludes to this, woke progressivism is highly similar to national socialism in its complete abandonment of truth and race essentialism. The ideology of the corporate state has become the worst sort of fascism. I wish Carlson (and Greenwald and others) wouldn’t make the error of treating liberal as a label for an ideology rather than an unchanging system of principles, as it makes our way out of this mess look like the cause of it, but they do (see The Democratic Party is Not the Party of Liberal Politics), and so we have to make the adjustment in our minds.
Ep. 27 Donald Trump appeared in court today, but it wasn’t a legal proceeding. It was a grotesque parody of the system our ancestors created. Victor Davis Hanson explains. pic.twitter.com/KhTHateWCZ
The fascism, albeit often offered in a soft and pleasant tone, is manifested right down to home visits by federal agents. Biden’s FBI is making unannounced home visits to Trump supporters nationwide. The visits are known as “knock and talks.” The FBI agents say, “You haven’t done anything wrong yet, we just want to talk.…” This is a form of voter intimidation. They will interview you for information identifying your friends, etc. If the FBI visit you, don’t answer the door. You don’t have to talk to them and it’s not safe to answer your door.
Milley, whom Trump essentially accused of high treason, said he’s been “faithful and loyal” to the Constitution throughout his career. The fact that he admitted he was willing to go behind the President’s back to warn Beijing of a pending US military attack proves that Milley’s opinion of himself is a false one. Trump’s implied accusation of high treason is not inaccurate.
The corporate state media is making much over Donald Trump’s suggestion that General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff under Trump, deserved to be executed. This is part of the push by the Party to defend the military-industrial complex and press warmongering into popular consciousness, key features of totalitarian systems. What the media are not telling the public is that, in a democratic republic founded on civilian control of the military, with the President designated by the Constitution to be the chief commander of the armed forces, for a general to go behind the President’s back to give the nation’s chief adversary, i.e., China, advanced warning of an attack on Beijing is an act of treason. Historically, treason has carried the death penalty. Denial of civilian control of the military by misinforming the public about the content of Trump’s remark is a clear indicator of the authoritarianism that pervades the corporate state media apparatus.
The ACLU is using the controversy over exposing children to sexualized performances to raise money for their organization. Lumping trans identifying people with gay and lesbian, the ACLU defends sexualized drag shows for children. The ACLU is determined to continually remind me why I resigned from that organizations after more than a decade of service as a board member. It’s not the same organization it used to be. It’s become a woke joke. (See Luring Children to the Edge: The Panic Over Lost Opportunities.)
This once venerable institution can’t be counted on to shoot straight anymore. What anti-drag legislation? I didn’t know that the free expression of drag queens was under assault—and I have been following this story closely. I didn’t know this because it isn’t. The ACLU is lying to ramp up fear and drive donations to their organization. The controversy has never been over drag queens per se. When drag comes on TV, if folks don’t like it, they change the channel. But clearly a lot of folks stick around and watch it because it’s on TV a lot. If drag was under assault we’d know about it. It is the opposite of suppressed—it’s promoted by the culture industry and in public instruction.
Ten years ago progressives would have condemned this because, you know, trailer trash. But throw a drag queen into a clutch of hyper-sexualized youth and it’s a social justice moment. Brave and beautiful.
Parents are not objecting to drag but to sexual displays in front of children and the sexualization of youth. That would be not only most parents but most adults. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 60 percent of American adults consider “Drag Queen Story Hour” inappropriate for children. Less than 30 percent think such programming is appropriate for children, with only 11 percent expressing enthusiasm for the practice. I don’t need to look at the age cohort cross tabs on that survey.
If adults feel that way about Drag Queen Story Hour, imagine how they feel about the practice of taking children to strip clubs and pushing them to stuff dollar bills in the g-strings of the entertainer there. Have you seen the faces of these children? They look terrified. Even some of the parents who show up to virtue signal are taken aback. (See Drag Queen Lap Dance at Forsyth Tech: Humiliating the Gullible; If All This Strikes You as Perverse, You’re Right. It is; )
There is no movement against exotic dancing in America today, either. But if exotic dancers were performing in front of children, I think a lot of Americans would object. I know they would. Wouldn’t the woke progressives complain about exposing children to the objectification of girls and women? But isn’t that what’s happening with drag performances?
Whatever you want to do as an adult, that’s fine. Sexual displays are fine. I like them, personally. And not a little. I’m a sex-positive feminist. But free expression like any expression is subject to time and place constraints and age appropriateness. The protection of minors is an important part of maintaining a safe and healthy environment for child development. The sexualization of children is neither safe nor healthy. You’d think after everything that we’ve learned about the life-course impact of trauma early in children’s lives that this would not be an issue. (See What is Grooming?Seeing and Admitting Grooming.)
Negative reinforcement involves punishing/disciplining a person until he acts and speaks in the correct way. The correct way is determined by the punisher/disciplinarian—the person who possesses power, the controller. For example, a DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) training program requires that an employee adopt the conclusions and the practices taught in the program. At least this is the metric of a successful reeducation program. The conclusions and practices advance the agenda and an ideology. The training program is unpleasant because it’s full of ideas that the individual does not share; he is moreover made to feel responsible for things he could not possibly have done; he is told he believes things that he doesn’t even know he believes. He’s gaslighted. The employee knows he will repeat the program until he complies. He may even be positively reinforced for adopting the punisher/disciplinarian’s standpoint. On the other hand, he may not get a raise if he doesn’t. He may be punished with a damning professional report in his permanent record. Worse, his employment may be terminated.
Today, employees are being punished/disciplined for believing and affirming such basic truths as, for example, that men cannot be women, i.e., an objective fact of the biological world. He may on this basis refuse to misgender colleagues, i.e., by refusing to use the preferred pronouns he knows are wrong. He may lose his career if he does not comply with demands that he believe, or at least says he believes, in a falsehood. He may be ordered to enroll in a specialized training program—a struggle session—to teach him how to address men as women and women as men or as both genders or as no genders at all, all of which are material falsehoods. He will taught not just how to use the wrong pronouns, but he will also learn about neopronouns. His superiors may encourage him to put his pronouns in his email signature. His speech will be compelled in a myriad of ways.
Authorities tell us that these struggle sessions are necessary to produce a more “inclusive” and “equitable” workplace, one that values “diversity.” The employees of an inclusive and equitable workplace are happy and thus more productive and the firm is more likely to retain them. This might alienate other employees, but if the estranged are white and cis gendered then their emotional and psychological experiences are rather unimportant (they’re privileged). What is important is diversity, and diversity means a workplace with ever fewer white and cis gendered people in it—with those remaining serving as allies to concrete personifications of abstract categories, some of whom are simulacra. To keep their jobs and avoid constant harassment and shaming by managers and other employees, white and cis gendered workers have to avoid saying true things; it’s almost guaranteed that there is an employee who believes something else is true, and his beliefs must be affirmed and everybody else required to suspend her or his disbelief. The individual who believes in true things will have to either convince himself that what is true is wrong, and that what is wrong is good—or he will at least have to act in bad faith.
Punishing/disciplining people for telling the truth, or punishing/disciplining them until they lie, is the beating heart of totalitarianism. Progressives are already, in the institutions they control, which are all the major institutions to some or near total degree (corporate firms, cultural and educational organizations, government, and media), significantly modifying behavior and belief by making truth telling a punishable offense or subject to discipline and punishment/discipline an acceptable means to compel lying. The younger generations are far more compliant in this regard because their educational experiences have been compromised of a comprehensive indoctrination program designed to condition them to be obedient to corporate control. Progressivism is an authoritarian praxis, and if the elders of western civilization don’t resist it soon, there may be no generations left who can.
I am reading that Trump has driven a wedge between voters. The wedge wasn’t created by Trump. He isn’t the divisive figure he’s made out to be. The wedge is a fundamental disagreement over whether we have, on the one hand, a republic where the ethics of individual liberty and popular democracy are upheld, or whether, on the other, we suffer the technocratic rule of a corporate state apparatus and its attendant administrative state run by executives, professional managers, and elite-picked experts.
The division in America is deep and objective. trump is calling attention to it. Trump is one of those making the choice obvious by speaking like an ordinary person and not condescending to the public. That’s why the establishment hates him so much. He’s a raiser of mutual knowledge through plain speak. He is the leader of a social movement that threatens entrenched power. So does RFK, Jr. The establishment hates him just as much. Maybe more. And for the same reason: populism.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., testifying before the House of Representatives’ Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government
On October 9, Robert Kennedy will announce that he is running as an independent. Kennedy can’t win the Democratic primary the way Trump did in the much more democratic system Republicans (the original populist party) developed. The Democratic primary is rigged.
Some Republicans believe that Kennedy running as an independent is a strategy by Democrats to divide the Trump vote. But really it will divide the Democrat vote. Kennedy is the embodiment of what many Democrats used to believe—or at least said they believed. There are likely scores of rank-and-file Democrats who have been waiting their entire lives to vote for a Bobby Kennedy. I know I have. I know others.
This will be a contest between two populists—if they don’t jail (or worse) Trump or Kennedy. Biden will look as lost and alone as he does when Barack Obama shows up at the White House. Good luck to Democrats finding 81 million votes again. The corporate state apparatus can’t manufacture enough votes to stop the populist train. Democrats are in real trouble. And it’s glorious.
* * *
Jesse Montez Thorton II savagely beat a 63-year-old white man for asking for the seats he reserved for himself and his wife.
A Florida movie theater in Pompano Beach, Florida. A white dude, 63-year-old Marc Cohen, asked a black dude, 27-year-old Jesse Montez Thorton II, for his reserved seats, in which Thorton and a girl who was with him were sitting. He got some reparations for his trouble. The beating was savage. Cohen suffered several injuries to his head and face and was taken to a hospital for treatment. If this were in a woke state the charges would’ve be dismissed or reduced to a misdemeanor. Because it’s Florida, Thorton was arrested and faces one count of aggravated battery with great bodily harm. Still, it took a two-months-long investigation before police moved to arrest Thorton.
Here’s the video from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office: 11-2307-003641.mp4. Sorry to be so real about this, but I’m sick of the shit and spin. Anti-white and anti-Asian bigotry is a real problem in America and we know from where it comes and who’s feeding it: woke progressives with their antiracist gospel. You cannot preach that white-run society is racist and owes a debt to blacks and not expect that some black people will hear this as permission to take matters into their own hands. I’ve been writing about this for several years (see, e.g., Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide?Race and Violent Death in America).
I wonder whether this incident will get the same level of attention a white congresswoman got for showing affection in a theater? That’s a rhetorical question. Of course it won’t.
Conservative activists and podcaster Charlie Kirk has been on the Internet today misrepresenting Georg Hegel’s views on the state. Yes, Hegel said, “The state is the march of God on earth.” However, Hegel did not mean by this that the state is a divine entity or that it should be worshipped as God. (Hegel’s views on religion are complicated, so I will leave them to one side for now.) Instead, Hegel is saying that the state is a historical manifestation of the rational will, a collective entity, which he believes plays a vital role in the development of human freedom and self-realization.
Georg Hegel, German philosopher who lived 1770-1831.
What Kirk and his fellow right-wingers don’t understand is that, in Hegel’s philosophy, the state represents the highest form of social organization, in which individual freedom and collective unity are reconciled via the dialectical process establishing a democratic process of working out oppositional desires. It’s through the state that individuals realize their full human potential by participating in a just and rational political system. Indeed, the state has a duty to protect the liberties and rights of citizens and to promote their well-being. This is the purpose of the modern nation-state.
So, while Hegel does attribute a significant role to the state in his philosophical system, and considers it a crucial aspect of human development, he does not equate the state with God or the closet thing to God on earth. Instead, he views it as a historical and rational institution that—if just and virtuous—contributes to human progress and the realization of individual and collective freedom. It is odd in light of Kirk’s rhetoric to make this accusation since his own side believes that the United States history is profoundly providential. Hegel’s argument is no different.
Karl Marx (1818-1883), who elaborates Hegel’s method in terms of scientific materialism
Right-wingers also misrepresent Karl Marx’s arguments concerning morality and the state. Marx is not seeking to clear out morality from politics. He does not argue that morality is a social construct in the way postmodernists do. He is rather asking us to consider the character of morality in politics. Is the prevailing morality that of the species-being or good for it—that morality of which we are alienated because of the oppressive and exploitative structures of modern society? Or is the prevailing morality that of the bourgeoisie—a morality used to justify those oppressive and exploitative structures.
Marx posits that economic structures and material conditions are the primary drivers of historical and social change and that these underpin the political-legal superstructure, a superstructure from which emerge ideology and consciousness. In this view, the prevailing morality is a reflection of the prevailing economic and social relations—that is, of those who control society. Marx argues that those who control the means of material production also control the means of ideological production. Thus, Marxists argue that moral values and norms are shaped by the interests and needs of the ruling class, and they evolve to maintain the status quo.
This conclusion (which seems to be be the correct one) doesn’t mean that Marx’s didn’t have moral commitments. Marx advances an elaborate critique of alienation, where individuals under capitalism are estranged from the products of their labor, from the production process, and even from their own humanity. This is a moral criticism of capitalism, an indictment of a system that devalues human labor and damages the human psyche. Marx’s moral concerns are therefore tied to his critique of class exploitation. He believes that capitalism inherently leads to the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. From a moral standpoint, exploitation is condemned as unjust and unethical.
Marx is critical of the private ownership of the means of production and advocated for collective ownership and control. He argues that private property is a source of inequality and that the moral principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” should guide society. This principle sounds astonishingly similar to Acts 2:44-45 of the Christian testament: “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.” Likewise, the ultimate goal of Marx’s political and economic vision was the establishment of a classless, communist society. He desired that the state and class divisions wither away. Individuals would then be guided by the principle of common ownership and cooperation.
From a moral standpoint, communism was a more just and equitable system. This was central ambition of Marx’s politics. The claim that Marx thought morality was mere epiphenomenon could not be further from the truth of the arguments the great man made.
freedom and reason 