This was sent to me in X (Twitter) as a response to my note that gender and sex are synonyms. As the reader can see, steeped in queer theory and woke progressive ideology, generative AI repeats propaganda as fact. This is one of the great threats of AI: the routine and universal and reinforcing substitution of corporate state propaganda for actual science. It’s a testament to the power of gender ideology that it has made the pattern of data AI scrapes and amalgamates to form the opinions it passes off as truth the apparent social logic of the system. As Antonio Gramsci told us, one key of establishing ideological hegemony over a population is making the logic of the elites feel like the common sense of the epoch.
When I made this observation in my Facebook feed, I had a former student, whom I greatly admire and count as a friend, disagree with my position on gender ideology while agreeing with me about the threat generative AI poses. In my response, I stressed the need to challenge problematic assumptions in conversation. Whatever I think about deceptive mimicry and medical-industrial practice (and I have been very clear about this in my writings), as well as the right of individuals to freely express themselves in a myriad of ways, a central point in all of this is my insistence that we cannot be compelled to believe impossible things because some individuals desire to escape reality or to control our perception of reality.
Where one stands on the scientific question is therefore not irrelevant. I told my friend that I wasn’t trying to draw him out and get him in trouble. I know the crowd he runs with and he would be in a world of shit for failing to preface any agreement with me about this matter with a disclaimer. I totally get where he is coming from. However, I told him the importance of making sure people understand that my point isn’t just about AI thinking for us, but also about the assumptions that underpin the propaganda and the normalization of false premises via routine knowledge production. Generative AI is not remarkable in the dissemination of ideology as science. Colleges and universities across the West, as well as the medical-industrial complex, push the madness.
To reiterate, then, gender is a synonym for sex. It is not a subjective thing. Plants have gender, and to my knowledge plants are neither social in any sociological sense nor aware and conscious in any psychological sense. In contrast, gender (or sex) roles refer to behaviors, identities, etc. The concept of the social role is a very old one. Indeed, humans have performed social roles since before they were a species. Since gender roles are historical, culturally, geographically variable, one is compelled by fact of observation to admit that gender roles are not solely a function of natural history, albeit I find it difficult to believe there isn’t an evolutionary piece to all of it. (I used to think differently. See, e.g., my 2009 essay The Myth of Extraordinary Evil: A Challenge to Evolutionary Theories of Genocide and Xenophobia. I was a hardline biological egalitarian then.)
Whatever the evolutionary side to gender roles, rooting any social role mostly or solely in a biological construct, in this case, gender, is essentialist and reductive—and reactionary from a feminist standpoint. Again, it’s not that there is no biology dictating social roles, but the variability problem means they cannot be reduced in a lockstep way. What gender ideology does is force stereotypes into our understanding of natural history, which is why men claiming an innate gendered self that’s incongruent with their actual gender typically look like caricatures of the gender they mimic—porn stars and prostitutes (same thing, really). It explains the fetish for drag queens on the woke progressive left. They think men in clown suits is the essence of women personified.
We have reached a critical moment in history when tens of millions of people believe mammals can change gender—with the state and law punishing those who know and say they can’t. AI is part of that structure of tyranny that means to force us to lie about the most fundamental of realities. As I noted above, simulation is not reality. In the era of hyperreality, we must defend the integrity of the real and combat at every turn the attempt to confuse us over what is synthetic and what is authentic. Human freedom depends on a politics of truth. Truth has its own integrity.
One last thing before I conclude this section. The student, who is a gay man (this was a public conversation on Facebook, so I’m not outing anybody), expressed an affinity with trans on that basis despite admitting that he hasn’t read a single thing on gender ideology or queer theory (his characterization). I told him I challenge the claim that there is or at least should be an automatic or natural affinity between gay and trans. They are entirely different things in so many respects. What’s particularly striking to me is the religious character of the gender ideology, especially the construct of gender identity. As I have noted before, the logic of gender identity is very similar to the thetan in Scientology, albeit in the extreme with much greater harm caused to those seeking the authentic self in the former. (See Dianetics in Our Schools; Step Away From the Crazy; Anti-Minotaur: Reclaiming The Truth of Gender From the Labyrinth of Lies.) On the other hands, like heterosexuality, homosexuality requires no mythology. There are no non-falsifiable entities. Homosexuality is a natural fact. We have observed it in nature.
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“At the centre of sissy porn lies the asshole, a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed. Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is.” Charming.” —Andrea Long Chu, Female: A Concern (2019)
“A therapist with a suicidal client does not draw the bath and supply the razor. Take it from my father, a pediatrician, who once remarked to me that he would no sooner prescribe puberty blockers to a gender dysphoric child than he would give a distemper shot to someone who believed she was a dog.” —Andrea Long Chu, “My New Vagina Won’t Make me Happy,” The New York Times (2018)
This essay in Intelligencer, by Andrea Long Chu, “Freedom of Sex The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies,” let’s know that the agenda is fully in the open now. “We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history,” he tells us.
Chu tells his readers that “it should be clear by now that when members of the anti-trans movement argue that sex cannot change, what they really mean is that sex shouldn’t change except in accordance with social norms.” No, what critics of gender ideology mean is that hormones and surgeries cannot change the sex of a person. Nor can everybody deluding themselves or being forced to act in bad faith change the sex of a person. Sex is binary and immutable. The denial that sex can change is the expression of a reality-based worldview. What Andrea Long Chu is saying is not merely anti-truth; it is in practice destructive.
For more about Chu, see Lauren Smith’s May 2023 expose, “A pornified view of womanhood.” Chu is a practitioner of a genre of pornography known as “sissy.” Indeed, he puts it central to his trans identity. Sissy porn made him trans, he said. Not listening to his father certainly didn’t help. For the record, sissy porn is one of the major avenues of grooming children.
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CNN published an article the other day presuming to explain to readers what diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) are all about (What is DEI and why is it dividing America?). “Equity is treating everyone fairly and providing equal opportunities,” the cable news outlet explained. This is true. But that’s not what DEI does. Equity means treating people as individuals, not as members of groups. For example, if there are individual differences between criminal defendants, these differences are considered at trial (this is the equity principle in the neoclassical compromise between the classical and positive schools of criminology). But if the differences between individuals are group-based, for instance racial identity, then it would be patently unfair to treat an individual on the basis of demographics. Black men are drastically overrepresented in the perpetration of homicide. Should this difference make a difference at trial? I trust you can see the problem. (In case you can’t, see my 2018 piece Demographics and People.)
DEI is patently unfair because it privileges individuals on the basis of group identity. That’s discrimination. We should ask ourselves more frequently than we do, why we passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It would remind us of the reason: to stop the practice of discriminating against people on the basis of their race (and other immutable differences). Like affirmative action, which the Supreme Court nixed (see Ending Patronage and Co-optation: The Death of Affirmative Action is a Start), DEI treats individuals as personifications of abstract demographic categories. It presumes that every black individual is disadvantaged on the basis of the demographic fact that blacks as-a-group are not as successful as whites as-a-group.
Individuals are not abstractions. They’re concrete things. The effect of privileging every black individual on the basis of an abstraction (which every average fact is), means disadvantaging every white individual. That’s discriminatory—and racist according to the logic of the Kendis of the world. There are black individuals who grew up advantaged over many whites in every possible way. If they’re given privileges over whites on the basis of skin color—many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds—then whoever is making the judgment is discriminating against individuals not on the basis of fairness and providing equal opportunities but on the basis of race.
DEI is an unjust practice because it isn’t fair and deprives individuals of equal opportunities. DEI is literally the opposite of equality. It’s not inclusive, either, since it is clearly designed to marginalize individuals on the basis of their group identities. All this is for the sake of diversity, which is a euphemism for tokenism. (See DEI Has Got to Go. There are several urls in that essay you can follow to develop a comprehensive critique of this and other ideas related to antiracism.)
freedom and reason 