As I frequently say I am in the business of
questioning assumptions and I don’t think there should be things that cannot be
said. This must be said. So let it be said.
At some point in the past fifty years or so someone
decided that there was a thing called gender that differed from biological sex.
From this all sorts of unlikely thinking has arisen. As with everything else it
is necessary to go back to first principles and question everything.
In the 1940s John Steinbeck wrote his novel East of
Eden. At one point a little girl tells her uncle that she would like to be a
boy and could he help her become one. The uncle points out to her that it isn’t
possible for her to be a boy and she has to accept what she is. Over time she
does so. She grows up and becomes a woman.
Imagine this same conversation today. I still think
most parents would try to convince their little girl that it wasn’t possible
for her to become a boy. But there is always the chance that someone would eventually
agree with the little girl. They would take seriously the idea that she felt
that she was really a little boy and they would set about making her dream come
true. Would this story have a happy ending?
Let’s look at the ideas involved in modern day
assumptions. It is assumed that gender can be different from biological sex.
The little girl’s biological sex is female but her gender is really that of a
boy. But how do we determine this gender? Is there anything empirically that we
can point to in order to determine if it is true? All we have is the little
girl’s statement that she feels like a boy and wants to become one. But how
does she know that she feels like a boy? How does she know what being a boy
feels like? I do not know what it feels like to be any other person. I only
know what it feels like to be me.
Moreover, if what matters is that someone says they
feel like something else, what if the little girl had said I feel like a cat
and want to become a cat? Should we take that statement seriously and set about
turning her into a cat? Why can’t we make a similar distinction between our
biology as homo-sapiens and our feelings that we are cats? This is clearly
analogous to the distinction between being biologically a little girl and
feeling like a little boy. It may not be technologically possible to turn
people into cats, but this is a mere medical limitation. One hundred years ago
no-one thought it possible to turn a girl into a boy. So we could work towards
a time when we could fulfil the little girl’s desire to be a cat, meanwhile
accepting that although she is biologically a human being she is really a cat.
If however we accept that there is a distinction
between biological sex and gender why ought there to be a need to change
biological sex. If gender is determined by how someone feels, why not say you
can feel as you please, no-one is stopping you. But why then do you feel the
need to change your biological sex? There is a contradiction here. Either
whether someone is a girl or a boy is something objective or it is not. If it
is a matter of how someone feels, there need be no need to get medicine
involved. If on the other hand it is something objective, then it ought to be
determined objectively. But how is it that we determine the sex of infants? This
is either the criterion of who is boy and who is a girl or it isn’t. You can’t
have it both ways. There is nothing
hindering you being subjectively a little boy even if you were born a little
girl. But subjectivity is not truth and ought not to determine reality. Once
you go down the route of making subjectivity the master of thought then you can
quite soon believe absolutely anything, no matter how unlikely. This
unfortunately is the case throughout much of the Western world. We have reached
the stage where “black” will soon mean “white” if that is what the latest PC
fad suggests. Moreover we all must conform or else face censure. Soon we will
be commanded to believe that 2 + 2 = 5 and we will all do so willingly.
With regard to the sex that someone is assigned at
birth, there are no doubt instances of people who have a medical condition that
requires intervention, but these are few and far between. However, in the vast
majority of cases it is simply unhelpful to make a false distinction between
gender and biological sex. In the world we live in today I suspect 99% of the
population understands sex as an objective matter that is almost always
determined at birth. Only in the West have we got ourselves into a terrible
muddle by making a distinction where there is no difference. The correct
response to someone who says they were born with the wrong gender is to point
out that they are simply mistaken. You may feel like a boy, but you are not a
boy. You may feel like a cat, but you are not a cat. It is better to be what
you are than to try to be what you are not and can never become. That way only
lies unhappiness, because it is to try to build a house on the foundations of
falsity.
It is unreasonable to base our whole theory of
identity on a few people who describe themselves as transgender. The norm for
nearly everyone is that there is no distinction between sex and gender.
Creating a distinction where there is none because of a small group of people who
are objectively mistaken is clearly odd and lacking in logic. Moreover it is I
believe harmful. Many little girls who would grow up to be women and little
boys who would grow up to be men are being confused by an assumption which has
no evidence behind it. It is quite simply something a few academics made up out
of their heads mainly because they are sophists who have fallen for the old lie
that “man is the measure of all things”.
Plato showed the folly of this position thousands of years ago. There is
truth and it is objective otherwise what I am writing right now would be
self-defeating and pointless.
There are objective qualities and there are
subjective qualities. For the vast majority of us it is simply a fact that we
are male or female, black or white. I cannot say that I feel like a black woman
and therefore I am a black woman. This quality of being black is objective. To
fail to realise this rapidly leads to the nonsense of someone pretending to be
black even though their parents were white. For the self-same reason I cannot say that I
feel like I am a man, therefore you ought to help me become a man. It is more
correct to simply say to me, “I’m very sorry but you are mistaken. You are a
woman. Accept it for this is something you cannot change.” If we really thought
that the idea of someone being a girl or a boy was subjective we wouldn’t
determine it in the way that we do at birth, but rather we would wait for every
infant to become eighteen before giving it a name or deciding what sex it was.
There are exceptions to every rule and we must be
kind and understanding. But we do not define words by how they are used by a
tiny minority. The fact is that for nearly everyone in the world there is no
distinction between sex and gender. We determine both by looking at someone when
they are naked. The whole theory of
gender being distinct from biological sex falls down upon a simple examination.
It’s a wonder that so many people believe in it. But then there is a lot of
pressure on them to do so. But I’m very sorry, I may be something of a lone
voice here, but I feel the need to point out that the emperor has no clothes on
at all.