The Growing Climate of Intolerance Towards Unicorns

 

A friend sends along this CBC article. 

They are awfully vague in their charges for most of the piece. You know someone is up to no good when they hide behind uncommunicative terms like “gender-affirming surgery” and “inclusive sex education.” You know they are hiding something.

What “protections” do transgender students need? That is, over and above the protections extended to all of us against bullying, intimidation, violence? Without being given specifics, this smells instead like special privileges. As the aristocracy, no doubt, needs protections against the mob.

What constitutes anti-gay rhetoric? Without being given specifics, this smells instead like an attack on free speech and open debate.

As a rhetorical trick, this is often called “poisoning the well.” The reader is mostly being asked to trust the judgement of the author. Just understand that the other side in this controversy is evil, without specifics.

Here’s what ought to be taught in schools: how to spot and argue against such rhetorical tricks and logical fallacies.

The example they finally give is “to deny the existence of trans and non-binary genders.” Interesting; the contrary position would literally have been considered insane up to a half dozen or so years ago. I believe ‘gender dysphoria” is still listed in the DSM as a mental illness. More broadly, to deny physical reality is definitive of severe mental illness.

I believe we have fallen down a rabbit hole here because we have falsely created a distinction between sex and gender. Take out the concept of “gender” as something apart from sex, and the matter becomes clear.  Sex is a binary system. There are and can be only two sexes, down to the level of egg and sperm.

“Gender” was originally a grammatical concept—this is why we have a separate term. In French, for example, all nouns are either masculine or feminine. It was also then sometimes rather casually used as a synonym for sex; literally, it just means “type.” 

Still no particular confusion here. If gender = sex, there are still only two genders. Or, more accurately, three: masculine, feminine, and neuter. 

Then, as of 1945 and postwar years, feminists started using “gender” to refer to the social role of women, as opposed to their sex. And from this, all the present confusion has emerged. In doing this, feminists intended to reject the feminine gender, the social role of women, and insist that it was all down to body parts and sex. There was no difference to the minds of males and females. “Gender” was a social construct.

But this attempt to separate sex from gender has led to our present confusion. Now, some people are imagining that they have a male sex and a female gender, and vice versa. 

Fine. But following the logic of the original feminist concept as of the postwar years, so what? So act however you like. If you want to go out to work, that does not make you a man. If you want to stay home and bake, that does not make you a woman. If gender really is a thing independent of sex, why then is there any need or call for “gender-affirming surgery”?

My wife is from the Philippines. There, transvestitism is socially acceptable, and always has been. My sister-in-law dresses as a man. No problem. But anyone there would laugh at the notion that she now actually IS a man. She is a “tomboy,” and a male-to-female transvestite is a “ladyboy.” 

Action4Canada, the CBC piece goes on to warn us, “describes gender-affirming surgery as ‘child abuse.’" This “gender-affirming surgery” is a lot more radical than female genital mutilation. Which so many of us fought so hard to end only a few years ago. It is, properly speaking, sex-denying surgery.

You may say that the distinction is that female genital mutilation is involuntary, while transsexual genital mutilation is consensual. Fine, if you are speaking of adults. Insane, yes; sinful, yes. But the individual’s own business. But an essential principle of law is that a child cannot give consent. Sex with a child is automatically abuse; it does not matter that the child “consents.” Therefore, genital mutilation of a child is automatically abuse. As is giving a child hormones which might interfere with their later ability to reproduce, without some pressing medical reason.