Some transition, indeed!
Reminder why this is important: Because biological reality is important.
Biggest under-the-radar news from last week, that I mentioned here: the US government now requires nothing for you to indicate your sex on your passport, no matter what your birth certificate says. So when I renew my passport next year, even if my birth certificate from 1960 (!) says “F” – I can put “M” on my form, and no one has the right to question it.
So, yes, it matters.
(Incidentally – today, the UK Supreme Court is hearing a case to allow non-binary gender designation on passports.)
We’ve seen this before, over and over again. Use of vague and misleading language, as well as emotional manipulation, is commonly used to promote causes of which most people would be skeptical or even opposed to. It’s happening with this issue, and it’s happening in Catholic circles.
Most of the links below have to do with communication and information: Suppressing conversation, dialogue and information, and demonizing and ostracizing those who question dogma.
Don’t fall for it.
The conflation of paraphilias with healthy sexuality, is a dangerous one and it is a conflation that is happening under the “gender identity” umbrella. It is posing as a human rights movement but, it is dehumanizing. This is not an accident. “Gender identity,” driven by elites invested in normalizing transsexualism and transhumanism are part of a techno-medical complex, using the internet to drive their ideology.
The main engines normalizing paraphilias are the internet, bio phobia and by extension, woman hatred. The internet, the beating heart of the techno dystopia we are entering is changing our cultures, our thoughts, our world and what it means to be human, faster than we could have imagined. This apparatus is wedded to the industries that have formed around the sexual objectification of women for profit: Porn, prostitution, surrogacy, and now “gender identity.” They are driving these industries faster than we can resist them.
I’m going to come back to this in a post either later today or tomorrow, but please don’t forget the profit to be made from this moment. You convince someone that they can change their sex via medical intervention, whether that be blockers, hormones or surgery, you set them on a lifetime of having to spend money on keeping that up. A lifetime.
The 11th Hour Blog is worth bookmarking if you are interested in these matters.
This sort of politicization of a very important scientific debate is pernicious for obvious reasons, and at first glance, a site like Science-Based Medicine would appear to be well-situated to serve as a useful balm to cool things down: Novella and Gorski enjoy leadership roles in a community of skeptics who aren’t afraid to step up and respond forcefully to confident overclaiming, whatever the politics of the overclaimer, on some of the most controversial subjects imaginable. And on this issue, confident overclaiming is rampant, so it’s a target-rich environment.
Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Instead, Science-Based Medicine has fallen into the exact same trap as numerous mainstream news outlets, violating some of its founding principles in the process. If you read the site’s recent coverage of this issue, you will come away thinking there is a big, broad, impressive body of evidence for youth gender medicine, that there isn’t any actual controversy here at all. Rather than evaluate the available evidence carefully, SBM defaults to just about every activist trope that has come to dictate the terms of this debate in progressive spaces. This is a disturbing example of what complete ideological capture of an otherwise credible information source looks like. Science-Based Medicine has “bought into the hype and failed to ask the hard questions.”
Then, Shrier herself lets loose on ineffectual “conservative” opposition to the Trans Train:
Here, then, is a solution for conservatives: Stop playing the Left’s game of victimhood, stop straining to adopt its lingo. I’m not suggesting that you speak disrespectfully. I’m suggesting that you’ll never win a victimhood contest, in part because you don’t believe in victimhood contests (to your credit) and it shows. The point of the Left’s quick-changing lingo is to confuse, to make it impossible to form an argument or respond to one. The lingo is very much a trap, and if you’re straining to master it, you’re already caught.
Speak as plainly as you can. When discussing issues of biological males competing in women’s sports, don’t say “transwomen in women’s sports”—because the entire question at issue is whether these biological men who identify as transgender are a kind of woman; they aren’t, and pretending they are forfeits the argument. In such context, talk about “biological males in women’s sports” because that is both accurate, clear and essential to making the argument our daughters need you to win.
Nor should you accept that the point of public dialogue is to avoid offense. That has never been the point of language, though it is often the point of its opposite (silence). The goal of language in the public sphere must always be to speak truthfully and as clearly as possible. If you can avoid offense, so much the better. If you cannot, then at least you’ll have been understood.
When a member of the Administration replaces the word “mother” with “birthing people,” you don’t Aw, Shucks, as if you’ve encountered the last native speaker of Etruscan. You’re faced with a direct assault on women and the family. And you respond in kind.
Again, it’s a little inside baseball-y, but that’s how all of these matters are played out, isn’t it? In subcultures and groups and smaller movements that police their own, which then moves out into the broader culture.
In short: Milli Hill is a long-time birth advocate, with a particular perspective, familiar to those of us who were discussing these issues back in the 70’s and 80’s: the commodification of the birth process and, in her view, the role of patriarchy in shaping the corporate medicalization of birth, which she characterizes as “obstetric violence.” She’s obviously coming from a progressive perspective. She started an organization to raise awareness, she’s written books. She’s all about empowering women.
And she has expressed the radical view that women give birth, and to change that language is not only unrealistic, but dangerous. As a consequence of posting this view on a couple of social media sites in rather mild fashion, the Cult has come down hard on her. Here’s her piece explaining what happened.
By sharing this story, I am aware I am laying it in front of you for your judgement. You may decide that my views about obstetric violence or the distinction between sex and gender are wrong. And that’s OK. It should be ok for us to hold different views and to respectfully discuss them. When we do so, it’s sometimes even possible to change people’s minds. Alternatively, we don’t change their minds, but our own clarity of thought benefits from the dialogue, and we develop and grow from the experience of sharing our views and disagreeing. We discover branches of thought we have not yet explored, we enter into grey areas, we see new perspectives. This is the kind of nuanced discussion that elevates humanity and promotes ideals such as peace, progress, growth and tolerance.
The opposite happens when we decide it is acceptable to mistreat, silence or bully people with whom we do not agree. It should never be acceptable to threaten individual’s livelihoods in the way that is currently happening to so many women. I can see that the tide is currently beginning to turn on this, as more women speak out – and this is my main motivation for speaking out. But I also hope that at some point there is a period of reflection on just how far the policing of women’s thoughts and opinions was allowed to go before anybody really noticed. To those of us in the eye of the storm, it felt completely dystopian, and this was exacerbated by the fact that the majority of people seemed to have no idea that a modern day ‘witch hunt’ was happening – or perhaps they did know, but looked the other way.
I also hope that people take time to consider why those who are being dragged to the pyre are not just women, but in most cases, lifelong left-leaning, open minded, educated and tolerant women, often with a history of supporting minority groups or working in areas concerned with justice and fairness. Either there is something in the water that has caused these usually rational and inclusive women to turn into hateful bigots overnight, or they have a point that’s worth listening to.
Finally (and these are only a few of the many I could have chosen from last week), on the implications of self-id in crime and crime reporting, from a UK perspective.
Violent offences committed by men who self-identify as female are being recorded as having been perpetrated by women – leading to claims that the practice is distorting official crime figures.
It was highlighted by the case of former police support officer Zoe Watts, who was jailed last week for a string of offences including building an improvised bomb and having a cache of illegal weapons including knives and a stun gun.
The 35-year-old worked for Lincolnshire Police for eight years.
The court was shown YouTube videos in which Watts used a baseball bat to smash watermelons bearing pictures of prominent public figures including Boris Johnson and the feminist author Germaine Greer.
Watts was born male and was called Kyle. But the force has confirmed it will record the crimes as being committed by a female offender because that is Watts’s self-declared gender identity.
Its record of the offences will be shared with the Home Office and become part of official crime figures.
To find effective solutions we must fully understand the problem, and accurate data is key in tackling the causes of crime, protecting the public, providing justice to victims, and rehabilitating offenders. Data must be accurately sex-disaggregated in order to fully understand the impact of all crimes on women and girls. In order to combat sexism, we need to count sex, and in order to combat discrimination against other groups, there is a need to record separate and additional data. The offending patterns of men and of women show the highest differential of all, so we need to monitor the sex of victims and of perpetrators of all crimes. For example, the proportion of women among those prosecuted in 2019 was 2% for sexual offences, 8% for robbery, and 7% for possession of a weapon.
We all want to live in a society that is respectful and tolerant and strives for equality. Gender reassignment is rightly a protected characteristic and we must respect the privacy of transgender people, but in order to protect everyone when it comes to official records of offences, particularly against women and girls, we need accurate records of the biological sex of the victims and the perpetrators of crime, in addition to data on the gender identity of victims and perpetrators. Why then are police forces recording the self-identified gender of victims of suspected offenders and not their biological sex? I understand that at least 16 regional police forces now record suspects’ sex on the basis of gender identity, following the advice of the National Police Chiefs’ Council. Data based only on self-identified gender does not give accurate data on which to build a violence against women and girls strategy, nor to effectively plan services that support all victims and target all perpetrators whatever their sex or however they identify.
If police records are not robust and correctly disaggregated by sex, we end up with unreliable and potentially misleading data in reporting. For example, the BBC asked 45 regional police forces in the UK for Toggle showing location ofColumn 507data on reported cases of female perpetrators’ child sex abuse from 2015 to 2019. The data received indicated that there was an increase of 84%. Data corruption means that we cannot tell whether this large increase is due to an increase in female offenders or those identifying as women, and that detail matters.
Women make up 3% of the arrests for all sexual offences. The number of women convicted for these crimes is so low that the misrecording of the sex of the perpetrator skews the data very quickly. Where offence categories are very rarely committed by women, the addition of just one or two people can have a significant impact on data. For example, a biological man convicted of attempted murder and other offences at Birmingham Crown court in 2017 was recorded as female, thus falsely elevating the number of females convicted of attempted murder that year in England and Wales by around 20%. We need to know what action the Government will take to ensure correct police record keeping and prevent the potential corruption of data on crimes and their impact on women and girls.
Charlotte was Both 