The Emperor’s New Gender Clothes – JCJ on ‘Lia’ Thomas.

I like Michael Shermer’s point that puberty is nature’s ultimate ‘doping’, which gives males significant and systemic physiological advantages over females in all kinds of ways. So he calls this kind of competition clear examples of ‘transdoping’, meaning the result cannot possibly be fair. And we see this result plainly.

If doping is considered cheating between competitors BECAUSE it offers an unfair advantage, then puberty for males is unquestionably the same unfairness when competing against females. Competitors that discovered to have doped to achieve some unfair advantage are quite properly stripped of ranking and medals and are banned from competition BECAUSE such cheating is unfair to all the other competitors. The ban in this sense is not personal; it id done on behalf of fairness in the sport. So the same reasoning applies to trans athletes BECAUSE they have gone through puberty doping and have an unfair advantage that will harm the sport if allowed to continue.

It is deeply shameful for any sport as well as any competitor to go along with the indisputable charade that transwomen are un-doped women when then can enjoy the physiological advantages puberty has provided yet conveniently ignored to tilt the clear advantage in favour of trans athletes over females. Once puberty has happened, no amount of injected testosterone, hand wringing, tolerance, and moral certainty in the righteousness of trans ideology will magically turn a male into an un-doped female. Killing women’s sports to make room for transitioned male athletes to absolutely dominate is as everyone clearly sees a death knell against competitive fairness. And, as always, women lose ground. Every time. Always women. That’s a clue…

LikeLiked by 1 person

Oh, that’s just one little word. The takeover of our language has been the long game with this ideology of which ‘gender’ for ‘sex’ is just one branch. I’ve been saying for decades the identifying feature is the reversal of language where up means down and white means black. Think of the key words: anti-racist now stands in for supporting race essentialism, social justice means accepting privilege for some and injustice for the ‘deserving’, tolerance means not tolerating any criticism, diversity means no differences will be tolerated, free speech means (self) censorship, and the big one, of course, is equity, meaning any differences in outcomes is evidence of systemic inequality. And so on.

The imposition of ANY group-based ideology inevitably conflicts with the sovereignty of the individual – the bedrock principle of liberalism and the essential foundation for democracy (consent of the governed). The loss of individual rights and freedoms in the name of improving some group-based identity in whatever form it comes is a toxic ideology. That’s post modernism today and it is deplorable. In. Every. Single. Way. Fundamentally, it creates the necessary conditions for an Us-versus-Them mentality, which is the necessary condition for zero sum conflict and the antithesis of compromise and consensus.

LikeLiked by 1 person

The entire critical theory model is really Marxism rebranded in the sense of framing the world as all about power and hierarchy and conflict between groups. The problem is that groups aren’t real discrete entities in the same sense that individuals are real discrete entities. A ‘group’ doesn’t sit on the toilet or bump a shin against a sharp edge.

Liberalism and the Enlightenment from which it arose is all about the base unit of various social considerations belonging not to some god, not to some king or emperor, not to some nation, but to the individual. That is the base until upon which all else is built. All people in this sense have the same sovereignty and so this is the unit around which all social institutions must be built so that outward social cohesion comes from a shared beginning, a shared base.

These two framings – group and individual – are fundamentally incompatible as base units for things like law. Whereas individual sovereignty works as a political model that fits with practice in reality (trade and social cooperation and shared rights, for example), group sovereignty always breaks down into incoherence when transferred from theory into practice. There’s no such base unit. So it’s this incoherence that is revealed when the framing is acted upon, and the resulting incompatibilities are then rationalized as some kind of necessary but temporary condition that group believers encounter. And so to try to fit the square peg of theory into the round hole of reality, ideologues attempt to alter the reality part to address the incompatibility, to excuse why the framing doesn’t work in reality. That’s why there’s always an attack on language first because changing theory into practice – black into white or male into female – is easy if we just go along with changing what the words mean and then pretend reality – and those who respect it – is the problem here! And so any group ideology will end up having individuals attacking other individuals who constitute the competing groups.

Although Marcuse wanted to confront certain toxic groups, I don’t think he ever clued into the fact that supporting contrary group ideology would ALWAYS produce exactly what he was trying to dismantle. That’s why we see the same authoritarianism in this left wing group ideology we see exercised in equivalent right wing group ideology.

LikeLike