So much debate around whether sex is a binary or a spectrum. The thing is, a binary is a mathematical thing. And there isn’t any need to debate mathematical things. They are easy to prove.
I’m a computer scientist, and if there’s anything we know, it’s binaries.
Let’s start with this. When you have two things, there are four ways to combine them. You can have the first without the second, the second without the first, neither, or both:
1
0
0
1
0
0
1
1
That’s it.
And now: sex. It’s not a coincidence that the word for sex, as in whether you’re a man or a woman, is the same as the word for sex, as in gettin’ it on between the sheets. They both have to do with reproduction.
There are two gametes in human reproduction: the smaller one, called the sperm, and the larger one, called the ovum. If you have those two things, you can make a baby. If you don’t have those two things, you can’t make a baby.
If you have those two things, you can make a baby in a petri dish. Even if there’s no boobs, hips, penises, vaginas, estrogen injections, silicone implants, lingerie, gaffes, tool belts, laser salons, cosmetic surgeons, or anything else anywhere in sight.
If you don’t have those two things, you can’t make a baby. Not in a petri dish. Not anywhere else. Even if you bring all the asymmetrical haircuts and stilettos and ambiguous genitals and pink and blue flags and bathroom bills and clownfish you can muster.
There’s only two things that are needed to make a baby. A sperm, and an ovum.
There are four ways to combine those two things in a human being. The person can produce ovum but no sperm, sperm but no ovum, neither, or both. In reality, the last is exceedingly rare. But the point here is that there isn’t more than one way to do this math. This is a classic binary system. Two things, four combinations. There’s no way to get an endless number of combinations out of two things or even seven combinations out of two things.
Since it takes a sperm and an egg to make a baby, and the question of whether or not folks want babies coming into their lives is an important one to absolutely everyone, it’s useful to have a word for those who make sperm and those who make ovum. Until recently, everyone’s been happy to use the words “male” and “female” for this useful distinction.
But even if you decide these words are harmful, even if you ban them, even if you question and censor every other word that springs up in their place, there will still be two gametes and four ways to combine them. Math is inflexible that way. Reality is stubborn that way.
Intersex? Despite the hype–which tellingly is spread mainly by folks who aren’t intersex–that’s a handful of conditions, and those are disorders of female development or disorders of male development. But it wouldn’t matter if there were a thousand intersex conditions. All intersex individuals produce sperm, ovum, both or neither. All fit into one of the four available combinations. In no cases does a human being produce a third gamete! Or a fourth!
Now if you want to say gender is a spectrum… well, I’ll still say that’s a mistake. But at least it’s not mathematically refutable in five minutes.
A position that requires bolstering with fake data is a weak position.
Hey folks, the woke internet is doing it’s best to deplatform and silence critical analysis and criticism of gender ideology. Here’s the thing, if your ideology wasn’t shit to start with, it could withstand critique and still be coherent. It isn’t, thus the censorship.
There’s a lot of chat around about pronouns right now. Specifically, ‘preferred’ pronouns. By which is usually meant, the pronouns a person would prefer other people to use when they are the subject being discussed by those people.
‘This is how I want you to talk about me’.
Almost without exception, the people who request, or demand, others talk about them using specific pronouns, are asking for pronouns associated with the opposite sex to their own.
A simple politeness. A courtesy.
I’ve heard many people tell me they don’t mind doing this, as a courtesy, although it takes some effort to keep up the mental gymnastics of perceiving one sex, but consistently using pronouns for the other. That’s a personal choice, and I respect the reasons why some people make it.
I’ve also heard many people declaring that anyone who won’t comply (usually directed at a woman) is obnoxious, mean, hostile, and unpleasant. ‘Misgendering’ is hate speech. They say.
But I refuse to use female pronouns for anyone male.
Because pronouns are like Rohypnol.
One of the biggest obstacles to halting the stampede over women’s rights is pronoun and preferred name ‘courtesy’. People severely underestimate the psychological impact to themselves, and to others, of compliance.
Pronouns are like Rohypnol to your brain’s defences.
You doubt this absurd claim I just made, obviously. You have the fortitude of mind to be uninfluenced by such trivia, and I have got this wrong. I understand. Bear with.
It’s a well known “name that colour” psychological phenomenon. A quick and simple experiment where you have to say the colour of the words written in front of you. Simple as that. Except the speed and accuracy of your answers is heavily impacted by any incongruence between the colour you see, and the actual word itself.
Try it HERE, if you like fun interactive tests. It takes less than a minute to complete. Compare the difference in your times between part one and part two of the experiment.
You’ll find you have to consciously fight the conflict of input to your brain each and every time. And it leaves you confused, distracted, slower, frustrated and fatigued.
Forcing our brains to ignore the evidence of our eyes, to ignore a conflict between what we see and know to be true, and what we are expected to say, affects us.
USING preferred pronouns does the same. It alters your attention, your speed of processing, your automaticity. You may find it makes you anxious. You pay less heed to what you want to say, and more to what is expected of you. It slows you down, confuses you, makes you less reactive.
That’s not a good thing.
The cost of HEARING or READING preferred pronouns from others:
Experiment 2.
For a week, re-translate all the transgender articles and comments you find, back to sex-based pronouns, nouns and original names. Rewrite them back to the blunt truth and then read them again. Doing this exercise solely in your mind will do just fine, but editing on a screen is better.
Convert female pronouns back to male; use surnames instead of first names, and convert terms like transwoman back to just ‘man’.
Better yet, if you know the original name of the subject, use it, be it David, or Rhys, or Ashton, or Jonathan.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, yes? It shouldn’t matter. No-one else will be hurt or affected by this private experiment. It’s entirely between you, and your own resilient mind.
(Try not to get banned from anywhere during this experiment)
Read your translated version again.
If those small acts of preferred pronoun compliance are truly meaningless concessions, (although, see above banning potential for contradictory evidence of import) given as a courtesy to others at no cost to you or to other women, then this private exercise will change nothing, cost nothing, affect no-one. You’ll walk away thinking, yep, as I thought, fuss about nothing.
After all, nothing *should* change, should it, simply with the alteration of pronouns and names? You already know the actual sex of the subject you’re reading about. Pronouns, male or female, add no incremental information. How can they in any way alter your perception, or influence you when you already know all the facts? They’re an irrelevance, the easiest concession to make. Not worth consideration, inconsequential. Right?
Cognitively, you should be immune to the effects of such linguistic cross-dressing. Pronouns are irrelevant, so you concede them easily, because they have no power to influence you, since you already see clearly. Yes?
[And you can confess here, it’s OK. You may already think that the minority of women who refuse to comply with pronouns are just awkward buggers, who can’t think strategically, don’t know when to let it go, probably are extremists. Do themselves no favours, damage their own ‘cause’, even. Unreasonable.]
But try the experiment. Translate pronouns and references back to male. Insert ‘dead-names’ or use surnames. (No-one will know but you) Read it a second time. And be honest with yourself.
Do you feel differently, on reading it this way?
Do you react differently?
How’s your anxiety?
Are you angrier?
Do you feel more scared?
Is your sense of injustice alerted?
What level have your natural defences armed to?
You may discover that, despite yourself, you have a viscerally different reaction to what is before your eyes.
Same story, same players, same core knowledge.
Different pronouns, different reaction.
Pronouns are like Rohypnol.
They dull your defences. They change your inhibitions. They’re meant to. You’ve had a lifetime’s experience learning to be alert to ‘him’ and relax to ‘her’. For good reason. This instinctive response keeps you safe. It’s not even a conscious thing. It’s like your hairs standing on end. Your subconscious brain is helping you not get eaten by the sabre tooth tiger that your eyes haven’t noticed yet.
Oscar probably didn’t intend the instinctive female response his words provoked
Incongruent pronouns also make your brain work much harder; not just when you are using them, but when you are receiving them as information. You are working constantly to keep that story straight in your head. Male or female? Which one, again? Concentrate harder. Ignore your instincts, ignore your reaction.
And that’s just you. You’re already aware of all the pertinent information, already alert, you know the score, no flies on you.
And you’re still affected emotionally and instinctively by incongruent pronouns, nouns, and names. Despite your efforts to be immune. You’re not immune to this effect. You can know perfectly the actual sex of a male person, and yet you will still react differently if someone calls them she instead of he.
So what then, is the impact on everyone who isn’t even aware yet, hasn’t fully comprehended yet what’s going on?
Pronouns are Rohypnol. They change our perception, lower our defences, make us react differently, alter the reality in front of us.
They’re meant to.
They numb us.
They confuse us.
They remove our instinctive safety responses.
They work.
If you do this experiment you may still decide to accept or use female pronouns for male people, perhaps a little wiser, but cognisant of their influence on you and others. That’s a choice you may make. At least now you understand that you may be voluntarily suppressing your own natural response. Your eyes are more open.
Maybe you’ll continue to mentally translate ‘preferred’ pronouns and names in your head back to reality, every time, as I do. We give ourselves the best chance to understand the reality of the situation before us. It becomes easier with practice. I want my instincts as intact as possible.
Maybe you shrug. You can live with this little phenomenon. Or it didn’t work for you, you don’t see it.
But please. Don’t judge so harshly those of us who refuse to submit, refuse to comply with preferred pronouns. There are good reasons why we might be doing that, for our own sakes, and for the sakes of others.
Pronouns are Rohypnol.
I want to be alert. I want others to be alert. I want people to see the real picture, and I want those instinctive reactions that we feel when something is wrong, to be un-blunted, un-dulled by this cheap but effective psychological trick. I feel like I owe this to myself, and I absolutely owe it to other women.
And more than anything, I owe this to girls. I don’t want to play even the tiniest part in grooming them to disregard their natural protective instincts. Those instincts are there for a reason. To keep them safe. They need those instincts intact, and sharp.
“Morgane Oger is the Vice President of the now ruling British Columbia New Democratic Party. The BC NDP is your typical left of centre political party. They have an ambitious social justice platform, spend most of their time letting us know how virtuous they are by claiming to speak for the voiceless, and have expressed a serious interest in increasing the number of taxpayer funded human rights organizations in the province. If you’re still stuck in your leftist bubble and haven’t experienced your awakening yet, this probably sounds like your party. If you’ve had your awakening, then you can likely see right through the whole mess and are painfully aware of the fact that like most political careerists that market to the social justice vote, they are quite willing to overlook some forms of violence and hatred in order to pander to the half-baked and trendy ideologies that have not yet discovered their proper boundaries.
The placement of boundaries really is the discussion to be had here. There is a growing movement that has not yet found its boundaries, and the patience and good nature of the citizenry appears to be approaching its limits. How much are we expected to put up with while maintaining the live and let live philosophy that most reasonable people espouse?
Live and let live is a reasonable and effective approach to a maintaining a harmonious society that’s made up of individuals with many different opinions, values, and beliefs. It works pretty well and is based on the idea that you are free to do as you please as long as you are not infringing on the rights of others. This allows people the freedom to practice their religion or to practice no religion, choose who they sleep with, choose who their friends are, choose their line of work, indulge all of their own interests – as long as those interests are legal, or even to alter themselves so as to appear to be opposite their original sex . You’ll generally get no objection from reasonable people on these basic rights. So far so good.
I am of the live and let live type. I make no objections to other people’s sexual preferences, lifestyles, religious views, choice of occupation, or any of the common topics that frequently do bring objections from one’s parents or siblings. In return, I ask that others not impose their view of the world on me in a way that causes me to either have to engage in activities that I object to, or to refrain from acting to prevent an obviously immoral action. Increasingly, this bargain is being degraded by those who wish to force us to think what they tell us to think, to accept their opinions and desires as concrete and unalterable fact, and to refrain from asking questions. Here, we run into a real problem. I’m not willing to go along with being bullied into agreement. I like to ask questions and I like to understand something completely before I go along with it. I like to weigh all the evidence and then make the best decision I can, based on that evidence. Increasingly, my desire to draw my own conclusions is being challenged by a highly aggressive and occasionally violent movement.
The movement that I’m referring to is the transgender movement. I’m hesitant to even call it a movement, as it’s made up of a wide range of individuals. However, it seems to behave as a movement and many of its adherents seem to be studying the same material. The reason I suspect this is that when I get into a minor argument on Twitter with a member of this movement, I can usually accurately predict the content and the outcome of the conversation very shortly after it begins. Many of these conversations are boring and irritating, but they’re necessary to have if you want to understand someone else’s position.
What I have been able to understand, so far, is that a portion of the transgender movement holds the position that a man who transitions into a woman, simply dresses as a woman, or says he sometimes feels like a woman, is the same as a woman who was born female and is therefore entitled to enter any female space he likes. Again, we have a problem here. I am quite willing to agree that he has the right to live as if he is a woman and I would never object or say that his decision is in any way morally inferior to any other way of living. Like most reasonable people, I’m willing to go along right up until the point where the behaviour begins to infringe on the rights of others. We’ve very much reached that point, and our provincial government appears to be complicit in the current aggressive overstep of the transgender movement.
It’s important to logically lay out my position that the transgender movement is overstepping its proper boundaries. In order to do that, I have to tell you something of myself. I’m an atheist. I could never be religious. This is because I fall into the category of people described by Pascal as being so made that I cannot believe. I am made this way and it is because of the way my mind works that I’m an atheist. I have no choice in the matter. I interpret information literally and I am unable to force myself into believing things that are untrue or even appear to be unlikely, based on the available evidence. I also object to compulsory enthusiasm, as this requires a similar tricking of one’s own mind. My mind is very mechanical, and it’s no surprise to me that I ended up as a machinist and an industrial mechanic. I like to design, repair, build, improve, and troubleshoot machines and their components. This work is very much in line with my nature. I was a very small child when I began taking things apart and making other things out of the parts. Proper and accurate categorization is very important to me. This is who I am and I expect others to live and let live when it comes to me.
The transgender movement looks to me to be exactly like a religion and it comes along with similar demands: an unwavering belief in implausible theories, demands of compulsory enthusiasm, and the demand that citizens and authorities look the other way while immoral actions take place under the spell of its ideology. In fact, here are some of the things that you are required believe in order to escape the hyper focused aggression of the transgender movement: That men have periods and menstrual cramps, too; that men should be allowed to enter women’s sports events if they say they’re women; that men should be allowed to enter women’s shelters if they say they feel like a woman; that men should be allowed in women’s and girl’s changing areas; that there are many genders; that people who don’t wish to have sex with a transgendered person maintain their position out of hate; that children should be exposed to the ideology of the transgender movement at an early age; that male criminals who would prefer to be in a female prison need only identify as female to make this a reality; and many other things that are being rapidly added to a growing list of preposterous ideas.
I cannot make myself believe that someone born a man can become a woman. My understanding of biology and evolutionary psychology is such that I would have to lie to myself in order to hold such an opinion. In addition to the available scientific information, my opinions are also formed by the fifty years that I have spent being alive and interacting with and observing friends, coworkers, parents, siblings, and children. I’m free, and wish to remain that way. I want to use my own mind, think my own thoughts, and I want to be honest and pursue knowledge for its own sake.
The fact that I cannot make myself believe that a man can become a woman does not alter the fact that I accept their right to try. It also doesn’t alter the fact that if it makes them happy, I support their right to engage in the pursuit of it. I treat their religion – the idea that gender is fluid – the same way that I treat other religions. I don’t even go so far as to say that they’re wrong. I simply say that, based on the available evidence, I don’t believe it and I can’t make myself believe it. I say that they’re welcome to believe it and also to live their lives as though it were true. I don’t understand why this isn’t enough for the transgender movement. I’m holding up my part of the live and let live bargain. Why won’t they?
The overstepping of the transgender movement consists of activities that I find morally reprehensible. There are constant threats of violence along with actual violence directed at feminists and lesbians from men claiming to be women. We see constant threats of financially crippling human rights complaints against those who question scientifically incorrect transgender dogma. Men are entering women’s sporting events and taking medals from female competitors. Women have been assaulted by men dressed as women in women’s change rooms. Women’s shelters now have to waste their precious resources hiring lawyers and defending themselves in court from men who feel entitled to dress as women and enter shelters where traumatized women could once find a reprieve from male violence. Young children are being indoctrinated into the transgender movement before they are old enough to understand very much at all. Some of these children are being given puberty blocking hormones and undergoing surgeries”
Every time a woman asserts a boundary, the echoes start rolling in…
Can’t you just be nice?
Can’t you just take pity on the poor fella?
Can’t you just lie to make him feel better?
Can’t you just sacrifice yourself, again?
… isn’t that what women are supposed to do?
It should be obvious that this is an extremely sexist insistence on women’s obligation to put everyone else first, and also highly revealing of just how entitled people feel towards everything to do with women – our resources, our bodies, our time, our empathy, and now even the very words that define us.
Yet the trans takeover of popular feminism has been so gradual and so manipulative that many have found themselves groomed into something that acts very much like a misogynistic cult.
Unlike any other civil rights movement, the one for women’s liberation is expected to solve everyone else’s issues before we might – hypothetically – be allowed to stand up for our own rights and needs.
Rather than fight against male supremacy, male violence and male exploitation of women, we are told, once again, that we need to not only include men, but center them, defer to them, shrink ourselves for their benefit.
These days “inclusion” always means inclusion of males. The women and girls who don’t want to be around men and boys, who want to be safe, have privacy and maybe even dare talk about women’s issues? We aren’t included. We aren’t deemed important.
Boys must be included in girls’ locker rooms and wherever else they want to go. The girls? Well they’re bigots if they say anything about it.
This is called progressive.
That is not only madness, it is saying in no uncertain terms that the whims of males matter more than the safety, rights and very definition of females.
Women are not your fucking giving trees. We are not resources to be harvested by men, used, abused, consumed and thrown away.
And here’s the thing. The thing that means the trans activists will never be satisfied, that the moving of the goal posts will never ever end:
A man cannot become a woman.
No matter how much you wish, how much you threaten, how much you throw yourself on the ground and demand, demand, demand.
These entitled, misogynistic, rage-filled men are so used to getting their way that they fancy themselves the rulers of material reality.
They cannot accept or even fathom that this delusional desire is out of reach of their grabby, male hands.
Their demands will never end, because they are impossible to satisfy.
Even if they burn every witch, even if they call the truth hate speech, even if they pick our bones clean…
Those bones will still be female.
And theirs never will be.
Even with all the power and male aggression in the world, you cannot force a lie to become true.
Men cannot have the word woman, because the truth fucking matters.
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