What’s happened with modern discourse can be described as no less than an absolute conflating of necessary intellectual and social friction with upset, unease, and personal criticism—take your pick. I see no reason to not primarily blame social media and the irresponsible metric-driven moguls behind it for having set all of humanity down a path so curated and self-involved that narcissism has become a form of empowerment. Twitter posts that read like scrawled extremist manifestos only they’re about pronouns and chestfeeding. Unironic magazine covers suggesting that a two-hundred and fifty-pound woman is “healthy”. And on the same note, Tess Holiday claiming to be in the grips of anorexia. Reality and science no longer have synergy with our existences. We live in an age of imagination.
It’s not.
Where does all this deconstruction end? I don’t want to find out. I say that not from fear, and instead since we have seen, in history, numerous examples of how monocultures of thought and identity run their course. We don’t even need long memories, which reach back hundreds and hundreds of years, and only a basic historical acumen of events occurring in the last century will suffice. Regrettably, when history is studied from one’s Twitter-feed society’s brazen ignorance is understandable. Mao, Lenin and Stalin divided people into groups based on class— while maintaining a level of elitism and rulership dissonant with their preached virtues—instead of today’s polemics of race and sexuality (sex arguments and women’s rights have largely been pulverized under the stilettos of trans activists, as these topics conflict with their agendas). Do what I say, not do what I do—sound familiar? Maoism and Stalinism had notes of religiosity and empowerment to their movements, instilling their followers with such a sense of belonging and unification that they betrayed and sold out their family members when convenient to their survival. Much like the current day Twitter-mob, who frequently consume their own, often to throw the piranhas off the scent of their individual, bloody sins. Asia Argento infamously comes to mind, a woman who almost single-handedly derailed the #metoo movement before the woke co-opted and crashed it anyway. Indeed, and with sickening predictability, the more one attests to their virtue and offers sacrifices to the mob, the more likely they have bodies festering under the floorboards that they dread being uncovered.
Sadly no one cares about women and their woes, and the speed with which we’ve moved from decrying female assault to encouraging men-who-believe-they’re-women to engage in it—punch a TERF, slap a TERF, do worse to a TERF are not uncommon parlance—suggests how much this movement is more about rebranded misogyny and zealous witch-burning than it is about any meaningful change. Placing a person who was a biological male that enjoyed the full and clear benefits of testosterone on bone and muscle growth through most of their adult life (40 years in the below case) into a competition with women who have a much lower baseline of these traits seems the height of narcissistic, misogynistic indulgence. And there are numerous heads to the hydra, each steering their Twitter infantry—or Twitfantry, if you will—towards nihilistic ends. Truly, the disembodied and multitudinous nature of the attack on Western civilization and values is one of the greatest obstacles to combating this threat.
Peak Clown World. Can we go higher? I bet we can!
So how do we fight the insanity? I’ve long argued that reason and science were the primary tools, however, I’m no longer convinced that reasoning with unhinged people is the strongest course of action. You cannot reason with someone who believes they are a deer, a demi-human, a lizard (see below) or who doesn’t understand the basic concepts of sex and/ or its distinction from gender. You cannot reason with them because they are not reasonable or living in reality. “B-but sex is a spectrum! Intersex people prove this!” Well, no, intersex persons don’t prove anything about acceptable differentials anymore than someone being born with a cleft-palette, an extra toe or a third nipple define the baseline for our species. Our species is overwhelmingly binary, with minuscule deviations from that median. The percentile of intersex persons is so minute as to be an irrelevance, which is why it’s ridiculous that given an iota of relevance in gender debates or by supposed “professors”. I know that everyone wants to feel special and be special, but as far as our primary sex characteristics go, we’re not. (Our secondary sex characteristics are where we can vary from sex to sex, though even they still fall within broad and often respective lists for both men and women.) If you want to be different or unique, pick an aspect other than your biology to extoll. Perhaps a physical or artistic skill, you know, something merit-based that allows you to truly shine above all others. Individualism, not tribalism, is the way forward.
Furthermore, we (of the sane) must begin a wholesale rejection of being sympathetic to woke arguments. Approach every dialogue from a place of science, not conjecture and feeling. No more should we dance around the awkwardness of mutilating our language to suit the particular mood and transient identity of a subject. We can call them by their name and one of two time-worn and highly specific pronouns and leave it at that. We need less complexity to this dialogue, not more. We lost tremendous ground by engaging in this wordplay in the first place. We must strip away the innumerable layers and word-traps that cocoon and protect this ideology and reveal it for the shoddy illusion it is: that we cannot change the immutable nature of our sex, our past or our racial identifiers.
If I remember correctly, Richard Dawkins (or a similar thinker) was promptly cancelled for positing—as a thought experiment—that we apply transracialism as we have applied transhumanism. Surely if everything is relative and based on identity and affirmation, then race can be too? Yet the hysterical and incoherent response to what should be a logical and playful discussion demonstrates the fickleness and puerility of identity politics, which seems a child’s game of make-believe, cliques and name-calling reworked for adult bullies in their Twitter playground. The truth is: there is no rational distinction between deciding that one can change sex any more than they can change another immutable element of themselves without massive compromises, often surgical alterations and even then a double-dose of suspension of disbelief for themselves and all those involved in the make-believe.
Not parody. Trans-woman who believes they are a lizard.
Thus living in reality, and reminding others of our collective, proven and scientific reality is the last recommendation I would make. We take back our society each day, each moment by living in objective truth, not delusional fantasy. Stop playing the word wars. Stop being silent when you should speak up. We have so much more of our culture, history and security to lose, and only so many more degrees to shift before those losses become irrevocable.
Great piece.
What’s also fucking stupid about the claim that intersex people prove that sex is non-binary, is that they do just the opposite.
Intersex people have physical characteristics from BOTH sexes. Why are we using the word ‘both’? Because there are two of them. Biological sex is a reproductive phenomenon; all of the bits and pieces are related to the function of getting two gametes together.
I know you’re gay, and I’m not in any way making a normative value statement about what SHOULD happen, but an observation about what DOES happen in reproduction. Just want to be super-clear on that.
It’s not like intersex people are a third sex, who somehow participate in a tripartite reproductive process. The whole of reproduction is based on two gametes and intersex people have bits involved in some way in facilitating the meting of BOTH of them.
Sex could not be more binary, and intersex people demonstrate that.