Guest post: Their own load of unclaimed baggage
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The dog that didn’t bark.
Saying ‘we have evidence’ or ‘there is evidence’ is not the same as presenting evidence. There are a lot of people who claim to have evidence for bigfoot; sure. Show us the evidence. Subject it to rigorous review and repetition to see if the claims hold up. Then you’ll have evidence.
One of the things that many people who argue for the existence of creatures like bigfoot/sasquatch, Mokele-mbembe, or the Loch Ness Monster don’t seem to realize or appreciate is that their claims entail perforce the continued existence through time of an entire population of their preferred cryptid(s). A population and a history. One means more, perhaps many. Now means yesterday, as well as long before. The secretive, hidden existence of a whole bunch of large creatures over long periods of time in the face of multiple, repeated expeditions actively seeking them is much less likely than supposed, impossible singletons. Unless they’re supernatural, any animal needed parents, grandparents, etc. Specimens would have been seen, hunted, eaten and/or stuffed and mounted in museums long ago.
Like the cryptozoologists saddled with bigger claims than they realize they’re defending (an entire breeding population of large animals with an invisible, unevidenced past, rather than just a single, elusive specimen), transgenderists have their own load of unclaimed baggage that they are in no hurry to pick up, apparently happy to leave it circling endlessly on the luggage carousel, hoping that nobody notices it. They depend upon the existence of some kind of gendered soul, but offer no proof of its reality, no physiological origin, or seat of residence, and no reliable, independent test for its presence or nature, beyond stereotype and affectation. “I slink, therefore I’m Femme.” This smuggling of unacknowledged Cartesian dualism is but one problem that hides within genderist claims. How it is able to accommodate the contradictory and incommensurate states of transgender, gender fluid and nonbinary “identities” within its already ill-defined remit is a question that is left unasked.
At least cryptozoologists go looking for their quarry, they have put their money (or, occasionally, someone else’s) where their mouths are. Genderists are content to leave it all a matter of faith. Vague definitions and verbal slight of hand keep things from getting too real or solid. Mustn’t try dissecting the Mysteries of the Faith. And like the Church of old, they reserve to themselves the right to punish heretics who question that faith.
A serious scientist can risk ruining their career if they admit to believing in cryptids, though the consequences for doing so do not spread much farther than their own livelihood and credibility. There are plenty of serious scientists who seem quite happy to believe in genderist claims; it is often the unbelievers who are at risk of sanction and ostracism.
Eventually, however, reality will win because it persists and endures. It will still be there long after the tweets that don’t age well, and the slanted, dishonest reportage that tries to obscure it. It only has to do nothing but wait. In the meantime there is real harm. Reality can’t win fast enough. The consequences of this belief, and its translation into practice, go far beyond those who espouse it. Yes, their reputations will eventually suffer because Reality (see above). If this were a battle that consisted solely of heated arguments by cloistered devotees hurling incomprehensible arguments at each other within the pages of obscure journals, we could safely ignore them. But the power of gender ideology reaches much farther than academia. It has gained influence in many of the fundamental institutions of the state and society, and it uses that influence to advance its demands and to punish its perceived enemies. This is academic argument with a body count amongst both proponents and opponents of transgenderism. Those who are seduced, ensnared and say “Yes” to its impossible promises, pay with their flesh and blood and fertility. Those who dare stand up and say “No” to its demands, particularly and especially women, are demonized, vilified, slandered, cancelled, fired, bullied, threatened, harassed, and assaulted. In short, agree or disagree with a transgenderism powerful enough to enforce its will, you lose.
I signed out a circulating copy of Gender Magic recently. Here’s some basics:
There’s no such thing as male or female brains:
Chromosomes don’t have anything to do with gender:
Intersex, or DSD people are as common as people with red hair. Adherence to the sexual binary is like:
<blockquote"we created a taxonomy of hair colors and listed blond, brown, and black as options. We decided to leave out people with red hair because there weren't enough of them, and they weren't important enough to count. Furthermore, in this imagined world, leaving out redheads is not only unfair but has violent consequences for anyone with a hint of red in their hair. And people who fall somewhere on the spectrum between blond and brown or between brown and black are assigned to a single group even though they have markers for both.
This kind of makes sense now that I think of it. We probably all remember the boy at school who started growing breasts in at puberty. Or the girls whose voices changed during adolescence and began to grow full beards and increased upper-body strength. We all remember Charlie Brown’s infatuation with the “Little Redheaded Girl” but we’ve consigned “Fluid Fiona” to the memory-hole.
Imperialistic Western science perpetuates the binary by assigning sex based on looking at a newborn’s genitals for a “‘hot second’ (yes, this is the medically accurate term)” and arrogantly declaring that we’re either boys or girls. Let’s all just be honest for a second and admit that we all need at least ten seconds of intensive scrutiny of someone’s genitalia to decide whether they’re female or male. Why are we pretending otherwise?
I’m so glad we’ve moved beyond Western science and started applying stuff about DNA, neurology, chromosomes and other folk wisdom.
Anyway, the proportion of people who are unambiguously female or male is about as large as the group of people who aren’t redheads. But those people are STILL on a spectrum the way some people aren’t completely blond, or brown haired or black haired. By that I think it is meant that short men are female heighted and tall women are male heighted.
Regardless, sex has little or nothing to do with one’s gender. Gender is a social construct that is based on a hierarchy that privileges white cisgender males. The artificially/socially constructed “male” gender is, moreover, “toxic” and hurts men as well as everyone else.
There’s more but it’s just the same slurry of incoherence and contradiction.
As I understand it, there ARE the two poles at either end of the sex spectrum; “Male” and “Female,” but many of us occupy a position between those two extremes. Furthermore, our position on this spectrum has nothing to do with our genders. Neither your genitals, your brain, your hormones, your chromosomes determine your gender. Your gender is your sense of your gender.
For some people, their sex is (more or less) “female.” And, if their gender also happens to be “female” then they are “cisgender.” Likewise for an AMAB person with a “male” gender. Why a gender would be “female” or “male” since sex has nothing to do with gender is unclear. What that even means is unclear. Precious few people are genuinely “female” or “male” sex-wise and what the hell is meant by a “female” or “male” GENDER is left unsaid.
Nonetheless, our deep, internal sense of our undefined gender is self-determined. And kids know their own (undefined) genders. Unless they don’t. In which case it changes as they learn more about themselves and the world and whether they feel more comfortable conforming to the [false] social construct of “female” or the [false/toxic] social construct of “male.”
Finally, non-white people the world over knew this for thousands of years and we would have done well to learn from them.
(I pray to gawd my html coding turned out right.)
Shit.
<blockquote"we created a taxonomy of hair colors and listed blond, brown, and black as options. We decided to leave out people with red hair because there weren't enough of them, and they weren't important enough to count. Furthermore, in this imagined world, leaving out redheads is not only unfair but has violent consequences for anyone with a hint of red in their hair. And people who fall somewhere on the spectrum between blond and brown or between brown and black are assigned to a single group even though they have markers for both.
There’s an interesting/funny circular logic concerning cryptids.
When people talk about cryptids, they mean BIG cryptids. If I claim there is an unknown species of bacteria, or lichen, or insect, or even a small bat in some jungle somewhere, well, sure. There probably is.
But the cryptids that people get excited about are the big ones. Sasquatch. Yeti. Nessi. And the thing about big cryptids is that there just can’t be any of them in lower Manhattan. We’d see them, right? There can’t even be any in Nebraska. The farmers would run into them with their tractors and there would be video on YouTube.
The big cryptids have to be in remote places. The Himalayas. The depths of a Scottish Loch.
But when we say “remote”, we mean remote from us. Places where there are no people. And the reason there are no people in these places is that these places are really inhospitable to life. For a start, they tend to lack food sources.
So the logic of cryptids keeps forcing these animals to places where they can’t survive…which is probably why they don’t exist…
@Steven – there are plenty of food sources at Loch Ness. Pubs, restaurants, snack vans – all catering for tourists.
[…] a comment by Steven on Their own load of unclaimed […]
Anymore these days, “evidence” in the gender world is nothing more than unchallenged statements, too. If I were to tell you I had a picnic lunch with Bigfoot, you would probably be skeptical and ask for a photo, for example, but if I tell you that I (a biological man) am actually a woman, then you’re expected by the alphabet soup gang to accept that instantly and completely.
(On that note, I enjoy knitting and keeping a clean kitchen and I believe that I have a pink t-shirt somewhere here, so in the gender world they’d probably claim that I’m a woman and expect ME to accept that instantly and completely, without question.)
James Garnett, I hate knitting, but do love a clean kitchen. I mostly wear black, tan, and beige t-shirts. And I wear pants! I’m sure that means somehow that I am also trans…only TiF instead of TiM.