Germany To Recognize Third Sex (aka "Gender") Option For The Intersexed; Used as Springboard For Transgender Agenda
link
Ok, intersex...uality? Intersexed-ness? (As with 'transgender' / 'transgenderism', there's this weird demand that we modify grammar here and just say 'intersex'...but that's ridiculous). Anyway: it's a genuine problem. Someone who is genetically and anatomically right between male and female can't, it seems, truly say they are either male or female. They genuinely fall between the cracks with respect to reporting their sex, and with respect to sex-specific pronouns. It's not clear to me what to do in this case, but it seems that we have to do something--and I think it's plausible to ask the people most affected what they think we should do. Anyway, there are real problems here that require real thought and real solutions; the actual facts of human sex aren't the way we (laypeople) thought they were. (In retrospect, it was silly to think that the distribution was strictly bimodal; that's just not how nature operates.)
Again: this is a real problem; it requires a real solution.
Transgenderism is different. It's not much about facts, it's all on the side of preferences and representations: some men prefer to falsely represent themselves as women, and some women prefer to falsely represent themselves as men. Except in certain circumstances--e.g. if they're on a trajectory to have sex with somebody, going into public restrooms or locker rooms, playing some organized sports, applying for some scholarships, some legal purposes, etc.--such false self-representations are permissible (at least in some sense of 'permissible'). This is not to say that sex (aka "gender") "dysphoria" isn't real. I expect it is in some few cases. Or at least it might be. Among billions of people, you'll probably find some few with almost any psychological problem you can think of. What it means is that preferring to represent yourself as a sex that you aren't is not, in principle, any different than any other preference for self-misrepresentation.
Transgender ideology, of course, hitches its unrelated arguments to the discussion of intersexuality for rhetorical/tactical reasons. But the discussions should be separated. TI holds the unrelated view that a paradigmatically male person can literally, actually become a woman simply by feeling or declaring that it's so. Which is nonsense. And it has nothing to do with the real, actual problem of intersex(uality). And none of any of this has anything whatsoever to do with "gender"...which term is basically an equivocation-generator as it's used on the left. It means sex when that's convenient, and a range of other things when that's convenient. Nothing about "gender" is relevant to the discussion of intersex(uality) unless 'gender' is simply being used as a synonym of 'sex.'
Incidentally, the story uses inflated figures, which is par for the course. Apparently the actual number of intersex(ed) people is more like 0.06% than 1.7%.
Also: the medical question of what to do with intersex(ed) children seems like a really tough one to me. Medical interventions are represented as being akin to sexual mutilation...but I'm skeptical. I expect we tend not to hear about the more successful cases. Seems to me that, if there were an irreversible procedure that would perfectly shift an intersexed baby into one of the two sexes, that procedure should be performed. It's possible that the child would regret that when he or she is grown, but it seems unlikely. The real question seems to be: how good are the procedures? The less effective they are, the stronger the case for not doing them. Or so it seems to me.
Ok, intersex...uality? Intersexed-ness? (As with 'transgender' / 'transgenderism', there's this weird demand that we modify grammar here and just say 'intersex'...but that's ridiculous). Anyway: it's a genuine problem. Someone who is genetically and anatomically right between male and female can't, it seems, truly say they are either male or female. They genuinely fall between the cracks with respect to reporting their sex, and with respect to sex-specific pronouns. It's not clear to me what to do in this case, but it seems that we have to do something--and I think it's plausible to ask the people most affected what they think we should do. Anyway, there are real problems here that require real thought and real solutions; the actual facts of human sex aren't the way we (laypeople) thought they were. (In retrospect, it was silly to think that the distribution was strictly bimodal; that's just not how nature operates.)
Again: this is a real problem; it requires a real solution.
Transgenderism is different. It's not much about facts, it's all on the side of preferences and representations: some men prefer to falsely represent themselves as women, and some women prefer to falsely represent themselves as men. Except in certain circumstances--e.g. if they're on a trajectory to have sex with somebody, going into public restrooms or locker rooms, playing some organized sports, applying for some scholarships, some legal purposes, etc.--such false self-representations are permissible (at least in some sense of 'permissible'). This is not to say that sex (aka "gender") "dysphoria" isn't real. I expect it is in some few cases. Or at least it might be. Among billions of people, you'll probably find some few with almost any psychological problem you can think of. What it means is that preferring to represent yourself as a sex that you aren't is not, in principle, any different than any other preference for self-misrepresentation.
Transgender ideology, of course, hitches its unrelated arguments to the discussion of intersexuality for rhetorical/tactical reasons. But the discussions should be separated. TI holds the unrelated view that a paradigmatically male person can literally, actually become a woman simply by feeling or declaring that it's so. Which is nonsense. And it has nothing to do with the real, actual problem of intersex(uality). And none of any of this has anything whatsoever to do with "gender"...which term is basically an equivocation-generator as it's used on the left. It means sex when that's convenient, and a range of other things when that's convenient. Nothing about "gender" is relevant to the discussion of intersex(uality) unless 'gender' is simply being used as a synonym of 'sex.'
Incidentally, the story uses inflated figures, which is par for the course. Apparently the actual number of intersex(ed) people is more like 0.06% than 1.7%.
Also: the medical question of what to do with intersex(ed) children seems like a really tough one to me. Medical interventions are represented as being akin to sexual mutilation...but I'm skeptical. I expect we tend not to hear about the more successful cases. Seems to me that, if there were an irreversible procedure that would perfectly shift an intersexed baby into one of the two sexes, that procedure should be performed. It's possible that the child would regret that when he or she is grown, but it seems unlikely. The real question seems to be: how good are the procedures? The less effective they are, the stronger the case for not doing them. Or so it seems to me.
posted by Winston Smith at
12:32 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home