Gender – RAnt(hony)-ings

A Tale of Two Blocks

This is a story of two Facebook friends who served as muses of a kind. Both of them in their own time and in their own way served as muses for my writing, but over the span of a few weeks or months they both left my circle in ways that were violent to my psyche. They will remain nameless here. Their names are as irrelevant as the names of any writer’s muse. Their importance was always in what they represented to the creative side of my mind, not in who they were, what they were called, but what they meant to me as inspirations behind some of the words that I have written here over the years.

The first was a singer/songwriter. His work has made an impression on me over the span of several decades. Ages ago, way back in the 1990’s, there was a cool site called MP3.com, a site that is completely different from the lame site that squats at that URL today. Back then you could log on this site, pop in a purchased audio disc, and after a short period of verification you could listen to MP3’s of that audio wherever you were, free of charge. It was a streaming service before any other streaming service existed.

Not only could you listen to previously purchased music, but you could find new music and local music on the site, making it a very useful place for the average music listener to go to find the kinds of music that they found interesting.

While registering my voluminous numbers of purchased albums I had time to discover even more music, music not available at the local music store. Music untouched by corporate handlers. I even purchased albums directly from MP3.com, music that I didn’t have to pay for, but do pay for because I wanted to support those artists.

His band was one of those new bands. They were different, not quite like anything else in the alternative rock scene that I had been part of for pretty much as long as I could remember. I bought their albums. I got to see them at an anime convention that I went to specifically to be able to talk to them and listen to their live performance. That weekend was the pinnacle of my experiences with the band and with the singer/songwriter that lead them.

My Favorite Fairytale

The mistake was in getting too close to him and to his band. It started with Facebook, like most of these kinds of stories do. I was an early adopter. I was part of Myspace before Facebook was a thing, and I migrated to Facebook when it became the thing that everyone was doing at the time. He was on Myspace and Facebook as well. MP3.com having since been sued out of existence, he had to move on with the tide, just like I did. Everywhere I was I looked for him and his band, promoted him and his band. I loved him. I loved his words. I loved his music, the music of the people he chose to surround himself with.

He has the same problem that so many Americans have. He is an armaphile, he has no capacity to understand that the killing machine he loves has to be given up if we are ever to get past this point in history.

Death Cult

This train of thought leads me directly to the second muse in this tale of woe. I honestly don’t know who she was aside from what she meant to me on Facebook. She was a she then, and she possessed that certain something that has always attracted me to women, that something that confirmed to me that I wasn’t a homosexual in the way that most people think of homosexuality. I was attracted to men, don’t get me wrong. I just wasn’t attracted to men as strongly as I was attracted to women.

The decades when I was growing up were tough for people who weren’t willing to either present as traditional males or traditional females. When my mother instructed me to leave my dolls at home when I went to school, explained to me that the other boys would not understand that I liked to play with dolls, I realized that I was different and that I would have to lock away certain parts of myself in order to fit in with the other children in my age group.

Much like a closeted homosexual, I locked away the things that were different about me and I tried to conform to the norms that were on display around me. Pretending to enjoy sporting events because all the other men did. Trying to play sports because it was expected of me. On and on and on. The list of norms that I attempted to conform to over the years is longer than the number of years in which conformity was something I strove for.

I made a series of bargains with myself as each stumbling point was reached in my life. The first one was to deny the nurturing part of myself to anyone who couldn’t accept who I presented myself as. This was manifested in my willingness to let my dolls go as a six year old. That part of me stopped then and only resurfaced again when I was forced to help raise my brothers and sisters as a teenager.

At about ten years of age I started exploring the mysteries of sex, as any growing human would and does. Having been denied an explanation of the ins and outs of the subject from my parents, I started exploring the subject with my childhood friends, the ones who were also curious about the subject and ready to explore. None of this exploration amounted to anything meaningful (nothing that years of therapy can’t address anyway) but it all ended with another bargain with myself. I would refrain from having sex with other men so as to avoid the stigma of being dismissed as a queer and being consigned to Hell for being one.

Strangely enough, one of the other bargains I struck with myself was that I would dismiss the possibility of the existence of Hell from my mind. Worrying about going to Hell will drive you crazy in the end, and I was already overburdened with more anxiety than the average person had to deal with by that point. So I dismissed the possibility of Hell as being outside the realm of dealing with a caring, loving god, and I got on with trying to live my increasingly complex life.

This lead to the next bargain I struck with myself, one that I am reticent to admit even now. Even now, after mentioning the other failings (failing to live up to the vision of manliness that was forced on males in my age group) I’ve had to bargain with myself over. The last bargain was my agreement to not kill anyone or anything else unless I simply could not avoid it.

It is strangely hard to not kill things in life. You kill plants and bugs every day whether you know this or not as you are passing through existence. Trying to be respectful of life is quite hard. I can’t even begin to imagine the kinds of burdens of doubt that the average Jain must carry, trying not to cause harm to the smallest of creatures.

It was the evolution of this last bargain, the evolution being forced by moving through the decades and periods of life, it was this bargain that lead to the falling out between myself and that singer/songwriter. If killing others is wrong, if killing itself is wrong, then the tools that are used to kill must be regulated so that killing can be minimized. Controlled. He couldn’t give up his shotgun, couldn’t understand that I wasn’t even talking about his goddamn shotgun in the first place.

So he blocked me, and through his blocking me he severed the connection between the meaning that his music carried for me as surely as he severed the emotional connection with me. So he gets to keep his shotgun. Good for him. I wonder if he has the wherewithal to make a living using that tool, and only that tool, for the rest of his life?

Does this tie to the Gift of Fear? (Sam Harris #90 Living With Violence) The guilt of being born a white man in the same way that being born black or a woman assigns you to positions, powers and groups you never wanted to be part of? Does it tie into the narrative that I’m constructing for the other muse, too? The she who no longer wants to be considered a she but instead wants to carry the cludgy gender identity of non-binary?

You cannot mansplain non-binary, unless men aren’t allowed in that club. People with dicks that also carry purses, like to look attractive, are nurturing to children, etcetera. I mean, I can’t mansplain that identity if I’m not a traditional man and if I’m not excluded from adopting the gender identity for myself, right? All of those things are true of me, so I can’t be mansplaining my dissatisfaction with adopting that identity for yourself. The problem isn’t the ambiguity of the identity. The problem is that it presumes to label a thing that already has too many names in the first place.

I present this podcast as evidence for my argument:

Gender is one of the first things we notice about the people around us. But where do our ideas about gender come from? Can gender differences be explained by genes and chromosomes, or are they the result of upbringing, culture and the environment? This week, we delve into the debate over nature vs. nurture, and meet the first person in the United States to officially reject the labels of both male and female, and be recognized as non-binary.
one – npr.org – The Edge of Gender

A podcast in which we discover that non-binary was a label invented by a lawyer. Non-binary is bad legalese and doesn’t address anything substantial. No, I’m not saying you have to be seen as male or female; what I am saying is that not adopting one or the other stereotype is something that cannot be captured by a made-up legal definition like non-binary. I’d no more accept that label than I would accept the label cisgender or transgender. None of those things are really things unless you had work done by a surgeon that alters your sex, and then you are a transsexual because you changed sexes. We put way too much importance on the gender stereotypes we subject others to. We put way too much importance on what we call ourselves in relation to what we think the stereotype for our sex is.

Biologically I am male. That hasn’t got a thing to do with who I am aside from the mechanics of reproduction. No one gave me a choice as a child. I was told I was a boy and a boy acts this way. I saw that boys that didn’t act in acceptable ways were targeted and destroyed by other boys. I wanted to live a full life. I chose to conform, outwardly. This conformity cost little for me because, as I jokingly tell the wife, I’m a bull dike who just happens to have the correct biological equipment. I get to be spared being called a lesbian and outed because I just happen to look outwardly like a man, even though I don’t like being a man very much if at all. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t assume that what goes on between my legs is any more of your business than what goes on between a woman’s legs, thank you ever so much.

Claiming to be non-binary is just striking a pose, posing, an attempt to escape categorization by creating a new category and not calling that category androgyny for some unknown reason. Everyone is non-binary, it is just that most of them have no idea that they can’t be one-half of a binary pair. For there to be a binary pairing, there would have to be sexual polarity in the same way that there is magnetic polarity, and every magnet has both a negative and a positive pole.

Monopoles (magnets with a single pole) probably don’t exist, so even the allegory that there is some essential polar opposites manifesting as sexes or genders fails in the end. How about ambisexual like ambidextrous? You can go both ways at once and you aren’t particular about the direction? It’s physically possible to be both at once. Why isn’t that acknowledged as it’s own sex, it’s own gender?

The moral of this story? You can rely on a lawyer to invent a term for a thing that already has a term in the first place. A term like non-binary. Next time consult a linguist first.

None of this would change the outcome of the argument on Facebook. They blocked me like he blocked me and I was forced to go searching for the next muse to stimulate my mind with, so that I could continue to do the thing that defines my existence these days. I don’t think I want to say anything more to the singer/songwriter. He’s off having a great time doing whatever it is he does these days with whoever he’s with these days. He’s a survivor. He’ll be fine.

I might have more to say to the non-binary person that used to be one of the women that I prize so highly. The women with minds of their own that are harnessed to wills that allow them to get shit done around them, and they don’t feel the need to put the man first and adopt that false femininity that only pisses me off when I’m around it. The ones that wake up and throw clothes on and never bother to check the mirror before heading out of the house because what they look like really isn’t that important to getting shit done. The people around you will tell you if you need to put the shirt on frontwards and right side out. If they don’t then it wasn’t that important in the first place. The women that act like a man does because he is allowed to act that way.

I worry about that former muse when I think about them. I don’t do it out of some manly need to protect. At least, I don’t think that is what this is. I do this because worrying is one of the things that I do best. I learned how to do this from a master, the strongest person in my life, who just happens to be the most feminine person in my life at the same time.

Facebook

Postscript

The content of this post had to be generated from memory because of the violence committed against me by these two former muses when they cut off my access to my own words by blocking me. C’est la vie. I used material from several uncompleted drafts to put this piece together as a tribute to lost muses. May there always be another muse to turn to.

The man/woman conundrum continues in the world outside. I hate to break it to these people who are terrified of the non-conforming around them but you can’t demonstrably be a man or a woman unless you have created children with your vaunted sex organs. Fertility is the only determinable difference between men and women. There are a lot of women who don’t like to think that the ability to produce children is what makes them women, just like a lot of men would be uncomfortable with the knowledge that not being able to father children means they aren’t men.

Sticking to these objectively determinable sexual facts would exclude a lot of people from residing comfortably in either sex category, but it remains true that the purpose of male and female, women and men, the existence of sex itself, is procreation. That is the only reason it exists and so the ability to procreate necessarily defines what it is to be a male or a female. EVERY OTHER CHARACTERISTIC IS SUBJECTIVE. Every other imagined purpose for sex is also subjective.

So either we need to stop pretending there are hard and fast definitions for what a man or a woman is, or we need to understand that a majority of people are neither men nor women in any objective sense and simply accept that fact. If you, dear reader, want to then say “oh that doesn’t count as a definition of the sexes either” then you are essentially saying “we’re all the same” and I’m good with that too. One human race not a bunch of different groups trying to distinguish themselves from the groups they dislike or want to be different from. Cool, cool. What were we talking about, then?

The Justification for the Explanatory Pause

Code Switch is one of those podcasts that I make a point to listen to even when the titles make me cringe. This is one of those episodes that I cringed through while at the same time having some relevant old white guy points I really felt were worth addressing.

Code Switch – Hold Up! Time For An Explanatory Comma – December 14, 2016

The podcast hosts bring on Hari Kondabolu (whose podcast Politically Re-Active isn’t one I listen to) to talk about why he takes a break in the middle of a subject riff in order to explain the subject matter being discussed.

He refers to it as Hold Up, Wait a Minute which is amusing, the right move for a podcast that is humorous in nature. However the title of this podcast Explanatory Comma had me yelling explanatory pause at my headphones by the end of the episode.

In my opinion, the breaking point for when/when not to explain things is entirely subjective. If the audience member knows about the thing, they will think you are talking down to them. If the audience member doesn’t know, then they will be lost if you don’t explain it. I knew who Tupac was, so was not lost during the previous episode of Code Switch that dealt with him but didn’t explain who he was.

On the other hand Hari Kondabolu says Tribe Called Quest and stands on his outrage at having to explain that this was another music reference. I know it is a music reference now, because I went out and looked it up and realized that my ignorance on the subject is a product of not having any interest in Rap, Hip Hop, or any other form of music that wasn’t Rock or Classical or the Country music my mother made me listen to as a child.

All of us are products of our experiences. If our experiences don’t include your experiences, then any attempt to connect will be fruitless unless a common ground of conversation can be established. So you have to take time to explain to the audience so that you can bring them along with you if you want them to go where you are going by the end of your narrative. If you don’t do that, they get bored, stop reading/listening/watching and your attempt to communicate fails.

When you can’t see your audience, the curse of the A/V field, you have to attempt to gauge what your audience will understand without your providing an explanation. Which is largely what this entire episode of Code Switch is about.

But I didn’t start writing this entry to talk about why explanatory pauses are necessary.

What I wanted to address was making sure that you don’t take time to explain things that really shouldn’t have to be explained. All of us have our own lives, our own heuristics, our own foibles and our own prejudices. Most of us are smart enough not to air our dirty laundry or (as Hari Kondabolu quite pointedly says) force our white supremacy onto the rest of society.

There are exceptions, the entirety of the FOX news team springs immediately to mind, but generally we keep our thoughts to ourselves because, hey, everybody is busy and why burden a total stranger with the bullshit in your life? Right?

On the other end of the spectrum we have something like the TED talk below;

Tiq Milan and Kim Katrin Milan – TEDWomen 2016 – A queer vision of love and marriage

Now, I’ve made a few attempts to line out what I think on the subject in the talk. Tiptoeing through Gender Issues. Partnership by Any Other Name. Homophobia In Denial. Before you come to any snap judgements about what I’m about to say, I’d suggest that you take an explanatory pause and go look at what I’ve said before, so that what I’m about to say doesn’t strike you as callous or unfeeling.

When I look at that couple I do not see the complex characters they want us all to accept them as. What I see is a perfectly average couple who clearly love each other. If I’m passing them on the street, serving them food, or any of the dozens of jobs of the people they will encounter every day, none of those people will have the time or the desire to understand and accept these two as what they see themselves as. There comes a point where you have to rely on your gender presentation (clothing, hair style, scents, makeup, whatever) to communicate all the myriad things you think are important as a first impression. You cannot go back and make a second first impression, and an angry explanation about why your presentation should have been understood will be accepted just as well as the FOX news junkie who goes around insisting that Santa is white.

This TED talk is an example of the dreaded internet oversharing. The needy posts on various social platforms that start with “Let’s see who reads this” or “if you really are my friend”. The entire TED talk is an explanatory pause; and frankly, I’ve contested a few of the belabored points in the talk. Contested them because, in the end, no one really should care that much about you unless they are having sex with you. You aren’t having sex with the entire internet and if you are you probably need therapy of a different kind.

A Queer Version of Love and Marriage goes over the line from explanatory pause into the realm of browbeating. If you are in an educational setting like a podcast or a TED talk, then you are going to get things explained to you that you probably already know. That is what the 30 second jump button is for (if your podcast app doesn’t have that, go get this one) if you don’t have the patience to hear something explained for the 97th time, skip ahead 30 seconds. But if you are getting a gallon of milk at three in the morning, don’t expect the cashier to know your preferred gender pronoun. Just pay the person behind the counter and say “thank you” and walk out. He’s got mopping to get back to and he really doesn’t care about your frustrations.

When I’m listening to a podcast about Code Switching I expect to have musical references, as well as many other references, explained to me. That is why it is called Code Switch. Because we are trying to Switch the Code; Race and Identity Remixed. Understand the other side. Broaden our understanding of the human animal. Can’t do that if we don’t understand the references. Hope I’m being crystal clear here.

I edited the first sentence in the second to last paragraph to be more clear as to where the line between explaining and over-explaining is, or where it is for me. Your Mileage May Vary, as the saying goes. Damned indefinite pronouns, the bugaboo of all attempts at clear writing.

Earlier on I changed the last paragraph to link the FAQ for Code Switch so that anyone who disagrees with what is being said can just go to the FAQ and educate themselves.

The most amusing thing about writing this piece, about my initial response to pushback against White Supremacy being attached to everything white people do, to the explanatory pause being denigrated as a distraction from the actual storytelling, is that the overwhelming number of negative attacks have come from White Knights who feel obliged to jump in and defend minorities from aggression. As if Old White Guy points are always going to be aggressive. Or White Supremacist. As if minorities aren’t capable of defending themselves in a battle of words and ideas.

May I always resist the urge to come to the defense of someone whom I consider to be my equal and does not appear to be losing a battle of words. All Social Justice Warriors should be compelled to adhere to that oath.

Gene Demby‘s sole response on Twitter was two characters.

NO

Those two characters, and then he promptly blocked me on Twitter. I think the blocking was a bit overboard, but fans can be a bit oppressive. I practice prophylactic blocking of MAGA trolls on all venues myself, so I will take the fact that it is Twitter and what would I do in his shoes? and go with that.

I puzzled on the meaning of those two characters. Puzzled on them off and on for months. I puzzled on them until the next time they needed to explain something on the show and they said it’s time for an explanatory comma. After about the third repetition of the phrase, I realized that the NO meant that I had completely missed the point the show hosts were driving at. They were introducing a new segment to the show, and this was to be its cringe-inducing title. I also missed the point that I was not in the segment of the audience that the phrase was directed at. It was the people resenting having things explained to them that they already knew. A cute way of attempting to disarm them, I guess.

I’ve tried clever titles for posts in the past. It rarely works out the way you intend, but I wish them luck all the same.

I’m still listening to Code Switch. Currently I’m looking forward to the last installment of the look back at the influence of President Obama (part 1, part 2, part 3 WBEZ’s Making Obama was also worth the listen) I have an opinion piece on that subject which I title Obama Best President Since Eisenhower. No, I am not subtle. Not in the least.

The last episode put a bug in my ear about the miscommunication of what Code Switch means to black people and why it might mean something different to white folks. I talk in code to old white people; old being my age and older (yes, there are older white people than I am) I will occasionally put on a filter for children that aren’t mine as well. I have found that being dead honest with the children of strangers can be more troublesome than being dead honest with old white folks.

However Code Switching takes on a whole new meaning when you take things like this into account.

The Green Book, or to give it its full title, “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” was first published in 1936. It was a revolutionary publication which listed restaurants, bars and service stations which would serve African-Americans.
Traveling during the Jim Crow era was difficult for African Americans. In the South, “black code” laws targeted them for loitering. In many towns, black travelers risked death if they stayed past sundown.
Travelers came up with their own ways to avoid violence and humiliation. One was called ‘The Green Book’ created by Harlem postal worker Victor Hugo Green. It was an invaluable tool to help black people plan a safe route across the country.
Alvin Hall’s BBC program ‘The Green Book’ documents this little-known aspect of racial segregation.

When you might be lynched or shot for simply driving into the wrong town, knowing what the code is takes on a whole new meaning. I know this. I knew this. But knowing isn’t being. While I know that I don’t speak freely (to not speak in code) around parents, children, people who aren’t into SF or video games or recreational drug use (legal. All my drugs are legal now. Have been for at least 25 years. I have the prescriptions to prove it) the downsides of slipping out of code for people like me are radically less life-ending than for people who face the possibility of death at the hands of people who hate them just for existing. Which is why a Code Switch takes on much more weight for minorities than for people like me.

My apologies for approaching the subject with less gravity than it probably deserved. I still see the refusal to explain as a missed opportunity to connect; but truthfully there is little use in telling me about one more artist whose rap I probably won’t be interested in either. The explanation for how I lost my music (and with it the appreciation for pretty much all music) is a story I haven’t tried to write down yet.

Another time, perhaps.

Knowledge vs. Belief

I started to write this post after Jim posted Unknown unknowns over at Stonekettle Station, which was a post in response to the tempest in a teapot that represented the 24 hour news cycle reporting on the clinic standoff and shooting incident in Colorado Springs. I shelved it for various reasons at first, none of them really earth-shattering. Of course, a week later and we have the inexplicable mass shooting in San Bernardino, which instantly eclipsed the previous story.

I could easily spin this into an screed against the gun lobby and their paid cronies in Washington DC who won’t let the CDC even study gun violence in an effort to figure out how to address it, considering that we have had more than one mass shooting every day of this year (2015) which has to be some kind of record that no society on the face of this earth is really interested in breaking…

…but that isn’t the article I want to write. This isn’t going to be the article I started out writing, either. The issue is much bigger than the specific subject of what we know or don’t know about a specific person set on doing wrong, or having been caught doing wrong. It is even bigger than the problem that Jim was trying to address, the 24 hour news cycle, which I agree probably represents the greatest threat to human civilization in the modern age. The need to fill time, to produce facts and counterfactuals when no hard facts are known about the specifics of the incident in question, can lead to greater and greater flights of fancy.

I turn the TV off when that feeding frenzy starts. It is hard enough to separate the wheat from the chaff on good days. On bad days like the two events above bring, listening to the news just feeds confirmation bias until you end up looking and sounding like an idiot.

I will include the specific arguments for the Colorado Springs incident in this post, but the point that I’m seeing come into focus now that the shooter has appeared in court and indicted himself is the argument about what we know vs. what we believe. How we can know what we think we know, and how is that different than belief?

That is the reason why the 24 hour news cycle is such a threat. Being not much more than the talking heads that sold soap in the early days of television, the current crop of news faces appear to have even less familiarity with what facts are and why fact-checking is important. They are, after all, just selling soap. Keeping the most number of eyes on the screen is how they sell soap and so the factual content of what they say isn’t the important part of the equation. That they tell you things that reinforce your beliefs on a subject so that you will keep watching, is.

Most of the white-looking people in the US trust the police intrinsically, for example. Most of us older types were raised on police dramas portraying the cops as the good guys who enforce the laws and keep the peace. It is very uncomfortable for most of us to be confronted with stories if entire police departments covering up the details of killings done at their hands. And yet, time after time over the last few years, we have been shown just how human police departments are everywhere in the US. Be it Chicago, Baltimore or Saint Louis, just about anywhere USA, there are examples of police who brazenly violate laws and procedures who are then protected by their brothers in uniform.

This really isn’t news. If you’ve been paying attention you would have run across stories by people like Radley Balko who have been documenting police excess for several decades now. The police are humans, they make mistakes just like the rest of us. If you were in their place you would act no differently than they would, because that is what humans do. But that doesn’t excuse the excess, it is a point of data that needs to be accounted for when deciding what you know or don’t know about any given subject.

For the black or brown people who are almost always the bad guys in police dramas, the revelation that cops are only human really isn’t news either. They’ve lived with the reality of constant police scrutiny for generations. So much so that stories abound of fathers and mothers cautioning their children not to become police statistics. So it is no wonder that the chant black lives matter resounds with them. The counter offered by clueless whites that all lives matter is heard by these same people as just another call for them to sit down and be quiet. How is this possible? How can realities and beliefs about these realities be so widely separated?

When it comes right down to it, what you know with certainty is a very small number of things. Whether it is night or day. Whether it is cold or hot. You know these things because you can test them directly with your senses. Solipsists will argue that you can’t even know those things because we are all just brains in jars at best, but I’d like us all to pretend that the shadows on the cave walls actually represent something real, and try to make sense of that. If that much can’t be granted, then there is little point in continuing to read this. Even less in my continuing to write.

Beyond what you can test yourself (fire burns) there are grades of factual knowledge which you can probably safely rely on. At each point where the facts exchange hands, the ownership of that data has to be documented to be trusted. This is why, when doing research, it is important to seek out source material and not just rely on wikipedia. The more obscure the subject matter the less reliable secondary sources are.

When watching the news on television or reading news stories on any other site than AP, Reuters or UPI you are already dealing with information that has been through at least three hands if not dozens. When you’ve gone beyond the point where the witness is being interviewed in person, you are dealing with evidence that wouldn’t be accepted in court. That doesn’t mean it is without value, it just means the news you are being offered could be just this side of fantasy.

It might even be pure fantasy. Case in point, the FOX/conservative/anti-abortion counter-narrative about the Colorado Springs shooter. When I logged on Blogger that night, the first thing I saw wasn’t the Stonekettle Station article. The first article that caught my eye was a piece over at Friendly Atheist in which Ted Cruz voices the notion that the shooter was some kind of leftist. No, I could not make something that stupid up myself.

Cruz is basing that characterization on a supposed voter registration form in which Dear was listed as a woman. Whether it’s a mistake, or Dear was just messing around, or simply not the right form, we don’t know, but no other evidence indicates that he was transgender.
There’s even less evidence that he was a “leftist.”

The problem that I had with Jim’s Unknown unknowns piece now surfaces. Jim mentions this story in opposition to the reports (which he attributes to Planned Parenthood) that the shooter was heard to say “no more baby parts” as he was being arrested. But the contrast between the veracity of these two stories is as marked as they are in opposition to each other.

The statement no more baby parts was repeated by an officer to a reporter directly on the scene, a reporter who dutifully passed the comment on to their viewing audience. While that is hearsay and not evidence admissible in court; the officer, if he were to appear in court, could repeat the statement and it would be admissible. It would also be accepted by an overwhelming number of juries who trust police officers to be truthful (see above) even in the face of so much evidence that police will lie to protect their own.

Since this case isn’t about one of their own, and since the police showed remarkable restraint in bringing a cop killer in alive, I was inclined to believe the statement of the arresting officer. That the shooter (not alleged, he plead guilty) repeated a version of the same statement at his hearing just confirms the motivation that lead him to commit the crimes he is guilty of.

On the other hand, the preferred story of conservatives/anti-abortionists is based on what? Essentially no evidence whatsoever, more wishful thinking than anything else. And yet it is repeated by a Republican Presidential candidate as if it was the unquestionable truth.

That is the nature of belief. It doesn’t require facts. Facts are counterproductive because they can be questioned. If facts are presented that counter a belief, it only takes the briefest scrutiny to discover or manufacture an anomaly which the believer will use to discard the entirety of the factual information presented. Ted Cruz wants to believe that the shooter couldn’t be one of his fellow anti-abortionists. Ted Cruz believes that leftists are dangerous people, and that LGBT people are a threat to his way of life. The story he repeats is ready-made to fit into his preconceived view of the world, and it matters not one bit that the story makes no sense on its face. That the average liberal and LGBT person would be in support of Planned Parenthood and consequently wouldn’t see a need to attack one of their clinics never enters into the mind of a conservative repeating this laughable story.

Given the history of attacks on Planned Parenthood, and the current cloud of controversy artificially created by anti-abortion activists faking videos that purport to show Planned Parenthood selling body parts, the story of a shooter in a clinic almost serves itself up ready-made as a vehicle to attack the religious right and conservatives in general. Of course they would want to craft a counter-narrative (however flimsy) to give themselves an out, a way to disavow accountability for their actions over the last twenty years and more.

A conservative could easily counter all of the above (most probably will) with the adult equivalent of I know you are but what am I? Since about the time that Reagan was elected, conservatives started to complain about the liberal media. Even I, for a time, fell for this notion that the media was somehow biased in general against conservatives. As the years have progressed, and conservatives have created their own outlets like FOX news, conservapedia, and uncounted news sites including the whacko fringe like prisonplanet and infowars, it has become clear that conservatives aren’t satisfied with simply presenting news from their point of view. No, what they want is their own set of facts which are unassailable. Unassailable because they aren’t based on anything real.

Another example is the softer, nicer language of pro-life and pro-choice adopted by the two sides of the endless argument over abortion. Having softened the language, pollsters can get majorities of citizens in the US to say they are pro-life. Who would be against life? I’m pro-life, I’m also pro-choice; militantly pro-choice. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans still believe that abortion should be legal gets lost in the conservative rush to declare the opposite, that the majority of Americans oppose abortion. This conservative view on the matter simply isn’t true as polling shows.

What has occurred since the creation of FOX news is the division of the US into two camps; one of those camps thinks they are right, and the rest of us are liberal. In their attempt to prove that the rest of the media is based on a liberal conspiracy, conservatives have consciously created a conspiracy of their own. A conspiracy where they tell lies which they know are lies, because the ends justify the means.

When you evade the truth, when you spin tales to hide your true goals, what you get are people who believe your lies so firmly that they will act on them as if they were truths. You get what transpired in Colorado Springs yesterday, to the embarrassment of every single person who identifies as pro-life. Remember that the next time you hear the phrase liberal media.

Tiptoeing through Gender Issues

I’ve been a fan of John Varley’s SF since the Wife first introduced me to it. Common in most of Varley’s work is the idea that sex was something you could change on a whim. That you might actually simply choose to be sexless as a statement (which lead to other perversions) that you could become female in order to have children (something I might have done) but then reverse to male in order to have more strength for work later in life if strength was something you needed. The idea that sex was a irreversible state you were assigned to at birth would be a foreign concept in a Varley future. The one part of Varley’s futures that I really didn’t have a problem with.

I’m starting with the subject of John Varley’s futuristic SF because I want there to be no confusion about my overall intentions while discussing this subject. The subject of gender, of sex, and changing it. This is about categorization. I’ve breached this subject a few times now in other places, and I’m not convinced that the overall subject, false categorization; the creation of groupings which don’t actually exist, really is understood as the point of it all.

This is not about nature, or about god. There isn’t some stamp that is placed on us at birth that says we have to be either female or male. Sexual attributes appear on a curve, just like all other attributes that we possess. Some small percentage of people identify more with the opposite sex than their own external appearance. Some even smaller group have sex organs for both sexes.

I mentioned in a parenthetical above that I might have opted for changing my sex to female had that been an option, for the purpose of having children. This is a true statement. The Wife has problems with the birthing of children. Had she been born even a generation before ours, she probably would have died in childbirth. Which is a very sobering thought. So sobering that I would have willingly changed places with her in order that we could have the children we both wanted, and save her the risk to her health. But that wasn’t possible. Still isn’t possible. If it were, it would be possible for her physiology to be altered in a way that allowed her to have children without dying, without my having to change my sex.

But would I do it anyway? I’ve always been a nurturer. Played with dolls as a child. My mother had to explain to me why I couldn’t take my dolls to school with me. How the other boys would not understand and would make fun of me. Giving up the dolls did not change who I was. I’d sooner spend an hour rocking a baby than doing almost anything else. Had I needed to carry my own children to term I’d like to think I’d have done it, despite the pain involved.

I’m not afraid of being mistaken for female, on the other hand. If you put a wig and breasts on me (as on most men) I’ll look like a dude with a wig and breasts. Just like most men will. So my status as male is secure; so secure that I would look stupid trying to be anything other than male.

I can understand being personally convinced that you are in the wrong body. I understand the quandary, or at least I like to think I do. I’m just not willing to concede that gender is a thing. A thing that can be altered. A thing that can be altered without altering the sex of the person.

This fact is easily demonstrable. If you gave the people who want to change their gender the option of simply modifying their birth certificates (which in a general sense is impossible) the vast majority of them would probably change the sexual designation on their identity papers and give up the gender argument. It is only the documentation’s immutable status that makes this entire argument so convoluted.

Hawaii is now allowing people to change their sexual designation on their birth certificates without having to undergo surgery. Only time will tell if this fixes the problem of sexual designation for public purposes. Personally I don’t think the problem will go away until there aren’t restrooms separated by sex; removing the requirement to declare sexuality just to relieve yourself. I know a lot of women who don’t like this idea (yes, dear) and yet I can’t think of any other way to address the inequality presented by separate restrooms.

Documents are fallible, as humans are fallible. Some drunken buffoon on duty at the delivery ward at night can’t uncross his eyes and figure out if the baby in front of him is male or female, and writes the wrong identification out on the birth certificate. Maybe the child just has ambiguous genitalia. Who knows? What is certain is that people are being asked to live their lives as one sex, when they know that they are not of that sex.

If you accept that the sexual role you will want to play as an adult can be determined by an outside observer at the time of your birth, then you might as well assume that there are also innate designations of dominant or submissive; that BDSM roles are also assigned at birth. That you might not want to play either role, or find the concept that you will have to play one or the other role insulting is beyond the comprehension of the record keeper. Obviously everyone will be in one group or the other. It has to be that way, right?

The birth certificate as an unchangeable document just doesn’t add up to a rational system capable of being defended, from a sexual designation point of view at least. What if you are physically capable of handling any role at birth? What if no sexual role mentally suits you as an adult? What if you think that role-playing should be left to fantasy and not real-world interactions?

Gender isn’t a thing. Gender is a perception. More than that, gender is the perception of an observer, the identity the observer assigns in their head when dealing with other people. Gender is the presentation that you attempt when you dress in a particular fashion. Wear your hair a particular way. In the choices of accessories. You cannot dictate what gender someone will assign to you before they meet you. It is the interaction which will define how they deal with you as a person. You can prime that interaction with overt displays of the gender you want to be seen as, but that doesn’t (especially for men trying to be women) mean that you’re going to pull it off without looking silly.

It is actually easier to pass as a man than it is as a woman. Most men (as the Wife has discovered) will treat the unknown other as an equal, as a guy, if the woman simply acts like a man. Dresses like a man. Even if she is curvy. It was common in earlier times when gender roles were more strictly defined for women to pass themselves off as men. To simply assume the role of male, and do it so flawlessly that most men they dealt with never knew.

We hold ourselves up to ridiculous standards of beauty. We idolize and worship the prettiest among us as if they are representations of ourselves. It is a fantasy that a regular person can ever match the beauty of models, as if even the models look that good in poor lighting. This is not a trans-gendered man, this is just a man. More of a man than I ever have been, if static beauty is a measure of manliness (could do without the tattoos, but it isn’t my body, so knock yourself out) Just as this person is a woman. What this is, more than anything else, is an error in record keeping; a bug in the process of sexual identification which needs to be addressed. This is a manifestation of the worship of documentation as some immutable testament to what is good and natural instead of serving as a reference to what is real and substantial.

I’ve been barraged with this lately from many different corners. It’s been on Skeptoid. I’ve argued about it on Facebook. It’s in my e-mail newsfeed. I’ve watched several TED talks on the subject. The celebration of the trans-gendered, and the labeling of the rest of us as cis-gendered. The idea that a minority can dictate to the majority what labels that majority will wear is farcical on its face. Never mind the fact that it is an invented label and not a correct usage of the terms. Just trying to give fair warning here.

On top of that, just exactly how do you determine who the cis are?

I’d like to speak to all the lumpy old people out there for a minute or two. You know who you are. You remember how, when you were growing up, everyone told you that you had to do this or that, or you weren’t manly? You had to paint your face, be happy and agreeable, like to clean house (or at least pretend to) or you weren’t feminine? And you, being who you are, either hesitantly agreed, said nothing, or offered a rebuttal; but then went on to ignore everything said on that subject by others and just went on to live you life like you wanted anyway? Are you trans or cis? Dom or sub? Do any of the many labels others want you to wear matter in the slightest? Or are these labels annoyances that you’d just as soon not have to deal with?

Just because the majority don’t go around complaining about the gender stereotypes they are saddled with, doesn’t mean that they are cis in any measurable way.

I’ll happily give up gender specific pronouns, given alternatives that don’t sound forced in conversation. I have no problem using they instead of he or she. Their instead of hers or his. Don’t have a problem with mixed-sex restrooms since I hate urinals in the first place and won’t use them. Wouldn’t put them in restrooms that I designed unless told to. I don’t see the problem with allowing people to change their sex designation on their identification.

I’m just not willing to accept that gender is a thing separate from sex. Not willing to adopt an invented label just because people who want to change their sex have been forced to wear the label trans. I’ll happily support your right to not have to wear that label, either. Not going to start loving sports, hating house cleaning, or conforming to the myriad of gender stereotypes that are out there in the world. I’m not cis. I’m not trans. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t presume to put labels on me that I don’t freely adopt. That statement should echo with quite a few people out there.

My children have friends that are struggling with this issue right now. Children and young adults who want to know what labels they should put on themselves. A few of them I’m actually quite worried about. To them I want to say STOP. Don’t harm yourself. Be who you are, don’t try to change to fit some perception that other’s hold for you. We love you just the way you are. There is no need to change. To pretend. Just be. Try to be happy, if you can. Experience all the joy you can wrap your head around. Good advice, no matter what label you want to hang on yourself.

I expected to get pushback from the trans community because I thrash that communities insistence that there is a thing called cis. Instead what I got was a whole lot of hell from non-trans people who kept insisting that trans was a problem. I continue to disagree with those people. No matter the source of pushback, no matter the source of the attempt to label non-trans as cis, there still isn’t anything called cis.

The reason why there isn’t a thing called cis is the same reason why there really isn’t a thing called natural; at least in the experience of everyday average human beings. The reason why cis and natural are not things you can define is because there is no default property or state which is then modified by biology or human intervention. There is just the world as it exists in all its riotous varieties of life and experience. Human modification of things from their natural state renders objects that are in many ways still natural since humans are themselves creations of nature. Something manmade is not necessarily something that is unnatural.

There were several comments on this post that were lost when I shifted commenting back to Blogger comments from G+ comments. This was an unanticipated and unavoidable outcome from my perspective. I hadn’t realized that comments would actually disappear from G+, I figured they’d stay there and you just couldn’t see them on the blog. I was tired of having to fight pitched battles on G+ that were visible on the blog and I was equally tired of seeing my posts to G+ show up as comments on the blog posts I was promoting on G+, so I migrated back to the Blogger comment structure which also allowed me to write comments with HTML code that would display properly. Things change and loss of information is always a potential outcome during change. The form this blog is published under is likely to change to a more mobile friendly framework shortly, and that itself may cause some information to be lost. My apologies if this troubles people who like things to stay the same. However, those comments are gone, gone, gone and that leaves me struggling to grasp the arguments that I can no longer reference for clarities sake. My apologies if I tangent while trying to present the argument thrust at me previously, an argument that is now lost.

There is a common misconception among the people who believe in concepts like cis or natural; the misconception solidifies with conscious modification of whatever the thing is. A thing that was natural becomes unnatural. A thing that was cis is now trans. This misconception manifests in belief that genetics are absolute and deterministic. That XX yields women and XY yields men and there is never a miscommunication. That if you have a penis you are a boy and if you have a vagina you are a girl. This kind of rigid codification is not the reality of life as it occurs, but I couldn’t explain or produce an exception to the presumed rule that was thrown at me. Until now.

Listening to LatinoUSA today I was introduced to the concept of Intersex. Intersex people can be male, female or both simultaneously, or even neither as the case may be. These individuals have been the subject of millennia of mistreatment by both society and the medical community. Mistreatment that is only now being rectified, and then only in places that honor the UN declarations on human rights for the most part.

By Jonathan.Marcus – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

It is possible to have sexual development produce these vague outcomes because a fetus doesn’t have any sexual variation until after the seventh week of gestation. Specifically, the story in the LatinoUSA piece was of an individual suffering from Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome producing an outcome of externally male appearing genitals but with no ability to produce secondary sexual characteristics at adulthood because the male sex hormones had no effect on her cells. She was subjected to corrective surgery against her wishes in her teens, surgery which made her female, the gender she identifies as today.

There are several different scenarios that will lead to a fetus not developing along expected male/female lines producing individuals who fall into one of the other two possible sexual outcomes neither/both, outcomes which don’t actually have accepted labels or words to define them. Yet. But what this information does provide is an explanation of how you can be of one genetic type and not be of the sex for that genetic makeup.

Given the potential permutations of complex organisms like humans beings, it is quite likely that any number of LGBT people could have some form of intersex affectation that has never been discovered. Many people who want to be identified as cis may actually be affected by one of the many diseases and syndromes that lead to what was once seen as a serious handicap requiring emergency surgery to correct as soon as possible. In the end it benefits us all to accept that there isn’t a clear-cut dividing line between boys and girls and to end these ridiculous rules of separation along sexually predetermined lines. We harm ourselves in trying to set such rigid boundaries to our own sexuality.

Lee Mokobe – TEDWomen 2015 – A powerful poem about what it feels like to be transgender

Queerest Thing Happened

Well that’s gay!

Friends of my children have been putting those particular words together for years now. It has always driven me to distraction. My typical response runs along the lines of “how was that a joyous event?” or “They do appear to be enjoying themselves” I’ve almost never been able to let that one pass. What they mean to say is “that went queerly” or “that makes me feel weird”, but their undereducated little brains cannot retrieve the proper words to express themselves clearly.

Gay≠Queer, Gay≠Bad, Gay≠Stupid

Gay is not queer, queer is not gay. Queer; as any decent dictionary (not Wikipedia btw. Wiki is consumed with slang usage, the nature of a popularly edited tome) will tell you, means strange or odd, or when used as a verb means something akin to spoiling. It was thrown as an insult at homosexuals and transgendered people by backwards thinking troglodytes who were made to feel strange or odd by a man wearing a dress or acting feminine. If those groups wish to label themselves as queer now (much the way christians adopted the insulting term for followers of christ as their name) that would be their business.

In much the same fashion, gay does not mean homosexual, even though most dictionaries now list that as its primary meaning. Gay means happily excited or lighthearted and carefree. Case in point; when the Flintstones theme song encourages you to have a gay-old time they are not suggesting you become homosexual;

The Flintstones Opening and Closing Theme

They want you to enjoy yourself lightheartedly; a perfectly cromulent way to define an episode of The Flintstones. So when friends of my children (or gaming troglodytes on the internet) exclaim “well that’s gay” in response to something that frustrates their primitive brains, I can get a bit snippy. Your latent homosexuality (homophobia) causing you to to be set queer towards homosexuals does not mean you get to call your reaction “gay”. Gay is something you enjoy, not something that pisses you off or scares you.

In that sense (a sense of joyous engagement) homosexuals who want to label themselves with the word gay are welcome to it. But can I have queer back, please? I mean, I like the word. It easily defines the feeling you get when walking through a graveyard at night. When someone is watching you and you can’t figure out who it is. It’s a good word, just not an insult to be hurled at people who are clearly enjoying themselves.

As my daughter observed on Facebook; yes, I have been reported on World of Warcraft for suggesting that someone insulting the english language by transposing the words gay and queer should pull their heads out of their asses and understand word meanings. Ironically their complaint was that I was insulting homosexuals by using the word queer.

What people choose to label themselves with is not a concern of mine; has never been something I take seriously or give meaning to. People call themselves all kinds of things in the course of their lives, almost never do they actually adopt the entirety of what the word really means (Objectivist and Libertarian spring immediately to mind) or actually even have a clue what other people adopting the label really believe.

The rant my daughter was on about on Facebook (the one that inspired this piece) concerned the word retarded. As someone who was labeled slow for most of his childhood, it’s another subject I can get snippy about. Having a learning disability, being retarded in development (retard means to slow; it is an engineering term) is one thing; being called a retard is no different than being called stupid, uneducated, or dumb (although dumb has many other insulting meanings as well) it is insulting to be so labeled, and people should be challenged when they offer base insults to people they disagree with. It is ad hominem, and beside the point of argument to be insulting to your opponents.

However, when you call a console retarded, I really don’t see the point of being offended personally.

McDonald’s gender issues

When we are pressed for time during a car trip, we have been known to pull into the local burger place to get the children something to eat. Truth be told, we do this far too often. The son always wants a kid’s meal, while the daughter has outgrown all that ‘baby stuff’ and gets salads these days. But that boy wants his prize with his chicken nuggets.

I’ve spent untold hours of my life repeating to them both “I don’t buy food for the toys, you get a toy with the food” in a vain attempt to avoid that “But I got this toy last time” argument. The ploy has never actually worked, but hope does spring eternal that one day I won’t hear “I want a different one!” when the toy is revealed. All this preparation and groundwork goes to waste though when the employee working the drive through window asks “Is the meal for a boy or a girl?”

McDonald’s frequently does these targeted marketing promotions with their kids meals. They give the boys trucks or weapons to play with, and they give the girls dolls or fluffy bunnies to nurture, as if the boys couldn’t do with some training in nurturing, or as if girls don’t have any interest in trucks. (or weapons) Not that McDonald’s is the only place with this problem. I witnessed a parent completely lose it once at the counter when the truly apologetic teen in the spotless uniform offered her son one of the girls toys with the explanation “this is all I have left”. She drug her son screaming and stomping (her, not her son) out of the restaurant, but I think the child would have been happier to have the ‘girls toy’ than to listen to mom make a fool of herself in public.

For as long as I’ve had children I have fought a losing battle not to go to McDonald’s. I don’t eat there, but the children beg endlessly to go (television marketing does work) and, really, one burger is pretty much the same as any other when it comes to national fast food chain stores. When the window attendant asks the question boy or girl? I won’t answer it directly. “A truck toy” or “A doll toy” is the best they will ever get from me, and I have driven off on a food order when the attendant presses me to answer girl or boy specifically. There’s always another McDonald’s a few blocks away. In McDonald’s defense, they’ve actually started noting the button on the register Truck and Doll a notation which displays on the order screen, but the person on the loudspeaker inevitably asks girl or boy? every time.

You’re probably wondering where this is all going at this point. Well, I’ll tell ya.

I gave in to the begging again tonight and wandered by the local McDonald’s. I pull up to the drive through window and notice that they’ve changed the marketing promo to Cars (the new Pixar film, I’ll be seeing it) and they give these cars to both genders of children. Here they’ve built up this 15 year legacy of properly filing the children away in their correct gender roles, only to blow it with this new promo that features ONLY CARS.

Cars for girls.

Fire that new marketing director. He’s clueless. The next thing you know, they’ll be giving dolls to boys instead of action figures.

2018 Mea Culpa review. I did a little refining of the wordsmithing for this one and that’s it. I did want to add a link to this episode of Hidden Brain, itself a repeat of a show first aired a few years previously. Still, it makes the same case that I make about gender stereotypes and how harmful they can be. Enjoy!