The dream of reason produces monsters. – Francisco Goya
It is impossible to overstate the evil which springs from the dogma of “social construction of gender”, the discredited notion which teaches that the only natural differences between the sexes are physical ones, and that all psychological ones are “socially constructed”. Those who believe in this mythology ignore the evidence of nature and the discoveries of science in favor of promoting the view that if one raised a boy as a girl he would grow up to act like a girl, and vice-versa. The most shocking refutation of the doctrine was the case of David Reimer, a Canadian boy born in 1965 whose penis was destroyed in a botched circumcision and who, on the advice of “social construction of gender” fanatic John Money, was then raised as a girl. Money repeatedly lied about the case for years afterward, claiming the reassignment was 100% successful and that David (then called “Brenda”) showed no male traits whatsoever. In truth, the victim of Money’s evil, agenda-driven experiment was deeply maladjusted, bullied by both girls and boys and by the age of 13 was so deeply depressed that he told his parents he would commit suicide if they forced him to see Money again. The parents eventually told him the truth about his sex and he started living as a boy, but never recovered from the torture inflicted in the name of this bizarre theory and, faced with a dissolving marriage, committed suicide in 2004.
But despite the Reimer case and volume upon volume of anthropological, biological, psychological, biochemical, neurological and anecdotal evidence, monsters all over the world are still willing to sacrifice their children’s happiness (and perhaps their sanity) on the altar of this mad belief. The most vociferous proponents are of course the neofeminists, who simply don’t care how many lives they destroy in order to establish their asexual dystopia; this June 27th story from the Daily Mail describes a preschool in Sweden (where else?) which is trying to force children to be asexual, androgynous beings by means of a bizarre regime which bans both pronouns and books about heterosexual couples or biological families:
A pre-school in Sweden has decided to stop calling children ‘him’ or ‘her’ in a bid to avoid gender stereotypes…as part of the [country’s] efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood…the taxpayer-funded school also carefully plans the colour and placement of toys and the choice of books to assure they do not fall into stereotypes. The school opened last year and is on a mission to break down gender roles – a core mission in the national curriculum for Swedish pre-schools…“Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing,” says Jenny Johnsson, a 31-year-old teacher. “Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be”…Lego bricks and other building blocks are intentionally placed next to the kitchen, to make sure the children draw no mental barriers between cooking and construction. Meanwhile, nearly all the children’s books deal with homosexual couples, single parents or adopted children. There are no “Snow White,” “Cinderella” or other fairy tales.
Director Lotta Rajalin notes that Egalia places a special emphasis on fostering an environment tolerant of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Rajalin says the staff also try to help the children discover new ideas when they play. “A concrete example could be when they’re playing ‘house’ and the role of the mom already is taken and they start to squabble,” she says. “Then we suggest two moms or three moms and so on”…Staff at the school try to shed masculine and feminine references from their speech, including the pronouns him or her – ‘han’ or ‘hon’ in Swedish. Instead, they’ve have adopted the genderless [and synthetic] ‘hen’…
Jay Belsky, a child psychologist at the University of California, Davis, said he’s not aware of any other school like Egalia, and he questioned whether it was the right way to go. “The kind of things that boys like to do – run around and turn sticks into swords – will soon be disapproved of,” he said. “So gender neutrality at its worst is emasculating maleness.”
So Egalia gives the children “a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be,” unless of course the girls want to be “girlie, nice and pretty” or the boys “manly, rough and outgoing.” Obviously, encouraging children to be what they are is bad, but encouraging them to play at living in lesbian communes isn’t. The child psychologist quoted at the end is completely right; the doctrine that all children start from a unisex baseline invariably presumes that feminine behavior is the norm, because the vast majority of preschool and grammar school teachers (not to mention the vast majority of people who feel compelled to inflict social engineering on schoolchildren) are female. Male behavior is therefore automatically regarded as a deviation from the norm, a pathology to be “treated” with punishment and even medication.
Of course, that’s in the West; in India, rather than trying to emasculate boys they’re trying to masculinize girls. And they’re not limiting themselves to brainwashing toddlers like the Swedes; oh, no! The Indian approach is one of which Dr. Money would have approved, as described in this June 27th article from the Telegraph:
Madhya Pradesh state government is investigating claims that up to 300 girls were surgically turned into boys in one city after their parents paid about £2,000 each for the operations. Women’s and children’s rights campaigners denounced the practice as a “social madness” that made a “mockery of women in India”. India’s gender balance has already been tilted in favour of boys by female foeticide – sex selection abortions – by families who fear the high marriage costs and dowries they may have to pay. There are now seven million more boys than girls aged under six in the country. Campaigners said the use of surgery meant that girls were no longer safe even after birth…Doctors confronted in the investigation claimed that girls with genital abnormalities were being sent to the city’s clinics to be “surgically corrected” and that only children born with both male and female sexual characteristics were eligible for the procedure. But campaigners said the parents and doctors were misidentifying the children’s conditions to turn girls into boys.
The surgery, known as genitoplasty, fashions a penis from female organs, with the child being injected with male hormones to create a boy. Dr V P Goswami, the president of the Indian Academy of Paediatrics in Indore, described the disclosures as shocking and warned parents that the procedure would leave their child impotent and infertile in adulthood. “Genitoplasty is possible on a normal baby of both the sexes but later on these organs will not grow with the hormonal influence and this will lead to their infertility as well as their impotency. It is shocking news and we will be looking into it and taking corrective measures,” he said. “Parents have to consider the social as well as the psychological impact of such procedures on the child”…
India is obviously far saner and more civilized than Sweden; whereas in the former this abomination is the result of base human traits like greed and ignorance, in the latter it is the result of a mechanistic social agenda. While the intelligentsia of India recognize it as madness, the intelligentsia of Sweden are either too brainwashed or too frightened to protest. And while the Indian government rightfully condemns mutilating children’s bodies and has ordered an investigation into the outrage, the Swedish government both encourages and finances a systematic attempt to mutilate children’s minds. But despite the differences, both of these forms of child abuse are the unnatural outgrowths of the anti-humanistic doctrine called social construction of gender.
One Year Ago Today
On July 18th, 2010 I published the ever-popular “Modern Marriage”, in which I propose that modern marriages based in romance have a lot more in common with the extramarital affairs of the past than with traditional marriages based in economics.
Devil’s advocate again.
The problem with the idea of “biological construction of gender” that you propose is that many children do not conform to this “biological construction”. What about the boy who plays with dolls or the girl who plays with trucks?
As a girl who played with trucks myself, I find the biological construction of gender to be just as tyrannical as you consider the social construction of gender.
As for the Dr. Money case, I would argue that the doctor went wrong when he tried to get David to be a *person* that he wasn’t, and nothing else.
Susan, no one says girls ‘hacve’ to behave a certain way – just that more often then not they do.
I dont know if they can check human cells, but studies of chickens have shown results that sex is imprinted on a celular level.
Maybe your issue with biological construction of gender could be solved if we defined gender differences more thoroughly. When you say that many children do not conform, what specific standards are they not conforming to? I played with trucks too, but that’s not what defined my being “girly” or not. After all, there must’ve been some standard before trucks existed.
With the exception of control freaks who use the differences as an excuse, people who recognize that gender differences are inborn generally trust nature to take care of itself and recognize that there will be variations from the pattern. Everyone agrees that things like height and body shape are inborn, therefore people accept that there will be variations because that’s the way nature is. But the belief that gender is “socially constructed” opens the door to tyranny designed to eliminate that construction, and that makes it evil.
As for tomboyishness, I read comic books and used to have my Barbie go on adventures, but that didn’t make my personality indistinguishable from that of a boy. Exceptions neither disprove rules nor destroy patterns.
You’re right about physical characteristics being accepted as gender differences that are biologically dependent. If one can see that biology causes men and women to look different, it’s silly to think that it can’t cause them to think or act differently.
Susan—
No, only a few do. Though I think boy’s playing with dolls would be a lot rarer if it wasn’t specifically propagandized than girls playing with trucks. The biggest biological gender difference is that boys like to play with pretend weapons whereas girls like to play at relationship modeling of various kinds.
Biological gender differences of the non anatomical type are distributed along overlapping bell curve for each gender with respect to each specific gender trait. There are a few girls that are more aggressive than some guys for example. Some girls are taller than some guys; not many within the same ethnicity, but some.
The sexes are not just anatomically different, they have different hormonal balances, and even different brain structures to an extent. So yes gender is biologically driven but is also partly socially constructed. Boys can be encouraged to act masculine, be stoic, be aggressive at appropriate times in controlled ways by e.g. loving competing even if they don’t necessarily win, and so on, or they can be encouraged to suppress all these things, be more sensitive, put girls on pedestals, and so on. It’s clear that post feminist American, Anglosphere and Scandinavian culture tried to do the later, at least among whites. Blacks raise whole other issues and feminists have largely back off there after losing some battles about “misogynist” rap lyrics.
You’d think from listening to radical feminists that the number of transgender people who are yearning to break free is very substantial. In actual fact it’s miniscule – it’s vastly lower than the percentage of gays or exclusively lesbians, which is only about 3% even in this time of vast encouragement of that sense of self.
I think it’s entirely appropriate that society generally socialize boys to be masculine in civilization building constructive ways (rather than in Marxist radical equalist ways), and girls to be feminine. American society has created a gen Y or millenials that have way too high a proportion of semi emasculated “nice guys” who are in fact sexually unattractive in their behaviors to cute and hot girls, and who accordingly can’t get sex in their twenties from other than fat girls, even though successful.
I have known a number of “transgendered” persons (one is a cousin), and they have all struck me as sad cases. The day may come when surgical reconstruction, gene-therapy, and drugs can perform a satisfactory gender switch. But that day isn’t now, and won’t be for a while. So for the foreseeable future messing with somebody’s biological gender is almost certainly only going to add a level of confusion and misery to a life that probably already sucks.
As for the swine who experiment on their own children, there is no pit in Hell too deep for them. An how OUTRAGED they would be if you DARED to compare them to fundamentalist Christians who send their homosexual children to be “cured”.
Foo.
Exactly!
Excellent, Maggie! Good balance of feisty vs. restrained rhetoric: no punches pulled, but everything delivered without resort to over-the-edge language.
That said, a nit-picking quibble:
India is obviously far saner and more civilized than Sweden; whereas in the former this abomination is the result of base human traits like greed and ignorance, in the latter it is the result of a mechanistic social agenda.
Danged if I can excuse either nation more than the other. You’re right of course to distinguish the government’s reaction of India vs. Sweden, but as a reflection on the two societies in general, all I can say is, both seriously suck. The United States is, of course, at most one notch above India and Sweden, a distinction hardly worthy of note.
I think that reality may impinge upon the Swedish experiment without much delay. Boys are notoriously determined to whack each other with sticks, no matter what their “betters” say they should do.
Thanks, JdL. To each his own, of course, but I’d much rather live in a society where greed, ignorance and other HUMAN characteristics cause some trouble than one in which an inhuman bureaucracy tried to cram every man, woman and child into a rigid mold and chops off any part which won’t fit in the allotted space.
A valid point. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that in India, what was being chopped was actual meat. I don’t mean to minimize the damage that social condemnation can do, but it’s a lot more possible to reassert one’s own nature, after a journey of self-discovery, than to reconstruct butchered flesh.
Very true, but wouldn’t you rather live in a country in which child-mutilating criminals are denounced and prosecuted rather than one in which they’re celebrated and allowed to continue hurting kids year after year after year after year…
Shouldn’t that be “to each his or her own, of course”?
😀
Incedenally, the emasculation of boys only works insomuch as they re ept isolated from each other.
I’m sure my mother didnt intend it but after she left my dad, it was just me her, my little sister and either my grandmother or my childless aunt depending on where we were. I was usually a perfectly restained kid for all the tormoil of a divorce and moving every few months.
Once we moved in with my aunt who had kids however, we both exploded into a pre – prepubecent contest for dominance. Who could climb the highest up the tree in the back yard, who could throw the trucks over the fence and get them to land on the neighbors pool slide, who could put the biggest dent in the shed with a cinderblock.
Its entierly antecdotal, but its my belief that the reason you see so many ‘out of control’ boys in the first couple of years of grade school is that until that time they are generally kept away from each other and dont know how to properly interact with other males not of the immediate familly.
This is still very common in the west, but not talked as much about in the same terms anymore. Just look at discussions of why there are few women in hard sciences and engineering. It is because women are intimidated by the male culture of those disciples, not because females are less likely to be interested in those subjects fro academic study.
Same as the new female IMF President who wants to end the male culture of the IMF. Most of the senior economists and staff are male at the IMF because it is rarer for a female to become a phd economist.
You assert that the cause of fewer women in engineering and sciences is solely an intimidating male culture. On what do you base that assertion? One can certainly find examples of intimidating males, but one can also find company after company falling over themselves to hire women in the hard sciences and engineering. No one should be disqualified on account of their gender, do you agree? That’s true whether the applicant is of the minority gender or the majority gender. To try to force-fit an equal number is complete madness, in my opinion.
Is it because of ‘male intimidation’ or is it more likely that women are less willing to sacrifce their social lives, future children, and better paying careers to toil in obscurity for years on subjects that carry less weight to the public then what color thong one of the kardashians flashed this week?
Women in hard sciences often command better salaries then their male counterparts, and most of the guys in into hard science only give a fuck about whats between a persons legs when there having sex, not when their engrossed in their pet projects
You both agree with what I said. You just misread what I was saying. I said those who believe in a sort of social construct of gender say it is an intimidating male culture when the real reason is less females are interested in studying those subjects.
It’s because 1) women tend to be less interested in those subjects, their not being about interpersonal relations, and their being populated by nerdy guys by and large; 2) while women are only a little less smart in math and related subjects at the average, at the higher IQ levels there are far fewer women than men — even in overall IQ there are 4x as many men as women with IQ’s over 140 – fact, it’s more so in math related fields; 3) most women don’t want to work grueling hours in university or at the beginning of their careers; 4) those fields aren’t cool or hip — see 1) above.
Dear doug1: “…can’t get sex in their twenties from other than fat girls, even though successful….”-do you think that women who are big have a hard time getting sex or that they should have a hard time getting it? Or that certain men can only get sex from women who are big because big women are seen as some kind of “last resort”? Just wondering.
If a fat girl* puts an ad in the personals, and tells the truth about her weight, she’s still going to get more offers than she can entertain and still hold down a regular job. Now, will somebody built like a young Sophia Loren get even more offers? Probably, but since by the time you get to “even more offers” you’re already off the scale of what a woman can realistically engage in, it hardly matters.
If the fat girl is giving to guys other women ignore because she thinks that’s all she can get, she is mistaken.
* I’m going to go ahead and say “fat girls” because I want it to be clear that Doug1 and I are talking about the same girls. If anybody has a problem with that, deal.
[…] problems (as they do not exist!) Maggie, from whom I stole the material for this post, concentrates mostly on the feminist preoccupation with establishing a social construction of gender, the noble savage […]
The idea that if parents would just raise their boys to be more like girls the world would be a better place isn’t a new idea. Ernest Hemingway wore a dress as a little boy, and it isn’t because he was a junior transvestite. His mother was following a fashion of the early 1900s that claimed that if mothers would just teach their boys not to be so distressingly male, there would be world peace within a generation.
And how did it work? Well, Ernest (his mother sometimes called him Ernestine) grew up to play football, fish, hunt, and enlisted in World War I, not waiting to be drafted or indeed for America to get into the war. He wrote books where manly men would do manly things.
Well, she sure constructed him, didn’t she?
Late to this party, but I thought you might be interested in Peter Berger’s blog – he was one of the co-authors of the book “The Theory of the Social Construction of Reality” published back in the mid ’60’s – yeah, this guy’s got a blog – all about religion – so many people don’t know is that the guy is a huge christian, he loves him some evangelical protestantism, and free market capitalist globalism and all sorts of other things you wouldn’t expect…
Just check it out, it’s hilarious in that ‘omg don’t people realize this guy is the social construction guru guy? this is why we’re all so fucked!’ sort of way…
Also! bonus ‘concubine’ anecdote in the first paragraph of his intro entry:
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/berger/2010/07/09/an-introduction/
Here’s a quick vid I did about Berger, sort of, it’s got lots of links under the vid on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GkPZfx_h2w
Thanks, FW! I’m definitely going to have to look into Berger; he may very well provide a column!