Thursday, January 28, 2016

So-called male bodies?

Roz Ward has been working with the Department of Education here in Victoria on a new transgender policy. She was quoted in the papers as complaining that those who were "assigned male at birth" have a hard time participating in girls sports because:
There is a perception that so-called male bodies are physically superior.

James Campbell, writing for the Melbourne Herald Sun, was struck by her use of the phrase "so-called male body":
I was taken aback by Ms Ward's claim that there is no such thing as the male body, or to borrow from Hamlet - that there is nothing either male or female, but thinking makes it so.

You probably think that if someone wants to believe something as obviously crackers as the idea that objectively there is no such thing as a man or a woman, only what we each want to be, well, that is their business. The rest of us will still be free to go on thinking there are men and women, just as we always have.

Go to the website for minus18, a taxpayer outfit that helps same-sex-attracted and transgender youth cope at school and you will see where we are heading.

In a section devoted to the vexed question of the pronouns he, she and they, its website tells the state's youth that while it's an easy mistake to make that "genitals and bodies in general don't reflect anything about a person's pronouns or gender." ["Gender Politics Distorts Reality", 28/01/2016]

James Campbell is criticising here a liberal mindset in which the aim is to make our biological sex not matter. It can be made not to matter either by insisting that what liberals call "gender" - the social expression of our biological sex - is fluid and not dependent on our being male or female, or else by denying that there are only two sexes, male and female, or else by blurring the lines in both respects.

The problem is that this mindset can't just be dismissed as crackpot as it is the state ideology. That's why Roz Ward is being allowed to help write the curriculum for Victorian state schools and James Campbell isn't. The transgender movement is triumphing everywhere because it fits into the "operating system" of society. So we either change the operating system or we can expect crackpot ideas to go mainstream over time and to move beyond criticism.

5 comments:

  1. There is a great interview over at ACL, where Lyle Shelton interviews a mum who has just pulled her kids out of Frankston High School because of its implementation of the Safe Schools program. The Safe Schools program, which is now in more than 400 schools, points to this Minus18 website referenced by James Campbell. Here's the link, if interested:

    http://www.acl.org.au/2016/01/boys-in-girls-bathrooms-brave-mother-speaks-out-on-what-safe-schools-is-teaching-your-kids/

    The Vic Ed Department didn't even know the content of the Safe Schools program; they've just run with it, apparently.

    Admittedly I haven't read the content itself of the Safe Schools program, but Mark, as a teacher I think you'd know the program reasonably well. What's you take on it?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Welcome to the world of the new humanities. This is a direct implementation of the insanity dressed up as philosophy that underlies the new humanities taught by our oh so sophisticated academics: postmodernism.

    According to postmodernism It is not only gender that "is nothing either male or female, but thinking makes it so" - nothing is what it is but the "narrative" of the rightly "educated" people makes it so.

    Having worked since Kant to obliterate their ability to know reality, our "intellectuals" have "progressed" to the "truth" that there IS no objective truth, just the "truths" of our narratives, no objective reality, just the subjective "realities" that we are free to create. Or, in other words: "objectivity" is just what enough of the right people subjectively agree it is.

    So you are neither male or female until we call you male or female, and nothing as crude as your delusion of having real genitals or XY chromosomes or ability to bear children shall impinge on our licence to decide which.

    And you are neither aboriginal or non-aboriginal until we call you aboriginal or non/-aboriginal, and nothing as crude as your delusion of having a skin colour or genes or an ancestry shall impinge on our licence to decide which.

    And you are neither guilty or innocent until we call you guilty or innocent, and nothing as crude as you actually bashing your wife or never doing any such thing shall impinge on our licence to decide which group guilt or group victimhood be assigned to you.

    And you are neither the owner of the money in your superfund or not the owner of that money until we call it yours or not yours, and nothing as crude as whether you earned it honestly or stole it shall impinge on our licence to decide which.

    Get it?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nothing new under the sun really. You remember WL George's Feminist Intentions? Belfort Bax wrote of the same malaise a decade earlier.

    "Now Mr. Robertson falls foul of Ferri on the ground of his using the general terms “woman” and “man,” his plea being that these terms are abstract, and, therefore, “medieval” (as he calls it) since no two concrete men and no two concrete women are exactly alike."[...]

    "No, where he draws the line is at human sex. if you speak of “man” or “woman” in general terms, if you employ the class-name in this case, then his anathema descends on you; then you are, indeed, a mediaeval survival discussing an abstract “man” and “woman” having no counterpart in “reality,” but being merely the coinage of a medieval brain. "

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/bax/1902/12/feminism.htm

    ReplyDelete
  4. Stop safe schools coalition group link. Please join us to create awareness!

    https://www.facebook.com/groups/933981209979164/

    ReplyDelete