Plastic and interchangeable?

Bria was born in Canada as a man but identifies as a woman. To an extraordinary degree:

We are supposed to believe that someone who is biologically male can have periods. Bria, it must be said, is smart enough to attempt to philosophically justify all this. It makes for interesting reading:

The argument is that there are no essential differences between men and women; that the human body is "plastic" and therefore able to be deliberately manipulated into something else; and that given the lack of essential differences, we are fundamentally the same and therefore there can be no "other".

Bria adds some further detail to the argument:

According to Bria we are nothing more than "chemical powered meat robots". The effort to find a secure basis for human dignity within liberal modernity flounders here. It would seem difficult, too, to find within a nature in which all creatures are chemically powered meat robots, anything resembling "natural law" or any principles of ordering oneself or society that would bring a definite telos (purposes or ends) to human life.

If the human body really is so plastic, and we really are as men and women easily interchangeable, so that there is no "other" sex, then it is difficult to take seriously Bria's own new identity as a woman. Bria's chemical robot settings have been changed a bit, that's all. The identity of "woman" would no longer mean very much, or have much wider significance. It would not connect identity to anything deeper than a mere chemical substance. It would not connect identity fundamentally to our core self, nor the self to a definite physical embodiment, nor the self to a discernible essence (the masculine, the feminine) with its own characteristic and meaningful qualities.

If you think of our sex as part of the essence of who we are, and as embedded within our DNA, then our best option is to order ourselves toward it, particularly toward what is best within it. Bria's counterclaim that we are meat robots, plastic and interchangeable, disconnects our sex from whatever stable aspects of the self remain. In this sense, it is self-defeating.

A note to Melbourne readers. If you are sympathetic to the ideas of this website, please visit the site of the Melbourne Traditionalists. It's important that traditionalists don't remain isolated from each other; our group provides a great opportunity for traditionalists to meet up and connect. Details at the website.

One reason we lose

So a portion of the alt lite is now trying to police the use of transsexual pronouns. They are insisting that Blaire White, a biologically male YouTuber, be called "she" and be considered a woman.

Roaming Millennial, for instance, claimed that because Blaire White "passes perfectly as a woman" that she should be considered one. Rita Panahi is similarly insisting that Blaire White be called "she".

The situation, then, is that liberals assert something very radical, namely that our sex is not something biologically predetermined, but that you can have a male body and be a woman. The mainstream right, which builds support by claiming to be the opposition to the left, comes to embrace the leftist position and helps to entrench it.

And the question is why? In part, it's because much of the mainstream right, even the alt lite, is right liberal rather than a genuine alternative. But it goes further than this.

Liberals are believers. For them, liberalism is about building freedom and equality and justice and is leading humanity to its ultimate end point of moral perfection. They accept that all this might take time, but they do not like setbacks, and if they do ever lose, they just keep pushing back until they win. They are serious.

The right are players. They see themselves as being on "team right" as part of the political "game". They have "concerns" about aspects of leftism. But it doesn't run much deeper than this. If they are accused of not being nice, they will collapse their principles.

Is it not obvious why society moves leftward over time?

It doesn't have to be like this. The right should be something very different. The right-wing personality should not see politics as a game but as a defence of truth, of the good, and of a natural order of being that is the real source of an enduring moral community. When this is assaulted, then the right ought not only to match the tenacity of the left, but have an even greater determination to push back and to win.

Clarity matters, but so too does seriousness. Some of the leaders of the movement are players. They do not really know what they are defending and how significant the cause is. They will collapse all this in order to show themselves to be "nice" or "respectful" which only really proves how unserious they are. They cannot match the left when it comes to belief in what they stand for.

Clarity and seriousness are necessary to match it with the left and to hold to the same long-term political tenacity.

He's be happy if his daughters changed sex?

Tim Lott is a Guardian columnist. One of his offerings is a piece titled "Why I'd be happy for my daughters to change gender." That's a radical assertion given what a sex change involves, and Lott does acknowledge that there would be significant hurt involved:

How would I feel if one of my daughters turned out to feel she were a male, and wanted surgery to reassign her identity?

I would, admittedly, be worried that this might cause her physical and mental distress.

So why then be happy? He explains this way:

All the same, I am perfectly happy, in the liberal tradition, that people should have any gender identity they want, or any sex that they want...

It is clear that from the hysterical reaction to Can I Tell You About Gender Diversity? by elements of the rightwing press, that transphobia is a real enough phenomena. So to be clear I am not in favour of simply tolerating it – the idea of gender fluidity should be thoroughly welcomed, for all its complications, as an extension of the range of human possibility.

It's Liberalism 101. What matters to Tim Lott is an individual freedom to pursue our subjective wants, i.e. a freedom to self-determine who we are, rather than being bound to predetermined qualities like the sex we are born to or to our natural telos (ends/purposes) as men and women.

However nice it might sound, Lott's liberalism leads to a grotesque outcome. He feels obliged to announce that he would be happy if his daughters went through a shocking medical procedure and spent their lives as biological women identifying as men. It's an extraordinary thing for a parent to announce their happiness at such an outcome.

The emphasis can never be on unlimited subjective wants. That's not how you arrive at the best kind of individual life. It's better to think in terms of a life that is successfully ordered or integrated, which then gives us the opportunity to stand above our desires and to judge their merits and how they might or might not deserve to be acted on.

Feminists losing the terf war

It doesn't matter how outlandish a liberal innovation might seem, if it fits with liberal principles then it will be pushed onto society regardless - if, that is, there is no effective opposition to liberalism itself.

Here's an interesting example. There is a push on now to have people accept the idea that men can give birth to children. It is beginning to become politically incorrect to talk about "pregnant women" as this excludes women who identify as men but who nonetheless get pregnant.

Seems kooky, but look at the following Facebook thread:

This is a debate between radical feminists who insist that you need to be biologically female to be a woman (they are called "terfs") and other leftists who reject this as "transphobic."

The significant part of the debate is that a professional organisation for midwives (the Midwives Alliance of North America) has already committed itself to the idea that men can give birth ("suggesting that only women can give birth is not welcome here").

The midwives association repeated this view in another thread:

The "terfs" who insist that being a woman is based on biological reality are warned by the midwives alliance that "comments that say that men can't give birth are transphobic and will not be tolerated."

There is so much that could be said about this. The twistedness of liberal morality is apparent in this discussion. Liberal morality is built on the idea that we should be free to choose our identity and our own subjective goods, but that we should allow others to do the same. Therefore, there is no objective moral order for individuals to orient themselves to, but instead the point of morality is to show how tolerant you are of others choosing as they will.

But it all gets mired in a contradiction. On the one hand, if a woman declares that she identifies as a man you are supposed to be tolerant and accepting of her decision to identify this way. But this then means that someone who points out, as a basic fact of reality, that there is a biological aspect to being a woman, will be told curtly that their speech will not be tolerated. So a morality of "tolerance" ends up being, by all previous standards, remarkably intolerant.

You can tell that if things go as they usually do that the terfs will lose this battle. If, as per liberalism, we are to be free to self-determine our own identity and pursue our own subjective goods, then it is difficult in principle to say to someone biologically female that they can't identify as a man and become a "pregnant male." To oppose this is, in liberal terms, bigoted, prejudiced, phobic, hateful, discriminatory and all the rest of it.

In the past, the only opposition to the liberal left came from the liberal right (the "establishment conservatives"). The liberal right would sometimes initially oppose these kinds of things (as "going too far") but once they got traction, then the right liberals would fold and would eventually end up defending the new status quo.

It's interesting now to see something different emerging. There's a section of the alt right which is now doing what a genuine opposition would have done decades ago, and actually push back in a determined way against the left liberal project. It is still too small to win in the wider society, but it is carving out a political space where the older dynamic no longer runs as it used to.

So perhaps we won't see, in a few years time, a liberal speech code outlawing the use of the term "pregnant woman" as hate speech. Maybe the usual pattern of politics will continue to lose ground.

Another step in the descent of liberal culture

There have been a couple of images doing the rounds lately on social media. The first is of a satanic-style drag queen reading books to young children in a public library in the U.S.:

The second is of a poster being displayed at train stations in Toronto, Canada, with the campaign title "The sex you want" and showing a picture of a homosexual threesome:

The instinctive reaction most people will have is that exposing children to these images is an attack on their childhood. And yet public authorities clearly believe the opposite - that it is either a good thing, or at least harmless, for the images to be displayed to children.

I understand the position of the public authorities, even if I think it is wrong. The liberal idea, dominant in our society, is that the individual autonomously determines his own goods and identity. But, as all desires are equally desires, they all have to be acknowledged as equally valid, as long as they don't claim primacy over others (which, for liberals, is the sin of "supremacy" or discrimination, intolerance, bigotry etc.) So the public authorities, following this liberal credo, don't really have a principled way to object to the imagery, without exposing themselves to charges of hypocrisy or inconsistency or lack of principle.

It seems we are witnessing another step down in liberal culture. Liberal culture had previously compromised by rating materials for their sexual content and allowing parents some control over what their children were exposed to. Apparently the aim of being inclusive toward transsexual and homosexual culture (making it normative) is now overriding the older compromise - it is now thought progressive to habituate children to these things.

And yet there is damage being done. The message being given to children is that sexuality is to be freely pursued in any direction and that there are no sexual impulses to be restrained or held in check. They are being exposed to forms of sexuality that are at the end point of what happens when restraints or modesty or checks give way.

This is especially problematic for those children who will later seek to form heterosexual relationships. Within homosexual culture, it does not matter so much if the emphasis is on fleeting sexual encounters for their own sake. But a heterosexual culture can't work this way. A heterosexual culture has the more difficult aim of bringing together men and women for stable, monogamous pairing, with the aim of raising children successfully and carrying on an intergenerational family tradition. This requires both men and women to integrate the sexual aspects of their relationship with other purposes relating to the good of children, family and society.

In short, sexuality has to be ordered toward higher purposes. A man cannot just follow his libido if he is to commit to a lifelong role of husband and father within a family and secure the material well-being of his wife and children and help to socialise his children toward a successful adulthood of their own. Similarly, a promiscuous woman damages her ability to pair bond with a man and to form a respectful and loving emotional relationship with a future husband.

If children are allowed to mature without being precociously sexualised, and within a culture that orients them toward marriage and family, then they are likely to reach early adulthood without having lost the innate qualities that might allow them to successfully pair bond with a person of the opposite sex.

And that's the sense in which we instinctively believe that it is possible for children to be corrupted, and that children need to be protected from certain types of sexualised content. We don't want our children to lose what is supposed to be intact within them, emotionally and psychologically, that allows them to successfully marry. It is our job to at least get them to independent adulthood, and the age of marriage, without this having been lost.

This requires not only good parenting, but also agreed upon social norms and standards within public life. And this is where liberalism is increasingly undermining the role of parents in the raising of their children.

A strange pathway to transsexualism

Helen Lewis of the left-wing magazine New Statesman wrote a story last year about why so many teenage girls don't want to identify as girls:

Among internet-literate teenagers, gender has become the primary way to challenge the mores of older generations. I know four journalists – London-based, middle class – whose children have announced that they do not consider themselves to be girls. It seems too many to be a coincidence.

Helen Lewis makes two main points in her story. First, she pushes the liberal idea that masculinity and femininity are arbitrary constructs that limit individuals and that should rightly be overthrown. However, she is concerned that young people challenging sex distinctions might think that they have to commit themselves to becoming transsexual.

We should welcome young people challenging gender, an arbitrary system that has acquired the status of immutable human nature

...But separating dissatisfaction with the social constraints of gender from body dysphoria is vital. Because we have smudged together the categories of “transsexual” and “transgender”, is every youngster who questions their gender – and, frankly, every youngster should, because gender is restrictive bollocks – getting the message that they must bind their breasts or tuck their penis?

Liberals are committed ideologically to the idea that sex distinctions are restrictive prisons. It stems from their underlying belief that individuals should be autonomously self created. Our sex is something we don't get to create for our self and therefore it is held negatively to be limiting to the individual.

If, however, you don't have the liberal starting point, you are more likely to see sex distinctions positively as an important aspect of identity, and as a pathway of self-development. The point is to try to perfect our sexed nature, rather than to liberate ourselves from it.

Helen Lewis goes on to make an interesting admission about her own attitude to her sex:

In the year to March 2015, the Tavistock in London – the only specialist gender clinic in the country for under-16s – saw 697 children. This year, it saw 1,419. The largest surge has been among girls aged 14 and over and it is this group I feel most personal affinity for, because, if I were growing up today, I would be among them. A few years ago, I found a textbook from my junior school, with three sentences that floored me: “My name is Helen. I am nine years old. I am skinny.” And the truth was, I was skinny. I had a bowl haircut and wore culottes. Then puberty hit and I piled on a few stone in a year. Taut pink skin turned to lumpen fat and mottled flesh. And everyone had an opinion about it. I was trapped inside a body that didn’t feel like mine any more.

Many of my school friends felt the same way. Some tried to escape through vomiting or starving. Others were part of that charmed cohort who became lissom, beautiful, golden; their parents felt a different sort of ­worry and they were treated to sermons about getting into strange men’s cars.

I won my body back by defacing it; at least, that’s how my parents saw it. An earring, then two. And another. Then piercings that no one could see: nursing each one like a wound or a child. Salvation through pain: a metal bar through cartilage that couldn’t be slept on for a month. A tattoo that hurt like hell. Pink hair, ebbing to orange in a shower that looked like Carrie. And finally – finally – a body that felt like me.

I tell my story not to belittle anyone else’s, or to imply that they have chosen the wrong path. If you cannot live in your body, then change it – and the world must help you to do that.

What she seems to be describing is that moment in time in our teenage years when we develop into our adult bodies and we become aware of where we stand in the dating pecking order (what is sometimes called our SMV).

Apparently she was a little on the chubby side and therefore she felt bad about her adult body and rejected it. She could not live in her body, not because nature really intended for her to be a boy, but because she did not rank herself amongst the most sexually attractive of women.

I'm not quite sure how to respond to this. It strikes me as an all or nothing attitude: either you are born perfect or else you reject your body and deface it so that you feel like it is your own. I can't help but feel that if she had cultivated what was beautiful within and without that she would have developed towards something much higher and greater than being just another pierced and tattooed young woman.

Canadian baby must choose its own sex?

The essence [of liberalism] is that individuals are self-creating...
Professor Alan Ryan

Let's say that you believe that the highest good is for individuals to be self-creating. What would this logically lead to?

Well, it might lead you to think that people should get to choose their own sex. Hence this story about a Canadian parent who believes that their baby should not be assigned a biological sex because this would limit them:

A baby has been issued an ‘unknown’ gender identity health card in British Columbia, Canada, after the child’s parent fought to raise the infant with a neutral gender.

“I do not gender my child,” Doty said in a statement. “It is up to Searyl to decide how they identify, when they are old enough to develop their own gender identity.

“I am not going to foreclose their choices based on an arbitrary assignment of gender at birth."

Doty said that they are 'raising Searyl in such a way that until they have the sense of self and command of vocabulary to tell me who they are'.

'I'm recognizing them as a baby and trying to give them all the love and support to be the most whole person that they can be outside of the restrictions that come with the boy box and the girl box,' Doty told the news site.

Note how something predetermined, like being a boy or girl, is portrayed negatively as a restriction, as something that boxes in the individual.

As outlandish as the Canadian baby case sounds now, it fits the state ideology and so is likely to become more accepted over time, unless that ideology is effectively challenged. As mentioned above, the Canadians state has already seen fit to issue the baby with a health card that lists its sex as unknown:

You can determine your own sex now?

This is something that seems crazy but is actually a logical application of liberal first principles.

Here are some excerpts from an interview (video below) between Tucker Carlson and a senior adviser to the Democrats, Zac Petkanas.

It begins with Carlson raising his concerns about the liberal attitude to how we identify as male or female:

Carlson: There’s no biological anchor to sex anymore. It’s all determined by the individual. So my obvious question for you is, how do I know if a person’s male or female? Is there some absolute standard people have to meet to be male or female, other than what they say?

Petkanas: One’s gender identity is enough to show what gender they are.

Carlson: Is there a scientific standard?

Petkanas: Your gender identity determines your gender. Period.

Carlson: As an apparent man, if I say I'm a woman is that enough, do I meet the standard, as a woman to play in a woman's sports team?

Petkanas: Yes. The answer is absolutely yes.

Carlson: I want you to name a single scientist, just one, who says you can determine your own sex just by saying so.

Petkanas: You clearly have some issues around this.

So the Democrats are committing to the idea that I can be considered a woman as long as I say that I identify as a woman even if I am biologically a man. If I say that I am a woman, then I can play on a woman's sports team, even if I am tall, muscular, broad-shouldered, bearded and biologically male.

It was predictable that this would happen. After all, liberals believe that the primary good in life is a freedom to self-define or self-determine. Therefore, the idea that something as important as my sex is predetermined by biology is a radical limitation on my individual freedom. Better, from the liberal point of view, if there are many sexes and if my sex identity is fluid and self-determined.

So you have to go one of two ways. If you want to stick with the liberal first principle, then you have to accept a future in which the idea of many sexes and self-determined sexes will be pushed on society. Alternatively, you can reject the consequences of liberal thinking about the sexes, which means challenging the assumptions on which liberal thinking is based.

If you take this second option, then you cannot view a freedom to self-define as always and everywhere the overriding good. You must, instead, be able to discern goods that are already there - that are given to us - as part of the created nature that we inhabit.

Sounds mad but it is liberal morality at work

The British Medical Association has issued new inclusive speech guidelines for its staff. One of the new recommendations is that the term "expectant mothers" be dropped in favour of "pregnant people".

It sounds crazy, doesn't it? You would think that pregnancy was inextricably linked to women, but liberals want us to use a gender neutral expression instead.

It's important to understand why liberals think this is a reasonable thing, in fact a moral thing, to do. We have to understand liberals to defeat them.

Liberals believe that the overriding good is that we get to autonomously define our own selves. We are to live our lives according to our own unique, self-chosen, self-determined schema.

Therefore, those aspects of life that are predetermined have to be made not to matter. This includes our sex. Being a man or a woman is not supposed to matter in a liberal society.

This is one part of the explanation for a liberal organisation to prefer a gender neutral term like "pregnant people".

And what does "inclusiveness" mean for a liberal? The moral equation for liberals is the idea that each individual should be able to define their own life schema as they wish, as long as it does not interfere with others doing the same thing. Therefore, liberals think that a good person is someone who proves their commitment to non-interference by being inclusive, non-bigoted, non-discriminatory, tolerant, open, supportive of diversity and so on.

So, a liberal will take seriously the idea that something immoral has taken place if someone is excluded from some possible life choice on the basis of a quality like their sex, race, sexuality etc.

Hence the British Medical Association not wanting to exclude those identifying as men from the process of pregnancy.

There is much more of the same in the BMA document:

Gender neutral language avoids stereotyping people according to their sex...You should avoid references to a person’s gender except where it is relevant in a discussion...if you aren’t sure whether someone identifies as male or female, keep your language neutral until you know what terms they prefer to use...You should also respect a woman’s preference to be referred to using the title ‘Ms’. A new gender neutral title ‘Mx’ is now being widely used by the Government and many businesses in the UK and should be included as a title option in any application or monitoring forms.

Liberalism has to be attacked at its roots. The antidote to liberalism is the belief that human life should seek to be ordered toward what is objectively good. Having an equal respect and tolerance for all behaviours and choices is not what makes you a good person. A good person is able to discriminate between what is higher and lower, and a successful community is able to find a way to harmonise what has been called the "tripartite order of existence," namely the natural/biological, the social and the spiritual within a positive moral framework..

Coming to a school near you

Nicholas Matte lectures at the University of Toronto. In the video below he asserts that "It is not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex". He then announces his intention to break down a "cisnormative culture" which he defines as the idea that "there is such a thing as male and female, that they connect to being a girl or a boy or a man or a woman..."



Crazy, right? But don't write him off. His views fit in with the state ideology, so they'll find their way onto your local school curriculum regardless of how outlandish they seem.

Remember, the ultimate aim of liberalism is for individuals to be self-defining. We don't get to define our biological sex, so a liberal will therefore be committed to making the fact of being a man or a woman not matter. They can do this either by aiming for sex neutral outcomes or, more radically, by denying the existence of biological sex. Liberals will be tempted to take the view that being male or female is merely a social construct designed to privilege some people and oppress others. They will want us to overcome the "gender binary".

Nancy Pearcey: the liberal world does not know for sure what a man or woman is

Nancy Pearcey has some interesting points to make on the topic of transsexualism. From a 2013 column:

Several states and school districts have passed laws on “transgender discrimination,” and most read something like this (from a 2011 California law): "Gender . . . includes a person's gender identity and gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person's assigned sex at birth."

What's the key word here? Assigned. As though a person's "sex at birth" were purely arbitrary instead of a scientific, biological fact.

What such language implies is that biological facts do not matter. The law is being used to impose a worldview that denigrates the physical body as inconsequential to personal identity. It is a worldview that drives a wedge between one's body and one's sense of self, which exerts a self-alienating, fragmenting effect on the human personality.

I had not heard of Nancy Pearcey before, but as it happens she is critical of liberalism on the same grounds that I am, namely that liberalism bases itself on the idea that the individual should be radically autonomous, and therefore not limited by anything unchosen, not even by one's own biological sex. Liberals believe that this is freedom, but are mistaken in thinking so:

...we are moving to a postmodern view that gender is something we can choose, independent of biology – and thus something we can also change.

...A few weeks ago, an NPR program featured young people who literally changed their gender identity throughout the day. "At one college, things were so fluid you could make up a different pronoun for a different event," NPR said. Students might go to lunch as a he, then to class as a she.

...many are...insisting that gender identity has nothing to do with biology. In an internet forum discussing transgenderism, someone wrote, Why should anyone care about "some little bit of flesh between the legs?" Why should that make a difference to your sense of who you are?

The autonomous self will not tolerate having its options limited by anything it did not choose – not even its own body.

We can call this view liberalism, employing a definition by the self-described liberal philosopher Peter Berkowitz. In his words, liberal thinkers focus on “dimensions of life previously regarded as fixed by nature” and seek to show that in reality they are “subject to human will and remaking.” For liberals, even your identity as male or female is now open to "human will and remaking."

This radical autonomy may be promoted as liberation, but it is a devastatingly disrespectful view of the physical body. The implication is that your body is not part of your authentic self.

A few years ago, Christianity Today quoted a female United Methodist minister who underwent a sex change operation to become a male. Her explanation was, “My body didn’t match what I am.” Clearly, she did not regard her body as part of “what I am.” She did not think of her body as part of her authentic self.

Of course, humans are more than biological beings. But biology gives an objective, scientifically detectable baseline for human identity.

When disconnected from biology, gender identity becomes subjective and ultimately unknowable. In a book titled Omnigender, the author says that all sexual identities are now up for grabs. A review of the book said – and this was written in all seriousness – “Arguments against women’s ordination need wholesale revamping since we do not know for sure now what a woman is.”

The liberal world does not know for sure what a man or woman is.

Not that long ago, nature was regarded as God's creation, endowed with God's purposes. This is called a teleological view of nature (from the Greek telos, meaning goal or purpose), and it is supported by the most evident empirical facts: Eyes are designed for seeing and ears for hearing; wings are designed for flying and flippers for swimming.

Of course, our physical bodies are part of nature, so they too were respected as having a purpose, a meaning, a moral significance.

...Transgenderism treats the scientific facts of human biology as having no intrinsic purpose or significance. It treats the body as nothing but a piece of matter that gives people no clue about who they are as persons. It is a self-alienating worldview that teaches people that their identity as male or female has no inherent purpose or dignity.

Our bodies suggest purpose, meaning and identity. They are not accidental to who we are. We are born male or female and develop either more or less successfully along these lines. We fulfil ourselves and our purposes, in part, by developing the highest and best qualities of our manhood or womanhood. It does not matter that we don't get to choose whether we develop along masculine or feminine lines. It is better to be given something meaningful, than to choose something emptied of meaning.

An even more revealing Swedish video

A few weeks ago I posted a video in which American uni students were asked if they would accept a man's claim to be a woman. Or Chinese. Or seven feet tall. The students mostly answered in the affirmative.

They did so because that is what the state ideology tells them they should do. According to liberalism, the highest good is to self-define who we are and to accept others doing the same. So if a man claims to be a woman? Or if a white person claims to be Chinese? A good liberal will respond "good for you".

A Swedish copycat video has now appeared. In some ways it is even better than the American one. The Swedish students are very clear that they will accept the claim from a very feminine Swedish woman that she is a man. But some of them hesitate to accept that she is Japanese or 7 feet tall or 7 years old. When asked to explain why they will accept that she is a man but not the other things they respond that she is not physiologically/biologically the other things. The Swedish woman then asks them the obvious follow up question: but isn't being female also something physiological/biological? The students struggle to cope when challenged this way.

To be consistent, and accept the claim that a biological woman is a man, you must then also accept that someone who is biologically Swedish is Japanese. Or seven feet tall. Or seven years old. The American students were consistent, the young Swedes haven't "got there yet".

What a strange world liberalism is leading us toward. There are basic aspects of reality being denied here. Imagine living within that mindset and how that would affect your sense of mental integrity.

Getting there

I thought this interesting, given the momentum toward allowing children to decide their sex. Jenny Paul is an Englishwoman who, as a child, wanted to be a boy:

I looked and often acted like a boy and I know that had I been offered the chance to become a real one at the age of ten and given hormones I would have leaped at the chance

Her childhood photos do show her looking androgynous, but look at how she turned out:


She offers an interesting explanation for the transformation. She believed as a girl that boys had it better and so identified that way, but when puberty kicked in and she realised the power that girls had, she embraced femininity. In her case, what mattered was a positive appraisal of what it meant to be a woman.

Germaine can't stop her own revolution

Germaine Greer has been criticised for comments she made about transsexualism on Australian TV:

Controversial feminist and author Germaine Greer has come under fire after saying it is not fair for a man who has enjoyed the 'unpaid services' of a wife for years to decide he is now a woman.

Social media erupted following Greer's comments with many labelling her as 'transphobic', while others said her lack of empathy was 'appalling'.

The criticisms were framed in the usual liberal terms:

Stephanie: Someone please tell Germaine it's 2016. My gender is not up to you to decide Germaine.

Cass: Germaine, you're telling women how to be women and that's not OK.

It must be odd for Germaine to find herself subject to these criticisms. After all, she herself was once at the cutting edge of the liberal belief that the highest good is a freedom to self-define and self-determine. Here is a quote from her 1999 book The Whole Woman in which she argues in favour of a "liberation" version of feminism rather than an "equality" one:

Liberation struggles are not about assimilation but about asserting difference...insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination...the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men. Seekers after equality clamoured to be admitted to smoke-filled male haunts. Liberationists sought the world over for clues to what women's lives could be if they were free to define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate...

It's a variant of liberal autonomy theory in which the overriding good is a freedom to self-define and self-determine. It's an interesting variant, as Greer does not emphasise the idea that men are privileged and that women should therefore seek to ape men. She looks at the lives men lead and doesn't see it as free at all; she logically concludes that women should try for something different.

However, what Greer didn't foresee was that once you place a freedom to self-define as the core good in a society, that the women's movement itself would eventually lose some of its status. After all, if it is oppressive to be defined by anything I don't choose for myself, then it is oppressive to be defined by my sex. Therefore, the cutting-edge freedom is to choose my own sex according to my will ("My gender is not up to you decide Germaine"). Therefore, transsexuals are the new heroes of a liberal social order - they are the ones leading the revolution. Which means that real women (i.e. biological women) aren't as important as they once were. Anyone who chooses to be so can now be a woman.

Consider this comment made by Greer in her TV discussion:

If you're a 50-year-old truck driver who's had four children with a wife and you've decided the whole time you've been a woman, I think you're probably wrong

Most people reading this post will agree with Greer on this (as do I). But in terms of the logic of liberalism, it is exactly this kind of scenario that represents peak liberation. Greer's example presents the most seemingly entrenched male throwing off a sex stereotype to declare himself to be female. What could be a more revolutionary act of self-definition than that?

Next stage transgenderism

Liberalism would have us believe that what matters is a freedom to self-define who we are. So it's no surprise that the transsexual movement is doing so well at the moment. Choosing to define your own sex is taking liberalism to the max.

Nor is it a surprise that the Australian Human Rights Commission is proposing changes to the law on transsexualism. At the moment, Australians have to get a certificate from a medial practitioner stating that they have undergone some kind of clinical treatment to transition from one sex to the other in order to officially change their sex. The Commission now wants to drop this requirement so that an individual can simply determine for themselves which sex they are.

That fits even better with the logic of liberalism, as it increases the extent to which the individual gets to define for themselves who they are. But at the same time it opens up a can of worms. Why couldn't someone who is biologically male declare themselves to be female and take advantage of their status? For instance, by competing as a woman in a women's sporting team? Or by claiming a job subject to a quota? Or by moving into a woman's college on campus?

While we're on the topic of future trends in transsexualism, I was interested to see a tweet at Australian feminist Clementine Ford's twitter feed. It was a complaint that a dating website has an option that allows people to opt out of being contacted by transsexuals. In other words, if you are a man seeking a woman, you can choose not to be contacted by a biological male identifying as a woman.

Some of Clementine's readers thought the opt out option to be morally wrong. One wrote: "wouldn't it be easier to have a button that says, "I'm a cis hetero bigot seeking same"??" Another lamented: "It's the 21st Century but society is changing sooo painfully slowly :-(".

I don't know if liberalism will follow its inner logic to the point of considering it discriminatory to prefer biologically female women over men identifying as women. It might possibly do so, as liberalism frowns on people who limit the "right" of others to self-define as they will. It might though pragmatically be a step too far even for a liberal culture. We'll see.

What do Swedish Youth policies really tell us?

You may have seen reports that the Liberal Youth of Sweden has called for incest and necrophilia to be legalised:

'We don't like morality laws in general, and this legislation is not protecting anyone right now,' Cecilia Johnsson, Liberal Youth chairperson in Stockholm told Aftonbladet.

'We are a youth wing and one of our tasks is to think one step further.'

And this is how liberalism functions. If you believe that there is nothing inherently good, except for the freedom to choose for yourself, then you will seek to extend this freedom to choose as far as you can. One generation will take it so far, then the next one will push the boundaries further and so on.

Remember, the only real sin in liberalism is not respecting other people's rights to choose likewise. So there is no offence for a liberal if two people choose to commit incest, or if someone consents before they die to permit themselves to be used for necrophilia.

I took a look at the website of the Liberal Youth of Sweden and their policies are what you might expect of a right-liberal party (i.e. a party which thinks of market freedoms as particularly important). In other words, the Liberal Youth of Sweden are consistent and principled in following a liberal philosophy. Here are some of their policies:

1. Abolish the Swedish monarchy. Why? Because it is something that people are born into rather than choosing for themselves.

The office of the Swedish head of state is inherited - it is an old tradition and undemocratic, contrary to fundamental liberal values...Who is Swedish head of state should not be decided by who happens to be born into it...

2. Impose feminism. Remember, there are no values for liberals except the freedom to self-define and self-create who we are. We don't get to choose whether we are male or female, therefore our sex becomes an oppressive restriction on what we might choose to become.

[We are] feminist youth, because we see that today there are strong norms in society that dictate how men and women should be. We have different expectations of a person depending on what they have between their legs, and we treat people differently depending on the sex they have. This separation between men and women leads to discrimination and the lack of freedom for the individual and makes it harder for the individual to live the life he or she wants, for fear of condemnation from the environment. A person's value is not in their sex, and therefore we want to actively combat the gender roles and norms that make it difficult for people to realize themselves and restricts their options.

3. Transsexualism. The pattern here is easy to identify. It is about unconstrained choice to self-define or self-determine:

People should have the right to choose what sex they want to belong to. Which biological sex you are born should not play any role for which gender you want to belong to later in life.

4. Open borders. The policy fits the principle. If the only value is a freedom to choose, then people should be free to move to any country they want to:

In a liberal world, everyone has the right to live where they want. No state has the right to keep people in a country - or to deny them to get into another. Man's freedom of movement and his right to move stands above all else. Therefore, we in the Liberal Youth support free immigration. Freedom of emigration and immigration is a matter of course for all the world's citizens. The EU must abolish the barriers for people to be able to come to the European Union. Labour immigration should be encouraged by abolishing work permits and visa requirements.

Note: This policy could easily be rejected pragmatically, on the grounds that it would be unmanageable. There are some voices in Europe expressing this view. The problem is that you also then get the Merkels who claim that the policy actually can be managed. It is better to oppose the policy in principle, by challenging the liberal idea that a freedom to choose "stands above all else". The principled opposition is to remind liberals that issues of identity, culture and kinship are core aspects of how we fully develop our personhood and that longstanding, distinct national cultures have a value in themselves (as unique expressions of the human soul) and draw out the love and commitment of those who belong to these communities.

5. Marriage. Can't fault these guys for sticking to principle. They want any number of people of any sex to be able to marry. So a man could marry two other men. Or a woman three other women. Why not, if the only thing of value in human life is the act of autonomous choice?

The state should not interfere with the sex of the person you want to marry ... [We] also believe that the state should ignore how many people you want to marry. There is a strong norm in today's society that makes people who choose to love and have a relationship with several people at the same time be viewed with great skepticism. But who or what you want to be with is your business and no state should prevent it.

The Liberal Youth is a right-liberal party so there are also various policies about deregulating the market.

What do we draw from all this? I would suggest the following:

a) It is not a good idea to oppose these policies on the basis that they "go too far." This might well be people's instinctive response, but the problem is that as long as the underlying principle is accepted, then the policies are principled and over time people will get used to them. What "goes too far" today will be the norm for the next generation.

b) You don't need conspiracy theories to figure out what has happened in the West. Yes, the way things get organised and financed is sometimes done clandestinely by various powerful forces. But the West has shifted in line with the dominant political philosophy. The first step in changing the direction of society is to promote better political philosophies for our political class to follow.

c) The Liberal Youth is actually a right-wing party. It is a free market party of the right. So the point is not simply to reject the left in favour of the right. The more important thing is to break with liberalism, whether of the left-wing or right-wing varieties.

d) Breaking with liberalism means breaking with the idea that the only thing of value is a freedom to autonomously self-define or self-determine. Because we have been caught within a liberal politics for so long, it can be difficult at first to articulate the alternatives to the liberal idea, but the alternatives are certainly there. Is it really true, for instance, that there is nothing of value in the predetermined manhood or womanhood that we are born into? Does this manhood really not contribute in any way to a man's sense of his own personhood? Liberal claims are in many cases built on sand, they just need to be effectively challenged.

e) If left unchecked, liberalism will continue to develop along logical lines toward increasingly radical policies. There is no stopping point.

f) Currently, nearly all of the mainstream institutions of society follow the liberal philosophy. We cannot rely on these institutions to act for the good whilst we ourselves sit back and watch.

g) Nor can we somehow dramatically and suddenly force change. It is a matter of perseveringly building up an alternative politics, especially one that is articulated in a sophisticated enough way to attract younger members of the Western political class.

"There's going to be so many casualties in the abolition of human nature"

Cartoon captures the liberal moment:

On the same issue, there's a Facebook post doing the rounds that is popular on the left:

Ryan Calhoun
Yesterday at 10:10 · Keuka Park, NY, United States 

I just feel bad for people who are weirded out by gender that's non-binary. Like, this is just the start, dude. Strap in. If technology keeps progressing you're in for a lot more radical alteration of people's identity than individuals telling you they don't want to be referred to as sir or ma'am. What are these m...... gonna think when we're all meshing our appearance and personality traits with computer simulations and turning into wolves, and fairies, and floating metal spheres? Masculine-presenting people showing up to work in dresses better stop freaking you the f... out soon or you might as well go live in the woods cause one day your friend Bob is going to show up mind-melding with your other friend Cathy and they'll be presenting themselves as a series of ever-morphing color patterns. You'll have to deal with that, so for now just understand that people have been non-binary for centuries and centuries, gender is fluid, and you aren't the boss of other people's identities or appearances. There are going to be so many casualties in the abolition of human nature. Don't be one of em.

One of his supporters wrote "I just feel sorry for cis people. That must be boring."

So here we have a couple of moderns who think that it's boring to be a man or a woman and who want to abolish human nature. They "feel sorry" for those of us who aren't ready to be transformed by technology into fairies or floating metal spheres.

It's that underlying difference between the modern and traditional understanding of things again. If you are a liberal modern and you don't believe that there is anything given to us as part of our objective reality that has value or meaning, then you might well look forward to abolishing human nature. You might well believe that the given categories of manhood and womanhood are "boring" and that becoming something arbitrary instead, as an expression of choice, is more interesting.

But what if our given nature connects us to something that is inherently meaningful? What if manhood gives men an identity and an aspect of their being which draws together self, the inner spiritual life, and objective sources of truth and meaning. Is that then boring? Is that something you would readily abolish? Is that something you would trade in, in order to turn yourself into a computer simulation?

We are called to be men not machines or morphing colour patterns. To Ryan Calhoun someone like myself is boring, but to me Ryan Calhoun is not so much boring as lost.

(Cartoon hat tip: here)

God's mistake?

The transsexual issue is big at the moment. My main concern is that the issue is being used by liberals to further attack the significance of our biological sex - the fact of being born a man or a woman and what this means for our identity and our way of being.

However, another concern is that children are being encouraged to change sexes. I've been reading the life story of an American woman called Rachel Reiland and it illustrates the dangers involved here. Rachel Reiland tells early on in her book that she believed she had been born in the wrong body:

I wasn't like the other little girls. I hated dolls and other “girly,” pink toys. I hated being a girl more than anything. I wasn't any good at it. If I had been a boy, things would have been different. But somehow God put me into a girl's body by mistake. I wondered if I would go to hell for daring to think God made a mistake.

You might think from reading this that Rachel Reiland might be a candidate for the sex change procedures that are currently being encouraged and that this would then solve "God's mistake".

Rachel Reiland grew up, married, had children and then had a mental health collapse. She went to see a psychiatrist who was clever enough to recognise what the real, underlying problem was. The "gender dysphoria" was a symptom of something else, namely a condition called borderline personality disorder, which is thought to affect about 5% of the population.

With the help of her capable psychiatrist, and intensive therapy, she eventually recovered. The point to be made is that if she had undergone a sex reassignment it would not have cured what was really ailing her. She would still have suffered from a confusion in her identity; from periods of dissociation; from a sense of not fitting in; from periods of depression; and from a sense of failure in life - as these stem from the borderline disorder and not from chromosomal issues.

Tory MP: what does it matter what someone's sex is?

I've often written that liberals want to make our biological sex not matter. Just to help prove my point here is the latest offering from a UK MP, Maria Miller. She wants a person's sex to be removed from documents such as passports and driver's licences. She said in support of this:

As a society and a government we should be looking at ways of trying to strip back talking about gender...what does it matter what someone's sex is?

She is not a radical communist but a member of the Conservative Party - as such she is an establishment liberal following the state ideology.

I want to stress this point because there are plenty of Daily Mail readers who criticise her in the reader comments, but it is mostly along the lines that she is stupid or that it is political correctness gone mad.

She is not stupid. She is someone who is clever enough to understand the logic of the ruling ideology, she just isn't clever enough to consider the destructive aspects of it. In a sense, she is a woman trapped within the intellectual and moral assumptions of her own times.

Nothing will change until the state ideology is clearly identified, effectively criticised and finally jettisoned.

What makes a woman?

Most readers will be aware that there has been a scuffle on the left between some of the older radical feminists and the transsexual movement - with the transsexuals winning hands down.

Elinor Burkett recently wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times defending the older feminist position. It's interesting how closely she follows typical liberal ideas in her argument.

The basic liberal idea is that society should be based on a principle of "equal freedom," meaning that the individual is to be equally free to choose for themselves who they are and what they do. This means that unchosen, predetermined qualities, such as our biological sex or our race, are thought of in negative terms as oppressive restrictions from which the individual is to be liberated.

This explains Elinor Burkett's first argument. She observes that when a transsexual man says that he has a female brain that many on the left applaud him, even though this suggests that there are real, hardwired differences between men and women that aren't self-determined:

Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination — are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us.

That’s the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries.

...By defining womanhood the way he did to Ms. Sawyer, Mr. Jenner and the many advocates for transgender rights who take a similar tack...undermine almost a century of hard-fought arguments that the very definition of female is a social construct that has subordinated us.

Elinor Burkett fears that if our biological sex - the fact of being male or female - is found to matter in some way, that there will be a limitation on how we as individuals chart our own individual destiny. It might mean, for instance, that a woman might not become a combat fighter in the army, because she was born a woman and not a man - something she cannot determine for herself.

It is difficult, though, to live by the liberal principle consistently. Our sex is important to our identity: it's not easy to see yourself as an "it". And it is clearly the case that being a woman does still matter for Elinor Burkett, no matter how feminist she is. And so her second argument is that transsexual men are undermining female identity.

She makes a good argument that this is so, and I will quote her on this shortly. But the point to be made here is that it is this very fact, that transsexualism undermines female identity, which makes it such a radically liberal force and which explains why it has so much traction in a liberal society. So this may not have been the best argument for Elinor Burkett to focus on if she wishes to win support from a liberal establishment.

How does transsexualism undermine a female identity? Well, if a man in his fifties is suddenly considered to be a woman, then all the things that women uniquely experience in life don't matter so much when it comes to what it means to be a woman:

People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women, whether Ms. Jenner or Mr. Summers, shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been doing for much too long. And as much as I recognize and endorse the right of men to throw off the mantle of maleness, they cannot stake their claim to dignity as transgender people by trampling on mine as a woman.

Their truth is not my truth. Their female identities are not my female identity. They haven’t traveled through the world as women and been shaped by all that this entails...

Elinor Burkett is running a fine line argument here. She is arguing that it is bad for women to be defined by hard-wired biological characteristics, such as differences between the male and female brain, but good for women to be defined collectively by shared life experiences, both negative and positive (on the positive side she writes that she has "relished certain courtesies" that she has received due to her sex). Again, I can't see this as being persuasive within a liberal framework when the liberal goal is to sever the connection between our biological sex and what happens in our life.

Elinor Burkett then lists a series of very strange outcomes of supporting transsexualism. They are strange to me and perhaps to older feminists, but no doubt they seem radically chic to younger liberals and will become part of the liberal mainstream over time.

For instance, if men can be considered women, then it becomes non-inclusive to link womanhood to having a vagina. Therefore, this:

In January 2014, the actress Martha Plimpton, an abortion-rights advocate, sent out a tweet about a benefit for Texas abortion funding called “A Night of a Thousand Vaginas.” Suddenly, she was swamped by criticism for using the word “vagina.” “Given the constant genital policing, you can’t expect trans folks to feel included by an event title focused on a policed, binary genital,” responded @DrJaneChi.

WHEN Ms. Plimpton explained that she would continue to say “vagina” — and why shouldn’t she, given that without a vagina, there is no pregnancy or abortion? — her feed overflowed anew with indignation, Michelle Goldberg reported in The Nation. “So you’re really committed to doubling down on using a term that you’ve been told many times is exclusionary & harmful?” asked one blogger. Ms. Plimpton became, to use the new trans insult, a terf, which stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist.”

In January, Project: Theatre at Mount Holyoke College, a self-described liberal arts college for women, canceled a performance of Eve Ensler’s iconic feminist play “The Vagina Monologues” because it offered an “extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman,” explained Erin Murphy, the student group’s chairwoman.

Let me get this right: The word “vagina” is exclusionary and offers an extremely narrow perspective on womanhood, so the 3.5 billion of us who have vaginas, along with the trans people who want them, should describe ours with the politically correct terminology trans activists are pushing on us: “front hole” or “internal genitalia”?

Similarly, there are transsexual women who identify as men but who still have functioning female genitalia. Therefore, to be inclusive means that abortion and contraceptive services can't be marketed to women alone:

Even the word “woman” has come under assault by some of the very people who claim the right to be considered women. The hashtags #StandWithTexasWomen, popularized after Wendy Davis, then a state senator, attempted to filibuster the Texas Legislature to prevent passage of a draconian anti-abortion law, and #WeTrustWomen, are also under attack since they, too, are exclusionary.

“Abortion rights and reproductive justice is not a women’s issue,” wrote Emmett Stoffer, one of many self-described transgender persons to blog on the topic. It is “a uterus owner’s issue.” Mr. Stoffer was referring to the possibility that a woman who is taking hormones or undergoing surgery to become a man, or who does not identify as a woman, can still have a uterus, become pregnant and need an abortion.

Accordingly, abortion rights groups are under pressure to modify their mission statements to omit the word woman, as Katha Pollitt recently reported in The Nation. Those who have given in, like the New York Abortion Access Fund, now offer their services to “people” and to “callers.” Fund Texas Women, which covers the travel and hotel expenses of abortion seekers with no nearby clinic, recently changed its name to Fund Texas Choice. “With a name like Fund Texas Women, we were publicly excluding trans people who needed to get an abortion but were not women,” the group explains on its website.

And what about those who are legally women but who consider themselves men? They can use female services but they don't want to be referred to as women:

Women’s colleges are contorting themselves into knots to accommodate female students who consider themselves men, but usually not men who are living as women. Now these institutions, whose core mission is to cultivate female leaders, have student government and dormitory presidents who identify as males.

As Ruth Padawer reported in The New York Times Magazine last fall, Wellesley students are increasingly replacing the word “sisterhood” with “siblinghood,” and faculty members are confronted with complaints from trans students about their universal use of the pronoun she — although Wellesley rightly brags about its long history as the “world’s pre-eminent college for women.”

Elinor Burkett shares the same underlying liberal theory as the transsexuals, but she is facing some unexpected loss of control in how the theory is played out. She liked the old way in which she got to be part of a movement in which women were defined as an oppressed group smashing apart oppressive social constructs to live liberated lives, in which women like herself could keep older privileges of womanhood but also have access to things they wanted in a more androgynous social setting.

But the theory has now reached a more radical moment, so that there is no longer a comfortable "women's movement," not when the notion of womanhood itself is in such flux. What now does it mean to be a woman? In our liberal society a woman's body doesn't make a woman, nor her distinct life experiences. Transsexuals reach back to traditional markers of femininity to make their womanhood distinct, but this isn't acceptable to feminists. Can you have a women's movement when there is confusion about what actually makes a woman?