 |
| A reed warbler raising a common cuckoo chick it hatched from an egg surreptitiously placed in its nest by the cuckoo's parent |
Parasite to Virus
Brood parasites are species that manipulate other organisms to raise their young for them. Among the best known of brood parasites is the cuckoo. A number of cuckoo species have specialized to lay their eggs among hosts whose eggs theirs mimic closely enough to provide protective camouflage. The eggs hatch sooner than host eggs, the chicks grow faster, and they often eject the eggs or hatchlings of the host from the nest. The cuckoo chicks begin to mimic the cries of the host young to encourage the fostering birds to keep up with their growth to the detriment of their own young.
Following one of the first documented cases of computer espionage in the mid 80s, the concept of brood parasitism was applied to malware. Clifford Stoll borrowed the concept when he likened a hacker inserting programming to manipulate access on computers to a cuckoo laying its egg. The computer was instructed to ignore its original programming to enact one which gave the hacker administrative privileges.
The concept can also be applied to the strategy for proliferating gender ideology. Only Adults? Good Practices in Legal Gender Recognition for Youth makes that explicit. Published near the end of 2019, the document is a collaboration between Dentons, which claims to be the largest law firm in the world, the Thomas Reuters Foundation, and the International, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth & Student Organisation (IGLYO).
Viral Spread
The document makes the case for enabling children to transition without parental consent. It also provides activists with best practices for enacting this agenda, mostly through secrecy and subterfuge. Jamie Hamilton and James Kirkup explored the document and its implications. Rather than retread their work, I'd like to note two things relevant to this writing. The Denton's document makes clear that there is nothing organic about this commitment to "trans youth". It's not in response to a pressing global issue. The strategy amplifies this fact, which is the second thing I'd like to note.
Unlike any grassroots campaign anywhere in the world, the Denton's document recommends that activists avoid press coverage and exposure. Put another way, they believe that their advocacy becomes less successful the more people know about their advocacy. Illumination is damaging to their goals. The document also recommends attaching the goals to movements and campaigns with strong public support. "This provided a veil of protection, particularly in Ireland, where marriage equality was strongly supported, but gender identity remained a more difficult issue to win public support for." They used marriage equality as camouflage for establishing gender identity in law, to the detriment of children, straight women, gays and lesbians.
If the gender identity goals can't stand on their own or withstand scrutiny it's useful to understand why. I began by trying to understand the origin of the institutional capture of gender identity. What led nearly every major medical association to support permanent bodily changes through low evidence cosmetic surgery and cross sex hormones to affirm an adolescent's fluid self identity? (This is the question that started my exploration of gender identity ideology.)
The Lab
Much of this ideology was formalized in a series of meetings taking place in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 2006 that resulted in The Yogyakarta Principles. These were supplemented and somewhat revised in a subsequent meeting in 2017 resulting in The Yogyakarta Principles plus 10. The original document purports to be focused on rights around sexual orientation and gender identity. The 2017 meetings added a focus on gender expression and sexual characteristics, while insisting that these concepts were grounded in the initial document. Taken together these documents are an obvious attempt to replace sex with gender in law while avoiding debate on the consequences.
I would suggest that gender identity ideology is a cuckoo's egg within a cuckoo's egg. It cannot make the argument for its putative goals on their merits without camouflaging them as something more popular. What should be more concerning and disqualifying is that the elaborated goals camouflage altogether different objectives. Better understanding how the Yogyakarta meeting came to be and how the ideology has quickly spread may offer some clues to those objectives. The billionaires funding the proliferation of the ideology may also offer clues. I currently only have unsupported speculation.
The people who have accused me of transphobia for ignoring gender in observing that sex in humans is binary and immutable are unable to define gender. There is no definition of gender that matches this use. The Yogyakarta Principles essentially memes it into existence. Their use brings up more questions than are answered. The preamble defines sexual orientation:
Sexual orientation is understood to refer to each person's capacity for profound emotional, affectional and sexual attraction to, and intimate sexual relations with, individuals of a different gender or the same gender or more than one gender.
Consider that definition in tandem with the document's definition of gender identity (gender is never defined, nor is sex):
Gender identity is understood to refer to each person's deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the body (which may involve, if freely chosen, modification of bodily appearance or function by medical, surgical or other means) and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech and mannerisms.
What does it mean to be attracted to someone's gender? How do you know their deeply felt experience of gender? Typically rights around sexual orientation are focused on gay men and lesbians, people with same SEX attraction. There are nations in which it's illegal to be homosexual or where one can be murdered with near impunity for being gay. Although promoted as progressive, gender identity ideology is incredibly reactionary and inherently homophobic and misogynist. The idea that a man who is effeminate or likes wearing dresses must really be a "woman inside" relies on and reifies sex stereotypes.
Homophobia For Justice
The conflict between gender identity ideology and homosexuality in Iran offers a mirror to the contradiction in tying them together in the west. In Iran, gay men may be executed for participating in sex and lesbians may receive lashings. Homosexuality is illegal, but transitioning to the opposite sex is encouraged and subsidized by the state. Changing sex has religious sanction, homosexuality has religious condemnation. Activists see this as Iran attempting to eradicate homosexuality through a form of state orchestrated conversion therapy.
There has been a massive exponential increase in the number of adolescents with what they present as gender dysphoria self identifying as trans in the west. The Tavistock clinic in the UK has been the center of conflict around medical transition for children and safeguarding for a number of years. The clinic received up to 50 referrals for mostly males experiencing gender dysphoria a decade ago. That number has since climbed to thousands, predominantly girls.
A number of clinicians have quit to become whistleblowers over their concerns with the quality of service and appropriateness of treatment. Aside from the low evidence for medical transition, clinicians had reservations over the reasons children were transitioning. A number felt that the process ignored comorbidities like autism, eating disorders, or trauma. Another concern was the number of possibly gay children coming to the clinic. There was a dark joke that they were seeing so many gay children there would be no gay people left. One clinician noted, "I frequently had cases where people started identifying as trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay." He likened the process to gay conversion therapy. It was done in response to homophobia from the family as well as internalized homophobia from the clients:
'For some families, it was easier to say, this is a medical problem, 'here's my child, please fix them!' than dealing with a young, gay kid'...At the service's "family days", a parent was allegedly heard saying that they did not want their child to have gay friends because they 'didn't want them mixed up in that hedonistic lifestyle...'We had so many families who would talk about wanting their daughters to be lesbian.' Young people 'repeatedly' confided their own 'disgust' that they may be gay.
The clinical setting isn't the only place where gender identity ideology attacks homosexuality. Keep in mind that the guiding document defines homosexuality as being attracted to people of the same gender rather than the same sex. When a male who identifies as trans dates a natal female, is it a homosexual relationship or a heterosexual relationship? The answer seems incredibly obvious to me. The question would have been considered ridiculous a decade ago. Considering that around 80% of males identifying as trans remain physically intact, it should still be.
Can a man be a lesbian because he says he's a woman? Can a woman ever be considered a gay man? Your answer may depend on whether you believe that identifying as the opposite sex means you truly are the opposite sex. Aside from assertions that it has something to do with gender and that sex is complicated, no one has explained the relationship between those statements and sex changing. Sex in humans is immutable. A man can't become a woman, a woman can't become a man. This doesn't preclude anyone from dressing and behaving as they like or dating anyone who will have them.
Cotton/Boxer Ceiling
A crude common refrain from my youth regarding lesbians suggested they were same sex attracted because they hadn't experienced the "right dick". Most people understand very clearly why dick and lesbian are incompatible. So it's disorienting to have this refrain growing in popularity again, this time among people who say they are progressive. Correction, it has changed somewhat, the progressive version suggests that lesbians need the "right lady-dick".
Lesbians and gay men who won't sleep with people of the opposite sex identifying as trans are pressured to overcome their "genital preference". Successfully pressuring lesbians and gays to ignore their "genital preference" is called breaking the cotton/boxer ceiling. For some reason the phrase feels like advocating for rape, perhaps because it renders the concept of consent moot. The goal, as with homophobic conversion therapy, is to essentially force people to overcome their homosexuality and engage in sexual intercourse with people of the opposite sex.
Increasingly the services, organizations, and places created to advocate for and meet the needs of same sex attracted people are hollowed out to cater to heterosexuals who reject their sex for their gender identity. There is a dating app for lesbians called Her. Here are a few lesbians from the app:
Lesbians complaining about the presence of these males identifying as trans on their dating app were kicked off the dating app for being transphobic. In a sense, it's like a reed warbler expelling its own hatchlings for not accepting the cuckoo as one of them. It's possible there are times it's safer outside the "nest" than in it.
This is who the @HerSocialApp wants on their platform looking to meet young lesbians. Lesbians who say they don’t want to meet this type of person get kicked off the app for “bigotry” pic.twitter.com/Ko1ojlt6xk
— 𝕯𝖗. 𝕱𝖗𝖆𝖓𝖐𝖎𝖓𝖛𝖆𝖑𝖎𝖉𝖆𝖙𝖔𝖗 🎃🎃 (@artofhunger75) September 27, 2021
The Lab 2.0
The introduction to Yogyakarta Principles plus 10 says that the Principles were adopted in 2006 and suggests that there are human rights violations on the basis of gender expression and sex characteristics. It doesn't say exactly who has adopted the YP. Despite this language the YP has never been ratified by the UN or any legislative body. The YP has never been voted on by the citizens of any nation. When brought before the UN General Assembly under the right to sexual education it was completely rejected.Special Rappoteur Vernor Muñoz offered a report recognizing comprehensive sexual education as a right which elaborated on the need of stated to ensure that the "gender dimension, human rights, new patterns of male behavior, diversity and disability" were all part of the curriculum. In rejecting the report Muñoz was accused of overstepping his mandate by attempting to create a right that did not exist. He was also accused of offering a twisted interpretation of the work that would harm children and undermine families. Representatives accused him of attempting to introduce controversial ideas unrecognized by international law and propagate harmful principles lacking international recognition.
Despite the lack of recognition, the Brazilian Supreme Court cited the legal guidelines of the YP in its 2011 judgement on same sex civil unions. In 2018 the Inter-American Court on Human Rights also used the YP to offer an advisory opinion to Costa Rica establishing self identity of gender identity without condition, which should be reflected on official documents. This decision impacts all countries in the Americas, despite only being supported by Canada and Costa Rica. The LGBTI Program manager of the International Service for Human Rights, Pooja Patel suggested, 'it's a testament to yhe power of the Yogyakarta Principles to bring about change on the the ground, that just a month after the publication of the YP + 10, they are already at the centre of an Opinion of a regional human court." Considering how throughly the undefined concepts at the heart of the YP have been, it's more a sign of the power behind promoting the Yogyakarta Principles.
As with "gender" and "sex" in the original document YP + 10 doesn't define its use of gender expression or sexual characteristic. It also doesn't name any population whose rights are violated on the basis of gender expression or sexual characteristics. Who is in danger based on their sexual characteristics rather than their sex, recognizing that both sexes have unique sexual characteristics? Perhaps my thinking is limited, but I'm unable to think of whose rights might be endangered on this basis other than women with the sexual characteristics related to their sex. Clearly, ensuring the rights of women is not the point.
To that effect, women are increasingly separated from the biology that makes them women. Women menstruate, get pregnant, miscarry, get abortions, give birth, breast feed, get cervical cancer. Supposedly, in the name of inclusion, rather than say women, which simultaneously contains all of those possibilities, institutions now say people who give birth or people with a cervix. The idea being that some "women" (read men who identify as trans) don't give birth or have a cervix or that not everyone with a cervix is a woman (despite having the biology that makes them female which makes having a cervix relevant). For some reason there's no need to dehumanize men to make male biology more inclusive. This was on full display at the end of September when medical journal The Lancet published two articles within days of each other. One article on menstruation noted that people with vaginas had a history of being neglected, the other article noted that 10 million men were living with prostate cancer. The quote that the Lancet chose to highlight the article referred to bodies with vaginas, which doesn't necessitate that the subject be human or alive.
Comments
Post a Comment