If you are as old, or nearly as old, as your humble editor–and granted, few are–you may recall a rock tune from the mid-sixties by a lesser known combo called The Barbarians. They scored a minor hit querying: “Are you a boy, or are you a girl?” The succeeding line, if memory serves, was,“If you’re not a girl, then you come from Liverpool!” It was funny in 1965 because it lampooned a sizable subset of American society that gloried in blaring the titular interrogative at any passing lad sporting hair past the tips of his ears. If you were so assailed in that era, you may recall that none of the assailing dullards seemed able to conceive any wittier insult, and seemed uniformly convinced that screaming “are you a boy or are you a girl?”constituted the ultimate squelch.
But whether you were a screaming dullard, or the recipient of the dullards’ taunts, you recognized the question was (albeit insultingly) binary. In other words you had only two available responses (or you could resist responding altogether, or you could break the issuer’s jaw)… No one in the Barbarians thought to include any alternatives, nor would it have occurred to recipients of the query to explain they were, in fact, “questioning” or “non-binary.” Nobody would have understood such gobbledygook, whereas nowadays we pretend to.
Then as now, however, with occasional hermaphroditic exceptions, all babies came in two varieties, which is to say “boys” and “girls.” It was easy to tell, because boys had penises and girls had vaginas. In fact, the same holds true nowadays. And, however briefly, babies are assigned one of two genders in the hospital, or yes, even by enlightened midwives, because the issuers of birth certificates are either unwoke, or, more probably, sensible of the insufficient space on birth certificates to accommodate whichever clusters of the 82 (currently available) ‘genders’ may appeal to woke moms and dads, dads and dads, or moms and moms. But yes, your editor has already committed an unpardonable sin–he has just confused gender with sex. Oops!
Oops!
Have you noticed how important such nice distinctions seem to liberal pundits? They relish imposing them at moments selected to disconcert the naive; usually college students eager to confuse paradox with profundity. These pedagogic slicksters bask in the stir their counter-intuitive assertions provoke:
“Rape,” the woke professor assures his dumbstruck students,”is not about sex!” Similarly, “the Civil War was not about slavery!” And of course–I admit the ‘error’–“Gender is not about sex–” an arguable lexicographic point rendered moot by repeated draggings (no pun intended) through the muck of contemporary academe. A few of us recall a day in which college professors contributed their insights to refining usage notes in dictionaries. More recently America’s educators seem content to loaf about their faculty lounges confecting nonsense terms that inflate their various unhinged lexicons. Stuffing dictionaries (and students) with such evanescent gibberish is a full-blown professorial fad.
Descriptivism villainously distorts the meaning of language [see previous editorial rant] while constructivism appears to legitimate the resultant havoc. But in this case, to lock down the meaning of our terms, let us return to an epoch antecedent to liberal contamination. Let’s consult Meriam Webster’s 1913 dictionary. In 1913, Webster insensitively defined gender as “Sex, male or female.” Additionally, it can imply “a classification of nouns, primarily according to sex; and secondarily to some fancied or imputed quality associated with sex.” [Italics added.] The entry seems uncannily prescient.
As to sex? Webster’s in 1913 defined it as “Sex, n. 1. The distinguishing peculiarity of male or female in both animals and plants; the physical difference between male and female; the assemblage of properties or qualities by which male is distinguished from female.” Of course, in 1913, nobody knew any better.
“Out there…”
Descriptivists are busy improving these definitions, or rather, deconstructing them into radical insipidity. A representative example is offered by no less an authority than Paula Leech, LMFT, and AASECT-certified sex therapist. Paula writes, “Thankfully, [sic] it’s 2022, and many of the terms surrounding gender are becoming more widely recognized in our society. The language we have around [gender identity] is rapidly expanding to accommodate for [sic] the wide variety of gender identities and expressions out there.” Out there? No wonder Leech believes 2022 is so thankful–it has shaken the stodgy encumbrances of binary neanderthalism and reached the heady apogee of constructive wokeness.
Jackie Golob, MS, writes, “Gender is a term that relates to how we feel about ourselves, the way we choose to express our gender through makeup, dresses, high heels, athletic shorts, sneakers, and more.” (So, in other words, gender is how we express our gender.)
Oh boy, it’s a continuum…
But Golob insists gender identity is more than a mere social construct, it is also “a continuum. Our society has convinced us that there are just two options for gender identity, ‘male’ ‘female,’ based on biological sex. But in reality, there’s more fluidity!” See? Fluidity. Now your college students can feel haughtily superior as they condescend to inform you that gender isn’t about sex, but rather, “how we feel about ourselves” (because), “In reality, there’s more fluidity!” Tuition, by the way, is sky high, but worth it if your students learn to recognize reality.
Marching to La-la Land…
But none of what Goleb and Leech are blithering about has any association with reality. Almost the entire literature of gender re-identification is pure fantasy, or as Meriam Webster sentiently suggested back in 1913,”some fancied or imputed quality associated with sex.”
By now the properly programmed liberal will be furious with your humble editor, assuming him homophobic (properly meaning afraid of sameness but relegated lately to what Joseph Sobran called “hive speak,”or what we currently call political correctness. In this sense it connotes one who is hatefully predisposed toward homosexuals. But this screed is not about homosexuality–not a bit of it. Rather, it protests the Liberal Order’s substitution of fantasy for biology, its abandonment of lexical precision in pursuit of that fantasy, and its casual ransacking of psychology en route to La-la Land.
The world according to Jesse…
Your editor shall now quote liberally (as it were) from an article by Jesse Belinsky that appeared on the website The Verge, Aug 8, 2022. In fairness to Jesse, who seems like a well intentioned bloke (or blokette), we’ll first explain that The Verge is a tech blog, thus Jesse’s article is understandably suffused with thoughts on social media and on-line realms. That said, Jesse also embodies the perfect conflation of fantasy and self-imagery that liberalism celebrates, although in Jesse’s case it is greatly accelerated by the Internet…which Jesse praises as a first-rate accelerant.
Jesse writes that he attends a “fairly liberal high school,” and affirms having “come out as Gay,” but his insecurities remain troublesome because “in real life, I’m a tall, slightly chubby, pubescent boy with the acne and self-esteem to match.” It seems significant that “real life” is mentioned only in this context, and is otherwise sloughed off as unacceptably burdensome.
A good school counselor or qualified psychologist might guide Jesse to accept the physical realities of the here-and-now while tackling deficits he realistically desires to modify (e.g., his weight, social anxiety, and acne). If he wishes to embrace his sexual preferences and transvestism, therapy may help him there, too–but Jesse seeks release online. Online he is meeting up with his “pals,” and he is determined to dress appropriately. “I want to show off my sense of style,” Jesse writes, “so I spend a solid amount of time trying on different skirts, dresses, and accessories in order to find the cutest look.” But Jesse assays these fittings on his computer. The dresses and shoes aren’t fitted to his physical body, “but rather, on my villager in the world of Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the Nintendo 3DS.” We don’t know what that means exactly, as we last played a video game when Pong was all the rage, but obviously, Jesse can flaunt his transvestism ‘virtually,’ while concealing his body dysmorphia behind his monitor.
Jesse admits he would face embarrassment and ridicule if he dressed as a female in public,” but online he can “be whoever I want to be — within the confines of New Leaf’s binary gender system, skinny player models, and light skin tones, that is.” Well, no fantasy is perfect. Jesse concurs. “It’s not perfect by any means, but New Leaf is the first game…that lets male villagers wear feminine clothing and vice versa. So, for people like me…it’s a blessing.”
Is there a Shrink in the hut?
There may not be any villagers in New Leaf’s game who practice psychology, (nor apparently any staffers at Jesse’s “fairly liberal high school”) but if such a clinician appears he might recognize transvestism as one of eight paraphilias (sexual deviancies) somewhat bashfully detailed in the 5th edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM-5).
If Jesse wished to discuss his transvestism with a professional he might discover that sexually-arousing fantasies entailing cross dressing are not uncommon in his age range–that homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals present with transvestism, that the symptoms often remit over time, often do not, and that the fundamental dangers are primarily to the transvestite–for obvious reasons. Jesse might find ways to reduce or refocus his behaviors, or simply learn to function more comfortably within his diagnostic envelope.
The village shrink had best make haste, however, because as God is our witness, Jesse’s paraphilia will vanish from the always-trend-conscious DSM‘s next edition–following in the wake of such prior ejectees as homosexuality, ego-dystonic homosexuality, and sexual perversion, all flushed down the editorial memory hole.
The Search for Jesse’s Gender Identity…
Predictably, the computer simulations are soon insufficient to assuage Jesse’s yearnings. “I’m starting to wear skirts,” he writes….”I’m at the beginning of the process of figuring out my gender identity” and though still riven with incertitude, he is making progress. “[I] pierced my septum and my ears; and …recently began painting my nails. However, I still can’t bring myself to wear dresses or try earrings that are larger than studs…”
A fashionista forever!
Jesse next praises Discord (the web platform, not the pejorative noun) exclaiming, “With the higher-resolution screen, brighter colors, and better graphics, the styles I choose…can really pop…and instead of asking me if I’m a boy or a girl …New Horizons asks me what my sense of style is…My friends and I can hop on Discord...I can now post screenshots of my villager on social media to say, “Hey! Check out my bangin’ style!”
But Jesse remains pessimistic owing to “the wave of transphobic fearmongering passing through the United States right now,” insisting his predilections make computerized meeting places “more necessary than ever.” [More than ever? Seriously?] “I hope that queer youth are able to continue to use these digital playgrounds as a safe and fun space to play with gender…I’ll never be able to resist the life of an Animal Crossing fashionista.”
We hope no one supposes this editorial an attack on Jesse. whose libertarian right to dress in feminine attire (‘bangin” or otherwise), we are predisposed to defend. Jesse also retains the 1st amendment right to deem himself an occupant of any whimsically-excogitated “gender category” he likes– but not the right to make rational Americans pretend it’s real. That’s a bridge too far–a ‘right’ invented by the liberal establishment. Discerning Americans are well advised to oppose such flapdoodle.
It pains your editor to disappoint Jesse, but he needn’t bother himself further about his true gender identity. In skirts or out of skirts, you’re male Jesse. Even if you ultimately succumb to surgical mutilation to more persuasively disguise the fact, (as is your adult right), you will still be a male, however brutally amended. The Left will help you play dress-up and urge you to pretend otherwise–but it’s not so.
Seizing upon zany, nonsensical nonce terms to decorate one’s “gender identity” is really just another kind of transvestism. And eventually, probably after playing with numerous gender flavors, Jesse will opt for whichever current phrase strikes him as the sheikest –the most nearly perfect touch that gives his putative identity the most appealing glow. But he’ll still be a guy.