Religion is a Mental Illness

A Rainbow-Colored Cage

Transgender ideology is sustained by scholars’ unwillingness to challenge its contradictory premises.

City Journal

More people are identifying as transgender and seeking medical care for gender dysphoria than ever before. Between 2018 and 2022, gender-dysphoria diagnoses increased considerably in every state in the U.S. except for South Dakota, according to Definitive Healthcare. Children’s share of dysphoria diagnoses rose from 17.5 percent to 20.4 percent in that same period. A JAMA paper noted a threefold increase in “gender-affirming” surgeries between 2016 and 2019.

The story that the “gender-affirming” camp tells itself about these developments is equal parts illuminating and frustrating. Proponents typically claim that transgender people, as we understand them today, have always existed, and that more people identify as trans because the public has become more aware and accepting of transgender identities. In other words, these activists believe that apparent increases in the trans-identifying population are not really increases at all; they merely reflect that the language, tools, and cultural climate are now in place to gauge more accurately the trans population’s size.

In a recent reported piece for The Hill, for example, Russ Toomey, a transgender professor at the University of Arizona, claimed that the alleged rise of transgender young people “is not an increase . . . we are seeing the numbers of people disclosing nonbinary and trans identity on a survey because we are asking people in more inclusive ways about their gender.” Shoshana Goldberg of the Human Rights Campaign similarly argued, “It is not that there are more people. It is that there are more people who are open and who are out. . . . The reality is that when you talk to the average person on the street, they are going to be more accepting and more affirming than they have ever been.” Of course, this observation cannot be reconciled with the pro-affirming camp’s claim that half of U.S. states are “anti-trans” and create a hostile environment for trans-identifying minors. Moreover, it seems unlikely that these explanations can solely account for the sheer size and scope of the increase in referrals over the last decade. For example, England’s Gender Identity Development Service saw a twentyfold increase in referrals for dysphoria between 2011 and 2021.

The pro-affirming side is willing to grant that social and cultural forces contribute to the documented rise in trans identification, but only in a narrow way. They allow that greater cultural visibility and acceptance leads to more people being comfortable sharing their “real” identities—but they won’t entertain the possibility that greater cultural visibility and acceptance has created cases of gender dysphoria and trans identification.

When confronted with statistical reality, this thinking yields absurd conclusions. A Williams Institute study from 2021, for example, noted the presence of 1.2 million “nonbinary” people in the United States, 75 percent of whom were below age 30. According to the pro-affirming camp, nonbinary people have always existed. But why are young people more likely than older people to adopt this identity? Why are nonbinary identities more common among girls and young women, specifically? And why didn’t this phenomenon seem to exist 30 years ago?

“You can’t identify as something if you don’t know what the word is,” counters Kay Simon, a professor who studies “queer” youth and their families. “From a very young age,” he adds, “I kind of realized I was gay . . . at the time, I probably could have told you that I felt different about my gender, but I didn’t have a word for it.”

Simon is right that discovering new terminology can sometimes help people describe elements of reality that they couldn’t previously describe. But language, and culture more broadly, can also create new social realities.

Certain material facts—our embodiment as sexed beings is one—exist independent of our cultural discourse about them. When you move beyond these natural phenomena and into the social realm, however, nature and culture can become hard to disentangle. Gender dysphoria, as a psychiatric condition, might have biological roots and in that sense be a biological phenomenon, though researchers have yet to confirm this. The idea that a person who has gender dysphoria is a different sex, however, and must be treated with hormones and surgeries is another claim altogether. It assumes that a person’s mind is the only thing that counts toward whether the individual is male or female (or something else). This is a cultural argument, not a discovery of natural fact.

Consider how our understanding of sex-reassignment surgeries has evolved. For most of the twentieth century, an adult who had surgical genital modifications would have been described as “transsexual,” not “transgender.” The popular scientific understanding of this person’s situation would be that he was suffering from a mental-health disorder and was opting to live socially as the opposite sex. Significantly, however, neither the scientific nor cultural understandings of this person’s situation would have included a metaphysical belief that the person really was the opposite sex (or another sex entirely). No shared cultural understanding existed that a male undergoing a procedure to create an artificial vagina was somehow already a female even before the procedure, though the concept of gender identity had been introduced.  

In the older paradigm, the language of sex reassignment suggests that sex can be changed through surgery. Filtered through the prism of the gender-affirming paradigm, though, sex reassignment is a misnomer, since the procedure simply confirms the patient’s true “sex” as reflected by his or her gender identity. Of course, a third possibility is that it is impossible to change sex, and that these procedures are simply cosmetic.

As the philosopher Tomas Bogardus pointed out in Quillette, our language used to maintain a sex-gender distinction that acknowledged sexual dimorphism. “Sex” referred to being biologically male or female, while “gender” stood in for qualities that we associate with the sexes —like wearing makeup for girls or playing sports for boys—that are not intrinsic, definitionally, to being male or female. These gender qualities are mostly “socially constructed,” though they may be biologically predisposed. Notably, gender was also used by feminists as a synonym for sex, while gender identity was used by sexologists to refer to a person’s perception of being male or female. “Queer theorists” would later argue that the entire sex-gender distinction was artificial and that both categories were socially constructed. In this way, the terms “man” and “woman” also came to be associated with gender, suggesting that a man or woman was a social role or position that one occupied.

According to Bogardus, the flaw in what he calls the social-role view of gender is that not every person who wants to be recognized socially as a man or woman is perceived as one. To rectify this, the social-role view of gender morphed into the self-identification view. In the process, the sex-gender distinction collapsed, and the survivor was gender, not sex. In this brave new world, men who identify as women are female, and women who identify as men are male.

Gender-identity theory, then, is a strange amalgam of ideas. The theory asserts that we are imbued with an innate gendered essence, but it defines that essence by time- and culture-bound masculine and feminine stereotypes. It divorces our sex from biology, and redefines it by how we dress, behave, and express ourselves.

Even the “queer theorists,” often credited with developing gender ideology, arguably would not understand its current incarnation. For the godmother of queer theory, Judith Butler, sex is subsumed under gender, and gender exists only as a performance made intelligible through repetition. The notion that there is a “real” gender—or gender identity—behind the performance is not only false but is the very idea that queer theory aims to challenge. Those who borrow Butler’s jargon and concepts to argue that all humans have an innate gender identity, and that this innate identity needs social and medical “affirmation,” seem scarcely aware of—or concerned with—the deep contradiction in their position.

Whether social scientists admit it or not, gender discourse has consequences. As the writer and researcher Eliza Mondegreen recently pointed out, growth in trans identification is not just fueled by interpreting various kinds of distress as gender dysphoria. Trans identification can come first, followed by the experience of gender dysphoria.

Imagine a shy, sensitive boy who likes to cook and draw, and is uninterested in sports and rough-and-tumble play. In a different time, this would be unremarkable. But now, ubiquitous cultural messaging suggests that this boy’s personality and preferences are evidence that he is a girl and always has been. The boy’s self-understanding is made increasingly unstable, and his sense of self is increasingly dependent on the opinion of others. Do I sound enough like a girl? Do I look enough like one? Do others see me as the girl I know I am inside? He becomes increasingly distressed about the reality of his male body and the ever-growing chasm between it and true female embodiment. Alternatively, a part of him may understand that he is in fact male, and yet this reality is routinely denied by the gender-affirming people in his orbit. Either way, he develops gender dysphoria.

Ironically, what some activists call “gender liberation” arguably reinforces the same pressures to conform. For example, the Gender Liberation Resource Center describes liberation as “people understand[ing] themselves free of pressures to conform or limit who they can be based on their assigned sex.” “Gender liberation” in this sense may free us from the limits imposed on us by our “assigned sex,” but significantly, it imposes new limits, pressures to conform, and understandings of who we can be based on personality, preferences, and gender expression. What the activist camp fails to grasp is that in practice they encourage the same rigid adherence to social norms, and intolerance of nonconformity, that their supposedly liberatory project rejects. Where some see liberation, others see a rainbow-colored cage.

The notion that there is a “real” gender—or gender identity—behind the performance is not only false but is the very idea that queer theory aims to challenge.

In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceede; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time -an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of a constituted social temporality. Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style. -- Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory"

Why Does the Trans Debate Focus so Much on Women?

No, it's not the patriarchy.

helenpluckrose.substack.com|Helen Pluckrose

It is frequently noted that the debate about trans issues - which range from reasonable discussions about conflicts of interests to just hurling accusations of transphobia or misogyny at the opposition - is very much centred on the definition of “woman.” Many people have pointed out that the definition of the word “woman” is so much more contested and defined in so many different ways than the word “man” in visible discussions of the topic.

It is possible that this is a misconception and that perceptions are skewed by what is most visible on social media than what people are really focusing on. However, it would have to be very skewed as there seems to be ample evidence that the transgender debate really is more focused on trans women, that there are more arguments for and against their acceptance as women in every situation and more arguments about the definition of ‘woman’ than there is focus on trans men and the definition of the word ‘man.’ A look at search terms by the anthropologist, Neil Thin, adds strength to this observation.

It has been argued, by gender critical feminists, that the reason that women are the ones having to argue so much for the acceptance of ‘woman’ as a biological category is because it is only women who are expected to subordinate their own interests to those of others.

That is, it is argued that sexism and a disregard for the rights of women who are seen as secondary citizens who exist to accommodate the needs of men before their own is inherent to trans activism. Trans activism, it is argued, is all about serving the wants of biological men and the patriarchy.

Regarding trans rights as penis rights clearly does not include any trans person who does not have a penis which would cover most trans men. This is where things get very complicated because this necessarily requires feminists to, at least while making that statement, pay attention only to the trans people they regard as men while ignoring the views of those trans people they regard as women. Ignoring women is also required if one wants to blame the existence of trans activism on men.

In reality, however, trans activism and the acceptance of the gender identity of trans people does not appear to be driven by men.

The fact that gender identity is more accepted by women than by men, at least in the UK, is inconvenient for those feminists who wish to neatly slot the rise of trans activism into their worldview of a society dominated by the patriarchal oppression of women by men.

If feminists wish to argue against gender identity as an oppressive social construct or simply to argue that trans people cannot fairly and safely be accepted as the gender by which they identify in every situation, they would do best to correctly identify their opponents. They will need to stop claiming that the problem is men and accept the fact that more of the people who accept trans identity are women. This will include ceasing to start sentences arguing for the protection of women’s spaces and sports by telling people, often women, what women do and don’t want. Women clearly differ widely on this and so they would do best to argue against the set of ideas they oppose, rather than asserting that “Women don’t want men in their spaces” or that “Transactivism is entitled men refusing to accept that women have said “No.” Any gender critical feminist wishing to ensure that the definition of woman remains “adult human female” would be wise not to, in practice, redefine “women” as “gender critical feminists” by telling any woman arguing with them what women want as though, by disagreeing with them, she has ceased to be one. They would also do well not to alienate men as a whole when they are statistically more likely than women to agree with them.

Why, then, given that the rise of trans activism does not seem to be driven by men or the patriarchy, does it seem as though biological men and trans men are much less in the crosshairs of it while biological women and trans women are much more front and centre? It is not hard to see why gender critical feminists see an imbalance here when they feel themselves to be having to do all the work of protecting everything from definitions to spaces to sports while biological men, even if gender critical, appear to be relatively unbothered by any such necessity on behalf of their own sex. It is also trans women who are more often the targets of abuse on social media with ‘transwomen’ often trending on accompanied by negative messaging while trans men are largely ignored or considered tangential to the debate. The main exception to this is when it comes to surgical or hormonal treatment for biologically female adolescents identifying as transmasculine and then this is again addressed as an issue negatively affecting girls and women and sometimes blamed on the patriarchy. It is very hard to escape the conclusion that trans issues are centred very much on women and concepts of “womanhood” and much less on men and concepts of “manhood” (except when men are erroneously blamed for them).

The reasons for this should be obvious, but it seems that, to many, it isn’t, as the question arises again and again. Men are significantly bigger, stronger and faster than women. While there may be some significant overlap in body size and in personality traits associated with dominance behaviours, there is very little in physical strength.

The reason that trans men seem to largely disappear from the issue and biological men have formed no large movement to protect the definition of “man” or their spaces or their sports is because they don’t need to. While a biological man may feel uncomfortable or even violated if someone he perceives as female observes his penis as he is using a urinal, he is unlikely to feel afraid. If men do feel uncomfortable, they do not appear to feel it strongly enough to have formed any movement to keep trans men out of their spaces. Therefore, trans men activists are not fighting for access to them and they are barely visible in bathroom debates. Similarly, biological men do not feel any need to object to trans men competing against them in elite sporting events because there aren’t any due to that strength and speed difference. Therefore, trans men activists are not fighting for access to men’s sports and they are barely visible in sports debates.

Because biological men have very seldom felt any need to object to the inclusion of trans men in any place in an organised way (with the possible exception of gay men objecting to being accused of being transphobic for not being attracted to trans men), trans men activists have not felt nearly as much need to assert their manhood & pressure for changes to definitions that reflect that. While some men have objected to being referred to as “prostate-havers,” they do not appear to have felt demeaned enough by this to organise a movement to oppose it in the same way gender critical feminists and other women, who don’t consider themselves to be gender critical feminists, have objected to being referred to as “menstruators”.

This does not mean that biological men do not engage on this issue or take it seriously. It mostly means that they do not primarily engage on it on their own behalves. There are those who are trans activists and engage on behalf of those trans people who are also trans activists. They just do this in smaller numbers than biological women do. There are others who are gender critical and concerned about the impact of authoritarian trans activism, but then they are more likely to engage in defence of women’s spaces and sports than their own for the reasons given above. They also do this is smaller numbers than women do. There really are safety and fairness issues that affects biological women but not biological men when it comes to accepting trans people’s gender identity in every space and situation. Recognising this is not very patriarchal of men, at all.

Whether you are a gender critical feminist who believes the very concepts of gender and gender identity are harmful to society and the pursuit of equality for women or, like me, you are not and believe that society can and should be accepting of trans people barring a very few situations where safety and fairness require trans women to have their own spaces or sporting categories, recognising all this is key. The debates around trans issues centres on women’s rights, not because they are being neglected by men whose spaces and sports are just automatically protected, but because they are being recognised and prioritised by people of both sexes, but more women. Trans women are more visible than trans men in the debates because they are subject to greater hostility and suspicion and so are regarded as in need of more support by people of both sexes, but more women. One of the reasons that trans issues are so intertwined with women’s issues is because there are more women on both sides of it. Recognising this is vital to addressing the issue as it is and also to identifying the key actors correctly by their stance on the issue and not by their sex or their gender identity.

Women are significantly more likely than men to endorse trans women’s right to enter women’s spaces. For instance, 36 percent of women support the idea that trans women should be allowed to enter women’s refuges while 32 percent oppose this. Men oppose this 40-30.

Women are more likely than men to say a trans women should be able to enter a women’s refuge, favouring this by a 36-32 margin while men oppose it 40 to 30. In fact, across all 6 questions pertaining to the trans issue (Stock, Rowling, refuges, gender identity, pronouns, teaching biological sex), women are significantly more supportive of the trans rights position even when ideology is taken into account. Women even exceed LGBTidentifiers in their support for the pro-trans position on many questions. Why? Is this not against the female interest? The likely answer is that women are more likely to be cultural leftists than men across most of the 25 attitudinal items in the survey. The inclination to empathise and care for groups perceived as vulnerable best accounts for the pattern.

• Sex differences in adolescents’ occupational aspirations: Variations across time and place
• Personality and gender differences in global perspective
• Young female chimpanzees treat sticks as dolls: Growing evidence of biological basis for gender-specific play in humans
• Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children
• Toy story: Why do monkey and human males prefer trucks? Comment on “Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children”
• Sex differences in response to children's toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus)
• Male monkeys prefer boys' toys
• Sex differences in personality traits and gender-related occupational preferences across 53 nations: testing evolutionary and social-environmental theories
• Why can't a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures

Male Underachievement and the Gender Turf Wars

Sydney. London. Toronto.

Quillette

Enrollment declines are steeper for men than for women across all sectors (declined by 400,000 and 203,000 students, respectively). This trend is especially visible in the community college sector, with male enrollment dropping by 14.4 percent compared to a 6 percent decline in female enrollment. Also, the increase of 44,000 female students (+1 percent) is contrasted with a drop of 90,000 male students (-2.7 percent) in the public four-year institution sector.

If there is one thing I am sure of within suicide, it is that I have no idea why men do it. And neither do you.

Even those closest to those lost; parents, partners, friends and family, are left never really knowing ‘why?’

Heartbreaking and impossible questions, that may never be fully answered, by anyone.

And yet, somehow an entire army of social justice warriors, moral guardians and cereal box psychologists, seem entitled to present their own one word answer to ‘why men do it’ anyway.

That’s right.

The devastated partner has no idea, and yet some asshole on Instagram has the answer.

Not just the answer for one man, but all men, all doing it for the same reason, apparently.

So we arrive at ‘toxic’ this, and ‘patriarchy’ that; each slogan doing its best to pathologise masculinity, and provide simple and meaningless answers, without evidence, to impossibly complex, individual problems.

And it’s not good enough.

What’s more, as a man, I have learnt to sit down and listen when it comes to women talking about women’s issues.

I agree, discussion for women, must be led by women.

So the same is true for men.

Discussion on men, and particularly male suicide, must be led by men and boys, and bereaved families, and not gate kept by bogus feminist theory.

Suicidal men, and the families of those who have lost loved ones, must be our eternal point of reference for male suicide advocacy and research. It is where we must start, and continually return to, forever and always.

More than any other, #malesuicide is not the place to make bigoted blanket assertions about masculinity or men. It is a place to listen, without judgement, and with compassion.

So let’s do that now.

Let’s ask the men dealing with suicidality, how it feels, and what we can do to help.

Why I Am Not a TERF

sarahhaider.substack.com|Sarah Haider

As I’m finalizing the Unbeliever’s Manifesto, I’m feeling a bit nervous about the audience such a strong position is bound to attract.

I am fascinated by gender because I am interested in irrationalities and how social dynamics distort our thinking, and this topic is a goldmine where both are concerned. Additionally, I want to “speak out” because I believe this particular irrationality will hurt a lot of people.

However, not all who are on my side of the aisle have arrived through the same path, nor do we share the same commitments. Highly religious people, as one obvious example, undergird their anti-gender stance in their faith, which I obviously do not share. What I also don’t share, however, are some of the commitments of the feminists, who make up the other significant cohort.

To be clear, on the whole I give a lot of credit to gender-critical feminists, and find many of their most powerful voices both admirable and interesting.

But they also get on my nerves.

At least the conservatives can claim, justifiably, that they had no hand in fostering the gender movement. But feminists are not so intellectually distinct from the gender crowd, no matter how much at odds their movements might be today.

For instance, even in the radical/gender-critical camp, too many feminists are happy to deny biological sex when convenient. Yes, GC fems, we agree that men are (on average) more prone to sexual violence. Are we now willing to acknowledge that they might be more prone to other things too–even some that are valued by society? Men are (on average) the more criminal sex, sure. Can we acknowledge that they are (on average) the more courageous sex, too? (That, indeed, those are two manifestations of the same drives?)

I notice a second-order denialism, too. Feminists will blame John Money for pioneering the concept of gender, and I will agree that he shares some blame. They might also point to queer theorists like Judith Butler for laying the intellectual groundwork for gender ideology, and I will agree that they played an important role. But what about Shulamith Firestone? What about the decades of campaigns by feminists downplaying the role of biological sex differences, casting all apparent dimorphism as a result of “socialization”? Wasn’t this priming necessary to arrive where we are today? I could go on (and maybe I will eventually), but suffice to say that an honest appraisal would find that not only did the feminist movement play a part in paving the way for the gender movement, it was in many ways the most crucial stepping stone.

Beyond these ideological differences, it seems I look upon gender ideologists in a different light than do many feminists—a difference that became clear a few days ago when I made the mistake of showing some sympathy for the trans TikTok star, Dylan Mulvaney. I understand why many find Mulvaney terribly offensive–I share this feeling. I understand that Dylan is popularizing a trend that is bound to hurt many people. It is possible that this person is a cynical manipulator–many in “show business” are. Or perhaps, Mulvaney is simply a run-of-the-mill attention addict, desperate for any claim to fame.

But a more sympathetic interpretation is possible, too.

It is possible that many people who gravitate towards gender ideology are seeking a solution to some unformed distress, it is possible that they honestly believe what they say, it is possible that they are simply wrong, not “evil”.

It is not my instinct to automatically view my ideological opponents as my enemies–even if they are causing a great deal of harm. Insofar as they are honest about their convictions, I see them instead as the followers of a false god, victims as much as anyone else. Detransitioners will often characterize their transition as a form of self-harm–and indeed if the anti-gender camp is correct, then that may be true of many current transitioners, who are taking on enormous risks with their health.

It is possible that one’s opponents are doing something harmful mostly because they are bad, or that they are doing something harmful mostly because they are wrong, and don’t know that what they are doing is harmful.

I’m not naive, and don’t imagine that everyone at the table has fantastic intentions and is simply mistaken. I just think it is possible that, more often than not, the intentions of both sides run in the same direction–that most people do feel that what they are doing is good–and that the difference lies largely in how one understands what is good.  

I realize that this is easy enough to say—many people struggle with managing their feelings in this arena, especially if they have been personally harmed. Anger and even hatred are not unwarranted emotions here, and I don’t shame anyone for having them. I won’t say the same about acting on them, however—anger (even when understandable and thus, rational) can easily mutate into irrationality and, then, injustice. So it seems to me that it is good/smart to work to temper such feelings, for the good of one’s own self-interest, if nothing else.

"I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend . . . for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts."

Deconstructing Hoaxes

From Alan Sokal's nonsensical postmodern physics article to the Grievance Studies fake papers, hoaxes serve a useful purpose in science & sc

michaelshermer.substack.com

Trailer Launch - The Reformers (2023)

Watch now (1 min) | The Reformers, my documentary about the infamous Sokal squared hoax, will premiere here starting Sunday, May 7th. In the

michaelnayna.substack.com

We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity.

We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.

Inasmuch as masculinity is essentially performative, so too is the conceptual penis. The penis, in the words of Judith Butler, “can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal legibility” (Butler, 1993). The penis should not be understood as an honest expression of the performer’s intent should it be presented in a performance of masculinity or hypermasculinity. Thus, the isomorphism between the conceptual penis and what’s referred to throughout discursive feminist literature as “toxic hypermasculinity,” is one defined upon a vector of male cultural machismo braggadocio, with the conceptual penis playing the roles of subject, object, and verb of action.

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers—particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge—remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.

This statement is, of course, absurd, but it reflects several conceits of “postmodern” theoretical writing. First of all, reality (even physical reality) has become in certain circles a no-no concept, which must be placed in scare quotes. … This assertion is a commonplace (dare I say a cliché) in radical-social-constructivist writing about science. Like most clichés, it contains a grain of truth but greatly exaggerates the case. Above all, it fails to make the crucial distinction between actual knowledge (i.e. rationally justified true belief) and purported knowledge. … The theory-ladenness of observations goes back at least to physicist-philosopher Pierre Duhem in 1894; it poses problems for the most naïve falsifiability theories but by no means undercuts the epistemic claims of science. … This statement is silly, but it strikes the right emotional chords: against “privilege” (especially scientists’ privilege) and in favor of the “counter-hegemonic”, the “dissident”, and the “marginalized”. … Note, finally, that the four assertions contained in this sentence are at the very least debatable (if not downright absurd); certainly some argument in their favor ought to be required. But the editors of Social Text were happy to publish an article in which these assertions are taken for granted. Apparently in certain circles nowadays these assertions are taken for granted.

Why can't a man be more like a woman? Sex differences in Big Five personality traits across 55 cultures - PubMed

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which

PubMed

Abstract

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development--including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth--were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men's personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated.

Sex differences in personality traits and gender-related occupational preferences across 53 nations: testing evolutionary and social-environ

Using data from over 200,000 participants from 53 nations, I examined the cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: ext

PubMed

Abstract

Using data from over 200,000 participants from 53 nations, I examined the cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and male-versus-female-typical occupational preferences. Across nations, men and women differed significantly on all four traits (mean ds = -.15, -.56, -.41, and 1.40, respectively, with negative values indicating women scoring higher). The strongest evidence for sex differences in SDs was for extraversion (women more variable) and for agreeableness (men more variable). United Nations indices of gender equality and economic development were associated with larger sex differences in agreeableness, but not with sex differences in other traits. Gender equality and economic development were negatively associated with mean national levels of neuroticism, suggesting that economic stress was associated with higher neuroticism. Regression analyses explored the power of sex, gender equality, and their interaction to predict men's and women's 106 national trait means for each of the four traits. Only sex predicted means for all four traits, and sex predicted trait means much more strongly than did gender equality or the interaction between sex and gender equality. These results suggest that biological factors may contribute to sex differences in personality and that culture plays a negligible to small role in moderating sex differences in personality.

Personality and gender differences in global perspective - PubMed

Men's and women's personalities appear to differ in several respects. Social role theories of development assume gender differences result p

PubMed

Abstract

Men's and women's personalities appear to differ in several respects. Social role theories of development assume gender differences result primarily from perceived gender roles, gender socialization and sociostructural power differentials. As a consequence, social role theorists expect gender differences in personality to be smaller in cultures with more gender egalitarianism. Several large cross-cultural studies have generated sufficient data for evaluating these global personality predictions. Empirically, evidence suggests gender differences in most aspects of personality-Big Five traits, Dark Triad traits, self esteem, subjective well-being, depression and values-are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity. Similar patterns are evident when examining objectively measured attributes such as tested cognitive abilities and physical traits such as height and blood pressure. Social role theory appears inadequate for explaining some of the observed cultural variations in men's and women's personalities. Evolutionary theories regarding ecologically-evoked gender differences are described that may prove more useful in explaining global variation in human personality.

Note from the editor: Every once in awhile it is necessary and desirable to expose extreme ideologies for what they are by carrying out their arguments and rhetoric to their logical and absurd conclusion, which is why we are proud to publish this expose of a hoaxed article published in a peer-reviewed journal today. Its ramifications are unknown but one hopes it will help rein in extremism in this and related areas. —Michael Shermer

“The conceptual penis as a social construct” is a Sokal-style hoax on gender studies. Follow the authors @peterboghossian and @GodDoesnt.

“The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.”

Manspreading — a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide — is akin to raping the empty space around him.

We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.

Destructive, unsustainable hegemonically male approaches to pressing environmental policy and action are the predictable results of a raping of nature by a male-dominated mindset. This mindset is best captured by recognizing the role of [sic] the conceptual penis holds over masculine psychology. When it is applied to our natural environment, especially virgin environments that can be cheaply despoiled for their material resources and left dilapidated and diminished when our patriarchal approaches to economic gain have stolen their inherent worth, the extrapolation of the rape culture inherent in the conceptual penis becomes clear.

Toxic hypermasculinity derives its significance directly from the conceptual penis and applies itself to supporting neocapitalist materialism, which is a fundamental driver of climate change, especially in the rampant use of carbon-emitting fossil fuel technologies and careless domination of virgin natural environments. We need not delve deeply into criticisms of dialectic objectivism, or their relationships with masculine tropes like the conceptual penis to make effective criticism of (exclusionary) dialectic objectivism. All perspectives matter.

Inasmuch as masculinity is essentially performative, so too is the conceptual penis. The penis, in the words of Judith Butler, “can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal legibility” (Butler, 1993). The penis should not be understood as an honest expression of the performer’s intent should it be presented in a performance of masculinity or hypermasculinity. Thus, the isomorphism between the conceptual penis and what’s referred to throughout discursive feminist literature as “toxic hypermasculinity,” is one defined upon a vector of male cultural machismo braggadocio, with the conceptual penis playing the roles of subject, object, and verb of action. The result of this trichotomy of roles is to place hypermasculine men both within and outside of competing discourses whose dynamics, as seen via post-structuralist discourse analysis, enact a systematic interplay of power in which hypermasculine men use the conceptual penis to move themselves from powerless subject positions to powerful ones (confer: Foucault, 1972).

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The publication of our hoax reveals two problems. One relates to the business model of pay-to-publish, open-access journals. The other lies at the heart of academic fields like gender studies.

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1. the echo-chamber of morally driven fashionable nonsense coming out of the postmodernist social “sciences” in general, and gender studies departments in particular and
2. the complex problem of pay-to-publish journals with lax standards that cash in on the ultra-competitive publish-or-perish academic environment. At least one of these sicknesses led to “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” being published as a legitimate piece of academic scholarship, and we can expect proponents of each to lay primary blame upon the other.

Soul Dysphoria

Understanding the “trans” phenomenon means recognizing it’s about more than gender.

The American Mind

I am convinced that laws classifying people as either male or female, and laws prohibiting people’s freedom based on their genitals, will become as obsolete in the twenty-first century as the religious edicts of the Middle Ages seem absurd in America today…. Over the next few decades we will witness the uploading of human minds into software and computer systems, and the birth of brand new human minds as information technology. As we see our selves and our loved ones in these transhuman beings, and they make us laugh and cry, we will not hesitate long to recognize their humanity with citizenship and their common cause with us in a new common species, Persona creatus (the “created person”).

My brother was with a girl who threw things at him and constantly hit him. And he would just stand there and take it because he didn't want to hit her back knowing what the result would be. My sisters didn't like that so they went after her. Huge fight among them, but my brother still didn't break up with her. She finally chose drugs over him and left. At least for my brother we all believed him. But I doubt other people would.

His current GF (might be an ex now, waiting to hear back), hit him and then threatened to tell the cops he hit her. She's an alcoholic and would fight everyone. She went after my niece and they called the cops, and the first thing the cops did when they got there was arrest my brother, who had just gotten home from work. My mom came out screaming at them that he didn't do anything. But that's how bad it is, they go after the first male they see for a domestic violence case when it was between two women,!

I was 15, sexually abused by my manager at my first job, one of the biggest fast food joints, Not once, but four times. Someone spotted the abuse and reported it to corporate and she got a promotion. I quit and my father ignored it. Police said the company handled it. Men who are abused are ignored... because it’s not “supposed to be possible”

I once had to do a presentation for a gender studies sort of course, and so having a friend who was abused by his girlfriend I chose to discuss the double standard in physical abuse. You'd think I was the devil incarnate - the women in the class glared and glared and glared for me raising the possibility that a woman hitting a man should be taken seriously.

My dad went through something like this. She threw plates and a bunch of other random objects at him, he was bleeding in several places and she called the police.

Despite that me and all of her kids told police that she was the aggressor they didn't care. He was arrested and a restraining order was on him before he even got out a few days later. We ended up homeless and lived in an old boxing ring for about 2 weeks before our local church helped out.

It was also his 3rd time dealing with police completely ignoring him when a woman was aggressive. It made me feel like women could just do anything they want as I grew up and I completely avoided them and relationships in general for a long time.

I'm 38 now and it still makes me uneasy

I lost my virginity bc a girl (who I had said NO to) mounted up and rode me while I was passed out drunk. I woke up from what I thought was a wet dream finishing inside her with no protection. It messed with me pretty hard because I'd been trying to save my virginity for a serious girlfriend or someone other than just some girl I barely knew. Not to mention the fact that I had no idea if I was about to be an unwilling father (thankfully that was not the case).

My friends just kind of said "well...at least you got laid, right?". I can't really blame them because it took a while (like, years) for me to even realize that what happened was clearly rape. Wrapping our college-age heads around the fact a guy could get raped was tough, I guess.

I also got sexually harassed by a pair of women at a job in college and telling people about it was met with attempts to high-five me.

Laughed at, mocked, put down. Even had video of her hitting/kicking/ abusing me and people just made fun of me and the situation even worse. It was not real to them.

The sexual abuse hotline counselor asked me if I was even into women when I told her what happened and then made excuses for her bc “she was drunk and acting on instinct”.

Tried to tell a few people. No one really believed me in my circle of friends. They were able to convince their friends that I was the abuser. The last straw was when they used a taser. That shit hurts and left burns. That truly was the last straw because it left enough evidence that I could use to document the abuse and get out. Without physical evidence it was word against word and as the male, no one believed me.

They didn’t believe me at first. And then they saw her do it to me. Her friends believed me before my own friends did. They said that they knew she was like that and that she was aggressive and physically abusive to them sometimes and her own mother.

I was with her for 18 months of hell. At first it was normal and cute and fun and then she started being really strange. First it was telling me I couldn’t have friends who are girls. Then it was I couldn’t have friends. Then it was the hitting and punching and kicking me. She said she was pregnant before she was pregnant and didn’t let me use protection with her and if I wasn’t into fucking her then she’d just fuck me anyways.

The kicker that really stuck with me all these years is when she was beating the fuck out of me and accidentally called her mom and she heard her yelling and screaming and thought I was hurting her so she called the police and her parents and police both showed up at my house asking if everything was okay and if I was hurting her. She said confidently “He didn’t hurt me I was hitting him” and the police and her parents both just kinda accepted that and told her to leave my house and go back to her parents for the night. No arrests. No talking to her about how wrong it was. Just a slap on the wrist after flat out telling police she was hitting me. Didn’t ask if I wanted to press charges. Didn’t ask if I was okay. Just were relieved it wasn’t me hitting her.

I had been attacked by now ex wife. I said something that made her mad and it wasn't the first time. She hit me in the back of the head with a rolling pin. I yelled and the neighbors called the cops. When they arrived I was still beading. I was then handcuffed and sat on the curb while they investigated the issue. My ex eventually confessed she hit me because she was mad at me. I never raised a hand at her during the incident but I was then taken to the police station and I was booked. I was released the next day after they determined i wasn't the aggressor. I was told on my release that if I antagonize her again its my fault and I deserve what I get.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/jidoph/men_who_are_abused_by_woman_and_tried_to_tell/

The feminist theory underlying the Duluth Model is that men use violence within relationships to exercise power and control.

According to the Duluth Model, "women and children are vulnerable to violence because of their unequal social, economic, and political status in society."

Criticism of the Duluth Model has centered on the program's sexist insistence that men are perpetrators who are violent because they have been socialized in a patriarchy that condones male violence, and that women are victims who are violent only in self-defense.

Abstract: This bibliography examines 343 scholarly investigations; 270 empirical studies and 73 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners.  The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 440,850.

Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.

-- Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”

This doing of gender is not merely a way in which embodied agents are exterior, surfaced, open to the perception of others. Embodiment clearly manifests a set of strategies or what Sartre would perhaps have called a style of being or Foucault, "a stylistics of existence." This style is never fully self-styled, for living styles have a history, and that history conditions and limits possibilities. Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an 'act,' as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where 'performative' itself carries the double-meaning of 'dramatic' and 'non-referential.' When Beauvoir claims that 'woman' is a historical idea and not a natural fact, she clearly underscores the distinction between sex, as biological facticity, and gender, as the cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity. To be female is, according to that distinction, a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of 'woman,' to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project. -- Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”

Queer theory functions to complicate existing academic frameworks, and conceptions of social relations, by deconstructing the dominant, heteronormative structures undergirding extant scholarship (Marinucci, 2010). One theoretical strategy relies on an insistence on the social construction of gender and sexuality (see Butler, 1990). Theories of social construction claim that human identities are not inherent or essential (that is, having an essence), but rather emerge out of social relations and discourse. In Butler’s (1990) work, she understands gender as produced through repetitive practices of personal and social practices. In other words, one’s gender does not exist a priori discourse, but instead is constructed by characteristics and experiences. At the base of social constructionist theories is the assumption that, since identities are constructed, they can always be constructed otherwise.

Queer theory also offers the opportunity to rethink or reimagine normative or dominant discourse “queerly.” Intellectual labor of this sort requires scholars to transpose queer ideas of identity formation and social relations to texts that might otherwise be taken for granted as part of the dominant sex-gender-sexuality matrix. For instance, one might imagine that two women in a mainstream magazine advertisement are lovers and then consider the social and political import of such a reading. Or one might “read” texts through a queer lens, as illustrated by Alexander Doty in Making Things Perfectly Queer (1993), which allows scholars to offer a queer “corrective” to mainstream interpretations of media culture. One could also read historical discourse queerly, as Chuck Morris (2007) and others do in Queering Public Address, an intellectual strategy that allows us to imagine a queer past.

One of queer theory’s strengths is its explicitly political character. Drawing on its roots in feminist intellectual projects, queer theory attempts to bridge the gap between the academy and the populations being theorized (Beemyn & Eliason, 1996). Because queer theory functions to complicate and challenge heteronormativity, it is situated in opposition to many oppressive practices (sexism, homophobia, etc.). Queer theory thus has the potential to undermine systematic domination by deconstructing the practices that lead to oppression. Scholars and activists (these identities frequently overlap within the realm of queer studies) often find that queer theory and the process of deconstruction is a productive way to rethink identity and to rework social relations. In its ideal manifestation, queer theory is also a form of queer practice.

-- Sherwood Thompson, "Encyclopedia of Diversity and Social Justice" (TOR)

Transgender | An umbrella term for people whose gender identity and/or expression is different from cultural expectations based on the sex they were assigned at birth.

Question: Do you need to have gender dysphoria to be trans?

Kyle responds, “Absolutely not, no. Not every person is going to experience dysphoria, or sometimes it might develop, or it might come and go like a little annoying house guest.” Kyle then says “You don’t need to have anything to be trans besides the knowledge or the feeling that you’re trans.”

Transitioning | A series of processes that some transgender people may undergo in order to live more fully as their true gender. [..] Transgender people may choose to undergo some, all or none of these processes.

“Concurrent with Queer Nation’s creation, feminist scholars began developing the foundations for queer theory, an academic framework for unhinging heteronormative notions of sexual and gender identities from within, and beyond, the academy (Butler, 1990; de Lauretis, 1991). Efforts on both activist and scholarly fronts have similarly imagined queer as another way to think of, through, and against identity. A queer subjectivity might constitute a “blurring” of identities (Goldman, 1996), or, as Michael Warner put it, being queer is being “at odds with straight culture” (2000, p. 38).

-- ”Encyclopedia of Diversity and Social Justice”

Michel Foucault: “Firstly, in general terms, to say: yes, of course, children do have a sexuality, we can't go back to those old notions about children being pure and not knowing what sexuality is.

But we psychologists or psychoanalysts or psychiatrists, or teachers, we know perfectly well that children's sexuality is a specific sexuality, with its own forms, its own periods of maturation, its own highpoints, its specific drives, and its own latency periods, too. This sexuality of the child is a territory with its own geography that the adult must not enter. It is virgin territory, sexual territory, of course, but territory that must preserve its virginity.

The adult will therefore intervene as guarantor of that specificity of child sexuality in order to protect it. And, on the other hand, in each particular case, he will say: this is an instance of an adult bringing his own sexuality into the child's sexuality.

It could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even have made the first moves. We may even agree that it was he who seduced the adult; but we specialists with our psychological knowledge know perfectly well that even the seducing child runs a risk, in every case, of being damaged and traumatized by the fact that he or she has had sexual dealings with an adult.

Consequently, the child must be 'protected from his own desires', even when his desires turn him towards an adult. The psychiatrist is the one who will be able to say: I can predict that a trauma of this importance will occur as a result of this or that type of sexual relation.

It is therefore within the new legislative framework - basically intended to protect certain vulnerable sections of the population with the establishment of a new medical power - that a conception of sexuality and above all of the relations between child and adult sexuality will be based; and it is one that is extremely questionable.”

Guy Hocquenghem: “There is a whole mixture of notions that makes it possible to fabricate this notion of crime or offence against decency, a highly com­plex mixture, which we do not have time here to discuss at length, but which comprises both the religious prohibitions concerning sodomy and the completely new notions, to which Michel Foucault has just referred, about what people think they know of the total difference between the world of the child and the world of the adult.

But today’s overall tendency is indisputably not only to fabri­cate a type of crime that is quite simply the erotic or sensual relationship between a child and an adult, but also, since this may be isolated in the form of a crime, to create a certain category of the population defined by the fact that it tends to indulge in those pleasures. There exists then a particular category of the pervert, in the strict sense, of monsters whose aim in life is to practice sex with children.

Indeed they become perverts and intolerable monsters since the crime as such is recognized and constituted, and now strengthened by the whole psy­choanalytical and sociological arsenal.

What we are doing is constructing an entirely new type of criminal, a criminal so inconceivably horrible that his crime goes beyond any explanation, any victim. It is rather like that kind of legal mon­ster, the term attentat sans violence: an attack without violence that is unprovable in any case and leaves no trace, since even the anuscope is unable to find the slightest lesion that might legitimate in some way or other the notion of vio­lence. Thus, in a way, public outrage to decency also realizes this, insofar as the offense in question does not require a public in order to be committed. In the case of attentat sans violence, the offense in which the police have been unable to find anything, nothing at all, in that case, the criminal is simply a criminal because he is a criminal, because he has those tastes. It is what used to be called a crime of opinion.”

-- “Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961-1984″

In 1979, Liberation published another petition, this time in support of Gérard R., a man on trial for having sex with girls between the ages of six and 12. It was signed by 63 people, many of them well-known intellectuals like Christiane Rochefort and Pascal Bruckner. It argued that the girls in question were “happy” with the situation. “The love of children is also the love of their bodies,” they wrote. “Desire and sexual games have their place in the relationship between children and adults. This is what Gérard R. thought and experienced with [the] girls … whose fulfillment proved to everyone, including their parents, the happiness they found with him.”

What the endorsements from prominent French intellectuals suggested was that young children possessed a right to govern their own sexuality. Under this interpretation of liberté, young children were empowered to find happiness in sexual relationships; their ability to consent was a foregone conclusion. Any effort to suggest otherwise would be a condescension, a disrespect to them as fully realized human beings. In a radio interview in 1978, Michel Foucault said of sex with minors that assuming “that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.”

Q: If you were a legislator, you would fix no limit and you would leave it to the judges to decide wether or not an indecent act was committed with or without consent? Is that your position?

MICHEL FOUCAULT: In any case, an age barrier laid down by law does not have much sense. Again, the child may be trusted to say wether or not he was subjected to violence. An examining magistrate, a liberal, told me once when we were discussing this question: after all, there are eighteen-year-old girls who are practically forced to make love with their fathers or their stepfathers; they may be eighteen, but it's an intolerable system of constraint. And one, moreover, that they feel is intolerable, if only people are willing to listen to them and put them in conditions which they can say what they feel. 

-- Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet, “The Danger of Child Sexuality”

“Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt. A lot of people will be embarrassed by their collaboration with this persecution, but it will be too late to do much good for those men who have spent their lives in prison.”

-- Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex”

“Within weeks, the federal government had enacted a sweeping bill against ‘child pornography’ and many of the states followed with bills of their own. These laws have reestablished restrictions on sexual materials that had been relaxed by some of the important Supreme Court decisions. For instance, the Court ruled that neither nudity nor sexual activity per se were obscene. But the child pornography laws define as obscene any depiction of minors who are nude or engaged in sexual activity. This means that photographs of naked children in anthropology textbooks and many of the ethnographic movies shown in college classes are technically illegal in several states. In fact, the instructors are liable to an additional felony charge for showing such images to each student under the age of 18. Although the Supreme Court has also ruled that it is a constitutional right to possess obscene material for private use, some child pornography laws prohibit even the private possession of any sexual material involving minors.

The laws produced by the child porn panic are ill-conceived and misdirected. They represent far-reaching alterations in the regulation of sexual behaviour and abrogate important sexual civil liberties.

But hardly anyone noticed as they swept through Congress and state legislatures. With the exception of the North American Man/Boy Love Association and American Civil Liberties Union, no one raised a peep of protest.”

-- Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex”

“In Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously. A person is not considered immoral, is not sent to prison, and is not expelled from her or his family, for enjoying spicy cuisine. But an individual may go through all this and more for enjoying shoe leather. Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a shoe? It may even be non-consensual, but since we do not ask permission of our shoes to wear them, it hardly seems necessary to obtain dispensation to come on them.

If sex is taken too seriously, sexual persecution is not taken seriously enough. There is systematic mistreatment of individuals and communities on the basis of erotic taste or behaviour. There are serious penalties for belonging to the various sexual occupational castes. The sexuality of the young is denied, adult sexuality is often treated like a variety of nuclear waste, and the graphic representation of sex takes place in a mire of legal and social circumlocution. Specific populations bear the brunt of the current system of erotic power, but their persecution upholds a system that affects everyone.”

-- Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex”

The takeaway from both the Sweetie project and The Child seems to be a reiteration of a point that Gayle Rubin made decades earlier: “In Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously. A person is not considered immoral, is not sent to prison, and is not expelled from her or his family, for enjoying spicy cuisine. But an individual may go through all this and more for enjoying shoe leather. Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a shoe.” Critics will no doubt insist that there is a distinction between masturbating over a shoe and masturbating over images of a virtual child. I am unconvinced. At their core, both are attempts to police the boundaries of appropriate sexual feeling, to delimit the range of possible options.”

-- James K. Harris, “Unbecoming Adults: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference in Post-1960s US Ethnic Literature and Culture”

“... any child old enough to decide whether or not he or she wants to eat spinach, play with trucks, or wear shoes is old enough to decide whether or not he or she wants to run around naked in the sun, masturbate, sit in someone’s lap, or engage in sexuality activity.”

-- Pat Califia, third-wave feminist author and trans-identified female, who later stated that pedophiles should be more - not less - invested in children's lives.

“In the late ’70s, child porn and statutory rape laws were disproportionately enforced against gay men who had sex with adolescent males. Many of these “boys” were gay-identified. I knew several gay men who proudly called themselves boy-lovers. They were politically conscious, kind and ethical people. I wished that I had been able to rely on adults like them for guidance and erotic initiation when I was a teenager trying to come out. What the cops called “protecting children” looked like repression of queer youth to me.”

-- Pat Califia, “Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex”

“So I keep adding this qualification: “when incest is a violation,” suggesting that I think that there may be occasions in which it is not. Why would I talk that way? Well, I do think that there are probably forms of incest that are not necessarily traumatic or which gain their traumatic character by virtue of the consciousness of social shame that they produce.”

-- Judith Butler, “Undoing Gender”

“Better data on pre-adolescent climax come from the histories of adult males who have had sexual contacts with younger boys and who, with their adult backgrounds, are able to recognize and interpret the boys’ experiences. Unfortunately, not all of the subjects with such contacts in their histories were questioned on this point of pre-adolescent reactions; but 9 of our adult male subjects have observed such orgasm. Some of these adults are technically trained persons who have kept diaries or other records which have been put at our disposal; and from them we have secured information on 317 pre-adolescents who were either observed in self masturbation, or who were observed in contacts with other boys or older adults. The record so obtained shows a considerable sexual capacity among these boys. Before presenting the data, however, it should be emphasized that this is a record of a somewhat select group of younger males and not a statistical representation for any larger group. These records are based on more or less uninhibited boys, most of whom had heard about sex and seen sexual activities among their companions, and many of whom had had sexual contacts with one or more adults.”

-- Alfred C. Kinsey, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”

“Orgasm has been observed in boys of every age from 5 months to adolescence (Table 31). Orgasm is in our records for a female babe of 4 months. The orgasm in an infant or other young male is, except for the lack of an ejaculation, a striking duplicate of orgasm in an older adult. As described earlier in this chapter, the behavior involves a series of gradual physiologic changes, the development of rhythmic body movements with distinct penis throbs and pelvic thrusts, an obvious change in sensory capacities, a final tension of muscles, especially of the abdomen, hips, and back, a sudden release with convulsions, including rhythmic anal contractions—followed by the disappearance of all symptoms. A fretful babe quiets down under the initial sexual stimulation, is distracted from other activities, begins rhythmic pelvic thrusts, becomes tense as climax approaches, is thrown into convulsive action, often with violent arm and leg movements, sometimes with weeping at the moment of climax. After climax the child loses erection quickly and subsides into the calm and peace that typically follows adult orgasm. It may be some time before erection can be induced again after such an experience. There are observations of 16 males up to 11 months of age, with such typical orgasm reached in 7 cases.”

-- Alfred C. Kinsey, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”

“The most remarkable aspect of the pre-adolescent population is its capacity to achieve repeated orgasm in limited periods of time. This capacity definitely exceeds the ability of teen-age boys who, in turn, are much more capable than any older males (Tables 33, 34, 48, Figure 36). Among 182 pre-adolescent boys on whom sufficient data are available, more than half (55.5%, 138 cases) readily reached a second climax within a short period of time, and nearly a third (30.8%) of all these 182 boys were able to achieve 5 or more climaces in quite rapid succession (Tables 32–34). It is certain that a higher proportion of the boys could have had multiple orgasm if the situation had offered. Among 64 cases on which there are detailed reports, the average interval between the first and second climaces ranged from less than 10 seconds to 30 minutes or more, but the mean interval was only 6.28 minutes (median 2.25 minutes) (Table 33). There are older males, even in their thirties and older, who are able to equal this performance, but a much higher proportion of these pre-adolescent males are so capable. Even the youngest males, as young as 5 months in age, are capable of such repeated reactions. Typical cases are shown in Table 34. The maximum observed was 26 climaces in 24 hours, and the report indicates that still more might have been possible in the same period of time.

About a third of these boys remain in erection after the first orgasm and proceed directly to a second contact. There is another third that stays in erection but experiences some physical and erotic let-down before trying to achieve a second orgasm. In another third, the erection quickly subsides and there is a complete disappearance of arousal as soon as orgasm is reached. Any repetition depends upon new arousal, and that may not be possible for some minutes or hours after the original experience. Among adult males, more individuals belong to this last class, and a much smaller number remains in erection until there is a repetition of the sexual contact.

Table 34. Examples of multiple orgasm in pre-adolescent males Some instances of higher frequencies.

These data on the sexual activities of younger males provide an important substantiation of the Freudian view of sexuality as a component that is present in the human animal from earliest infancy, although it gives no support to the Freudian concept of a pre-genital stage of generalized erotic response that precedes more specific genital activity; nor does it show any necessity for a sexually latent or dormant period in the later pre-adolescent years, except as such inactivity results from parental and social repressions of the growing child.”

-- Alfred C. Kinsey, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”

“In an April 14, 1980, article in Time, Money was sharply criticized for what looked dangerously like an endorsement of incest and pedophilia. “A childhood sexual experience, such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely,” Money told Time. And according to a right-wing group critical of his teachings, Money reportedly told Paidika, a Dutch journal of pedophilia, “If I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 12 who’s intensely attracted toward a man in his 20s or 30s, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way.” Money’s response to criticism has been to launch counterattacks of his own, lambasting his adoptive country for a puritanical adherence to sexual taboos.”

-- John Colapinto, “The Case of John/Joan”

“As the twins got older, Money’s questioning grew more explicit. “Dr. Money would ask, ‘Do you ever dream of having sex with women?’ ” Brian says. “ ‘Do you ever get an erection?’ And the same with Brenda. ‘Do you think about this? About that?’ ”While attempting to probe the twins’ sexual psyches, Money also tried his hand at programming Brenda’s and Brian’s respective sense of themselves as girl and boy. One of his theories of how children form their different gender schemas—Money’s term—was that they must understand at a very early age the differences between male and female sex organs. Pornography, he believed, was ideal for this purpose. “[E]xplicit sexual pictures,” he wrote in his book Sexual Signatures, “can and should be used as part of a child’s sex education.” Such pictures, he said, “reinforce his or her own gender identity/role.”

“He would show us pictures of kids—boys and girls—with no clothes on,” Brian says. David recalls that Dr. Money also showed them pictures of adults engaged in sexual intercourse. “He’d say to us, ‘I want to show you pictures of things that moms and dads do.’

Money had two sides to his personality, according to the twins: “One when Mom and Dad weren’t around,” Brian says, “and another when they were.” When their parents were present, Money was avuncular, mild-mannered. Alone with the children he could be irritable or worse, especially when they defied him. They were particularly resistant, the twins say, to Money’s requests that they remove their clothes and inspect each other’s genitals. David recalls an occasion when he attempted to defy the psychologist. “He told me to take my clothes off,” David says, “and I just did not do it. I just stood there. And he screamed, ‘Now!’ Louder than that. I thought he was going to give me a whupping. So I took my clothes off and stood there, shaking.” In a separate conversation with me, Brian recalls that same incident. “ ‘Take your clothes off—now!’ ” Brian shouts.

Though the children could not know this, the genital inspections that Dr. Money demanded they perform were central to his theory of how children develop a sense of themselves as boy or girl—and thus, in Money’s mind, crucial to the successful outcome of Brenda’s sex reassignment. For as Money stressed in his writings of the period, “The firmest possible foundations for gender schemas are the differences between male and female genitals and reproductive behavior, a foundation our culture strives mightily to withhold from children. All young primates explore their own and each others’ genitals, masturbate, and play at thrusting movements and copulation—and that includes human children everywhere, as well as subhuman primates. The only thing wrong about these activities is not to enjoy them.”

But the children did not enjoy these enforced activities—particularly those involving “play at thrusting movements and copulation,” which Brian recalls that Dr. Money first introduced when the twins were six years old. Money, he says, would make Brenda assume a position on all fours on his office sofa and make Brian come up behind her on his knees and place his crotch against her buttocks. Variations on the therapy included Brenda lying on her back with her legs spread and Brian lying on top of her. On at least one occasion, Brian says, Dr. Money took a Polaroid photograph of them while they were engaged in this part of the therapy.

Of all the therapy the children received, this particular form of counseling left the deepest impression on both twins. Today David is still unwilling to speak about it. “There are some things I don’t want to remember,” he says. In 1989 he did describe the sessions to Jane Fontane, the woman who would become his wife. The two had just watched a TV documentary on CIA torture involving electroshock to people’s genitals. “He cried hysterically,” Jane told me. “He was crying about John Money. I’d never seen him like that. I tried to comfort him. David said Dr. Money made him go on all fours and made Brian go up behind his butt. They were being photographed. He mentioned that very act.”Brian speaks of the coital mimicry only with the greatest emotional turmoil. “It’s very hard to— I don’t understand why to this day we were forced to do that,” Brian says.”

-- John Colapinto, “As Nature Made Him”