The Witherspoon Institute has once again decided to dictate to us all about the proper, conservative approach to everything. This time, they take aim at National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution”: Bad Argument and Biased Ideology. Of course they’re agin’ them transgenders.

The January 2017 issue of National Geographic is dedicated to exploring what it calls the “Gender Revolution”—a post-Sexual Revolution movement that seeks to deconstruct traditional understandings about human embodiment, male-female sexual dimorphism, and gender. In an article titled “Rethinking Gender,” Robin Marantz Henig cites evolving gender norms as a justification for the Gender Revolution. But Henig’s argument is not only unpersuasive, it’s also based on a radical proposal about human nature that is at odds with both natural law and biblical anthropology.

I started reading this essay enthused about seeing their “natural law” and “biblical anthropology” arguments, both subjects I find to be nonsensical trash, and therefore ripe for mocking. To my disappointment, there is no biblical anthropology anywhere in it, and what ‘natural law’ arguments there are are sadly implicit, and just assumed. It reduces the whole essay to weak whining.

They have only one point to make, and it’s laid out in this one paragraph.

Indeed, this is the crux of the matter that plagues the transgender movement. It is based not on evidence, but on the ideology of expressive individualism—the idea that one’s identity is self-determined, that one should live out that identity, and that everyone else must respect and affirm that identity, no matter what it is. Expressive individualism requires no moral argument or empirical justification for its claims, no matter how absurd or controverted they may be. Transgenderism is not a scientific discovery but a prior ideological commitment about the pliability of gender.

The Witherspoon Institute, that deeply ideological organization, wants to argue that transgender people are wrong because they are ideological. But of course they are! So am I! So are they! If they want to claim that an “absence of scientific discovery” invalidates a whole personal and cultural phenomenon, they’re going to have to burn down the entirety of their archives, because nowhere, including in this essay, do they build a case for their ideology with science. In fact, this is the whole of their defense.

Accepting the claims of transgender ideology requires papering over one’s conscience and making a mockery of the “law written on the heart” that our bodies bear witness to in our complementary design.

They want to claim that there is a “law written on the heart” that makes the gender binary natural and proper and righteous — but they make no scientific (or biblical anthropological, which is fine, because I’d dismiss it) argument for that claim.

Here’s my proudly ideological argument against the Witherspoon’s biases.

The gender binary is a social construct: it is a set of behaviors and expectations for how people should conform within a society. It is built around biological predispositions which are real but not absolute; all we have to do is look at different cultures around the world and see that there different expectations in different societies. Real men don’t cry? Not always. Women are the sheltered, weaker sex? Not always. Men should always “pay” at the “restaurant” when they take a woman out on a “date”? I can’t even begin to unpack all the artificial cultural constructs built into that sentence. They are really trying to impose the standards of Victorian England on all of humanity, which is the kind of thing Victorians did all the time, but isn’t it about time we kicked that bullshit to the curb?

They want to argue that humans aren’t plastic, but are fixed by their biological natures. But we know that isn’t true, because we can see that human beings have thrived in a variety of different cultures without a necessary genetic difference in their makeup. Look at the United States — we have people living here who within the last few generations have come from Vietnam, Ireland, Laos, Nigeria, Peru, Sweden, Somalia, Iran, etc., etc., etc., and they have adapted, and in fact, the conservative American ideology requires that they must conform.

This is what people do. They adapt, they conform, they absorb the expectations of their surrounding culture, especially as children, and they also bring their past experiences into communities and shape their environments. The Witherspoon wants to reify masculinity and femininity to fit their ideological preconceptions, deny the reality of people’s identity, and they reject arguments against that kind of cultural imperialism because, they say, you can’t fit a person’s perception of their identity under a microscope. Well, you can’t fit Christian conservativism under a microscope either, yet you’re sinking a lot of money, time, and effort into propping it up.

Not everyone will be accommodating of your particular views. I am not comfortable, to put it mildly, with Christian conservativism — you don’t get to tell me that I am wrong in my identity, and that I must learn to love faith and oppressive authoritarianism. However, I am personally comfortable with my expected gender role — I have never questioned my conformity to maleness — but I am also capable of recognizing that not everyone else is, and that they would be as unhappy with a world that dictates that they must be a straight heterosexual man’s man as I would with a world that told me I had to participate in gay sex, and like it (although if I’d been brought up through childhood in that world where gender fluidity was more common, maybe I would…which I suspect is one of the ideas that horrifies the Witherspoon).

That the majority of people fall into one of the two broad, culturally accepted definitions of gender is not scientific evidence that these divisions are natural and necessary because, as I said, people are plastic and tend to conform to cultural norms. There have always been individuals who refuse or are unable to meet social expectations, even in Victorian England. The question is whether we punish people by demanding that their identity meet a narrow set of criteria, or whether we accept people for who they are and who they want to be. The former is a formula for widespread misery. The latter leads to greater happiness, although it does tend to piss off the authoritarian prigs who enjoy crushing the joys of others.

I have to confess to sharing a little bit of that latter attitude, because I would greatly enjoy crushing the totalitarian hopes and dreams of the Witherspoon Institute members.

Oh jebus. Lucas Werner is gloating about winning millions of dollars in a lawsuit against Starbucks, because they wrongfully banned him when all he’d done is pass a “nice note” to a young barista he found attractive.

Unfortunately for him, a “nice note” of the kind he passes to people has been revealed.

“Nice” is not the adjective I’d apply to that: “creepy” is more accurate. As a biologist, I’d say “WRONG” would also be good, although I think the barista is more reasonably going to feel that the former is the right word to use.

It’s been a remarkable day for email from idiots.

Prof. Myers, I have 3 questions about the evolution of humans that I have not been able to find the answers to. Could you offer your opinions?

1. If men prefer women who are less intelligent than they are does this mean there could have selection for lower intelligence in women?

2. Why haven’t women evolved to spontaneously shit themselves to deter rapists?

3. Why are women so annoying? Could they have actually evolved to provoke men into giving them a slapping?

Thanks,
Gary.

Happy to help, Gary!

1. Go fuck yourself. You’re an idiot.

   In case you hadn’t noticed, women are members of the same species as men. You had a mother (she’s probably embarrased by you), and you inherited rougly half your chromosomes from her. It would require a remarkable degree of dimorphism to configure genes responsible for intelligence to be differentially expressed.

   Also, speak for yourself. Men don’t necessarily prefer less intelligent women. I happen to prefer a partner who is my equal. I don’t think it would have been advantageous in our evolutionary history to have half the population deficient in a trait that is responsible for our evolutionary success.

2. Go fuck yourself. You’re an idiot.

   Why haven’t men evolved to find violent abuse of their partners repugnant? I suspect it’s more of a matter of random variation within the population producing some proportion of individuals who are more stupid and more violent than the mean. That’s you, Gary. You are noise. You are the unpleasant nasty detritus of chance variation.

3. Go fuck yourself. You’re an idiot.

   As you so well demonstrate, some men are even more annoying.

Sadly, I cannot continue this enlightening conversation with Gary — I’ve blocked his email. If any of you would like to explain things more gently to Gary, you can write him at gary99@rocketship.com. I’m sure he’d appreciate it.

Spokane’s most single man is getting a heck of a lot of press. Inquisitr covers him, he made it to Seattle television news…I almost feel sorry for him.

But then I discovered his Tumblr page.

Sympathy…evaporated. Although with this kind of heavy criticism, it might be a good idea for law enforcement to be aware of him in order to protect him. Another side of this kind of toxic masculinity is that some people will feel justified in doing violence to him. Nothing he has done warrants violent action or even legal sanctions — his creepiness is self-defeating.

I do appreciate the fact, though, that he has taken a fairly common ugly sort of behavior and taken it to such an extreme that the media finally noticed.

Watch this video. @LaurenDuca goes up against Tucker Carlson and you get to learn.

It’s amazing. She’s confident. She calls him out on his bullshit. She points out when he’s being patronizing. She clearly explains her points. She dumbfounds him because he can’t understand how she can admire many of Ivanka Trump’s accomplishments while also deploring her actions in “supporting the most aggressively anti-woman candidate of our time” — which seems like a fairly obvious and reasonable concern to me, but Carlson doesn’t get it.

Ivanka HAS IT ALL, & by that I mean, "a job, family, & sinister complicity in aiding the most aggressively anti-woman candidate of our time"

— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) December 19, 2016

Or, at least, he pretends he doesn’t get it. Most of his rebuttal seems to involve adopting a dull, stupid expression, repeating her words, and acting as if there is some kind of contradiction there, when there isn’t.

And then at the end he tries to fight back by mocking her writing for Teen Vogue — she has an article on thigh-high boots which apparently, to the one-dimensional mind of Tucker Carlson, means she can’t have thoughtful political opinions…and further, there is an implicit belittling of teenaged girls, which Duca confidently rejects.

Here’s hoping a generation of teen-aged girls are growing up aware and angry, preparing to put on their thigh-high boots and do a flying drop-kick to Tucker Carlson’s condescending stupid face. He ought to be worried.

By the way, it also helps that she’s defending a righteous and reasonable position. Confidence is good, responding aggressively is good, but it doesn’t help if your confident aggression is in defense of racist sleaziness, for instance.

Joe Soucheray has a few words on the recent UM football scandal.

No player involved appears to have risen to the moral or ethical clarity required of any man whose instinctive character would have compelled him to say, “Wait a minute. Stop. This isn’t right. This has gotten out of hand. Everybody clear this building.’’

Any man of character — we call football players men — would have not only cleared the building but would have helped the woman, taken her to the hospital, for example. Actually, if there were men of character around that night the bacchanal would never have happened and the woman would not have required a hospital visit.

There was no respect for anybody in that apartment. There does not appear to be any awareness of physical or mental health at stake. There does not appear to be any awareness of safety.

Exactly right. It’s not enough to simply say you’re not going to rape or harass or take advantage; you also have to refuse to turn your back when others do so. Our football team is full of cowards who’d rather avoid conflict than correct an injustice.

Soucheray has a recommendation for the football coach:

But what Claeys should have really said is, “I don’t want any of these players on the team. These players will never set foot in this practice facility again nor will they ever wear a Gopher football uniform as long as I am coach. If you don’t like it you can take your poorly formed idea of due process and shove it where the sun don’t shine.’’

Maybe our overpaid coach should be shown the door, and the next candidates should have their moral compass measured and calibrated before any are hired.

The full EOAA report, and the police report, of the University of Minnesota football team scandal, have been released. It’s 80 horrible pages.

I can see now why the police aren’t pressing charges — the victim would be crucified in court, because she went along with some of the activities that went on in that apartment, out of fear or drunkenness. I can also see why the university is taking action against them, because the football players who participated were awful, ghastly, horrible, rotten young men. I am even less sympathetic with the other team members who are supporting them.

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One bit of good news: the other players have ended their threatened boycott. It’s not clear whether it’s because they read the EOAA report, or because UM just got awarded a bowl game.