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Saying something isn't so don't make it not so

Liberal lunacy from NPR questioning whether we are seeing the end of gender, a merging of the sexes if you will.

What bollocks, almost invariably one of the first things you notice about someone is their gender, the second their age.

When my boy was about three we encountered a transgendered female in the mall. "Why is that man dressed like a lady" he said loudly. We were embarrassed of course - "shh shh" we said our faces glowing reddishly. But the truth of the matter lies there, it is almost impossible to hide either your gender or your age. Sure you can disguise it a bit but the middle aged woman dressed as a teenager is instantly recognizable as such. "Mutton dressed as lamb" we used to say disparagingly in my youth.

We are acutely good at making these judgments - its inbuilt.

Driving in your car if you see a pedestrian walking along the footpath, without thinking you know both their approximate age (within a decade or less) and their gender - try it and see and your first impression is almost always correct. Ambiguity is rare.

This world is a cruel, hard place, and much as we would like to and try to make it otherwise it is so. And we have to raise our kids to negotiate it and its sorrows as best they can with what the Good Lord or natural selection (depending on your bent) has endowed them with.

Which means boys need to be raised as boys to become men and girls raised as girls to become women. Because sadly the world is not going to conform to some idealized notion dreamed up by utopianists to suit those who cannot cope with the struggles and challenges life has confronted them with.

Comments

  1. The human body makes visible the invisible. To deny our masculinity or femininity to deny ourselves, and leads to very disconnected, confused people who don't know who or what they are.

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  2. I suspect it also ties in to the modernist notion that we are created not in God's image, but our own.

    And that freedom is about choosing anything you like, even your gender.

    The more freedom as an idea is disconnected from the associated responsibilities it brings, the more our sense of self becomes confused.

    Or maybe this is just post-modernistic rejection of anything that categorizes and labels. Maybe the modern secular atheist doesn't get possessed by demons, instead, ideas of others take over their minds and play out the story on these simian puppets?

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  3. Around the beginning of this year, the State Department began using gender-neutral language on U.S. passports — replacing "father" and "mother" with "Parent One" and Parent Two" — to make it simpler for nontraditional parents, beyond the male/female combination, to get passports for their children.

    I see myself as "father", not "Parent 2345". How offensive they don't cater for my role preference.

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  4. I suspect it also ties in to the modernist notion that we are created not in God's image, but our own.

    Even if we were to accept the idea that humans are made in a god's image, how is that relevant to issues of sex and gender? What sex is God, and who would he reproduce with?

    As with most things in biology, the line between the sexes can get a pretty blurry in individual cases - yet another example of why the religious insistence that sex/gender outliers are simply moral failures is just plain wrong, and also yet another example of why "intelligent" design is anything but.

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  5. Hi PM. Good points. Let me try to explain what I meant by that.

    Firstly, when I say we are made in God's image, to me that is an image that transcends sex, age, gender, race, creed and appearance.

    So when I say that the modernist view of the world is creating it's own image, it's in a more philosophical sense that it turns away from God, and the sense that our life is a gift of something far greater than being an evolved ape that panders to an evolved sense of short term self-interests.

    And I disagree with your example that seeks to imply that mutations and variations are proof of non-intelligent design. Every example of life I see is a testament to the over-arching design of life - it's simply amazing to me the way life seeks to be, and the "rules" written into the fabric of the Universe that need to be just so in order for life to spring forth and evolve. Even chaos has an underlying order to it.

    These ideas play out when, on one hand, we see people (Michael Laws in his article today missing the entire point of the Right To Life argument over the value of life) arguing that any variation in the gene pool needs to be screened and aborted, even though variation is the only (physical) reason we exist today. It's an ironic twist that illustrates broadly this idea I'm trying to convey about man's image versus the image of God (or perhaps my point would be easier to understand if it was a contrast between knowing the mind of God versus the wisdom of man).

    A little time poor at the moment to develop this topic more fully.

    yet another example of why the religious insistence that sex/gender outliers are simply moral failures is just plain wrong

    Yes, I think that argument far too simplistic, and thankfully not all religious people make that exact argument. The discussion is far deeper, but the media and certain groups are happy to keep the debate at the level that generates friction rather than growth.

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  6. I understand the idea that "in God's image" refers to sentience rather than physical characteristics - that's really the only way it could have been intended. But the thing about sentience is, it can lead you to look at sex and gender and ask yourself why someone who feels like they're trapped in a body that's the wrong sex should just learn to put up with it, rather than do what they feel to be right. As creatures with self-awareness and a sense of right and wrong, we have to go where those things lead us, otherwise "in God's image" is just fine-sounding spin for "Do as you're told."

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