Andrew Sullivan, whose increasing self-imposed distance from Trumpism now makes him at least a centrist, has a good column in this week’s New York Magazine. Half of it is about the dangers of global warming and the malfeasance of Republicans in not just ignoring it, but exacerbating it.
The other half is about whether or not sex is binary. Like me, Sullivan concludes that it’s almost binary but certainly bimodal. I swear he’s been reading my thoughts, if not my site. But maybe it’s just a case of like minds. At any rate, both of us are right!
Sullivan:
The real question, it seems to me, is therefore an almost philosophical one: Do these exceptions prove or disprove a general rule? I’d argue that, by and large, they prove it. The number of people with a mismatch between chromosomes and hormones, or with ambiguous genitalia, is surpassingly small. Well under one percent is a useful estimate. Similarly with a transgender identity: It absolutely exists but is also very rare — some estimates put it at around 0.7 percent of the population. Gay men and lesbians who have unambiguous male and female sex organs and identity but an attraction to their own sex are also pretty rare (whatever we’d like to think). Maybe 2 to 5 percent, with some outliers. Does this mean that general assumptions about most people being either male or female and heterosexual and cisgendered are misplaced or even offensive? Hardly. I’m gay but usually assume that everyone I meet is straight until I know otherwise. And I don’t mind the hetero assumption applying to me either. It’s a reasonable statistical inference, not bigotry. And I can always set them, er, straight.
My preferred adjective for sex and gender is bimodal, rather than binary. What bimodal means is that there are two distinct and primary modes with some variations between them. The vast majority of humans are either male or female, with corresponding chromosomes and hormones, and heterosexual. But with nature as messy as it is, and genetic variation being the spice of evolution, there will always be exceptions on a spectrum. Think of it as two big mountains representing, in sex matters, well over 95 percent of humans, with a long, low valley between them, representing the remaining percent. Everyone is equally human. But clearly the human experience of sex is one thing for almost everyone and a different thing for a few.
Do we infer from this that we need to junk the categories of male and female altogether, as many critical gender theorists argue? That seems insane to me. These two modes actually define the entire landscape of sex (the exceptions are incomprehensible without them), and the bimodal distribution is quite obviously a function of reproductive strategy (if we were all gay, or intersex, we’d cease to exist as a species before too long). Ditto the transgender experience: Does the fact that less than one percent of humans feel psychologically at odds with their biological sex mean that biological sex really doesn’t exist and needs to be defined away entirely? Or does it underline just how deep the connection between sex and gender almost always is?
I was invited to the Heritage Foundation this week for a panel on political correctness (You can watch it here. I speak at 1:04). The invite was quite a surprise. I’ve been a nonperson in Washington conservative circles ever since I objected to the spending explosion, torture, and shambolic Iraq War in the Bush administration, around 15 years ago. Of course I wasn’t invited to criticize conservatism — just to excoriate the social-justice movement for inverting the principles of liberalism. Nonetheless, I included in my remarks an attack on the Trump movement for providing so much ammunition for the hard left with its race-baiting, and even got one dude to walk out. But what surprised me was the positive response to a single, minor point I made about intersectionality.
The discussion (Sullivan starts at 1:04:06 and ends at 1:16:44). Note that he claims (correctly, I think) that extreme identity politics has spread far beyond campus and into the Leftist mainstream media.
He finishes with a snarky discussion of “intersectionality”, and a discussion of who’s a victim and who’s an oppressor. Conclusion: everyone is both.
And that’s why I favor more intersectionality, not less. Let’s push this to its logical conclusion. Let’s pile on identity after identity for any individual person; place her in multiple, overlapping oppression dynamics, victim and victimizer, oppressor and oppressed; map her class, race, region, religion, marital status, politics, nationality, language, disability, attractiveness, body weight, and any other form of identity you can. After a while, with any individual’s multifaceted past, present, and future, you will end up in this multicultural world with countless unique combinations of endless identities in a near-infinite loop of victim and victimizer. You will, in fact, end up with … an individual human being!
In the end, all totalizing ideologies disappear up their own assholes. With intersectionality, we have now entered the lower colon.
I can’t help but like this guy, even though we’ve crossed swords in the past.
Sub
I don’t get the thyroid reference
Andrew Sullivan: “You will, in fact, end up with … an individual human being!”
I am aware the personage I am about to quote is not very welcome at this page, but Sullivan has put the ball on the tee for her, so here’s the home run, from half a century ago.
“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
~ Ayn Rand
Ug. Ayn Rand took this to absurd heights of absurdity. Sullivan wishes to restore the idea of liberal democracy that included a social contract.
No such thing as a contract that one is bound to without consent.
The US constitution ain’t bad.
Parts of it are. The senate and the electoral college. The high bar in getting it amended. The vagueness of the second, ninth, tenth and fourteenth amendments.
That is the nature of government. Some group has the power to take control and enough people gollowvto make it stick. Including our government. I am not saying that is bad, just a fact if life.
Andrew Sullivan writes and thinks well. If all conservatives were like him, it wouldn’t be so bad.
In this category, one might add David Frum and maybe George Will. Like Sullivan, they reflect a tradition that used to be called Liberal in Europe, and I suppose could be classified as Center-Right, or pragmatic-conservative. There even was some concern for human welfare among certain “wet” or “red” Tories of Canada and the UK. The last such individual in American Republican politics, Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, left the Republican Party on June 6, 2001.
Not sure you and they are using “sex” in the same sense, but your header made me think of this, and I’ll use any excuse to check out Salt-N-Pepa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydrtF45-y-g
Sorry for goin’ off topic, but life’s got a soundtrack, man.
I haven’t thought about them in ages! I remember being really into them when I was in elementary school (strange, I know). I don’t know how that happened, but it did.
I was really into them back when you were in elementary school, too, BJ, ‘cept I was already a grown-ass man by then. 🙂
I think Sullivan has been what most would consider a centrist for quite a few years now. I must say I have great respect for him. He always stands for what he believes and is willing to disagree with anyone, no matter their politics/party or their cultural import/influence. He’s also a phenomenal writer. His material is always intelligently written, yet clear and efficient. Such skill is rare.
One group of people seem to be obsessed about sex, and another about gender. I guess there’s a Venn diagram out there somewhere that shows where they’re in agreement. Nevertheless, sex and gender are two different things.
To me, sex is a scientific term, gender a social one. If you were born with the ability to produce an egg that can be fertilized by a sperm, your sex is female. If you were born with the ability to produce sperm that will fertilize an egg, your sex is male. If neither, you are non-sexual. Your gender is what ever you declare it to be. And socially, I interact with your gender, not your sex.
When you use the word msle, how does another person know whether you are talking about sex or gender?
Seems confusing.
I listened to the whole panel discussion and it was quite interesting. Since it was put on by the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institute, I expected and hoped to get the conservative point of view on identity politics. Of course, these are mostly academics so we’re not talking about Trump voters.
One quote I liked: Identity politics is “feeding off the moral capital of the civil rights movement. A good phrase: “beatific victimhood.”
It was interesting that the most in-your-face speaker was the woman, Heather MacDonald. My guess is that this is not a coincidence. It is perhaps easier, and more impactful, to have a woman railing against identity politics than elite white males. Of course, she’s only a victim in one dimension.
If you watch it at all, do watch the Q&A session at the end. There are some interesting exchanges. As you might imagine, some of the questioners are really seeking only to voice their own opinions.
I should add that one of the questioners ties “decline of Christianity” to the rise of identity politics, Sullivan seems to agree, noting that we now lack the binding power of “equal under God”.
I fully agree. Sullivan is right on the money here. Post modernism…identity politics…and so on has been a severe setback. Let’s get back to basic liberal values.
I mentioned in a previous note about the Native American Berdache, the example of which I was aware was a male preferring to wear female clothing and do female tasks. In the first source from Wiki that I list below, the preferred name by Native Americans seems to be “Two Spirit” and may have some sacred elements to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-spirit
I read an article last night about the Muxes, Zapotecs of Oaxaca, Mexico who are referred to as “Third Gender”. Apparently, they are well accepted in the area, without the stigma of LGBT. Then, I discovered that there are such people throughout the world (e.g. in Hawaii, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, etc.)that are not stigmatized, and that there have been throughout history.
Following are some more Wiki references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muxe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakla
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femminiello
There seem to be some people in the world who
do not view these individuals as LGBT, but as
“Two Spirit” people or as “Third Gender”.
Sullivan probably does read this site. It was linked fairly frequently on The Daily Dish, so he’s at least aware of it.