The Intersex Gambit

Today’s offering is a follow-up to this past Wednesday’s Erasing Women, which looks at how the purported goal of acceptance of transsexuals in society masks an effort to eradicate women’s rights in our society.

The Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney kerfuffle has rekindled my long-running puzzlement over how a matter that involves such a tiny percentage of the populace grew into one of the defining cultural issues of our day.

I write, of course, of the transgender movement, which morphed with stunning rapidity from a matter of simple acceptance of individuals' right to self-determination to a wholesale redefinition of "sex" and "gender."

An on-point article at the Wall Street Journal, written by an actual biologist (Ketanji Brown Jackson could not be reached for comment), highlighted one of the expositive gambits put forth to defend the reinvention of the concept of gender. Specifically, the existence of "intersex" individuals in the population is brought forth as a justification for asserting that gender isn't really binary.

The recap, for the TL;DR crowd.

1. Biologically, there are two sexes, full stop.

2. Intersex individuals, whom activists point to as refutation of (1), comprise 0.018% of the populace, and in any event...

3. When advocates speak of trans persons, they aren't talking about intersex individuals, but rather people with XX or XY chromosomes who are easily determined by their bits as men or women declaring they are the other, and (sometimes, but not always) pursuing chemical and surgical alteration.

The false yet deliberate conflation of transgender and intersex is a deliberate equivocation intended to falsely conflate a mental state (or choice, depending on who you talk to and when you talk to them) and a physical state. It’s also, more insidiously, intended to “put you on your heels" and shift debate away from the disagreement itself and onto skeptics' purported bigotry. For which I coined a phrase:

Why is this happening? How did the matter of a few tens of thousands of intersex individuals in a population of three hundred thirty million become a cultural inflection point? How did transgenderism, which occurs in well under one percent of the populace (politically motivated statistics aside) get elevated to a massive wedge issue and a Corporate America cause-celebre?

Like everything else in modern politics, the issue is, I've concluded, being elevated as a means of cudgeling the cultural out-group (i.e. social conservatives… and anyone else who doesn’t buy the BS) into submission. It also serves to goad some into speaking against all trans persons when their focus should be on the gender-erasers, just so the “bigot” label can be more easily applied.

If this means fudging the numbers upward, that's OK. If this means destroying women's rights, that's OK too. If this means sacrificing some children's futures by pushing them to transition upon the first hint of "maybe???," no problem. Gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet, and all that. Besides, in the modern collectivist worldview, individuals don’t matter except in their utility to causes and agendas.

My position on all this is as it is and always has been in all matters related to the individual: It's not my business what an adult does. This includes what one puts in the body, what one puts on the body, and what one does to the body. My line is, as it always has been, where another's rights are infringed.

Milton Friedman’s observation on individual liberty and autonomy extends beyond the mouth, of course. Sovereignty of the individual applies to the entirety of one’s self.

As long as one is an adult of sound mind, that is. Societies establish an age of majority for a reason.

Projected upon the transgender matter, all this shakes out as: No chemicals or surgeries for minors. No prohibitions against adults transitioning. No laws debarring transgender individuals from employment, marriage, or any other consensual (again, see: adult) activity.

Now, the unnecessarily trickier part: The interaction with others in the real world.

It is an indisputable, irrefutable, sure-as-the-sun-rises fact that men and women are biologically different. In sports, the physical differences are obvious and blatant. The fastest women in the world can be outrun by decently fast high school boys. The USA Women's soccer team was defeated by an under-15 boys' team. Women's world records are, at best, "middle of the pack" figures for men. Men's weightlifting records are double women's. Men have different skeletal structure, muscularity, heart and lung capacity, and other biological advantages, and the notion that a year or two or three of hormones can balance all that out is laughable. As Michael Shermer pithily put it,

Puberty is a performance enhancing drug.

Societies all around the world and across history have recognized this reality, and created separate categories of athletic competition for men and for women.

If you are a transgendered person, I will offer you the same baseline respect I do with any other individual. But, unfortunately, you are out of luck if you are male-to-female and want to compete in women's sports. You have unfair biological advantages, so please respect women's rights to their own sports. No rational person is impressed by a man who took a year or two of hormones defeating women or shattering their records.

And, if you have a penis, please don't insist on women's locker rooms, women's bathrooms, or women's prisons. I don't think I need explain further.

I've made the point before that I believe the transgender acceptance movement has been hijacked by radical activists. I don't believe that every trans person wants the line between men and women erased, I figure most simply want to live their lives as best they can, and find whatever peace and happiness might be out there. The minority who want to figuratively shove the movement down everyone else's throat are the ones doing the greatest harm to acceptance. That our political leaders have turned their backs on reality, and in particular on women, is a disgrace that we all, and especially women, should wake up to and reject.

As for pointing out that "intersex" exists, this doesn't obviate XX vs XY. In fact, it validates it. Without XX and XY, the outlier occurrence of intersex individuals would not be noted or even notable. As Colin Wright noted at WSJ, the existence of day and night is not refuted by dawn or dusk.

The intersex gambit is intended to deflect argument away from the absurdity of saying there's no difference between an XX-chromosomed woman and a trans woman. Activists insisting on the eradication of this distinction is the problem. There's nothing wrong with being a trans-man or a trans-woman, if that's what you as an adult feel is correct, but the genes you were born with are not, at least at this juncture of science and medicine, alterable. And, yes, those genes matter.