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Science Requires We Not Call a Man a Woman
What’s my name? Muhammad Ali
“What’s my name? What’s my name?” In the eighth round of their 1967 bout, Muhammad Ali yelled that question to Ernie Terrell every time he hit him. Terrell refused to call the former Cassius Clay his new chosen name before the fight, and Ali wanted to make a point about it.
There was no politics to Terrell’s refusal. There was no religion about it. Terrell was trash-talking against the man who, regrettably, made trash-talking in sports mainstream. I never liked Ali the bully in the ring or Ali the coward outside the ring (full disclosure: I grew up a Joe Frazier fan).
Yet, at another moment, I did learn something from Ali about names. When Howard Cosell called him Clay, Ali corrected him and insisted on the new name. Howard then agreed, saying yes, of course, a man should be called what he wants to be called.
That’s a poignant moment in a plural society that favors individual choices and respect. I’ve always agreed that a man should be called what he wants to be called.
During my time, we’ve seen an oscillation in the black community as to how they wish to be addressed. They have favored “colored” (see NAACP), “negro,” “African-American,” and today there is a rebirth of “black.” The rest of us have, to our credit, respectfully used the favored name.
A man should be called what he wants to be called.
That’s an easy call with proper names. They are randomly chosen by parents, have no scientific rhyme or reason (though they certainly have cultural moorings), and they are changed with frequency. Surnames were traditionally changed by women upon marriage, and that is still substantially the case.
Gender and sex are different than proper names. There is some science that sets rules to follow.
The nebulous issue of gender is a product of the loose science of sociology. Since there is no discipline in that discipline, gender does not follow strict rules. It’s a social construct, and is a sliding scale between what is considered “masculine” and what is considered “feminine.”
America has a culture. It developed naturally over a couple of centuries. As in other countries, our culture developed identifiable symbols of the masculine and feminine — and, because of that, gender.
America has not been without its social shifts in masculine and feminine, whether in women entering into a variety of roles in the workforce or the current experiment with some women’s desire to enter infantry roles in the military.
It is noted with interest (not with explanation, as it is outside the subject of this treatment) that our cultural shifts have been easier to accept when it is the female attempting to take on masculine roles. It is framed as a matter of equal right — but I wonder if there isn’t something more to it when it comes to human beings. There is, after all, a masculinization process that happens to fetuses, as boys are created when the female pathway is redirected to become male. There is no such scientific process wherein a male pathway switches to female.
Perhaps, due to some subconscious dynamic, that is why there has not been the same acceptance of men trying to feminize their gender. Some change has admittedly occurred. When I was a young boy, nurses and flight attendants were women. Today, however, men are part of those work forces and none of us gives it a second thought when we see them.
Yet some things haven’t changed. A woman in pants is a 20th century invention that’s accepted today, but a man in a dress is still an oddity that will occasion repulsion in both sexes. Men don’t carry purses either — no matter how many times those who run the fashion industry try to push European handbags on us.
Masculine and feminine were not, however, simply created out of thin air. They were tied to sex — which is a different matter altogether than gender.
Sex is more rigidly defined by science. It is chromosomal. In our most common situation, female humans have XX chromosomes and male humans have XY chromosomes.
Sure, there are some rare situations that involve unusual chromosomes. Yet they don’t affect sex. Turner Syndrome is someone with one X chromosome, but that person is still female. XXX-females are still females. Klinefelter Syndrome has males with XXY chromosomes who show some female traits, but their sex is still male. Swyer Syndrome is a person whose genitalia does not perfectly match the chromosomes, but their sex is not in issue.
For the above rare medical instances, we, of course, should be open to accommodations. For now, however, we’re dealing with the huge majority of everyone else.
The science is clear on the rest of the human race. XX is a female and XY is a male.
Is Caitlyn (nee Bruce) Jenner a woman? No. The definition of ‘woman‘ has always been tied to female in every medical reference you’d like to check. ‘Man’ is similarly associated with the science of being male.
I owe Caitlyn Jenner dignity and respect. A man should be called what he wants to be called. I’ll use Caitlyn. I owe Jenner that.
I don’t owe Caitlyn an ignorance of science. That would be asking too much of me. Caitlyn is, scientifically, a man. He can lop anything off and sew anything on, but not change chromosomes. It is an imposition upon me (and quite rude I might add) for Caitlyn to insist that I ignore science. I don’t owe that to Caitlyn or anyone else.
The same is true of the pronouns “he” and “she.” They have been connected to the scientifically established male and female. I don’t owe Jenner a “she” in place of “he,” as that denies the science of the matter.
I wonder too about the idea of someone like Jenner being able to finally “be himself” (or herself, as he would have it). Isn’t that the opposite of what is going on here? Bruce Jenner is not being himself – he’s a man. He’s trying to change himself. Is this not antithetical to the stated idea of “be yourself” or “be who you are?” He is trying to change who he is. A gay man is still a man and a gay woman still a woman.
Culturally, I might be able to accept a feminized man or a masculinized woman. I can acknowledge that. Don’t ask me to deny science and agree a man is a woman because he wishes it to be.
A question for Claire Berlinski regarding the Ricochet Code of Conduct: We live by a different creed here on Ricochet. We go out of our way to treat others with dignity and respect. What will be the Ricochet rule on pronouns here? On our august, civil and well-mannered website, will we have a rule on calling Caitlyn Jenner a he or she?
Published in Culture, General
I finally figured out what bothered me (beyond the obvious) about the Vanity Fair cover. Look at his pose. One can almost imagine Annie Liebovitz telling him, “Honey, lose the man hands.”
I have been thinking lately that public bathrooms should be marked XX and XY. That would get rid of the whole gender argument on what bathroom to use.
There is some precedent for it. I understand the law requires that Caitlyn Jenner on medical forms disclose his male birth……
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2945943/Woman-95-MALE-DNA-gives-birth-twins-doctors-medical-miracle.html
So now we bring medical forms with us to gain entry into restrooms? No, society will pretty much continue as it has …. The individuals themselves determining which restroom they should use….
Misthio, science tells us that Jenner will always be a man. Science also demands that language accurately describe our world, otherwise scientific fact is lost in euphemism. Even if science does not dictate how to employ language, philosophy does. Words should be used precisely, lest we deceive ourselves. If I knew Jenner personally, I suppose, out of courtesy, I’d avoid pronouns when referring to him, and just say Caitlyn to avoid confrontation (or an “outing” of my regressive views).
Anyway, I hope you read Dr. Hugh’s WSJ piece. He’s been attacked by the LGBT community, but he came to his view because he took seriously his oath to do no harm. I believe he was initially of the view that the surgical procedure could be helpful if it reduced rates of suicide in the transgender community. But, when presented with evidence (in the 1970s) that it did not, he decided that mutilating functioning organs was not something in which his hospital should participate. I believe there has been some conflicting study on the point of the suicide rates of post-op transexuals since then, but still, I think it’s uncontested that the suicide rate of that population remains far, far higher than the general population’s rate. So, the usefulness of the procedure remains questionable, particularly in the long term.
This is not in response to the preceding comments, which I haven’t read carefully.
I have a theory about why there are so many boys and men wanting to be girls and women.
My fellow females have been acting like a victim group for the last forty years. They are able to do this because the male half of the world are nice sympathetic people, unlike the image of them in literature.
Over this time there has been a huge buildup in the media and literature about how either perfect, wonderful, and marvelous girls and women are and/or how victimized they are, how atrocious things have been done to them.
This has led to some poor guys’ internalizing all of these feelings, and worse, feeling like the inferior bad guys.
We live in weird times. Instead of seeing women as conquering Amazons, we see them as supersmart superstrong in need of protection. Right. That’s pretty illogical. So goeth the heart and mind.
This has taken its toll on the male half of the world, and of course, on the edges some guys have been made ill with it. They don’t want to be men anymore. (This was common among women around the turn of the century, their wishing to be a man because men were more highly regarded in some ways. It makes perfect sense. Why would anyone want to be associated with the women depicted in the past?)
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[continued from comment 94]
What’s the answer to the cognitive dissonance for some guys way out on the extreme end of that continuum? What is mental illness? It is destroying yourself. They want to be someone else.
It’s all pretty understandable given the image of women in literature and the media.
I worked on a book in eighties by Maryellen Ferguson about the imagine of women in literature. It was depressing. Her point way back then was that the way women were depicted–witch, goddess, sex object, whatever–had the cruel effect on individual girls and women of making them want to dissociate themselves from other women. “I’m not like that.”
That’s what I think is going on with guys right now, some guys.
MarciN,
My kids say that there are lots of highschoolers who have come out as gay or bisexual. They have a class size of about 100 and a half dozen kids claim to be gay/bi. IOW, way above the 2-3% that certain members claim to be the stable, innate level of homosexuality in any society.
I have also wondered if a lot of this is a teenage identification with an identity group that is fashionable and glorified in the pop culture. Conchita Wurst, Doogie Howser, Orange is New Black guy/lady, etc are all lionized as trailblazing heros. Why wouldn’t an angst ridden teenager want to glom onto some of that reflected glory?
Yup. Exactly. I saw it too with my kids, who are all just out of college and graduate school.
It’s natural. It’s what literature is designed to do. It’s working. Sadly.
My prediction, from spending five minutes cruising the popular television shows, is that there will be a lot of kids doing this. A lot. This has been my concern with the gay rights activism all along.
Yes. Our right to life is not just a right to individual life, but to family life as well. Mothers and fathers are just as essential to human life as brains, hearts, and kidneys. You can’t live without a heart or kidneys, and likewise families can’t continue over generations without men and women, actual men and women who can actually procreate. Babies, whether adopted or not, always come from natural born women and men.
I don’t think we need to make transgender surgery illegal, but we need to be free to affirm that family life is just as sacred as individual life.
But back to the subject of what is going on for guys right now:
All human beings have a masculine-feminine polarity inside them. It’s what enabled Shakespeare and Ibsen to create female characters that were reasonably believable. It takes empathy and sympathy to be able to do that.
Whatever it is that enables men and women to understand each other is askew in some guys right now because of literature and the media.
Making matters worse, the image of men is very negative, especially fathers. That means that some guys aren’t connecting well to their own fathers and other men in their lives, and it means they don’t want to be associated with them.
As I said, women went through this in the fifties through the early eighties, when the image of women mercifully changed. As a woman, watching the original Star Trek series is painful. You’ve got to be kidding. They are funny, but they are not people I would ever want to be like.
Why the media couldn’t just improve the image of women without making men look ridiculous and evil I cannot explain. It must have something to do with our competitive natures. It wasn’t enough to make us somewhat equal in our abilities and talents. There had to be a superior group, I think. Or perhaps that’s the nature of drama and storytelling. Villains and victims.
A quick postscript: I do not want to exaggerate my concern here. I see this negative impact as affecting only a small number of guys ultimately.
It’s like video games. Most kids, 98 percent, are completely immune to any negative effects that might occur from playing video games too much. They have full lives and nice people around them, and so they won’t absorb the negative messages from the games. But the isolated or supersensitive 2 percent will process them differently. For them, those video games, the really violent ones particularly, could be harmful.
It’s the same thing with guys and the media and literature. Most boys and men will be fine, but a small percentage will process the negativity poorly. And act on it.
It just seems to me that the Left has a very superficial concept of what a woman is. One could paint or digitally generate an image of a woman, and we would accept that image as a woman. Intellectually we understand that ink, paper, and pixels are not a woman, but for purposes of perception, the image is a woman. Likewise, given that Bruce Jenner is a 65 year old man, he has done a fantastic job of using his body to present an image of a younger woman. For purposes of a magazine cover, there’s not much reason that you need to use a real woman, since the image itself is not real.
I once had a professor who gave us advice on how to do science presentations well. He said that one should pretend to be a great scientist. If you pretend that you are good, you will be good. I have tried to follow that advice, and I think it generally works. I used to be incompetent with microscopes, but after teaching enough classes where I had to pretend to know what I was doing, I got good with microscopes.
However, there are limits to this method. I can pretend to be a seal, but I’ll never be able to hold my breath for an hour. I could pretend to be a woman, but I’d never be able to bear children like a woman.
Oh, don’t worry, there’s also a documentary series on the way:
http://ca.eonline.com/videos/236262/caitlyn-jenner-s-new-show-i-am-cait-trailer
The choice quote from the trailer: “I’m the new normal.”
I guess there is a market for it, but could we refer to making money that way Freakonomics?
I am fairly certain I am alone in how I see this type of story, however, whether it is Dennis Rodman’s publicly engaging in self-humiliating activities (at least in the past), or Bruce Jenner mutilating his body, or the woman who has had herself carved into the shape of a toy doll named Barbie — it always reads to me as exploitation of seriously troubled persons. So it is sad, and feels wrong to me.
— it always reads to me as exploitation of seriously troubled persons. So it is sad, and feels wrong to me…
What did you think of the reality tv shows with the Duggars?
Expect the % of the population who identify as GLBT to increase from the historical 3% due to the massive pro socialization of this lifestyle. There are about another 4% of the population with slight to moderate same sex attraction so we can expect the increase to come from these folks as they don’t want to get left behind by the GLBT moment train.
There was a recent study done that showed that 41% of transgender or gender-noncomforming people have attempted suicide in their lives – nine times the national rate for suicide. Obviously these people are mentally and/or emotionally unstable. The money quote from the article;
Having a mental health condition increased the chance that a transgender or gender-nonconforming person had attempted suicide, as did having a lower income or being HIV-positive. But researchers said that the most stunning finding was just how high the risk was for all transgender and gender-nonconforming people, no matter how much money they made, how much education they had, or whether they were single or married.
These people need psychological help – not encouragement and celebration of their illness. Of course many of the so called experts are calling for increased acceptance and nurturing of this lifestyle to lower the suicide rate. How about counseling and therapy to dissuade them before they mutilate their bodies?
Very sad…
Responding to #106 — Never watched that television show, have no thoughts about it.
God Bless Rush Limbaugh. Today on his program he comforted a caller—a genetically 100% caucasion white man who has known in his heart since he was 10 that he’s black. The man lives everyday with the pain of having his true identity hidden. When he tries to gain recognition as a black American, other black Americans just laugh at him. It was so sad.
I’m wondering why the feminists aren’t screaming about the amount of makeup Caitlyn was forced to wear by Vanity Fair.
And why not a curvy transgender person? Are not photos like this going to force the trans teens into anorexia and bulimia?
Usually a photo like this would generate hash-tag fever: #curvytranslivesmatter #beautifulthewayyouare,well,atleastnowthatyouchangedyourselfwithsurgery
Look up “Clayton Bigsby; The Black White Supremist” on Youtube.
Dave Chappelle was way ahead of the curve there.
I’m curious about that choice, too. Wanting to be much younger, as well as female?
This happened in the sixties through eighties with some small amount of frequency.
No surprise.
I immersed myself in Holocaust literature through my teens and twenties. I wanted to be Jewish. I can’t explain it. But it has something to do with human empathy. “You’ll have to pick on me too.”
They’re on it. OK, more about cis and Eurocentrism, but at some point, the effort to make her attractive was going to make someone angry. Although in this context, there are no alternatives that won’t make someone angry.
Wait, does she have a brother named Alf?
MarciN and others,
I completely agree that teens see this as a fad, and the real number of transgendered persons (e.g., boys born with abnormal sexual organs, surgically made into “girls,”) is greatly overstated. I am trying to be supportive for friends whose teenage daughter decided she is a “boy.” Being the good progressive open-minded types that they are, they are allowing her to start her transition. At a very young age. I can’t help but think I am witnessing unintended but de facto child abuse in the name of them being “supportive” of her decision. Like the good doctor says –enabling the desire for self-mutilation is enabling mental illness.
Being Jewish doesn’t really have a hell of a lot to do with being picked on. We’re on a mission from G-d,
Honestly, who cares? Seems to me that an attention-seeker desperate for attention is getting plenty of it. No kids or animals were harmed in the making of this temporary farce.
Of course he’s still male – the chromosomes don’t lie – but if he wants to be called something else because he added and subtracted a bit of flesh here and there then good luck to him. Relax, the sky wont fall in and nobody here will be required to change their own orientation without their consent.