Cultural Marxist Happy Hour

or ragey hour, whichever emotion you want to go with.

I was recently asking myself, “What happened to drag queens? Sure, you hear about trans folks all the time these days, but what about good ol’ fashioned drag queens? Are people just not doing that anymore?”

I’m sure you ask yourself these sorts of things all of the time, so take heart! I’ve found some, and it turns out that politically active drag queens are crazy Cultural Marxists. Who knew?

I wasn’t going to post a picture, and then I saw this. (BTW, this pic got over 1,000 “likes.”)

Yup, it’s those guys I highlighted the other day, Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian, claiming that Norway was “colonizing” black people by expecting migrants to Norway to obey Norwegian laws and hosting voluntary classes to explain to the immigrants some of the ins-and-outs of Norwegian social codes.

Alok and Janani have degrees from Stanford University.

This time, they’re back to helpfully explain to us how, exactly, Norway is “colonizing” people who moved there voluntarily. I was going to just post a screencap, but I keep wanting to respond to individual lines, so we’re going to quote:

This has been said so many times but I’m reading some troubling comments about the news from Norway (https://tinyurl.com/norwaycolonialism) and I suppose it needs to be constantly pushed.

Yes, constantly push that narrative! Constantly! Push, push!

Gender based violence can never be discussed outside of colonialism because gender based violence is foundational to colonialism.

Concrete used in my sidewalks can never be discussed without discussing the World Trade Center, because concrete is foundational to the World Trade Center. It’s also foundational to almost every large building on Earth, so discussing this crack in the sidewalk outside my house is going to take a really, really long time.

Also, colonialism was about conquering land and making money.

Also, Norway hasn’t colonized anyone since the Viking era.

Norway’s training of refugees in European “sexual norms” is part of a long history of the West understanding Black & brown masculinities as “backwards” and white feminism as the answer.

Actually, it’s an immediate response to these migrants raping Norwegians.

Funny how people who are quick to proclaim that “race is a social construct” will turn around and talk about “The West” as though it were a single, coherent entity–of which Norway constitutes less than half of one percent!

Norway, with no history of colonialism and no (until now) imported minority of non-Europeans, has no “history” of “understanding” black and brown “masculinities”–at least, not until they altruistically let in a bunch of people who started raping the locals.

White supremacy would have you dwell on the particular (“But who did Norway colonize anyways?” “Isn’t it harmless?”) without addressing bigger systems and ideologies. Whiteness is the privilege to observe the particular and not experience the structural.

Who needs facts? What facts? Sure, all of the facts might actually contradict all of the bullshit I’m blathering, but that’s some kind of “white privilege” to notice actual reality! Nonwhites get to notice “structures”, even when those structures are completely contradicted by actual facts.

The West isn’t a saint because it’s taking in (a few) refugees because it was the West who drew the borders the refugees are being forced to cross to begin with!

1. Norway had nothing to do with the drawing of anyone’s borders.

2. The Syrian refugees are genuinely fleeing violence, but the black migrants are went to Norway voluntarily.

Blah blah blah…

The fact that you are unaware about the long and brutal history of the West “training” the Global South into gender and sexual norms (read: imposing Victorian sexual ethics, codifying the gender binary, importing homophobia and transmisogyny, etc.) has everything to do with colonialism. The fact that it’s easier for you to think of Black & brown masculiniteis as sexist/homopohbic moreso than white European culture (the most (trans)misogynist of all!) has everything to do with colonialism.

Oh hey, you know how people claim that whole “Cultural Marxism” thing is just a conspiracy theory? (How does anyone who has ever been to college claim such a thing?)

Marxism became a popular ideology among the de-colonializing nations because colonialism was capitalist, and Marxism is anti-capitalist. Cultural Marxism takes the original Marxism’s economic arguments and replaces them with cultural arguments. So we get this weird and completely a-historical argument about colonization having to do with gender oppression and homophobia.

Of course, no statistics are given on rates of homophobia, transmisogyny, etc. Statistics are like “facts”; things that only white people use. But hey, since I am white, how about some poll data on what Muslims think of homosexuality?

From Pew Research Center, Muslim Views on Morality

Yeah, whites are SOOO homophobic.

It reveals a deep and misplaced anxiety that white supremacy has always held: that immigration is really about penetration, that opening white imposed borders for Black & brown men is inviting in rape.

Someone here is a Freudian, and it isn’t me.

Just as economists don’t discuss Marxism anymore, especially since the major test case crashed and burned, psychologists don’t discuss Freud anymore, since his theories were found to lack predictive value.

This is the point where one might want to cite some data that proves that black and brown men rape at the same rate as white men.

Of course he doesn’t, because data is for white people he knows the data overwhelmingly contradicts him.

(Newsflash: White people already did this very thing: it’s called colonialism!) Colonialism IS rape culture.

Wait, now he’s arguing that invasion is rape?

White feminism is never the answer unless your solution to ending gender based violence involves mass criminalization, detention, torture, bombing, occupation, and war. … White feminism is never the answer because it actually can and will never be about the liberation of all women and femmes: it will always only be about the conditional safety of white women and femmes. Never forget: White men have used the alleged “safety” of white women as an excuse to occupy the whole world haven’t they?

Nope. They haven’t.

It keeps going, and going, and going, like the Energizer Bunny of made-up history and bad logic. I’m going to stop here, because it really isn’t worth continuing with this idiocy, but you can read the whole delusional thing if you want to.

The sad thing is that this is not some obscure, random voice, but a post that received over a 1,000 likes.

Transsexuals Prove That Gender is Real

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one: Sex is biological; gender is a social construct.

Well, you should know my response by now: Sex is also a social construct.

X is a social construct does not mean “X is totally made up.” It means, “The word is defined however the hell people feel like using it.” This is true of all language.

200 years ago, people did not define “biological sex” as “has XX or XY chromosomes,” because no one knew about chromosomes, and yet they still had this concept of “biological sex.” For that matter, if you get right down to the nitty gritty of how “biological sex” develops in the fetus/young person, it is not just a matter of “Do you have a Y chromosome?” Biological sex does not work the same for all species, (eg, for crocodiles, the egg’s temperature determines whether the baby inside develops as male or female,) but even within humans, the process is complicated.

Diseases or medical conditions are the easiest way to highlight all the things that come together to determine one’s “biological sex”:

Klinefelter Syndrome: person is born XXY instead of XX or XY. People with KS have tiny genitals. The Y chromosome triggers male development, but the two Xs cause an over-production of female hormones. Most people with KS are infertile. KS occurs in 1:500 to 1:1000 live male births.

Given about 150 million men in the US, that comes out to between 300,000 and 150,000 Americans with Klinefelter Syndrome.

Some other obscure conditions with similar names are XYY, XXXX, and XXYY Syndrome. People with only one X chromosome and nothing else have Turner Syndrome. TS affects about 1 in 2000 to 1 in 5000 females, or about 75,ooo to 30,000 Americans.

Congenital adrenal hyperplasia “are any of several autosomal recessive diseases resulting from mutations of genes for enzymes mediating the biochemical steps of production of cortisol from cholesterol by the adrenal glands (steroidogenesis).

“Most of these conditions involve excessive or deficient production of sex steroids and can alter development of primary or secondary sex characteristics in some affected infants, children, or adults.”

The Wikipedia  recounts the potential first historical description of a CAH case:

“‘In one of the anatomical theaters of the hospital…, there arrived toward the end of January a cadaver which in life was the body of a certain Joseph Marzo… The general physiognomy was decidedly male in all respects. There were no feminine curves to the body. There was a heavy beard. There was some delicacy of structure with muscles that were not very well developed… The distribution of pubic hair was typical of the male. Perhaps the lower extremities were somewhat delicate, resembling the female, and were covered with hair… The penis was curved posteriorly and measured 6 cm, or with stretching, 10 cm. The corona was 3 cm long and 8 cm in circumference. There was an ample prepuce. There was a first grade hypospadias… There were two folds of skin coming from the top of the penis and encircling it on either side. These were somewhat loose and resembled labia majora.’

“De Crecchio then described the internal organs, which included a normal vagina, uterus, tubes, and ovaries. … He interviewed many people and satisfied himself that Joseph Marzo “conducted himself within the sexual area exclusively as a male”, even to the point of contracting the “French disease” on two occasions. “

CAH apparently varies in incidence; among the American Indians, 1 in 280; among whites, 1 in 15,000. Given 245.5 million whites and 3 million Indians, that works out to about 27,000 in those two groups. (Wikipedia doesn’t give numbers for blacks or Hispanics.)

Androgen insensitivity syndrome “is a condition that results in the partial or complete inability of the cell to respond to androgens. The unresponsiveness of the cell to the presence of androgenic hormones can impair or prevent the masculinization of male genitalia in the developing fetus, as well as the development of male secondary sexual characteristics at puberty, … these individuals range from a normal male habitus with mild spermatogenic defect or reduced secondary terminal hair, to a full female habitus, despite the presence of a Y-chromosome.”

The people in this picture have XY chromosomes, but developed as females because they have have AIS or related conditions:

The exact incidence is unknown, especially since XX carriers are basically unaffected by the condition, but Wikipedia lists estimates between 1 in 20,400 XY births and one in 130,000, or between about 7,000 and 1,000 affected Americans.

Kallman Syndrome isn’t so much an “intersex” disorder as an “asex” disorder. Kallmann syndrome is a genetic disorder in which, “the hypothalamic neurons that are responsible for releasing gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH neurons) fail to migrate into the hypothalamus during embryonic development.”

The most prominent symptom is a failure to start puberty; oddly, one of the other common symptoms is an inability to smell. It affects both men and women.

Incidence: about 1 in 10,000, or about 32,000 Americans.

“True hermaphrodites” are rare, but do exist–perhaps due to improper cell division in developing fraternal twins. See also “human chimeras“:

“The Dutch sprinter Foekje Dillema was expelled from the 1950 national team after she refused a mandatory sex test in July 1950; later investigations revealed a Y-chromosome in her body cells, and the analysis showed that she probably was a 46,XX/46,XY mosaic female. …

“Another report of a human chimera was published in 1998, where a male human had some partially developed female organs due to chimerism. He had been conceived by in-vitro fertilization.

“In 2002, Lydia Fairchild was denied public assistance in Washington state when DNA evidence showed that she was not related to her children. A lawyer for the prosecution heard of a human chimera in New England, Karen Keegan, and suggested the possibility to the defense, who were able to show that Fairchild, too, was a chimera with two sets of DNA.”

And as I have mentioned before, people exposed to Diethylstilbestrol–DES–a synthetic estrogen used as an anti-miscarriage drug between 1940 and 1971, (when they realized its major epigenetic effects included cancer,) seems to have triggered female brain development in male fetuses.

“An estimated 3 million pregnant women in the USA were prescribed DES from 1941 through 1971. … The number of persons exposed to DES during pregnancy or in utero during 1940–1971 is unknown, but may be as high as 2 million in the United States.” Or about 1 million men.

There are others, but I will stop here. It is difficult to give a total for such conditions, but folks estimate incidence of intersex conditions around 1.7% of births, or 5.4 million Americans. (By contrast, identical twins occur in only 0.3% of pregnancies.)

As I have mentioned before, I strongly suspect that the vast majority of “trans” people actually have some form of intersex condition–I base this suspicion on the lives of the trans  people I’ve actually talked to. According to LiveScience, about 700,000 Americans, or 0.2%, are trans–significantly less than the estimated number of people with intersex conditions.

Even though 98.3% of us probably don’t have any kind of intersex (or asex) condition, 5.4 million is a lot of people. In a country where we like to put weirdos on TV so we can laugh and point at them, really obscure conditions can become quite well-known. Like octuplets.

Whether you want to call them “male,” “female,” “intersex,” or something else all has to do with your particular definition of “biological sex.” If you’d lived in 1800, your definition of “biological sex” would probably have something to do with genitals and maybe something to do with behavior, but certainly nothing to do with chromosomes or hormones or anything like that. Ten minutes ago, you probably defined “biological sex” as “has XX or XY chromosomes.” Now you’re probably wondering what the hell is up with crocodiles.

None of this changes reality. Reality doesn’t care what you call it.

 

On to Gender!

What does it mean when people say, “Gender is a social construct”?

I’m pretty sure the technical answer is, “Gender is the set of behaviors and social roles and things that people expect out of people based on their biological sex, and those expectations vary by society, ie, people in Uganda expect different things out of ‘men’ and ‘women’ than people in Japan. Heck, some societies even have ‘third genders’ and things like that.”

However, most of the time when people say, “Gender is a social construct,” what they actually mean is, “People don’t actually have gender; gender roles are a mass delusion created by the Patriarchy to oppress women that we are taught to hallucinate as little kids.”

Unfortunately, the belief that children are blank gender slates is not only common among many academics and feminists, but was a thing people really believed–leading to the surgical “correction” of intersex children born with incorrect genitalia, followed by attempts at raising them as whatever gender the parents picked. They usually picked female, because it is much easier to lop a bit off than to add on.

Imagine, for a moment, that you born with a small penis, so your parents just decided to have it chopped off, turned the nub into a clitoris, stuck a dress on you, and called you a girl.

No, it doesn’t work.

I don’t have any statistics, but I have read a lot of stories along the lines of, “My parents lied to me all my life that I was a girl and it turned out I was a boy and it was horribly traumatic and I was suicidal for most of puberty, etc., etc.”

Gender is a real thing, and even intersex kids can figure it out.

If the feminist “You learn gender roles from the patriarchical society around you” school of thought were correct, these kids would turn out completely normal members of the gender assigned to them and not have any issues at all.

If gender is a real thing, then trying to raise a kid as the opposite gender should result in exactly what we see: The kids are miserable, and then they assert that they are the gender they were born as.

 

But what about trans people who don’t have any kind of intersex condition? Given 7 billion people in the world, there are probably some. Again, if gender were nothing more than arbitrary social roles determined by our dumb patriarchical society, why would anyone bother changing their “sex” to match their “gender”? Remember that SRS is very expensive, painful, time consuming, and incurs significant social stigma. If I can just say, “hey, all this business with handbags and football is totally arbitrary; I’m just going to re-define football as a thing “women” like and handbags as something “men” like,”–which is exactly what the feminist theory of gender claims you can do–then why wouldn’t trans people just do that, and save themselves all of the effort?

Because trans people understand that gender is a real thing, not just a made up thing that they can re-define because it happens to suit them.

“But wait,” I hear you saying, “trans people are actually just autogynophiliacs, and so that’s why they transition, not because they’re actually trans.”

To be honest, I consider this a weird story. For starters, half the trans people I know started as “female”, not male. Second, almost all of the trans people I know have really obvious intersex conditions. Third, most people into LGBTQ etc. sorts of things will NOT SHUT UP about their sexual interests. If these people had weird self-fetishes, they’d be talking about it all over the damn place. Like furries. Remember furries? No one was ever confused about furries’ sexual interests.

Now, could some trans people be autogynophiliacs? Sure. There are 700,000 of them in the country. That’s a lot of people. Some of ’em are probably into all kinds of weird things.

But there are about 1 million men who were exposed to DES in the womb. So DES sounds like a more likely cause of biological men who “feel female” than weird sexual fetishes.

However, I am willing to grant a chicken and egg potential: once a “man” starts believing that he really is a woman trapped in a man’s body, then he will of course begin thinking about himself as female, and want other people to treat him as female, and even fantasize about being treated like a normal female, being found attractive as a normal female, etc.

That is, I suspect the autogynophiliac hypothesis has the causation backwards. Believing that one is a female trapped in a man’s body leads to imagining oneself as female, not the other way around. The same probably holds true for trans folks in “female” bodies who decide that they are really men–they desire to be seen as attractive, too.

(I will note that a fair number of people with intersex conditions are asexual.)

Now, does that mean that Jenner or any other high-profile celebrity trans person is actually intersex and not just a weird attention whore? I have no clue, but if Jenner wants to be female, I don’t care.

But I don’t consider Jenner “brave” or “pioneering” or anything like that. Jenner has millions of dollars and a media three-ring circus to praise her every move. Meanwhile, I know people with actual, diagnosed chromosomal abnormalities who live in poverty because their families don’t believe in fucking genetics.

 

But anyway, why does this whole “Sex != Gender” thing get hauled out every time people start trying to explain transsexuals?

Eh, it’s because they’re gender non-conforming weirdos and so for a long time, the only people who would accept them were other gender non-conformists like radical feminists and gay people, and this whole “gender is a social construct” business has been the dominant catch-phrase of feminists out to re-define femininity for a long time. And I’m sure that for some trans people, it has given them some peace of mind to think that it’s okay, they can redefine gender how they want to include people like themselves.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the reality of gender is what trans people are actually seeking.

If Race is just a social construct, why can’t Rachel Dolezal be black?

Iron Eyes Cody–ne Espera Oscar de Corti–was a Sicilian-American who acted in an impressive 200+ movies or TV shows, (plus numerous commercials.) But the most interesting thing about Cody is that nearly all of his roles were American Indians. You know that commercial of an Indian chief who cries at the sight of litter? That’s Iron Eyes Cody.

For all intents and purposes, Cody lived life about as much like an Indian as a non-Indian could manage. He married an Indian woman, went by an Indian name, adopted two Indian children, and told people he was an Indian. He seems to have been a decent and enough guy that he didn’t piss off important people who could have made a stink about his ethnic background, even if they did politely point it out on occasion.

Apparently Cody’s Sicilian features looked sufficiently like an Indian to satisfy Hollywood audiences; I have no idea whether he looked like an Indian to actual Indians. (Experience suggests that there is no particular “look” to Indians other than hair color, given that “Indian” includes a great many ethnic groups, and individuals with a fair variety of African and European admixture, so you get everything from the almost blond-kid holding up her tribal citizenship card on the Cherokee Nation website to Radmilla Cody, 46th Miss Navajo.)

Michael Jackson is a far better known but much less certain case of transracial identity. He may have wanted to look like a white guy (or gal,) or he may have just been coping with vitiligo. Or maybe he just wanted to look however he wanted to look.

And now we have Rachel Dolezal, president of the Spokane NAACP, up for her 2 seconds of internet fame and notoriety. Mrs. Dolezal appears to have been basically portraying herself as a black person, despite actually being a white person.

So Mrs. Dolezal really likes black people, likes learning about black people and being around black people and thinking of herself as a black person? I don’t give a shit. People can think whatever they want about themselves as far as I’m concerned.

But for the sake of argument, let’s have one. Can a person be, legitimately, transracial, ethnic, or cultural? Does it matter if they were raised in the culture (say, by adoption?) Does it matter if they look like the culture in question? Or are there some essential parts of racial/ethnic/cultural identity that an outsider simply can’t experience?

What does it mean to be anything at all?

Transsexuals are not your enemies

I know this is a sign that I am incredibly dumb, but I am always vaguely surprised by neoreactionaries/Dark Enlightenment types who claim to understand human genetics but are openly hostile to transsexuals, transgender, and otherwise trans- folks.

Look, guys. Every trans person I have met has something medically wrong with them–some sort of genetic or hormonal condition interfering with the production/development of normal sex hormones/characteristics. Don’t get distracted by the “gender is a social construct,” nonsense–it’s totally irrelevant. (More on that later.)

So you now how boys are genetically XY, and girls are XY? I have met trans people who are literally XXY. Like Down’s Syndrome, only your genitalia don’t quite develop right due to your body trying to produce male genitalia with way too many female hormones.

Another condition that appears to affect quite a large % of trans people is exposure to massive levels of artificial sex hormones while still in the womb, due to certain medications pregnant women have taken.

Diethylstilbestrol, (or DES,)  is a synthetic nonsteroidal estrogen, synthesized way back in 1938. Between 1940 and 1971, DES was given in large quantities to pregnant women to prevent miscarriages. Unfortunately, it turns out that pumping babies full of unnaturally high levels of estrogen might be bad for them–DES was discontinued as a medication for pregnant women because it gave their daughters cancer, and the sons appear to have high rates of trans and intersex conditions, which is exactly what you’d expect.

And then there are the people I have met whose health histories I am not privy to, but who quite obviously have something hormonal going on–girls who grow up and sprout beards, for example.

Alas, I don’t have data on what is going on with 100% of trans people, but from everything I’ve seen, it looks like we’re really just talking about a few people with rare medical conditions, prenatal hormonal or toxin exposure, etc., not weirdo degenerates who are trying to destroy civilization.

In fact, every trans person I’ve ever met just wanted to live their life without being harassed and be a contributing member of society, like almost everyone else I know.

 

In a nation with 320 million people, and a world with even more,  and the technology to find people with <1/million conditions and put them on TV or find each other on an online forum, it is easy to overestimate the commonness of extremely rare conditions. (Homosexuality comes immediately to mind–gay folks number around 3% of the country, but IIRC, people estimate that about 30% of people are gay.)

Trans people are an even smaller % of the population–even on LGBTetc forums, they complain about being left out and forgotten–because there are just so few of them. 0.3% of the population to be exact, according to Wikipedia. (This number seems consistent with “caused by a variety of rare medical conditions.”)

There are more prisoners in this country than trans people, but I don’t hear people complaining that a convicted criminal might use a public bathroom while they’re in there, even though criminals are way more likely to rape, assault, or kill you than some “chick with a beard.”

So even if I can’t convince you not to hate them, remember that trans people are such a tiny % of the overall population that worrying about them is a total waste of your time.

 

 

But what about all of this business about gender being a social construct?

Look, people throw around a lot of words without knowing what they really mean. Trans people are really the embodiment of the opposite of this principle. If gender were just a social construct, a woman with a beard could just say, “Well, society is wrong to say that beards are a man-thing; I’m going to declare that beards are a woman thing, too!” instead of feeling like there was something really wrong with her. Trans people would not bother with sex-reassignment-surgery (which is expensive, painful, and a pain in the butt;) they would just declare themselves to be whatever they want.

In fact, experiments have been done in which babies with indeterminate genitalia were just assigned a gender, surgically altered, (usually to female, because it is easier to subtract from working tissue than to add to it,) and then raised as their assigned gender, on the assumption that since gender is just a social construct, you can do this.

These experiments went badly. A lot of these kids grew up confused, hit puberty, and realized that they were in fact not the gender they’d been raised as (and that their parents had removed a good chunk of their genitalia.) Gender, in short, has so far resisted our best efforts to make it malleable.

 

In  short, trans people aren’t your enemies. They just want to pee in peace.