Children learn to differentiate between the sexes by two years of age.
Or, at least, that’s what we were told.
Now even Supreme Court nominees are confused about, for example, what a woman is — or so it appears. Journalists are, too, ostensibly.
At issue is, of course, the answer Joe Biden’s SCOTUS nominee, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, gave when Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked during confirmation hearings if she could define the term “woman.” She couldn’t within the given context, said Jackson, because “I’m not a biologist.”
It was an expedient answer, of course, one Jackson delivered “because she fears the transgender lynch mobs that, under the banner of ‘intersectionality,’ are able to mobilize the angry identity groups that bully the rest of the left and much of the middle into compliance with their madness,” pointed out commentator Thomas Lifson Saturday. Despite this, the mainstream media were Johnny on the spot ready to validate the madness.
To be precise, a USA Today piece written by one Alia E. Dastagir bore the headline represented in the tweet below.
First note that, strictly speaking, the phrase “Science says” is deceptive because while we’re perhaps supposed to jump to it like “Simon says,” “Science” doesn’t say anything. You can’t place Science under oath and have it testify in court as the ultimate expert witness. You can’t ask Science how he (yes, Science would have to be male!) feels or what new marvels lie ahead on his agenda. It’s scientists who say things.
And, of course, different scientists say different things. Yet ironically, Dastagir couldn’t find (or didn’t try to) even one scientist to say what she wanted said. Oh, she did quote a Harvard “historian and philosopher of biology” (which could make one wonder if Bill Clinton, now in his dotage, has transitioned from womanizer to “philosopher of women”). Dastagir featured as well “a professor of gender studies” and, transposing some words, “a gender studies professor.” But then there’s also Rebecca Jordan-Young, “a scientist and gender studies scholar at Barnard College,” as the writer put it. (Emphasis added.)
Branding the academic a scientist is as when journalists would introduce Dr. Anthony Fauci and state that he’s “working as an immunologist at the NIAID”; the readers’ natural inferences will do the rest, with most not knowing that Fauci actually has just an M.D. in internal medicine. But he’s working as an immunologist.
As for Jordan-Young, she told USA Today, “I don’t want to see this question [What is a woman?] punted to biology as if science can offer a simple, definitive answer.” No, she apparently wants it punted to her “science.” To wit: along with her extra last name, Jordan-Young has a B.A. in political science and a Ph.D. — in “sociomedical sciences.”
This impressive-sounding discipline “is dedicated to understanding and addressing the social, political, historical, cultural, psychological, and economic forces that influence health outcomes,” informs Jordan-Young’s alma mater, Columbia University.
Oh, she’s also an associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College.
“That’s your scientist?” writes blog Ace of Spades, incredulously. The site continues:
Oh, a “scientist and a gender studies scholar.”
Her bio says she’s a “feminist scientist.” You know — the famous scientific field of Feminism.
I wonder which branch of Feminism Science she works in — Theoretical Feminism? Applied Feminism? Experimental Feminism?
… So no, she’s not a “scientist.” She brands herself that way so she can make her gender studies claims sound “scientific” to idiots, such as those who populate the media.
Ace of Spades went on to remark about Jordan-Young being attached “to the Women’s and Gender Studies Department — not to any scientific department. Not to the ‘Sociomedical Science’ department, which of course does not exist because it’s not a real thing.”
In reality, though, “gender studies” isn’t a real thing, either — even though it boasts countless departments — partially because “gender,” in the sense intended here, does not exist (as a valid concept).
That is, it’s mistaken to apply to people the term “gender,” which not many decades ago was mainly a grammatical term used to reference word categories (i.e., masculine, feminine, and neuter). People are defined by “sex,” as in male or female.
“Gender,” in contrast, is used by sexual devolutionaries to reference your perception of what you are; this may, of course, differ from the reality of what you are. Your issue doesn’t then, however, fall under “gender studies” but “abnormal psychology.”
As for Dastagir, despite not actually citing a scientist, she writes, “Scientists agree there is no sufficient way to clearly define what makes someone a woman, and with billions of women on the planet, there is much variation.” This is typical sexual devolutionary sophistry.
When someone defines a woman as, for example, a female of the human species — meaning a person with two X chromosomes and a womb, ovaries, and external female genitalia — the “variation” argument may be deployed. “What of the genotypes X, XXY, XYY, and XXX?!” the sexual devolutionaries will retort. “Sex is a spectrum.” It’s convincing to many.
Unmentioned is that these genotypes are chromosomal disorders affecting one sex or the other. They do not make you a third, fourth, fifth, or sixth sex.
Sexual devolutionaries will also point out that hermaphrodites exist. “What if a ‘woman’ doesn’t have a womb or ovaries?” The answer is that there’s a difference between something being true in principle and something being true in the particular.
For instance, extra-terrestrials who visited Earth might report that humans are creatures with, among other things, two arms and two legs. This is true, too, even though there are people born without all those appendages. For particular anomalies don’t change what humans are in principle.
Another example is that in principle an apple is a thing that does not contain a worm. This reality isn’t changed by the existence of worm-inhabited apples because those creatures are not integral to the apple. All these phenomena are “exceptions that prove the rule.”
What the sexual devolutionaries are doing is that they’re trying to redefine, as suits their agenda, abnormality as normal variation. This hurts people, especially impressionable children, because it distorts their grasp of reality.
And reality is this: True love involves correcting abnormality when and where you can, not touting it as an alternative lifestyle choice.
