“The only reason a man won Miss Netherlands is because the girls were stupid enough to play along with this charade and hand him the crown,” said Gina Bontempo, reacting to news that a biological male had won a women’s beauty contest. This follows news that Monroe Lace, also a biological male, won the Miss San Francisco title. Questions to which everyone knew the answers no longer have definite answers, as this exchange in the US Senate between John Kennedy and Kelley Robinson illustrates.
SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: How many genders are there?
KELLEY ROBINSON, HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN: I think that gender is expansive and the definitions are always growing. Today, I can —
KENNEDY: More than 5?
ROBINSON: — talk about non-binary as —
KENNEDY: More than 5?
ROBINSON: I think that gender is not a binary. That is what I am trying to say.
KENNEDY: But are there more than 5 genders? I am just trying to understand. Are there more than 5 genders?
ROBINSON: Well, I mean I think there was a time where women wearing pants didn’t feel like it was appropriate for their gender and yet I am wearing pants today. I think there are ways to express our gender that are expansive.
KENNEDY: Are there more than 5 genders?
ROBINSON: I wouldn’t subject myself to naming how many genders there are….
KENNEDY: Let’s get back to athletics. I think I understand what you’re saying. There are three sexes — male, female, and intersex.
ROBINSON: I believe that to be true but I am not a physician.
KENNEDY: And there are an infinite number of genders because gender is a mental state?
ROBINSON: Gender is about expression and I think there are a variety of ways that you can express your gender.
What the recent men’s incursions into formerly women’s domains — sports, beauty contests, bathrooms — demonstrate is that nothing is accepted as established by natural right, only by narrative. Reality is completely plastic with no given properties of its own. There is no reason why plasticity should apply to gender alone. No truth exists except “your truth.” If truth exists, the two cups from which we may drink are:
- Freedom arising from truth, ie “the truth shall make you free”;
- Freedom from truth. I think, therefore it is.
What’ll you have? If the correct answer is just a matter of opinion then any choice will do. Darwin had a test which our ancestors once had to ace to beget us. It went like this: “see that lion in the grass? Is it a meat eating machine or a cute kitty cat?” If the answer truly does not matter then Darwin’s test would have no effect on the probability of survival. Once it did, and this awareness is — or perhaps was until recently — hardwired into homo sapiens. Hence the saying: “you can take a person out of the Stone Age, but you can’t take the Stone Age out of a person.”
Perhaps its equally true to say that “if you take the Stone Age out of the person he will soon find his way back.” The most common explanation for the decline and fall of great empires was forgetting reality and lapsing into moral decay and intellectual corruption, embodied in the saying “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad” or in Sophocles’ version “evil appears as good in the minds of those whom god leads to destruction.” We forget the facts and it catches up with us; hubris brings on nemesis.
But to return to our two cups: suppose we can will facts into existence, doesn’t that free me from truth? The common counterargument is that technology has lifted us above facts, beyond Darwin. The gods can’t destroy us since we are now the gods. Technology has helped us to become the first species capable of adapting the environment to suit ourselves. That is why Climate Change efforts are not focused on adapting to planetary changes but controlling it, rather like setting the thermostat on the HVAC. To any sufficiently advanced technology, Darwin doesn’t matter any more, or so the argument goes. Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London, said: “in Shakespeare’s time, only about one English baby in three made it to be 21. All those deaths were raw material for natural selection, many of those kids died because of the genes they carried. But now, about 99% of all the babies born make it to that age.”
Darwin’s history. I can be free from truth. I think I’m a woman and therefore I am. But this voyage remains happy only for so long as it doesn’t run into an iceberg. We remain gods only for as long as our Olympus lasts. But as Harold Robertson warned, technology increases complexity while Woke simultaneously increases stupidity and concludes: complex systems won’t survive the competence crisis. The gods make Olympus, not the other way around.
The two cups remain on offer. What’ll you have?
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