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Reading List – On Gender & Sexuality
A Sex-Positive Framework for Research on Adolescent Sexuality
Harden argued for a “sex-positive framework for research on adolescent sexuality” that considers “consensual sexual activities in adolescence as developmentally normative and potentially healthy,” in contrast to a “risk” framework “that presumes that abstinence from sexual activity is the ideal behavioral outcome for teenagers.”
The needless, self sabotaging lies of the LGBT Movement
Adults should have the right to engage in consensual behavior with other adults and to bear the costs of that behavior. They should have the right to pay for the body modifications of their choosing. This is the only argument that was ever necessary. It does not require any false or misleading factual claims. It does not require the politicization of science. It stands strong whether homosexuality is pervasive across species and whether sexual orientation or gender identity are innate and unchanging traits. Choosing this stance could mean giving up some things that activists want. Perhaps it means people cannot force coworkers to use their preferred pronouns, the end of youth medical transitions, and the restoration of many single-sex spaces. It is a stable compromise: leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone. Asking for anything more than this risks throwing us out of equilibrium and creating cycles of oscillating backlash. As soon as you start imposing on other people, they will push back.
What Is A Woman?
Chappell doesn’t think that we can give any of these terms neat definitions, but has suggested that being transgender involves wanting to transition from one sex to another . In short: Biological men who want to be biological women are transgender women. Chappell also suggests that transgender women are those who want to transition from one gender to another, where gender is defined in terms of social norms, not biology. I’m wary of this suggestion, since it comes quite close to the sexist view that being a woman is a matter of acting like a woman. But there’s an acceptable interpretation in the vicinity. Gender norms are not just about how particular people act, but about how they are treated by others. A (biological) man who wants to be treated the way that (biological) women are generally treated, and thought of in the way that (biological) women are generally thought of, should be considered a transgender woman. So these, then, are our two coherent definitions of the term “woman.” The first is a biological definition: a woman(1) is someone who has the homeostatic cluster of biological properties that are characteristic of adult human females. With this definition in hand, we can define a trans woman as a man(1) who wants to be a woman(1) or wants to be thought of and treated the way that women(1) are treated. And now we can give our second definition of “woman:” a woman(2) is anyone who is either a woman(1) or a trans woman. Adopting two definitions for the term “woman” means that everyone wins. Those who insist that “woman” refers to a biological category are correct. Those who insist that “woman” can be defined in social terms, and that trans women are women, are also correct.
Designing Women: The Definition of “Woman” in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
I argue for the definition of the term “woman” as any person who is biologically, anatomically, and/or genetically female and/or who performs and/or identifies as a woman.
What Is a Woman?
It’s rather amazing that the definition of a woman is debated today. It wasn’t long ago that no one asked this question. It’s not because no one knew the answer—virtually everyone did. Rather, no one contested the answer. We live in a different world now. People give less authority to external reality and more authority to inner thoughts and feelings.
What Does It Mean to Be a Woman? It’s Complicated
Labeling others contrary to how they have labeled themselves is an ethically loaded act, but “woman” remains a useful shorthand for the entanglement of femininity and social status regardless of biology—not as an identity, but as the name for an imagined community that honors the female, enacts the feminine and exceeds the limitations of a sexist society.
When a transgender person identifies as a woman, what exactly are they identifying as? What does the word ‘woman’ mean?
A woman is an adult human female. A transgender woman is a male who lives as a woman. These are two completely separate lived experiences and, if logic is employed, would use different words to describe the two different groups that they belong to. A male can never be female and cannot be a woman without the “trans” identifier.
Sophie Cunningham’s Common Sense
What was required was not just the subversion of our instinctive sense—what Cunningham calls “common sense”—that it was both unfair and immoral to force women to swim against a post-pubescent male; it was the rejection of the epistemic reality that undergirded our moral intuitions. Photographs from this period depict the six-feet-four-inch Thomas literally towering over the competition: broad-shouldered, square-jawed, intact penis and testicles bulging conspicuously beneath a women’s tank-style swimsuit. As naked emperors go, this one was both indelible and undeniable—and yet, denying it was what the party demanded.
Gavin Newsom’s former aide Ruby Rippey breaks silence on 2007 affair; Kamala Harris advised her to stay silent, California Governor responds through spokesperson
Reflecting on the aftermath of the scandal and the later #MeToo movement, Rippey said she disagreed with narratives that completely removed her responsibility because she was a subordinate.
Sex Ed
At some point in the history of the modern women’s movement, the belief that men and women are psychologically indistinguishable became sacred. The reasons are understandable: Women really had been held back by bogus claims of essential differences. Now anyone who so much as raises the question of innate sex differences is seen as “not getting it” when it comes to equality between the sexes. The tragedy is that this mentality of taboo needlessly puts a laudable cause on a collision course with the findings of science and the spirit of free inquiry.
Adventures In Antimisandry
Also I think it’s best to avoid value judgments as much as possible. They have made discussion of gender politics very difficult and sensitive, thereby warping the play of ideas.
How Roy Baumeister challenged the idea of self-esteem (2014)
The mistake of many modern feminists, he writes, is that they “look only at the top of society and draw conclusions about society as a whole. Yes, there are mostly men at the top. But if you look at the bottom, really at the bottom, you’ll find mostly men there, too.” His examples: The homeless; the imprisoned; the people who die at work, 92 percent of whom are male. The popular modern view is that it’s women who are most poorly valued by culture. But, ever the contrarian, Baumeister says men are demonstrably “more expendable than women.”
Marlon Wayans, Father of Trans Son, Defends Friendship With Dave Chappelle
“You’re supposed to align yourself with your children because you want your children ultimately to be happy,”
Lesbian Intimate Partner Violence:
Prevalence and Dynamics
As an aside, one cultural feature I would like to delete from Nigerian society is men paying their female friends for sex. Stop. Paying. For. Sex.
If you’re going to pay, find an actual sex worker, do your transaction, have your experience, and keep it pushing. Don’t let that transactional stuff thing seep into your real life. Stop making it socially acceptable for people to have sex with each other in exchange for money without the psychological acknowledgment that this is prostitution (which to be clear, I have nothing against). Sex is not a precious or rare commodity. It is not a capitalist invention. It is a human experience which must either be freely experienced or traded in an acknowledged transaction. While I am a proud advocate for prostitution (I think it serves a very important societal role), I think it is very important to keep prostitution and regular human relationships firewalled away from each other. Because this lack of firewall is taking human relationships in Nigeria into this weird, hyper-financialised space where even in committed relationships and marriages, people are trading sex for money. Even in schools now, kids are normalising trading money for sexual favours. So instead of going through the normal, awkward, personality-building teenage development phase that a boy must pass through to become a man, boys are now learning that money is this magic shortcut/hack for getting everything including the girl you like without actually putting in effort or improving yourself in any way – that money in and of itself is what gives you value. Part of the manifestation of the externally-driven modification of our society that I keep warning about is that 15 years ago, a 14 year-old boy in Igbosere who wanted to date the cute girl in his class would have had to make an effort to learn to hold a conversation, dress and smell good, maybe play a sport or 2 and learn to speak confidently so that Tinuke would notice him. Nowadays, his immediate visual reference for what “man near me who gets all the girls” looks like is one dirty loser on Twitter called Ezra who looks like he has a permanent smell, or one Yahoo Boy down the street with colour riot clothes and trousers hanging below his butt – simply because they wield money. Someone is trying to morph Nigerian men into a group of disgusting, pathetic losers who try to fill the void in their souls by paying for everything under the sun including love, and we must resist it. There are only so many rich perverts and liquid social deviants. If enough Nigerian men collectively stop normalising the hyper-monetisation of sex, the equilibrium will be restored. Both the Yahoo Boy with the blue tongue and mouth odour inside his Mercedes GLK, and the sociopath nerd waving his American VC dollars inside his Tesla are signs of the same loser disease that someone wants to become our norm, and we mustn’t be afraid to tell losers that they are losers. A loser does not cease to be a loser simply on account of wielding money – money itself is a construct.
The Limits of the Bit
Instead of the carte blanche of the bit, we could opt to commit to the concepts that we mobilize, and to being accountable to their consequences.
Think Gender Is Performance? You Have Judith Butler to Thank for That.
And yet completing this feat of endurance today leaves the liberal-artsy reader with a curious sense of lightness. The feeling is not of your worldview’s being upended but rather thoroughly explained. That gender is not an essential biological fact: Sure. That it comes into being through repeated actions, so, like, I become recognizable as a “girl” by doing girl things: Okay. That the world as we know it has generally presumed everyone to be straight; that people who don’t play by the rules, gender-wise, straightness-wise, pay the price; and that, while maybe we can’t totally escape all of this, we can find ways of questioning it, possibly even undermining it, and so making life more livable for everybody: Yeah, sounds about right.
How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way
The gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, had long asked for simple liberal equality and mutual respect — live and let live. Reform, not revolution. No one’s straight marriage would change if gay marriage arrived, we pledged. You can bring up your children however you like. We will leave you alone.
Andrea Long Chu Is the Cult Writer Changing Gender Theory
Gender identity is maximally essentialist,” Chu says, reversing the popular claim that gender identity is the liberating escape route from a genital-based logic of gender.”It leaves no room for anything else, because you are [characterized as having been] always exactly what you are. Gender deviance becomes ontologically impossible under the gender identity model—like, ‘Oh, since you were always a woman, you shouldn’t have to—’ It’s like, No, bitch! The whole point of this was to change. That means there has to be a before. Even if that before is uncomfortable.
The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies.
By asserting the freedom of sex, we may stop relying on the increasingly metaphysical concept of gender identity to justify sex-changing care, as if such care were only permissible when one’s biological sex does not match the serial number engraved on one’s soul. The same goes for “sex assigned at birth,” which unhelpfully obscures the very biological processes that many people have a right to change.
‘White Lotus’ and the Plight of the American Man
Lost, threatened, vulnerable to loneliness and disoriented by societal expectations that tell them to do one thing and individual human beings who often want the opposite, the men here tread on shaky, ever shifting ground; an active volcano rumbles in the distance
Maria Miller called me a fake feminist over gender self-ID. Now she says I was right all along
It is still shocking to me that Miller could be so little versed in feminism that she could sign off a report advising a change to the Equality Act, replacing “gender reassignment” with “gender identity” as a protected characteristic, without realising the profound public policy implications of that change. At a stroke, she advised changing our concept of gender from something that is partially socially constructed – how you are treated – to entirely a matter of internal essence. She entered the realm of metaphysics, asserting that everyone has a gender identity, something which no instrument can measure. That isn’t the kind of thing you can casually toss out in paragraph 4.108 and expect everyone to nod through, unless you have no idea what you’re proposing. It may well be that our understanding of gender will change significantly in the future, but it’s something which will have to be subject to public discussion, since it affects all of us, not just trans people.
Consent by Vanessa Springora review – a memoir of lost adolescence
What Matzneff dismisses as “hardness” and “disillusionment” in adult women is actually capacity – rooted in experience – for negotiating ambiguity and desire. Springora shows that it is Matzneff himself, not “life”, who initiates her into disillusionment and despair.
https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1918747065460420745
Undoubtedly there will be further occasions such as this where the rights of transgender individuals compete with the rights of other protected groups, and a decision must be made as to how best to navigate this difficult area.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘Becoming transgender is a sacred journey’
“ To be trans is to enter a sacred journey of becoming whole: precious, honoured and loved, by yourself, by others and by God.”
A New Biography Presents Gandhi, Warts and All
In the wake of #MeToo, we know that the powerful may delude themselves about the willingness of those they manipulate, and that their less powerful victims may go along with things they do not want because they are overwhelmed by the status of their abuser.
Homophobia in drag
Sylvester, an androgynous disco icon of the 1970s and 1980s, was once asked what gay liberation meant to him. He answered, ‘I could be the queen that I really was without having a sex change or being on hormones’.
The Queers Versus The Homosexuals
The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body. Because heterosexuality is the overwhelming norm, and homosexuality the exception, and because society is nothing but a complex of oppression, homosexuals are defined by their rejection of heteronormativity. To be queer is inherently to exist on the margins; to be odd, peculiar, weird, queer, hated, oppressed, and in revolt and rebellion. To be queer is to be dedicated to subversion, to mock conventions, to deconstruct language, to dismantle the human body, to defy “nature” and, above all, to liberate humankind from the prison of gender.
Harvey Weinstein Is Monster of the Moment, but the Whole System Is Rigged
I confess I found it refreshing to shelter briefly in a world where sex was just something people did together, not a trauma in the making.
University Rejects Calls to Fire Camille Paglia
It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women’s studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects,” she said. “The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.” Paglia has said that she supports equal rights and does not object to people defining their sexual orientations and gender identities as they wish — including in ways frowned upon by traditionalists. But she has defended the right of scholars to question some of the stances taken by some who support transgender rights. Via email, she said that she identifies as being transgender — and that she regularly talks about the great contributions made to art and society by people who cross gender boundaries.
Transgender ideology will lose Biden the election
The Cass report simply found what a growing chorus of Americhttps://brighterthansunflowers.com/2023/08/21/guest-post-on-zero-sum-nonmonogamous-family-and-consent/ans suspected: Our capacity for tolerance was preyed upon by radicals in academia, business, and media who foisted an experiment on children en masse.
Helping Trans Kids Means Admitting What We Don’t Know.
To the radical, the easiest way to win a debate is to insist that the only choice is between opposing poles. If you oppose any element of their argument, you have endorsed the enemy. If the criticism is tempered and credible, this only makes them regard it as more dangerous.
How Pride lost itself
In the ultimate betrayal of the gay rights movement, steeped in liberationist and civil libertarian politics, the Pride flag has come to represent a thoroughly intolerant, authoritarian tendency. The gender identitarians are not interested in liberation or equality or tolerance. They demand affirmation – submission. They are in the business of both compelling and suppressing speech, of threatening the livelihoods and reputations of dissenters, of disrupting their opponents’ ability to peaceably assemble, of politically and socially ostracising those who think differently.
The mystery of gay animals
Science is meant to be about striving to better understand our world, just because it’s interesting, “ because it’s there ”, because we can. For politicised areas, a dose of plain, unmotivated interest is especially needed. If we stigmatise whole realms of research, well-meaning scientists will avoid showing an interest in sensitive topics, and only those with an axe to grind remain. Scientists must actively commit to protecting curiosity for curiosity’s sake. Asking why the sky is blue need not carry the subtext that it ought to be some other colour instead.
Being gay is not biological
It’s a shame that this view of homosexuality, as neither fixed biological orientation nor “radical” disruptive force, has been forgotten. Key victories in gay rights have not given way to a “post-gay” moment of self-reflection for those who feel predominantly same-sex desire see themselves not as “other” but as universally human. Instead, we see a doubling down of identitarianism, particularly online, where every kink, feeling and sexual experience is ripe for categorisation.
The six key things from Piers Morgan’s interview with Rishi Sunak
“we should have enormous compassion and tolerance and understanding for those who are questioning their gender and identity.” Mr Sunak said: “But we have to recognise the challenges that that poses, particularly for women’s safety. For me… whether it’s sex, whether it’s women’s spaces, whether it’s prisons, biological sex really matters.”
The emptiness of being queer
Relatedly, a serious historical inquiry might ask: how did Stonewall move from defending the rights of homosexuals in the Nineties to arguing in 2022 that lesbian women should date members of the opposite sex — that is, males who identify as women — or else be judged as motivated by “social prejudice” and even “sexual racism” ? And while historians were at it, they might also consider how our society has moved from the laudable aim of depathologising homosexuality, to a now fairly widespread acceptance of the chemical castration of confused gay youth, under the guise of “transitioning” them — a fate horribly reminiscent of the one meted out so vindictively to Turing. All fascinating historical questions, none of which are remotely likely to be asked within the glossy corporate-friendly walls of Queer Britain, I predict.
Pride is no place for homosexuals
This, surely, is the stuff that matters. It’s the stuff we once used to care about, before a fragile generation started treating polite disagreement as “genocide” and our rebranded community acquired a reputation for cry-bully tantrums. One day, I hope, the gender wars will end and we can return to those more proportionate values.
Richard Dawkins: There are two sexes and that’s all there is to it
There are two sexes. You could talk about gender, if you wish and that’s subjective.
Piers: But when people say there are 100 genders?
Richard: I’m not interested in that. As a biologist, there are two sexes and that’s all there is to it.
The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count
The women’s movement and the gay rights movement, after all, tried to free the sexes from the construct of gender, with its antiquated notions of masculinity and femininity, to accept all women for who they are, whether tomboy, girly girl or butch dyke. To undo all this is to lose hard-won ground for women — and for men, too.
I live in a sexual and romantic world without women, where no patriarchy could definitionally exist, a subculture with hookups and relationships and marriages and every conceivable form of sexual
desire that straight men and women experience as well. And you know what you find? That men behave no differently in sexual matters when there are no women involved at all. In fact, remove women, and you see male sexuality unleashed more fully, as men would naturally express it, if they could get away with it.
So to end more straightforwardly, I will make a prediction: Within not too short a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence, inspired by ideological motives rather than scientific rigor, in a way that future generations will regard as a grave medical-political scandal.
Which means that if you are a liberal who believes as much already, but you don’t feel comfortable saying it, your silence will eventually become your regret.
Hot Joel Summer
Perfecting his body became the price of entry, a way to make himself visible and viable.
The Bittersweet Silliness of Hulu’s Fire Island
The script does not judge drugs or sex, but it is attuned to the comedown, and moreover, to them what’s next that yawns between highs.
Fire Island review: A sweet, queer rom-com that takes aim at Jane Austen’s ‘hetero nonsense’
The script does not judge drugs or sex, but it is attuned to the comedown, and moreover, to them what’s next that yawns between highs.
Has the gay movement turned down the wrong path? Bill Andriette talks with Pagliaabout sex, violence, gaybashing, and liberation
I think that that is a trap the gay movement fell into. Stonewall should have been about liberating all sexuality. The argument in my work is to try to convince heterosexuals that they have in them potential homosexual impulses that are pleasure-giving, and that there is absolutely nothing to fear from now and then expressing them. I would think that this would be in the interest of gay people to think that the whole world is open for homosexual expression.
But gay activism, by insisting on this sharp polarity, has insured its own defeat, has insured that the world will hate it. There will always be a liberal minority that will tolerate homosexuality, the art world and so on. But the majority of people now and forever in the future will always be attracted to the opposite sex. So the more you insist on the separation of gay versus straight, the genetically innate separation, the more you insure the defeat of gay objectives. I think the only way true tolerance will come is for people to be convinced that bisexual responsiveness is a perfectly achievable ideal. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to convince people that, “So you had sex with another man, oh, big deal.”
How to Stop Rushing Into Love
There are no good people or bad people here. We only risk becoming something static when we decide that we’ve got it all figured out and that our moral code can be absolute. We will all do good things and bad things, and we will all hurt the people we love. Sadly, we will probably hurt them the most in the service of what we believe is right. What makes you good is not perfection in action or strictness to code, but the willingness to question, to change, and to listen to your heart when your life stops matching it.
Unfortunately, far too many believed removing pregnancy from the equation was all that’s needed for women to behave like men. Sex, people thought, would become a free-for-all.Tell that to all the men—not the Harvey Weinsteins but men like Ansari—who’ve been accused of “assaulting” women by taking them at their word and assuming women want what men want.
How dare they believe what women and society told them all these years?
When Does a Watershed Become a Sex Panic?
If the presumption of innocence is rooted in the idea that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than risk jailing one innocent person, then the policing of sex seems to assume that it’s better to have ten times less sex than to risk having a nonconsensual sexual experience. The problem is not just that this reduces the amount of sex people are likely to be having; it also serves to blur the boundaries between rape, nonviolent sexual coercion, and bad, fumbling, drunken sex. The effect is both to criminalize bad sex and trivialize rape.
Discussing Consent in Gay Spaces Requires Nuance, Not Sex Panic
To suggest that the initial placement of a hand is in itself assault, however, completely betrays this contract and willfully ignores that consent can work differently in different contexts
Cruising in the Age of Consent
For women, sex remained “a bargaining tool”—something too socially significant to be casual, and something that could be taken, possibly by violence. At The Club, by contrast, everybody really was after the same thing: sex for the sake of sex. Brute coercion didn’t appear to be an issue. She walked away wishing that she had her own bathhouse to go to—that such free pleasure might be possible for women, too. And yet something still nagged at her. “Is this fuck palace the ultimate conclusion of sexist logic,” she wondered, “or is it erotic freedom?”
