The Gender Identity Of ... Eunuchs
Or dolphins. Looking at the nebulous nihilism of transgenderism.
What is gender identity? Since this very new term is now cemented in law, corporate practice, and now medicine as well, it’s a good question.
Here is an official description from HRC, the biggest “queer” lobby:
One’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither – how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves.
The key word, it seems to me, is neither. It means that your gender may not have anything to do with being male or female or on any kind of masculine/feminine spectrum. Your gender identity can be a tree, a fish, a Nazi, a puddle, or an earthworm — and these innermost identities must always be affirmed and be protected in law.
Like most decent people, I am more than fine with accepting that some people really do deeply feel that they are one sex and yet biologically are the opposite one. It’s rare, but very real, and I have long supported care and protection for this tiny minority of marginalized people we now call transgender. Mercifully, they are now covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And Americans are on board: in a new poll, support for protecting transgender people from discrimination has 64 percent support and only 10 percent opposition.
But what on earth does it mean to identify as no human gender, neither male nor female nor a mix, but as, say, a tree — and use “tree” as a pronoun? You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Just making shit up to make it sound insane. But wait:
Students are introduced to gender pronouns through the children’s book, “They, She, He: Easy as ABC.” The somewhat familiar pronoun ze is introduced, as are more bespoke possibilities. On one page, “Diego drums and dances. Tree has all the sounds” (tree is Diego’s preferred pronoun). For a character named Sky, all of the pronouns are right.
This is in a first-grade curriculum in Evanston/Skokie School District 65, a public-school system in the Chicago suburbs, as reported by Conor Friedersdorf. The pronoun “tree” has already been deployed by some as legitimate. I noted recently how, in another HRC-recommended book for kids, a baby “can’t decide what to be. Boy or girl? Bird or fish?” Yes: fish. The idea that children can identify as other species has now been approved in the education world. It’s being taught to your kids as truth. It is the Biden administration’s and “LGBTQ+” lobby’s view of what “gender identity” is.
It is anything you want it to be. And must always be affirmed by others.
This week I stumbled across two examples of this exponentially limitless construct. The first is a shop teacher in Canada. The teacher — who identified as a male a year ago — now comes to school and teaches in a woman’s wig and two ginormous fake boobs with sharp protruding nipples. The prosthetic breasts are so huge they are larger than the rest of her upper body and hang pendulously around her waist. This outfit cannot be criticized without violating the person’s “gender identity” as a kind of real-life, milk-porn anime character. Asking her to take off this crazy costume legally violates her human rights.
The second example was when I read the new guidelines for trans healthcare, issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. These are the approved medical guidelines for sex-changes now called “gender-affirming care.”
The guidelines remove any clear lower-age limits for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and removal of healthy organs — allowing any individual treatment at any age. A minor who, in some states, cannot legally have sex, can have breasts and womb removed, clitoris turned into a pseudo-penis, or be fully castrated. But none of this is new. What’s new is another gender identity, requiring more “gender-affirming care.”
That gender identity is a eunuch. Yes: eunuch. Money quote from the most authoritative body on transgender healthcare in a new chapter:
Eunuch individuals will present themselves clinically in various ways. They wish for a body that is compatible with their eunuch identity—a body that does not have fully functional male genitalia. Some other eunuch individuals feel acute discomfort with their male genitals and need to have them removed to feel comfortable in their bodies …
Like other gender diverse individuals, eunuch individuals may be aware of their identity in childhood or adolescence. Due to the lack of research into the treatment of children who may identify as eunuchs, we refrain from making specific suggestions.
Yes, children may identify as eunuchs, according to these experts. And a whole session at the WPATH conference this past week was devoted to the subject. Wes Yang has transcribed the session here. Read the whole thing. One expert noted:
Eunuch is the oldest recognized gender outside the binary. It’s in the Bible … It became the standard route into bureaucracy for religious hierarchy, military, and district administrators throughout the Eurasian landmass … [The reduction in reactive aggression from castration] is part of why they were so prominent in past governance. They make excellent military commanders, they can sit back and carefully plan and organize a campaign without getting caught up in the immediate emotions of it with reactive aggression.
This is called “eunuch calm.” For “eunuch-identified individuals,” it’s also related to early environment:
Close to 30 percent of both the eunuchs and the wannabes [those wanting to be castrated but still with their balls attached] had practical experience with the castration of an animal. They know what the procedure is, they know the results that occur … So there’s a lot of interest out there that is not being taken care of.
The WPATH guidelines also link to a website “which includes graphic and sexually explicit fictional descriptions of child eunuchs. When signing up to the site, called the Eunuch Archive, users are asked to select their interests from a menu of options that includes “forced castration” and “smooth look.”
Another speaker at the conference — an endocrinologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston — said:
This is probably one of the most marginalized and stigmatized communities in any culture anywhere across the world ... Withholding treatment will cause individuals harm through self-surgery, surgery by unqualified practitioners, or unsupervised use of medications.
This, of course, is the same rationale for operating on children: that if they don’t treat them, the kids will harm themselves. If this sounds like a return to the 17th century when the Vatican castrated boys to sing in choirs so that their voices would never deepen, well it is:
We have documents from some of the Italian duchies of boys coming and requesting the funds to pay the doctor to get castration, and of the funds being granted. They did fall into this as voluntary, as well.
You really have to read the whole transcript to believe it. This is the same group now determining what can and cannot be done to children who don’t conform to gender stereotypes.
I cite these examples to show that the term “gender identity” is so nebulous, so completely subjective, that it can be used to describe literally anything, any perversion, any mental illness, any deranged fantasy — like South Park’s Gerald Broflovski’s compulsion to become a dolphin. And it’s being used as a construct to tell first-graders that they can identify as a tree and a fish now. In public schools. With the full backing of the president and the Democratic Party.
I’m not nut-picking. I’m using the official description of “gender identity” to show that the term itself is nut-enabling. There are no limiting principles in a truly nebulous product of postmodernism now worming its way into our legal system.
New On The Dishcast: Christopher Hitchens
As you’ll tell from my brief new intro to this 2006 conversation, my voice right now is so eviscerated I can’t speak at all. Silenced at last! So here is a very early experiment I did with kinda-podcasting, when I took a microphone to Hitch’s place and let the tape roll. A blast from the grave in some ways.
We debated the nature of religion and the global war on terrorism, among other things. For two clips — on the divinity of Jesus, and whether the Golden Rule is actually “cruel and stupid,” as Hitch put it — pop over to our YouTube page. Listen to the whole episode here. The audio quality is a bit rough, but the pod page has a full transcript you can read.
Our episode with Louise Perry last week caused a torrent of fascinating responses, including Rod Dreher’s accusation that I am “completely consumed” by sexual desire. My response to Rod and others are on this page. Check them out.
The Swedes Turn To The Far Right
It’s a big enough story that much of the US MSM felt obliged to cover it. Sweden, long seen as a progressive, egalitarian nirvana, will now be run by a right-wing government heavily influenced by a former neo-Nazi party, the Sweden Democrats. That party just won 20 percent of the vote in the general election, and is now the second biggest in the country.
What on earth happened? Good question. According to the MSM, the voters were expressing concern about immigration and crime. The NYT’s explanation: the SD party exploited “grievances about crime, migration, identity and globalization — and the way they affect health care, schools and taxes.” The WaPo: “The party singled out crime and social issues popularly associated with immigrants, such as gang violence, sexual assault and welfare benefits dependency.”
A casual reader might ask: well, is higher crime just “popularly associated” with immigrants? Or is it actually linked? And you can scour the MSM and struggle to find any answers. The one thing the MSM will never tell you is the identity of criminals.
Here’s the data. A 2020 study found that “58 per cent of those suspect for total crime on reasonable grounds are migrants. Regarding murder, manslaughter and attempted murder, the figures are 73 per cent, while the proportion of robbery is 70 per cent.” The vast majority of migrants, it is vital to note, do not commit crime. But a big majority of violent crimes in Sweden are now committed by migrants — who comprise just a fifth of the population. The vast majority of refugees are young men — the demographic most prone to mayhem.
Then there are the explosions: “Since 2018, there have been almost 500 bombings — yes, bombings — in what is known as one of the most stable societies in the world … [Sweden] has the highest per-capita number of deadly shootings of 22 European countries — 47 fatalities so far this year.”
There’s a collapse in public order, and a big rise in public fear: “90 percent of suspects in public shootings have immigrant backgrounds.” Another detail: “There are now so many grenade attacks in Sweden that it is the only country other than Mexico in which police record the number of such attacks.” On sexual violence: “Swedish-born offenders with Swedish-born parents accounted for 40.8% of the offenders. But, strikingly, almost half of the offenders were born outside of Sweden (47.7%).” When part of only a fifth of the population is responsible for almost half the rapes, something is very wrong.
The mass immigration experiment has become, it’s now impossible to deny, a disaster. A Kurdish-Swedish economist, Tino Sanandaji, notes: “Forty-two per cent of the long-term unemployed are immigrants. Fifty-eight per cent of welfare payments go to immigrants. Forty-five per cent of children with low test scores are immigrants. Immigrants on average earn less than 40 per cent of Swedes.” Inequality has soared as a result — destroying the decades-long Swedish celebration of egalitarian social democracy. If you think of the election this way, it’s not so puzzling that the Swedes decided they needed radical change, is it? Rapid mass migration, we now know, is arsenic to egalitarian social democracy.
But why turn to the former neo-Nazis? You won’t find an answer to that in woke-captured media either. The answer is similar to the reason Americans turned to Trump: for a very long time, no one in the mainstream parties or media would acknowledge the reality of the migrant crisis or do anything about it, except call those asking questions racists and fascists. “In anonymous social surveys,” Sanandaji notes, “there was never a majority in favor of increasing migration to Sweden.”
Debate was stigmatized; data was buried (the 2020 study was the first of its kind since 2005); the majority opinion of ordinary Swedes was dismissed as “hate.” This waned over time, as even the liberal leaders realized they could not continue to pretend none of this was happening. Earlier this year, the prime minister felt she had to come clean:
Sweden has failed to integrate the vast numbers of immigrants it has taken in over the past two decades [PM Magdalena] Andersson said on Thursday, as she launched a series of initiatives to combat organized crime. Many Swedes were shocked earlier this month after violent riots left more than 100 police injured … Andersson blamed criminals and said both Islamism and right-wing extremism had been allowed to fester in Sweden, in unusually frank and self-critical comments. “Segregation has been allowed to go so far that we have parallel societies in Sweden. We live in the same country but in completely different realities.”
But by then, large numbers of Swedes had simply tuned her out. And I don’t blame them. At some point, elite indifference and sanctimony generates anger and resentment. In the immortal words of David Frum: if liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will. We’re seeing this across the Continent, as Italy now also prepares to be governed by the “far right.” Except what was once “far right” is now quite close to the political center in one of the most progressive countries on earth.
Sweden is not America, of course. Sweden remains a tiny, homogeneous country with a very limited history of mass immigration. America is a vast, multicultural, multiracial continent, with centuries of successful immigration and integration under its belt. But what the two countries do have in common is a liberal establishment committed to mass migration as a moral cause; a mainstream press that sees its job as celebrating this and suppressing any facts that might complicate the picture; and a growing number of citizens ever-more alienated as they are condescendingly told by their vice president that “the border is secure” when their own eyes can see it manifestly isn’t.
That gave us Trump. The Biden administration responded by ushering in more than a million migrants in under two years (with a record two million apprehensions, many of them repeats) — with no hope of processing them any time soon, after a year with the lowest rate of deportations since 1995, despite record-high border crossings.
We’ll see what that gives us politically soon enough. Let’s just say that the record in Sweden is not encouraging.
The View From Your Window
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 8.27 am
Money Quotes For The Week
“We’re on the escalatory ladder with a nuclear power. Every time we escalate, the media cheers. Every time they escalate, the media calls it a bluff. Dangerous recipe,” - David Sacks.
“This article is just pure nonsense — I am really surprised the Atlantic would publish such drivel,” - Martina Navratilova, on a piece advocating the end of women’s sports.
“I just fell down a thread where someone started arguing that the word ‘stupid’ is ableist and I really didn’t drink enough wine to prepare for that tonight,” - Jordan Weissmann.
Dissent Of The Week: Still Digging DeSantis?
A reader writes:
In the past you’ve been moderately bullish on DeSantis as a successor to Trumpism and an alternative to what you see as a radicalizing left. Setting aside my own vigorous disagreements with that perspective, I wonder if your view has changed given that in the last few weeks DeSantis has:
Repeatedly referred to the Biden Admin as “the regime” — a pretty open flirtation with the Big Lie and election denialism.
Claimed at NatCon that private corporations should be viewed as extensions of the government (and treated accordingly) when they agree with the president’s social policies.
Tricked asylum seekers from Venezuela onto a plane and flew them across the continent in an act of performative cruelty designed to, somehow, “own the libs.”
This just seems like Trumpism with a slightly better hairdo and worse-fitting suit. I’m wondering if you’ve come to see the same conclusion.
I have indeed been more than a little dismayed, as I’ve previously noted. Still: better than Trump. A quick correction from a reader:
You wrote, “Marriage rates have indeed declined very recently — from a rate of 6.9 per 100,000 in 2017 to 5.1 in 2020.” That should be per 1,000, not 100,000, as per your source.
Thank you for correcting the typo. Apologies. For many more dissents, check out that separate page we created for listener feedback — including Rod Dreher’s — on the sexual revolution. As always, keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Mental Health Break
The rhythms and patterns of a train ride in Portugal:
In The ‘Stacks
What the hell is happening in Iran? Know hope.
The cash-starved GOP is getting “grifted” by Trump, “who sits on his pile of cash like Smaug on his gold.” It’s probably a civil-war chest.
Is Biden really going to kill the death penalty? Likely not.
Nick Clairmont complicates the martyrdom of Jamal Khashoggi.
A woke apostate reflects on the racial stratification imposed on the dance floor: “My mind started whirring and a crushing exhaustion fell over me.” Is it any wonder why the right is becoming the new counterculture?
Barro pwns Gavin Newsom.
Ad pun FAIL.
In web publishing, is the pendulum swinging back to ads? They’re surging on platforms, and we’ll even see ads on our iPhones soon.
Kevin Williamson — once hired and quickly canceled at The Atlantic — joins la résistance!
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.
See you next Friday.