The alternative sex obsession of the woke Left is now near-ubiquitous. It’s also a bizarre ideological rabbit hole. Why spend so much time trying to convince the rest of us that biological reality isn’t real?
Three stories this morning reinforce the lunacy. (These days, probably three stories every morning could illustrate the strange phenomenon.) The September issue of (perhaps not so) Scientific American magazine insists on “ Visualizing Sex as a Spectrum ” because, supposedly, there is “a robust, evidence-based argument to reject rigid assignations of sex and gender.”
A different part of the same sentence, though, gives the game away. It says the occurrence of “disorders of sex development,” even if “broadly defined, may affect about one percent of the population.” Re-read that: Because a “broad” definition of various “intersex” biological anomalies “may” affect one in every hundred people, we are all to pretend that sex is a “spectrum.”
Never mind that it’s not a spectrum for most of the other 99% of humanity, including the additional few percent who engage in same-sex practices while still being quite sure about what makes men different from women.
Obvious physical hint: Anatomy. Further biological hint: Chromosomes.
Yes, of course, wonderful children can be born with rare and challenging genetic anomalies, but even most of those don’t involve sexual identity stemming from the presence or lack of a Y chromosome.
Oh — the same magazine tells us that “a binary framework of binary sex didn’t exist in Western culture ‘til the late 18th Century,” and — of course! — that binary sex is also, well, racist . On the former point about how binary sex appeared around 1776, we must have just imagined Genesis 1:27 , or maybe we just imagined that Genesis was written several millennia ago.
Then, there’s the “guest essay” that ran last weekend in the New York Times, oh-so cutting-edgingly headlined “ Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created .” Apparently, modern brain science, when squinted at through just the right prism (or kaleidoscope) and “with urgency and with an awareness of the cultural baggage we bring to the task,” shows that women aren’t born with maternal instinct but instead conditioned to it.
Some women aren’t cut out for parenthood, supposedly, because “it is brutal, in a sense, how completely engulfed we are by it and from multiple fronts, like a rock at the ocean’s edge, battered by waves and tides and sun and wind.”
Essayist Chelsea Conaboy writes that it was only the combination of the industrial revolution and Charles Darwin’s writings that pushed women into “domesticity” and cemented the idea that women demonstrate “inferiority” aside from “their primary function” of child rearing. All of which, of course, supposedly led to bad policy choices such as lack of “universal child-care” and other horrors.
