I’ve gotten quite a giggle these past few months over the entrance into women’s sports events of biological men who claim to be women. A curious thing happens when that’s permitted: the winner of the event is always a biological man. As my Roman ancestors might have said, mirabile dictu! (Or as a contemporary American would probably put it, “Whoda thunk it?”)
Needless to say, some women – especially women involved in women’s sports – are rather exercised about the whole thing. I can understand it perfectly. Indeed, my sympathy is boundless – right up to the point where those women are posed a very simple question:
That’s when the hemming and hawing begins.
I have no problem with a man of effeminate characteristics changing his appearance, his dress, and his manner to resemble that of a woman and thereafter living as if he is female, just as long as he doesn’t use his altered appearance to commit a crime or an interpersonal deception. That practice has been going on for quite some time, really. I’ve written about such men in my novels Experiences and The Wise and the Mad. If criminality and cruelty are absent, so is any objection I might make.
But for a well developed, athletically gifted man to exploit the current “transgenderism” craze to enter women-only sporting events is beyond any possible justification. A word I cordially detest in most contexts — unfair — is the only possible evaluation.
What’s that? You’re seriously asking why? Genetics, my good man, genetics! The Y chromosome and what goes along with it confer immense physical advantages on men over women, statistically speaking. It’s why women-only sporting competitions exist.
I would hope that the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch don’t need to have that explained to them. I think far too much of you folks. But from here we move to a couple of related topics that are, shall we say, likely to generate high emotions. I think you’ll find the contrast in attitudes illuminating.
Just as men and women differ physically, they also differ emotionally. Here again there is general if not entirely comfortable agreement. Women are more emotionally driven than men. They tend to be more dependent on their support groups than are men. (Indeed, men seldom have “support groups,” unless you count the neighborhood tavern’s collection of regular attendees.) Women are more concerned with winning the consensus of their social circles than are men.
Genetics again? Hard to say with perfect confidence, but the pattern is well established, impossible to gainsay. The same is true for the well established differences between the sexes in occupational preferences. Far fewer women are attracted to the STEM fields than are men. Despite decades of effort to attract increasing numbers of women into the scientific and technological fields, men still heavily outnumber women in all of them.
The point here is not some sort of invidious comparison. The sexes differ in several ways. The ability of one of them to conceive and bear a child is only one such. It’s not about “better” or “worse.” It’s certainly not about “value.” It’s about perceptible, enduring differences that have resisted efforts to change them and being frank about them, just as we’re frank about the athletic differences between the sexes.
Breeding matters. It always has and always will.
While there are probably characteristics one cannot breed for, it’s definite that there are things one can breed for. Physical beauty and physical prowess are among them. Why are there so many beautiful women in Southern California? Because attractive women who sought to enter the world of cinema, whether or not they succeeded in doing so, remained there, married handsome men, and produced children from those matings. No, not all of their offspring were absolute stunners, but a percentage of them were. A higher percentage than one would find elsewhere in these United States. The same is true for athletic potential, for height, for eye and hair color, and for other characteristics…including a few that one should not, ethically speaking, attempt to reproduce (e.g., deafness).
Luther Burbank knew it. What applies to plants applies with equal validity to animals and men. Gregor Mendel knew that.
The thorniest of all subjects within the envelope of heritability is intelligence. To what extent is intelligence heritable? The consensus among cognitive scientists is that there is a predisposition toward high intelligence among the children of the intelligent. The heritability factor is variously estimated to be between 20% and 60%. But few of them will say so “out loud,” as there are large, militant interest groups all too eager to destroy anyone who might suggest that breeding matters to intellect.
Yet here again, there are patterns to be observed that no man can gainsay. One of them is the difference in the distribution of IQ scores between Caucasian men and Caucasian women. The two distributions’ means are just about identical, but their standard deviations differ significantly. Why? No one knows. But the pattern has persisted for at least a century.
The number of scholars that dare to discuss such matters in public grows smaller every year. Those militant interest groups are frighteningly good at using strategically composed and placed slanders to destroy reputations and careers. Ask Arthur Jensen. Ask Philippe Rushton. Ask Charles Murray.
Only one thing do I know, and that is this: To condemn a fact because it crosscuts one’s political agenda doesn’t falsify the fact. It merely renders the condemners and those who go along with them vulnerable to their prejudices in ways that could cost them heavily at some unpredictable future time. Reality is cruel that way. It always has been to men who prefer their wishes to the observable, verifiable facts.
Wasn’t that fun? Maybe tomorrow we’ll talk about race.
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I actually just posted elsewhere the comment that if you need to check the chromosome of someone to determine how you will act towards them, you’re doing it wrong.
On the other hand, I agree with the idea that it is STUPID to believe that males competing against females in physical sports is ok.
“Is a transwoman a FEMALE” gets the answer of NO. But she can be a woman. Gender and sex are not synonyms. So the debate is not over womanhood, but over biology. And that is where the transactivists are delusional and the ‘defenders’ of womanhood mistaken.
There has long been a connection between intelligence and affluence, that is the children of affluent parents tend to be more intelligent on average than those children born of parents of more modest means. Intelligence is almost invariably measured through performance on some sort of standardized test. There are many people who claim that this indicates standardized testing and education favors the wealthy, and also favors whites, and is therefore the basis for so-called ‘white privilege’. My own pet theory on why this is so goes like this:
People who are affluent are usually more wealthy because they value knowledge. (Note that knowledge and education are not always the same thing.) Since they value knowledge, they impart their love for knowledge on their children, who in turn will outperform the children whose parents do not value skills and knowledge. This neatly explains why Jewish and Asian children often outperform other demographics on standardized tests. After all, Asians and Jews have an almost religious reverence for education and hard work.
I can think of one instance wherein the woman questioned “Is the transwoman a woman in truth?”may well answer “Well, she deserves points for consistency.”
In the competition for whining, Jim Acosta always beat Kayleigh McEnany and the both contestants seemed fine with it.
What bothers and amazes me most is how these males who have altered their appearance can believe it is fair or acceptable to be a male ringer in an all-female athletic event. Regardless of what surgical or pharmaceutical alterations they have made to their appearance, every cell of their body is still male. Also, they have had the huge advantage of receving massive daily doses of testosterone during their adolescent years (compliments of Mother Nature), enabling them to have greater muscle mass, bone mass, strength, speed, and endurance than virtually ANY actual born-female woman.
They KNOW that they have unfair advantages that no woman can win against, and yet they still think it is a fair competition. Any real man would feel burning shame to compete and ‘win’ against women, and would not consider himself a winner. These so-called ‘women’ are thus mentally and morally defective. And because of their fundamental moral turpitude, I have nothing but scorn for them.
Intelligence for men and women is a different thing.
The IQ tests measure a very particular type of intelligence, related to ability to benefit from academic instruction. On the other hand, there are more practical indicators of “smarts” that are not tested:
The ability to “read” others. That’s a type of intelligence that is quite beneficial in life, yet high IQ people are often woefully deficient in that aspect. And, while women may cause their problems in a male-dominated environmet, by using those tools that work in female places, they also can outperform men in getting a team of women to work towards a goal.
With that above ability, comes the associated ability to correctly judge the motivations of people – in short, those with that ability can often “smell” a con (and, if less honest, to put one on). Many high IQ people have been duped out of their life savings, by someone who is well within the average part of the bell curve. They are deficient in that sort of street smarts. My Dad made a bundle of money in WWII, playing poker with the “educated” soldiers who knew that they were smarter than a hillbilly high-school dropout.
Manual dexterity, which, when allied with a willingness to rely on a semi-intuitive understanding of the proper functioning of systems, allows the not-exceptional intellects to get that car or other machine to work properly. I’ve seen mechanics listen to the sound of the car, and figure out the problem. In prior societies, these were the guys who could get the mill running, the horse team working together, and the edifice to be built. They are ‘smart enough’ for the job.
Ability to find the essential tasks to focus on, and ignoring other input that distracts from that mission. Many people have trouble with that, yet the IQ tests would not necessarily pick up that useful trait.
For most women, an education that focuses on development of useful traits would lead to a better life than one that tries to mold women into psuedo-men. There is a time and place for academics, and a need to realize that practical schooling is also important.
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Linda, aptitudes and special skills of the sort you describe here are not intelligence. Intelligence is the capacity to reason logically, accurately, and in some situations, quickly. That’s why we have a special word for it — and I’ll fight to the death any attempt to redefine the word intelligence to salve anyone’s feelings or support anyone’s agenda. We can find value in those aptitudes and skills, in the contexts in which they prove useful, without distorting our understanding of human mentation.