November 4, 2022 - 10:12am
A Dundee flasher has appeared in court simultaneously as Alan and Alannah Morgan, on a series of charges in which Morgan is listed variously as a man and a woman.
Based on reporting from the case, Morgan sounds like a deeply disturbed individual. He was carrying a knife, shouting incoherently, kicking bins and flinging around slices of pizza. Once apprehended, he shouted, swore, banged on the cell door, and pulled his trousers down to expose his buttocks and genitals, before urinating on the cell floor.
This is not behaviour we associate with a balanced person. Nor, bluntly, is claiming to be simultaneously a man and a woman, when this is clearly empirically false. And yet — thanks to concerted campaigns by activists — courts and police forces are now compelled to humour this claim, a claim that’s then repeated by news reporting.
The Scottish Sun’s reporting veers back and forth between pronouns, leaving the reader to discern who is being referred to.
Elsewhere, Scotland’s Daily Record opts for the increasingly common practice of reporting the crimes of obviously male individuals as perpetrated by a ‘woman’, referring to Morgan as such in its headline. Here the Daily Record seems to have adopted the Green Party approach, according to which ‘woman’ is now a wildly expansive term that encompasses everyone who can’t or won’t be straightforwardly categorised as a man.
But what is the reason for all this pandering to obvious nonsense? The most charitable explanation is that it’s downstream of a desire, that originates in liberal feminism, to rid the world of sex-based stereotypes believed to hold us all back from individual self-realisation.
Other well-documented normative differences between men and women — physiological variation, career preferences or patterns in sexual behaviour — are now handled with extreme caution as political hot potatoes. In most cases, they are waved on as, obviously, entirely a consequence of social stereotypes. This is argued even in the case of sex differences as consistent and universal as male-offending patterns. The push to abolish sex stereotypes, in other words, forbids us to notice any sexed patterns at all, lest this impede the efforts of a handful of women to become oil-rig engineers or software developers.
The problem is that pattern recognition is how we make sense of the world. Think of well-understood patterns as mental habits, ones that enable us to recognise familiar situations and save us having to reason every situation out from first principles. Without such cognitive short-cuts, we would be overwhelmed at every point by a welter of confused stimuli coming at us, non-stop, from the world. This is a situation indistinguishable, in fact, from madness.
Rather than asking why public servants and institutions are now giving in to this kind of idiocy, we should recognise that a progressive demand to rid culture of all stereotypes — which is to say, cognitive shortcuts — effectively compels them to do so. By demanding our public servants and institutions pretend even important, measurable and politically salient patterns don’t exist, we literally render those institutions unable to think. We are driving our own institutions insane.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeMy goodness : simultaneously man and woman!
Does this make him Schroedinger’s pervert?
Human sex is in fact an offshoot of particle/wave theory and quantum uncertainty. I now understand why I don’t understand it anymore.
Very good
He is in a prison cell, which is kind of like a box.
Yes. A quantum wave function collapses when you make an observation.
In this case, by pulling its pants down.
Surely his pants are both up and down until the custody officer peeks through the hatch?
How dare you mis-gender her by using the pronoun ‘his’?
You are nothing but a hetero-normative bigot!
Funnily enough Schroedinger provides an excellent approach to addressing the dilemma of how to interpret people’s preferences today without causing offence – just view their sexuality as anything possible unless you choose to open their ‘box’.
I’m not opening ANYONE’s box, Ian!
Haha, nice one!
I suppose the quickest way to close down all those complaints about the patriarchy is for us men to collectively identify as women. We don’t actually have to dress or behave differently as any challenge to our status as women could be met by pointing out that that involves stereotyping what a women is by her clothes and behaviour which of course is against woke ideology as plenty of lesbians dress and behaviour in a stereotypical masculine manner.
I for one am heartily sick of being typecast as an oppressive male and this seems the clear way out. Jeremy is a unisex name as far as I am concerned so I am not going to change my name and as for my pronouns I have never demanded anyone refer to me by a male pronoun and don’t intend to change that. The only thing that changes is that I am now no longer a member of this supposed oppressive class of white male oppressive patriarchs. Didn’t I mention I had also decided to be a member of the colourless class. I trust everyone will respect my choices.
I also consider myself to be a Transparent Omni Sexual being. We’re an emerging minority don’t you know.
Excellent idea! Thank you, ma’am.
You’re just using your white privileged education to exploit diversity – there’s no escaping their damnation!
This would then be described as ‘the greatest crime the patriarchy ever committed’. There ain’t no pleasing those people.
Presumably as they simultaneously witter on about being kind.
To every problem there are two solutions: One so convoluted and demanding that it has very little chance of being implemented, and the other so obvious and easy that it has absolutely NO chance of being implemented.
I would say that your solution fits into the first category; the second answer would be to accept that XY and external genitalia = male, and XX & internal gen. = female.
“…courts and police forces are now compelled to humour this claim…”
WHY?
Why are they “compelled”? They’re not. We’re not. It’s our country, our society, and our laws. If people choose to be misfits and lawbreakers, we can and should just lock them up until they grow up.
It’s not compulsion but rank cowardice that is the reason for institutional capitulation to such obvious nonsense.
Cowardice and anticipatory obedience.
I’d settle for him keeping his trousers up.
You’re right. They are not compelled, but fear of a so-called “sh•tstorm” on Twitter & Co. by a small, but very vocal and verbally (perhaps even physically?) violent minority, is enforcing compliance as a form of anticipatory obedience. We, the rational majority, remain mostly silent, giving the minority an even louder voice. It’s a mixture of cowardice and the Spiral of Silence Theory by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann.
Unable to fit into the world as a conventional boy (but not wanting to do so as a conventional girl), I spent many years believing that my ultimate enemy was “gender.” At first, feminism seemed to be a source of hope. If women could “reimagine” femininity, after all, why couldn’t men “reimagine” masculinity? Why make any distinction at all between men and women except for childbirth? But I was wrong. Like it or not, men and women are not identical, let alone free-floating fantasies that can mean either anything or nothing.
Harrington, however, is making a much larger and more important point, because gender is only one system of distinctions among many. We can’t continue to dismantle all cultural and natural distinctions, what she calls “cognitive shortcuts,” without paying a very heavy price. We can alter this one or that one, to be sure, but not the very idea of distinctions.
What she calls collective “insanity” amounts to collective suicide, the ultimate result of a rebellion against reason that originated (in modern times) with romanticism in the nineteenth century, continued with avant-garde movements in art, literature and music in the early twentieth century and postmodernism in the mid-twentieth century. Without the latter’s replacement of objectivity (including science) with subjectivity (including “deconstruction” and “identity politics”), ideological feminism and wokism would have been actually unthinkable.
The result is a celebration of upheaval (a.k.a. “change”) as an end in itself. The goal is not merely to make room in the public square for formerly marginalized groups but to destroy the public square–and with it a civilization that has cultivated thinking no less than feeling. Political activists today rely not on guns and tanks, to be sure, but on far more effective weapons. These include everything from clever word games and intellectual sophistry to journalistic bias and moral or legal double standards to what I call the “teaching of contempt” and the “mobilization of resentment” (let alone legal intimidation and censorship) in order to undermine every institution from within–in other words, to replace one civilization with an ill-defined utopian one.
That’s an interesting analysis. I don’t agree with some of your points, but in reminding us of the greater problem to which Mary points us in the article, you’ll get my uptick.
Very briefly, the industrial and post-industrial worlds are very different from that which spawned the Enlightment – indeed, they’re a product of it. Romanticism can be seen as a very natural and human reaction against the removal of man from his hitherto natural habitat. What therefore follows as flowing from that hiatus can also be seen as entirely natural, and even necessary as a prelude to a new (for want of a better term) reformation. I remain optimistic whilst deeply questioning.
Very good analysis. What is labelled as distinctions, I call categories.
I would recommend James Lindsay’s recent “bullets” podcast called Totalitarianism and the Progressive Impulse, available at his new discourses YouTube channel.
The problem is more basic, the universal faith in progress or in “the right side of history” or even in Enlightenment liberalism itself.
“We can’t continue to dismantle all cultural and natural distinctions”
Secular liberalism requires us to do exactly that though. If Mill is correct that “my rights only stop at your nose”, then cultural and natural distinctions must be eliminated, since they will inevitably interfere with my (or someone’s) individual autonomy. Liberalism seeks to liberate; it really can’t stop.
The Enlightenment thinkers were too busy waxing eloquently about “Natural Law” and “Inalienable Rights” to notice that the system they were building tended to undermine exactly the sort of natural and cultural norms and standards that were a precondition for its existence. 300 years later… it’s finally collapsing into an orgy of secular, radical individualism.
Uptick
If something is neither : male, female, or even ‘Good Red Herring’ should it be referred to as ‘it’?
“The Dundee flasher’s pronouns are driving us mad”
But can Mary really assume that “our” pronouns really are “us”?
Mary is on a roll indeed.
I think this article should be read in conjunction with some passages of Kathleen Stock’s from earlier today.
Kathleen Stock, while routinely lionised for her brave stand against the bullies and vandals intent on erasing our cognitive categories, was, and where it suits her book, remains a category denier and wrecker of the first order. What was it Mary said? Oh yes. “… it’s downstream of a desire, that originates in liberal feminism, to rid the world of sex-based stereotypes believed to hold us all back from individual self-realisation.” We’re pretty blooming far downstream, as evidenced by the winsome Alan|Alannah, and Kathleen Stock just doesn’t like it, and now makes a career out of girning about it.
The individual may be deeply disturbed – fancy flinging around slices of pizza. What a waste.
To be fair, I ordered a Tops Pizza sometime ago and it was vile. Each slice was duly ‘flung around’, and until I read this article I wouldn’t consider myself disturbed.
In northern parts, we have annual pie-throwing, black pudding-tossing and Yorkshire pudding flinging contests, albeit the latter in deepest Lancashire (Ramsbottom) which pretty much defines all us locals as deeply disturbed whilst we happily gurn away. Oh, and there’s a gurning championship too…
By the by, the succinctness of Mary’s woke-skewering abilities are in a league of their own.
”He was carrying a knife, shouting incoherently, kicking bins and flinging around slices of pizza.” — reminds me of one of those teenaged turtles from the 80s
‘ By demanding our public servants and institutions pretend even important, measurable and politically salient patterns don’t exist, we literally render those institutions unable to think. We are driving our own institutions insane.’
Brilliant! Should be quoted widely and often.
I would think a “flasher” would be particularly easy to pronoun correctly.
The whole reason she/he/it is in custody is because he/she/it was demonstrating its/hers/his biological pronouns in the most graphic way.
Edit again, Brian. It’s translates to “it is.”
See! Stupid made up pronouns are a pain in the butt. 🙂
I did. Thanks.
I actually think they are driving themselves insane as it’s mainly them driving this.
“But what is the reason for all this pandering to obvious nonsense?”
It is a sign of the end times.
I’ve now realised how easy it is for any organisation to eliminate its gender pay gap.
Thanks, Marie for being the voice of reason,
The trouble is, no one is listening. Polititions are
mererly appealing to th mob to gey their votes==all paoties.
I, simply. won’t voye anymore.
Indeed, what is described by so called progressives as unconscious bias, *phobia and such postmodern terms as “comptemporary” or “ambient” racism/sexism is simply a heuristic behaviour.
Failure to recognise this is the typical ploy of bad faith actors
“The problem is that pattern recognition is how we make sense of the world. Think of well-understood patterns as mental habits, ones that enable us to recognise familiar situations and save us having to reason every situation out from first principles.”
The word for this is “heuristic”.
We are today seeing the collision between two opposite theories of sex and gender. The feminists declare that gender is a social construct- there are no intrinsic differences between the sexes, every observed difference is a result of societal pressure. The trans ideologues claim the opposite – that there is a hard-wired immutable gender programmed into the brain, irrespective of biological sex. Neither extreme position is correct, and there are mountains of empirical evidence to demonstrate the falsity of both.
“The trans ideologues claim the opposite – that there is a hard-wired immutable gender programmed into the brain”
In other words, we are back in the 19th century and a world of male and female brains. The supposed existence of such differences and the implied inferiority of the female brain based on its smaller size, a conflation of quality and quantity, was then used to keep women out of universities and to withhold voting rights — amongst other things. I believe in the equality of the sexes (there are only two not counting genuine chromosomal disorders), but I completely agree with you that both feminists and trans ideologues are simply wrong.
Are European countries obsessed with gender self-identification, altering their language to comply with the demands of small pressure groups and bringing in legislation to confuse the justice system. I doubt it!
All this shows is that our public institutions are crazier, and more stupid, than he is.
“ … we should recognise that a progressive demand to rid culture of all stereotypes …”
Ok. I’ll bite. What is a progressive?
A fascist wolf in liberal sheep’s clothing.
I wish that all these women would stop exposing their penises.
Luckily, however, incidences of men exposing themselves have reduced by a similar amount over the same period.
Please, Unherd.. who cares?!!!
I suppose just the folks who have some care for basic, fundamental reality?
Thanks for clearing up the woke poo.