October 22, 2024 - 7:00am
The world is a frightening place. There are savage conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, with no end in sight. The Scottish government, however, thinks it knows what is important.
Last week, the Scottish National Party administration produced a list of 24 genders that can be recorded by public bodies in official documents. This might seem an arbitrary figure, and most sane people will see it as further evidence that the SNP has yet to come to its senses. First ministers may come and go, their careers destroyed by their belief in identity politics, but the ideology still has a death grip north of the border.
The people who came up with this nonsense appear to believe that “genderfluid” and “trans masculine” describe real, verifiable states of being. Some lucky individuals are apparently “bigender”, which means they have two genders at the same time. Why stop at two, one wonders?
What’s really pernicious about this exercise, aside from being a waste of time and money, is the way it seeks to co-opt those of us who don’t buy into identity theory. We’re “agender”, according to the Scottish government, which means “a person who does not identify as having a gender”. A normal human being, in other words.
Presumably, ministers have decided that scorn and mockery are a small price to pay for staying on the right side of a small group of committed activists. The current First Minister, John Swinney, doesn’t even pretend to believe it, admitting three months ago that he accepts there are only two genders. Presumably, the SNP is still smarting from being told by the UK government that it couldn’t impose self-ID in Scotland, but that’s no reason to persist in promoting an ideology which most sensible people regard as delusional.
Scotland has become a test case for the ease with which a bunch of ideologues can seize the agenda, sweeping all before them. Gender politics was driven by a Green-SNP coalition, now defunct, but it couldn’t have happened without a failure of opposition. Labour in Scotland bowed to the demands of extremists, told by their leader, Anas Sarwar, to vote in favour of self-ID, and most Labour MSPs did as instructed.
Scotland was one of the cradles of the Enlightenment, but it turned out that a couple of centuries of rationality was no defence against a belief system which is akin to magic. Suddenly, a handful of Scottish politicians affect to believe that sex isn’t fixed, that men can magically become women, and anyone who protests is smeared as Right-wing or “transphobic”.
A group of people insistent on defining themselves in any way they choose has thus denied that courtesy to everyone else. It’s clear that the terror of being called a bigot has affected politicians throughout the UK, and the impact is evident in the absurd documents just published by the Scottish government’s chief statistician.
When will someone call a halt to all this? We’ve witnessed far too much bowing and scraping to what is in effect a reality-denying cult. There are only two sexes, and collecting information about “gender” is nothing more than an exercise in appeasing narcissists.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.
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SubscribeMany thanks to Joan Smith for flagging this up. I am not a petrol-head, but I mis-read “bigender” and thought that is must be someone who gets a thrill out of a rotating motion in their crankshaft.
Surely it refers to how you eat a soft boiled egg? (Gulliver’s Travels)
If that’s what floats your boat …
Fabulous. That is the best joke I’ve read online in weeks.
I read it as Big Ender and wondered what is one of those. Thought further and decided that is no more ridiculous than bigender.
“I identify as a Kardashian.”
Ha Ha! That made me laugh out loud!
The main priority is to differentiate Scotland from England in all things. So this means they can sign up to nonsense like gender, self id, their own currency, no government debt “we will walk away from it” regardless of whether it is a disaster to their country or stated aims. Above all they must be hypocrites that employ hate speech freely and promiscuously whilst crying about anyone else even being allowed any view whatsoever.
I totally concur with Joan Smith’s observation that “What’s really pernicious about this exercise … is the way it seeks to co-opt those of us who don’t buy into identity theory.” I resent the way that this tiny group of people dictates the terminology for discourse. Why should I have to describe my views as “gender critical”? As far as I am concerned, my views are biology-affirming.
Slyly forcing people to validate what they disagree with by describing them in terms of what they don’t beleive in. That’s why I don’t call myself as an ‘atheist’.
‘atheist’ … or, over here, ‘cis’.
Right. Like arguing in terms of “transgender.” There is no such thing: you can’t change someone’s sex. At most, you come out with a eunuch, and I’ll say that, or transvestite or cross-dresser, or male prostitute.
Simlarly “Climate denier”..I mean-WTF-I don’t subscribe to your ideology so I’m what-someone who doesn’t believe in climate! Its the language of the simpleton who is so used to soundbite discussions that the very idea of a nuanced,data based debate on extremely complex issues is just too much for their tiny brains to comprehend.
‘Gender critical’ is a really clumsy term that doesn’t add to the discussion at all. However I understand it to mean that gender isn’t a real ‘thing’ like biology is, which is what makes those who believe in biology ‘gender critical’. Unfortunately along with ‘trans woman’ it’s not intuitive as a term.
It’s all a bit odd.
Joan seems to want to want to distance herself from identity politics and yet is a feminist. Feminism is identity politics.
Also she wants to distance herself from “gender” claiming not to believe in it. And yet the sex/gender distinction is pretty much central to modern feminism.
It’s like knocking the valve off a tank and then saying: “Ok, that’s enough, now stop.” Once you detach from reality it’s hard to say: “We’re keeping these fantasies but *those* fantasies have to go.”
Presumably those who believe in gender might be called “biology critical”. Do they want to march under such a banner – it does rather suggest a certain extra level of lunacy which is perhaps why it has not been adopted.
I “believe” in biology, i.e. that most people have either XX or XY chromosomes, with a few exceptions.
Also that phenotype is not the same as genotype, and that there is significant statistical overlap between males and females across most traits.
I “believe” in social gender, i.e. that societies have certain sets of social rules and expectations that are applied to people based on their (usually perceived, rarely measured) biological sex, but these rules are only loosely linked to genotypes.
I also believe that people generally have a self-image. That for some people, their self-image is contrary to the social gender expectations applied to them, or even that no social gender fits them well.
I am neither “gender critical” nor “biology critical”. But I am against poorly applied generalisations.
I suspect that only a tiny number of hardcore ideologues really believe there are 24 genders.
This is mainly about embedding the metaphysical concept of gender as a replacement for the biological concept of sex in public policy.
Then they can do what they like to women’s rights because “woman” will have become just one more gender identity among dozens. No more meaningful in respect of policies and services concerning women’s safety, fairness and dignity than “trans masculine”.
Body dysmorphia is a psychological complex. Fetishes are simply forms of sexual expression. The two have come together in a reconstruction of the feminist political concept of ‘gender’.
I’d say that’s a political ontological move but there’s not a metaphysical concept involved. There could be said to be an underlying quasi-religious concept – like the Christian ‘soul’ – and yet no religious claims a being made in relation to an established faith.
The makers of tartans had better get busy creating 24 new patterns to flog to tourists.
What I am not clear about is who is actually responsible for the document. This comes authored by the “chief statistician”, a civil servant. Does it mean that he wrote it under dictation by the lovely Kaubab (or similar) or is it his own work?
Can anyone clarify?
At one level its more like technical guidance from a specialist branch of the Civil Service.
Statisticians are always concerned with consistent categorization of information because that’s how they turn it into data which can be interrogated. Basically what it is doing is advising public bodies that if they are surveying people on their gender identity, then these are the categories to use so that all the information can be aggregated.
But of course, this isn’t happening just because a civil servant thinks its a good idea. Its a reflection of the SNP’s policy of prioritising the metaphysical concept of gender over the biological concept of sex.
Being able to paste precise numbers on an inanity doesn’t rescue it from being an inanity.
What we need to do is identify a 25th gender, the one that they missed. This must surely send the Civil Service’s chief statistician over the edge as he/she will have to redo all their lovely work. Then we can identify a 26th….
Godel-gendered.
Thanks for that. So, who would have come out with that list, the SG or the Chief Statistician?
Joan asks “When will someone call a halt to all this?” Back in the 1990’s. the SNP decided that the best way to defeat Labour is to out-woke them in any relevant policy area. This is just another example of that strategy. Although the two dozen genders might seem ludicrous to us, you need to remember that in Scottish Parliament elections, the voting age is 16. Scottish 16-year-olds could not care less about health, education, jobs, etc., but they are prepared to burn their Harry Potters in the name of trans rights. These kids have been brainwashed in Scottish schools by trans activists for years. The brainwashing activists have been paid by the Scottish government. The SNP is hoping that this gender nonsense will garner the teen vote. I doubt whether many of the “high heid yins” in the SNP actually take it seriously.
24 genders? That doesn’t seem like very many! Surely there must be more than that?
There are many (many!) more 🙂
https://youtu.be/yO5Hdidlh2g?si=CS7X6s6Ne6BIS9XD
Depending on what you think gender actually is, then there could effectively be infinite genders.
Clearly if you think gender is just another word for biological sex, then there are only two genders.
But if, as seems to be fashionable, you think gender is some kind of metaphysical concept (e.g. “gendered soul”) which is (a) unfalsifiable, (b) infinitely mutable, and (c) a matter of self-identification then, in principle at least, every individual in the world could have their own unique, self-identified gender which changes every 30 seconds.
This is why its been a deliberate tactic of gender ideologues to resist a firm definition of the word gender. That way they can use it however suits them at the time.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ “
The self-destruction of the Krankies has been one of the most entertaining spectacles of recent years. It’s almost tempting to wonder whether they’ve not been the target of some fiendishly clever false flag operation to stigmatise them as not only criminal but barking mad to boot. If so, chapeau to whoever thought of it.
How many genders are there? 2. And if the party says there are 24?
What a bunch of wusses we seem to have become. George Orwell envisaged that Winston Smith in 1984 would require grotesque torture involving hungry rats to persuade him to agree to whatever the Party decreed. Today no such torture is necessary to get large swaths of the population to agree to such manifest nonsense.
Even the believers don’t believe there’s that many genders.
Any number of fetishes can be called ‘genders’ if one wishes them to be.
All of this debate is about the abuse of language.
Consider the construction of ‘gender’ as an old tool of feminism and how that was then refigured by Queer philosophers to refer to fringe sexual identities which, campaigners believed, should enjoy more mainstream rights.
The odd thing is those fringe identities are mostly taken by middled aged white men.
Hey do you think this could be some crafty white supremacy in action?
The SNP doesn’t even believe in the concept of the nation state, does it?
So all bets are off
Gender is uncountable, unverifiable and mutable. It’s a non-concept, birthed by some degenerate French celebrity philosopher on the make in his career. “Experiment with who you are,” says the guru, and the nodding infants at his feet take him literally. The function of the non-concept is to be a marketing tool for parasitic lobby groups siphoning public money to fund their narcissistic lifestyles. Essentially, these useless drones have become secular clergy, guardians of the new mysteries with the power to burn heretics at the stake.
“We’ve witnessed far too much bowing and scraping to what is in effect a reality-denying cult. There are only two sexes, and collecting information about “gender” is nothing more than an exercise in appeasing narcissists.“
Totally agree.
‘Scotland has become a test case for the ease with which a bunch of ideologues can seize the agenda, sweeping all before them’. Germany in the 1930s is another example.
Firstly Scots are the same as everyone else and can believe in all sorts of nonsense. Secondly, ‘bigender’ is an unfortunate word for the civil service to use. Doesn’t it mean ‘big bum’? I suppose, given the current obesity crisis, that’s possible but it does seem an odd correlation. Perhaps it needs a hyphen…….
It’s a very brave, or foolhardy, thing to put a number on this. The Scottish government has automatically made itself the excluder and oppressor of group 25.
And with such an opportunity to be excluded and oppressed, that number 25 slot will not remain vacant for long.
I don’t understand it either.
It’s worth noting that there is even a contingent of trans people who would oppose this sort of thing. The most ‘sensible’ rendition of what ‘being transgender’ is, is that it’s essentially a ‘brain DSD’ – i.e. for reasons people don’t understand yet, some quirk neurodevelopment causes some aspect of the brain to develop along the a pathway that the opposite sex typically does. This is akin to, but potentially distinct from, the neurological cause of homosexuality.
While I don’t really buy this explanation either (not enough evidence, probably not true for all trans subpopulations), but it is at least plausible. 24 genders is not. The real trouble with gender ideology came when activists abandoned the former explanation of gender identity for one rooted in empirically unmoored postmodernist hogwash.
What makes you think they haven’t thought this through. If you want to be able to identify a sub group of people, the easiest way is to get them to self id themselves.
That’s a bit of a joke but history does tell us that when you have a caste system some are lower then others.
It is odd that this nonsense still hangs on. How many people really believe it?
Why 24? Which ones didn’t make the cut, and why not? I suspect massive bigotry at work. I heard the Irish are going to confirm an official 72 genders… If so that would seem to confirm my suspicions.
When will the madness end?
When the madmen regain their senses ….
Don’t hold one’s breath.
Perhaps the best thing to do, and I do it, is to refuse to fill in any question about sex that has more than two choices.
Standing next to Swinney is Kaukab Stewart of Decapitate Terfs fame:https://www.thenational.scot/news/23267343.row-erupts-snp-mps-appear-near-violent-sign-glasgow-protest/