If you read a lot of nonfiction, Gentle Readers, you're probably aware of the quirks that can occur in the genes that give most of us mammals, birds, and insects our sexes. In fertile individuals there's a pair of chromosomes that look vaguely like either two X's, or one X and one Y (or sometimes even a V). In sterile individuals there are all kinds of other options. Nature really plays around with some individuals' DNA.
The first time I heard of these genderquirks was in 1971, when a health magazine mentioned that two "women" athletes, "sisters," had been disqualified and denied their medals because a chromosome analysis of their hair showed that they were "really" men. This is a gene, not merely the effect of taking steroids to build muscles; it doesn't always show, especially when teenagers are being blitzed with "Darling, you are growing up" material and they, in fact, are not, or not in the way the schools told them they would. These are not the visibly abnormal kids who don't seem to be growing up at all. They're not even (usually) the ones who
look as if they'd be gender-confused. They're more likely to be asexual than to be lesbians. They can be pretty, girly girls who just don't develop the ability to have babies--or want to.
(Grumble. I recently, as in since 2010, read a relatively new, as in since 2000, book in which an author who'd aged beyond writing young adult novels summarized the then-newest biological studies on gender issues. Fascinated by these girly-looking chromosomal males, she presented lots of information and even short interviews. I have the book at home where, like a lot of other books I've brought into my home since the last three or four people decluttered their home libraries into mine, it's been catalogued on my home computer and packed up in storage. But, having made no effort to remember it, I've forgotten the author's name.
UPDATE: So on the first of February I dug into a box and found this book:
I remembered three authors of novels about baby-boomers as teenagers who've moved up into nonfiction; Amazon isn't showing anything like the book I have in mind at any of their pages. Instead Amazon is trying to sell me a lot of new novels. Feh. Instead, here's a vintage science fiction novel about a human-friendly alien lifeform whose genetic quirks put it completely outside the four normal gender roles for its imaginary species...it turns out to be a "he" but it chooses a traditionally feminine name.)
Over the years, genetic research continued and science news revealed other ways humans and other animals can be born outside the whole question of "male" or "female." There are, for instance, butterflies who normally show conspicuous sexual dimorphism--males and females are different sizes and colors. Some individuals in these species have male-type wings on one side and female-type wings on the other. They can fly, and pollinate flowers; the only thing they can't do is produce more butterflies.
The vast majority of sterile individuals, in all species, are normal males or females who simply don't produce offspring. Others are sterile during some, not all, of their lives. Some individuals, like Abraham in the Bible, could have babies with some partners but not with the ones they've chosen. Only one or two people out of a hundred ever have any real confusion about whether they're male or female, although lots of people disagree with at least a few cultural expectations about what males and females "normally" do apart from sex, and as many as one out of ten may experience same-sex attractions. (If you've heard one out of three or even one out of seven, those figures were extrapolated from studies of young people who
settle for homosexual activity when confined to single-sex institutions.) In the past, humans who were born with visibly gender-confused had a career cut out for them--as carnival freaks, flashing their private parts for coins per peek. Wotta career.
You would think that people who'd read the genetic science about this would at least want to be polite about it. Y'know, you don't walk up to people with different hair textures and say "I want to touch your hair," you don't just walk up to people with prosthetic legs and ask what happened to their legs, you don't give people a hard time about the fact that their asexuality is more than just a temporary effect of mononucleosis or something similar. If you know someone who appears to be a girl but has just found out she's a chromosomal male (hopefully before she's all grown up and married), and she wants to experiment with acting like a boy and asks you to call her "Jake" instead of "Jane" and so on, no problem. You wouldn't blare and bray about it and make person feel more like a freak than person already does. You'd know that person knows more than you know about what person is meant to be and do. You'd just wish person well and try to be a good friend no matter how strange Jane's or Jake's life may become.
You would imagine that even Donald Trump would do
that. So you might have been startled, as I was, to read that Trump had issued some sort of order that people be locked firmly into the boxes of social gender, whether or not they have any real biological sex, on the basis of which sex they seem closer to.
In
my family, and presumably in Trump's family, it's been quite simple. You stand up straight and look down at your feet and count the bumps in your clothes. One bump, male. Two bumps, female. So you might carelessly imagine that if people are less lavishly supplied with bumps, at least when they take off their clothes...well, that's not necessarily true either. So why would anyone give these people further grief for pity's sake? Trump's order looked a bit like something that might go on to specify what people have to do about microphthalmia or polydactylism...who knows, really, where that kind of order might lead. It did not look like the kind of order that would be issued by a very stable genius.
So I thought..."What's
this all about, anyway? Oh, that orange extrovert from New York screeching for attention again. Ignore! Life's too short!" and I figured that, of all the Trumperies of this administration, a ruling that people
must be permanently locked into identities as "he" or "she" was the
least likely to need another blink of my eyes. The people who love any excuse to talk about sex would take it over. People new to this country learn to say "Trump is not a gentleman" before they learn to order a take-out meal, I've observed, so what else is new. I stuck to glyphosate.
As mentioned in several other posts, I'm not a great fan of President Trump, but I
really detest the "politics" of personality cults. I like hammer-and-tongs debates, like the one my Twitter account has been documenting in Europe this year: to what extent does glyphosate harm people, must it be totally banned now, what are farmers going to do without it? I think a good debate where people are presenting facts is beneficial even if it raises people's blood pressure, but it turns ugly when people start bashing their opponents as human beings, screaming back and forth--"Your party's man is evil!" "Yours is a fool!" "Yours is a traitor!" "Yours is a murderer!" Etc. etc. etc.; it gets predictable, and lame, and it ruins the benefits of debating the facts.
Between the fact that some people love to show off how "liberal" they are about other people's sex lives and lots of people love to hate President Trump...well, I was appalled by Twitter's recent reaction.
Twitter has censored people who've observed that laudable efforts to protect (a very few) decent ordinary people who want a role in society other than carnival freaks have, in fact, inadvertently enabled people who are physically ordinary but not decent to do very bad things.
People who are genuinely, biologically, chromosomal men trapped in women's bodies or women trapped in men's bodies, or who aren't sure which is more alien because they're trapped in really unusual bodies, are not usually motivated to go into a communal restroom marked "Women" in order to expose their private parts. They're motivated to duck into a cubicle and latch the door before they unbutton
anything, just as most normal women do. Likewise, if they have to spend time in jails or shelters, they don't spend that time hitting on young women or girls; they're motivated to look for ways to deflect attention from their bodies.
Then there are men who don't like or respect real women, who want access to "women only" space in order to harass women or molest little girls. These are extremely shabby specimens of manhood so it's not really surprising to learn that they're taking advantage of society's efforts to be polite about people with unusual bodies. While screaming that they
are women, they've been doing things that would get a real woman locked up for life, if not lynched, and should have similar effects for men who want to put on skirts and claim to be "in transition."
(This web site does not encourage lynching. The position of this web site is that government should proactively discourage lynching by making sure that if, for example, a male body dressed in female attire is used to commit rape or child abuse, that body is immediately placed in solitary confinement, so the question of what to call it becomes permanently irrelevant.)
For those who don't go on Twitter, I recommend reading what's been tweeted using hashtags like #StopTheBias, #TwitterHatesWomen, #MeghanMurphy or @MeghanEMurphy, and more. People from different countries where public policy has emphasized tolerance are sharing statistics on the incidence of hatecrimes against women being committed by cross-dressed males.
Twitter has switched from a policy I've always endorsed (everyone should be free to say anything that can't be prosecuted as a crime, people can choose to filter out language or posters they don't want to see) to a policy of blatant censorship in support of the rapists in skirts.
Haters have shrieked that gender-confused teenagers are committing suicide because people aren't accepting whatever gender identity they're trying on that day. Statistics don't support this, probably because gender-confused teenagers are, like celiacs, rare enough that even if every single one reacts to certain things in a certain way it hardly makes a blip in the statistics. Statistics that concern society-as-a-whole are therefore irrelevant to questions about causes of death in really small minorities. Any real abuse of gender-confused teenagers is too much. But trying to force everyone to "call everyone else by their pronoun of choice" is no longer just statistically more likely to enable more real abuse to more teenagers than it would, hypothetically, coddle the feelings of a few. The statistics are in. Mistaking someone's gender identity, even if their gender identity is solid and the mistakes are blatant verbal abuse, is the kind of thing teenagers have to learn to laugh off. Admitting people who want to be identified as "women trapped in male bodies who are making the transition gradually" to women-only space is real abuse that can lead to permanent physical harm.
Pronoun errors happen to people if, say, their names are unusual or are not strongly identified with one gender or the other. No matter how famous people like Alexis Xenakis, Lindsey Graham, or Tatum O'Neal become, they learn to laugh off the people who either mis-guess their (obviously normal) gender, or pretend to mis-guess it just to be tiresome.
Then, of course, there's the tradition that screen names and images not only don't have to indicate Internet users' real gender (or species) but may deliberately misrepresent it. Quite a few people like to go online for the express purpose of finding out whether people would react to their personality differently if people thought their gender, or age, race, nationality, etc., were different. Some writers used to hang out in forums and chat rooms where they deliberately enacted fictional relationships among their male and female, younger and older and same-age, multiethnic personas. If you have absolutely nothing else to do and live in a place where US pennies will buy lunch, there are still forums where you can pick up a few pennies this way--say five cents a day for your "chats" as Chat Mama, then five cents for reactions as Chat Papa, five cents for more comments from Chat Son, and so on. It can add up. (My own paid guest posts in the form of conversations aren't usually gender-specific, but they could be--it's called writing fiction.) Accordingly,
one reason why people on Twitter can't be expected to know or care about each other's "pronoun of choice" is that we all know that some Real Twits are using fictional personas.
@Cheerios is obviously neither a "he" nor a "she"; it's a box of cereal used as the Twitter identity of various company employees who post comments in aid of a brand. @5PriscillaKing
is in fact the Twitter identity of a woman, but Twits have to take my word for that, because it was not the name of a real woman in my part of the world when I registered it as a brand. (It was the name of a little girl in Tennessee who is now a woman; I've never met her.) In the English-speaking world it would be hard for anyone to think that my screen name could be masculine or ambiguous, but it may well read that way in China, where English Bibles are not abundant and English dictionaries list "king" as a masculine noun. Strangers address me, collegially, as "King" now and then. If they extrapolate to "King...he," am I going to go crying to Twitter Safety that, ooohhh, they've huuurt my feeelings by assuming that I'm male? In real life, if someone looks at me in a group and says "you guys," I do usually stare and say "
Guys?" or "Only the guys? What about us gals?" I do
mind. But in cyberspace nobody should have the information that my body shape gives people in real life. In cyberspace, if someone guesses I'm a "he," I think: "Person doesn't know." That doesn't hurt my feelings; if the person has read only one tweet, it's the way things
should be.
Cyberspace
ought to be uniquely hospitable to the gender-confused because it offers a rest from having to have a gender at all. On Twitter, if Bruce Jenner hadn't already made a real-world show out of his surgical makeover, he could just have set up an account for Caitlyn and been instantly accepted as a "she." He could have set up an account as a box of cereal, a plant, a car, any kind of object, or animal or space alien from a genderless planet, and been accepted as an "it." Early adopters of computer technology tended to be people who preferred creativity and humor to conformity, and some bloggers have actually been using screen names like "Wetdryvac" or "Amoeba," with appropriate images, longer and more successfully than others have used "sexy" names and images. In cyberspace, science fiction fans can be "Hivemind" and other fans of the same sf series will happily visualize them as a swarm of bee-like alien lifeforms and call them "they." On Twitter, I imagine @Cheerios really is a "they" (written by several people) but its image clearly says "it."
In cyberspace it's acceptable to be an "it."
Kardashian in-law Bruce Jenner, missing the attention he used to get as a champion athlete, adopted a female alter ego he calls Caitlyn. Being rich enough to get away with anything, he's had an extreme body makeover, with surgery and hormone treatments, to make the old man whose parents named him Bruce look like a daughter he never had who seems to be permanently stuck at about age thirty. I find Caitlyn Jenner easier to look at than I found the middle-aged Michael Jackson, although
his abnormality was hereditary, in no way a parody of anything. Actors have the right to adopt new stage names; Bruce Jenner playing Caitlyn is most definitely an actor, like Flip Wilson playing Geraldine. When people persist in calling Jenner "Bruce," as when they persisted in calling The Artist Formerly Known as Prince "Prince," we're making a critical statement about his act. He may resent that, but if he were as good an actor as Flip Wilson he'd respect the audience response and learn from it. If he wants to stay in character as Caitlyn, he should let "her" laugh, as Tatum O'Neal, Meryl Streep, Brooke Shields, Jodie Foster, and Dale Evans all laughed, at the "mistakes" made by people who hadn't seen them and thought their names looked masculine. His surly response to being called Bruce while he's trying to play Caitlyn is one of the several ways we know that Caitlyn is not really a "she." Some celebrities' acts, like Dolly Parton's, Roy Rogers', and Ronald Reagan's, have been plausible, even improvements on those people's real looks and personalities; Jenner's is not in that class. Some find Caitlyn sexy, some find "her" offensive, and I personally find "her" a dead bore. But I find it very offensive that people's opinions of a third-rate TV act can be confused with the way they treat people with minority genes.
Twitter's Jack Dorsey
might have admitted the "safety" policy dictating that people use other people's "pronouns of choice" just to humor Bruce Jenner's amateurish reaction to people's opinions of Caitlyn, but I wonder. Given the surreal quality of Twitter "conversations" among apparent humans, objects, and cartoon characters, the "Pronoun Police" policy seems a bit extreme even if the muddled old actor were a major stock holder. It seems more likely to be a display of what Scott Adams calls Trump's form of persuasion. You tell a lot of people who've become comfortable with role-playing and animated "it" characters, "You must all know everyone's 'pronoun of choice' and use it exclusively, overnight, or we'll accuse you of hatespeech and ban you from the site!" ? ??? ???!!
That's not going to make the school bullies lay off a gender-confused teenager. School bullies spend their extra time at school thinking of lots of different ways to make a victim cry. If insisting that young Jake can't be "Jane" (even on Twitter, where the rest of the world are seeing "JHSGiraffe") is specifically banned, they can just move on to "Who tripped over own ft in assembly" and so on. Instead, it's going to generate, it is in fact generating, a lot of attention for an otherwise unexceptional young writer, Meghan Murphy, who's been wrongly banned for outing a cross-dressing child molester as a "he." It is in fact calling a lot of U.S. Twits' attention to the hatecrimes against women that have already been committed by cross-dressers in countries where public policy has tried to pamper the gender-confused. And it is in fact bringing a lot of socially liberal thinkers, who believe in "live and let live" and would no more persecute people for having ambiguous private parts than for having surplus fingers, to see Trump's point of view:
Whatever you feel like being, today, the private parts of your body can be described in one of three ways: they look male, they look female, or they're too close to call but in any case they're not positively male enough to be used to commit rape.
If they look male, then
as a matter of policy you can't be admitted to women-only space.
In private, informal situations, of course, who gives a flyin' flip. You rush into the nearest public bathroom, slam the door, throw yourself at the toilet, clean yourself and the toilet cubicle as best you can, and shamefacedly walk out--people are more concerned about avoiding your norovirus than about what you might have looked like with your pants down, so nobody cares. Or you get into a lively online conversation while using your opposite-sex persona, and someone says "You're awfully well informed and you look like a movie star. Let's do lunch," and you shamefacedly admit that in real life you don't even know the name of the movie star whose public-domain image you used, but nobody cares
much. Trump's edict, annoying and orange though it was, is not addressed to that. Neither is it addressed to the person whose private parts, when viewed, give people something to think about, but what they're thinking is not that you're likely to commit rape. It is addressed to men who want to violate "women only" rules in order to violate women and children.
In view of which, it's not such a bad policy after all.
If you were an young involuntarily celibate male, or an aging postsexual male, you may well
be unhappy enough to consider trying to "make the transition" to having yourself remodelled into what looks like a woman. You probably will never scrape up the money to have yourself rebuilt into a glamourpuss like Caitlyn, and even if you did you wouldn't be able to maintain that look, but you might enjoy acting as your female persona enough to stay with a surgical makeover. Or, more likely, you might not. Few people really care, as long as you confine "experiments" and "transitions" to ordinary social settings. If you're tired of being Jake the Stockboy, why
not stop trying to hide your upper-body flab, buy a bra, and be Jane the Cashier at a different store; beyond an occasional "Do you have a brother who used to work at the other store?" you're still middle-aged and largely invisible to strangers, and no great surprise to your friends.
But once you get within range of official policies, this
should change. Go to a prison, homeless shelter, or hospital, you should expect to be stripped, inspected, and, as long as you have a male-looking body, put on the men's side. Harass even one woman with your surprisingly male-looking body in any "women only" area, you should expect to go to either a prison or a hospital and stay there for the rest of your worthless life.
Donald Trump has made a career of issuing edicts in a voice-of-God tone that he knows, and his employees know, his employees are going to have to tweak and adjust to reality. He once railed against having Braille buttons in elevators--"People who stay in this hotel aren't going to be blind!" He got attention for saying that, while the hotel staff quietly kept the Braille buttons, and the people who love to hate him quietly continue to hope that cataract surgery will leave him...well, he would sort of deserve it. Similarly, I wouldn't expect that people would
let Trump's gender edict be used to harm gender-confused teenagers. In practice it will work to protect them, too, from exploitation and violence.
Twitter is going to have to drop its "preferred pronouns" policy, and not wait much longer, if it wants to survive...meanwhile, let's salute the way Jack Dorsey has managed to serve his most famous customer's purposes while building his own credibility, on the opposite side, as a good Trump-hater who risked even corporate profits to show how profoundly he wanted to disagree, etc. etc.
the Angel and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog.) 
when Ramona was five and I was seven; Ramona was funny enough that I didn’t mind reading about a younger child. Now I’m over fifty and, when I reread Ramona and Her Father for this review, a funny scene I’d forgotten made me laugh out loud again. Quite a few adults laugh at this series, although the Henry/Beezus/Ramona series are “chapter books” for primary-school-level readers, rather than picture books or short novels, so adults who enjoy these books seem to find it useful to explain to other adults that they’re buying the books for a child. Bosh. I won’t tell if you don’t. If you missed this series as a child and don’t have a child to give the books to, buy them for yourself and donate them to a school library after reading. They are that funny. 
, about fraternal twins who live in California rather than Oregon. In that story, Amy loves reading and acting out novels, and is already reading the 
books at nine, but her twin brother Mitch can hardly spell out words...until one day he gets interested in a book and finds himself reading it. 
, 
, 
, 
, and maybe 
, and leave them lying about. Sooner or later a book will be funny, or interesting, or beautifully illustrated, enough to get a bright but slow-reading child to read. All books by Beverly Cleary are funny enough to be the one that changes a child’s life.
