BY JOHN NASH
I received another one of those emails this week, signed by a person who put (him/his) after their name.
What in the blue blazes is going on? Is it something in the water?
First, a biology lesson for post-modern and LAME (Look At Me Everyone) people. You are born either male or female. Less than two percent of people have intersex fiddly bits that are neither solely male nor solely female. It means that more than 98% of people are either man or woman. The two types of bodies – their sex – when adult, are very different and mostly obvious. A person fitted with a plug is called a “man”, a person fitted with a socket is called a “woman”. End of biology lesson. End of biological argument.
Now consider the human mind. The human mind (or mentality) is far more complicated.
The fact that you can’t see into any mind except your own because it is a property rather than a thing makes it even more complicated. However, most of us are happy to accept this Cartesian duality of mind and body. I am convinced that, for example, my mind can find something funny and cause my body to laugh, so they work together as one – like hardware and software. I am happy to use this duality and don’t want to get into the philosophical mouse-nest that is called the mind-body-problem (how the mind actually makes the body do stuff). It works for me without lifting the bonnet.
Mind and body are both personal to each of us. They are both “inside” us. But we have to live in the real world, so our mind needs to deal with two environments – inside us and outside us. The physical world outside is what it is regardless of how we feel about it, so, put very simply, part of our invisible mind deals with stuff “outside us” and is called, in short, the objective side.
Our bodies, on the other hand, have to include our feelings and emotions, so the part of our invisible mind that deals with “inside us” is called, in short, the subjective side.
For reasons that would take a really long book to explain fully, the objective side of the mind that deals with the mindless reality of the world outside has long been called our “masculine” side of the mind. It looks outside us and excludes our needs, feelings and emotions. The subjective side of the mind that deals with the mindful world inside us has long been called our “feminine” side because it includes our needs, feelings and emotions. Modern psychologists like Hines dispute this, but everyone else knows that men are from Mars and women from Venus.
Our minds are filled with information from outside us via our senses, affecting and mixing with information inside us, so you can say that for each and every one of us, most of our mind activity is actually a mixture of the two – often a bit more masculine and objective when dealing with the outside and a bit more feminine and subjective when dealing with our inside.
Our daily circumstances more often than not require a variation in the proportions or mixtures of the two sides. The labels masculine and feminine are therefore woefully simplistic and inadequate – there is an infinite, seamless variation of androgynous, non-binary mixtures of the two sides of the mind-gender, fluctuating according to need. To make matters worse, the mind sometimes uses neither part during abstract thought. In short, we each have a fluid mind-gender with masculine and feminine sides that mix (both) and separate (neither) as required. But it is still mind, not body.
The masculine side of the mind deals with many external things including outside reality, competition, ownership and outside threats and opportunities. The feminine side of the mind deals with many internal things like inside needs, cooperation, sharing and inside feelings and nurturing ourselves. Each one of us has both sides (and mixtures and none) but all over the world, especially where men and women exist together, men tend to use more of the masculine side of their minds and women tend to use more of the feminine side of their minds – the well-known sexual division of labour and behaviour that created the mind-gender labels in the first place.
Again, modern clever Dicks dispute this, but all over the world you can see women hoeing the fields with babies on their backs while the blokes sit under the trees drinking beer and discussing important male stuff like football.
But, as I said, the gender of the mind is fluid – when you deal with objective things, you tend to use more male mind-gender and when you deal with more subjective things, you tend to use more female mind-gender. In times of poverty or conflict, you will “be more of a masculine mindset” because you need stuff from outside and in times of peace and plenty, “more of a feminine mindset” because you can spoil yourself. Mind-gender is also dependent on nurture and society – civilisation itself is a feminising process, and as the standard of living rises, the need for a masculine mindset appears less and less important. Because of all the variables, ebbs and flows, the search for a single “description of mind-gender” is like trying to herd fog.
Which brings us to a problem. Ideally, all men would have masculine minds and all women feminine minds. But it doesn’t work out that way. Body-gender (plug or socket) is fixed but mind-gender is fluid. There can be plenty of “crossmatch” between gender of mind and gender of body. You can have biological men with feminine minds (still men, but feminine men) and biological women with masculine minds (still women, but masculine women) and this is where the brown and malodorous collides with the rotating ventilator.
The terms “man” and “woman” describe the physical, biological reality of every one of us and the terms are 98% accurate, making them useful for everyone to describe and separate one from the other because we can see everyone’s body-gender, regardless of their mind-gender.
That’s of no consequence if you are a hermit, but we live in a society where everything we do has to take other people into consideration – the social contract. Your body-gender is usually obvious to everyone because it is “outside you” for all to see. Your mind-gender is “inside you” and is personal to you, invisible to everyone else. Other people cannot see your mind-gender (although sometimes they can make a guess from your behaviour). Your biological sex, your body-gender, is therefore the “outside” one that society utilises as a descriptor, an identifier, a kind of communication that all of us can use. If you live in a society, that is the social convention and it will, in turn, govern lots of related things, including the use of pronouns, healthcare provision, prisons and the control of single sex spaces.
Only you are aware of your “inside” mind gender. Your “outside” biological gender is obvious to everyone else, and since you live in society, it is only polite and civil to use the convention that everyone else uses. If you demand that other people become somehow magically telepathic and use your invisible, personal, “inside” mind gender when addressing you, you are committing a selfish, non-social act. You are being anti-social. It is bad enough if you demand people address you with a binary gender that doesn’t match your physical appearance, but if you then demand-with-tantrum that people address you using one of the infinite mixtures of androgynous mind genders (The list is now 100-odd) and a strange pronoun that is meaningless in normal communication, people won’t know what the hell you mean. You are speaking gobbledygook.
You are, of course, welcome to use your own personal mind gender (or even think you are a penguin or a spaceship) in your own “inside” mind, but in “outside” public, people won’t understand you and shouldn’t be expected to. In effect, you are using a strange, invisible language and people will rightly ignore you. You are herding fog. If you insist that they use some kind of invisible, inter-sex, mind-gender, fluid pronoun to address you, they will simply get cross because you are an annoying prat. Their anger is not discrimination and certainly not “violence” – it is your use of some obscure mind-gender label that is anti-social, and, far from being “inclusive”. Indeed, like most extreme left-wing ideas, you will rapidly find it is the exact opposite, getting you socially excluded.
Our civilisation is built on our superior ability to communicate accurately. If you refuse to communicate accurately using conventional language, you are being uncivilised. You may be a legend in your own mind, but others will not share your triumph because the rest of us cannot see the Happy Valley that is your mind. The reason is clear – the rest of us developed theory of mind, the realisation that other people don’t share our thoughts, at around 4 or 5 years of age, so grow up.
Of course, if you are an excited teenager, trying desperately to be a “rebel” and break free from parents, convention, tradition and all things oldy and mouldy, the idea of being shunned by sane grown-ups will probably appeal to you – we have all been there, long hair and bell-bottoms included. But when it comes to living in the rest of society as an adult, you will need to use accepted pronouns in a shared adult language that everyone else understands because the pronouns that we use refer to your visible public body-gender, not your personal invisible mind-gender. A description has to make sense to everyone in common – that’s why it’s called common sense. Common sense is not “violence” just because you are asocial and have no common sense. If you are older than five and you think everyone else except you is wrong, you need help with your pressing mental problems of denial and belief-superiority, not with your mental gender.
And the same applies to all related social matters “outside” you – since change-rooms and toilets are used by all of society, they can only be reliably separated by visible body-gender, rather than by your invisible mind-gender, so civil behaviour requires you to observe the social convention like the rest of society if you wish to use the facilities. It’s your choice. Your freedom is to choose whether to use them conventionally or not use them. They are society’s facilities, not your personal facilities. The same goes for mothers’ breast-feeding facilities – if you want to barge in even though you are a huge person with a beard and meat and two veg under your frock, calling yourself Doris and renaming breast-feeding as “chest-feeding” won’t cut the mustard. You are a bloke. You are not a mother, and if you have taken a wheelbarrow full of hormones to male-lactate, you really shouldn’t be feeding a baby anyway.
It is not really that difficult – if the Good Lord has furnished you with a plug, you simply use the facilities marked “men”, if you have been given a socket, you simply use the facilities marked “women”. To do otherwise is not clever or inclusive – it’s anti-social, and anti-social behaviour does not deserve any tolerance, let alone indulgence.
That is the price you pay for living in civilised society.
John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa.