Man from Mumbai

I’m not sure what’s driving it, but Horsham has acquired a significantly ex-pat population lately and it’s made the place noticeably more cosmopolitan and colourful. There are substantial new ex-pat communities from Iran and India in particular, joining the already well established ones from Ukraine and other central European countries like Poland, Romania, Bulgaria etc.

One of the most noticeable aspects of this is the sense of family and community they bring, something that is visually very apparent in Horsham park. You regularly find these ex-pat groups spending time, either as family or friends, in the park. It’s making Horsham an especially rewarding place to live at the moment.

Lady from Ukraine

The irony is that my mother came here from Italy as a Polish refugee in 1948 because the pre-war family home was located in a part of Poland that was annexed by the Soviet Union as part of the post WWII agreement between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchlil. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Polish territory ceded to the Russians effectively landed in Ukraine. None of this was the doing of Ukraine of course, this was the Russians, or more accurately, Stalin.

Adolescence

I am the father of two wonderful boys. There is nothing in the world that comes close to the joy and fulfilment I feel by being their father, and the opportunity I have to be an integral and essential part of their development, both as people and men, is something I regard as both a privilege and a duty. I feel this despite the fact that, in general, society regards fatherhood as somewhat optional. I fully acknowledge that the reality of this situation is the result of many fathers having chosen to be absent, either through feckless disregard towards their responsibility, or the ‘societal nihilism of fatherhood’. But still there it is. The positive regard that society holds me in as a man has very little to do with how good a father I am. I feel lucky then that I do not give a fig about society’s evaluation criteria in general, either towards men or women.

What I do care about, very deeply and passionately, is not allowing my sons to grow up thinking that their gender (or indeed their ethnicity, religious belief, sexual preference or sexual identity), is a problem. The world has benefited enormously from men and masculinity, as indeed it has women and femininity. Nature saw fit to evolve us in this way and our success as a species is the result of what we each bring. For sure there is toxic masculinity; this is a topic I explored in antidote through the ‘Here Among the Flowers’ project, an attempt to show that masculinity is no more inherently toxic than femininity. Men and women are subject to negative emotion and those negative emotions manifest in different ways. In men it tends towards aggression (low agreeability), whereas in women it manifests as over wrought anxiety (trait neuroticism). Both are problematic both for the individual and collectively at a societal level, but only at the extremes. Anyone with a basic understanding of statistics (which ironically will be a vanishingly small percentage of the population) can understand that the problems associated with the extremes of a distribution will only manifest in a tiny percentage of the population. By the time it becomes problematic, you’re a good two or even three standard deviations away from the mean, meaning that the sample you are basing any judgement on is so under representative of the population distribution as a whole, that making those judgements is unequivocally the very definition of bigotry. Correlation is not causation so even if the value of r is say 0.9 between being guilty of a violent crime and being male, that correlation provides zero insight into how likely any man might be to represent a risk (of violence) to you, male or female (although you are still three times more likely to be subject to a violent act as a man than a woman).

What does all this have to do with my two sons? Adolescence, both in terms of the age they are now and the Netflix TV show, which has let lose a tyrannical monster of raging moral panic about men and masculinity. That heuristic has been let lose in all its rampant, vile glory. The media is not interested in representing reality to you (I say ‘you’ here because I barely interact with it these days; I do not have a TV and have not interacted with ‘mainstream media’ for over six years, and I feel much better for it. I also recently deleted my Facebook account and have never had a Twitter or Tick Toc subscription). It is not interested in representing reality because no one is really interested in reality, not least when it comes to consuming entertainment. Most of reality is boring to us because it is, well, reality. Our heuristically driven brains crave signals that are distinct from the background because those are the ones that most strongly resonate with us. System One thinking, as Daniel Khaneman described it, prefers the emotional to the logical.

Events as portrayed in Adolescence certainly happen, indeed just such an incident took place only a few months before the airing of that show. This is close enough in the timeline for this to be purely coincidental, nevertheless the events happen just rarely enough for them to reside in our consciousness more sharply than the vast background of otherwise well adjusted, morally sensible, sincere and gracious humanity that represents ‘normal’. But as I said, we aren’t interested in normal because normal is rational and logical, and our brains just don’t work that way.

None of this would be a problem except we’re extrapolating a definition of masculinity and defining the existence of a real problem based on a vanishingly small set of data points. The likely hood of any man, over a 50-year period, murdering someone is about one in 1111 or 0.09% of the male population. For contrast, women who murder are about 0.0002% or one in 10,000. So yes, a man is ten times more likely to murder someone than a woman but using that data point to make some assessment about men and masculinity in general is no better than using similar data prevalence to make an assessment about the propensity of say someone from a black ethnic group being guilty of the same, or indeed any, crime.

Correlation is not causation, and making any judgement that they are is lazy at best and bigoted at worst.

Presentation is not representation and a TV series does not reflect reality; it specifically has to distort it in order to be even worthy of being ‘entertainment’, which is what Adolescence is (in a bizarrely perverse kind of way).

Of course, if we carry on with this collective denigration of men, if we continually pump out the message that men and masculinity are ideologically problematic (remind me again which toilet my anatomically and hormonally female transwoman friend should use), then do not be surprised if the backlash panders precisely to the very negative traits we are lambasting. It will be your failure though and just like you get the government you deserve, so you will get the men (and women) you deserve.

XX, XY and Everything in Between

Roughly half the population are born with XX chromosomes, with the other half presenting with XY chromosomes. Generally speaking, people’s anatomical development follows a predictable path aligned with this chromosomal presentation and we have traditionally categorised these people as ‘female’ and ‘male’.  For the great majority of people these terms do not present a problem.

There are also people born with XXY chromosomes; although this is rare (somewhere between one in 500 and one in 1000 males) this does mean there are likely around 33,000 to 66,000 people in the UK with this unusual chromosomal presentation. We tend to use the word ‘intersex’ for these people. Although that term lacks humanity, it is technically correct. We don’t have clear rules about whether we treat people with this chromosomal pattern as male or female, and their existence demonstrates that the statement ‘sex is only ever binary’ is incorrect, even if that statement holds true for the overwhelming majority. To say otherwise is to disavow the existence of those people with XXY chromosomes, as well as other forms of DSD, which is to disavow scientific evidence.

Some people find that their chromosomal presentation is misaligned to their internal feelings and their anatomical gender. This dystopia can range in severity from mild enough to be managed by relatively benign actions (changes in presentation, pronouns etc), all the way through to so severe that relief is only achieved by undergoing extensive (and painful) surgery to correct the anatomical presentation. We have made accessing that surgery very difficult; although possible, it requires an individual to live in their target gender for at least two years before being eligible for consideration. Thus far we have used the word ‘trans’ to broadly describe this group of people. Both men and women can experience this gender dysphoria and as a result, there exists in our world ‘trans women’ and ‘trans men’.

The pathway to transition is exceptionally challenging. There can be few experiences in life as difficult, both emotionally and physically, as this. However, once complete, i.e. once ostensibly (externally) anatomically and hormonally male or female, society ought to have little if any trouble regarding an individual as being defined by the anatomical and hormonal, rather than their chromosomal presentation. For some reason society has expressed no problem with accepting trans men as men, but trans women have created a furore of discourse that has often felt like there is an undercurrent of resentment and hate behind it. This narative is presented in the guise of ‘protecting women’s rights’ and, as best as I can tell, what that means is ‘don’t allow men pretending to be women to access female only spaces’. If it really were that simple I think that would be an easy wish to grant. Of course it is not.

A key failure of this debate is to either recognise or accept that a ‘trans woman’ who has undergone complete surgical and hormonal realignment presents no more risk, either physically or ideologically, to any other human being, than any other human being. Denying them access to female only spaces is not just churlish, it’s abhorrent and degrading. It comes at best from a place of personal negative emotion, perhaps even transcending this into hate and prejudice. Most likely this emanates from some past physical and emotional trauma that has found expression in hate or distrust of all men. The word for the hate of men is ‘misandry’, and the word for ascribing the negative traits of but a few individuals in a homogenous group to all members of that group is ‘bigotry’ or ‘prejudice’.

If treating anatomically and hormonally female ‘trans women’ as women is an easy outcome, there still exists the problem of how to treat those who are only part way through that journey. There is a point where an individual may be presenting in, and claiming membership of, their target gender but still retains some or all of their genetically aligned anatomy. It is understandable that the presence of someone so obviously male or female in a single sex space might well cause very high levels of anxiety for those around them. It is also more likely that women encountering anatomically male individuals in these spaces will experience that anxiety more than the opposite situation. This is because the degree of sexual dimorphism that exists in humans and the degree to which a much stronger male might pose a risk to a weaker female. In some ways, this has come to be codified as ‘all men present a risk to all women’, which is somewhat understandable, if also somewhat based on prejudice and bigotry (because it assumes to make a generalised assumption about a group of people based on the actions of a very small minority of its members).

Whilst the risk posed by men to women is vanishingly small (you are three times less likely to be subjected to violence as a woman than a man; women are actually more likely to be violent towards an intimate partner than a man, with the important caveat that this violence rarely does any physical harm), nevertheless, the heuristic way our brains process information means that the perceived risk is hugely disproportionate to the actual risk. Society has therefore codified ‘men’ as representing a risk to ‘women’ and for this reason, we have to protect women in some, if not all, of these single sex spaces.

The trans women who are still anatomically and hormonally male therefore probably need to be denied access to these spaces (and probably always need to be denied access to female categories of sport irrespective of where they are in their transition, although the science on this is not so strongly deterministic), in order to protect women, both emotionally and physically. Whilst being ‘male’ is barely a useful predictor of how much a person represents a threat to anyone, not least a woman, if an XY man is looking to target women to satisfy some deeply misogynistic desire to do harm, then claiming to be a woman in order to gain access to those (very likely more vulnerable) females in female only spaces would be an obvious ruse.

It’s also entirely possible, that the experience of gender dysphoria might itself trigger a deep-seated resentment towards women; the hate or anger being an expression of frustration towards those that you wish you could be but cannot because of your chromosomal presentation. There have been at least two incidents of anatomically male ‘trans women’ being placed in female prisons and subsequently raping a female prisoner. That kind of outcome has to be made impossible. All people need to be kept safe from all incidents of violence. To not do so is a dereliction of our civic duty.

But the glee with which some people are celebrating the Supreme Court ruling on biological sex is deeply disturbing. This is not a ‘victory’ for anyone, not outside of it being at best a phyrric victory ; it is merely the first step on trying to resolve the conundrum of how to best meet every human’s right to feel protected and respected by our collective values. The ruling represents an acknowledgement that we have not yet fully addressed how best to do that for the small group of people who experience gender dysphoria strongly enough to want to change their identity.

Granting access to female only spaces for anyone who is anatomically and hormonally female should not pose a problem for anyone who is genuinely free of prejudice or bigotry. However, this is not the case, and what we are witnessing with this latest outburst of ideology is the nothing less than the (un)acceptable face of misandry. It’s very likely that most TERFs don’t hate trans-women, they just hate men. What other explanation can there be for regarding someone with breasts, a vulva, a vagina and oestrogen and testosterone levels in line with ‘XX females’ as a risk to women simply because they present with XY chromosomes?

For all those in transition, we need to take a more circumspect and nuanced approach, but of course, neither political processes nor Supreme Court rulings are very good at this. To some extent, the law is also unable to offer this, but that does not mean we shouldn’t try. At the very least, we ought to be able to resolve that if you are anatomically and hormonally male or female, you ought to be treated as such by society, irrespective of your chromosomal presentation.

String Theory

String Theory

He claimed to be the third best theoretical physicist in the country and a chess grandmaster. I had no reason to doubt him other than heuristically speaking, one doesn’t very often come across people who either are world leading theoretical physicists or indeed, if they are, make that claim so brazenly. He was very keen to talk, even going as far as suggesting we find cafe to chat over coffee. I felt a little bad making my excuses but in truth I only had this one day to spend making short connections and pictures.

Leica MP, Ziess Sonnar C 50mm, Kodak Porta 160

Gen Z

Randomly connected with this group, enjoying the spring sunshine in our local park. What a delight to connect with such sincere and young adults.