Nature or Nuture?

 

OK, this is a return to more serious and controversial issues.  I can’t help it, I find these debates interesting.  Before I start this rant properly, I should state that I am a perfectly normal heterosexual male, but that over the years, I have known and been friends with a number of gay people.  I don’t care what people’s preferences are; what two consenting people get up to behind their own closed door is nothing to do with me.  However, it should stay behind that door.  It does not need to become the defining characteristic of life.  I once had a work colleague who kept describing gay sex practices to me like fisting, and cottaging, as if these were going to be somehow attractive to me.  Quite the reverse.  I was naive enough to ask him what the hell he was talking about.  I hope my reaction was enough to communicate the message that I really wasn’t interested!  He did eventually give up…..thankfully.  Behind all that he was a humorous, intelligent person, but I can see why in a situation where I was not stuck at the next desk to him, I may well have had a more immediate reaction and would have walked away, never to talk to him again.  I also have a relative who is gay.  Again, if you can get her off topic and into a normal conversation she is great, but she is also too WOKE for words, and seems to think that if you don’t think like her you are somehow stupid, so conversation with her can be both difficult and off-putting.

Anyway, back to the reason for this post.

On Wednesday 16^th April, the Supreme Court in London gave judgement in an equality case saying, “"woman" refers to a biological woman and does not include biological men who identify as women”.

Since that ruling there has been an awful lot of protest and backlash.  Perhaps we now live in an era when the loudest voice wins?  There appears to be a lot of confusion out there about the terms sex (in the meaning of what sex a person is), and gender.  The World Health Organisation: refers to gender as ‘the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other’.  Basically, you can choose your gender, but you cannot choose what sex you are.

This is backed up by the chromosomes that we are born with, and which define which sex we are.  You will all know this.  Two X chromosomes make a female, an X and a Y make a male.  Of course, things are not as simple as the previous sentence implies.  I’m sure for example you will all have heard of hermaphrodites, where a baby is born with both sets of sex organs?  There is a modern term, ‘intersex’, which has a much wider definition.  Google tells me this occurs in about 1.7% of all births.  I’m not even certain what the entire intersex definition covers and thus what physical or social elements there may be within it, but let’s take it as read.  There are also people born with extra chromosomes, but these are both rare, and come with numerous health and physicality problems.  Neither of these relatively rare explanations can account for the 3.8% of the population (in the UK at least), who identify as being gay in some form.  While it is possible that there is some physical, biological mechanism that makes people gay, only socially learned behaviours can account for the number of people with that identity. Therefore, a lot of the whole LGBGT thing is down to choice.  Nurture, not nature.

I’ve often heard the excuse that because someone likes dressing up in women’s clothes, then they must be gay.  Yet, any idiot can see that women’s clothes are a social construct.  They are different now from they were in Victorian times, and from any number of eras before that.  They also differ by religion, class, geography and other factors.  Yet, I see few supposedly ‘gay’ men want to dress in a Hijab!  And then there are the cartoon like drag queens!  Bloody Hell!!  We have reached a state of strange decadence in society when people even want to look like that.  As you can see, I just don’t get it.  Mind you, they are no more strange than Trump!

Personally, I think it is right to have female only changing rooms and loos.  It seems ridiculous that anyone who still has the physical ‘tackle’ of a male, should be allowed to use such a personally female space just because they have decided, or have somehow come to the belief that they are really a female.  A man can never truly be a female, just as a woman cannot ever really be male.  If they don’t produce the hormones within your own bodies, such pseudo females will never have periods, the menopause etc, etc.  Without that, and no matter how many artificial hormones they take, they are not women, and never will be.

If you disagree, I would be interested to hear your logic.