Now That's What I Call Arty! Essays You Might have Missed, Vol. 1
Excerpts of my writings from around the web.
My Substack is relatively new, but I’ve been writing online about the gender mess under the nom de plume “Arty Morty” since at least 2019, and I’d certainly been following it since long before that — and living in it! I’ve worked in the gay community since the ‘90s.
Here is a collection of excerpts from my writings elsewhere, pertaining to the gender mess. Feel free to browse. If there’s anything that tickles your fancy, there are links to read the whole pieces at their original places of publication. You’ll notice that a lot of it appears at Butterflies and Wheels. I cannot recommend that website highly enough.
If you see anything you feel like sharing or restacking, by all means do.
Enjoy!
Graham Linehan’s Gender Blasphemy Exposes the Fear that Stifles the Trans Debate
On progressives’ ongoing fears and anxieties regarding the gender debate.
The first problem for gender heretics when they get accused of things like “misgendering” is that even acknowledging the act requires the accused to play along with gender belief. Like sin, if you don’t believe in it, you can’t really agree or disagree that you’ve committed it. So addressing such accusations comes with burdensome conceptual unpacking work right from the start.
One side — my side — starts with the foundational assumption that everyone, trans or not, is first and foremost to be treated as an individual, no more or less equally deserving of respect than any other individual, and then builds from there. Of course I understand how much sensitivity there is in the transgender community about, say, pronouns. I’m a gay man; I’m deeply embedded in the gay community. I even worked at a trans bar back in the day. But I don’t take it as religious doctrine that anyone who simply claims to be a transgender woman is one — I don’t believe in gender religion and I reserve the right to have my own beliefs about anyone — and I don’t take it as law that I have to abide anyone’s pronouns. I aim to be respectful, but it’s case-by-case, and I’m the judge.
But the other side, the one that sees Jesus in the toast, starts out with the foundational assumption that anyone who identifies as transgender belongs to a special kind of people who are, to true believers at least, almost supernaturally vulnerable. There are lots of problems with that, but the big one is that “trans” is a label anyone can freely adopt, and the doctrine that once you call yourself trans you’re no longer seen first-and-foremost as an individual but instead you’re now first-and-foremost a member of a special class — this is ripe for exploitation. And us gender heretics are watching it get exploited like crazy, and we’re tearing our hair out in frustration because the other side, the ones who can only picture Jesus whenever they hear the word “trans,” seem completely oblivious, no matter how loud we yell.
Transgender is an active faultline in the culture right now. When Graham Linehan published those images of males with highly dubious claims to being lesbians (to put it generously), what he was doing was creating a little earthquake: tension was building because lesbians were angry and frustrated that they were constantly being intruded upon by straight men, and no one was listening. […] We need more of these little earthquakes to release the growing tensions around trans and open up the debate so we can actually make some progress. Indisputably there are serious conflicts between gender ideology and women’s rights, gay rights, and freedom of speech. The gender ideologues declared it taboo to talk about these issues. But unless more people start breaking these taboos, the tensions will keep building up and we’re gonna get The Big One, a massive and ugly backlash which could do terrible harm to the entire LGBT community.
Read the rest here.
The New Yorker Has Fallen
On Lia Thomas, and the disgraceful decline of the New Yorker’s editorial standards:
The benefits of testosterone are indeed well-established, and it’s well-established that they aren’t the only benefits male bodies have.
There’s no maybe about it. If a few months without testosterone literally rearranged a man’s pelvic bones, we’d have heard about it by now.
No bills have ever restricted transgender people’s access to sports. In your own piece, you said that Lia Thomas continued to swim on the men’s team after he came out as transgender and even after he began hormone therapy. Thomas chose to switch to the women’s team after the hormones he voluntarily chose to take in order to indulge his gender identity began slowing him down. This is in your piece.
Healthy PEOPLE don’t compete in women’s sports. Healthy WOMEN compete in women’s sports. Unbelievable that you think women’s sports should be available to ALL PEOPLE who want to play in them. Unbelievable that you’re pondering whether it’s “ethical” for women’s sports to be for women — adult human females. Just nuts.
Read the rest here.
They Pull The Lever Anyway
On “virtue signalling”:
I think the term “virtue signalling” can be susceptible to overuse in something like the way “critical race theory” is. Signalling virtue in itself isn’t a bad thing, because virtue isn’t a bad thing; “virtue signalling” as a pejorative is meant to refer to a cynical or vacuous performance of a kind of artificial morality. Likewise, critical academic analysis of race in itself isn’t a bad thing, but “critical race theory” is a specific strand of academic theory which is a hot mess. The terms’ lack of clarity make them susceptible to being co-opted or misunderstood.
But we definitely need some kind of term for the phenomenon we’re seeing everywhere, which is that the relationship between incentive and moral behaviour has been warped. Everywhere I look, I see examples of people choosing to signal their allegiance to various groups or causes in ways that actually harm them. A thousand Trolley Problems, and everyone’s pulling the lever to drive the trolley over the victims because it gives the lever-pullers a short-term dose of social credibility.
People make a big show of embracing gender extremism because they want to appear aligned with gays and lesbians, even after we show them that it’s harmful to gays and lesbians. People make a big show of saying “trans women are women” because they want to appear as though they’re on the cutting edge of women’s rights and breaking gender stereotypes, even when it’s crystal clear that trans-identifying males are gutting women’s rights. People make a big show out of supporting ayurveda and other pseudoscience because they want to make a big show of how racially and culturally open-hearted they are, even though “alternative medicine” hurts many of the very people they’re signalling their allegiance with.
On and on. They pull the lever anyway.
Read the rest here.
A Pyramid Scheme Where the Product is “Progressive Values”
On why supposed progressives embrace regressive gender fundamentalism:
Ironically, the appeal of gender ideology is its unpopularity — most people don’t actually like it.
All the civil rights movements started out unpopular, and only became popular through arduous campaigning and struggle. This pattern repeated itself enough times that everyone absorbed three things:
1. The eventual outcome for all civil rights movements is success and widespread adoption by society. Why should the next one turn out any different than all the ones that have come before it?
2. The eventual outcome for those who oppose civil rights is social shame. For this reason, overt opposition to sex equality, racial equality, sexual orientation equality, disability rights, etc, has largely quieted down. (I may still have anti-gay colleagues, but no one’s said anything overtly homophobic to me in a workplace for 20 years because they know they can’t anymore.)
3. The eventual outcome for those who embrace civil rights is social capital: virtue. The earlier someone joins a new civil rights movement, the more virtue she will eventually receive. The very earliest adopters of civil rights eventually get statues and holidays in their honour.
This pattern suggests that the more overt opposition a (supposed) rights movement has, the earlier it is in its inevitable trajectory to widespread adoption, and the greater the virtue will be amassed by those noble souls who were the earliest to heed the calling of progress. It’s counter-intuitive, but it’s the same pattern of human behaviour that has driven people to join religious sects. Call it the economics of religion.
It’s kind of like a pyramid scheme where the product is “progressive values” and the reward is “virtue.” It doesn’t actually matter what you’re selling; the point is that you always have to have more people below you to sell it to, or the whole thing collapses. The other civil rights causes have lost their usefulness precisely because they no longer have a huge pool of outspoken opponents. There isn’t an anti-gay or anti-Black equivalent of JK Rowling, and by progressive logic today, that’s a weakness for those movements, not a selling point.
Read the rest here.
Military Men Dress Up in Women’s Clothing
On the unusually high rates of autogynephilic crossdressers with military backgrounds:
I’m not entirely surprised the army is so hostile to gender-critical views, considering the military is lousy with crossdressers. For reasons still not quite understood, military men are far more likely to become transvestites than men in any other profession. The trope of the secretly-crossdressing general has been around since at least the 18th century. It’s incredible how many of the most famous trans activists of the 20th and 21st centuries were soldiers:
Private Bradley “Chelsea” Manning, famed Wikileaks whistleblower.
Admiral Richard “Rachel” Levine, Assistant Secretary of Health.
Sergeant First Class James “Jamie/Ellie Rae” Shupe, first legally-recognized “nonbinary” American.
Lieutenant Colonel James “Jennifer” Pritzker, founder of the Pritzker Military Library.
G.I. George “Christine” Jorgensen, the first famous transsexual.
Lance Corporal James “Jan” Morris, CBE, journalist and bestselling author; famed for accompanying Hillary on his Everest expedition.
Read the rest here.
The Kinky Elephant In The Room
On the irksome acronym “LGBTQ+”:
“LGBTQ+” is an example of a term that gives us less information than we had when the individual letters were broken out into separate attributes. And I suspect that’s a large part of LGBTQ+’s appeal.
LGBTQ+ basically just means “different in a sex and gender kind of way.” Which is deliberately more vague than “sexually attracted to persons of the same sex.”
Deliberately more vague is appealing to lazy journalists who don’t want to bother being specific.
Deliberately more vague is appealing to formerly-LGB-focused lobby groups who want to capture a broader demographic.
Deliberately more vague is appealing to straight people who aren’t actually sexually attracted to persons of the same sex, but who want to claim a place in the rainbow parade now that it’s got cachet.
Deliberately more vague is appealing to men for whom their specific “sex and gender” difference constitutes having sexual paraphilias that they’re too embarrassed to openly admit to; and it’s more appealing to the people who have to interact with these paraphilic men in their family or work life, who would rather not have to address head-on the kinky elephant in the room.
And deliberately more vague is most appealing to the many young people who are struggling to reconcile themselves with the bodies they inhabit, which each come equipped with a sex and a sexual orientation of their own, outside of their inhabitants’ control, and often ill-fitting with the identities these young people are trying to curate online so that they can fit in with their peers.
Read the rest here.
This Is So Not a Leap Forward
On the medical profession’s complicity in the gender scandal:
This is the only area of medicine I can think of that believes “an overabundance of caution” means caution about offending activists instead of caution about the health of vulnerable patients. It was out of an overabundance of caution over fears of being perceived as transphobic that they rushed to greenlight experimental treatments on vulnerable adolescents before they had any good data to back them up, and in the face of overwhelming data that shows none of this treatment is entirely necessary, plus a growing body of data that shows most of it may in fact be harmful.
“Gender dysphoria” is being defined ever more broadly, and treated more aggressively at the same time. Fifteen years ago it was “gender identity disorder” —a full-blown debilitating mental disorder. Now it’s just a feeling of distress. And plans are already underway to redefine it again, this time as “gender incongruence” — nothing more than a preference to be one sex over the other. But these softer thresholds aren’t being matched with softer treatments. It’s full-on sex changes for everyone; the more the better. So there it is, the underlying ideal, a bizarre new “human right”: sex is a choice.
Read the rest here.
Not an Allegiance, but a Hostile Takeover
On the “LGBTQ+” Borg’s attempt to assimilate abortion rights into gender ideology:
I detect a strong tone of bullying subjugation in HRC’s statement. I could be wrong, but I doubt other groups’ advocacy orgs are putting out tweets with such wording that could be interpreted as claiming ownership over abortion rights. But that’s par for the course for the gender movement: its objective is to annex and then dismantle anything that has to do with biological sex. First, they took over gay rights orgs, which, save for LGB Alliance, have been completely assimilated by the Gender Borg and are now overtly hostile to actual homosexuals like me. Now it’s abortion’s turn.
Any marginalized group that counts women within its population has an overlap with abortion rights, so of course it’s reasonable that advocates for those groups would state an allegiance with abortion rights. In that sense, abortion rights are African American women’s rights, disabled women’s rights, women labourers’ rights. But because abortion is centrally about biological sex, gender lobbies see this issue as a threat and a territory that must be conquered. It’s not an allegiance; it’s a hostile takeover, and that shows in the wording these groups are using. Abortion can’t be seen as about women’s rights because sex must never be acknowledged, so abortion must be seen as inseparable from and central to the gender movement instead. And look how far they’ve already gotten: by now almost no one will dare use the words “woman” or “women” when talking in public about abortion rights, thereby putting the concept of people’s made-up gender identities firmly in the centre and pushing biological sex off to the side in terms of which people are most affected by abortion restrictions. Abortion rights are LGBTQ+ rights, NOT women’s rights. By omitting the word women altogether, the emphasis is shifted.
Read the rest here.
When Politics Becomes Identity
On the Overton Window, and the left’s lurch to extremism:
All across the left, we’re seeing this. It’s because the left have conceptualized the causes we hold dear — the environment, gay rights, anti-racism, women’s reproductive rights — not as fixed, external objectives we’re trying to achieve at this point in time in political history (reduction in greenhouse gases, equal rights for sexual and racial minorities, access to contraception and abortion, etc.) but as relative, internalized political identities on an ever-shifting political spectrum. When a progressive cause gains ground and enters the mainstream zeitgeist, it’s not seen as a victory but a loss: the cause is no longer appealing to the activists who championed it because it doesn’t line up with their internal political identity as being more progressive relative to the mainstream.
This is our old friend the Overton Window of course. But there are two extra effects at play here. One is a sort-of feedback loop that develops between the zeitgeist and progressive politics; it seems to be a repeating pattern in history: the point where progressivism suddenly and rapidly melts down into totalitarianism. (I suppose you could call it a “China Syndrome” in more ways than one?) It goes something like this: progressive cause succeeds in shifting the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist now sees that the progressive side is probably correct, and decides that in future it will be quicker to adopt the progressive position. Progressives now see that their cause is no longer progressive, so they quickly shift to a more progressive position. The zeitgeist moves even faster this time to incorporate the progressive position; the progressive wing moves even faster to an even more hardline-progressive position, yadda yadda the feedback loop has a meltdown and we end up with totalitarianism.
The other effect at play is that the “extremification” of the left isn’t just becoming more hardline about progressive causes, it eventually turns hostile to the very causes it started with. In the end, the Chinese Communist Revolution did the exact opposite of abolishing the ruling class and ushering in equality and freedom. Trans is an especially good (bad) example, because it is fundamentally about an inversion: flipping the sexes, thus flipping the polarity of the power structure behind sexism and homophobia, literally putting men and straights (even misogynist men and anti-gay straights) at the forefront of women’s rights and gay rights. Lots of people have pointed out that some of the more extreme “anti-racist” positions around things like cultural appropriation are sounding more and more like old-fashioned segregationism.
Read the rest here.
What Kind of Experts?
On the media’s gullible reliance on gender “experts,” who I compare to Scientologists:
This drives me crazy. What kind of “experts”? The journalistic principle in play should be to weigh the testimony of “experts” against the possibility of influence by a religious belief system that’s applying pressure on the debate.
If you’re talking about any other religious belief — say, Scientology — it becomes very clear that there’s two kinds of “experts” about it: believers themselves, and those who look at the belief system from the outside. Everyone on the inside will of course have nothing but good things to say about it because they have to. It’s people on the outside, who at least ostensibly have more freedom to look at it critically, who journalists should seek out for comment.
So the press really has to take the social pressure aspect into account any time they cite “experts.”
L. Ron Hubbard, crazy as he was, had shrewd insights into how to spread his cult, one of them being to glom his beliefs onto the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, because that’s what had the most appeal to Americans at the time. It wasn’t just a new science, it was a new science that made you glamourous and successful! In just the same way, the pseudoscience of trans ideology has been yoked to the virtues of progressive politics: gay and lesbian rights; identity politics; the civil rights movement. In a way that’s even more fiendishly clever, because its appeal is deeper than aspirations to fame and fortune: it’s morally righteous. Righteousness is stubborn as an ox, and prone to blindness. Blind righteousness is dangerous.
Read the rest here.
They Love Women’s Bodies but They Hate Women’s Souls
On why so many men hate women and claim to be women at the same time:
It’s like a jumbled kind of mind-body dualism deployed in service of misogyny: they love women’s bodies but they hate women’s souls.
I think many trans-identified men are like many other men in that they’re preoccupied with women’s bodies, but not keen on the female people who “inhabit” them. Damn that pesky business of women as autonomous persons who are different from men, and who are in control of their own bodies — the ones men want so badly to possess and control.
It’s surprising how many trans activists more-or-less come right out and say this: a “woman’s” body inhabited by a male soul is therefore the ideal woman to be, and a woman’s body inhabited by a female soul who is obedient to your demands is the ideal woman to have. Your soul is male so you can possess a woman’s body if you bloody well say so, and her soul is female, so you need to keep her under control.
You can see why so many misogynistic trans-identifying males call themselves “lesbians”.
Read the rest here.
And of course, there’s plenty more of my writing right here at my Substack. Thanks for being a subscriber!