STOP OVERWORKING THE WORDS.

Our President laid down a marker in favor of sanity in youth sports, but in so doing got it about half right.  It's an overworked word or two doing the damage.

I forget when the overworking of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex" began.  Years ago, when I was helping construct Divisia indices of labor quality, which, these days, might have to be prefaced with an apology for "neoclassical economics" and insufficient "decolonisation," I recall something like a five-way classification of workers by sex, age, experience, industry, and occupation.  My own research focused on location problems in heavy industry, and some years into that work, all those dummy variables for "sex" became dummy variables for "gender."

Blast furnaces are still "she," but the word-noise goes on forever.

Accordingly, the federal government will now use the word “sex” for male and female, not “gender,” in its official documents, including identification forms such as passports and visas.

But the directive is even broader: Agencies must now remove any content “that promotes or otherwise inculcates gender ideology.” That could be interpreted as an almost completely discontinued use of the word “gender.” Let’s hope so. Good riddance!

Today, the word “gender” seems to be everywhere. It wasn’t always like that. Not long ago, “gender” was heard almost exclusively in grammar lessons, including pronoun-antecedent agreement, and also for foreign languages since their nouns often have genders. For example, “fork” in French is feminine (la fourchette), while “knife” is masculine (le couteau). Nouns in German can also be neutral such as the word “child” which is das kind.

When officials replaced the word “sex” with “gender” on government forms, they were intending to signal that “male” or “female” are also man-made, the way grammar rules are. In this way, they set the stage for the larger “gender identity” movement, which is really a war on reality, though it’s marketed as a war on man-made power structures or “social constructs.” This obsession with power by the political left, including the gender movement with its manipulation of language, is distorted and destructive. Any doubt about that is resolved when one sees how the movement has metastasized to the point of falsely claiming that mutilating an individual’s genitals can change his or her sex. It can’t.

Even on this aspect, Trump is doing what can be done: EO 14168 not only bans federal funds for these “transition” procedures (on inmates, subject to the Bureau of Prisons, for example) but also points out the movement’s internal inconsistencies: It insists one’s sex is fluid—“an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity”—but at the same time insists that one must have access to clinical and chemical castrations because someone was born in the “wrong sexed body.” (Maybe the body will be correct next year?)

In sum, with this administration, the grown ups are back: Trump is replacing confusion and chaos with clarity and common sense—not just for women’s sports but also for America.

It might be a start.

OVERWORKING A WORD.

Sex is binary, personality is a continuum.  Our President, in his attempt either to score culture-war points or to force the culture-studies types to acknowledge there are coherent beliefs, gets it about half right.

In an effort to "defend women's rights" against "efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex," the order—titled "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government"—seeks with the force of federal law to establish men and women as distinct and immutable categories.

"It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female," which "are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality," the order states. It defines "sex" as "an individual's immutable biological classification as either male or female" and notes that the term is "not a synonym for and does not include the concept of 'gender identity,'" which the order says "does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex."

Perhaps ironically, supporters of transgender equality might agree with parts of this characterization. "Sex is a label—male or female—that you're assigned by a doctor at birth based on the genitals you're born with and the chromosomes you have. It goes on your birth certificate," according to Planned Parenthood. Gender identity, on the other hand, "is how you feel inside and how you express your gender through clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. It's a feeling that begins very early in life."

I forget when the overworking of "gender" as a euphemism for "sex" began.  Years ago, when I was helping construct Divisia indices of labor quality, which, these days, might have to be prefaced with an apology for "neoclassical economics" and insufficient "decolonisation," I recall something like a five-way classification of workers by sex, age, experience, industry, and occupation.  My own research focused on location problems in heavy industry, and some years into that work, all those dummy variables for "sex" became dummy variables for "gender."  I suppose that's also a problem for Reason's Joe Lancaster.

The order tautologically defines "sex" in terms of "male" and "female," which are then defined in terms of "sex."

But by ruling so starkly, the order completely writes intersex people out of existence.

"People who are intersex have genitals, chromosomes or reproductive organs that don't fit into a male/female sex binary," according to the Cleveland Clinic. "Some people who are intersex consider their gender to be intersex. Others identify as female, male, nonbinary or a different gender." In this case, a person's professed gender may change from the one assigned at birth because they literally have biological markers of both. The clinic further notes that one in 100 Americans is estimated to be intersex.

The executive order criticizes "gender ideology," which it says "replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity" and "diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body." But intersex people literally are born in the wrong sexed body, at least as defined by the executive order, which says everyone is either all male or all female.

I don't recall that being an issue in assessing the quality of labor, although in those days dealing with the lingering effects of Jim Crow was where the research action, and the grant money, was.  And I worry, a bit, about that Planned Parenthood conception of "gender identity."  Should Charles Schultz have done a series of panels on Peppermint Patty's sex-change operation?

HERE WE GO AGAIN.

Megyn Kelly hails a new ukase from Our President.

BEHOLD!! pic.twitter.com/XXcWlKWgdm

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 20, 2025

Twitchy's Sam J. carps, "It's insane that this is not just common sense, absolutely."

The ukase, sort of, recognizes that people overwork the word, "gender."

I cannot resist the temptation to mock the anthropology establishment.  "Dear reader, we begin thus.  'Is it that difficult to understand that sex is binary, while personality is a continuum?'  The idea is so difficult to understand that it takes an academic discipline to screw it up."

The screw-ups just keep on coming.  "Anthropology groups cancel all-female panel defending biological sex as ‘necessary category.’"

Maybe the practitioners of what we used to call abnormal psychology will get around to clarifying when personality is personality rather than some sort of pathology.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Another week of life under the heel of the Credentialed Elite.  How well has higher education served us?  "The mix of ideas and perceptions swirling through the contemporary American academy is not, intellectually, an impressive product. A peculiar blend of optimistic enlightened positivism (History is with us!) and anti-capitalist, anti-rationalist rage (History is the story of racist, genocidal injustice!) has somehow brought 'Death to the Gays' Islamism, 'Death to the TERFS' radical identitarianism, and 'Jews are Nazis' antisemitism into a partnership on the addled American campus. This set of perceptions—too incoherent to qualify as an ideology—can neither withstand rational scrutiny, provide the basis for serious intellectual endeavor, nor prepare the next generation of American leaders for the tasks ahead. It has, however, produced a toxic stew in which we have chosen to marinate the minds of our nation’s future leaders during their formative years." When you admit unprepared people and call it access, what happens next will not be amusing. "If you are a fumble-fingered incompetent with a limited attention span, it doesn’t matter how rich or well-connected your parents are—you still can’t be a neurosurgeon or an air traffic controller."  That article is worth reading in full, dear reader, as it summarizes in one essay the essence of twenty years of Cold Spring Shops posts.

Meet The AWFL demographic.  "The Batshit Crazy demographic (single women) who famously have the highest rates of mental health issues, are obviously driving the Democrat short bus."  Meet Nancy Pelosi, conductress of the short bus:  "Some pro-Palestinian protests, especially those against Joe Biden, have 'a Russian tinge to it.'"

Meanwhile, here's some crossover hip-hop for your amusement.  (NSFW)  "Fuck Israel, Israel a bitch / Bitch we out here mobbin’ on some Palestine shit / Free Palestine bitch, Israel gon’ die bitch / Nigga it’s they land why you out here tryna rob it / Bullshit prophets, y’all just want the profit."  I wonder if somebody got credit in a Yale victim studies course for composing that.  Hail Columbia.  "After years of encouraging students to make life difficult for normies like you and me, the revolution is eating its own, as it always does."

Yale, Columbia, Rutgers, George Washington: four Hamas cells with lousy football teams?  "At publishing time, the Columbia administration had put forth plans to load Jewish students onto train cars and transport them to special camps to help them concentrate."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

WHAT DO I KEEP TELLING YOU?

Pajamas Media's Rick Moran finds a survey.  "More Than 50% of Scientists Believe Sex Is Binary but Gender Is 'Fluid'."  My formulation is "sex is binary, personality is a continuum," that being a difference of second-order smallness.  (Keep your prurient thoughts to yourself!)

"Sex" is a biological classification while "gender" generally refers to society's expectations for the two sexes as far as roles and relationships between males and females.

The "relativist" view of gender posits a sliding scale of male/female attributes where most people are completely or almost completely male or female with the rest being varying degrees of male or female. It's still a controversial view of gender that some scientists believe where facts are shoehorned into a theory to explain a poorly understood phenomenon.

I'm more than inclined to concur with that "shoehorned into a theory," and I'm grateful that when Lionel introduced that girl's train in the 1950s, and the girls who wanted train sets rejected it in favor of trains that somewhat resembled trains, the trendy developmental psychologists didn't prescribe transition therapies.  Mr Moran appears to be of like mind.

Yes, sex and gender are two different concepts. But the question needing to be answered is what basis is there to believe one's gender is "fluid" and can somehow be different from the sex they were born to? If gender is a "preference," that is, a conscious decision made that does not match one's sex at birth, why aren't we all running around in hysterical confusion about who we are? Or what we are?

Society doesn't "impose" gender as much as it recognizes sex roles already present. If one wants to reject those roles, they're free to do so.

Just don't expect most of the rest of us to agree with you.

Or, put less contentiously, it's vintage P. J. O'Rourke.  "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."

VIVE LE DIFFERENCE.

The following headline is a candidate for a Friday short take, but for a lack of Cold Spring Shops posts elaborating on its message.

Men and women's brains do work differently, scientists discover for first time.

To borrow a maxim, if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be research.  "That I might get into trouble claiming sex is binary, while personality is a continuum, and body types require Euclidean n-space to categorize does not mean using the left's cancel mob tactics on the left's court intellectuals in Bloomington or anywhere else."

And now, dear reader, there's evidence on the side of the binary.

The brains of men and women operate differently, scientists have shown for the first time in a breakthrough that shows sex does matter in how people think and behave.

The issue of whether male and female brains are distinct has proven controversial, with some academics arguing it is society – rather than biology – that shapes divergence.

There has never been any definitive proof of difference in activity in the brains of men and women, but Stanford University has shown that it is possible to tell the sexes apart based on activity in “hotspot” areas.

They include the “default mode network”, an area of the brain thought to be the neurological centre for “self”, and is important in introspection and retrieving personal memories.

The limbic system is also implicated, which helps regulate emotion, memory and deals with sexual stimulation, and striatum, which is important in habit forming and rewards.

There is always reason to conduct further reseach.

Dr Vinod Menon, prof of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford, said: “This is a very strong piece of evidence that sex is a robust determinant of human brain organisation.”‌

“Our findings suggest that differences in brain activity patterns across these key brain regions contribute to sex-specific variations in cognitive functioning.”

However, he added that further research is needed to fully understand the implications of the findings.

‌It is well known that male and female chromosomes release sex-specific hormones in the brain, particularly in early development, puberty and during ageing.‌

In particular, might the stereotypically male or female brain functions be evolutionary adaptations?

Women tend to be better at reading comprehension and writing ability on average, and have good long term memory.

Conversely, men seem to have stronger visual and spatial awareness and better working memory.

‌Yet scientists have struggled to spot these differences in neural activity, with brain structures looking the same in men and women.‌

Selection, respectively, for gathering and nurturing, or for hunting and defending? You decide.

Dr Gina Rippon, emeritus professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, and author of The Gendered Brain, has argued that society is to blame for brain differences in men and women.

‌Commenting on the study, she said: “The really intriguing issue is that those areas of the brain which are most reliably distinguishing the sexes are key parts of the social brain.

‌“The key issue is whether these differences are a product of sex-specific, biological influences, or of brain-changing gendered experiences. Or both. Are we really looking at sex differences? Or gender differences?

‌“Or, acknowledging that almost all brain–shaping factors are dynamically entangled products of both sex and gender influences, are we looking at what should be called sex/gender differences?”

Personality is a continuum. The sifting and winnowing goes on.

ONE DOWN, MORE TO GO?

Today is for kicking ass and taking names.  First on the list, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, who first had the smirk wiped off her face in a notorious hostage video, and she's now out.

Elizabeth Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, is stepping down following months of rising tensions on campus and among alumni. Her resignation is effective immediately, according to an email sent to the Penn community today.

Scott Bok, the chair of Penn's board of trustees, will also be stepping down, according to the school's newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Magill has been the subject of complaints from donors, alumni, and students for her reactions to the October 7 attacks on Israel and incidents of antisemitism, or purported antisemitism, on campus.

The criticisms escalated when Magill evaded a question during a December 5 congressional hearing on whether calling for Jewish genocide violated school policy.

Following the hearing, the board of Wharton, Penn's business school, called on Magill to resign. Separately, Penn's board of trustees met Thursday, and scheduled a second meeting on Sunday, the school's paper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported.

Magill's troubles started before the October 7 attacks by Hamas.

In September, students and alumni signed an open letter to the president condemning the school's Palestine Writes Literary Festival, which they said platformed speakers with histories of antisemitism. (Organizers of the festival denied that anyone involved embraces antisemitic ideas).

The letter was signed by 4,000 people and accused the school of not denouncing antisemitism at the festival.

We'll take stock of the challenges of breaking out of the punishment cycles of the Grim Strategy later this week.  Let me go on record as suggesting that strengthening the existing speech codes to proscribe ever more conduct as "harassing or demeaning" is not the way to go.

Today, though, the Bears beat the Lions (in fact, it was a tough day to be a Detroit team playing an Illinois team) and in that spirit, I'm going to round up some of the ass-kicking and name-taking.

SEX IS BINARY, PERSONALITY IS A CONTINUUM.

Yes, Richard Dawkins, who has the relevant intellectual capital, has trouble selling that message.

No less than Richard Dawkins has recently taken stick for maintaining that sex is binary whilst race, and I contend, personality, are better understood as existing on a spectrum (his word) or in a continuum in n-space.

The disciplines of psychology and psychiatry, unfortunately, aren't yet well-enough developed to be able to assess such claims in a systematic way.  We're a century or so away from eugenics and sterilization, three score and ten years or so away from frontal lobotomies, and forty years ago Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union had regime psychiatrists diagnosing dissidents as schizophrenic, in order to make the dissenters go away whilst claiming the corrective labor camps were for more conventional criminals alone.  There is a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for neuroses and psychoses, but the committee that revises it responds to Popular Sentiment.  That is not the behavior of scholars confident in their paradigm.

Current academic thinking is complicit in some sort of experiment against reality, but I'm not sure which experiment that is.

It doesn't matter much whether I take a side in that argument, or not, but perhaps I cannot resist the temptation to mock the anthropology establishment.  "Dear reader, we begin thus.  "Is it that difficult to understand that sex is binary, while personality is a continuum?"  The idea is so difficult to understand that it takes an academic discipline to screw it up."

REGRETS? THEY'VE HAD A FEW.

National Review have set up a new article aggregator, "The Detransitioners," with links to the stories they have run about various young people who underwent sex-change, er, gender-affirming, treatments they later regretted.  I can't rule out the possibility that the aggregator is set up for clicks and subscriptions, as many of the individual tales of woe are behind the paywall.

Unfortunately, the academic understanding of the phenomenon is not much better.  No less than Richard Dawkins has recently taken stick for maintaining that sex is binary whilst race, and I contend, personality, are better understood as existing on a spectrum (his word) or in a continuum in n-space.

The disciplines of psychology and psychiatry, unfortunately, aren't yet well-enough developed to be able to assess such claims in a systematic way.  We're a century or so away from eugenics and sterilization, three score and ten years or so away from frontal lobotomies, and forty years ago Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union had regime psychiatrists diagnosing dissidents as schizophrenic, in order to make the dissenters go away whilst claiming the corrective labor camps were for more conventional criminals alone.  There is a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for neuroses and psychoses, but the committee that revises it responds to Popular Sentiment.  That is not the behavior of scholars confident in their paradigm.

Current academic thinking is complicit in some sort of experiment against reality, but I'm not sure which experiment that is.  Unfortunately, that will be small solace for the discontented detransitioners who discover that their lives still suck, only now their lives suck in different ways than they previously did.

SEX IS BINARY.

Dear reader, we begin thus.  "Is it that difficult to understand that sex is binary, while personality is a continuum?"  The idea is so difficult to understand that it takes an academic discipline to screw it up.

In my first year of graduate school at Rutgers, I attended a colloquium designed to forge connections between the cultural and biological wings of the anthropology department. It was the early 2000s, and anthropology departments across the country were splitting across disciplinary lines. These lectures would be a last, and ultimately futile, attempt to build interdisciplinary links between these increasingly hostile factions at Rutgers; it was like trying to establish common research goals for the math and art departments.

This time, it was the turn of the biological anthropologists, and the primatologist Ryne Palombit was giving a lecture for which he was uniquely qualified — infanticide in Chacma baboons. Much of the talk was devoted to sex differences in baboon behavior and when it was time for questions the hand of the chair of the department, a cultural anthropologist, shot up and demanded to know “What exactly do you mean by these so-called males and females?” I didn’t know it at the time but looking back I see that this was the beginning of a broad anti-science movement that has enveloped nearly all the social sciences and distorted public understanding of basic biology. The assumption that sex is an arbitrary category is no longer confined to the backwaters of cultural anthropology departments, and the willful ignorance of what sex is has permeated both academia and public discussion of the topic.

That's Skeptic contributor Robert Lynch, and he continues at some length.  The problem might be as simple as a word, "gender," being overused.  When I started messing about with the National Income and Product Accounts and something called "quality of labor," there was a five-way taxonomy of occupations, by sex, age, education, experience, and nature of the work.  Open any economics journal these days, and you see references to "gender," which might be current noodling in the income accounts, or it might be something from the culture studies crowd, and it's likely that saying "quality of labor" gets you scolded.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

America is screaming for another Reagan Revolution.  Stop being stupid, Republicans.  We need someone with Trump's policies without all of the drama.

Michael Ramirez cartoon retrieved from his Substack.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Americans have had enough.  Americans started paying attention.  The punishment cycles of the grim strategy begin.  "Normally polite and courteous citizens can only be pushed so far, before returning insult for insult."  Temporarily unhinged Americans are slowly reviving.  The left is America's narcissistic abusive spouse.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

IT'S AN INSULT TO THE ITINERANT CIRCUS.

Miranda Devine uses that comparison to the Jarrett regency's strip show.  "The whole debased circus of Joe Biden’s 'Pride' extravaganza will go down in history as a metaphor for his presidency."

That's Friday short take material, but for the elaborations that follow.

There are certain standards of decorum and norms of behavior that this president and his administration continue to transgress, from arresting his political opponent to promoting depravity.

Biden’s seeming cognitive confusion is no excuse. He knows exactly what he’s doing: pandering to a perceived voter bloc of narcissistic TikTokers and impressionable youth while indulging his favorite muscle memory, sticking it to conservatives.

But tough luck for an unpopular president: Support for transgender tyranny is plummeting amid parental pushback.

The latest Gallup poll reveals social conservatism at its highest level in over a decade.

Reality is socially conservative, and the administration's Cabaret on the South Lawn simply reminds people what's at stake.

These results are not bigotry but common sense at a moment in history when the grownups in charge have lost their minds.

Compassion for the tiny percentage of adults who are gender-dysphoric is a good thing, but it is not a green light for gender-transitioning toddlers.

The same Americans surveyed by Gallup who overwhelmingly embrace same-sex marriage reject the lie that biological sex is malleable.

Sane parents object to schools and Disney confusing their children with nonsense about whether they are boys or girls — and exposing them to gratuitous sexual content way beyond their years.

Is it that difficult to understand that sex is binary, while personality is a continuum?  The occasional chromosomal aberration is a canonical example of the exception that proves the rule:  sex is binary.  That people play around with personalities is part of growing up; and growing up ought come with the understanding that you are free to play around with whatever personality you want, but I don't have to associate with you, let alone affirm your choices.

Ultimately, there are limits to transgressivity.  "But degeneracy is the animating force of the progressive left which has captured the Democratic Party, and, shockingly, the White House."  It might be that the transgressive left has pushed people too far in affirming those transitioning toddlers, and I can think of no position more likely to keep the polity in a prolonged grim strategy equilibrium.

A BROADER MOMENT OF MORAL PANIC.

Ordinarily, Nico Perrino's observation on behalf of The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, "Faith in the value of knowledge, once thought safe — at least safer than it was in the 1950s — is giving way to faith in ignorance," might be part of Friday's Friday Short Takes.