Gender gymnastics

Society has tumbled off the vaulting horse of reality

Photo by Levi Arnold on Unsplash

Elite sports men and women sometimes experience a devastating condition known as the “yips.” It is a disorder that disrupts the execution of automatic fine motor tasks. It occurs in sports like golf and baseball. A version of the yips known as the “twisties” can occur in gymnastics. Another version may affect musicians—“focal dystonia”.

The yips cause a perplexing disorientation in the performer, such as loss of spatial awareness in gymnasts, and the loss of the automaticity of complex, well-practised movements usually achieved by elite athletes and musicians. Instead, they lose control over the fine-tuned dexterity in their bodies, honed by years of dedicated practice.

The gymnastics version of the yips recently received a lot of publicity since the greatest gymnast of all time, Simone Biles, retired from the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, stating that she had lost her sense of aerial awareness during the vault component of her program, and she feared serious injury if she crashed to earth. The public reacted with shock and disbelief that such a decorated athlete would exit her Olympic campaign in this way.

According to experts, you can’t cure the yips, but you can take action to manage them. Essentially, the messages from your brain to your muscles to re-acquire and perform the motor skill you spent your life developing must be slowly re-educated. It is a long and painstaking process to return to full function. Some performers never recover.

I believe that society has developed the “gender yips”—the loss of the automatic comprehensibility of gendered language that was once universally accepted to define and describe our scientifically acquired knowledge of biological sex and the fundamental concept of sexual dimorphism—men, women, ova, sperm, mother, father, husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister.

Now we have gobbledygook language—penis haver, cervix haver, pregnant person, birth giver, chest feeder, body feeder, fae/fem and ze/hir. One website, Healthline, presents 68 terms that describe gender identity and expression, among them aporagender, aliagender, demigender, gender void and gray gender. The style guide for the US National Institutes of Health provides the following advice—

“Because there are many different gender identities, avoid using binary language that indicates there are only two. Use all genders instead of both genders, opposite sex, or either sex.”

We are also told by the University of Maryland’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion to eliminate “binary” language from our vocabularies as it is offensive.

The gender yips gathered a head of steam in the 1990s with the emergence of queer theory that rejected objective reality. Its exponents—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler,¹ among others—created the (shaky) foundations for gender ideology, in which sex and gender were decoupled and biological sex was denied. According to queer theory, gender is conceived as an immutable subjective feeling that is also fluid—note the contradiction in terms. Queer theory underpins later claims that sex occurs on a spectrum as well as laws that recognise self-identified genders, thereby subverting societal norms based on biological sex.

The flawed logic is glaring. Few would disagree that environmental factors, self-understanding and cultural expectations may and do change over time. If fluctuating factors underpinning gender identity change over time, how can gender identity itself not be subject to change? Yet children are told that one’s sense of gender is a deeply held, immutable personal precept that cannot be challenged or altered. Rather alter the body than the precept!

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Video: Philosopher Kathleen Stock on how the idea of gender got “tumblerised”

Pseudoscience

There is a similar acquiescence to the flawed thinking of gender ideology on display in the peak medical and psychological journals, some of which are claiming that a perception of sex as binary is simplistic and outdated. Providing a foundation for this flawed ideology, Butler declared there was no biological basis for the categories “male” and “female” and that both the concepts of sex and gender are cultural constructions.

This was followed by the deluded academic narrative of Anne Fausto-Sterling about the existence of five sexes. Two new contributions from gender critical theorists have appeared more recently—Judith Butler’s book Who’s afraid of gender? and Andrea Long Chu’s magazine essay Freedom of sex. There is a bewildering number of claims in these works—foundationally, that our physical existence is a social construction, and that anatomy does not determine our sex!

Butler asserts that sex assignment is not a description of anatomical facts at birth because society will “girl” girls and “boy” boys in the manner demanded by heteronormativity. This amounts to a denial of the existence and influence of the biological and physical world. For Butler, the belief that sex is binary is a human invention—“dimorphism [merely] serves the reproduction of the normative white family in the US.”

The fringe ravings of critical gender theorists are one thing. After all, they have freedom of speech like everyone else. However, responsible citizens, parents and scientists must challenge the denial of reality underpinning this school of “thought” that has catapulted gender ideology into the position of the dominant paradigm for the current generation.

When the dizzying gender lexicon becomes overwhelming and the twisties set in, we are given a solution by the American queer theorist April Callis—

“Rather than rolling out the ‘alphabet soup’ of g(ay) l(esbian) b(isexual) t(ransexual) t(ransgendered) i(ntersexed) a(sexual), queer allow[s] a pithy shorthand for authors and organizations concerned with inclusivity. Queer also became an identity category unto itself. Individuals who wanted to label themselves with a non-label, who wanted to be fluid or inclusive in their own stated desires or who wanted to challenge hegemonic assumptions of sexuality described themselves as queer…A queer identity implies ‘that not everybody is queer in the same way [and signals] a willingness to enable others to articulate their own particular queerness.’ [For] queer is ‘by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.’ There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers.”

Bingo! “Queer” may refer to everything or nothing! Queer theory is the great dismantler whose primary accomplishment was the deconstruction of science, art and the humanities as well as a generation of adolescents. And shamefully, these disciplines have allowed it to happen. The prestigious journal, Nature, has endorsed the notion of sex as a spectrum, a doctrine reiterated in Scientific American and reappearing in a Nature editorial which declared that, “A move to classify people on the basis of anatomy or genetics should be abandoned.” The propagation of truly bad science continues unabated with even The Lancet buying in.

Bad science, flawed theorizing and muddled language have consequences—for education, the law, politics, medicine, sport and our collective sanity. Is it possible that we can return to our understanding of biological sex as comprising either two X chromosomes or an X and Y chromosome; ovaries or testes; a vagina or a penis?

Can we relearn the formula that two X chromosomes + ovaries + vagina=female, while XY chromosomes + testes + penis=male? And let’s leave disorders of sexual development—a very rare group of conditions affecting 0.02 per cent of the population—out of the equation. A few brave souls in one US state legislature have been attempting such an acrobatic feat with limited success.

I will now conclude my gymnastic gender manoeuvre—a salto vault with complex twists. Not sure where I will land.

Dr Kenny, a former professor of psychology and professor of music at The University of Sydney, is a psychologist and psychotherapist. Her forthcoming book “Gender ideology, social contagion, and the making of a transgender generation” is to be published by Cambridge Scholars Press in late 2024

1. In 1998, Butler won the first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature.