Amerika

In the recent transgender wars, the Left insisted on its usual gambit: reality is not how it seems, but how we need it to be in order to do what we want. This is a way of promoting opinions about reality above reality itself because humans want to rationalize their desires as, if not real, at least, “good.”

Transsexualism promotes equality. Nature makes us unequal, so humans must “correct” this with social engineering, which requires that we pretend men are women and vice-versa. Luckily, nature has wired us to recognize sex differences at a biological level:

The discovery adds to a growing list of brain circuits in mammals that work differently in males than they do in females, illuminating an ongoing debate about inherent predispositions versus social influences in molding sex-specific behaviors.

Investigators focused on a cluster of neurons in one of about a half-dozen regions of the mouse brain that Shah and his colleagues have linked to sex recognition. The region — the bed nucleus of stria terminalis — differs in anatomy, physiology and behaviors governed, depending on whether the brain is that of a male or a female.

A fraction of this structure’s nerve cells, called AB neurons, produce aromatase, an enzyme that regulates key hormones in reproductive and sexual development.

The Left claims that such biology is an error of history, misinterpreted, or otherwise irrelevant. They counter that those of us who believe in biological sex over political/social gender are essentialists:

Essentialism comprises three key ideas.

First, there is the idea that nature is divided into discrete kinds of things, which are completely and definitively distinct from each other. For example, there is the view that living things are fundamentally different from non-living things, or that human beings are fundamentally different from other animals.

Second, there is the idea that these differences are eternal and necessary. This sometimes takes the form of the religious doctrine that God created the world and all the things in it in accordance with an unchanging typology. But the idea can also be attributed to Plato, the father of Western philosophy, who postulated eternal and changeless “forms” that worldly things copied and instantiated. If a particular thing is an instance of an eternal metaphysical form, according to this theory, it must have clearly delineated properties.

Third, essentialism suggests that each kind of thing has an “essence,” which requires it to maintain its distinctness by acting in a way that is true to its nature. If God created things as clearly distinct from one another, then these distinctions become sacrosanct. Another example is Descartes’ view that the essential difference between human beings and animals is that only human beings have rational souls.

This is their way of ascribing to us a belief system, or a type of religion, instead of accepting that we are realists who see biology, physics, history, and philosophy as more important than emotions, sensations, and judgments. We are “essentialists” in the sense of seeing reality as more important.

Saying this is not an argument against essentialism. Essentialism like realism and transcendentalism sees reality as more important than human assessments of it. Most importantly, in contrast to the Left, essentialists view reality as consistent and purposeful, which is why observations of its tendencies have value.

We also notice that reality is consistent, does nothing without purpose, and things tend to act according to what they are. Funny how much this upsets this since all of human advancement has come from this perspective, but it did not write realms of obscure and deflective theory of course.

Tags: essentialism, gender, sex