This started off as a short essay for me to dump out my thoughts on “gender”. Gender is actually not an area of particular interest for me, and I don’t want to circle it forever. I thought I’d extract my thoughts from my head onto (virtual) paper all in one go, thus freeing mental space for about three hundred things I find more interesting.
But during the writing what I had grew and grew until I split it in two: One piece on the sex binary and sex complementarity (this), and a second piece on gender dysphoria (to come). Hopefully some of this is useful for a person or two who manages to wade through it. Really, it is for me to empty my head.
If gender isn’t an area of interest, why think about it at all? Well, society cares — a lot. It’s obsessed. What the hell is up with all this gender madness I see everywhere? By gender madness I mean a few things:
(i) the idea that people can change their sex (and gain rights to sex-segregated spaces) by declaration;
(ii) the invention of non-binary, as if sex is an opt-out phenomenon;
(iii) the prescription of permanent, life-altering and dangerous off-label medication to children who are experiencing psychological distress, followed by surgical procedures;
(iv) the idea that everyone has something called a “gender identity”.
If you want to dip your toes into the terror of the pediatric medical machine, you can read Hannah Barnes’s horror-documentary Time to Think (astoundingly, not available in the US Amazon store). If you think that’s the UK and not the US, you can read the affidavit of Jamie Reed, in which almost all the same concerns seen at the Tavistock GIDS clinic are replicated in Missouri.
From what I’ve read, the underlying reasons for “gender dysphoria” are quite diverse and vary between the sexes. Normally, different underlying conditions cause healthcare providers to do careful differential diagnosis. But not in this case. The treatment protocols are in disarray and captured entirely by trans ideology, which admits only a single cause of gender distress (“gender identity”, something like a trans soul) which can only be treated through extensive body modification. One result of this is dangerous experimental procedures done on children.
The more I have read about this, the more I am convinced that it is in part a sublimation of western taboos around sex. When people say “gender” they really mean “sex”. Now this does not mean just “intercourse” but all of sex: the sexed body and its rhythms and changes, sexual desire and fears (or atypicality) around that, and finally intercourse itself. But we can’t talk about this directly because of the strong taboos in our society around sex. So it’s “gender”.
Before anything about gender dysphoria (properly speaking, sex dysphoria) can even be discussed, I feel like one has to get around the strong sex taboos we have inherited in the west, and take a look at sex, which means far more than intercourse.
The sex taboos
Taboos are social bans on the mentioning of or participation in some activity. They are the site of social policing and norm-enforcing, and their transgression is often alluring: either because one wants to violate it (and assert individuality), or because one wants to punish violators (and assert social righteousness). The presence of taboos in society is neither good nor bad, though I’d say some are better than others. The prohibition itself turns the taboo into an important site of meaning-making.
There are many sexual taboos in the west, and sex as such is extremely fraught (probably an inheritance of Abrahamic religion). There are taboos around intercourse: against incest, against pedophilia, against exhibitionism and voyeurism, against public sexuality (though inconsistent: sexualized performances by pop stars are okay), against homosexuality (spotty and rapidly changing: but taboo violations are also sites of meaning-making). There are taboos around sexed bodies as such, which largely are about the female body: against menstruation (don’t mention it or make others aware of it), against the exposure of breasts (even when breastfeeding: here European and American attitudes differ), against the presence of hair on parts of a woman’s body. There’s increasingly taboos around sexual desire as such, especially when it’s the male version (typically described as “objectifying” even in its basic form). There’s taboos about the level of public displays of affection (what degree of kissing, what degree of touching, what degree of hugging). The specifics have changed over time but taboos against mentioning sex are old: the stork story about babies would never have come to be without them. The sex taboos are so numerous and cumulatively so all-encompassing that we often avoid the topic altogether.
When sex has to be brought up, there is a kind of schizophrenia about it. This is seen nowhere better than LGBTQ+++ public events, which are either so devoid of sex that even the existence of a sexual partner is omitted (the ideal advertisement for Pride seems to be a single young person smiling over a rainbow backdrop: perfectly individual, perfectly atomized), or it is aggressively and uncomfortably sexual.
This schizophrenic split appears everywhere. Modern films are strikingly lacking in romantic or sexual tension (compare the new Disney Star Wars trilogy to the originals), while in popular television the use of sex can be practically pornographic (perhaps the best example is Game of Thrones, which coined the term “sexposition”: exposition dialog spiced up with sex in the background).
Taboos are things we obsess about it.
And they aren’t always about sex. There’s a fairly new taboo, at least in America — and here you must imagine my voice dropping to the barest whisper — the N-word. The N-word is a special kind of taboo, as its forbiddenness is linked to the race of the speaker. John McWhorter (a black linguist) is fond of telling a story where he was invited onto a local radio channel in the 1990s to discuss the word, and he used the full word (not “the N-word”), the white interviewer used the word, and it was utterly unremarkable because no one used it as a slur. But in recent decades, the word has transcended from a slur (which is bad when used derogatorily) to a taboo (which is bad to utter). It’s so forbidden that the syllables are forbidden, even when speaking another language. As with all taboos, this one is also a site of meaning-making: A person is good for avoiding the taboo, or brave for violating it, or righteous for enforcing it and policing the boundaries.1
Other taboos exist or have existed in various societies — the Ancient Near East (and large parts of Europe) obsessed about the violation of guest right, Judaism has a taboo against the true name of God, many religions have taboos against particular types of food. It appears to be an open set.
I can’t explain why sex taboos in particular have accumulated to such a large degree in the west.2 However, I do think that gender madness is in part driven by those taboos, which both increases anxiety around the subject and hides the source of that anxiety by rebranding it as “gender”.
Men and women
The first thing everyone notices about sex — as children — is that there’s two of them. This raises questions, like “where do I fit”, and “how different are they”?
To start, they’re different in terms of reproduction.
Reproduction is asymmetric for most multicellular life on this planet. It involves the combination of a large stationary gamete with a small motile gamete. This strategy might be mathematically driven: the sex binary could just be the most efficient way of recombining DNA in a finite population pool. Sexual reproduction is 1 to 2 billion years old and has possibly evolved multiple times. Sexual dimorphism — that these two sexes are housed in morphologically different versions of the same species — is even more mysterious. Many species are hermaphroditic and contain both ova and sperm, and just swap them when they come across an appropriate mate. But as we go to larger and larger organisms, this becomes extremely rare. We don’t really know why, though there are hypotheses.
Once you split a species by gamete production, all sorts of secondary effects start piling up. Specialization doesn’t stop at the gametes. What does this dimorphism we encounter mean for how we should structure society? Past societies have come up with a variety of answers. Often, after creating roles around the two sexes, societies have gone on to add, “You know, one of them is better.”
For large parts of the globe and long stretches of history, it has been the male sex that has been defined as better. Women are very silly, not to mention physically weaker (great for imposing your views on them), and they thus couldn’t be trusted with things like political, legal, or economic rights. (This is an oversimplification of patriarchal systems, which contra the imaginings of modern fantasists, demanded a lot out of the men, too.) The feminist movements that reacted against this were aided mightily by capitalism. The first employees of early mills were often young women, who suddenly had an alternative to staying at home and marrying whomever dad told them to. With a lot of effort, and leaning heavily on the groundwork of the new social arrangements, the legal status of women as second class citizens was lifted across the west. The male-superiority view is all but dead in this part of the world. This is not to say that its second and third order effects are completely nullified, nor that it does not hover over society like some terrible ghost. But the male superiority view no longer structures law or economy. While some may still hold to it, they cannot restructure society as they wish.3
What is the answer, in such post-patriarchal societies, about how different the sexes are? In many places, no longer dominated by war or hunting and with greater technological control over reproduction, they really can seem about the same. This allows for a new answer: Not much. This seems to be the dominant view in the west.
Then there is the opposite of the male-superiority view: “The sexes are different, and it’s the women who are better.” Men are inherently dangerous, especially with respect to their sexuality, and must be tamed and strictly policed by society. Women meanwhile are naturally cooperative, disinclined to violence and war, and the better half of our species. This seems to be the opinion of radical feminism (or radical feminisms, as there are more splits among that group than among American baptists), and it is mainstream enough that it can be spoken without much fear of backlash. There’s even a name for the asymmetric badness of men: toxic masculinity (note the conspicuous absence of its theoretical opposite, toxic femininity). This view is normally espoused by women, although occasionally male feminists will agree. If you encounter such a male feminist, I urge you to disengage and get away from him immediately. He is almost certainly trying to hide something bad.
There remains a mysterious other answer, which is quite an old idea about sex complementarity: Men and women are different, yet neither is better than the other. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and they work against each other but also with each other. This view has sometimes found its way into religion.
But it seems to be hard for societies to hold onto this view. Perhaps it tends to destabilize because, whoever we are, the experience of other sex is never really accessible to us. It’s an alien, foreign thing, while our own experience is familiar and close to hand. Our own, right experiences. A fair number of patriarchal societies had religions that taught sex complementarity, but this didn’t stop them from having quite sexist laws.
Male bonding, female bonding
While we can’t really have an insider’s view of the opposite sex, we can get clues here and there. One clue is provided by the science of oxytocin, a hormone associated with feelings of social bonding, sexual coupling, and stress relief. Men have overall lower levels of oxytocin than women.4
Though this hormone is implicated in a lot of human behavior, including general prosocial behavior and physical touch (such as hugging), it is intimately involved with sexuality. It’s been nicknamed the “love hormone” but I think this is misleading and belittling of the concept of love. I’d rather separate love — the action, the choice — from urges and drives, although of course they often go together. Rather than love, let’s call the effects of this hormone bonding.
In males, oxytocin spikes powerfully after ejaculation (from 3 pg/ml to 7 pg/ml in the blood plasma), with rates returning to normal within an hour (usually much less). It is possible that this is the largest regular spike of the hormone that men can experience naturally. If sexual climax results in the release of bonding hormones, this is one reason (among others) why it has always been silly to talk about men having a separation between sex and love. The hormones suggest that sex leads to bonding.5
Women also experience oxytocin release from (pleasurable) sexual intercourse, but get additional doses from sources men don’t have: pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. Breastfeeding increases oxytocin to around 13 pg/ml. This one set of numbers is of course not the whole story, but it’s not a bad heuristic that women experience roughly twice the level of biochemical bonding with their children as men do with their partner during sex.
Just in bonding, there’s already an asymmetry between the sexes. For men, it is mostly centered around intercourse, and for women, it is mostly centered around pregnancy and childcare. (I think this is the ultimate source of the collocation “women and children” — why are men not in that ‘and’ statement? Because we don’t bond in the same extreme way.) Evolutionarily, this makes a lot of sense. The small gamete producer is being told Go and spread those small gametes, then get attached; and the big gamete producer is being told Your offspring is the most important thing that has ever existed. It’s a pretty good foundation for reproductive fitness.
But this is bonding, not really love. Upon discovering this biological reality from the inside, there’s roughly two possible reactions:
Wow, this feels great. Other people must have this experience too, and I should respect and uphold their pleasure, and see that they uphold mine.
Wow, this feels great. I should get as much as I can.
On the inside, I don’t think these two responses feel very different at first. That’s what the hormones are for, after all: creating urges, not carefully thought out decisions. But over time I think they look very different.
A word on male sexuality
I only have first-hand experience of half of what’s going on with human sex. But the same is true of you. I feel like women have especially poor insight into male sexuality — all the worse for the cultural belief that the two sexes are “basically the same” — and so for whatever it’s worth, I think it’s a good idea to try to explain a little how it works in men.
The male sex drive appears to be very different from the female sex drive, primarily in its intensity and constancy. In fact, the methods we have for measuring sexual orientation in men do not distinguish this in women. A common myth holds that men think about sex every few seconds. This is certainly an exaggeration. But men do think about sex more often than women.6 Sometimes when women realize this, I have seen responses which boil down to, “There’s something wrong with men.” I can understand this, if only because men sometimes think women are wrong for not being man-like. But this difference is part of an over-a-billion-year-old evolutionary program of sexual reproduction, and this asymmetric sex difference encompasses things we may consider beautiful (monogamous albatrosses), extremely awful (the rape strategy of many male tree frogs), and very strange (whatever it is dolphins are getting up to).
The experience of male puberty is not like having an additional bit added to one’s personality. It’s more like one of those Orthodox priests baptizing a baby by remorselessly plunging him bodily into water, except the water is testosterone. Hormone levels go from basically zero to a million overnight, and for a while the result feels both strange and uncontrollable. Sexual stimulus seems like it is everywhere. Four square centimeters of normally-concealed shoulder flesh can send the brain spiraling off into its own arousal loop, without asking permission. This can also have contextually-inappropriate bodily correlates. Very suddenly the adolescent male has to acquire an entirely new set of skills around selective attention to thoughts, mental and bodily control, the nature of which he could not have even imagined yesterday.7 (Athletic clothes and sweatpants briefly become suddenly popular among teenage boys around this time.) A significant part of male adolescence is integrating this new sexuality into one’s existing personality in a healthy way. (I’m not saying this is always successful.) The learning is done on the fly.
From what I can tell, this experience of one day waking up to discover that there is a new road system, and you are in a car on it, and you are also driving, and also the car is going 100 miles per hour, does not seem to have an equivalent in women. This is not because I don’t think women have a sexual awakening at puberty, but it doesn’t seem to show up with anything like the persistent ferocity that it does for men.8 The challenges of female puberty seem quite different. The bodily changes for men tend to be along a single dimension, while for women they are more multi-faceted, and set off a complex cycle that you have to learn to manage and come to peace with. Also your body suddenly becomes a site of interest for men, in a way that is new (and observable), and can be profoundly uncomfortable. Of course I cannot see what this experience is like from the inside.9
But unlike the cyclical nature of the female body, the male sex drive doesn’t come and go. It abates after puberty, but largely sticks around. And 99.998% of the time the mental response to possible stimulus is, “No, I can’t do that / not now.” This doesn’t mean men are constantly sweating it to deny themselves momentary sex, nor that at any moment they might drop the ball and turn into a sex werewolf. Inhabiting a male body becomes a habit, like anything else. But I think sexuality ends up fairly integrated in men’s personalities, and from there it is sublimated in all kinds of ways: in making oneself appear attractive, in pursuing (super sexy) success by money or accolades. All male activity isn’t done “just for sex.” But you can’t always and easily separate sexual motivations from other motivations. Sometimes. Not always.
Toxic masculinity, toxic femininity
I don’t actually object to the term “toxic masculinity”, despite what I said above. People use it to refer to male biological urges that lie outside their proper context or are pursued without concern for other people. It’s getting that bonding chemical without love attached; it’s “wow, this is great; I should get as much as I can.” Above all this means too much or inappropriate sex10 and violence.11 It’s useful to have a term for this. I don’t think it should mean a man is all toxic or all not: a man could mess up non-catastrophically — perhaps being a bit more pushy than he should have been in trying to get a woman’s number, for example — without being unredeemable or evil. If toxic masculinity means masculine behavior in an inappropriate context, it’s a continuum, not a binary. But I did complain before about “toxic femininity” being absent from our discussions. What would this opposite be?
The opposite would be the selfish application of uniquely female urges outside of their appropriate context. So, about children. Though it’s an older term, “helicopter parenting” became suddenly culturally salient in the late 1990s and 2000s, that is the practice of following one’s child around, exercising control over their decisions and experiences in a way that is inappropriate as the child grows up. It should more properly be “helicopter mothering”: the number of fathers who behave this way is incredibly small. This helicoptering is a quite important and noble bond outside of its proper place. Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy — an authority figure inducing and creating a fictitious disorder in a subordinate — is almost always imposed by a mother on her child. The bond is so strong, and such a source of such great (biochemically-mediated) pleasure, that the disordered mother chooses to overtake the child, completely swallowing them. Though this lacks the violent immediacy of the extremes of toxic masculinity, I’m not convinced it is any less damaging to the victims. The poisoning of a mother-child bond is an act of extreme violence.
I’m sure there are other ways that toxic femininity can leak out (in general, a kind of nurturing or over-nurturing where this is not needed). Someone with an insider’s view can say more about it than I ever could. But much like toxic masculinity, I don’t think toxic femininity is a descriptor that typically can apply to a person. We all make bad decisions at times. Toxic and noble isn’t primarily a divide between different people but a division that goes through each of us.
Noble masculinity, noble femininity
The complementarity view of sex, a view quite absent in our culture, would speak not just of toxic versions of the sexes but noble ones as well. We are much more comfortable in general saying either that there is no difference or that the female drives are better and nobler.12
But there are differences between the sexes, and we will always have both with us. It would be nice to culturally redevelop a more complex idea of sex complementarity, which allows for variation within manhood and within womanhood. The distributional means are not “good” and their outliers are not “bad”. Men and women who are a couple standard deviations from their sexed mean are not suddenly outside their sex category. Maybe this is too much to ask.
Though I’ve spoken about how different the sexes are — and they are, in very important ways — the difference shouldn’t be overstated. Neither of us has urges that the other totally lacks. Women have sexual desire. Men deeply love and bond with their children. We are the same species, after all, we are not from Venus and Mars. There’s a bit of a contradiction or at least tension here. Men and women are very different from each other: except, of course, when we’re very much the same.
Gender is about sex
I began writing this because I wanted to answer for myself the question of what is going on with all this gender madness. I find that if I do a search-and-replace with “sex” a lot of it becomes clearer. But because sex is so taboo in our society, I really had to look into what this entailed.
When people experience “gender dysphoria” they are uncomfortable with their sex, for one or more of a wide variety of reasons. When someone tries to “opt out” with boutique gender identities like non-binary, they are rejecting this billion-year-old inheritance of being a sexed species. A gender identity is a sex identity, with everything that entails. Gender can’t even be approached without the backdrop of sex. Gender is only sex wearing a disguise.
The N-word has mostly replaced previous social taboos around swear words like “fuck” and “shit” (Carlin’s seven dirty words routine is probably unintelligible to people under thirty).
If you spend time in a non-western culture which lacks the extensiveness of the western taboos around sex, you will begin to notice that people consider it just one part of life, neither particularly worth talking about nor particularly worth avoiding.
I can hear, as I write this, the shout about the repeal of Roe v Wade, and the Handmaid’s Tale fantasy about the repeal of women’s rights. But women are by no means universally pro-choice in the US, although they have leaned more pro-choice since 2020. I would invite people who think the anti-abortion movement is men’s rights activism to attend a pro-life rally and give me their estimates of the sex ratio.
The obvious hypothesis that lower oxytocin may correlate with the higher levels of male aggression may be wrong: it is possible that oxytocin increases aggression, at least for some males.
This sex-to-bonding pathway may somewhat describe the differences in both cheating and divorce. Men are much less likely to divorce (women file for divorce at a rate of 2-to-1 over men in the US). With the base rate of divorce being close to half of all marriages, it is not plausible to explain this ratio in terms of male abuse of females, but rather a difference in a sense of bonding and what motivates this. I do not say this to laud men for being somehow “the good ones” in marriage: They are also far more likely to cheat (and then want to stay in the marriage). Like women, men are full of contradictory desires.
This study, hilariously, concludes that the differences are not that great compared to other factors, while reporting that men in their sample thought about sex ~19 times per day and women ~10 times per day. Nearly double.
This process is accelerated with an extra dose of fear for homosexual boys, especially in homophobic environments. Becoming aware that one’s sexually-oriented thoughts are quite different from most of the other boys, and receiving this information in the boys’ locker room, is a particular kind of challenge. On-the-job-learning can be accelerated by an urgent need to keep the cartilage in one’s nose and the bones in one’s body in their preexisting conditions.
I have heard of not one but two lesbians that have their sexual orientations regularly fluctuate during their period: either becoming briefly attracted to men or attracted to both men and women. From the male perspective, this is almost unimaginable. But men don’t live on a hormonal cycle, we live on a hormonal flatline. I actually think the stereotype of women being emotional and men being calm is in many cases quite opposite from reality: Women seem to be to be much better at handling exogenous emotional shocks than men. I have long wondered if this is because they have had to get used to the endogenous emotional swings of the hormone cycle, while men are just coasting, and thus more primed to get flustered by external changes.
Some readers may notice The Banner of Light, a symbol from The Wheel of Time. It’s hard to recommend those books (because the series is long and has about 3 books’ worth of material that could be cut), but if you enjoy fantasy and have a high tolerance for long and uneven reads, it can be very rewarding. Male/female complementarity is an extremely important theme woven into every component of the story, and I cannot abide the Amazon television series, which wokely omits this (it also makes the story utterly unintelligible).
This can happen among straight men too, but if you want to see the worst versions of this you need to look to gay men, who without the handbrake of female willingness can more easily go crazy on this.
I’m not sold on the idea that male violence is always bad. Certainly in the wrong contexts. But it is also what made us the primary hunters, or enabled us to protect the group in intertribal warfare. It exists for a reason. With changes in our social structure, channeling this urge into other outlets, whether sport or some other kind of non-lethal “winning”, seems like a decent way to put this evolved tendency to work in a new context.
This absence of a noble vision of maleness has generated all sorts of figures, from the dangerous (like Andrew Tate) to the merely silly (I would place Jordan Peterson in this latter category, who I think has a very cartoonish idea of masculinity, and a horrible relationship with social media and the internet).