https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sjJ4WSzHqnE
Two things that I was thinking when you said that. One was that what I’m doing when I refuse to accept a man who says he’s a woman as a woman is I’m like the mother who’s refusing to give the infant what he wants, which is really a wicked person. That’s right. We think very poorly of people. A predator. Yeah. And so the rage is there. I’m stepping out of role for a woman. And I think the other one is that the most enraging thing for anybody is to desperately want to be something that they can never be or to desperately want something that they can never have. And so a man who’s got himself into this headspace where he can be a woman in his own mind, somebody who says no, and that no can be in one millionth of the world. It can just be in one place. It could just be in rape crisis centers, say. That’s not good enough. That’s not good enough. That is taking away the dream and being a very bad woman, stepping out of role for a woman. Well, especially for this hyper-idealized, feminine, compassionate woman, right? Yes. All-encompassing and all-loving and all-nurturing. And you see this again in two-year-olds. You know, I’m just watching this right now with my grandson. The most magic word for two-year-olds is not please. The magic word for two-year-olds is no. Yes, they love it. I would say 20% of the utterances of a two-year-old is no. And that’s because no is the word you use to give yourself some space in some sense. And so two-year-olds don’t like it when you say no to them. It makes them mad and they push the boundaries as they should because they need to find where the boundaries are. That’s what you should do when you’re two. And if you haven’t had those boundaries organized for you in a systematic way, that enables you to expand your personality so that you can find alternative, cooperative routes to adaptation and you just face this arbitrary no or you don’t face it at all, then you’re going to end up being a person for whom no is a— well, it has the same effect on you as it does on a recalcitrant two-year-old. It demolishes your entire emotional being the same way that no demolishes the world of a two-year-old. Yeah. I mean, and the strange thing, the very strange thing is that sometimes this is described as conservative or even libertarian values. So I just saw somebody here recently say, I’d like to see the Conservative Party here in England make the case for self-ID, the conservative case for self-ID, that it’s not anybody else’s business to tell you who you are. That’s such rubbish. Exactly. It’s such utter insanity. Yes. Well, the idea that identity is subjectively defined is utterly preposterous. Yes. It doesn’t apply. It doesn’t apply in any situations where there’s more than one person involved. And then this weird devolution of that idea, it’s like, well, not only do you get to say exactly what you are— now, first of all, we could talk about what you are means, but the second part of that is—and it depends on your feeling. Well, what is that feeling? Is that your moment-to-moment balance between positive and negative emotion? That’s now the arbiter of reality itself. And then what are you? Well, the answer to the question, what are you, is it depends on the context. And we actually know this. Personality researchers know this. So we all have a temperament that’s partly biologically instantiated and partly socially constructed. But if you look at how much our innate temperament—measures of our innate temperament—can be used to predict our behaviour from situation to situation, it tops out at about 9% to 16%. So that means—and maybe 25% in the case of IQ, which is the most powerful temperamental factor we know— 75% of what determines your outcome, even on the cognitive front, is social context. And that means, like the progressives claim to believe, that about 80% of your personality is socially negotiated. 80%! So also what that means is, imagine you’re temperamentally extroverted. And so you want to talk like I do all the bloody time. I’m still going to shut up mostly in a funeral. Right, right. Right. Now, I might be the most talkative person at the funeral. Right? But I’m still going to use the context to regulate my behaviour. And what that means is that the context actually defines my identity. And that’s how it should be. That’s what happens if you’re a civilized person, is the context defines your identity. Period. The end. Yeah, and then the strange thing that layers on top of that is that not only are they saying that how you feel defines who you are, they’re saying that it defines who you are, that you’re a woman or you’re a man. When those are just about the most concrete things about us, the most non-negotiable things about us, the most bedrock things about us, like far more than our IQ. Well, they might be the most bedrock thing about us, right? Which maybe is why the culture war is centering on this issue. Because if it is a war between epistemology and ontology, or between, let’s say, narcissistic delusion and reality itself, then the battle devolves to identity on the grounds of sex. What did Freud say? Biology is destiny. Yeah, and I mean, I don’t believe that entirely. Well, it isn’t true entirely. Well, on top of biology, we have got this civilization that we’ve built, and it’s very anchored to biology. Of course it is. But it is also, to some extent, malleable. We do co-negotiate it in different societies, to some extent, on top of that. But then to have this idea that a man can say, I wish I was a woman, or I feel like I’m really a woman, or I think I’m a woman inside, which are things that only a man can say. I can’t wish to be a woman. I can’t feel like I should have been a woman. Those are things that are only possible for men. And then those things are meant to make you a woman. And then it’s so detached from reality that there’s no tether. It can go anywhere. This can just float off to anything at all. And that’s why we see this weird proliferation of, you know, a poorer gender, or somebody being graysexual or something. It goes off into almost stamp-collecting levels of precision and difference and so on. Well, there’s another issue that comes up there too. This is relevant to your claim, which is entirely warranted, that we vary on top of our biology. And so, for example, there is a lot of biological and socially-constructed variance in temperament on top of biological sex. And so you could say, without fear of error, that a reasonable percentage of boys have a feminine temperament. And so that would mean they have more negative emotion, they’re more compassionate, and they’re more interested in people than in things. Those are the cardinal differences between the masculine and the feminine. And a non-trivial number of boys have those characteristics, just like a non-trivial number of girls are less compassionate and polite, so more competitive, let’s say. They’re more emotionally stable, and they’re more interested in things. Now, those are relatively rare girls and relatively rare boys, but statistically, they’re hardly, what would you say? They’re not so rare that you don’t see them all the time. It might be 10% of boys are essentially feminine in their temperament, 10% of girls. And that’s a lot. And so that’s at the level of temperament, which is really where gender should be conceptualized, because there are no good measures of gender. There are good measures of temperament and interest that differentiate men and women. If you use measures of temperament, including interest, you can reliably identify someone as a man or a woman about 80% of the time, something like that. So you can do it 50-50 on the basis of chance. And with the best measurements we have, you can get that up to 75-25 or 80-20. But that’s certainly by no means perfect identification. And so one of the things that’s perverse about this too, isn’t it, is that despite the claims of the radicals that identity is socially constructed and variable, their fundamental notion is that if you have a variable temperament, so if you’re a feminine boy, what that means is that your biological reality is out of sync, because the biology is so fundamentally important in that case, but never in any other case. It’s so incoherent, man. It’s unreal. Completely. And also, if we were to say, which would be a terrible thing to say, and I don’t say it, if we were to say that this 10 or 20% of boys who are actually, statistically speaking, more like the standard for girls, if we were to say, well, actually, they’re really girls, that’s not what we’re seeing. There’s no objective claim here. That would at least be semi-objective or be absolutely repulsive as well. They’re just slightly out of the ordinary boys. But it’s the people who are claiming that a man can tell you he’s a woman or a woman can tell you she’s a man. There’s no way you could say, no, you’re actually just very like a man, so you can’t be a woman. In particular, he could be a rapist, which is the most masculine thing. So we don’t even say that a trans woman who commits rape thereby demonstrates that this claim to be in some gendered way really a woman has been disproved.