Gender and Public Policy: A Miniseries for Undergraduates (Season 1)

Season 1:  Sexual Differentiation 101

NB: Editor's Note

This series was conceived as a series of lectures to interested undergraduates. The course would be open to all, from freshman to graduate students and its class size limited only by the fact that no grades would be assigned, and no credit toward graduation. It is what educators call, "An enrichment course." Which is to say, it's likely to have little appeal to the ordinary student because there is no payoff in terms of GPA, professional school admissions or academic prizes. "Lectures" are planned to be interrupted by questions, but students who stand must ask a question, as opposed to making a speech.

Season  1:  Sex and Sexuality--The Hook

When I was 24 years old, in 1971,  and still a student, the faculty presented for consideration a case of a 16 year old patient who had not had a menstrual period.  In medical terms, her problem was that of "primary amenorrhea."

She was lucky because she had been brought to The New York Hospital in Manhattan, which did not have much of an endocrine department, but it was home to a stellar biochemist, named Ralph Peterson, and the pediatric endocrine department had Maria New. In a very real sense, this patient had come to the perfect place to make her diagnosis. 

This was before CT scans or ultrasounds, so her internal organs could only be examined by physical exam, and exploratory surgery, and she was found to have normal labia, a vagina which ended "blindly," which is to say, which had no cervix at the north end, and her clitoris was described as "a small phallus." She was sent to surgery where no uterus or fallopian tubes were found but gonads were located in the inguinal canals and on microscopic examination, "early spermatogenesis" was noted. Her breasts were normal pubertal female.

A karyotype, which is a picture (in those days, literally a photograph) of the patient's chromosomes, revealed the normal complement of 23 autosomes and an X and a Y chromosome.  

The 2 main questions our faculty presented the students were:

A/ What is this patient's sex and its corollary: is there a difference between "biologic sex" and gender?

B/ What gender should this patient be "assigned?"

As students, we had learned enough to understand two things even before this riddle was presented us:

1/ We knew that during fetal life the collection of cells which start to form tissues, and ultimately recognizable organs, are something like Playdough, or wet clay, which start out as nubbins of primordial structures and gradually take shape into forms which we can see form, as gestation progresses into a heart, brain, gut and sexual structures and organs.

2/ With respect to sexual differentiation of primordial genitalia, in the absence of the effect of male hormones on developing tissues, the tissues "develop along female lines," which is to say, female is the default mode for our homo sapiens species. This is an important concept: without the action of male hormone on the nubbin of tissue which can become either clitoris or penis, the wet clay goes clitoris. 

3/ The production of male hormones occurs as the downstream products of at least three separate assembly lines which occur in the ovaries, testes and adrenal glands. At the beginning of the line is cholesterol, sort like a base frame for an automobile, with protuberances where wheels, then tires can be added, and the rest of the product can be assembled at each station along the way, and what moves the thing along the line, at each step are workers called "enzymes." At certain points in the lines, the assembled structure can be diverted toward an SUV or a sedan or a sports car: working machines with very different functions, but the origins for all of these different end products has a common origin, cholesterol.

The key concept here is that if you throw a block anywhere along these assembly lines, or you may think of them as roadways, there is spill over into the other pathways, like cars bailing out of Rte 95 when an accident slows down traffic, or going back to the assembly line analogy, if the process runs into a slowdown at one point, the thing on the line gets diverted from the sedan route down another line to the SUV route, so a lot more SUV's get made in this factory than is normal.

What Ralph Peterson discovered, running this patient's blood through his lab, was that there was a block along the road to Testosterone because there was a deficit of a specific enzyme, and as a result precious little testosterone got made during the patient's gestation, and if not enough testosterone is not made, normal quantities of dihydrotestosterone, which is the next step beyond testosterone, are not  made.) The entire androgen pathway was at least partially blocked. 

The patient's parents told Dr. New  their daughter had been a normal little girl, although, her mother added, "a classic tomboy."  She had preferred playing with boys, chasing them around and shouting "Bang! Bang!" shooting them with her finger gun, and climbing trees and she liked her hair cut short and did not like dresses much. "I just never felt much like a girl," the patient said.

That, I thought, was perhaps a bit more than "classic tomboy" and her remark would come back to haunt me years later as the "gender dysphoria" discussion arose, where patients began to say they felt like a man trapped in a woman's body (or vice versa) but for this patient, there was no real note of desperation, just simple observation.  

What had happened to the patient's genitalia was easy enough to appreciate: No androgen (male hormone) , no penis, no scrotum.

But what about her mind? Why did she not feel "much like a boy." This feeling stuff goes beyond structure to behavior, from anatomy you can see with your eyes to electrical activity in the brain.

The faculty had a hypothesis for that, but only a guess, really. They could measure hormone levels in the blood, but the brain is a black box.

The hypothesis was this: During life we all remember going through puberty, around age 12, or thereabouts, and we remember what that felt like. But actually, there are "three puberties" in a way, or at least three times when a surge in male hormones occur: Once around 6 weeks gestation, once shortly after birth to about 6 months and then the one we all know 12 years later. 

The faculty guessed this girl had enough testosterone during fetal life to "condition" her brain in a male direction, and that was enough to cause "tomboy" behavior. They emphasized that this did not explain tomboy behavior in patients who had normal biochemistry, which is to say "normal tomboys" may be tomboys for any number of reasons, and often embrace their female roles enthusiastically, later on, but maybe this patient had just enough of a surge of male hormone at a critical time during fetal life to play a role in this particular patient.

So the answer to question A was clear enough. The patient's "phenotype" i.e., what she looked like, what her genitalia looked like, was different from her "chromosomal sex." When the phenotype does not match the chromosomes, or the internal glands,  this is called "pseudohermaphrodism."  When both female and male organs are found in one patient, that is called "hermaphrodism." 

But what about question "B," her "gender"? 

What should the doctors tell the patient, and her parents, about her gender? Is she a girl or a boy, will she grow into a woman or a man? What should she grow into? Or, in short, is she a "she" or a "he?"

In those days, there was no option for calling her a "they" or talking to the patient or her parents about "gender fluidity."

The students (90% male) voted for "male." She was "chromosomally male" we argued, so her "biology" was male and she should be raised a male and live her life as a male. 

But the faculty had a different point of view: What do we mean when we say a person is "biologically" or "chromosomally" a male? We know the Y chromosome plays a role in sexual differentiation, but it does that by directing the production of certain hormones, and if the hormones that chromosome affects cannot be made, is the biology not altered? If the Y chromosome, for whatever reason, fails to do its job in directing the timely production of the right amount of the right male hormones, who is to say the patient is "biologically" a male?

And then there was the practical consideration, beyond any theory about what nature defines as a male:   As one of the faculty members said, holding up her pinky, "If this patient's penis is never going to be any bigger than the tip of my finger, she is never going to function as a male."

The faculty had, in fact, done one more set of tests on the patient: they infused testosterone into her and she did respond to it by growing hair in male places, on her chin and face.  So she could respond to testosterone; she just couldn't make much on her own, so she had "developed along female lines."  

Defining her as "male" because she had a Y chromosome in every cell was narrow minded, the faculty argued. The Y worked through hormones and this patient could not make those hormones. The fact she had testes rather than ovaries meant she'd never be able to have a child, but she could have sex with the vagina she had. 

Of course,  in those days, the doctors felt they had to "assign" her a gender, but, even in 1971, ultimately, accepting that advice was up to the patient and her parents.

 

On Being Alone: Return of the Phantom

 L'enfer c'est les autres

--Sartre

Alone, alone, all, all alone. Alone on a wide, wide sea

--Coleridge

Hiroo Onoda, lieutenant in the Imperial Army of Japan was ordered to hold the Philippine Island of Lubang in December of 1944, as the inevitability of defeat was only beginning to set into the minds of the Japanese.  He lived alone in the jungles surrounding villages on that island, encountering islanders and possibly the occasional Filipino or American soldier as he emerged from the underbrush, by his count 111 times, but he did not surrender or end his mission until 1974 when a major in the Japanese army arrived to relieve him and bring him back to Japan, where he lived until age 91, dying in 2014.  He spent the years from age 21 until 51 alone in the jungle. He was alone, but he knew, on some level, there were other people within reach. He could see them. He occasionally stole from them. He was voluntarily alone. The book I'd like to read is what he was like living in Japan among people for 40 years. Just a normal guy in the neighborhood?

At age 8, I read Robinson Crusoe and was captivated and horrified by the idea of being involuntarily stranded on an island, where there were no other people and no likely prospect of ever seeing another person. But the operative word in that sentence is "likely." The ocean, as Dylan said, is vast, but it ends at the shore, and as long as there are ships at sea there is always the possibility, however faint of human contact.

Hollywood did an admirable job of the horror of complete isolation in "Cast Away" with Tom Hanks, who goes mad and creates his own toy human being to keep him company. It's an uncomfortable film to watch.

"Passengers,"  the Jennifer Lawrence movie, addresses the problem head on: It asks the question, what would you do to not be alone? Would you commit the awful crime of condemning someone else to join you in your isolation simply to keep you company? Would you kidnap your playmate? In this movie, space travelers are held in their cocoons in suspended animation for the 120 year journey to another planet but one cocoon opens prematurely, and at only 30 years into the journey a 30 year old space man faces the prospect of spending 60 years alone. Or, he can open the cocoon of the fetching Jennifer Lawrence and spend that time with her. Let's see: Jennifer Lawrence/aloneness/Jennifer Lawrence/aloneness? Of course if you open her cocoon, she'll never reach the new planet with the hundred fellow travelers to live a full life on a lovely planet. She'll die before arrival, or, at best be an old hag by the time they land.

So there's that moral dimension, in "Passengers." It's one of those movies which reminds me how weak and despicable I really am, because I know for sure I'd open Jennifer's cocoon. And even Crusoe and Cast Away remind me I would not do well in total isolation, even if I had animals for friends.

When I went to college I had had enough of playing the popularity game in high school and decided I did not need people, so I went from class to library to cafeteria to bed and the only time I spoke to another person was in class or briefly to my roommate at night. Which is how I got the name, "Phantom." The designated crazy man of the dorm, a guy who urinated in the stairwells and bounced bowling balls down the stairs just to annoy people, heard about this guy, me, the Phantom, who lived apart, never ate with anyone, did not go to parties, just went to class and the library and it terrified him. He literally ran in the other direction when he saw me. Sociopath that he was, he still needed people, if only to abuse them.

My brother heard I had gone to see a movie alone and was horrified. He made me promise him to never go to see a movie alone again. I resisted but just to get him off my back I promised, which meant I never saw another movie on campus the rest of my time in college.

You know there was some psychopathology with Onoda. His refusal to believe the war was over, his insistence on living the hermit's life might have been, initially, motivated by some idea of duty, but after a decade, there was something else going on there.

Not true for those shipwrecked on the islands or in outer space. Those folks are truly faced with what for most people would be a nightmare. 

Today we have libertarian types, who believe government is oppressive and bad, the ultimate version being the live off the grid types.  And we have the guys on their motorcycles gunning their motors as they rumble down the streets, Trump flags flying, through our town, spitting in the eye of the townsfolks, figuratively speaking, with their ear splitting noise. They want to separate themselves from the dominant society and live with each other, living off the grid, lite. They are rebels without a cause, but with a definite pathology.

It's that old tension: People, you can't live with 'em and you can't live without 'em. 

Finding the Hidden Van Gogh

 In his life time, of course, van Gogh, was dismissed, unappreciated and virtually invisible.

But what if there were another van Gogh out there in the world today? 

Invisible, dismissed, unknown.

Would he be equally obscure and could he or she ever be found?

Of course, there were then and are now wonderful painters, whose works touch us, move us give us "an experience." But there is something about van Gogh, who now is unique in having his own museum. There may be another artist with his own museum, but I'm not booking a flight to Europe to see it. There is only the van Gogh museum, really. No other artist has attracted crowds for an "immersive" experience based on his work, but not even his work.

Why is Van Gogh so widely loved? 

His work is accessible. Unlike Picasso or Jackson Pollack, his work does not have to be explained. There are, of course, youtube channels which instruct you on what makes a van Gogh painting wonderful, but you don't really need them. You know, just looking at a van Gogh, it's wonderful. The why can be explained and you may even agree with the explanation but you know it's wonderful without the explanation and the explanation only adds to the enjoyment.

In his day, there were arbiters  of taste: The Academy could accept or reject your paintings. The Post Impressionists got together and exhibited their paintings together and challenged that authority and van Gogh colluded with them. He learned about color from Gauguin. 

That's another thing about van Gogh: not all his paintings are wonderful. He went through a brown period and his brother suggested he needed to use more color and that turned out to be crucial to van Gogh's success. 

Today, there is no art critic who could propel an artist with van Gogh's appeal to world wide attention. There is no academy.

What might propel an artist would be money: a big sale at auction, at Sotheby's. 

Andy Warhol knew this: He gave away art to rich and famous people, like Linda Eastman, of the Eastman fortune, later married to a Beatle. Warhol knew to be recognized and celebrated you have to pursue fame and fortune.

And Warhol was good. But he is no van Gogh. 

Nobody is.

What other artist would attract crowds for electronic renditions of a "virtual Van Gogh," a walk into "immersive" van Gogh? 

"Genius" is a useless word. Overused. Misapplied. 

"Unique" means one of a kind and is also so often misused as to be almost worthless as a word, but van Gogh might qualify.

But could there be someone like van Gogh out there somewhere? In this internet age, if we were patient and persistent enough, would we discover that one of a kind blow you away artist?

So far, the answer is no.

The Problem of Public Schools

Reading. Writing. 'Rithmetic. Those are the things most people agree should be taught in public schools. 

But now we have public schools as a battleground, where "parents rights" to keep their kids from learning things are turning elections, and the Republican elected officials from Marjorie Taylor Green to Matt Goetz to Tom Cotton to Josh Hawley to Ted Cruz have seen public education as an opportunity to establish themselves as the new high priests of The Truth.

Schools, as Jill Lepore notes in a recent New Yorker article, have been battlegrounds before in America. Surely, in autocracies, schools were seen as the instrument for inculcating belief in the next generation during the Third Reich, which sought not simply to indoctrinate those already born in Hitler Youth groups, but to form the not yet conceived, in Lebensborn.  During 75 year Communist regime history was taught as an instrument of right thinking, much as Orwell described. New Think.

Walking home one day with Sue, from my "advanced placement" high school English class, I was astonished to hear her say, "I think English should not be taught in school." "You can't be serious," I said.

"I'm completely serious, " she said.

"She might be right," said Terry Rodgers, who was walking with us. 

Sue wound up going to Berkeley, the place for people who thought radical thoughts in those days.

Terry wound up becoming an artist, something nobody from Bethesda, Maryland aspired to be, at least nobody I knew.  He went to Amherst.  Did he need to go to Amherst to become a painter? He likely would have said, of course not, but he benefited from the education, even if it made no difference to preparing him for what he ultimately made his living doing. He would ask, "How many people really needed college for what they ultimately wound up doing?"

So many of us found jobs in computers which nobody had imagined, let alone prepared for in the schools of the 1960's and 1970's.

I alone among the three of us used public schools to launch myself beyond what my first generation parents had done--they went to public schools and college; I went to private college and professional school.

The thing about the particular public schools we attended in the striving, post War suburbs of Washington, DC was they were not places where education really mattered so much as places designed to select the winners and losers for the glittering prizes ahead.

Had classrooms simply been places where we learned whatever the teachers might be able to impart, take it or leave it, then public education might not have seemed so important or fraught.

Until that advance placement English course, English had been my favorite subject, but in that AP class we were somehow aware something beyond the discussion of the Scarlet Letter or Billy Budd was afoot.  In 11th grade, we read Thoreau, which I loved and which seemed more and more relevant a few years later during the Vietnam war era when Civil Disobedience was all the rage. But in AP English, we were being judged, selected or being selected against.

During those adolescent years, we had enough popular history books around the house, I knew enough to know how inept my high school history teachers were.  I knew the scrubbed anodyne versions of history they taught were simply castrated versions of history the Montgomery County government would allow, which is to say, I didn't take it seriously.  It was just so much blather. I felt the same way about history Sue felt about English. If you can't teach the real thing, don't teach it at all. Don't call it something it isn't. 

Now the governor of Florida accuses public schools as being in the business of "grooming" children, as if public schools have not ever been in that business.

When I got to college, my roomate, from Long Island, was astonished I had not read The Sun Also Rises or Farewell to Arms as he had in his public school. We had read The Old Man and the Sea. I thought Hemingway was an outdoorsman writer. He knew Hemingway wrote about sex, men and women. Sex was not a subject mentioned, except obliquely, in our high school below the Mason Dixon line.

In college, I took a radical turn away from my public school education, and went into the sciences. Never got to return to my favorite subject, history, about which I was well versed and self taught.  I've continued to read history ever since. And I love it still.

One of my sons attended the same public  high school I did, and 30 years later it was essentially the same hypercompetitive place, claiming an academic excellence which existed only in its own marketing, a wasteland of squandered talent. It still attracted the occasional exceptional teacher--a refugee from the Bronx High School of science who taught a dazzling physics course and a department of music which taught an intimidating music theory course, but mostly it was just busy work and who is willing to memorize the following nonsense to get the "A."

We sent the other son to a private high school, which was blessed with a high percentage of excellent teachers, but also carried a dismal lode of clunkers who had no idea what good is. 

That son, assigned to write a two page biography of some important American, stumbled upon a biography of Ben Franklin written by non other than DH Lawrence, who, as he eventually admitted, "I loathe the man," writing about Franklin. My son was captivated by the insouciance, the critical courage, the daring of the book and he wrote his essay reflecting that breezy British style only to be given a "C" and a severe scolding saying the paper hardly even deserved that high a mark, disrespectful as it was, not just of the great American which was its subject but of the teacher and the school.

Picking him up after school, I thought he must have lost his wrestling match that afternoon, but no, he had pinned his opponent, but he was crushed by the results of the paper, of which he was very proud. Critical analysis of our great American past evoked the ire of the establishment as far back as the 1990's in America.

Quality Control

Having read a review of "A Molecule Away from Madness" in the New York Times Book Review, I quickly downloaded it to Kindle.  

The only reservation the reviewer, Annie Murphy Paul, voiced was the author had not revealed much about herself in the course of her narrative about the fascinating neurological diseases she describes.  Well, I thought, that's a virtue in many cases. Of course, the reviewer compared this new author to Oliver Sacks, the grace and clarity of prose. 

Expecting a journey through both familiar and new territory, led by an author in the footsteps of  Sacks, Berton Rouche, Natalie Angier, Gina Kolata, Lawrence Altman, I flipped open my paper white and flew off a cliff, like some misguided lemming. 

The writing would have not made it past my high school English teachers. And it was not just the occasional malapropism, but the indiscipline suffused every sentence, the rank amateurism simply destroyed the stories.  

You have to fight your way past the writing to the story.

"He used chemicals to turn the samples into liquid. Finally, he injected the material into several chimpanzees that lived in his laboratory."

My God! Where to begin?

These chimpanzees, living in this scientist's laboratory, as opposed to living in the jungle, were the subjects of this experiment? Why do we need to be told the chimps were residents of the lab? If the scientist was using them for the experiment do we not already know the chimps' domicile? Or, perhaps, these resident chimps were there, as opposed to chimps who just happened to wander through the lab and were trapped into being subjects? 

And the chemicals in which the brain samples were liquified--do we need to know that the tissue had to be dissolved into a liquid to be injected?

My high school teacher's blue pencil would have slashed through all this and what would be left would be, "Chimps, injected with brain material from diseased brains, exhibited the same syndromes seen in human subjects."

Even the "Months later, the animals developed the same symptoms akin to the clinical syndromes in humans," which followed, is jarring to any medically trained human. 

Symptoms are what a patient reports to the doctor which the doctor cannot see for himself--nausea, lightheadedness, pain. Signs are what the doctor can observe in the patient: vomiting, unsteadiness of gait, grimacing. The chimps showed signs of the syndromes; they did not complain of symptoms. (Unless these brain injections really did do something remarkable to those chimps, which would be another and more exciting story altogether.)

"Using a foul-smelling adhesive, she attached two dozen electrodes to Joe's scalp. His hair stood in all directions, as if in fright, to make room for the small pieces."

Which is to say, the patient had an electroencephalogram. 

I suppose this description is supposed to place you in the viewpoint of the patient's wife or the patient himself, but it is entirely irrelevant and adds nothing to the pathos and horror of the story told. In fact, it reads like a snippet from Daniel Tiger, that nauseating profoundly insipid children's cartoon show, where every moment is filled with empathy, fear, compassion and the mother's milk of reassuring drivel.

Enough said

But I'm not writing this to complain about my misspent $9 for the Kindle edition. In fact, I keep reading because the author does assemble and connect a series of fascinating diseases and patient cases, which need no emotional embellishment, because the stark facts of suffering are so evident, but I'm writing because I was moved to look up the author, to see what sort of academic training, if any, she had suffered through, to arrive on the other side so wholly incapable of constructing a single well wrought sentence.

She is, it turns out, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, which claims to be one of the most elite medical schools in the country--although some have doubted this, dubbing Penn Med as "Penn Pretender" with insistent claims to a glory not actually demonstrated by achievement.  

Penn medical school has, for years, tried to compensate for a dearth of actual faculty talent by claiming to accept only the most illustrious undergraduates and it will not even consider a medical student applying to its post graduate training if that student is not AOA, which is the Phi Beta Kappa of the medical school world. Make it exclusive and you make it superior, seems to be the strategy.

In recent years, Penn has been more famous for eating its young, as it cashiered the lady who pioneered mRNA science which formed the basis for the mRNA vaccines almost into oblivion.  Only when talk welled up about a possible Nobel prize for this lady, whose work likely saved more lives than any other technology since the discovery of insulin 100 years ago, has a technology and investigative breakthrough had as much impact. Now Penn is running advertisements in the New Yorker claiming that such investigators are nurtured at Penn and it's no surprise the work was done there.

Such a story really illustrates Christopher Hitchens' remark that hypocrisy is the compliment canard pays to truth. 

Penn, at least has the excuse it is a medical school, and if medical students cannot write, that is the fault of the undergraduate colleges where they are supposed to teach that sort of thing. In fact, the famous explanation by the Dean of Harvard Medical School about why there were no written exams at the medical school in the early 20th century: "Very few of the students would be capable of writing competently enough to write an exam."

But getting back to the author of A Molecule Away, here is a young woman who doesn't even know how bad she is. (At least as a writer; she may be a stellar neurologist.) No editor has explained it to her. No book reviewer--and this review appeared in the hallowed pages of THE NEW YORK TIMES--has let her know. 

So there we have it. The center will not hold. Bad is good. Every author needs a safe space. Criticism and correction and basic skills are just so 20th century, at least among the elite. The effete elite.

Somewhere out there among the unwashed, dismissed, disrespected state colleges and universities, and community colleges, there may be some folks who will replace H.L. Mencken and Christopher Hitchens and Oliver Sacks, but as of this current report, none have been detected on the bleak horizon of Kindle or The New York Times. 

What Is A Woman?

 

They gave a lecture on "Testicular feminization" when I was in school that literally changed my life, reorganized my brain and opened my eyes. 

The first slides showed some naked women, who looked for all the world to be normal women, except, for some reason they didn't seem to have pubic hair. 

These women had XY (normal male) chromosomes and high levels of testosterone, and their internal gonads, which looked like ovaries were, in fact, under the microscope, testicles and they had no uterus or cervix. They had grown up thinking they were female, having sex with men through what they thought was a vagina, but they never got pregnant and, in fact, they never had menstrual periods.

So were they women? Of course, they were. Science cannot define what is a woman. These individuals defined themselves as women.

We had a ward where these women hung out, getting diagnosed and talking to students like me. 

At age twenty-four, these women were mind blowing for me.  In my world, there was nothing so fixed as the "fact" there are two sexes. This was the 1970's of course, when gender bending consisted of men dressing in drag, for reasons known only to God and possibly to the men in question.

Later, of course, I learned about fish who shifted sexes--there are a number of species which can do that. 

And moles! It's not easy being a mole.  A mole lives mostly underground and it digs all day and has to consume prodigious quantities of worms just to survive. During the heavy digging season, when it needs lots of testosterone for its muscles, its vagina seals shut and its ovao/testes, a gonad with both elements of ovary and testicle, shifts toward testosterone production. So the mole can go back and forth over the course of a year between male and female.

Then, there were the little girls who never really quite accepted the fact they were girls.

Some of these folks had biochemical deficits of enzymes which did not allow the assembly line which takes the cholesterol molecular down range to become testosterone to function properly. There were even those folks with 5 alpha reductase deficiency, who were discovered by medical students doing some field trip work in the Dominican Republic where mountain villages, where there was a lot of intermarriage, and they gave their kids gender neutral names because some of the girls born each year turned out to be boys when they hit puberty.

Beyond all those fascinating people, are people who have no identifiable enzyme or biochemical derangement who simply feel they've been assigned the wrong sex, that they are boys trapped in female bodies or vice versa and they go to Transgender Clinics. This group  is a tiny percentage of all Americans but to hear Senators Cruz and Hawley talk, you'd think they cause almost as much problem for the rest of us as all those human tidal waves washing across our southern borders. 

These estimable Senators seem to think any discussion of these differences from the norm, gender speaking, should never occur in schools, which are places, after all, where you would never want to expose children to things which are different or not normal.

In fact, the whole idea of presenting new ideas to young children should be as threatening as thinking about green eggs and ham.

Exorcising Christopher Hitchens

 

When I realized that my God given male member would give me no peace, I determined to repay it by giving it no rest.

--Christopher Hitchens

Winter in New Hampshire means I cannot ride my bike up and down the steep hills for exercise and I'm confined to my basement treadmill and the beer truck size TV screen my son gave me for Christmas, where I watch hour after hour of youtube. 

Lately, it's been all Christopher Hitchens all the time. Any man who can toss of bromides like "Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue" paragraph after paragraph has got my full attention.

Hitchens interviews by Bill Maher, Dennis Miller and Hitchens in debate with various doctors of theology, and after the first seven debates, you see he has his schtick down very nicely, an armamentarium of moves, as my son had, when he wrestled, which he could throw at an opponent to bring him to the mat, just as soon as his opponent made his first move. 

William Lane Craig

Noticing online remarks that Hitchens has met his match or even been "annihilated" by William Lane Craig, I tuned in to that one. 

Any man with three names deserves to be taken seriously, and Dr. Craig was introduced as having an impressive array of credentials, and he began the debate by racing through a series of statements of "fact" which he claimed used the second law of thermodynamics, the Big Bang theory and various other impressive sounding things, to establish, using these "facts" that God has to exist. 

Clearly having spent a lot of time in departments of philosophy, Craig tried to execute a "proof," as one would in geometry, which ran something like this:  a/ If we really do exist, there must be a cause for that existence, b/ Our universe had a moment, as everything must, when it began to exist c/ Thus, if there is a cause to the beginning, there must be a God which is that cause.

None of this bothered Mr. Hitchens in the least, who proceeded, in his first 10 minute response, to demolish all that Craig said. 

Very simply, Hitchens remarked, almost off handedly, well, if you cannot conceive of something that simply exists without cause or beginning, then who made God? When did God begin to exist? And for what cause?

I had previously heard Hitchens get at this by reciting a line George Carlin loved to use: If God is all powerful, can he create a rock so large even He cannot lift it?

Responding to Craig's declamation that all the experts had established as undeniable fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, which proves there must be a God, Hitchens said this is a very curious claim. And he unwound the path by which Craig had stumbled to it.

Religious authority had, for generations, no access to the Big Bang theory or space telescopes and simply used for their authority faith, that is, the pope says it's true, therefore it's true or some text from the Bible, but in recent years they've decided they ought to marshal evidence to back up their claims. This is just what Craig had done in his opening 20 minutes. Evidence based theology.

Hitchens noted that after establishing the universe operates according the laws of physics and thermodynamics, which is the way God actually does things, according to his Devine plan, when it comes down to the resurrections, the evidence based theologians leap to a miracle to prove the laws of nature actually do not apply in the case of the Resurrection, which proves their point, there must be a God.

Hitchens, with impish delight, then notes the scriptures say that upon the resurrection, the graves gave up their dead, who were seen wandering all over the Holy Land, so that resurrection in that time and place, must not have been remarkable at all, common place even, if everyone could do it.

Hitchen's has a set of propositions which his debate partners can never seem to dent:

1/ The claim from the religious that were there no God, there would be no objective right or wrong, since rape, murder, theft could all occur in primitive or developed societies unless there were a set of rules from God, is a special delight to Hitchens. "Name me a single morally good  thought or action which a religious person can have or do which an atheist cannot do." And then, "On the other hand, name me a dreadful, immoral act done by a religious person, often in God's name or said to be at God's direction--it won't take you five seconds to think of one. The entire suicide bomber community is religious." You do not need stone tablets to know the difference between right and wrong, to know kindness and charity are good and murder and rape bad.

2/ If morality flows from God, down through his religious prophets to man, then why have a long list of iniquities been done by the churches, mosques, synagogues throughout history, from endorsing Hitler, to flying airplanes into buildings, to subjugating Palestinians because they want to live on land given to Jews by God? And, of course there is the child rapes by Catholic priest which Hitchens calls a policy of let no child's behind be left alone. 

The response to that is always that churches are the works of fallible man, and we are all sinners but that does not mean God is not perfect, even if his messengers are imperfect. Poppycock, says Hitchens. Either you speak for God and He speaks through you, or you do not. You can't have it both ways. And why should any of us believe God has decided to speak not directly to people but only through a chain of command?

3/ Hitchens says, essentially, God is man made and a horrible God that is: He knows your thoughts, a celestial dictator even worse than Orwell's Big Brother, so you can be sent to Hell not just for what you do, but for what you think, for thought crime! At least in North Korea, the most religious place on earth, where everyone worships the Dear Leader from sunrise to sunset, you can escape by death. Not so for Christians who are paying for their trespasses  for eternity after death. 

4/ The impulse toward wanting to create a God is the impulse toward desiring a totalitarian dictator, the impulse to want to be a slave to be told what to do and what to think. The prospect of freedom, that you have to create meaning in your own life by your own thoughts and actions is terrifying, but it is the courageous thing to do. The religious are often described as a "flock" and that is a horrible thing to want to be part of.

I could go on. But really, he is important and fun and well worth watching on a winter's day when you cannot be outside, enjoying the wonders of God's green earth.