The modern Panopticon

Janice Turner from The Times today interviews Maria Miller, the (Conservative) Chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee.

The article: "How do you solve a problem like men in women’s changing rooms, Maria?"

"Maria Miller gathers up her handbag and makes to leave: “I don’t think I’m happy about this. I think I’ve finished . . . I didn’t realise this was such a stitch-up.”

I’ve been questioning Ms Miller about a report on transgender rights she produced last year as chairwoman of the women and equalities committee. ...

"The heart of the controversy is the view, espoused by Ms Miller’s report, that switching gender should instead merely be a matter of “self-definition”. A man need only “declare” that he is a woman. Your gender is what you feel it to be: there would be no requirement even to take female hormones or have surgery — about 70 per cent of trans women still have intact male genitals — or even “present” as a woman to be legally female. ...

"Furthermore, if the law changes, “gender identity” is likely to become a protected characteristic under equalities legislation: ie if you deny a person is a woman or a man when they claim to be, you are guilty of discrimination or hate crime. ...

"Take this scenario: a man enters a female communal changing area, removes his clothes while women get undressed. Now they have a right to ask him to leave. Under gender self-definition, if he said “I identify as a woman” he would be entitled to stay. This, I stress, is unlikely to be a trans woman — many who use women’s changing rooms every day with discretion and no fuss — but could be a sexual predator exploiting the loophole. (There have been a growing number of cases in the US, including a man in Seattle using women’s pool facilities claiming “the law has changed, I have a right to be here”.) Does Ms Miller not see why women fear a conflict of rights? ...

"I show her a photograph of a bearded, male-born American called Danielle Muscato who dresses in men’s suits and ties, has made no attempt to transition but nonetheless “identifies as female” and insists on living in a women’s homeless shelter. On International Women’s Day he tweeted: “Some women have penises. If you’re bothered by this, you can suck my dick.” ...

"In Toronto, Christopher Hambrook claimed to be a trans woman to access a refuge then raped residents."

“These spaces carry out a risk assessment before individuals are allowed to use them and those that pose a risk to safety are not necessarily one gender.”

"But 90 per cent of violent crime and 98 per cent of sexual crime is committed by men. Trans women, such as Davina Ayrton, who raped a 15-year-old girl, have been convicted of offences seldom committed by natal females. Would self-identification mean these crimes would be registered as committed by women, skewing the figures? ...

"Sport is another problematic area: self-identification could destroy women’s competitions, allowing former-men with greater musculature and testosterone to dominate. In New Zealand a weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard, has broken national records; in Canada the mountain biker Michelle Dumaresq dominated for years."

“Those are already issues that professional bodies have to deal with. And again that is something which needs to be looked at in significant detail.”

"I ask her about school sports. In Connecticut Andraya Yearwood, a male-bodied, moustachioed 15-year-old trans girl, has won state championships although she would have finished last in the boys’ competition. Does Ms Miller think this fair to the girl athletes?"

“Well, I think it’s a bit of a difficult one to answer because boys are not going through gender reassignment when they’re at school.”

"But what would you say to the girls who lost?"

“It’s a very difficult one to answer . . .”

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Walking along a country lane this morning I discussed this with Clare.

"This thing could run a long way. For example, I could claim to be a toddler and demand the right to join an infant play area. If someone objected that I'm a sixty six year old male, could they be open to the accusation of hate crime?"

"Don't worry," she said, "No-one can hear you here."

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Would you like to know more?

The mediaeval belief that God saw all thoughts & actions was a powerful force for conformity.*

In a more secular age, it's good to know that our technology will soon step into the breach.

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* Part II .. and related (SSC).

A Scanner Darkly

Your problem for today: to find the right linkage between the following two items.

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1. Robin Hanson wrote this, including an almost throwaway comment on feminism:

"Yes one sex may have a worse deal overall. But most of the ways in which we’ve had sex-asymmetric official rules and widely held expectations did not result from a conspiracy by one sex to repress the other. They were mostly reasonable responses to sex differences relevant in ancient societies.

"We may have failed to adapt them quickly enough to our new modern context. But many of them are still complex and difficult issues. We’d do better to roll up our sleeves and deal with each one, than to obsess over which sex has the worse overall deal."

This seems a more reasonable line to take than the moralising we frequently get. It could also conceivably generalise to other groups who once got a raw deal within one set of social relations, which they later saw a way of overcoming, once those social relations had moved on.

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2. From The Sunday Times today (Jonathan Leake, Science Editor):

"Research into human IQ — long one of the most controversial areas of science — has produced a new set of suitably awkward results.

Men’s average IQ is four points above women’s because they typically have bigger brains.

Scientists used the latest scanning techniques to measure the brain volumes of 896 people, who were also subjected to a battery of intelligence tests.

“We found that the average IQ of men was about four points above that of women,” said Professor Dimitri van der Linden, of Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

“So if men had an average score of 100, women would score 96.”

This would mean that 40% of women would be smarter than the average man. The Sunday Times 'balances' this two month old research result with some recent moral absolutism:

"The research coincides with a new book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong — and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story, whose author, Angela Saini, is sharply critical of it.

She said: “It is scientifically well established that there is no difference on average in general intelligence between women and men. It’s also well known that women have, on average, slightly smaller brains than men because they are, on average, slightly smaller in size. This paper does not disprove these facts.

“For more than 100 years, male anatomists and neuroscientists have sought to find evidence of women’s intellectual inferiority by comparing their brains to those of men. It’s surprising that in the 21st century those efforts haven’t ended.”

It obviously never occurred to Professor Dimitri van der Linden, of Erasmus University in Rotterdam and his team to correct for that, except:

"Men’s brains are bigger than women’s, even when controlling for bigger body size, which means they should have higher intelligence, though the evidence for that is conflicting. Most researchers find no notable differences overall, saying that different strengths and weaknesses balance each other out, but Lynn and Irwing (2002, 2004) argued that adult males are almost 4 IQ points brighter than adult females.

"The authors of the present paper have found one of the largest MRI samples available, each scanned person having done 10 cognitive tests, which is what makes this study particularly interesting."

Yes, this is not a new story: Dr James Thompson discussed it back in April.

Helena Cronin on "Sex"

Edge mission statement:

"To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."

Every year, Edge asks these great minds a question. This year the question is "Which Scientific Term or Concept Ought To Be More Widely Known?"

By now you probably have a question of your own. What word best describes this mutual back-slapping fest?

• Smug 
• Pretentious
• Self-indulgent
• Conceited
• Pompous?

The full list of essays is here.

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Amongst the self-satisfied, complacent, virtue-signalling there are a few intriguing articles.

Take Helena Cronin's piece on "Sex"

"The poet Philip Larkin famously proclaimed that sex began in 1963. He was inaccurate by 800 million years. Moreover, what began in the 1960s was instead a campaign to oust sex—in particular sex differences—in favor of gender.

Why? Because biological differences were thought to spell genetic determinism, immutability, anti-feminism and, most egregiously, women's oppression. Gender, however, was the realm of societal forces; "male" and "female" were social constructs, the stuff of political struggle; so gender was safe sex.

The campaign triumphed. Sex now struggles to be heard over a clamor of misconceptions, fabrications and denunciations. And gender is ubiquitous, dominating thinking far beyond popular culture and spreading even to science—such that a respected neuroscience journal recently felt the need to devote an entire issue to urging that sex should be treated as a biological variable."

It's the usual issue: equality of opportunity (ie no discrimination) vs equality of outcome (ie no differences in preference).

"Bear in mind that equality is not sameness. Equality is about fair treatment, not about people or outcomes being identical; so fairness does not and should not require sameness. However, when sameness gets confused with equality—and equality is of course to do with fairness—then sameness ends up undeservedly sharing their moral high ground. And male/female discrepancies become a moral crusade. Why so few women CEOs or engineers? It becomes socially suspect to explain this as the result not of discrimination but of differential choice.

Well, it shouldn’t be suspect. Because the sexes do differ—and in ways that, on average, make a notable difference to their distribution in today's workplace.

So we need to talk about sex.

Here's why the sexes differ. A sexual organism must divide its total reproductive investment into two—competing for mates and caring for offspring. Almost from the dawn of sexual reproduction, one sex specialized slightly more in competing for mates and the other slightly more in caring for offspring. This was because only one sex was able to inherit the mitochondria (the powerhouse of cells); so that sex started out with sex cells larger and more resource-rich than the other sex.

And thus began the great divide into fat, resource-laden eggs, already investing in "caring"—providing for offspring—and slim, streamlined sperm, already competing for that vital investment. Over evolutionary time, this divergence widened, proliferating and amplifying, in every sexually reproducing species that has ever existed. So the differences go far beyond reproductive plumbing. They are distinctive adaptations for the different life-strategies of competitors and carers.

Wherever ancestral males and females faced different adaptive problems, we should expect sex differences—encompassing bodies, brains and behaviour. And we should expect that, reflecting those differences, competitors and carers will have correspondingly different life-priorities. And that's why, from that initial asymmetry, the same characteristic differences between males and females have evolved across all sexually-reproducing animals, differences that pervade what constitutes being male or female.

As for different outcomes in the workplace, the causes are above all different interests and temperaments (and not women being "less clever" than men). Women on average have a strong preference for working with people—hence the nurses and teachers; and, compared to men, they care more about family and relationships and have broader interests and priorities—hence little appeal in becoming CEOs. Men have far more interest in "things"—hence the engineers; and they are vastly more competitive: more risk-taking, ambitious, status-seeking, single-minded, opportunistic—hence the CEOs. So men and women have, on average, different conceptions of what constitutes success (despite the gender quest to impose the same—male—conception on all).

And here's some intriguing evidence. "Gender" predicts that, as discrimination diminishes, males and females will increasingly converge. But a study of 55 nations found that it was in the most liberal, democratic, equality-driven countries that divergence was greatest. The less the sexism, the greater the sex differences. Difference, this suggests, is evidence not of oppression but of choice; not socialization, not patriarchy, not false consciousness, not even pink t-shirts or personal pronouns … but female choice."

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In yesterday's post, on Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Submission’, I finished with a quote from the book where François says this:

'I’ve never really been convinced that it was a good idea for women to get the vote, study the same things as men, go into the same professions, et cetera. I mean, we’re used to it now — but was it really a good idea?’

Houellebecq needs this throwaway apparently-misogynistic remark to ease the way for his narrator's later conversion to Islam - thereby opening the door to a well-paid lecturing job at the Sorbonne and three wives. (It's satire, but Islam's historically-regrettable attitude to women is entirely real).

Of course women should have the vote, as should the poor, the rich and the liberal intelligentsia.

Elites used to worry about mass democracy, for example that the great unwashed would simply vote themselves endless benefits financed by taxing the rich, resulting in economic collapse.

Things like that have happened, but the ruling classes are now on the case. Governments with such programmes don't end up actually pulling the levers of power, and if they do, they find those levers don't connect to anything. The bureaucracy has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.

Military force serves as the ultimate insurance policy.

Mass-participatory, bourgeois democracy has been made stable and safe, most of the time. François's half-hearted flirtation with Islam as a replacement ideology - vigorous, based on deep biological truths, giving meaning to life - is flawed through and through.

I'm sure it will never catch on.