HARDWARE TRYING TO BE SOFTWARE

When it comes to differences between men and women – and how to bring some order to relations between them – there remains a huge amount that we do not know. But there is a lot that we do know. Or did know. And as the snapshots of popular culture above demonstrate, this was not niche knowledge but knowledge just about as widely held as any knowledge can be. Yet something happened. At some point some scrambling device was imposed on the whole issue of relations between the sexes. Something caused this massive upsurge of rage and denial just at the point the issue should have reached a consensus and settlement.

Without doubt the scrambling device laid over the issue of the sexes is among the most deranging aspects of all. It involves a set of unbelievable mental leaps to try to play along with it, and even then it cannot be even attempted without causing unbelievable personal and societal pain.

It comes down to this. Gay campaigners spent the 1990s onwards hoping to persuade the world that homosexuality was a hardware issue, and as we saw above it may be or it may not be. But the drive to make it so was obvious. Hardware was good because hardware protected your status. But something happened at the same time as that fight was going on in gay rights which is truly staggering. Thanks to the work of a number of people – including people who were mistakenly thought to be arguing for feminism – the direction of travel for women simultaneously went in exactly the opposite direction.

Until the last decade or so, sex (or gender) and chromosomes were recognized to be among the most fundamental hardware issues in our species. Whether we were born as a man or a woman was one of the main, unchangeable hardware issues of our lives. Having accepted this hardware we then all found ways – both men and women – to learn how to operate the relevant aspects of our lives. So absolutely everything not just within the sexes but between them became scrambled when the argument became entrenched that this most fundamental hardware issue of all was in fact a matter of software. The claim was made, and a couple of decades later it was embedded and suddenly everybody was meant to believe that sex was not biologically fixed but merely a matter of ‘reiterated social performances’.

The claim put a bomb under the feminist cause with completely predictable consequences for another problem we’ll come to with ‘trans’. It left feminism with almost no defences against men arguing that they could become women. But the whole attempt to turn hardware into software has caused – and is continuing to cause – more pain than almost any other issue for men and women alike. It is at the foundation of the current madness. For it asks us all to believe that women are different from the beings they have always been. It suggests that everything women and men saw – and knew – until yesterday was a mirage and that our inherited knowledge about our differences (and how to get along) is all invalid knowledge. All the rage – including the wild, destructive misandry, the double-think and the self-delusion – stem from this fact: that we are being not just asked, but expected, to radically alter our lives and societies on the basis of claims that our instincts all tell us cannot possibly be true.

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (2019) by Douglas Murray