Steve Sailer has a post up highlighting the general lunacy of the Bruce Jenner story. The thing no one says in all of this is we are required to pretend, along with Jenner, that he is a woman and it is perfectly normal for him to have done what he has done to himself. No amount of pretending, however, can change the fact we all know it is not real. Jenner is not a woman.

In fact, Jenner is a person with a serious mental illness. If he were convinced, let’s say, that he could fly, society would take custody of him in order to prevent him from jumping off a building. He would be deemed a danger to himself and others. Similarly, if he started slashing his wrists or stabbing himself, he would be remanded to a psychiatric facility and appropriately restrained so he could not mutilate himself.

Biology tells us that humans come in one of two sexes. Not genders. Sexes. We know that some small portion of men and women are sexually abnormal, being attracted to the same sex. Similarly, some humans appear to have no sex drive, while others have an all-consuming sex drive. Like any other abnormality, these are exceptions to the standard.

Where there is no exception is in the presence of a Y-chromosome. If you have that, you are biologically male. About 1-in-1000 have two or more X-chromosomes and a Y-chromosome. These people are not a third sex as there are no documented cases in which both types of gonadal tissue function. In other words, they express as male or female, not both or some third option.

This is basic biology. If someone claimed that their head was on backwards or that they had eight legs, this conflict with observable biological reality would be proof of mental defect. The question, therefore, is why this other type of mental illness is being treated as a triumph, rather than insanity. The Sailer post argues, in its own way, that this has some utility to the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

Most normal people seem to think it is a part of the war on white men or the general attack on traditional western sensibilities. I think that’s the Sailer line. His subsequent post from Theodore Dalrymple adds in the need to crush and humiliate the people. I think that was certainly true in the authoritarian societies Dalrymple was observing. Corrupt the man and you break the man.

There’s more here though, in this denial of biology. Blank slate types used to claim that maleness and femaleness were 100% cultural. That’s largely been forgotten, but I’m old enough to recall when it was an article of faith amongst Progressives. It’s what was behind the push to put girls into sports in the 1970’s. That way, girls could learn to be competitive, just like the boys!

That turned out to be a bust. Women’s professional sports are mostly for lesbians. A typical crowd at a WNBA game is wearing flannel and comfortable shoes. Normal females will play sports until they discover boys and then their interests change. They may keep playing, but it is a part of their competition for eligible males. In other words, girl’s sports remained girl’s sports.

I wonder if what we’re seeing here is a renewed effort to claim that sex is a cultural artifact. After all, if Bruce Jenner can change sexes, then there’s no such thing as sex. That is the unsaid truth of egalitarianism. If everyone is the same, then no one really exists as a unique individual. Egalitarianism is a nullification of humanity and what better way to prove that than to change someone’s sex?

Of course, it could simply be wholesale what has long been observed retail. The person who is willing to break one social convention is likely to break others. Serial killers are often spurred on by the exhilaration from the previous act. Potheads are more likely to try coke and then meth than is the teetotaler. Similarly, a society that has broken from its traditional constraints is always on the prowl for some new high, some new adventure in cultural nullification.

Maybe that’s all there is to this. For as long as I have been alive, the worst thing you could say about someone is that they are average or normal. Everyone invests a maximum amount of time proving they are a special little snowflake, God’s special angel. That usually means being a nuisance or social irritant. Having run out of ways to be weird, we’re now onto mutilating the mentally ill.