Devastating Fashion

Some of this I've said before, but I think it bears repeating.

If ever you want to embarrass a Mormon, there are two names you can mention. 

One is Solomon Spaulding, a failed preacher who, more than 200 years ago, tried to recoup his fortunes by writing a historical novel about the lost tribes of Israel -- only to see his manuscript stolen from the printer, shortly after which he died of broken heart.  A few decades later, his family -- whom he had often subjected to readings of his various drafts -- discovered that his book had resurfaced under a new title: The Book of Mormon.  The Spaulding heirs cried plagiarism and threatened to bring their case to court, whereupon the Mormon church settled out-of-court for the then-staggering sum of a million dollars, provided that the Spauling heirs never mentioned the subject again.

The other name is J. Golden Kimball, second son of an Elder in the Mormon church, who expected that his older brother would inherit his father's business, and so went off to make his living as a cowboy.  His father died, and then unexpectedly his older brother died, so J. Golden inherited the job of Mormon preacher -- but he still tended to talk like a cowboy, which left him a legacy of memorable quotes, such as: "I won't go to hell for swearing because I repent too damn fast", and "I may not always walk the straight and narrow, but I sure as hell try to cross it as often as I can", and -- to a careless driver who almost clipped him: "Son of a bitch!  Ain't you got no respect for the priesthood?"

J. Golden's most memorable quote is very rarely repeated, for reasons which will become obvious.  The church had heard of a Mormon town where the ladies had become too obsessed with fashionable clothes, so they sent him there to straighten them out.  He did indeed preach a fiery sermon against yielding to the temptations of fashion, so fiery a speech that he got carried away and ended by saying: "You wicked ladies, I swear, you would wear a feather sticking out of your @ss if it was in fashion!"  Half the fun of this quote, as I've heard more than one reporter tell me, is "imagining the Mormon ladies so attired."

In fact, that would be far from the worst disaster people have inflicted on themselves -- and their children -- in the name of fashion.  The Victorian English fashion of cinching young girls into ever-tighter corsets left countless women with crippled backs and deformed livers.  Enough has been said about the Chinese fashion for binding women's feet, and the 17th-century French fashion for white face-powder that contained arsenic, or the upper-class Mayan custom of deforming babies' skulls with cradle--boards.  Not enough has been said about the Aztec custom of bobbing women's noses, or the Fundamentalist Russian custom of gelding second sons to as to keep them "pure" -- and unmarriageable, so they would stay home to take care of their families in their parents' old age.  Most of these destructive fashions were foisted on children by their parents -- and ultimately for the parents' benefit, one way or another.

Right up there with foot-binding daughters or gelding second sons is the modern upper-middleclass fashion for childhood transgenderism.  It usually starts with a child claiming that he wants to be a girl, or -- more often -- that she wants to be a boy, and the parents happily going along with this claim even unto prolonged hormone treatments and major surgery, both of which (despite the claims of their supporters) are irreversible;  a transgendered person is gelded, permanently.  The process is also expensive -- $75,000 at last count -- which may be another reason why parents of lower income brackets have no truck with this fashion.

Now I've met many people in my long and public career, and exactly three of them "transitioned" to the opposite sex and remained happy with that choice decades later.  All three of them had five characteristics in common:  1) all of them were well over legal age -- in fact, over 30 -- when they made the change, 2) they had all had successful love-affairs in their original genders 3) they were highly regarded in their communities in their original genders, 4) they were all considered quite handsome -- even notable beauties -- in their original genders, and 5) they were successful in their careers.  These were not troubled teenagers or petulant children.  Their parents had no influence on their choices -- in fact, in most cases their parents were already dead.  It was not parental "acceptance" that made them want to change genders.     

Why some parents actually do go along with this fashion is a good question.  The book "Johnny the Walrus" (currently a best-seller on Amazon.com) kindly suggests that the parents are misled by too much trust in Internet friends.  I can think of less charitable reasons, seeing the fame -- and political support -- that such parents have managed to get for themselves by telling their stories on Internet websites.  

In any case, pre-pubescent children -- and even some adolescents -- definitely don't have the knowledge to make any such choice for themselves.  Most, in fact, seriously don't want any such change.  I recall that at the age of 9 I was a tomboy, because I knew that the version of "femininity" that my mother and aunts tried to foist on me left me totally disgusted.  I absolutely despised the "Little Lady lessons" my mother tried to teach me -- walk just so, talk just so, moo and coo -- when I much preferred running off into the local greenbelt to climb trees and hunt for snakes, and loved riding horses (astride, thank you) most of all.  Even then I knew that I certainly wasn't "really a boy", and I didn't even want to be one;  why should I want a body that was clumsy, smelled bad, and had its tender parts hanging out where they could be easily kicked or poked or snagged on thornbushes?  I didn't want to be a boy;  I wanted to be treated like one -- like a default-setting generalized human being, judged by better standards than how pretty-pretty my clothes were, or how mincingly I could walk. 

One thing I learned early, and have seen no evidence to disbelieve since, is that gender is real and natural, but gender roles are totally artificial social constructs.  For anyone who doubts this, I recommend the undeservedly-blacklisted book, "The Dominant Sex" by Mathilde and Matthias Vaerting.  Quoting a mass of evidence from ancient and modern societies, it shows that the characteristics of whichever gender is dominant in a society are almost exactly the same, whether that gender is male or female.  In fact, in those rare societies where neither sex is dominant, the characteristics of both genders are almost identical.  The only differences which those researchers could find were: 1) females, knowing that they'll have to devote large portions of their time to bearing and nursing children, make arrangements in their marriage contracts for the males to take on larger shares of the family's support;  and 2) in female-dominant societies there is no prostitution -- simply because males aren't capable of performing sexually as often as females, and therefore can't make a living at it.  Those are the only behaviors which seem to be inevitably linked to physical gender.

As for the question of natural physical strength, speed, endurance and so on, those studies of female-dominant and ambiarchal societies show that the females had at least the same size, bone-density, and muscle attachments as males.  This is evidence that the way children are raised has more to do with physical abilities than genetics does, especially considering the effect of the environment on the expression of genes.   

And herein lies a solution to the modern problem of "transgender" men competing in women's sports, not to mention careers.  It's quite simple, really.  We must raise our male and female children -- for at least two generation, and better it be six -- exactly alike.  Give them the same nutrition, exercise, training, education, dress and expectations.  Show no difference in treatment to the genders, and in fact don't mention sex at all -- until the children themselves ask;  then give them the simplest answer possible.  So when your 4-year-old asks: "Why is my wee-wee different from Sandy's?" answer: "That's so that when you're all grown up and married you can put them together and make babies of your own."  Any self-respecting 4-year-old will promptly reply: "I'm no baby!" -- and lose interest in the subject.

Now that would be a fashion well worth following -- and a hell of a lot safer than the "gender-fluidity" fashion of today.

--Leslie <;)))><