Recommended readings: Trans: When Ideology meets Reality, by Helen Joyce

 

In her book Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality, The Economist writer Helen Joyce presents a compelling study of what is behind the "non-binary" movement.

Joyce argues that while sex is a biological reality and gender a social convention, using surgery to change the former on behalf of the latter is not "liberating" but restricting future options. Joyce studied what is behind the extreme "sex-reassignment" hormonal treatments and surgery -especially in children-.

Rather than focusing on the "non-binary" versus "binary" false discussion -sexuality has a spectrum that determines that no person is 100 percent male or female and cross-dressing and homosexual sex and relationships have always been part of normal sexuality-, Joyce focuses on what she calls "transactivism" and the special interests behind its agenda. She explains:

"It is a story of policy and institutional capture; of charitable foundations controlled by billionaires joining forces with activist groups to pump money into lobbying behind the scenes for legal change. They have won over big political parties, notably America’s Democrats, and big businesses, including tech giants. 

They are backed, too, by academics in gender studies, queer theory, and allied fields, and by the pharmaceutical and health- care industries, which have woken up to the fortunes to be made from ‘gender- affirmative’ medicine. 

This powerful new lobby far outnumbers the trans people it claims to speak for. 

And it serves their interests very poorly. Its ideological focus means it seeks to silence anyone who does not support gender self-identification – which includes many post-operative transsexuals, who are under no illusion as to how much bodies matter. 

It also ignores other possible solutions to problems faced by trans people – research into the causes and treatment of gender dysphoria, for instance, or adding unisex facilities alongside single-sex ones. Its overreach is likely to provoke a backlash that will harm ordinary trans people, who simply want safety and social acceptance. 

When the general public finally realizes what is being demanded, the blame may not land with the activists, where it belongs."

Joyce explores the forces behind "transactivism" and the perils for minors and their parents of itas agenda and clarifies several concepts focusing on the consequences:

"This is a book about an idea, one that seems simple but has far-reaching consequences. 

The idea is that people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they declare, instead of their biology. It’s called gender self-identification, and it is the central tenet of a fast-developing belief system that sees everyone as possessing a gender identity that may or may not match the body in which it is housed. 

When there is a mismatch, the person is ‘transgender’– trans for short – and it is the identity, not the body, that should determine how everyone else sees and treats them. The origins of this belief system date back almost a century, to when doctors first sought to give physical form to the yearnings of a handful of people who longed to change sex. 

For decades such ‘transsexuals’ were few and far between, the concern of a handful of maverick clinicians, who would provide hormones and surgeries to reshape their patients’ bodies to match their desires as closely as possible. Bureaucrats and governments treated them as exceptions, to be accommodated in society with varying degrees of competence and compassion. But since the turn of the century, the exception has become the rule. National laws, company policies, school curricula, medical protocols, academic research and media style guides are being rewritten to privilege self- declared gender identity over biological sex. 

Roughly, sex is a biological category, and gender a historical category; sex is why women are oppressed, and gender is how women are oppressed. 

In the simplistic version of the new creed that has hardened into social-justice orthodoxy, gender is no longer even something that is performed. It is innate and ineffable: something like a sexed soul. 

What is being demanded is no longer flexibility, but a redefinition of what it means for anyone to be a man or woman – a total rewrite of societal rules. 

liberal, secular society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on everyone else. 

Gender self-identification, however, is a demand for validation by others. The label is a misnomer. It is actually about requiring others to identify you as a member of the sex you proclaim. Since evolution has equipped humans with the ability to recognize other people’s sex, almost instantaneously and with exquisite accuracy, very few trans people ‘pass’ as their desired sex. And so to see them as that sex, everyone else must discount what their senses are telling them."

Joyce explores and predicts several backlashes that transactivism is already generating in different areas such as:

Sports

"Their entire purpose is to enable fair competition, since the physical differences between the sexes give males an overwhelming athletic advantage, and competing separately is the only way that exceptional females can get their due. 

Allowing males to identify as women for the purposes of entry to women’s competitions makes no more sense than allowing heavyweights to box as flyweights, or able-bodied athletes to enter the Paralympics, or adults to compete as under- eighteens. And yet, under pressure from transactivists, almost every sporting authority right up to the International Olympic Committee has moved to gender self-identification. The sight of stronger, heavier, faster males easily beating the world’s best female athletes is sure to outrage deep-seated intuitions about fair play – once it comes to wider notice. "

Pediatric Gender Surgery

"Until recently, hardly any children presented at gender clinics, but in the past decade the number has soared. Every one of the dozen or so studies of children with gender dysphoria – discomfort and misery caused by one’s biological sex – has found that most grow out of it, as long as they are supported in their gender non-conformity and not encouraged in a cross-sex identification. Many of these ‘desisters’ are destined to grow up gay: there is copious evidence of a strong link between early gender non-conformity and adult homosexuality. 

But as gender clinics have come under activists’ sway, the treatment they offer has taken an ideological turn. Instead of advising parents to watch and wait with sympathy and kindness, they now work on the assumption that childhood gender dysphoria destines someone to trans adulthood. They recommend immediate ‘social transition’– a change of name, pronouns and presentation – followed successively by drugs to block puberty, cross- sex hormones and surgery, often while the patient is still in their teens. This treatment pathway is a fast track to sexual dysfunction and sterility in adulthood."

The book also covers the negative impact this agenda has on women's rights and the cultural acceptance of alternatives such as bisexuality and homosexuality as not just lifelong but personal, private, and changing options.

Ancient societies such as Classical Greece had already achieved a better balance as any reader of Plato can verify. But Plato and the Great Books are temporarily (we hope) out of fashion, so Joyce's book is a very helpful alternative to distinguish between reason and nonsense. 

Adam Smith: The Invisible Founding Father

 

The documentary that starts this article, written and narrated by Donald L. Miller, professor of History at Lafayette University, explains some interesting but lesser-known facts about the United States' early economic development.

Adam Smith could be considered an "invisible" Founding Father of the United States economic system. Although Smith never visited the British colonies that proclaimed their independence the same year he published The Wealth of Nations, the seeds of the system he described had already traveled with the early settlers in the form of entrepreneurial capitalism. 

These are some interesting facts that Professor Miller points out:

• During its first 100 years, in the period between 1801 (Jefferson) and 1901 (Theodore Roosevelt), the United States population grew from 7 to 77 million, and the territory quintupled to the West and South.

• The first American factory was established by Moses Brown in 1789 using a water mill to power looms in  Pawtucket Falls, Rhode Island. A few months later, they acquired a patent to use a 32-spin loom to expand. Facing problems with the new technology, they hired a British partner, Samuel Slater, who had worked with the system in Britain. The factory employed mostly women and children from what continued to be a rural community. Men kept working as farmers, and women and children earned extra income working in barns turned into factories. What would be called today illegal child labor was in fact a bonus for the new employees, who already toiled 70 hours a week in rural labor much harder and exacting to the body that working on looms inside the barns.
• Hamilton was strongly in favor of the urban capitalistic model. Jefferson preferred the agrarian version of the part-time farm/factories, farmers/workers.
• At the time "child labor" was normal, particularly in farming, where having as many children as possible was a competitive advantage over hiring (and paying for) hands outside the owning family,
• The westward expansion between 1801 and 1901 went hand-in-hand with the entrepreneurial capitalist model embraced by all parties. 
• Business-financed channels and railroads connected the East Cost, NY transatlantic trade with the Great Lakes and prairie land beyond the Appalaches. \

The "invisible hand" of the growing markets and free enterprise created a century of prosperity and growth, making Adam Smith an "invisible" founding father.

Recommended readings: Cuba, an American History, by Ada Ferrer

 

A significant part of the relationship between the United States and Latin America during the 20^th century was defined by our relationship with Cuba. What turned Cuba and the US into rivals was not the 1959 triumph of the young guerrilla men and women that defeated and deposed the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, but instead on December 2, 1961, when Fidel Castro declared his new government communist and turned to an alliance with the Soviet Union at the onset of the Cold War. Until then, the American press primarily portrayed Castro as a freedom fighter that would deliver some form of liberal democracy after Batista.

From 1957 to 1961, the US and Cuba were, as during much of their previous history, a sort of quarrelous allies. And in 1959 friendship reached a high point. Castro put special care into befriending American media during his guerrilla campaign. US reporters interviewed Castro, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos several times in their Sierra Maestra quarters. The US and Fidel were undoubtedly playing both ends of the nascent Cold War until the CIA fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 signaled the final break with the US and the beginning of a direct alliance with the USSR.

 "Cuba, An American History," by historian Ada Ferrer provides a long-view perspective of the Cuba-US history. As an American citizen born in Cuba who has continued to return to the island since she left it as a child, Ferrer combines her personal experience with solid scholarship in terse prose to provide a well-balanced portrait of the complex relations between Cuba and the United States.

The result is a picture of unusual clarity, precisely because Ferrer does not fudge complexity and stick to historical facts. The book starts the history of Cuba and the US  with the first trip of the now vilified Christopher Columbus and follows up to the times of Donald Trump. Ferrer's focus on the people's history rather than the government's only shines light on the US and Cuba's critical common ground and ideals rather than on the apparent confrontations. To do so, it avoids the political narratives espoused and promoted by the rival governments to focus on the actual relationships between Americans and Cubans from 1959 to -almost- the present.

Ferrer shows how history repeats itself in both directions. How American independence was supported and launched from Cuba (which controlled Spanish Florida), secession and the slave trade, and how the Cuban flag and its independence founders came from New York and New Jersey.

The book prologue provides a good example:

"Prologue: There and Here 

"The connections between Cuba and the United States stretch back over centuries and run in both directions. Few Americans have likely considered the significance of Cuba for the United States. During the American Revolution, Cubans raised funds in support of Washington’s army, and soldiers from Cuba fought against the British in North America and the Caribbean. 

As the thirteen colonies lost access to other British possessions, the Spanish colony of Cuba became a vital trading partner. In fact, Havana’s storehouse of coveted silver currency helped finance the new nation’s first central bank. Later, after Florida and Texas became states of the Union in 1845, propertied southerners—and even some northerners—looked to Cuba as a potential new slave state or two, as a way to buttress the power of slavery and its economy. 

In 1898, the United States intervened militarily in Cuba and declared war on Spain. With that intervention, the United States turned what had been a thirty-year movement for Cuban independence into the conflict that history usually remembers as the Spanish-American War. 

The end of some four hundred years of Spanish rule was ritually observed at noon on January 1, 1899, with the synchronized lowering of every Spanish flag on the island. But the flag raised in its place was not a Cuban flag but an American one. With that began a full-fledged military occupation that ended four years later, only after Cuban leaders, under enormous pressure, agreed to grant the US government the right of intervention in Cuba. If the events of 1898 were fateful for Cuba, they also helped produce two consequential developments in the United States: first, the reconciliation of the white South and North after decades of disunion and, second, the emergence of the United States as an imperial power on the world stage. 

For more than a century, the role of the United States in Cuban independence has been the subject of disagreement— a shared history viewed in radically divergent terms. Historically, American statesmen have tended to view US intervention in 1898 as an illustration of American benevolence. The United States had rallied to the cause of a neighbor’s independence and declared war to achieve it. In this version of history, Cuban independence was a gift of the Americans, and for that Cubans owed them a debt of gratitude. In Cuba, however, 1898 represents something entirely different: more theft than gift. There, 1898 was the moment when the United States swept in at the end of a war the Cubans had already almost won, claimed victory, and proceeded to rule over Cuba as a de facto colonial power. Cuba Does Not Owe Its Independence to the United States read the title of an important book published in Havana in 1950. 

Alongside that American presumption and Cuban resentment, however, existed dense networks of human contact forged over decades by people of all kinds in both countries. 

Cuba’s flag was designed and flown for the first time by Cuban exiles in the United States. 

The first pro-independence Cuban newspaper was published in Philadelphia, and the first national novel was written in New York. 

Cuba’s most famous patriot and writer, José Martí, spent more of his adult life in the United States than in Cuba, and the largest memorial service for Cuba’s most important war hero, Antonio Maceo, was held at Cooper Union in New York. 

Cubans traveled to the United States to study at Harvard and Tuskegee, to shop in Miami, to play baseball in the American Negro Leagues, to escape dictators, and to view the famous falls at Niagara. 

Americans traveled in the other direction: to drink during Prohibition in the States, to buy land and cigars, to convert people to Protestantism, to forge networks of Black solidarity, to honeymoon and to fish, to hear jazz and get abortions. 

Americans listened to Cuban music, and Cubans watched American movies. Americans bought Cuban sugar; Cubans bought American appliances. Actually, Cubans bought just about everything (except sugar) from the United States."

Then Fidel Castro came along for almost 50 years and Cuba-US relationships seemed to take a 180 turn at the political level. At the social level, relationships remained like those of a family divided by forced migration, with one-third of Cubans living in the United States -most barely 100 miles away in Florida- while the other two-thirds remained -willingly or not- in their home country. After reading Ferrer's book the concept of "home country" for Cubans becomes healthily extended. 

The video at the beginning of this entry is worth watching in its entirety. Ferrer was interviewed in 2018, shortly after Barak Obama's trip to Cuba, and spoke candidly and presciently about its repercussions. At that time, the book we are discussing was still unpublished -Ferrer read the manuscript here and there-, and a well-informed American and Cuban audience made sharp and enriching questions and comments.

The book now includes Trump's four-year return to hostilities and Biden's more recent return to Obama's opening. 

Cuban-American history is still in the making, but it is clear that it will not be long before returning to its traditional roots. Cubans will be freer, and Americans will discover more about their Southern cousins.