The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Cognitive Collapse: A First Reconnaissance As most of my readers know by now, when there are five Wednesdays in a month, it’s up to the readers to suggest and then vote on the theme for the post I put up on the final Wednesday. Sometimes most of my readers vote for a single theme, sometimes there’s a quiet little contest among an assortment of themes. Then there was this month, where three topics broke from the pack early on, a lot of people who rarely or never vote in these contests flung themselves into the fray, and all three of the leading topics got more votes than most winning topics do. Since I have the best as well as the most eccentric commentariat on the internet, I decided promptly enough that the only sensible thing to do was to do posts on all three. This week’s post, accordingly, is on the topic that nosed ahead in the final days of the contest and won the contest. Some weeks ago, in the course of the ongoing discussion of Situationism on this blog, I noted that the...

  "Gender" Doesn't Exist How a dubious concept took over the academy Written by Steven Gussman. The reason that “transgender healthcare” — from “social transition” (in which the people in your life pretend that you are the opposite sex by using the wrong pronouns) to surgery — was always doomed to  failure  is that “gender dysphoria” doesn’t exist. And “gender dysphoria”  doesn’t exist  because “gender” doesn’t exist. It is worth peeling back this onion of confusion one layer at a time to understand just how we got here. As with so much of postmodernism, which  accords   language  an almost supernatural role in worldly causation, the story of “transgenderism” begins with etymology. Whereas ‘sex’ had always denoted the biologically immutable reality of males and females, and was eventually understood to be defined by gametes (many small, mobile sperm versus few large, sedentary ova), “gender” began as a  grammatical  offshoot. Early on (a...