Deliberately left untitled

About a decade ago, while I was still working for the Air Force, I knew someone whom I will call, for the purposes of this article, Sergeant Panigrahi.

Sergeant Panigrahi had a daughter, who at that time was about seven years old. At least, she was biologically his daughter. But you’d never know it to look at her.

You see, Sergeant Panigrahi and his wife brought her up as a boy. They dressed her in boy’s clothes, cut her hair in a crew cut, called her by a boy’s nickname (which has escaped my memory), and even referred to her as “he”, not “she”, in her presence. But for the fact that I had to write the treatment sheets and prescriptions, I’d never have known that this was a female.

I don’t know where the sergeant is now or whether he is still in the air force. The last I saw of him was in circa 2007, and he must have long since been transferred elsewhere and he ought to at least be a warrant officer by now. And his daughter, whom he’d brought up as a boy, must be in her mid-teens...and realised that she is, you know, actually a she.

I can only imagine the psychological trauma the poor kid had to go through when she started getting her periods, sprouting breasts, and the rest of it. I can only imagine how much her parents managed to screw up her sexual identity for her.

Why did they do it?

To this day, especially in North India, the craze for a male child is so extreme that it defies rational analysis. The most common response is to breed and breed until the couple has achieved the desired male heir; and this is, I’m sure, what Sergeant Panigrahi would have done if he’d not been restricted to a sergeant’s salary. In rural communities, where polygamy is rampant, if one wife doesn’t produce a male baby after several tries, the commonest recourse is that the would-be father of a son simply “marries” again.

What he doesn’t do, of course, is adopt a boy. That wouldn’t be someone of their own “flesh and blood”, would it?

Some years ago – in 2012 or 2013, if I’m not mistaken – there was a case where the middle-aged daughter of a prominent business family got a sex change operation done and became a “male”. There was a rumour in the media that she’d done this in order to inherit the family business, because a daughter can’t inherit. This is actually total rubbish; there’s no law to discriminate on the basis of gender where inheritance is concerned. But, because of the rumour and the prominence of the person involved, it got splashed all over the media, and a lot of people suddenly became aware that sex change operations were a thing.

So can you tell me what happened? Yes, of course. All over the country, couples rushed to the nearest surgeon, daughter in tow, demanding that she be turned at once into a son. I don’t know how many were actually put to the knife, but I would be amazed if there weren’t at least a few.

I think about this kind of thing each time I hear about female genital mutilation. I also think of this kind of thing each time I see a picture of a four-year-old girl in high heels or a twee little bikini top to cover her nonexistent boobs.

In what world is this a good idea?

[Image source]

Just how much do people in different cultures hate their female children, and express it in whatever way is socially acceptable to them?

The hell with it.  I need to write something to cheer myself up now.

Hitler Redux: Vladimir Putin and the war on Homosexuality

He’s a tyrannical dictator who’s Evil Personified. He’s a vile, twisted psychopath who is the Greatest Threat To The World since Hitler. In fact, going by some of the photoshopped images floating around the net, he is Hitler.

Who else would declare a War on Gays? Hitler! Who else would utter such evil, twisted rhetoric against gays? Hitler! What next? Concentration camps where gay people are herded into gas chambers and afterwards stuffed into crematoria! Right? Right!

I don’t suppose I’m the first person to smell a bit of a rat in all the sudden surge of online hate against Vladimir Putin and his alleged war on homosexuality. In fact, it’s such a convenient – and such an obviously arranged – upsurge of hatred that said rat stinks to high heaven.

After all, if the history of the past twenty-odd years has taught us anything, it’s to be highly suspicious of any issue which arises suddenly, apparently out of the blue, and captures the popular imagination. I’ll just put a short, very short, list here:

1.     The Kuwaiti babies story: Back when Saddam Hussein’s army entered Kuwait, they were said to have ripped Kuwaiti babies from incubators and thrown them to the floor. An alleged eyewitness, a supposed nurse, testified movingly about it to American politicians and roused worldwide anger against the evil Iraqi regime. Of course, she later turned out to have been the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, who had been coached by a PR firm, but she’d fulfilled her purpose. 

2.     The WMD/Iraq Al Qaeda Alliance Story: We all know what that was. No need to elaborate further.  

3.     The Kony Story: Hey, remember Joseph Kony, the monstrous African warlord who suddenly set the internets on fire a while ago? You do? Well, anyway, I’d analysed the brouhaha about him in some detail elsewhere, and concluded that it was a thin edge of the wedge meant to ease the way to a Western occupation of Central Africa. And, guess what? The West now has largish forces in Central Africa. Heard much of Mr Kony lately? No, I didn’t think so. 

4.     The Gaddafi Story: You know, how he was “bombing his own people” and how Libya had to be attacked to stop a “massacre in Benghazi”. Well, again, we know what happened to that. And we know the lies about Syria which followed.

Also, we know the so-called “colour revolutions” of Europe, where non-Western aligned governments were overthrown by alleged “peoples’ revolutions” which installed pro-Western regimes; “revolutions”  which then turned out to have been instigated with the help of Western money channelled through non-governmental organisations. We know, by now, that substantially the same thing happened to the “Arab Spring” which is now turning fast into an Arab Winter.

Also, way back when I was a teenager and still used to read the American propaganda organ Reader’s Digest, I realised a very interesting thing: you could accurately predict when a US puppet would fall out of favour by reading the coverage, which would turn abruptly from approving to damning. I knew that Ferdinand Marcos was going down, for instance, when hagiographic coverage of his Imelda suddenly turned chilling; and when, after the end of the Iran Iraq war, Saddam Hussein suddenly got called a “brutal dictator”, I grew assured that he was moving into the cross-hairs. So, yes, it’s not something that I hadn’t ever encountered before.

Ergo, when Vladimir Putin suddenly gets splashed all over the internet as a gay-hating, tyrannical monster, I have this sudden urge, you know, to ask why. Especially when those who keep going on about his “hating gays” don’t seem to have much of a clue what he’s actually done to them. Just that he’s Hitler.

So, um, has Putin locked away millions of gays in concentration camps? No? Has he at least confined them to ghettoes, forbidden them to have any kind of economic or social relations with heterosexuals? No? Well, then, for heaven’s sake, surely he’s made being homosexual a criminal offence??? What do you mean, still no?

What did Putin’s vile law actually criminalise? In English, it bans, I quote, “the propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors” – in other words, it bans, basically, gay pride rallies. And what’s the actual penalty if you defy the ban? You go to a Gulag for the rest of your life, don’t you?

Actually, no, you don’t. Being sent to a Gulag for life is what happens to people the Empire doesn’t like; look at Guantanamo.

What actually awaits those who break the Russian law? This (and I'm deliberately quoting from an anti-Putin site so nobody can accuse me of bias):

If you’re Russian. Individuals engaging in such propaganda can be fined 4,000 to 5,000 rubles (120-150 USD), public officials are subject to fines of 40,000 to 50,000 rubles (1,200-1,500 USD), and registered organisations can be either fined (800,000-1,000,000 rubles or 24,000-30,000 USD) or sanctioned to stop operations for 90 days. If you engage in the said propaganda in the media or on the internet, the sliding scale of fines shifts: for individuals, 50,000 to 100,000 rubles; for public officials, 100,000 to 200,000 rubles, and for organisations, from one million rubles or a 90-day suspension.

If you’re an alien. Foreign citizens or stateless persons engaging in propaganda are subject to a fine of 4,000 to 5,000 rubles, or they can be deported from the Russian Federation and/or serve 15 days in jail. If a foreigner uses the media or the internet to engage in propaganda, the fines increase to 50,000-100,000 rubles or a 15-day detention with subsequent deportation from Russia.

Fines, and at most up to fifteen days in jail and deportation. Doesn’t sound much like Hitler, does it? Doesn’t even sound much like what happened to Bradley Manning for exposing the Empire’s war crimes...and, incidentally, Manning is gay.

In fact, Putin wasn’t exactly overthrowing a liberal Russia; as one can see in this map, Russians as a society don’t have great sympathy towards homosexuals. I'll get to this again a little later. 

Now, it seems strange that someone like Barack Obama, who supports cannibal headhunters in Syria, drone-bombs children in Yemen and Afghanistan, and ruthlessly persecutes whistleblowers, should be suddenly concerned about gay rights in Russia. It seems even stranger that his supporters should suddenly be gripped by this to the exclusion of so much else. 

After all, it's hardly likely that until this law was passed - and, incidentally, it wasn't Putin who promulgated it, or even proposed it; he just signed on the dotted line - nobody had realised that most Russians don't much like gays, just as they also don't much like people with Central Asian features. In fact, Russian attitudes towards these things are so marked that even a relatively short visit exposes them clearly.

Also, there's the other thing that Russia bans - Wah'habist Islam, the Saudi version of the religion so beloved of jihadists. You don't see the Western "liberals" attacking Putin over clamping down on religious freedoms, do you?  

But remember that mention of Bradley Manning? It brings us to a rather interesting point: the asylum granted Mr Manning’s fellow-whistleblower, Edward Snowden, in Russia. As we all know, or should know, Snowden’s arrival in Russia was not exactly something that made the top echelons of the Empire happy. In fact, said asylum made a lot of people very unhappy. 

And it wasn’t the first crime that Putin has committed against the Imperial order, either.

Let’s see a few of the crimes that Putin has committed over the years:

 1.     He put an end to the terrorist-run dystopia of the pseudo-republic of Chechnya, and stamped out the worst of the jihadist criminal gangs.
  2.     He crushed the oligarchs who had looted the Russian economy dry during the regime of the great democrat Boris Yeltsin, a corrupt, drunken sot who had his army invade his own parliament when it wouldn’t kneel to his diktats.
 3.     He began the process of turning Russia from a basket case back to a nation of some importance and influence in the world, something anathema to the imperialists of NATO.
 4.     He defeated US proxy Georgia in the latter’s aggressive war against the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia instead of rolling over as Yeltsin would surely have done.
 5.     He repeatedly won the popular vote in elections which the West had to admit were genuine, despite media propaganda; and, besides, won them with much higher percentages of the vote than most Western politicians did.
 6.     In order to forestall a manufactured, Western-created “colour revolution” which would send Russia stumbling back to its knees, he banned organisations from receiving funds from abroad.
 7.     He – along with China – stood firm, and is still standing firm, against the Empire’s plan to overthrow the secular government of Syria and replace it with an alliance of murderous jihadists and cannibal headhunters.
                                  And, last but far from least:
 8.     He gave asylum to Edward Snowden, thereby directly humiliating the Nobel Peace Prizident and defying the Empire.

And so now we know why the anti-Putin tirade, don’t we?

First they tried with the canard that he stole the election, but it didn’t wash.

Then they switched to Pussy Riot, but nobody cared enough about them to make a difference.

They tried to crucify him over banning adoptions of Russian children by American couples, but there was the little fact that many of these couples could be proved to have treated the adopted children most vilely.

So now they’re telling everyone, in increasingly shrill voices to LOOK LOOK LOOK at the evil anti-homosexual Putin. Because if you don’t condemn him, you’re obviously a homophobe and a terrible person, besides being a supporter of Hitler.

Is it a surprise that American “liberals” are at the forefront of the campaign? The same American "liberals" who clamour for war against Syria and support Obama's drone bombing habit?

At this point it might be appropriate for me to state my position: I am a straight person who is also strongly supportive of gay rights. Sure, I completely agree that it’s silly to ban gay pride parades, but Russia isn’t exactly a liberal society, and if Putin’s law was put to a referendum it would be approved by an overwhelming majority. Which doesn’t make it right, of course, any more than racist laws would be right. But the Western “liberal” anti-Putin propaganda is far more hypocritical.

For an illustration of why it’s more hypocritical, let’s look at the nations which actually ban homosexuality, and often impose the death sentence for it. Let’s take a look at this map – especially the red and maroon bits. What do we see?

Well, well what do you know, the list of countries which can kill you or send you to prison for life for being gay includes US allies Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Malaysia, Uganda, “liberated” Libya and Somalia, and new ally Myanmar as well! Don’t hear anybody, least of all the Nobel Peace Prizident, screaming their heads off about them, do we? Of course we don't.

[While we're on the subject, check out the position of Syria - coloured light yellow, a country which doesn't actually impose any penalties on homosexuality, whatever's in the law books. Any guesses on what's going to happen to gay rights there if the cannibal headhunters, so beloved of the Western "liberal" brigade, take over?]

I rest my case.

    

Homophobia and all that

“How,” queried the lady, eyes open wide in real or pretended shock, “can you not hate gays? How?”

This was about fifteen or sixteen years ago, and the lady in question was a cousin of mine, who was otherwise – I used to think – a relatively sane and well-adjusted individual, progressive enough to be living in with her boyfriend, still a rare thing back in the nineties. My own response to her was something along these lines, if I recall: “How would you like it, then, if gays hate you? After all, what’s sauce for the goose...”

It didn’t faze her. “But,” she proclaimed triumphantly, “I’m normal. Gays aren’t!”

That was far from the first time I’d come across reflexive homophobia, and it’s far from the last, but I thought it worthy of mention because it’s typical of what I like to call “thoughtless homophobia.” Even a casual look back at the conversation will show you that my cousin didn’t bother to think about her own attitudes before proclaiming triumphantly, “I’m normal. They aren’t.”

This is an easy attitude to get into, because, of course, every one of us loves to think we’re “normal”. So if we are normal, the “other” must be abnormal, and, for purely evolutionary reasons, everyone is hard-wired to discriminate against the “abnormal”. Sigmund Freud (yes, that Sigmund Freud) chose to regard homosexuality as a “treatable condition” [1], which is one of many reasons I regard that allegedly great man as being fairly full of faeces...though, as I shall shortly discuss, not quite completely.

But, of course, homosexuality isn’t abnormal; if it were, it would have disappeared long ago, by being weeded out by natural selection. After all, it’s fairly well established that homosexuality (despite what many people choose to believe) is a genetically passed on trait; which means you can’t choose to be homosexual or heterosexual any more than you can choose to be born with blond hair or slanted eyes. Now, if homosexuality is a genetically transmitted trait, shouldn’t it be a very ephemeral one? By and large, homosexual people don’t breed (unless, of course, they come to realise their own sexuality fairly late in life, or unless they are trapped in societies where they have no control over their own sexuality). In addition, homosexual non-human animals (and homosexuality is very common throughout the animal kingdom) shouldn’t, by and large, breed. Therefore, homosexuality should have been weeded out long ago by natural selection.

Right?

Well, the facts are all around us, and the facts show that plenty of our friends, relatives and colleagues are homosexuals; more, in fact, than we probably could have imagined (please excuse me for saying “we”; as a heterosexual, I’m writing this article from the heterosexual viewpoint). Therefore, far from being extinct, homosexuality is (at least in the private domain) thriving. How does one explain this?

I said above that Freud wasn’t completely full of faeces. True. He also thought that all people were born, inherently, bisexual, though he thought that it was possible to “cure” homosexuality by letting the heterosexual part assert itself through psychotherapy. Freud had a nineteenth-century mind, after all.

However, if we are all bisexual to some extent, it explains a lot of things. It explains why the homosexual gene refuses to die out; it’s there in all of us, and it expresses itself to various extents, so that some of us are mostly hetero, some mostly homo, and a fair number roughly half and half, so they’re bi.

And it also explains a large part of the homophobia. When does one hate something? When one feels threatened by it, am I right? Suppose I put myself in the position of your average homophobe. He knows perfectly well he’s part of the overwhelming majority, sexually speaking; and that the weedy gay youth he and his friends are beating up can never threaten one of them directly, by anal rape, let’s say (for the time being I’ll set aside male homophobic dislike for lesbians; that can be explained in terms of having fewer available females to breed with). So why does he do it? How does he feel threatened?

I believe, consciously or otherwise, he feels threatened by the knowledge of his own bisexuality; he’s afraid that he may give in. And that also pretty much guarantees that a homophobe is not, cannot be, comfortable with his own sexuality. As they say, you can only insult someone by calling him a bastard if he’s not sure of his mother’s fidelity.

Which brings me to the question I’m building up to; why should we be inherently bisexual? What possible evolutionary benefit could it have? And, unless it has some evolutionary benefit, why are we hanging on to bisexuality?

I can think of two distinct reasons.

Firstly, as biologists know, we all start off as female [2]. Femininity is the default sex, as a little thinking will show, because those organisms which still reproduce parthenogenically are female. The Y chromosome, which makes males male, really doesn’t do anything much except shut off the expression of female genes. Therefore, each of us men has a little bit of femininity in us, and it responds to other males. And all women have the possibility of partial suppression of female genes, for male traits to show through; enough, at any rate, to allow for attraction to other women.

Then, I am convinced that bisexuality isn’t just an accident; that, in social animals like humans, bisexuality was an important evolutionary tool. Let me run through my reasoning and tell me if you see any flaws.

Early humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies, where the men went out together for varying periods of time leaving the women to care for the children and the home caves. Humans aren’t, by and large, very effective predators; without firearms, they need a large amount of co-operation to bring down large game, or even smaller burrowing animals, let alone bringing back injured members to the home place, and the like. Each man was, to an almost unimaginable extent today, dependent on the rest of his tribe; he would have found it virtually impossible to survive alone (and on a side note, this may be the reason why banishment from the tribe was the ultimate punishment, because it meant almost certain death apart from being incredibly psychologically traumatic). He would have needed to be absolutely certain of the loyalty and reliability of at least some of his fellow tribesmen.

The women, on the other hand, would have depended on each other to help out with the more domestic work; taking care of the children (there would have been a lot of them, and they would have been just as slow to develop as today’s babies) and the sick and old, low-level foraging, helping each other out in late pregnancy and childbirth and the like. Again, co-operation would have been crucial, and each woman would have to be sure of the support and help of at least one other woman. Familial ties were, in all probability, not of much importance in a hunter-gatherer society which lacked the idea of heritable property; so blood ties wouldn’t be of much importance in forming a bond with one’s peers. What would, then, form a dependable bond?

One answer is rather interesting: sex.

Quite apart from its reproductive purpose, sex has a whole lot of other functions; and among them the physical and emotional intimacy that comes from swapping body fluids and orgasms ranks very, very high. If you have a regular and reliable sex partner, wouldn’t you go out of your way to ensure that he or she remains your sex partner? In the modern world, it might involve giving gifts of cars or jewels. In the hardscrabble time when just about all of our modern social behaviour actually originated, the gifts would be much greater: the absolute support and reliability you needed to stay alive.

And, of course, there’s the point that intercourse does have health benefits galore [3], and having regular sex even when there’s no access to the opposite gender would significantly boost your own health and therefore your chances of successfully passing your genes on to a future generation when said access to the opposite gender actually materialised.

Can we now agree that bisexuality had a distinct evolutionary role, and helped in the survival of the species? Am I making sense here?

Assuming I am, therefore, people ought not to be called by such absolutist terms as “heterosexual” or “homosexual”, but (except for the few who genuinely fall in the middle and might be called bisexual) but by something more descriptive of what they really are; “homosexual-oriented” and “heterosexual-oriented”, perhaps. Certainly, since words have power, they would also aid in making people more comfortable with what they are. I’m all in favour of throwing out terms like “straight”, “gay”, or “lesbian”, because they’re far too amenable to abuse. I’ll admit though that this is highly unlikely to happen.

Today, in India at least, there’s a kind of backhanded recognition of bisexuality. In certain circles – specifically, among the fashion designers, advertising agency whiz kids, and the other “creative” lot – being gay is suddenly cool. It seems to me that at least some of these people pretend to be gay to gain cred. It’s ridiculous, pathetic and touching all at once. I remember a transvestite in Bombay who declaimed loudly to an admiring circle of friends that “no Indian male is heterosexual” while staring at me...

Of course, among the hoi polloi, it’s different, but there’s hope in that at last there are now even Gay Pride parades in India, and homosexuality has finally been decriminalised by order of the Supreme Court. Yeah, if you are a man, you can’t get locked up any more for having consensual sex with another member of the same gender. (The ladies were never at risk, because Indian women were supposed to be too pure to have sexual desire, so couldn’t possibly wish to have sex with each other.)

That’s...kind of progress. Relatively.

But to get back to the point.

Once we do realise the fact of innate human bisexuality, we can probably understand why most religions hate and condemn homosexuality, can’t we? Homosexual people are less likely to be tied down to families than heterosexual people, and therefore are less amenable to religious overview and control. Besides, religions are all about numbers, and thence about income. More followers equal more income, in the form of tithes, donations, tax exemptions or whatever; therefore it’s self-destructive of religions to be permissive of anything that can reduce those numbers. A perfect family, seen from the organised religion point of view, would be large, ignorant, and willing to believe anything the church/temple/mullah tells it. That’s why religions – sometimes explicitly, and sometimes implicitly – discourage birth control, encourage breeding (often as a “religious duty”) and almost universally condemn homosexuality. Just look at the Vatican as the prime exemplar.

They hate it because they fear it. And they’re losing.

They’re losing because the “enemy”, from their viewpoint, hides where they can never reach it, inside our genes. I suppose they could make some kind of misguided and doomed attempt, by means of genetic engineering, to stamp it out; but not only would it fail spectacularly, but they’d be acknowledging what they dare not: that homosexuality isn’t a sin.

Yes, they have met the enemy; and they are us.

Sources:

[1] http://meemgroup.blogspot.com/2009/07/short-essay-about-freuds-views-about.html

[2] http://bayesianheresy.blogspot.com/2008/08/female-brain.html

[3] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16282622/ns/health-forbescom/

The girl who wasn't

Back when I was an intern, and was posted in Surgery, I was shown a kid in the paediatric surgery ward with a rather unusual problem.

The child was, if I recall, something like three years old (this was a long while ago; I’m talking of 1994, and my memory of the little details is hazy at this distance in time). Her problem was a hypertrophied clitoris; and I mean hypertrophied. The organ was literally much larger than the average penis at that age.

Obviously, sexual fantasies aside, this was not a good thing.

The only treatment possible for this condition was clitoridectomy: surgically reducing the clitoris to something approaching normal size; and this was what the surgeons proposed doing. So far so good, and if that had been all to it I’d not even have bothered to remember this.

The point was that the kid’s parents hadn’t brought her in because she had an enlarged clitoris. They hadn’t even realised that it was an enlarged clitoris. They’d brought her in because she had a cleft below her “penis” instead of testicles...in other words, they weren’t even aware that she was, in fact, a she.

I still remember the ruckus they raised when they discovered that the surgeons, instead of closing the cleft and rendering their precious “son” fully male, intended instead to turn “him” into a girl. They were screaming about how the college was conspiring to rob them of their son.

I still have no idea what finally happened to the kid; it’s more likely than not that they took her away and disappeared when nobody was looking, and decided to bring her up as a male until her breasts began sprouting and her menstrual blood began to flow. If she was lucky, they wouldn’t have taken her to some village quack who’d have stitched her vagina shut. If she was lucky.

All these years later, I still wonder what happened to her, and where she is now.

Now go ahead and tell me how women are oppressed in Afghanistan.