The growing tension between LGB and TQIA2SPD+

Trigger Warning: Personal opinion ahead. I will explain my position on the growing divide. This isn’t intended to offend, but of course that doesn’t stop you claiming to be offended if you so desire.

Spot the odd one out: Blue eyes, Green eyes, Brown eyes, Black hair

I’m pretty sure you got it right. But isn’t it the same with LGBT? The L, G and B are all about sexuality – Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual. If we wanted to add extras to that list, we could add H for Heterosexual and A for Asexual, or O for Omnisexual. LGBHAO might make some sense, detailing the main options for sexuality, but LGBT doesn’t. The T refers to ‘gender’, someone’s inner feelings of their alignment with attributes they associate with men or women, compared to the sex they were born, and that is largely independent of sexual preference. Someone says they are transgender if they feel more aligned with the attributes they consider to be associated with the sex opposite to that they were born.

I put ‘gender’ in quotes and defined transgender using ordinary words, because like many people, I do not buy in to the often divisive, insulting, self-contradictory, illogical, deceptive and devious jargon created by activist groups. Nothing in this blog is intended to cause offense, but as a scientist and engineer, I strongly value clear thinking and logical reasoning. It makes very little sense to create a term such as ‘non-binary’, and then define it using reference to binary options of male and female. It makes no sense to define a woman as ‘someone who considers themselves to be a woman’. Sorry, what do they mean by ‘woman’? Circular definitions are meaningless.

I am no historian, but it seemed to me that activist groups that once stood up for L, G and B people took on the T group because like any organisation, extra members means extra income, extra power and influence. The inclusion of “T” for transgender in the acronym is also an acknowledgment that gender identity issues sometimes intersect with sexual orientation in the social, political, and personal realms. While sexual orientation and gender identity are distinct aspects of an individual’s identity, they are both integral to the broader conversation about rights, recognition, and respect for all individuals, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation. In any case, activists had done a great job, taking a much-oppressed group and getting legal protection and social respect. Back then, there were very few ‘transsexuals’ – around 1 in 2000 people had been the norm for decades, remarkably similar across the whole world, and most people had a great deal of sympathy for anyone who had suffered the misery of gender dysphoria, the psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s birth sex, i.e. the feeling that they had been born in the wrong body, couldn’t relate their body to their inner feelings, and hated the sight of their own body parts. Pretty much everyone accepted that such people need sympathy and protection from discrimination, and together, they all had a bit more power and influence to win more rights and protections. Striving for basic protections and rights was a good cause that most of us could buy into.

For a few years it all seemed to be going quite well and we all got used to seeing the LGBT acronym, but in the last decade that unity has been failing and now a great many LGB people have separated off into The LGB Alliance, and one of the common hashtags on social media has become #lgbwithoutthet. Activist groups are strongly resisting the split, hurling insults at those who threaten their power.

The majority of trans people are just trying to live their lives in a way that makes them more comfortable, and that is entirely worthy of respect and tolerance. None of us can fully know what someone else feels or what they have to cope with. I and most other people would be perfectly happy letting them get on with doing so in peace, free from discrimination. Since this blog is delving in to reasons for the coming LGBT breakup, I will look at the problems that are arising, not those many trans people who aren’t causing any. I don’t have any issues with them at all.

Nevertheless, the chasm is rapidly widening, and with good reason – the T bit, that had originally only included trans-sexuals, soon started accepting cross-dressers (someone who dresses in the clothing typically associated with the opposite sex from their birth sex), a several times larger but completely different group who like to present themselves as the opposite sex for fetishistic reasons, and who get sexual thrills by being affirmed as such, and drag queens, who dress up as female parodies for entertainment purposes. Some cross dressers and drag queens might well have transgender self-perceptions too of course, but self image and outward behaviours are quite different concepts. Having accepted those quite different groups, the definition of what makes someone transgender had already ballooned close to bursting point, but since then, the T group seems to have been taken over by extremist activists that have welcomed in many bad actors who are not T at all, but are using the cover to abuse its associated privileges, most of which were won by leveraging the association with LGB, while aggressively attacking those who questioned the extent of that association. While most transgender people are innocent, just getting on with their lives as best they can, reading any daily newspaper will quickly reveal that the broader group now claiming to belong to the T category now also includes a good many bad actors who should never have been allowed in – rapists and violent abusers who want to go to women’s prisons to gain access to vulnerable women and hide from potential punishment by other male offenders; mediocre sportsmen who cannot win prizes in male sport, who want to capitalise on superior male strength or height to win women’s prizes instead; paedophiles who use the T platform to gain access to children; people who want to persuade L, G and B children that they are not really L, G or B, but T, and they should be ‘cured’ by asking for hormonal and surgical sex reassignment, otherwise known as ‘conversion therapy’. The first three of these groups are men or transwomen. The final group includes all genders.

These four bad actor groups (I may have missed others) should never have been accepted into the T lobby, because they have destroyed the reputation of the transgender lobby as a whole, which used to solicit widespread sympathy and support. They managed to infiltrate and take over the platform via the fringe activism that made those illogical definitions, that ‘a woman is anyone who says they are a woman’, so that can quite happily include a 6ft, 150kg rapist with huge muscles and a full beard. Once those cracks in language appeared, they were quickly forced wide open into wide doorways through which anyone could pass any time for any reason, good or bad. These bad actors have become prominent in recent media, essentially taking over and fouling the public image of transgender people, so it really is not surprising that others no longer want to associate with that lobby, at least until it purges itself of those bad actor groups.

Meanwhile, the T is no longer T, but has exploded into TQIA2SPD+, the + meaning that new letters are frequently added at will. . LGB covered everyone that wasn’t heterosexual, typically around 3-5% of the population. TQIA2SPD… covers the much smaller 0.1% who said they were transgender in the most recent UK census. The tail is now wagging the dog. Many LGBs feel their organisations and political power have been stolen from them.

Let’s go back to lists of similar things. We could for example have LGBHAO for sexuality, so that everyone is included, as is today’s fashion. T is actually a large basket of different things now, so we need to unpack it and group those things into more manageable groups to get more sensible acronyms.

Firstly, a few of the extra letters are about a person’s feelings of how they relate to their perception of sex stereotypes. Already, we are in trouble, because no two people have the same view of what it means to be ‘male’ or ‘female’. Apart from sufferers of schizophrenia and other brain disorders, nobody has any experience of what it is like to be someone else, let alone someone of a different sex. We can only imagine how it might feel, based on a combination of life experience and prejudice. In that sense at least, transgender activists have a point that ‘gender’ is at least partially a social construct, though they usually omit the fact that that construct is very different between one person and another. Each of us has a perception of how a woman or a man might feel, but perception is not reality. I can’t even put myself inside the head of someone else who is the same sex, let alone someone of the opposite sex. If you think you can, that’s almost certainly just projection. If, as gender activists want us to accept, that there is a spectrum of femininity and masculinity, then there are currently 8 billion locations on that spectrum. No two people are the same, so what’s the point of trying to give names to every position? For millennia, we accepted that some people were unusually macho or girly, or tomboys or sissies, but we used to manage fine without 100 different terms. It seems to me that these terms would still suffice, and that at least some of the new terms show a quite distasteful degree of narcissism or status seeking. It’s quite enough to know that you do or don’t consider yourself extremely feminine or masculine or that you are somewhere in between, I really don’t care about the mind-numbingly boring details of your self-obsession thanks!

The other letters are more about sexuality, but we didn’t do that for the L,G and B groups, so why do so for T? Why should the 0.1% get all the attention, compared to the 5%? Why not explode their letters to the same degree too, to cover all the various divisions within lesbian or gay or bi people. I won’t attempt to expand the LGB bit because I have absolutely no idea what the correct names should be. Thankfully, LGB groups haven’t forced every aspect of their personalities onto the front pages of newspapers and social media every day. Apart from the odd Pride march, they just get on with their lives and leave the rest of us to get on with ours. Now even Pride marches are far less LGB and far more T.

If we are exploding fields, we could expand other dimensions such as how people present themselves (they might dress up just like regular people of the opposite sex, or in drag, or as a transvestite, or only online or in games or in VR as an avatar etc etc). Regular, Drag, Gaming, Social media, VR. Add an extra subscript letter for each one. Tr, Td, Tg, Ts, Tv to start? Surely the external presentation of someone’s feelings is just as important as their labels of their internal feelings and their associated pronouns, especially if they demand that we have to acknowledge and conform to their choices?

The reasons for being trans can be very different too, but are just as important. Studies decades ago have showed that around 20% of ‘transwomen’ suffered ‘gender dysphoria’, the feeling that their body doesn’t match their internal perception of themselves, and that the other 80% or more of transwomen were autogynephilic, (autogynephilia is a male’s paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought of oneself as female), getting a sexual thrill from presenting themselves as the opposite sex and ‘gender euphoria’ when they ‘pass’ or someone otherwise ‘affirms’ their chosen gender. I would have thought that distinction very important – one is relief of mental suffering while the other is indulgence of a fetish, but members of the 80% are often offended if that is pointed out. In fact, there has been much effort by gender activists to discredit the studies. Since then, we have numerous people that have been added to transgender groups via diverse routes such as social contagion (influenced by social media, celebrities, activists, friends or peers, porn sites, conversion therapy of LGBs by trans activists, and even as a result of exposure to environmental endocrine disruptors. Some of them won’t have gender dysphoria or be sexual motivated. Their motivations and personalities are as unique as each individual, so again, why try to label them all? Isn’t T sufficient? Their names already give them a name.

Dividing the T into Td and Ta would thus make a lot of sense to cover the traditional categories. With all the bad actor hangers on, perhaps we could add Tc for those who only pretend to be the other gender for convenience, to gain access to other sports categories or prisons. And Tp for those who do so for perversion reasons, to gain access to children for example. And maybe we should add To for those trans people with other non-sexual, non-dysphoric reasons for being trans that are totally benign. How does LGBTdTaTcTpToQIA2SPD… look?

Adding the second subscript letters, I suspect Tdr would be extremely popular claims (someone who suffers gender dysphoria and just wants to live as the opposite sex, dressing as a perfectly normal person of that sex, but who gets no sexual thrill from doing so, only the relief from their dysphoria). I equally suspect that the far more honest Tad would be rather less willingly used, (someone who pretends to be the opposite sex for fetishistic sexual stimulation reasons, and dressing to maximise that thrill). The high likelihood that people would not be very honest about choosing their letters perhaps explains why these categories are missing from the current nomenclature. Nobody wants to admit to being a fetishist or a pervert; everyone wants the rights and protections we might think appropriate for the gender dysphoria category, even if they can’t be bothered to shave off their beard and wear wig and dress. The one that used to be T.

I think that is the reason for the LGB split from the TQIA2SPD+, and it is overdue. Everyone still supports protection for the few people with gender dysphoria, and to a lesser extent for the many others who enjoy living in another gender for whatever reason without harming anyone, though many of us would still draw the line at male entry to places rightfully reserved for women That tolerance and support hasn’t evaporated yet, though it is certainly under strain. But it is very overdue to remove the bad actors and fetishists from the T category, and restore the power balance towards the 50 times bigger LGB grouping. The sooner it happens the better. Bad actors and fetishists will still exist, but they deserve no support and protection.

We need to stop xenoestrogen pollution

Endocrine disruptors in the environment are becoming more abundant due to a wide variety of human-related activities over the last few decades. They affect mechanisms by which the body’s endocrine system generates and responds to hormones, by attaching to receptors in similar ways to natural hormones. Minuscule quantities of hormones can have very substantial effects on the body so even very diluted pollutants may have significant effects. A sub-class called xenoestrogens specifically attach to estrogen receptors in the body and by doing so, can generate similar effects to estrogen in both women and men, affecting not just women’s breasts and wombs but also bone growth, blood clotting, immune systems and neurological systems in both men and women. Since the body can’t easily detach them from their receptors, they can sometimes exert a longer-lived effect than estrogen, remaining in the body for long periods and in women may lead to estrogen dominance. They are also alleged to contribute to prostate and testicular cancer, obesity, infertility and diabetes. Most notably, mimicking sex hormones, they also affect puberty and sex and gender-specific development.

Xenoestrogens can arise from breakdown or release of many products in the petrochemical and plastics industries. They may be emitted from furniture, carpets, paints or plastic packaging, especially if that packaging is heated, e.g. in preparing ready-meals. Others come from women taking contraceptive pills if drinking water treatment is not effective enough. Phthalates are a major group of synthetic xenoestrogens – endocrine-disrupting estrogen-mimicking chemicals, along with BPA and PCBs. Phthalates are present in cleaning products, shampoos, cosmetics, fragrances and other personal care products as well as soft, squeezable plastics often used in packaging but some studies have also found them in foodstuffs such as dairy products and imported spices. There have been efforts to outlaw some, but others persist because of lack of easy alternatives and lack of regulation, so most people are exposed to them, in doses linked to their lifestyles. Google ‘phthalates’ or ‘xenoestrogen’ and you’ll find lots of references to alleged negative effects on intelligence, fertility, autism, asthma, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, neurological development and birth defects. It’s the gender and IQ effects I’ll look at in this blog, but obviously the other effects are also important.

‘Gender-bending’ effects have been strongly suspected since 2005, with the first papers on endocrine disrupting chemicals appearing in the early 1990s. Some fish notably change gender when exposed to phthalates while human studies have found significant feminizing effects from prenatal exposure in young boys too (try googling “human phthalates gender” if you want references).  They are also thought likely to be a strong contributor to greatly reducing sperm counts across the male population. This issue is of huge importance because of its effects on people’s lives, but its proper study is often impeded by LGBT activist groups. It is one thing to champion LGBT rights, quite another to defend pollution that may be influencing people’s gender and sexuality. SJWs should not be advocating that human sexuality and in particular the lifelong dependence on medication and surgery required to fill gender-change demands should be arbitrarily imposed on people by chemical industry pollution – such a stance insults the dignity of LGBT people. Any exposure to life-changing chemicals should be deliberate and measured. That also requires that we fully understand the effects of each kind of chemical so they also should not be resisting studies of these effects.

The evidence is there. The numbers of people saying they identify as the opposite gender or are gender fluid has skyrocketed in the years since these chemicals appeared, as has the numbers of men describing themselves as gay or bisexual. That change in self-declared sexuality has been accompanied by visible changes. An AI recently demonstrated better than 90% success at visually identifying gay and bisexual men from photos alone, indicating that it is unlikely to be just a ‘social construct’. Hormone-mimicking chemicals are the most likely candidate for an environmental factor that could account for both increasing male homosexuality and feminizing gender identity.

Gender dysphoria causes real problems for some people – misery, stress, and in those who make a full physical transition, sometimes post-op regrets and sometimes suicide. Many male-to-female transsexuals are unhappy that even after surgery and hormones, they may not look 100% feminine or may require ongoing surgery to maintain a feminine appearance. Change often falls short of their hopes, physically and psychologically. If xenoestrogen pollution is causing severe unhappiness, even if that is only for some of those whose gender has been affected, then we should fix it. Forcing acceptance and equality on others only superficially addresses part of their problems, leaving a great deal of their unhappiness behind.

Not all affected men are sufficiently affected to demand gender change. Some might gladly change if it were possible to change totally and instantly to being a natural woman without the many real-life issues and compromises offered by surgery and hormones, but choose to remain as men and somehow deal with their dysphoria as the lesser of two problems. That impacts on every individual differently. 

Gender and sexuality are not the only things affected. Xenoestrogens are also implicated in IQ-reducing effects. IQ reduction is worrying for society if it means fewer extremely intelligent people making fewer major breakthroughs, though it is less of a personal issue. Much of the effect is thought to occur while still in the womb, though effects continue through childhood and some even into adulthood. Therefore individuals couldn’t detect an effect of being denied a potentially higher IQ and since there isn’t much of a link between IQ and happiness, you could argue that it doesn’t matter much, but on the other hand, I’d be pretty miffed if I’ve been cheated out of a few IQ points, especially when I struggle so often on the very edge of understanding something. 

Gender and IQ effects on men would have quite different socioeconomic consequences. While feminizing effects might influence spending patterns, or the numbers of men eager to join the military or numbers opposing military activity, IQ effects might mean fewer top male engineers and top male scientists.

It is not only an overall IQ reduction that would be significant. Studies have often claimed that although men and women have the same average IQ, the distribution is different and that more men lie at the extremes, though that is obviously controversial and rapidly becoming a taboo topic. But if men are being psychologically feminized by xenoestrogens, then their IQ distribution might be expected to align more closely with female IQ distributions too, the extremes brought closer to centre.  In that case, male IQ range-compression would further reduce the numbers of top male scientists and engineers on top of any reduction caused by a shift. 

The extremes are very important. As a lifelong engineer, my experience has been that a top engineer might contribute as much as many average ones. If people who might otherwise have been destined to be top scientists and engineers are being prevented from becoming so by the negative effects of pollution, that is not only a personal tragedy (albeit a phantom tragedy, never actually experienced), but also a big loss for society, which develops slower than should have been the case. Even if that society manages to import fine minds from elsewhere, their home country must lose out. This matters less as AI improves, but it still matters.

Looking for further evidence of this effect, one outcome would be that women in affected areas would be expected to account for a higher proportion of top engineers and scientists, and a higher proportion of first class degrees in Math and Physical Sciences, once immigrants are excluded. Tick. (Coming from different places and cultures, first generation immigrants are less likely to have been exposed in the womb to the same pollutants so would not be expected to suffer as much of the same effects. Second generation immigrants would include many born to mothers only recently exposed, so would also be less affected on average. 3rd generation immigrants who have fully integrated would show little difference.)

We’d also expect to see a reducing proportion of tech startups founded by men native to regions affected by xenoestrogens. Tick. In fact, 80% of Silicon Valley startups are by first or second generation immigrants. 

We’d also expect to see relatively fewer patents going to men native to regions affected by xenoestrogens. Erm, no idea.

We’d also expect technology progress to be a little slower and for innovations to arrive later than previously expected based on traditional development rates. Tick. I’m not the only one to think engineers are getting less innovative.

So, there is some evidence for this hypothesis, some hard, some colloquial. Lower inventiveness and scientific breakthrough rate is a problem for both human well-being and the economy. The problems will continue to grow until this pollution is fixed, and will persist until the (two) generations affected have retired. Some further outcomes can easily be predicted:

Unless AI proceeds well enough to make a human IQ drop irrelevant, and it might, then we should expect that having enjoyed centuries of the high inventiveness that made them the rich nations they are today, the West in particular would be set on a path to decline unless it brings in inventive people from elsewhere. To compensate for decreasing inventiveness, even in 3rd generation immigrants (1st and 2nd are largely immune), they would need to attract ongoing immigration to survive in a competitive global environment. So one consequence of this pollution is that it requires increasing immigration to maintain a prosperous economy. As AI increases its effect on making up deficiencies, this effect would drop in importance, but will still have an impact until AI exceeds the applicable intelligence levels of the top male scientists and engineers. By ‘applicable’, I’m recognizing that different aspects of intelligence might be appropriate in inventiveness and insight levels, and a simple IQ measurement might not be sufficient indicator.

Another interesting aspect of AI/gender interaction is that AI is currently being criticised from some directions for having bias, because it uses massive existing datasets for its training. These datasets contain actual data rather than ideological spin, so ‘insights’ are therefore not always politically correct. Nevertheless, they but could be genuinely affected by actual biases in data collection. While there may well be actual biases in such training datasets, it is not easy to determine what they are without having access to a correct dataset to compare with. That introduces a great deal of subjectivity, because ‘correct’ is a very politically sensitive term. There would be no agreement on what the correct rules would be for dataset collection or processing. Pressure groups will always demand favour for their favorite groups and any results that suggest that any group is better or worse than any other will always meet with objections from activists, who will demand changes in the rules until their own notion of ‘equality’ results. If AI is to be trained to be politically correct rather than to reflect the ‘real world’, that will inevitably reduce any correlation between AI’s world models and actual reality, and reduce its effective general intelligence. I’d be very much against sabotaging AI by brainwashing it to conform to current politically correct fashions, but then I don’t control AI companies. PC distortion of AI may result from any pressure group or prejudice – race, gender, sexuality, age, religion, political leaning and so on. Now that the IT industry seems to have already caved in to PC demands, the future for AI will be inevitably sub-optimal.

A combination of feminization, decreasing heterosexuality and fast-reducing sperm counts would result in reducing reproductive rate among xenoestrogen exposed communities, again with 1st and 2nd generation immigrants immune. That correlates well with observations, albeit there are other possible explanations. With increasing immigration, relatively higher reproductive rates among recent immigrants, and reducing reproduction rates among native (3rd generation or more) populations, high ethnic replacement of native populations will occur. Racial mix will become very different very quickly, with groups resident longest being displaced most. Allowing xenoestrogens to remain is therefore a sort of racial suicide, reverse ethnic cleansing. I make no value judgement here on changing racial mix, I’m just predicting it.

With less testosterone and more men resisting military activities, exposed communities will also become more militarily vulnerable and consequently less influential.

Now increasingly acknowledged, this pollution is starting to be tackled. A few of these chemicals have been banned and more are likely to follow. If successful, effects will start to disappear, and new babies will no longer be affected. But even that will  create another problem, with two generations of people with significantly different characteristics from those before and after them. These two generations will have substantially more transgender people, more feminine men, and fewer macho men than those following. Their descendants may have all the usual inter-generational conflicts but with a few others added.

LGBTQ issues are topical and ubiquitous. Certainly we must aim for a society that treats everyone with equality and dignity as far as possible, but we should also aim for one where people’s very nature isn’t dictated by pollution.