A Morganucodon, our great, great, great. . . . . grandmother or grandfather. Really. You'll have to read below to get the point. By FunkMonk (Michael B. H.) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15356075
A post on a Twitter account I follow, because the fellow is a clinical veterinarian who is really interesting on topics of veterinary medicine, science, and wildlife stated the following:
National Coming Out Day.
Fair warning: I’m a contrary bear here. Always have been.
When do cis-het people have to come out?
Why do LGBTQ+ people feel like we _should_ do it?
Why aren’t we just people? People where you find out organically/naturally, when you get to know us?
P.S. You _don’t_ have to do it. You do you and make choices that make you happy/content/secure. If you ever want my support either w ay just holler.
The author of that tweet is a homosexual, but as he more or less implies in this post, he really doesn't post on that topic very often, and if so only in a societal, i.e., non-personal, way.
I had to look cis-het up. The definition is:
To be cisgender means that you identify with the gender you were assigned at birth. If you are cisgender, which is often shortened in discussion to "cis," chances are you have not experienced gender dysphoria, where you feel unaligned with your assigned gender.
People who identify as cisgender may never have to think at all about their gender identity. That is a privilege.
People who are gender non-conforming, transgender, or of another marginalized gender identity often have a much more complex journey in relation to their gender identity, and face much more discrimination than cis people do.1
Hey! That's me. I don't have to think about my gender identity whatsoever, as I am a (married) man who is in fact attracted exclusively to women.
I don't know if that's a privilege per se. I think it's actually undoubtedly the norm. But in this day and age in which we live in a society so rich that apparently a lot of people have lots of free time to think of nothing otter than their genitals, apparently a new category was needed.
I know, you are thinking, wasn't there already a word for this.
Well, yes, heterosexual, or in colloquial terms, "straight".
But that word won't do if you are part of the UberWoke on these topics, as that its more fun to assume that some people are heterosexual due to acceptance of societal roles. Hence, these explanations, from Quora, the most worthless social medial outlet on the Internet.
I don't know who started it, but its a concatenation of cis; short for cisgender which means your gender and sex are in alignment; and hetro; short for heterosexual aka straight. The term cishet stuck because lacking a better word, cishet people would term themselves “normal” in comparison to LGBTQ people, which was offensive, even though most of the time the offensiveness was unintentional.
And:
Cishet is derived from the words cisgender and heterosexual. Cisgender, as opposed to transgender, is an adjective applied to someone who identifies with the same gender as their assigned gender at birth.
Heterosexual is someone who’s straight.
As I like the etymology of words, I tried to find it for this word, which is apparently closely related or perhaps identical to the word cisgender. It isn't easy to do, but I did find it, and what it derives from, in the first part, is the Latin word "cis", which is:
cis-
word-forming element meaning "on the near side of, on this side," from Latin preposition cis "on this side" (in reference to place or time), related to citra (adv.) "on this side," from PIE *ki-s, suffixed form of root *ko-, the stem of demonstrative pronoun meaning "this." Opposed to trans- or ultra-. Originally only of place, sometimes 19c. of time; 21c. of life situations (such as cis-gender, which is attested by 2011).
Or, as the online Latin dictionary would have it:
cĭs
preposition
This word is an invariable part of speech
1 on, to this, near side of, short of
2 (time) before, within
It is posed as the opposite of "trans". So, if you like this word what it is supposed to mean is, in the case of cisgender, loosely, is "within your gender". I.e, your sexual attraction is within the category natural, for your nads, for your gender.
Cishet is more complicated, as it means it derives from cis and heterosexual, and heterosexual is a compound word. Here you go for heterosexual:
hetero-
before vowels heter-, word-forming element meaning "other, different," from Greek heteros "the other (of two), another, different; second; other than usual." It is a compound; the first element means "one, at one, together," from PIE root *sem- (1) "one; as one, together with;" the second is cognate with the second element in Latin al-ter, Gothic an-þar, Old English o-ðer "other."
Compounds in classical Greek show the range of the word there: Heterokretes "true Cretan," (that is, of the old stock); heteroglossos "of foreign language;" heterozelos "zealous for one side;" heterotropos "of a different sort or fashion," literally "turning the other way;" heterophron "raving," literally "of other mind."
sexual (adj.)
1650s, "distinctive of either sex, of or pertaining to the fact of being male or female," from Late Latin sexualis "relating to sex," from Latin sexus "a sex, state of being either male or female, gender" (see sex (n.)).
The meaning "pertaining to copulation or generation" is from 1766, on the notion of "done by means of the two sexes;" hence also "pertaining to erotic appetites and their gratification" and "peculiar to or affecting the organs of sex, venereal" (1799). The phrase sexual intercourse is attested by 1771 (see intercourse), sexual orientation by 1967, sexual harassment by 1975. Sexual revolution is attested by 1962. Sexual politics is from 1970. Related: Sexually.
We should note, however, how the online etymological dictionary characterizes this word:
cisgender (adj.)
also cis-gender, "not transgender," in general use by 2011, in the jargon of psychological journals from 1990s, from cis- "on this side of" + gender.
Which bring us to how they define jargon, which is:
jargon (n.)
mid-14c., "unintelligible talk, gibberish; chattering, jabbering," from Old French jargon "a chattering" (of birds), also "language, speech," especially "idle talk; thieves' Latin" (12c.). Ultimately of echoic origin (compare Latin garrire "to chatter").
From 1640s as "mixed speech, pigin;" 1650s as "phraseology peculiar to a sect or profession," hence "mode of speech full of unfamiliar terms." Middle English also had it as a verb, jargounen "to chatter" (late 14c.), from French.
Exactly.
Which all gets to the really odd nature of the modern world today.
We did a very long post on the the topic of etymological and societal genital angst some time ago, which can be found here:
In our view, it's still very much worth a read.
Okay, well, so what.
Well, this, and being at war with it:
In a span of over a little over 150 years, we've gone from a society which had just introduced the term homosexual to one that now has so many terms that, for the standard genetically programmed (and that is what it is) attraction, which we've been calling heterosexual, we now have to circle back around and come up with two additional ones, cishet and cisgendered.1
That's insane.
And it's also deeply anti-scientific.
Now, there's the thing. Let's look at that Cis-het definition again:
"To be cisgender means that you identify with the gender you were assigned at birth."
Eh?
Let's break that sociological concept down, start with "the gender you were assigned at birth."
Your gender was assigned?
Men being assigned their gender. . .oh wait, that's not it. Um. . . men voluntarily recieving vaccinations so they can serve in the Army. . . oh, gee. . . that's not it either. . . Draftees who have been compelled by the United States to serve in the Army during time of war getting a vaccination whether they darned well want it or not.
That makes gender sound like something you get in a long line at basic training. You know, you are in a big long line and "here's your three sets of utilities. . . here's your cap. . . here's your two pairs of boots. . . here's your gender. . . "
Why assigned the gender and how was that done? Did central administration assign you a gender?
That's almost the way this is now treated. Mr. Smith, you were assigned a gender by administration as a male, but I see that an opening in classroom 3B for a female has opened up, would you like to take that?
That's really weird.
The way it really works, of course, with mammals, which we are, is described here in Wikipedia:
A zygote (from Ancient Greek ζυγωτός (zygōtós) 'joined, yoked', from ζυγοῦν (zygoun) 'to join, to yoke')[1] is a eukaryotic cell formed by a fertilization event between two gametes. The zygote's genome is a combination of the DNA in each gamete, and contains all of the genetic information of a new individual organism.
In multicellular organisms, the zygote is the earliest developmental stage. In humans and most other anisogamous organisms, a zygote is formed when an egg cell and sperm cell come together to create a new unique organism. In single-celled organisms, the zygote can divide asexually by mitosis to produce identical offspring.
Zygote. By Nina Sesina - File:Zygote.tif, CC BY-SA 4.0,
That's how your gender is assigned. Sperm and egg meet, zygote is formed, and your DNA starts rolling. Your gender is determined, not assigned, by your DNA.
More particular than that, however, is that your DNA is determined by a long line of evolutionary influences going back to the first life. Young earther's aside, you go way, way, back in evolutionary terms.
As we've noted before, our species supposedly goes back about 150,000 years, which probably means it goes back 250,000 to 500,000 years. We almost always get that wrong.
Anyhow, we've noted this story, and this science, before:
Human beings are mammals and mammals. Of the mammals, primates have the highest sexual dimorphism by quite some measure. Members of the Homo genus, moreover have the highest sexual dimorphism of the primates. It's basically off the charts in the animal kingdom. If you were a space alien and popped down on this planet with no prior knowledge of our species, you'd assume it was two different species the way that you'd note that cattle and sheep are two different species, and one of the things you'd probably note is that one of the species had quite a different body from from the other, and that other was fascinated with it the way that cats are with catnip mice. The dimorphism extends to our physical bodies in an off the chart fashion, and it also, like it or not, extends to our psychological makeup.
Part of that is that human beings, our species, Homo Sapien Sapien, has the highest sex drive of any member of the primates. So we are the pinnacle, for good or ill, in this category. We're extremely unusual in terms of a mammal, including a primate, in that both males and females are attracted to sexual intercourse outside of the females reproductive receptivity. Men are, moreover, off the charts on this, and interested pretty much at any time, if the conditions arise.
Your "general assignment", it's tempting to say, was determined 210,000,000 when the first Morganucodon's, the very first known mammals, began to produce cute little babies, but even that really wouldn't completely be true. It would be true that the path was up and running and, frankly, accelerating as an evolutionary strategy. Warm-blooded, smart, and male and female, they were off and running on raiding reptile eggs and making a general nuisance of themselves to the taxonomic order that had dominated for millennia.
Of course, even earlier than that, around 250,000,000, mammals started to evolve out of reptiles, and reptiles were also male and female, and go back over 300,000,000 years.
In other words, the male and female thing is really baked in. It goes all the way back, and as mammals came on, "la différance" increased in fashions that matter in many mammals, and in particular in primates, and particularly in primates amongst the genus homo, of which you, dear reader, are a member of.
So am I saying that homosexuality isn't a thing?
Well, I'm coming really close to saying something like that.
What we know for sure, of course, is that homosexuality, just like cis-het, is a word, albeit not one that almost meant the same thing.2 As a word, it actually refers to a psychological classification, not a biological one. And it dates from the early 20th Century in its current use. That's significant in that almost 100% of early psychology has borne out to be wrong, and by wrong "whopping wrong" would probably best define it. Arguably other fields that deal with the mind, such as the law, politics, and theology, have much better track records on what's going on in the psyche than psychology even approaches having.
Aspects of psychology have improved enormously since the mid 20th Century, which is also when the field of sociology, given a boost by the Great Depression, arrived at the scene. But nonetheless, psychology tends to be plagued with error, and the newer a concept in psychology is, the more likely it is to be massively off. Giving people lobotomies, or zapping them with electricity, for perceived psychological aliments was common just a few decades ago and is now regarded with horror.3
Currently, the trend is to list every human condition that is somewhat problematic to really problematic as a psychosocial ailment. People who are anxious, who eat too much, who are shy, who are attracted to drugs, alcohol, or sex (or at least too much of those) aren't simply lapsing the boundaries of desired conduct, they have psychological conditions.
Well, many don't.
Indeed, at some point we'll find that people like Bill Cosby who acted like creeps around women weren't "sex addicts" or whatever, they were just creeps. Which returns to evolutionary biology, and theology.4
Leaping back, we know that our species evolutionary strategy features long childhood and high sexual dimorphism. We've gone over this a lot, but what the general gist of it is that male and female are bound, and are male and female, in a unique way that, well, involves sex. We also know that this is how we started off, but as we've advanced, assuming we have, and that's pretty debatable, we've really fallen into all sorts of disorder. Indeed, you really won't find any human beings that, in a state of nature, grow really fat, or have anorexia, or suffer much from depression, or frankly dally a lot with other people's spouses, the latter of which pretty much guarantied getting a person killed. The introduction of modern civilization, and all its wealth, luxury, and unnaturalness and high stress, combined with unnatural living arrangements and conditions, has brought all of this about.
Indeed, going back to a line used in a comment here recently, that of "rum, sodomy and the lash", navies provide a good example of this. Navies, at one time, were indeed havens of rum, sodomy, and the lash, as well as a host of other vices that they supported. The reason is pretty obvious, the living conditions in them were deeply unnatural and completely divorced from the normal outlets for deeply ingrained genetic drives, which remain there nonetheless. Modern navies, or at least those who have incorporated women into shipboard service, are really no better, with a notable percentage, up over 10%, and sometimes well over that, becoming pregnant during their combat vessel tours. 4
The point of this is that many of the departures from the norm in our primary drives stem from departures from a natural manner of living, and they really don't arise until that point. I'ts not as if departures, disorders and the unusual don't exist from way back, they do, but not in the same degree, and in some circumstances for more newly found psychological disorders, they just wouldn't have been recognized as such.
By way of elaboration, going way back, or at least into the aboriginal, almost everywhere around the globe all children are under the care of their mothers, directly, until they're around six or seven. At that time, which is also generally the "age of reason", the age at which the average person can distinguish right from wrong, male children have already started to heavily lean towards male activities as play, i.e., hunting and war, and female children have already started to heavily lean towards female activities. After that age, they begin to actually take them up, essentially in a student role.
This is true in agricultural societies as well, and the interesting thing about that is that we now know that agriculture has been with humans so long that at least some human cultures have genetic adaptations as a result. Tolerance for certain foods, for example, is a genetic thing, showing that those populations have evolved into it. At any rate, traditional agricultural societies work almost identically in terms of how children develop.
This is all in general, of course. As time has gone on, it's possible to find exceptions in everything, but we're speaking of the average here.
It isn't really until societies develop into early civilized ones and develop classes and leisure that the exceptions really start. Those societies really started stratification as well, including social and gender stratification. And once entire groups of one gender were separated from the other for long periods of time, we get a noticeable degree of same sex attraction that's fairly consistent. Navies are one such example, British boys schools another. Those are more recent examples, of course, and others go way back.
Looked at that way, however, homosexuality as currently understood by psychologists, which tends to change due to social pressures darned near every day, wasn't understood the same way. Same sex attraction clearly existed in different groups, and there's plenty of evidence of that. But the concept that it was so deeply programmed into a person that it formed a person's essential core character did not.
And let's be clear here. Same sex attraction obviously exists. The degree to which some people have it varies quite a bit. The men and women who have it, have it, no doubt. But why they have it isn't really grasped, in spite of the way it is currently discussed.
For those who do have it, why they have it probably isn't enormously important on a daily basis, if at all. I.e, a person may learn why they have something, which doesn't mean, for the most part, that it impacts how they view that inclination. And by the same token, while the nature of the inclination should be a genuine social topic, and one of importance, the reason a person has an inclination is not a societal excuse for treating them badly.
So what do we know about same sex attraction and its source? Not very much. The thought that it's genetic is thinly supported. It seems more likely therefore that its psychologically of origin, although genetics may play a role in how a person's early influences may cause them to incline in this direction, or resist doing so.
When study of it was still regarded as okay, which it largely isn't now, it seemed to be the case that the source of it was different for men and women, which reemphasizes how different men and women really are. With men, what tended to be the case was that something, often worked, removed men from the lives of their sons around the age of reason, leaving only a protective mother as an influence on a daily basis. It seems that this separation, something only common in antiquity due to some unique circumstances in some societies, and otherwise common in all industrialized societies, was the origin of it. It was particularly exhibited in some societies, such as boys schools and militaries, such as the example of the Prussian/Imperial German officer corps, which separated boys from their families entirely and raised them in all male environments. In those examples, the introduction of a minority number of young men exhibiting it pretty clear spread it beyond the limited extent to which would otherwise exist. Sexual impulses being strong, the introduction of all of these elements or some of them in these very early ears seems to have been the best guess for what really caused and causes it.
Determining the situation for women has been harder, but it often seems to involve something similar, sort of in the reverse, but not quite, for some women. In those cases, the mother is often completely checked out mentally for some reason, and the young girl comes to nearly completely identify with her father and her role. For other women, however, it's driven by protection, as men are dangerous. Faced with predation early on, they take refuge in this fashion with other women, whom are unlikely to be violent.
It might be worth noting at the same time that something similar seems to go with other sexual departures from the norm. In recent years, it's been clear that early and frequent exposure to pornography alters the mental landscape of men, and some of them severely. Programmed to be monogamous and with sex to be unitive, the brain overcomes it with sexual images in which, essentially, the mind marries itself, if you will, to hundreds or thousands if imagined women whose images trigger sexually.
And before we depart from it, something else similar seems to have developed with abuse. Sexual license overcomes the naturally unitary binding that sex creates, with its genetic programming to be permanent and life long, which has been associated at a certain point with predation upon the vulnerable, specifically minors. The number of sexual "partners" that seems to be that breaking point is apparently eight, which is also very close to the average number of the same for Americans.
Weren't we talking about "cis"?
Yes, so here's where we are really at.
All men are programmed by their DNA to desire women, sexually and women are programmed by their DNA to desire men.
In spite of what pervert Hugh Hefner wanted to claim, and he was a sick creepy weirdo, human beings only really want a single mate, for life, and sex actually creates that bond when it occurs, which means that people ought to be really carefully and not treat their nads like toys. You can break them, psychologically.
Some people have same sex attraction, but it's a tiny minority.
Some people imagine that they want to be members of the other gender, which interestingly comes much closure to the original understanding of the term "homosexual". This isn't a popular view, and frankly transgenderism doesn't really exist, except as a questionable psychosocial definition. This is likely, in most cases, an unusually developed example of homosexuality as what it entails is so identifying with the sexual nature of the opposite gender, that these people think they want to switch genders. Rather than conventional homosexuality, in which men continue to identify as men, and women as women, they want to cross over to basically rationalize their same gender orientation. Having said that, however, in some cases, they identify as homosexuals of the opposite gender.
All these things really only come about in any significant degree in richer societies which have departed from the historical norms of living patters. Yes, I'm sure that there are exceptions, but contrary to the line in Major Dundee, there probably were a few "fat Apaches" too. Just hardly any.
That fact, that this tends to really only come up in these very pronounced forms in societies that have surplus, is an interesting one. It does, as noted, come up even in societies with think resources, but not to this degree, in spite of what modern sociologists have sometimes claimed. Indeed, historical and anthropological examples bear this out. In societies that feature some cross-dressing men, for example, it tends to bear out that these men very much identify as men and don't like being accused of being transgendered or homosexual. Their clothing affectation serves a different purpose of some sort, usually. Likewise, in societies in which we believe, not always very accurately, that there was a notable instance of homosexuality, we tend to find that they're really early examples of societies that had surplus wealth. Of course, as noted above, you can also find in some early civilizations, and then throughout history, examples of societies departing from the natural norm and separating the genders pretty tightly, in which cases this always arises.
None of which is not to say that in all ages and all times, and in all societies, some small percentage of the population has a strong same sex orientation.
In our society and culture, this was at first just regarded as a moral failing, in the same categories, loosely, as being a sexual libertine. I.e, sodomy, adultery, fornication, etc, were all regarded as vices, rather than personality traits. It can be argued that this treatment was a more natural one, and a more scientifically based one, and less condemning one, than the sharp classifications that came about later and are still with us, save for the part that, like most sexual transgressions, at later points in time they were criminalized. Early on, they were not.
Because this is how this was viewed, there was no real concept that people were homosexuals, as we now define it. Rather, the concept is that some people fell into moral vices for various reasons, and some moral vices were worse than others. "Wenching", for example, was regarded as dangerous and immoral, but tolerated among younger men, and indeed that was basically true into very recent times, and it still is, except in a different form. Sodomy was regarded with disdain, but a person who was guilty of a handful of such known instances wasn't regarded as permanently tainted, and oddly enough those who committed in the context of all male military service were regarded as simply giving outlet due to conditions. A person had to show a persistent attraction to sexual vices before it really attached to their personality in a permanent fashion.
As time went on, and as I've addressed elsewhere, ultimately all of this became criminalized and while not widely recognized, the criminalization is still with us. Sodomy, due to a United States Supreme Court opinion, is no longer illegal, but prostitution, which is part of the same legal developments, is. I'm not suggesting that it be legalized, but this is interesting to note, as it wasn't always illegal in Western Society, just disdained. It still varies widely, we might note, in how it's viewed in the law, with it being a felony in some Eastern states, while being a misdemeanor in many Western ones.
The psychological classifications that exist in this area and the sociological ones came much later, and really ought to give us pause. Quite frankly, the history of psychology, as noted, should give us no room for comfort on these topics as psychology as been more often wrong than right and has also been subject to the pet view of psychologists. As noted elsewhere, homosexuality was regarded as a mental illness by psychology until a paper by a homosexual psychologist suddenly changed that.
Sociology is even worse, as it's an exclusively Western discipline that views the West as the archetype of everything, even while often disdaining it. Often it's doing no more than serving as a mirror on liberal popular culture and in this area it's deeply at odds with Eastern societies, which regard homosexuality as an exclusively Western European Culture thing, and not without some reason. This is in fact a common view worldwide. It can't help but be noted that Western European cultures are by far the most wealthy in the world, and have by far the most idle. In other words, these societies, which ours is one of, are really the only ones in the world where a lot of people have a lot of time to think about sex in a nearly narcissistic way.
But another way, you won't find too many women of Madonna's age coming out as late in life Lesbians in Chad or Botswana. They have other things to think about.
Which brings us back to this.
Cis, doesn't exist. As a matter of nature, or genetics, which are part and parcel of each other, the mammalian default is boy wants girl, and vice versa. But that however you might want, dog wants bitch, bull wants cow, buck wants doe, and vice versa. That's the way that is, universally, without exception.
Among primates, that's very much true.
And among Homo sapiens, it's pretty much over the top, compared to anything else in Animalia.
Like anything else that nature develops to extremes, there's going to be a small percentage that fall outside the norm. And as we're extreme in this regard, it's where disorder is likely to manifest. We show this in other areas as well, as in our intellectual faculties. We're one really darned smart mammal, but we fail in this category with real note as well.
Okay, well so what? What am I suggesting?
Well, just a few things, really.
One is not to modify human intuitions of antiquity to fall outside of their long ordained, and likely highly natural, purpose. Marriage is the prime example. It serves as a framework to deal with male/female relationships and their natural byproducts. That really has nothing to do with 1) love, or 2) homosexuality. Justice Kennedy and his fellow travelers got that wrong.
Another is don't criminalize things that fall outside the norm unless they're really destructive to others. It makes no more sense to criminalize overeating than it did to criminalize homosexuality.
The final one is just an observation. Western society is pretty clearly in a state of advanced, but well funded, decay right now. It's unmoored from anything, other than our fascination with ourselves. Indeed, the very ethos of the age is we can define our own realities.
We can't. Reality is reality. In an imperfect world, few of us comport with an ideal, but that doesn't mean the departures mean reality doesn't exist. Words, terms, and definitions don't change that.
Reality is defined in nature, and that was defined long ago.
Footnotes.
1. When the term "homosexual" was first introduced, it didn't mean same sex attraction, The etymology there "man"+"sexual" meant what some with vast vocabularies refer to as onanism, or attraction to oneself. I.e, self gratification. Interestingly, it was thought to lead to what we now call homosexuality.
2. See footnote 1.
3. Rose Kennedy was probably lobotmized simply because she wasn't as smart as the rest of the Kennedy family and was begging to show an interest in men. Townes Van Zandt, who really did have psychological problems, was zapped into worse ones.
4. First things has a really interesting podcast episode from several years ago in which they explore how the evolution of societey into a cruder and more sexualized culture has given license to the creeps to be creepy, and it obviously has. We've explored the same topoic, but not quite in the same fashion. It's undoubtedly true, however.
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