Ink

 

Kid with ink drawing mimicking tattoos. A lot of the tattoos I saw the other day were no more artfully placed and were equally bad.

I went to two weddings in two weeks.  They were both outdoor weddings.

Weddings in July mean, of course, that people's clothing is relatively light.  Women wearing dresses, generally will wear light ones, although anymore, a lot of women don't wear dresses to outdoor summer weddings.  The nature of summer dresses is such that women therefore are showing more skin than they do in, let's say, January.  This is true for a lot of men as well, although not to the same extent.

One of the guys I know at the second wedding is a year or two out of the Navy, in which he spent six years.  His comment, "geez, with all these tattoos, maybe I should get a tattoo".  It was said in at least semi jest.

That a sailor would comment on the plethora of tattoos really says something.

There were quite a few women with tattoos at the first one, but it was also on a ranch, and probably half or more of the attendees were actual working ranchers or hands of some sort.  Young women at that one were closely associated with ranching.  Tattoos haven't spread, at least here locally, to the agricultural class.

They certainly have to the legal class.  I'd guess about 1/3d of the paralegals, who are usually women, have tattoos and I know some lawyers who have tattoos, which used to be the kiss of death for employment in the law.

Anyhow, never in my life have I seen so many outright bad tattoos as I did at the second wedding.  And I mean horrifically bad.

The best example was a young woman (I'm terrible at guessing ages) who was nicely dressed in a summer dress and who has attractive in the sort of youthful pouty way.  The sort of girl whom, if she'd been that age when I was that age, in the early 80s, would have drawn a lot of attention at a dance.  But the horrific tattoos. . . 

Both arms were tattooed, one with a horrific crying heart, which is just childish in the extreme.  And there was some sort of tattoo of an off-color dead center on her sternum.  Roman numerals?  Initials?  I dunno as the color made it difficult to see, if noticeable, and a person would have had to close the distance to read it.

Do women really want men reading tattoos that are cleavage originated?

The same young woman and an older woman (late 30s?), who may very well have been her mother, had very fresh tattoos that started on their lower side and curbed into their bodies. They were large.  Now, these tattoos were such that they'd have had to have been pretty much completely nude in order to view them, which raises its own question.  If they're just elaborate floral decorations, what's the point, unless you want to show them off, in which case, well, that's its own problem.

One young man had a long arm tattoo that was a set of geographic coordinates.  Why?  Whatever the reason, these remind me of the blood group tattoos that members of the SS had during World War Two, or that Vietnamese Marines had during the Vietnam War.  Both of those tattoos, by the way, gave the person away later on to the victors in those war as to their wartime service.

Some young woman had a huge, but quite well-done tattoo of a water dog of some sort.  It was very artfully done, but extremely large.

Now, I have to be careful here.

I have to be careful as 100% of the female members of this household are now tattooed, the spousal unit having a small tattoo that's a significant signature to her, and the female descendant having one or deep religious significance and the other of personal significance, which are very well done.  The latter aren't visible normally. The former is barely noticeable.  And the male defendant's long time wishes to be betrothed has a colored trout tattoo that's quite well done.  In my place of legal employment, one of the male employees has two tattoos for which I'm responsible, remotely, as I noted the pilgrim's tattoos from Jerusalem when he was on his way there.

I have to admit, if I went to Jerusalem, which I have less than zero interest in doing, I'd get one of the pilgrim tattoos, although that brings up something about tattoos, which is that they sometimes seem to operate like peanuts at the bar.  You have a couple, and then the next thing you know, you've forged on them.  My colleague started with one, then had it added to, and then got a second.  One former female employee of mine was constantly having new ones added.  The pouty girl at the wedding probably started off with one (bad) one before they spread.

Over a year ago, I ran this item:

Percentage Tattooed

 From the Twitter feed of Simon Kuestenmacher:

I admit, I just hate this trend.  And if its 46% of Americans, that means its well over 50% of younger Americans.

I've wondered what it was in the US. Over my lifetime, It's gone from something only certain veterans and members of motorcycle clubs had to being darned nearly universal for people under 40.  I have to confess that while tattoos have gotten better, I hate this trend.

I really wonder what percentage it is now, just a little over a year later, but this is an amazing trend.  That Israel stands at 25% is notable, for example, as tattoos are banned by the Torah.

You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.

Leviticus 19:28.

Indeed, some Christians take the position that tattoos are likewise accordingly banned for everyone, but generally this is regarded as one of the Jewish laws, like ritual cleaning of pots and pans, clothing fiber restrictions, and circumcision that is regarded by most Christians as having been lifted by Christ.*  Indeed, in some Christian cultures at one time, tattooing was common to mark yourself as a Christian.  As already noted, Christians being tattooed in Jerusalem for having made the pilgrimage there is an ancient custom.

Those pilgrimage tattoos set a person apart because they've been on the pilgrimage, which is an important clue, I think, to the popularity of tattoos in our current era.  Tattoos have always set a person apart, while at the same, quite often, saying that you belong to some sort of special group.  Marine Corps tattoos meant that you'd been part, or were part, of a hardcore group of soldiers of the sea, tough men.  Bluebird tattoos on the chest likewise meant that a man had been part of the pre World War Two 25th Infantry Division, which was stationed in Hawaii.  Biker gang tattoos served the same purpose.

When tattoos starting emerging in recent times in the wider population, this was still true.  It might mean, for example, that athe person was a member of a sports team.  Now, however, what they seem to be trying to do is to either express a deep belief of some sort, something important to the person, or to set the person apart, sometimes both.

And hence the purpose. They're a reflection on the fake nature of modern life.  

In prior eras, people lived so much closer to authenticity that tattoos for the masses were basically unnecessary.  Tattoos expressed something unusual, but most of society experienced a wider authentic life.  Not necessarily a pleasant one, but an authentic one.

Now a lot of life just isn't authentic.

The culture has been stripped of its authenticity and much of the most fundamental aspects of it are now reduced to "lifestyles".  In the wider American culture, nothing has much of a value, including people and existential beliefs.  

Tattoos are a strike against that in a valueless society.  Not always effectively, and not always entirely.

An office worker may spend his days in a cubicle, but his arm sleeve of the forest says where his heart is, and where he wants to be.  A mother may spend all day in front of a computer, but the names of her children say where her heart his and where she wants to be.  A bold religious tattoos says the wearer can't get to Mass daily, but that's where her heart his.

Nobody gets a tattoo of a cubicle. 

Footnotes

*Generally, most Christian denominations don't hold anything against tattoos per se today, although some "fundamentalist" Christians do, and some of those can be found in any denomination.

It Catholicism, there's no set rules on tattoos, which is true of most other Christian denominations, maybe all of them. The only time they're regarded as definitely sinful is if they're in the nature of something sinful, i.e., the classic naked lady type tattoo.

Still, some must feel uncomfortable about them as it was recently notice that one of the chapel veil girls at our local parish applies make up to a tattoo of a turtle on her forearm while at Mass. There's really no reason she would need to do so.

Related posts

The Evolution and Rise of the Tattoo.

Percentage Tattooed

Coast Guard Drill Instructor

i nolunt

Radical refusal to consent.

More specifically, radical refusal to consent to the spirit of the times.  It's part of what I admire in them, but it didn't strike me until recently.

John Pondoro Taylor, in his memoirs, recalled having seen Maasai walking through Nairobi as if it simply wasn't there, as they had always done, dressed in their traditional fashion, and carrying spears.  On their way from one place to another, refusing to consent that the development of the city meant anything in real terms.

I was recently waiting in the Church for the confession line to form.  One of the Mantilla Girls walked in.  I've seen this one once or twice before, but not at this Church.  She not only wears the mantilla, and is very pretty, but she carries herself with pride.

They don't all do that.  Some of the younger women who wear chapel veils do so very naturally.  Some sort of timidly, or uncomfortably.  With at least one, and I could be massively off the mark, it's almost sort of an affectation.  But here, you see something quite different.

Or so it seems.

I don't know her.  I could be wrong.  But it's clear she isn't timid and it's not an affectation.  

It is, it seems to me, a radical rejection of the modern secular world in favor of existential nature.

For those who believe in the modern world, in modernism, or the spirit of the times, or who are hostile to religion, that may seem like a shocking statement.  But the essence of our modern lives (or post-modern, if you insist) is a radical rejection of nature, most particularly our own natures.  Wearing a chapel veil indicates that the person deeply believes in a set of beliefs that are enormously grounded in nature.  The wearer is a woman, in radical alignment with biology in every sense, and accepting everything that means, including what the modern world, left and right, detest.  I nolunt.  She's accepting of the derision, and ironically, or in actuality not ironically, probably vastly happier than those who have accommodated modernity.

Moreover, those who think they're reaching out for a radical inclusion of the natural, who don't take the same approach, never can quite reach authenticity.  There can always be a slight feeling that something isn't authentic, and there isn't.  Reserving an element of modernity defeats it.

Related Thread:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

Labels: Agrarianism, Agriculture, An hoc pertinet ad naturam?, Commentary, Daily Living, Food, Friday Farming, Medicine, Men, nature, The roles of men and women, transgenderism, trends, Women

New Years Resolutions for Other People

I don't do this every year, and usually when I have, it's been tongue in cheek.

This will try to be, partially, but this one is more serious than most.  Indeed, for the most part, there's no jest in this at all, and I'm going to do it in a different format, partially for that reason.

Donald Trump need to retire and go away.

Based on something I read the other day, in his personal life he nearly has. As the limelight fades away, he's spending a lot of his time at a nearby golf course he owns, rather than at Mar-a-Lago.  

Even Theodore Roosevelt, the Old Lion, reached a point where he really didn't care about politics anymore, and that included his very last run for office.  The fire had gone out.  It'd dangerous to compare Roosevelt, who was a highly admirable man, to Trump, who isn't, but that seems to be happening. 

Reportedly Trump's favorite film is Sunset Boulevard, which I've never seen, but which is reportedly a masterpiece about a fading silent film movie star. Trump, according to the article I read, will rarely pay any attention to anything, including films, but he loves Sunset Boulevard and will sit through it even after having seen it a zillion times.

That tells us something.

Gracefully fading away is hard to do.  Truman did it, I'd note.  Jimmy Carter seems to have done it.  Douglas MacArthur did it, and the odds were against it.

Of course, Trump's problem is that he's disgraced himself and soiled his legacy.

Anyhow, he really ought to simply keep making that golf course trip and leave everyone alone, for the good of the country, and for the good of what little dignity he has left.

I noticed this morning that Elsie Stefanik is taking all sorts of flak due to a Washington Post expose.  There's a lesson to be learned here, but it's probably too late for her to benefit from it. She could still learn from it.

Elon Musk needs to go back to South Africa, and whatever immigration loophole that was exploited to allow him to come in to the country and take up U.S. citizenship needs to be examined.

I can't think of a single qualification that Musk may have legally met to enter this country permanently. Somebody ought to look into that, and if he really didn't meet it, his citizenship should be revoked as a fraud and whatever person assisted this process looked into. And I feel the same way for all of the entertainment figures that hang around in this country as well.  Go back.

Whatever weird, weird, loophole in our immigration system let Musk come in needs to be fixed.  South Africa can use him. Go home, Elon.

Harriet Hageman and Chuck Gray won their elections, fair and square, but based upon the lie that something was wrong with the last election.

Now that they're in office, they have a lot to make up for, given that.

One thing they both can do is stop feeding the bogus rage machine.   The other thing they ought to do is to admit that times are changing and the concept of hanging on to the 1970s economy, which we've only had in this state for the last 50 years, not forever, is dying.  

Hageman, also, who is no dummy, ought to do some serious introspection before raising her right hand, once again, and swearing to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.  She's done that at least once, and yet she was willing, although not at first, to boost a lie in favor of somebody who was willing to, and is stilling willing to, usurp that same Constitution.  Gray probably has taken a similar oath upon becoming a legislature, but I don't know him, and I frankly hold him to a lesser standard.

Hageman when a large number of her fellow bar members reminded her of her duty to tell the truth advanced a really wild fantasy regarding that.  If she believed that, she needs to spend about a week in the hills, perhaps with Thoreau, or perhaps with the Book of Tobit.  It'd do her good.

The Grand Old Party in Wyoming needs a serious shake up, I'd note, but it's not going to happen. The Democratic Party of Wyoming needs one as well. At this point, that's only going to come through Independents, I'm afraid.  My Resolution, therefore, is for them.  I hope, and hope they resolve, to take over the state's politics.  The Democrats have become so mired in left wing goofiness, there's nearly no saving them.

Interestingly, the Libertarian Party, nationally, recently seems to have taken a step to the middle.  Maybe there's hope for them yet.

There's a huge percentage of the country that need to resolve that science is not its enemy, and Newsmax is not the place to get the news.  If the news just fuels your preformed beliefs and, simultaneously, makes you mad, you need to get your news somewhere else.  Actually, what you need to do, is get the news.

Vladimir Putin needs to go to confession, and then go to a monastery.  I'm not joking.  Russia needs to join the modern, democratic, world.  The Russian Orthodox Church needs to end its schism with the rest of the Orthodox, and the Eastern Orthodox need to end their schism with Rome. This has gone on too long.  The German Catholic Bishops, for their part, need to end their drift into wherever they are going.

Something needs to be done regarding the condition giving rise to an epic level of attempted migration into the United States.  If conditions in Central America are that bad, we need to figure out why, and do something about it immediately.

In large part, in many ways, we all need to look forward, by looking back.  Being perpetually angry doesn't serve any interest at all.  Pretending it's 1973 won't either.  Turning to grifters, caudillos, snake oil salesmen, and those selling anger won't work.

We all know that.  It's doing something about it that seemingly is difficult.  But once we get moving, momentum is a force until itself.

Speaking of 1973, left wing American economists like Robert Reich need to realize that they continually espouse another economic option, and then pull back to the current one.  They're basically in the position of being a concerned stranger walking up to a desperate drunk in a bar, giving him a temperance lecture, and then suggesting he switch to beer.  That's not going to cut it in an economy that truly needs adjusting.

On a minor notes, would people on Twitter stop using this stupid cartoon for points they're trying to make:

There are all sorts of version of this, and they're all hideous and bad.  Whatever you think you are trying to prove this way, you are not.

An addendum.

Let's start 2023 with some basic consensus on proved things.  If we do, we'll have a productive year.  

If we don't, it suggests that we really prefer blinding ourselves to truth and arguing for sport/self-satisfaction.

And that would certainly merit a sense of pessimism.

Okay, first of all, some lingering political things.

Donald Trump lost the election.  Believe whatever you want about who should have one, whether the electoral college makes any sense, whether we're a republic or democracy (as if the two are mutually exclusive), but he lost.

There's no point in arguing otherwise, unless you just like arguing, much like the fellow I know who insists the Women's NBA "isn't a sport".  Why, well because a 50-year-old overweight guy who couldn't play basketball against a junior high team can safely take that position for self-satisfaction.  Same here.  Trump lost, and arguing that he won at this point is really just insisting the opposite isn't true.

Vaccinations are safe.  We really don't need to argue about this anymore, but we really don't need to be arguing about vaccinations in general.

Note that I didn't limit this to the COVID-19 vaccination.  People out there who don't vaccinate their kids for things we haven't seen for years, only to have the kids get ill, are acting criminally.  If there's one thing we have COVID-19 to thank for, and I don't believe it is, it's that it shut people up like Jenny McCarthy on this topic.

Let's resolve to follow the science on stuff, no matter how scary that may be, or how much that impacts our self interests, or our narcissistic desires.  If that leads to "you know, what I want isn't okay", or "my own impulses aren't ordered", well, so be it.

Let's also resolve that the end point of being a human isn't to be a consumer.

Let's completely skip altering our natures this year. Whether that's dying our hair some color it isn't, or inflating our boobs, or changing our gender, or whatever.  

Feel that you really want to be in touch with who you really are?  Well, be who you really are, and that starts with the body nature gave you and all that means.

Face the basic fact that you are going to die.  Hopefully not soon, but you will. And that's okay, as long as you are in the right place when you die. Eating the All Kale Diet won't stop it.  Don't accelerate it, please, we need you around, but we need you who you are, and as part of us, as we really are.

Don't be mean.  I've come to realize that there are certain people who revel in being mean.  Don't be one of them.  Don't take joy in other's suffering, or inflict it in them.  Meanness, I'd note, is often masked in arrogance, or self-righteousness, or even ignorance.  

Don't follow the mean, either. If somebody seems perpetually pissed off, there's something wrong in that.

Cheerfulness strengthens the heart and makes us persevere in a good life; wherefore the servant of God ought always to be in good spirits.

St. Philip Neri.

Mehr mensch sein.

Appendix II: Down the rabbit hole. (Additional topic references).

 

Down the rabbit hole.

Blog Mirror. Today's Document: John Joseph Mathews, Osage Council Member, author, historian, and Rhodes Scholar, seated at home in front of his fireplace, Oklahoma, 12/16/1937.

 

John Joseph Mathews, Osage Council Member, author, historian, and Rhodes Scholar, seated at home in front of his fireplace, Oklahoma, 12/16/1937. 

Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs

Series: General Photographs of Indians

Image description: Mr. Mathews sits in an armchair in front of a fireplace, with a dog at his feet. The fireplace and walls are made of stone. Next to the fireplace is a table with smoking pipes on it, and a filing cabinet; on the wall is a framed cover of Mathews’ book SUNDOWN. The mantelpiece has candles, framed photos and certificates, and taxidermied animals. The mantel bears the Latin words VENARI LAVARI LUDERE RIDERE OCCAST VIVERE (To hunt, to bathe, to play, to laugh, is to live).

Source: catalog.archives.gov

Too good not to repost in its entirety.  

And a great motto!

How to loose friends, make enemies, make a bad argument, and discredit everything you stand for. The Transgender issue and a minister in Laramie.

Our friend here again.  As we previoulsy noted, 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

I'm not going to post names, as that is what really go this thing rolling in the first place, in some ways.  What I will  note is that when I say "minister", I am referring to a protestant minister and, as will become clear, what used to sometimes be called a "fundamentalist" protestant minister.

Centuries ago, when I went to the University of Wyoming, there were no tables for people advocating things in the Student Union.  The Union was smaller than, and frankly we mostly just passed through it on the way to somewhere else.  The bookstore was in the Union, but it was actually diagonally across from the enormous book store that is now in the Union.  Current students would be shocked to see how small the union was.

On rare occasions something might happen in the union, but it would actually have to be held somewhere else in one of the various rooms in the building.  I recall going to an international students bake sale there, for instance.  And I saw the film Risky Business with a girlfriend in the ballroom once, so they obviously showed movies there on occasion.

But mostly we just passed through it on the way from the lower campus to the upper campus.

Now the much expanded union has tables in it, and various organizations will set up a display.  The times I've been in there, and I still get down to UW on occasion, it's been student organizations of one kind or another.  Most people seem to pass through ignoring them, which is predictable.

Apparently, however, groups from outside the university are allowed to set up there as well.

I frankly don't know what I think about it, but I don't think I like it in general.  This post, however, isn't really about that, but about one person whose been maintaining a booth there.

That person is the minister of a certain protestant church in Laramie.  I know where the church is, as I once had a friend who lived near there.  Oddly enough, it's not a church that I've ever posted a photo of at our Churches of the West blog.  

This has hit the press as the minister put up, amongst other things, a large at a booth he maintains in the Student Union which stated:

God created male and female

"_________________" is a Man.

Now, obviously, the "________________" had the name of a student on it.

So, apparently, the minister sought to point out that a student who apparently is in some aspect of the current "transgender" spectrum, for lack of a better way to put it, is a man, as he was born male.

Which brings us to this.  Rev. Schmidt (okay, I named him) is correct, "___________" is in fact a man.  And, yes, God created us male and female.

And this is just about the worst way to go about arguing in opposition to the transgender trend there is.  Schmidt is hurting himself, his cause, science, and Christianity in general.

Regarding science and Christianity, I'll note right away that Rev. Schmidt's table makes it clear that he's from that non-Apostolic branch of Christianity which is oddly opposed to science to start with.  Apostolic Christians endorse science, and take the position that science and Faith can always be reconciled, and science serves to illuminate the grandeur of God's creation.  We don't oppose, for example, the theory (and at this point it's a theory in name only, it's actually a fact) of evolution.  Schmidt does, based on one of the books on his table.

Schmidt's table was adorned with books taking on all sorts of things in the photos, including taking on Anthony Fauci and, as noted, evolution.  I'm pretty sure, based on that, that Schmidt would be one of the protestants who regard Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which make up the overwhelming number of Christians on Earth, in horror or at least disdain. 

I'll get back to that in a moment, but I mention it here as having a booth in a hall that tells people that something is contrary to a religious tenant works fine if you are engaging in a debate with fellow Christians.  So, for example, if this Reformed Baptists minister seeks to take on American Episcopalians, that argument makes sense, although it certainly could be done in a more articulate fashion.  But if you are engaging the public at large, and not knowing who your audience is, that argument is going to fall flat and with quite a few, actually push them away from Christianity, to the extent that objecting to the reality of the fossil record and feeling that Anthony Fauci is a bad guy isn't already achieving that.

So all it really serves to do is to make a guy who is tainting Christianity feel like he's advancing it when he's not.

Which takes us to St. Paul.

Chances are that Rev. Schmidt like St. Paul and thinks St. Paul would be in his corner here.  St. Paul was a tough guy, and he had a lot to say about improper sexual conduct, including homosexuality and men dressing like women.  St. Paul makes people today squirm and they avoid him.  One lesbian minister here in Casper actually dismissed St. Paul entirely on these matters in a radio interview, saying "well that's just St. Paul's opinion".

That's not the way that Paul presented it.  No, not at all. 

But consider this:

Paul’s Speech at the Areopagus.

Then Paul stood up at the Areopagus and said:

“You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious.

For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’ What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.

The God who made the world and all that is in it, the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything. Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything.

He made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.

For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

Since therefore we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination.

God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent because he has established a day on which he will ‘judge the world with justice’ through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.”

When they heard about resurrection of the dead, some began to scoff, but others said, “We should like to hear you on this some other time.”

And so Paul left them.

But some did join him, and became believers. Among them were Dionysius, a member of the Court of the Areopagus, a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

Ch. 17, Acts of the Apostles. 

Now, that's interesting.  Paul entered a new area, full of non-believers who had never even heard of Christ, and what did he say:

“You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious.

For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’ What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.

Well, he didn't do what Rev. Schmidt is doing.  He didn't go in and insult the unbelievers and assume they knew the entirety of the Christian message and point fingers at individuals ones of them, a la John Calvin.  No, he engaged them on common ground.

Here the common ground is science.  But chances are that Rev. Schmidt can't engage there.

The science of transgenderism is that its not supported by the science.  A person's gender is actually present in the DNA of every single cell of their body.  Humans, like all mammals, are male and female, and nothing else, right down to every single cell in your body.  Surgery and drugs aside, that remains the case.  It cannot be changed.

And hence our great grandmother and grandfather to the nth degree, the Morganucodon again.  Yes, male and female we were created, but not 4,000 years ago, but millions of years ago.  As we noted when we brought our cute little dinosaur egg eating progenitor up before:

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 there's the reality of it, which can be brought up in a scientific way to students who, at the end of the day, are just that.  Scientifically, the gender is baked in the cake and beyond actual changability. All the genetic behavior that goes along with that is baked in too. Therefore, the current transgender trend and story, which is largely confined to adolescent females who are in the ADHD scale, and who are white and from affluent families, is a sociology and psychological trend, not a biological one.  A person need not bring up God at all in this discussion.

Indeed, the evidence there is distressing in the extreme.  As noted, transgenderism is most female, not male.  It's mostly white, not black or Hispanic.  It's mostly in well-to-do sections of society, and it exhibits itself mostly amongst those female adolescents who have ADHD or something on "the spectrum".  It's appeared suddenly in White Europeans and European Americans as once one member of a clique claims it, it tends to rapidly spread in that clique.  Most of the members of the demographic cohort, moreover, have tended to have been exposed to a fair amount of pornography

And hence the most logical explanation of its spread.  It's spreading in a wealthy European culture.  Starting in the 1960s, we started to jettison the culture itself, leaving it without moorings, as we became wealthier.  Pornographers, including Hugh Hefner, were prosecuted for their actions as late as the 1970s, but that's now stopped completely, save below the age line of 18.  We've steeped children in it, and earlier this past week, a news story broke of a school official somewhere exposing grade school children to implements of what would have been regarded as deviant behaviors not long ago.  Indeed, the recent series on Playboy magazine revealed that when the young women working for Playboy clubs were exposed to the same behavior as part of after work gatherings, they were traumatized, so rare and so disgusting was it regarded as being.

In short, what the young females in the category are doing, psychologically, is fleeing from the role of female in regard to sex. They're not seeking to really change gender, they're seeking to opt out of what they think is the universal adult norm. They don't want to engage in endless sex as an object, they don't want things shoved up their butt, and the like.  

Who can blame them?

This doesn't cover all of this, of course, and it doesn't explain sexual dysmorphia as to males, . . exactly.  But what it does do is this. Scientifically, transgenderism isn't a thing.  So what we're seeing is something else that's not of biological origin.

And not once did we have to mention religion in order to engage in that discussion, now, did we?

Of course, what we did have to do is to reference evolution and biology, and in doing that we're referencing a genetic evolution that's  210,000,000 years old, long before our species, which is at least 250,000 years old, and probably twice that old, came about.  And that isn't going to be something a fellow who probably thinks the world is 5,000 years old and that evolution is some conspiracy by scientists is going to be keen on.  So instead, he's taken to the campus and is reading from the Bible.

St. Paul, in his letters, wrote a lot about Christian conduct and what barred a person from the doors of Heaven.  But he was writing to Christians when he did.  Going into Areopagus, he complimented them on their religious faith, non Christians and even non Jews that they were.

You students, I see that in every respect you are very scientific.

For as I walked around looking carefully at your buildings, I even discovered an some dedicated to biology.

Of course, you have to grasp that you aren't speaking to your own audience in the first place.  And you can't reject vast tracks of reality in order to proclaim other aspects of it either, and be convincing.  And in an era in which resources are so freely available, you might have to go back and take a look at what those early Christians were doing, including St. Paul, a Bishop in the Catholic Church.

Related Threads:

Genetics I: After all the propoganda, this is what actually matters.

Evolutionary Biology and Resources. Mysteries that aren't.

Cis

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

A Nature Party and a question. Does this comport with nature?

 

Altered from imagine done by Di (they-them) - This SVG flag includes elements that have been taken or adapted from this flag:, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114863039

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.

The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac.  Aldo Leopold

I wish there was a political party whose first principal was a question; "does this comport with nature?"

And asked that question, as its first principal, honestly.  Not seeking to ask it in some preconceived of manner in which the answer to the question is known before the question is posed.

And not in a way that always aligns with the questioners personal interest and economics.

One that posed it honestly, and went from there.

Such a party would make nearly every political pundit and national politician today squirm.

Senators who come on Fox News every other week, or on Twitter every week, who are from the State of Extraction would disappear behind the dour looking Mitch McConnell rather than answer the question first, and go on honestly from there.

So would left wing politicians who take to the floor in Big Green Rectangle to proclaim allegiance with "gender care", having undergone "gender care" themselves, without answering this question first.

It'd be a step towards sanity in a major way.

Indeed, the very fact that such a question is not the first posed is responsible, in no small measure, for why American politics are as stupid as they currently are.  The rational middle is gone, with the irrational agenda driven extremes in control.

This is why discussions on economics and production are totally divorced from reality on the right and the left.

And this is why discussions on existential biological issues devolve into anti-scientific diatribes that are linked with ill-informed world views rather than reality.

And this is also why those same issues become attached to extremist whose world view is ground not in science, but in ideologies of all type that are of their own fantastical creations, or those whose fantastical creations match a world the way they wish to see it, causing it to become impossible to debate or discuss any issue, as all issues all end up lashed to the philosophy, rather than the science, and reality.

Primum non nocere, first do no harm, we are told, is the first and most ancient rule of medicine.  Perhaps for politics, that branch of philosophy which is applied in the same way that engineering is applied physics, should consider  An hoc pertinet ad naturam?, does this comport with nature. This should be added be added to philosophy of all types, applied and not, as the first principal.

Related Threads:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

Robert Clary

We were not even human beings. When we got to Buchenwald, the SS shoved us into a shower room to spend the night. I had heard the rumours about the dummy shower heads that were gas jets. I thought, 'This is it.' But no, it was just a place to sleep. The first eight days there, the Germans kept us without a crumb to eat. We were hanging on to life by pure guts, sleeping on top of each other, every morning waking up to find a new corpse next to you. ... The whole experience was a complete nightmare — the way they treated us, what we had to do to survive. We were less than animals. Sometimes I dream about those days. I wake up in a sweat terrified for fear I'm about to be sent away to a concentration camp, but I don't hold a grudge because that's a great waste of time. Yes, there's something dark in the human soul. For the most part, human beings are not very nice. That's why when you find those who are, you cherish them.

 Robert Clary (born Robert Max Widerman), famous for Hogan's Heroes.

Blog Mirror: "We keep you alive to serve this ship", Part 1 of societal institutions and work. - November 04, 2022

"We keep you alive to serve this ship"

Ben Hur

Just observing things, It's really struck me over time how certain social programs, of the left and the right, basically amount to nothing other than serving the needs of businesses, particularly large business entities, no matter how they are styled. This is so much the case that certain huge proponents of some programs who would regard themselves as real fire breathing leftists are actually heavy-duty capitalists, and don't know it.

This shows in their justification for the programs.

Let's, once again, make reference to our evolved place in a state of nature, and where we are actually at.

In a state of nature we'd not do what most of us do daily, which is to leave our abode and clock in time somewhere else, to come back to our home.  In our natural state, while we would leave our families, the family would be the focus all the time.  In our industrial societies, our work is.  Most people spend most of their lives with people they are brought in contact with solely because they serve an economic interest, and nothing else.

Men got there first, long before women. But starting in the early part of the 20th Century, if not slightly before, that changed for women and now women are basically expected to work away from their homes and families.

Everyone is.

When looked at this way, we see why left wing emphasis on child care, and paradoxically abortion, are part and parcel of serving industry.  If women can be prevented from having children, they can, ie., they'll have to, go to work. That's what they should be doing, working.  If they must have children for some weird biological and psychological reason, well then government sponsored child warehousing, i.e., daycare, will force them back into work in another fashion.

Either way, they'll be freed, i.e., forced, to serve work.

Almost all the post 1945 liberalization of domestic law and structure works this way.  Easy no-fault divorce makes it easy to dump families, sending everyone unhindered and untethered into work. Where that results in women falling below the poverty line due to their children, as they foolishly chose to have children, government funded daycare will address it.  Abortion must be kept legal, we are told, as it means women can go to work.

What if things didn't work this way?

Well, men would still be men, and women be women, but they'd have to fund their families themselves, and at least attempt to choose more wisely.  That would have a lot of collateral impacts, but chief among them would be, frankly, less of a focus on work and more of a focus on the domestic.

But that would also mean that a society based on consumption, and which reduced its members to consumers, would be focused on families instead.

And then who is going to make and buy all that crap?

So the next time you here Bernie Sanders spouting off about something like universal child care, remember, what he's really saying, whether he means it or not, is:

"We keep you alive to serve this ship"

Cis

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:

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.

In our view, it's still very much worth a read.

Okay, well, so what.

Well, this, and being at war with it:

Genetics I: After all the propoganda, this is what actually matters.

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.

Related Threads:

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.

Genetics I: After all the propoganda, this is what actually matters.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgist Part 13. Nature and Homo Sapien Sapien

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

But what if we are wrong?