A few months ago a news item appeared in the ‘UK’ of how girls wishing to change gender are going to be tested for autism. This is an interesting one for several reasons and of course is only relevant at all because of the strange obsession with sex and gender which has taken hold in the last decade or so, and of course with the possibility of actually being able to go through a medical change. This post is not about what is a biological woman, and which has also been in the news recently, causing hours of debate. Logically that subject is as it always has been, and where the ancient Greeks had such a very sensible view that there was male and there was female, and then there were some males who were a bit more female and there were some females who were a bit more male, and such has ever been the human population all over Earth. Happily for the ancient Greeks, men-men had their place, men-women had their place in the household, and for the real women-women well, there was Lesbos just over the water.
This comment is about the link made between girls wishing to change gender and that a test for autism could be made. Apparently statistics show a higher percentage of those wishing to change gender are autistic than the average, so there is a correlation. Why would this be? A few decades ago when a tiny number of people did change gender, to now when it has almost become those not questioning their gender have to apologise for being just as they are, where do sex/gender and autism stand? And why autistic girls, and not autistic boys? Why do autistic girls want to become boys but not so many autistic boys want to become girls?
Because this blog is measured entirely from the logical point of view, where does logic sit in this matter? A logical approach would be to cross reference back over recent history, because as the medical facility to change gender has been a bit of a boom industry in the 2000s it is very easy to compare back to say, the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s when these sort of societal questions were just not in the public parlance. What is missing in this question of autistic girls and changing gender?
Well, logically, society itself is missing in this debate in Britain. The public realm in which young and old live, males and females, and all the variations, never gets a look in now. The inversion of the public sphere – meaning a measurable public area – used to have an identity even if not actually living like a biological being, it still did have an identity to which the human related and engaged. Now in the strange psychological inversions that have taken place, probably largely from the digital screens which invert and invert again, those born in the 1990s, almost it seems into a digital screen, have no knowledge of society as an entity only a few decades back. In that society were groups of young people like the Famous Five, with George, real name Georgina, who wore her hair short, wanted to be called a boy’s name, and could stand as one of society’s greatest icons to the tomboy. What a great position to hold. If the balance of hormones puts a girl into a more masculine category and society allows the freedom to cut the hair, use a boy’s name, and not have to worry about the feminine complications in life then what better a life could there be?