Sugar and spice and all things nice

Girls aren’t what they used to be, and I suppose that’s what all old curmudgeons are saying.

In the times long since passed, some girls were nicer than others. Some were tomboys, others unapologetically feminine. Some were pretty, others described as ‘beautiful eyes’ or ‘great personality’. Some were clever, some just bubbly. Some played chess when others played with fluffy toys. Some were virtuous, others less so.

But one thing uniting them all was that they were all girls, born and bred. While some of them, mainly those from the sunnier climes, had more facial hair than others, very few had bushy beards at any time of their lives.

Those who were so cursed sometimes turned that defect to pecuniary advantage by performing at county fairs, sharing the limelight with men sporting breasts or women who could smoke cigarettes without using their lips.

All that has changed. According to the modern ethos, some girls may have beards and even penises. And some can even compete against other women weightlifters in the Olympics.

This brings us to Laurel, née Gavin, Hubbard, 43, who is to represent New Zealand in the upcoming Olympic Games. Laurel will be a firm favourite in the women’s superheavyweight division, mainly because she had been Gavin until ‘transitioning’ at age 35 (don’t you just love those neologistic coinages?).

I don’t know if Laurel, née Gavin, still boasts the male appendage but, as far as the International Olympic Committee is concerned, that doesn’t matter one way or the other.

Men don’t have to undergo complete surgery to qualify for women’s events. All they have to do is keep their testosterone count below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months.

Now, given the pharmacological advances of which modernity is justly proud, I’m sure a quick course of testosterone suppressors can do the trick well enough. Yet someone who had a full dose of that hormone for the first 35 years of his life still possesses a body built by male biochemistry.

Since, all else being equal, men are inherently stronger than women, I’m even ashamed to make the point about the unfairness of it all – stating the blindingly obvious isn’t what writers should do.

No such compunctions for Kereyn Smith, New Zealand Olympic Committee chief executive. “We acknowledge,” she allowed, “that gender identity in sport is a highly sensitive and complex issue requiring a balance between human rights and fairness on the field of play.”

No, dear, the issue isn’t, or rather shouldn’t be, at all sensitive and complex. And the balance required isn’t one between human rights and fairness. It’s between madness and sanity. Or, if you’d rather, between seemliness and unseemliness.

Yet, while it’s still marginally permissible to discuss the fairness of the issue, it never occurs to anyone that the topic should never even arise in any sane society. Hence 96 per cent of the 2,418 respondents in an Australian poll thought it was unfair that Hubbard should compete against women.

Did any of them suggest it was cloud cuckoo land for this subject even to come up? I bet many felt that way, but then decided that valour wasn’t the only thing discretion was the better part of.

Discretion is also mandatory for anyone finding himself at odds with a prevailing orthodoxy. That juggernaut can crush anyone, once it gets rolling. Best to keep out of its way.

Thus an intrepid soul daring to use such outdated words as ‘seemly’ and ‘unseemly’ is likely to be mocked and ostracised. The orthodoxy has spoken, and it has stated in no uncertain terms that nothing is unseemly, provided it serves to knock out the last bricks of civilisation still standing.

Defiance of everything seen as normal and decent for millennia is not only welcomed but actively promoted – starting at the elementary school, or even kindergarten, level. No one even considers the long-term devastation such anomie will wreak on society. No one even recognises that such a thing as society exists, and that it’s a garden worth tending.

And no society can survive without a set of norms: moral, legal and aesthetic. In fact, it’s such norms that keep the atoms of individuals from spinning out of the social molecule to create chaos.

That said, a norm isn’t an umbrella under which everyone can fit. Some people can’t, and others won’t, do so. Yet it’s up to society to decide which deviation may or may not be tolerated. A free society will allow any number of them, but an enduring society will also know how to protect itself from disintegration.

Gender dysphoria in itself presents no more danger to society than phocomelia (being born with no limbs) does. Sufferers from either deformity deserve our love, compassion and support.

What they don’t deserve is a claim to normality and exemption from any natural restrictions. When transsexuals insist on being accepted on their own terms, and society concurs through its subversive mouthpieces able to impose a new orthodoxy, norms are no longer seen as normal. Society tries a flipflop and lands smack on its head.

I dare anyone, even a fully paid-up ‘liberal’, to claim he doesn’t wince, at least inwardly, at the sight of a sideshow like Laurel-Gavin. Natural instincts aren’t always laudable, but sometimes they are more honest and noble than pseudointellectual contortions passing for morality. This is one of those cases.

P.S. In a parallel development, now it’s Boris Becker’s turn to fall foul of the new orthodoxy. When he was doing commentary on a Wimbledon match involving a Hungarian player, the camera lingered on the player’s fiancée.

Boris remarked: “They do say they have the most beautiful women in Hungary. I wouldn’t know that, but she’s certainly very pretty.”

The transgressor didn’t realise that any comment on a woman’s appearance is these days prohibited. The ensuing public outcry, with words like ‘sexist’ and ‘chauvinist’ most salient, must have reminded him of the way the strudel crumbles. Boris is fortunate that the lady in question isn’t a converted man, for in that case he would have been accused of mockery.