Top Tweets for #REDAlert

In this week's Weekly Peak, I wrote about the €2.4 million EU grant for a project whose aim is to “end the categorisation of humans into men and women and the gendered social order”: "The European taxpayer is funding a research project that will help create a world in which sex is considered irrelevant outside narrow applications relating to reproduction, and where we no longer give credence to the words and concepts “man” and “woman”, “boy” and “girl”. The ultimate objective of the project, for which we’ve forked out 2.4 eye-watering millions, is to banish gender — the sometimes oppressive and often inaccurate traits we associate with the two sexes. And then we can all live happily ever after. Unlike trans activists, the brains behind the project, Daphna Joel, doesn’t make the batshit claim that sex doesn’t matter ever. She’s TERFy in the sense that she acknowledges that biological sex is real, does matter sometimes, and is relevant in reproductive medicine (the bar is so low.) But she thinks that our practice of separating men and women conceptually, outside of this narrow field of medicine, is not just pointless, but that it is causing harm. She asks: if men and women (specifically, men and women’s brains) are so similar in so many ways, and so many individuals don’t match the stereotypes projected upon them by the labels “man” and “woman”, then what’s the point of giving these labels any weight in our culture? There is, she says, nothing that can be accurately called a “male brain” or a “female brain”, because the brains of the two sexes overlap so much as to make the distinction useless. As if humans — a species that reproduces by seeking out the opposite sex and fucking it — could possibly wean itself off noticing who is male and who is female just by stopping using certain words." Read the rest in Peaked, see link