I have recently been enjoying a bit of cross-Atlantic mud-slinging with some of our most prolific writers, most recently on the subject of which is the true and authentic version of Football.

However, there are occasions where the urge to do this must be resisted.  Recently, through the agency of Real Clear Science or one of its sister sites, I came across an article

Girls on the Run: When Efforts to “Empower” Girls Go Wrong

written by an assistant professor of educational foundations and affiliate of women’s studies at Millersville University of Pennsylvania.  It is a complaint against the “pinkification” of girls, and much of it I sympathize with.  Indeed, nothing raised my hackles until I came across this concluding sentence:

In the end, then, this simply serves to reproduce gender stereotypes and the old-fashioned and false notion that gender is binary.

(Now it is pretty clear that the author is not thinking of us as similar to the intelligent beings in Isaac Asimov’s story The Gods Themselves, who have three sexes, Rational, Emotional and Parental.)

As a brief example of why this is nonsense, one of our noisiest homosexual celebrities, Stephen Fry, is reported as saying that even from an early age the idea of engaging with a female in what Sheldon Cooper refers to as coitus was abhorrent to him.  But things like that do not make gender non-binary, simply that that particular switch in his circuitry is fixed opposite to the way it is in heterosexual males.

And so one is inclined to think “another load of nonsense coming out of America”.  But then one looks this side of the Atlantic at some of the things coming from across the Channel, and even being proposed in European legislation, and it is much more pernicious.  This is the downside of things sounding much more serious and significant when they are said in French or German.  As for Britain, I don’t notice it so much.  Am I simply used to it, or is it that as a result of we Brits laughing ourselves so silly since WW2, that we are rarely capable of rising to such a level of thought, even bad thought?

So why blame America?  Perhaps the amount of intellectual activity, especially in Harvard and Yale, makes it like the core of a massive star where helium builds up in the core more rapidly.  Or is it simply because “it’s not ours?”