I think Colin Wright on Reality’s Last Stand is on my wavelength in his concern about messaging strategies, but I wish he’d increased broadcast strength:
In discussions about intersex conditions it is common to hear the claim that intersex people make up 1-2 percent of the population and is therefore “as common as red hair.” There appear to be two main goals when forwarding this claim—one laudable, the other insidious. The laudable goal is to normalize the existence of intersex people and thereby help facilitate the societal acceptance of a marginalized community who may experience social ostracism and who have often been victims of unconsentual [sic] and medically unnecessary “corrective” cosmetic surgeries. The insidious goal is to plant seeds of doubt in our collective understanding of biological sex and suggest that the categories “male” and “female” may be social constructs or exist on a “spectrum.”
Unfortunately, and as I think Colin would agree, the blind use of statistics to normalize or demonize anything is simply an abuse of statistics. If you can replace “people with red hair” with “pederast”, and thereby demonize the intersexed, well, your original argument’s really shit.
Colin’s conclusion, so far as it goes, is fine, but it’s all negatives:
While the prevalence of intersex conditions, defined in [Dr. Leonard] Sax’s clinically-relevant sense, is quite low, this by no means justifies any of the mistreatment, whether socially or medically, that many gender activists hope to prevent when they overstate its prevalence. How we treat people, and the rights afforded to them, should not be predicated on their prevalence in a population. And that is the point we should be trying to normalize, rather than false statistics.
Sure. But how about asking, then, how do we recognize those who should be regarded as threats? I quite agree, those who deviate from the norms are, on that valuation alone, harmless, or more accurately insufficient information to make a judgment. How about if we ask the evolutionary question, Does this deviation harm society and its members? After all, a pedophile shouldn’t be restrained because they are a small percentage of society; but they are restrained because such sexual relationships have been found to be a bane when it comes to the proper and normal development of the child. Broken children do not usually make for productive, happy people.
And, thus, statutory rape laws.
I recognize Wright is treating the case of improper statistics and how it leads to inaccurate messaging, which in turn leads to doubts about the trustworthiness of the source, but I cannot help but feel that he left me hanging with his terminating paragraph.
