The Jeremy Clarkson Postulate 

  This is an advance showing of part of a chapter from my shortly to be released book The War on Gender

   No offence or insult is intended to Jeremy Clarkson

I

n the past, trans identity was something on the edge, something which was beyond the limit of most people’s experience.  And why should it have been anything else?

As this phenomenon gradually climbed over the horizon of common awareness, those who found the easiest acceptance were those who, whether through good fortune from nature, or through greater diligence, have fitted best into the conventional world.

I knew that the more I put into it, the more I would get out.

Today however, we have devolved to a point where the mere claiming of an identity is supposed to command respect.

This is why I put forward what I call The Jeremy Clarkson Postulate.

Gender theorists argue that there are no essential qualities to gender, that chromosomes, gonads, hormones, morphology, neurology and reproduction are not what it is about.  These are irrelevant.  What is really going on is that society is constructing the concepts around certain stereotyped notions of what masculine and feminine qualities are and that these are merely performative displays to fit the desired role.

Since even this has now been deconstructed to the point where the only required performative act to qualify in a particular gender is to claim that one is of that gender, and by implication, sex, we are left with my Jeremy Clarkson Postulate.  Jeremy Clarkson, as most of my British readers will know, is a particularly outspoken and politically incorrect television presenter on that most mannish of subjects, cars.  He is also a reputed to be a male chauvinist pig, and would probably be proud of it I believe.  If it is otherwise, I apologise to him.  I have no particular objection to Jeremy Clarkson; I find him quite amusing and he adds variety to our existence.  I intend him no disrespect and merely take him as an example.

The thing I wish to postulate about Jeremy Clarkson is whether, should he one day suddenly pronounce that he was a woman deep inside and that he had only hidden from saying it for so long because

of embarrassment, we must be bound to accept what he says simply on the basis that he said it?

This is a serious philosophical question which the modern LGBT Cultural Marxist lobby hasn’t properly dealt with.

In the realm of epistemology we usually require reasons for believing that such and such a matter is the case.

The contemporary descent into unreason which has currently possessed both the academic and political lefts allows that in certain circumstances no evidence other than an unsubstantiated claim is considered sufficient to engender belief, whereas in others, no evidence of any kind at all could ever be enough.

My own take on this is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but that there may be conditions in which such claims can be substantiated if such evidence can be produced.

So if Jeremy Clarkson continued to appear and act in the same way as we are accustomed to seeing him appear and act, should we believe his claim that he is really a woman, or that he is a transsexual who at least wants to become a woman insofar as that is medically possible?  

If his behaviour and appearance remain the same, then I put it to you that we should not believe him.  We should conclude that he is either joking with us in a manner which should not surprise us, or that perhaps this is a passing whim.  If he had never shown any indications of gender confusion, had never tried to feminise his appearance and never behaved any differently than the typically masculine way in which he has always behaved, then we should say that at most this is some idea which lurked at the back of his mind, but which had never been strong enough to find its way into any actual form or manifestation in his life; that more was required than the mere assertion that he is a woman, when all evidence appears to the contrary.

This is probably a convenient point at which to introduce my own way of understanding sex and gender that I develop in later chapters.  I shall make reference to Dr Jason Reza Jorjani’s concept of the spectral, but I think my core theory is only expanded by that. 

Dr Jorjani has argued persuasively for the existence of what he terms a Spectral Realm[1] from the analytic efforts of Descartes, Kant and others, and I think that this may be only one of several, or many, layers of preceding metaphysical levels and structures between us and the Absolute Ground of Existence.  Thought, consciousness, imagination,

possibility, memory, but also parapsychic experiences and more all exist in the Spectral dimension.  I find this an immensely helpful conceptual advance in category distinctions of the phenomenal world.  I cannot here recapitulate the entire history of Western Philosophy in order to demonstrate that there must be something behind the experiential world of the senses which, though we have come to understand some of it, also clearly has some extremely evasive, but persistent, qualities and features; however I would simply argue that we must find some way to reassimilate consciousness into our structural ontology of the world ~ and gender.

 

 I earlier referred to my spectral sense of self, the ghostly haunting by my potential self which sought to manifest itself in my material existence.  But spectres are merely ghostly images that haunt us unless they can find some purchase in materiality to affect or become real. 

Existence is a confluence of uncountable influences which may vary from one moment to the next.  Our own stream of consciousness is the nexus of our immutable past with the external influences of the present which we may project into the future through our choices.  I would suggest that the spectral sense is a type of latent morphogenetic field such as has been proposed by Dr Rupert Sheldrake, on which I shall elaborate later; an influence of formative causation as he describes it.  The actual mechanisms would be the brain structures which tend to resonate with existing stable patterns and so produce certain subjective experiences of self.

As I have mentioned, Techne in the Ancient Greek has the meaning of control or skill from which we get technology and so by extension it can be a useful notion when applied to survival adaptation.  The techne of the genome of a species would include the specific adaptations which enhance its success in survival, such as petals that attract bees, scents that attract mates, and so forth.  This is not techne in its fullest sense as an agent of conscious intent, but neither is it simple physis, the mechanical workings of the unconscious material world.  It is the emergent expression of the drive within the Universe to know itself.

 

On a more macro scale male and female are a dynamic which enhance survival adaptation by allowing for exchange of genes.  The qualities of these principles masculine and feminine were known to the ancient Chinese as Yang and Yin, the Great and the Small.

The expansive, the contracting.  Day and Night.  Up and Down.  And so on and so on.

Male and female are the expressions in biology of these principles. Just as they are demonstrated in the Law of Motion that ‘for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’: meta level principles are expressed through physical laws.

Gender is the driver of one's inner make up.  If the only expression is the obvious, then we must say that it is what it appears to be.  

In the court of public perception our hypothetical Jeremy Clarkson must do more than simply claim, he must at the least act in some way as to demonstrate his conviction.  His spectral self must show itself to the world and establish itself in some way or else it remains no more than an unproved ghostly imagining.

The danger we face today is that we may encourage what in previous epochs might be seen as mass possession by these ghosts, copycat psychoses promoted by a media hungry for the latest thrill.

How may we distinguish between those anomalous individuals who are so hard wired that they cannot escape the resonance of their spectral self and those who merely adopt this sense through social entrainment as the girls at a school where seventeen of them are receiving various degrees of treatment seem to have done[2]?

It is commonly said that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.  This is probabilistic functionalism as applied to perception.  You cannot be making conscious judgements on every perceived detail of reality every moment.  Assumptions have to be made on the basis of past experience and inherited archetypal templates. 

There is a curious subgroup within the trans community who in some ways embody the hypothetical situation of Mr Clarkson.  Claiming to be male to female transsexuals they then, rather than sorting out some facial hair removal, or even just shaving and using a concealer, actually allow their beards to grow.  When questioned about the apparent incongruity with their claimed identity they answer that some women have facial hair, so why shouldn't they?

And it is, of course true, that some women have facial hair.  I don't mean a little down on their upper lip or the odd coarse hair on their chin, but a stronger and more widespread pattern of growth, more akin to the male pattern.  And this is the point.  While these

women have all, or most, of the other characteristics which identify them as female, and thus override an interpretation of them as male, these supposed 'male to female transsexuals' who let their beards grow rarely have any, if at all.  The beard is an evolutionary adaptive signal demonstrating male fertility.  Why would you choose to present this signal if you want to be taken as a female?

Perception is a stable hallucination projected on the basis of external sensory data which is filtered and interpreted in the light of both learned experience and inherited unconscious material, which hopefully has enough verisimilitude to be probabilistically functional.  The postmodernists might say it is a construct, but they are so profligate with their use of this term that it becomes meaningless.  Every detail of every aspect of human life is a construct in their view, whereas in a world in which consciousness takes centre stage we must think more in terms of meaning, interpretation, intentionality.

So, when we ask what does it mean to conceive of oneself as a woman? we are to some extent asking how that conception might be brought to fruition, indeed how should one birth this self-concept into materiality?

How is the Spectral Self to be expressed in one's life?

...................................

Read the full unredacted chapter in The War on Gender to be published by Arktos Books later in 2021.

https://arktos.com/

..................................

Is the mere performative act of claiming to be a woman sufficient to create a reality?

Hopefully Mr Clarkson has no such conflict between his inner and outer selves, for if he did, or at least claimed to have, then we should surely wish to critique his claims in good postmodernist style.

Regrettably it seems to be the case in the present climate that the mere questioning of claims, the felt need to see evidence in the long term is deemed transphobic.  On the contrary, we are expected to extend affirmation on the basis of mere unsupported claims.

This is why someone such as myself has to stick their head above the parapet and cry 'Stop!'

This chapter © 2020 Claire Rae Randall

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[1] Dr Jason Reza Jorjani, "Prometheus and Atlas", Arktos Books (2016)  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prometheus-Atlas-Jason-Reza-Jorjani/dp/1910524611 (2019)

[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6401593/Whistleblower-teacher-makes-shocking-claim-autistic.html (2020)

[3] 'Remember you will die'