I observed the recent Eurovision song contest with a passing interest much like one would when passing a traffic accident – mildly curious and glad not to be involved in any way.  Like many modern music shows and videos, it seemed to be overly sexualised and ever since ABBA won with Waterloo in 1974 it joins a long line of immemorable Eurovisions.  Another thing that stood out for me was that there seemed to be a disproportionate number of artists identifying as non-binary which led me to dig out a SMAC which I wrote in 2022 but never got around to drawing a picture for.  In a spurt of laziness, I did however dig out an image from a MAD magazine of my boomer youth as a fig leaf for its nudity.

A MAD magazine take on Star Wars with Luke Skywalker walking into some galactic bar

The mathematical proposition is:  How can 2_­­¹ = 2⁶  be true?

Well, it’s not really a mathematical proposition but rather like those terrible riddles that kids of a certain age confound their parents with.  The way to make the proposition true is to unleash the woke blokes on the binary sexual identity idea which man/woman/…  has been happy to live with since time began. 

Yes, the Greeks, apart from grappling with serious philosophical issues, also grappled with pretty slave boys and were quite happy with gender fluidity what with the Lesbians of Lesbos.  Nevertheless, they still only recognised two human genders – male and female – but then again they didn’t know about chromosomes and anomalies thereof.  Ok, so there were eunuchs, but those were still recognised as male just with willies severely edited against the owners’ wills.

After the demise of the Roman Empire, homosexuality became increasingly frowned upon in Europe although the Roman Catholic Church quietly kept the passion burning.  Nevertheless, its public acceptance probably reached a nadir in the 19^th/20^th century.  Since the second half of the 20^th century, acceptance of differing sexual identities has increased resulting in a veritable Cambrian explosion of sexual species.  The demeaning homo tag of my youth was soon dropped and gay and lesbian became the accepted terms.  This was not enough and the universe of sexual identities was expanded when the acronym LGBT was introduced from the 1990s for brevity. 

My older generation, disdainfully called out as boomers by the so-called young sensitive generation, was slowly coming to terms with the undermining of our foundations when the four-letter acronym expanded to LGBTQIA.  It has since gone beyond that, leaving us floundering in its wake.  It’s become a nuclear arms race amongst sexual identity interest groups to see who can feasibly add another letter, another tweak to the minefield of sexual identity.  People like JK Rowling have been cancelled because they dared voice an opinion of what the definition of a woman is and politicians in the House of Commons refuse to answer that question on the basis that they might incriminate themselves if they misspeak even slightly whilst trying hard to please.  In fact, defining that a woman is someone who can give birth – an entirely logical proposition – will result in a fatwa being issued against you as a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) – a form of turf war, I suppose.  It always amazes me how illiberal liberal people can be sometimes.

We’ve now got to the point that it’s being reported that the American School of London is teaching their kids/learners/scholars/pupils/… that there are 64 gender identities.  For the non-mathematical, 2⁶ = 64 which links through to the original non-sensical proposition.  Not to be outdone, a BBC educational film claimed that there are more than 100 (or 2^6.64) gender identities – just when I thought that it was safe to go back into the sea.

Kids of the future won’t be taught their A, B, Cs but rather their L, G, Bs and critical gender studies might become a compulsory school subject through to matric along with Critical Race Theory amongst other hot woke topics.

References
Parents’ fury as £32,650-a-year American School in London teaches there are ’64 genders’, www.dailymail.co.uk
BBC education film that claims there are ‘more than 100 gender identities’ is blasted as ‘nonsense’, www.dailymail.co.uk