Episode 7 The Gender debate

 Episode 7 

Hello! Welcome to the Listening Tube. I’m your host, Bob Woodley. On this edition, ….we’ll try to figure out what a woman is. I guarantee that by the end of the program, you won’t be wrong, you’ll just change your mind. This week in history, another dictator gains complete power, while a king goes to work for the United States Army. Plus, a Dolly that rolls, but doesn’t rock. But first, not the headlines…

The British Government recently paid a 4-million pound debt to the Iranian government, and although we’re not supposed to connect the two, the payment also coordinated with the release of two British/Iranian nationals from Iranian prisons. It seems the debt was owed since the 1970’s, and nobody from the British government seems to know why the debt was never paid. In any case, the Iranian government, about six years ago, arrested one of the women who was recently released for spying while she and her infant daughter were visiting her parents in Iran. The daughter was two years old, I don’t know if that counts as an infant. Any mom would know. Anyway, the woman claims she’s not a spy, and doesn’t know why the Iranian government would think she’s a spy. But because they said she was a spy, they accused her of plotting to overthrow the Iranian government and sentenced her to five years in prison. While she’s in prison, she’s told by Iranian authorities they “wanted something off the Brits,” and they would not let her go until they had got it. The BBC article quotes the woman as saying, “And they did keep their promise.” Now, if you’re a math person, you might be thinking, “Well, if she was only sentenced to five years in prison, why did it take six years for her to get our?” Excellent question. Here’s why: As the end of her sentence was approaching, and the Iranian government still hadn’t got what it wanted from the Brits, in April of last year they sentenced her to another year in prison on charges of propaganda against the government. Was she yelling political slogans out the window of her cell? So the Iranian government chose someone to kidnap and hold hostage until a decades-old debt was paid. 

Her husband, who in Britain waged a tireless campaign to regain his wife’ freedom, gave credit to the Foreign Secretary for securing his wife’s release, and said it was “nice to be retiring” as an activist for his wife. The wife, on the other hand, wasn’t so generous with the accolades. “We all know how I came home,” she said. “It should’ve happened exactly six years ago.” The woman’s representative in the Parliament has called on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee to investigate why the debt took so long to be paid. Meanwhile, the woman is happy to be home again and getting to know her now 8-year-old daughter, Gabriella. “I’m so pleased she’s back home, that she came home to us,” says the dad, “We’re still negotiating whether daddy’s allowed in the same bed as child and mother. We’ll get there.” He continued, “I think we’ll do this and then we will disappear off and heal a bit.”

This is an example of how a government that is not controlled by its people is perfectly willing to use people as bargaining chips with no regard to the person’s life, value or dignity. Sure, there are mistakes made in every justice system, but corruption and politics probably play a bigger role when prisons are used as tools, and prisoners are used as pawns. In this case, though, the prisoner was an innocent civilian, chosen, possibly at random, maybe by design, to make Great Britain pay a price that they believed was long overdue. Usually, or perhaps historically, this only happened with prisoners of war. Prisoner exchanges would happen at the Galinika Bridge in Berlin or in a desert of the middle east. When governments start taking civilians hostage to settle political disputes, you risk your freedom when you leave the borders of your own country.

The current political climate taken into consideration does not bode well for WNBA star Brittany Griner. She plays for the Phoenix Mercury during the WNBA season, then in the off-season, she, like many others, play in basketball leagues in other countries to pass the time and earn more money. It’s a common practice among women and men in a variety of sports. So Brittany flies into Moscow, and the people at the airport say they find hash oil in her luggage. It was in a vape form, which is now legal in many American states, but not in Russia. Assuming they found what they say they found, I believe it’s possible that Brittany just didn’t think twice before throwing them in her bag, or that she’d been through this airport before and they never searched her, so it was no big deal. Well, now it is. Brittany’s facing 10 years in prison in Russia. We already know she’s not getting out of jail until the middle of May, and with the situation in Ukraine, Ms. Griner may end up being one of those political pawns. As it stands right now, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and although she’s a two-time Olympic Gold Medalist with a legal team working on her behalf with both American and Russian authorities, her fate rests on political breezes. Not all of the political breezes are blowing in her favor. Critics of Brittany are quick to point out that in 2020, she said, “I honestly feel we should not play the National Anthem during our season,” she told the Arizona Republic. “I think we should take that much of a stand.” She stayed in the locker room while the National Anthem was being played as a sociopolitical statement. So people who feel that her statement was disrespectful to the country aren’t losing any sleep over Brittany Griner being in a Russian jail. Perhaps she’s singing the Star Spangled Banner in her cell right now. Over and over again as a sort of pennance. I wonder what she’ll feel the next time she sees the American flag flying. Russia and the United States have strained relations right now, to say the least, and then a U-S basketball star falls right into their hands Ukrainian citizens are being taken into Russia for what some analysts say might be for political bargaining later. Russia could be stockpiling chips for a global game of poker.

Let’s go back…

The first thing I want to do is give a shout out to a guy who semi-started it all. This week in 1896,

Alexander Popov makes the first radio signal transmission in history. In America, we give Marconi the credit for inventing radio, but Popov was a Russian physicist and teacher at a naval school who was doing much of the same work as Marconi at the same time. But Wikipedia gives him credit for being one of the first persons to invent a radio receiving device. Now, you might be thinking, “What’s the big deal, Bob? It’s just radio.” Wellllll. It is just radio. But like the wheel, and fire, radio is one of those discoveries that transformed society. This was the first time we realized that we could move information from one place to another without shouting or handing somebody a piece of paper. We now know we could move information through the air without any physical manifestation of it. We could communicate with other people in almost real time. Not just with people in the same room, but with people miles away. It was the start of everything we know about electronic communication today. Since then, we figured out how to make a physical manifestation of the radio signals in the form of telegrams and teletype machines. We figured out how to add pictures to the sounds and found different ways to preserve them and broadcast them for large audiences. But it all started in 1896 with radio waves, and now we have access to the internet, the next way to move information. But while the internet has changed the way we get information, the radio is still the most popular media in the nation, reaching more than 90 percent of Americans every week.

In 1918, Daylight Savings time was used for the first time in the United States. There’s a lot of talk right now about whether or not we should continue to use Daylight Savings Time. It always reminds me of the Cheech and Chong skit when a hustler on the street offers to sell a watch to Chong, and he says, “Oh, no, man. I’m not into time.” Classic…. I did a fluff piece about Daylight Savings Time for AFN TV in Berlin. As I recall, my research then told me that Daylight Savings Time was actually invented in Germany. But they didn’t call it Daylight Savings Time. They called it War Time. It certainly was a different time, wasn’t it? 

This week in 1933, The Enabling Act is passed by the German Reichstag, allowing Adolf Hitler to gain complete power of the German Government. You know, it’s only been since I started this podcast that we’ve heard about the anniversaries of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and now Adolf Hitler being given absolute power over their people and governments. Look at what all three stand for and what all three are responsible for. Destruction, domination, and the elimination of peoples and cultures.

As a reminder, it was this week in 1948, during the Cold War, military forces, under direction of the Russian-controlled government in East Germany, set-up a land blockade of West Berlin. The objective was to starve the people and industries of West Berlin in the hope that the western allies would simply turn all of Berlin over to the Soviet Union. It didn’t work. The allies went to the sky to supply Berlin with fuel and food. Russia is today employing the same tactics in Mariapol, Ukraine. Starving the people, eliminating escape points, demanding surrender.

1958

Rock'N'Roll teen idol Elvis Presley is drafted in the U.S. Army. We don’t have the draft in effect right now, so you don’t hear a lot about entertainers in the military, with notable exceptions. After the attacks on America in 2001, Arizona Cardinals player Pat Tillman left the NFL to become an Army Ranger. Sadly, he died in Afghanistan by what was determined to be friendly fire. Rocky Bleier of of the Pittsburgh Steelers served in Vietnam and overcame extreme odds to eventually earn four Super Bowl rings. Today, an entertainer is leading the Ukrainian military against an invading Russian force. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is an entertainer. He’s also a lawyer and a politician, but he actually played the part of the President of Ukraine on a fictional television show. He created the company that produced the show, along with other shows and cartoons. Now he’s being compared to Winston Churchill. But getting back to Elvis, I still remember the first time I heard Jailhouse Rock. I was visiting my grandparents, and my mammam dug some old record and a record player out of the attic. A stack of 45’s that belonged to my dad’s sister when she was a kid. When I put the needle down on Jailhouse Rock, and heard those first four notes, and then repeated, I was hooked. When the song says the guys would rather stay and listen to the music than break out, I was shocked but I understood. It also never occurred to me that number 47 and number 3 were both men, and one thought the other was the cutest jailbird he ever did see. I was just a kid. I didn’t know that jails were segregated by gender. And now I’m not sure why they are….By the way, Elvis also mentions the Purple Gang in Jailhouse Rock. I recently learned that it wasn’t a fictitious name. 

Look that up liner

The Purple Gang, also known as the Sugar House Gang, was a Detroit-based criminal mob of bootleggers and hijackers, according to Wikipedia. During the Prohibition Era, the predominantly Jewish gang was Detroit’s dominant gang, but destroyed itself by the 1930’s through infighting and violence.

1975

Construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System begins.

1979

Operators of Three Mile Island’s Unit 2 nuclear reactor outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania fail to recognize that a relief valve in the primary coolant system has stuck open following an unexpected shutdown. As a result, enough coolant drains out of the system to allow the core to overheat and partially melt down.

1989

Exxon Valdez oil spill: In Prince William Sound in Alaska, the Exxon Valdez spills 240,000 barrels of petroleum after running aground.

Now, you might be saying, “Wait a minute, Bob. If the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was started in 1975, why were we transporting oil from Alaska by ship in 1989? Well, as it turns out, there was a political argument about the safest way to transport oil and great pains were taken to make pipelines look bad, including sabotage. Meanwhile, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System is still in operation.

1999

Kosovo War: NATO commences air bombardment against Yugoslavia, marking the first time NATO has attacked a sovereign country. We may be on the verge of it again. But this time, it’ll be Russia.

2004

Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia join NATO as full members. Which really upsets Russian President Vladimir Putin. QED.

None of our history highlights mentioned women, and all of them happened this week in March, what is now Women’s History Month. The current nominee for the Supreme Court was asked to define “woman” and basically refused to answer the question by stating that she’s not a biologist. Many have come to her defense, suggesting that it was wise to not answer the question. A USA Today headline claims that science says there’s no simple answer. The story quotes a gender studies scholar at Barnard College as saying “There isn’t one single biological answer to the definition of a woman. There’s not even a singular biological answer to the question of ‘what is a female?” Hmmm. So when the Supreme Court nominee said she couldn’t answer the question because she’s not a biologist, that would lead one to believe that a biologist could answer the question. Turns out, biologists won’t say what the definition of a woman is, either. A philosopher of biology who studies policy ramifications of sex and gender from Harvard punts the ball back to the social sciences: “As is so often the case, science cannot settle what are really social questions,” she said. In any particular case of sex categorization whether in law or in science, it is necessary to build a definition of sex particular to context.”

So what contextual variations should we take into account? Well, the woman from Barnard College who may or may not think she’s a woman says there are at least six different biological markers of sex in the body: genitals, chromosomes, gonads, internal reproductive structures, hormone ratios and secondary sex characteristics. So, let’s take a look at genitals. Well, not literally. This is an audio-only program. But conventional belief is that if you’re born with certain body parts in your bathing suit area, that’s what determines what sex you are. This is the sole factor taken into consideration when the person who fills out your birth certificate writes male or female. It’s a boy! It’s a girl! They can even tell before the child is born what equipment it has. Ninety-nine point four percent of Americans accept this classification as they continue to grow and live their lives as men or women. If you want to get a little more testicle than, I mean technical than what’s between your legs, we move on to the next variable listed: Chromosomes. Well, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute on the genome dot gov website, humans and most other mammals have two sex chromosomes, the X and the Y. Females have two X chromosomes in their cells, while males have both X and Y chromosomes in their cells. A woman’s egg cells contain an X chromosome, while the man’s sperm cells contain an X or Y chomosome. That means that it is the male who determines the sex of the offspring when fertilization occurs. Well, so far, the first two variable seem to indicate clear definitions of gender. Next on the list: Gonads. I must admit, I don’t think I’ve been exposed to the word “gonads” since high school, and it wasn’t in sex education class. It was actually an upper classman saying, “If you forget to put your tuba away again, I’ll rip off your gonads.” I derived from context that he was talking about my testicles, and I was right! What I didn’t know is that women’s ovaries are also considered gonads. In any case, unless someone is born with ovaries and a penis, this seems like a very clear demarcation between a male and female. Internal reproductive structures were also one of the variables. This seems to be a very wide net, and there really isn’t any available data about how they might vary from one person to another, and certainly there may be cases of internal reproductive structures that are somehow abnormal or subject to some type of defect or anomaly. And if that’s the case, then I suppose there’s room for interpretation. Hormone ratios. Now here’s something that’s truly a variable, as estrogen and testosterone levels will vary from person to person, and even within a person as they age. But the only way you can call this a biological markers is by stating that estrogen is in women, and testosterone is in men. Changing that biological marker in a person one way or the other is changing the person. If you’re somewhere on the road to completing a change in either direction, you are either both male and female or you are neither. In any case, it’s a variable that we can, in many ways, control, so the gender studies people can call it a marker, but it’s really a measurement. And last but not least: secondary sex characteristics. Secondary sex characteristics are basically the changes in our bodies that accompany puberty. This is definitely my favorite biological marker, because like many other heterosexual men, I like some of the things that happen to women when they grow up. Just like a beard can become a part of a man’s persona, a woman’s chest can easily become part of her personality. A woman’s chest can have an effect on her self-esteem, especially when adolescent females are developing right before everyone’s eyes. Other secondary sex characteristics include fur where there was no fur before, changing of the voice, broadening of the hips or shoulders and menstruation. Are there women who never menstruate? Are there men who menstruate? I think menstruation, or the ability to produce sperm are good biological indicators of gender. Sure, there are women who grow more facial hair than they wish they did, and there are men who wish they could grow a beard, but just can’t seem to pull it off. So, those are the six biological sex markers in the human body, and from what I can gather, the Gender Studies people argue that you can’t always get all six of them to line up in everybody, and that’s why there are questions about sex and gender and the definitions of men and women, males and females. Let me ask you this...What percent of Americans do you think are transexual? The number might surprise you. But first, even though we can’t seem to define a woman, let’s see if we can define a transsexual…

Gonna look that up…

The dictionary has a definition of a transsexual. After all, isn’t this what all of the talk is really about right now? It isn’t if we can define a woman, it’s if we can define what is either both or neither. Well, the dictionary defines transsexual as “denoting or relating to a transgender person, especially one whos bodily characteristics have been altered through surgery or hormone treatment to bring them into alignment with their gender identity. So if you’re born in a female body and you don’t feel like a female, you can take both chemical and surgical steps to make your body look more like you feel. If you’re a man trapped in a woman’s body, or a woman trapped in a man’s body, thanks to modern science and medicine, you can relieve yourself of that burden and live your life in a body that meets your needs. Isn’t science wonderful? But when do you know that you’re ready to make that change? From what I’ve read about the six sex markers that are used to determine gender, you really can’t know until puberty. Now, I could be wrong, and probably am, but I simply can’t relate. I don’t know what it feels like to want to be anything other than a heterosexual male. So how many of us aren’t happy with the gender we got at birth? The fact is, and I’ve already given away the answer earlier in the program, point six percent of Americans are transsexual. Just over one half of one percent. That’s still a lot of people! Over one and a half-million people. The average person, according to a YouGov poll, shows that we think the number of transsexual people in America is 21 percent. That would be more than 52-million people. A good question is why do we think there are 52-million transsexuals in the country when there are only about one and a half-million. Easy answer there: The mainstream media. Transgender people, as well as mixed-race couples and families, gay people and even racial and ethnic minorities are over-represented on television programs and especially commercials. You really can’t blame the advertisers, as they’re trying to appeal to as large a group of customers as they can, plus if they exclude a group, accidentally or on purpose, they get called out on it by lobbying and special-interest groups as being homophobic or racist. In reality, gay people make up about 3 percent of our population, but most people guess it to be around 30 percent. People guess that 29 percent of the population is bisexual, when the truth is around 4 percent. These misconceptions about the numbers are both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, if you are transsexual, gay or bi, now you know that the general population is accepting of there being a lot more of you than there are. On the other hand, the media inflating your numbers is fodder for those who peddle fear of you and your lifestyle. Similar fodder is produced by those who insist on exposing children to the facts of life too early. That’s why you end up with laws like the one in Florida that hold off teaching gender and sex education until a child is mentally prepared for it. It’s a good law that’s been demonized by special interest groups who want to expose our children to fringe lifestyles as if they’re mainstream when they’re not. Let me tell you a little story about my sister. She’s passed away a few years now, and was born when I was 4 years old. We spent a lot of time together as toddlers and kids growing up. I was her biggest influence and she looked up to me and wanted to do what I was doing. She couldn’t always keep up, though, as she was much younger. One day, she said, “When I get to be a boy, I’m gonna do what Bob does.” She was probably around 3 or 4 years old when she said it, and it was a cute thing for a little girl to say at the time. She didn’t know that she was going to continue to be a girl for the rest of her life. At some point she must’ve figured out that she would never become a boy, and I guess she was okay with that. She grew up to be a beautiful, confident and very loud-talking woman who had a daughter who is now a mother of two. Although I often questioned her taste in men, I never once questioned the degree to which she became a woman. I have no reason to believe she ever wanted to be anything other than a woman once she understood that she wouldn’t become a boy. So, why am I telling you this story? It’s not to embarrass my late sister. It’s because in today’s environment, if a little girl said, “When I get to be a boy,” she may end up in some kind of therapy, perhaps mental and chemical, under the supposition that even though she is a biological female, she somehow identifies as a male. That’s what frightens people when the relatively small number of people living on the fringe of sexual identity insist on making it appear more common than it actually is. Ninety-nine point four of us are content living in the bodies we have and are enjoying life as the gender we’ve been since birth. 

The fact that a Supreme Court nominee can’t (or won’t) define a woman is just sad. Consider all that’s been done over the last century to improve the lives of women, to give women rights equal to men, to change our very culture to one of respect for women, to elevate women to the highest positions of government and industry around the globe, and especially here in the United States. All that work that’s been done by feminists, supporters of an Equal Right Amendment, making movies about both real and fictional female super heroines and recognizing great women throughout history. By the way, this week was my late sister’s birthday, born in 1966. She’s the only woman who made it onto my historical review this episode. Title IX and the push to elevate women’s sports exposure and success. The list goes on, but it may just stop right here. If we can’t define a woman, if the Supreme Court can’t decide what gender is, or how many there are, then what happens to the continuing fight for women’s rights? Are we just supposed to abandon that pursuit now that we don’t have a definition for what a woman is? By the way, the dictionary defines a woman as an adult female human being. The Supreme Court nominee was nominated for two reasons. One of the reasons is that the President thinks she’s a woman. Now I’m not so sure.

Speaking of women, there’s one who knows her place, and it’s not in the kitchen, nor is it in the poorly-named rock and roll hall of fame. Dolly Parton recently turned down the opportunity to be inducted into said hall. “I haven’t earned that right.” she said. Dolly recognizes that she’s never made a rock and roll record, unlike many of the other inductees, like Grandmaster Flash, Bonnie Raitt, and others who never made a rock and roll record in their lives. Dolly Parton realizes the Rock and Roll genre doesn’t include her. So if Dolly Parton is going to be represented in that hall, one of two things are going to have to happen: Either the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame changes its name the more accurate Popular Music Hall of Fame, or Dolly Parton needs to make a Rock and Roll record. None of this is new to Dolly. Back in 1980, I was working at a country music radio station in Allentown, PA called WHOL. At that time, Dolly Parton was being criticized for her recent album, Dolly, Dolly, Dolly, for it not being “country” enough. Yes, long before Taylor Swift and other country/pop crossover artists today, Dolly Parton was ahead of her time. In fact, her four previous albums also reached the top100 on the Pop Music chart. Dolly, Dolly, Dolly made it to number 7 on the country charts, but was her only one of five albums released between October 1977 and 1980 to not be certified gold. As for induction in the Rock and Roll hall of fame, Dolly says, “This has however inspired me to put out a hopefully great rock ‘n’ roll album at some point in the future, which I have always wanted to do! My husband is a total rock ‘n’ roll freak, and has always encouraged me to do one.” We’ll look forward to that, Dolly. And thank you for recognizing the difference between Rock and Roll and what you’ve always done so well. 

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