Naturalism and Nurses
Thoughts on Sandie Peggie’s legal proceedings
We are determined to de-naturalize sex. We are trying to make sex as disconnected from reproduction and the heterosexual marital bond, and hence from the family and kinship ties, as we possibly can. This is the most un-natural, the most posthuman, the most anti-human, cultural development in human history. As a result of this development we are performing massive untrialed state-run social engineering experiments, constructing entirely new roles for educating and child-care institutions, and developing deeply invasive family and community replacing technologies to manage individuals and the formation of children. All in the name of being liberated and equal. All in the 1960s sexual revolution name of being ‘natural’.
Natural men
Whilst it is only marginally possible to do this now, let us be blunt about a few natural facts of human sexuality.
I am a male of the human species. Even though I am no longer what you might call a fine physical specimen, I am still hormonally and physically wired to fight to protect my wife and daughters from marauding opportunist males. For such males do exist and, if they are not boxed in by various means, they will definitely try and abduct, assault, and rape the women I love and care about. You can call my male protectiveness towards my wife and daughters socially condition bigotry or sexism if you like, but actually, its natural.
Until recently, I have hardly ever felt the need to fight for (brace yourself) ‘my’ women, because gender conventions used to be very effective in recognizing and upholding the rights of my wife and daughters to physical and sexual safety from marauding men. Equally, there used to be a reasonable expectation that the law protected women and children from marauding males, and the police were authorized to use legitimate force to protect my wife and daughters. All of this is now breaking down. Males can now legally enter exclusively women’s safe and vulnerable spaces, and it is transwomen males in female spaces who will get institutional and police protection against any women who complains. This of course is a serious violation of the dignity and safety of womankind. But it is also a situation that men such as myself (old-fashioned natural males) find intolerable. Should my wife come home from work and tell me there is a transwoman in her changeroom and she is very uncomfortable about this, my response would definitely not be to tell my wife she is being a bigot and I’m sure her institution knows what it is doing. No! Such laws and such institutional guidelines are against nature, and not just against the natural needs of women for safe vulnerable spaces, but against the natures of men wanting their women to have safe spaces.
Don’t tell me there are no marauding males out there, for I, and my wife and daughters, have met them. And don’t tell me that no transwoman who wants to enter female only spaces could under no circumstances actually be a marauding male or fetishizing voyeur wanting to gratify his own sexual fantasies via gawking lasciviously at my wife and daughters. And don’t tell me that it is bigoted and unreasonable for my wife and daughters to expect to be able to have safe single sex spaces when they are changing, whether any given male identifying as female is a marauding sexual voyeur, or sexual predator, or not.
If my natural male protection responses towards threats experienced by ‘my’ women seem strange, I am wondering, whatever happened to naturalism?
Natural women
Sandie Peggie is a Scottish nurse of 30 years’ experience with an unblemished record, until 2023. She complained to a male transwoman doctor, Dr Upton, that she was uncomfortable with him being in the female change rooms with her. Peggie had to explain: “If I wanted to get changed in front of a man, I would have went to the male changing rooms.” At the time she complained to Dr Upton she was attending to her own menstrual needs. Doctor Upton responded to her expression of discomfort by lodged a harassment complaint against Peggie. The result, Peggie was suspended for “harassment” and has been under a continuous institutional “misconduct” cloud since Dr Upton lodged his complaint. Peggie has had to fight this ruling in the courts and the matter is currently adjourned until July. What a drawn out and profoundly costly business, in more than monetary terms, this has become for Sandie Peggie.
My mother was a nurse. There are very few people who have a more down to earth appreciation of the physical realities and natural needs of men and women, boys and girls, the elderly and babies. There are, of course, very capable male nurses. Even so, there is something unsurprisingly natural about the majority of nurses being female. Nurses, and mothers, really understand the practical care needs of physically dependent humans. My wife gestated, birthed and nursed our six babies, caring for them in their total dependence. Nurses and mothers concretely understand that natural biological realities are not a matter of abstract and performative identity politics, they are matters of human necessity.
Mothers in particular understand that in biological and relational reality, sex is actually about reproduction, hence human sexuality needs safe and nurturing environments for women and children, and this is not an identity performance. No transwoman will understand this because they are not reproductive females. You cannot un-explain what women need to female nurses and mothers, because they know what the truth is and they are not going to fall for any sort of delusional abstraction put forward as inclusive workplace virtue signalling. Nurses and mothers will tolerate a lot of things, but natural reality denying bullshit is simply something they will not swallow, no matter how much you threaten and punish them. A principled and realistic natural woman – and particularly one who has suffered sexual abuse from a man – is not going to budge an inch from the truth about the natural realities of human sex.
The conundrums of naturalism
At the time when Russell Brand really was a marauding womanizing male sex icon, he was untouchable. Unsurprisingly, now that Brand has seriously and consistently turned away from the celebrity profligate lifestyle, a press enflamed retrospective moral outrage is after his balls on a plate. The philandering male sex symbol has been valorised since the 1960s because we are now determined to celebrate all and any hedonistic erotic desire as natural and hence good. Casting aside prudish Christian sexual ethics, James Bond set the scene for the glamorizing of male sexual conquest. Sex, violence, and male power, all wash together in the Bond mythology. Somehow men behaving like profligate dicks was both seductive and ‘natural’, but men wanting to protect their women from being treated like expendable sex objects by fast and lose men (the James Bond type) was prudish. Hmm… think a little about the odd inclusions and exclusions in the post-1960s social construction of ‘the natural’.
Ironically, feminism is the central reason why time-out-of-mind cultural expressions of the natural wiring of men to protect their women has been dropped. Simone de Beauvoir’s “second sex”, the female sex, is theorized by her as an inferior male, doomed to subjugation because of her weaker more naturally inter-dependent sexual body. She is the second sex, not the first sex, because she is cursed in her vulnerabilities due to her reproductive needs and maternal nature. The second wave feminism de Beauvoir inspired promoted the equality imperative of treating men and women as in all regards equals, making as little of the biological differences between men and women as possible. Thus did postwar feminism set about undoing natural patterns of male and female social interdependence where men protect and defend their women. Contraception and abortion give a women power over her sexual vulnerabilities and equalized the score with sexually irresponsible men. Whether this resulted in – as Germaine Greer put it – the rise of female eunuchs or not, it certainly emasculated any traditional natural man who felt wired to provide for and protect his woman. But it gets worse than that. In the 1990s, along comes third wave feminism with Judith Butler, which efeminated natural women such that sex based definitions of woman are now ruled out. And, of course, a man can now gender-identify as – of all things – female. This is an inclusive feminism that has no interest in what your sex is. Oh brave new “feminism.”
Since de Beauvoir, there has been a feminist war against human reproductive nature going on, in the name of women’s liberation, and the question of whether this has really been in the genuine interests of women is now pressing. The individualizing of women so that they are no longer relationally defined as the wife of their husband or the daughter of their father is a significant aspect of the far from woman benefiting Sexual Revolution. But in defence of the old way, my wife and daughters as ‘my’ women is fully reciprocated with me being ‘their’ man. And none of this stops any of us from being a unique individual. And then, what is so bad about la différence?
I have a daughter who rides a motorcycle. She has a great seat, she is elegant, poised, has great traffic and conditions awareness, and handles her machine very well. I watch her ride with much admiration. But there really is a difference in style between how she and I ride. My style, compared with her style, is more joyously aggressive, more forward, more at one with the machine, the assertion of will and action into space and time in my riding is more prominent. My daughter is not in any sense a defective male, but our styles really are different. These stylistic differences are, in the end, physiologically influenced, as being embodied is integral with who we are. The male body is in some sense naturally built to fight and to be externalizing and assertively active. Is it shocking to say this? The female body is in some sense naturally built to bear and nurture children. Is it shocking to say this? A male is not a defective female who can’t get pregnant, and a female is not a defective male who can’t produce sperm, but males and females really are two physiologically and hormonally different body types and this impacts on who we are and how we function.
There is no sex-defined reason why a woman shouldn’t like riding motorcycles and be genuinely expert in so doing, but the reality is, males and females at comparable levels of competitive achievement, still ride differently. This is all naturally obvious, but we are now meant to not notice these differences as if it is a slight against women to do so. Sure, women can do anything (except produce small gametes), but they do what they do as women, not as men. Sure, nurture, infant care, household chores can be done by men just as well as they are done by women, but they are done as men do them, not as women do them. I’m a nurturing father type who did a lot of nappy changes and baby care (particularly for our too very ill infants) and loved it. But I was not mother, I was father. More generally, there really are stylistic, attitudinal and behavioural differences between men and women. And, suck it up, men cannot bear children, whether or not they take estrogen, have their genitals removed, and get a prosthetic body cavity implant inserted between their legs. Let us be honest about nature. Let us be honest about ways nature is naturally expressed in culture. And let us be honest about how nature and sex shape human identity.
In reality we are more fundamentally relationally and naturally defined than we are individually and ‘freely’ defined. And this is an enormous part of the problem with subjective and performative “gender-identity”. For an atomic and performed ‘identity’, by and for the self, it is no real identity at all. Real identity is naturally and relationally given, not individually and performatively made. In concrete natural reality, who I am is most basically defined by the nature and relationships I did not choose. I did not choose my parents or relatives, I did not choose my name, I did not choose my sex, and – as a language user – I do not reasonably get to choose my pronouns. “Gender Identity” is a denial of the actual reality of who I unchoosingly am. But now we have made performative fantasies trump natural realities, and a women will get suspended for harassment for telling a man in the women’s changerooms that he should not be there. What anti-natural madness have we unleashed?
Nature and the sacred
Twentieth-century secular naturalism took the transcendent spiritual horizon out of sex. Worse than that, it made naturalistic sex the spiritual measure of personal fulfilment. This was not good for sex or nature. As Malcolm Muggeridge grasped, “sexuality” now carries a ‘meaning of life’ weight, without any transcendent horizon to give it any more meaning than a brief orgasmic ping, and it has been separated out from human reproduction and familial bonding as much as we possibly can. Nature, high meaning, and familial meaning have been excised from sex, and it is now just an identity game and a hedonic recreational past-time played by sex and gender confused people. But if by some strange fluke of legal misfortune, one is not sex and gender confused, one is still required to play the natural sex denying and gender-identity affirming fantasy game. And so bizarre identity games replace natural reality, atomistic fantasy replaces any common social horizon of natural meaning, and strangely constructed delusions replace the realities of sex. CEOs and judges seem to have less than primary school awareness about the natural facts of life. This is the worst of all possible worlds.
And here is a very odd thing about modern naturalism: it is seriously un-natural. All cultures until our own have nested the natural realities of human sexuality in the categories of the sacred. For sure, you can read Foucault’s exploration of how the privately powerful male citizen pursued sexual desire as a function of self-care, and any boy or slave that he owned was simply his property to sexually use for his own care however he saw fit. Frankly, this is pretty similar to how Foucault himself is reported to have behaved in Tunisia and California. But cults, liturgical ceremonies, and sacred vows were always integral with marriage and the sexual reproduction that arises from marriage in Classical times, no matter what personal sexual liberties powerful men obviously (and despicably) took with their private property. Foucault can valorise that world, but I think a culture shaped by categories of the universal sanctity of all people and Christian marital sexual ethics is substantially less barbaric than a culture defined by the glories of ancient Greco-Roman privileged male power.
Returning to the present; without a sacred horizon to the meaning of sex – a horizon that is above my own wishes and performative fantasies and hedonic gratifications, a horizon of real spiritual meaning – we have no reason to respect the mysteries and natural wonders of concrete sexual realities. We just make things up and act and fanaticise however we like. But every women’s sexual integrity really is sacred and really should be protected. And men who violate women and children in their sexual vulnerabilities should be judged guilty and punished.
Men’s sexual integrity is sacred too, and it is integral with stable and safe family life. Social conventions that strongly curtail the sexual objectification of women should be upheld. Modesty and sexual propriety is crucial for safe and flourishing human societies. On-line porn, and the enormous and hugely lucrative sex industry, and the sexualizing of advertising, should all be illegal. But we have promoted the commodification of sexual desire, and in order to do that, we have killed off the very idea of the sacredness of human sexuality. Hence, as Sandie Peggie’s case sadly illustrates, we now have no sacred respect for the distinctive natures and needs of real women. And we don’t allow any sacred role for husbands and fathers, as real natural men either. What a mess.
So, I pray for Sandie Peggie. Natural reality is on her side, but our laws and workplaces are no longer on the side of natural reality. She will need a miracle to win.