It’s generally agreed that sex-selection is a Bad Thing. In India and China, sons are favoured over daughters – but so are they in the USA, where the margin has only moved a few points since the 1940s; 38 per to 24 per cent then, 36 per cent to 28 per cent now.
Not surprisingly this overall preference is driven by men; 43 per cent preferred a son compared to 24 per cent who preferred a daughter while women showed no preference. This may be down to the somewhat doomy male perception that, as Billy Bigelow sang in the musical Carousel ‘You can have fun with a son – but you gotta be a father to a girl!’ This led Bigelow to take to a life of crime and be shot dead by the police before his daughter was born – so that worked out well.
How sad and strange it will be if this female subservience helps build a mostly male brave new world
The rise of trans-activism raises questions in this area for followers of the magical thinking associated with the lobby. If babies are merely ‘assigned at birth’ and if we are to go along with the trans-theory claim that being gender critical is a racist white Western shtick – and that the developing world is far more sympathetic to their kind – then surely the thorny issue of sex-selection is solved. Stonewall can simply inform a Sudanese subsistence farmer that though their new baby may appear to be a girl, it’s entirely likely to change into a boy during adolescence. Problem solved.
Except it never works out that way. Like straight male pop stars and politicos keen to be good trans-allies but apparently believing that trans-women are women only so long as it doesn’t involve having sex with them. So, I was interested to see that a gay male couple are suing a Californian fertility clinic after they ordered a son but were served a daughter.
Pink News huffed this month:
Albert and Anthony Saniger were determined to be fathers to two sons. Before the couple wed in 2013 they had already chosen the names of their future kids and even created Gmail accounts for them. The HRC Fertility clinic and fertility specialist Dr Bradford A Kolb reportedly assured the couple that they could make this happen. The couple were explicitly clear that they wanted a male embryo implanted in their surrogate. The couple is seeking unspecified damages, citing the $300,000 cost of the fertility process, as well as the cost of raising three children instead of two, as they still plan to have two sons.
The clinic huffed back:
Every child has value and limitless potential regardless of gender…we hope the Sanigers find love and value in their healthy child while so many across the country are struggling with reproductive issues.
This got me thinking – when gay men choose surrogacy, do they often specify the sex of the baby? It’s an interesting one. Is there a big sex-selective thing going on, a desire to father only boys, in the world of the mostly wealthy, white gay men who make up such a large part of the surrogacy industry?
Gay surrogacy is now accepted in popular culture. For some years in The Archers, the apparently mute ‘Xander’ has been the test-tube offspring of resident Lovely Gay Couple Adam and Ian (the names inevitably leading one to think of the old redneck joke, ‘It was Adam and Eve – not Adam and Ian!’) who hired a Bulgarian fruit-picker to have a baby for them.
It’s interesting to contrast the approving attitude of the writers towards this situation compared with the fire-and-brimstone treatment meted out to poor Rory for touting himself out to a sexy cougar for pay. It’s degrading for men to hire parts of themselves out, presumably – whereas women have always done it, so that’s OK.
Over at scripted-reality show Made In Chelsea, Ollie and Gareth are expecting twins. Sadly they suffered a miscarriage some time ago (or rather their surrogate did) after which Ollie described feeling ‘emasculated’ by the experience. Hopefully he and Gareth will soon be in the fortunate position of Tom Daley and his husband Dustin Lance Black when they welcomed Robbie Ray Black-Daley into the world on Insta.
And of course there’s the grandaddy of them all, Elton John, who quipped recently that his surrogated sons were ‘co-fathering’ a male dog. There was a poignant photo in 2018 of John, David Furnish, the actor Neil Patrick Harris and his fiance David Burtka, each couple with two surrogate children apiece; just one of them was a little girl and how odd-one-out she looked in this world of men.
It’s telling that women like Angelina Jolie who have adopted children from impoverished backgrounds and improved their lives greatly get a good deal more flak than gay couples who use surrogates to pander to their own narcissism.
Once again we are witnessing the normalisation of whatever men want women to do and the demonisation of women who do what they want. Once again, this further twist in the Handmaid’s Tale comes from the liberal establishment, not from the right. The idea of women being put on earth to serve and accommodate men persists; it would be very weird indeed if women escaped their habit of deferring to heterosexual men only to reassume their subservient role to homosexual men and transvestite men.
We already have the Transmaids, in particular those female Labour MPs who get angry about the repulsive level of violence against women but in the next breath say it’s fine and dandy for a rapist to be housed in a female prison if he decides he wants to be called Karen, not Kieron. And now the surrogates bearing sons for rich white men.
How sad and strange it will be if this female subservience under the cape of ‘being kind’ helps build a mostly male brave new world. It would be carrying on the erasure of women – which increasingly appears to be the grand project of the 21st century Left – by another means.
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