Was der Mensch Quasten hat, und die Frau hat Hoden !
--Georg Büchner, Woyzeck (1837); slightly revised for these modern times
The California legislature, taking some much-needed time off from worrying about the actual real-world economic problems that are bedeviling their state, have just passed a bill to remedy the shameful and little-known suppression of mention of the massive contributions of eunuchs and the like to American history, science, and culture, requiring schools to revise their curricula accordingly (competence in math and language meanwhile returning to the back burner). Governor Moonbeam has signed it into law.
(That title-slug does not say it all: the law specifically requires promotion of the "transgendered".)
This is wonderful. Now at last the schoolchildren of this great land can learn about the magnificent achievements of such transgender physicists as Alberta Einstein(**), Dick(less) Feynman, and Stephanie Hawking !
(**. I could have written Keinstein; but that would have been in bad taste, and good taste is so-o important to us. Plus only three people would get the joke.)
*
In the Comments section of the L.A. Times, I challenged readers (who were mostly foamingly in favor of this latest special-interest ingérence into public education) to offer a single example of a great American achievement, mention of which had been actually suppressed (for such is the contention of the law’s supporters) owing to the sexual deviancy of the achiever. The sole example given was that of Alan Turing. That limps on both legs, since
(a) As an Englishman, not an American, Turing is not covered by the law.
(b) Turing is already one of the very best-known scientists of the past century, his achievements (or, if these be too technical, his glowing Being) celebrated throughout the land.
Now, not knocking Turing here at all; a major figure; a mathematician, and, incidentally, a patriot, having rendered great services to the cryptography and the Intelligence Community against the Nazis. The subject, moreover, of an excellent biography, by a gay author, Andrew Hodges. All I wish to point out, in the present context, is that his public fame has if anything be aided by something that, near as I can tell, was pointlessly irrelevant to his actual -- very abstract -- mentation, namely his sexual orientation.
After all, Church’s Thesis and the Turing conjecture (concerning effectively calculable functions in Recursive Function Theory) turned out to be logically equivalent; yet who has heard of Alonso Church? Turing made contributions to mathematics and the development of computers; but these pale by comparison to those of his contemporary John von Neumann -- who likewise contributed keenly to the war effort (and to theoretical physics), and who is much less well known. That is to say: He is reasonably well-known among the educated; but among the half-educated, I’d wager that ten people have heard of Turing for every one that has heard of von Neumann. And this, I would venture, not because of any inordinate public fascination with the Halting Problem, but because of the frisson over deviant sex.
Bottom line: It’s a stupid law, the product of a notably narcissistic population and a notoriously dysfunctional state legislature.
* * *
Tired of marinating
in a rehash of such squalid shenanigans?
Then bail out and
read something timeless instead:
(For those not opting
to do so --
We now return you to
the folly of life here below.)
* * *
[Update]
Now that's diverse !
(A gang of transgenders rampages at Dunkin Donuts... Can't make this stuff up.)
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