Deus Servavi: II

The purple duck bobbed, ploughing the suds with the tenacity and vigour only attainable by the very finest rubber ducks. God sighed contentedly, and flicked the duck with her foot, sending it swashing off to new adventures in the far-flung outer reaches of the bathtub. The bath had been a good idea, and God let her auburn hair fall down the sides of the tub to brush the warm slates of the floor below. Of course, being the manifestation of a shared cosmic consciousness, the auburn of the hair could easily have been grey, or blue, or even ultra-puce, and, given that there was no observer, it was all three and none, all at the same time. But the bath was real, and the room was too, a little piece of metaphysical engineering of which God was rather proud. It might be made of the coalescence of countless trillions of thoughts and dreams, but it was as solid a foundation as rock. The trouble was, God wasn’t a huge fan of rock; and, looking at the duck, now fighting bravely against the impossibility of progression beyond the ceramic cliffs of the bath’s sides, her thoughts strayed back through billions of years…

 

Rocks. That was what they were. If God had been in a generous mood, she would have admired the fascinating geology crafted by the effects of the few simple rules she’d established right at the Bang, rules that now led to plumes of fire and crafted new types of rock in the heart of the planets. She didn’t admire it; they were rocks. Squeezed, leaking rocks. Truth be told, she was lonely. Oh there were the angels, alright, but they were merely extensions of the same cosmic consciousness as her, and as such dull. She’d swiftly found that conversations with someone who held exactly the same thoughts as you couldn’t be conversations at all. She might as well have been talking to the backs of her hands, and she’d given that up after a few millennia, so the angels had never got off the ground as companions. But here, in the stuff that had come from the nothingness, there was potential. The rocks were oozing with it, or at the very least oozing. She summoned all of the power at her disposal, which, given the whole omnipotence thing, was quite a lot, and focussed, forced consciousness into the very matter of the planet below, crafting a spark within it; life! The planet, new, aware, a sudden entity in a vast unknown, was confronted by the beauty and wonder of creation. The stars! The planets! The endless gaps between them! It drank it all in, and, with a surge of its newly acquired life force, blew itself into a billion pieces.

God sulked for a week.

But when she returned, something was different. Far at the edge of boundless space, one rock was, well, weird. She walked on its surface, the blistering heat doing nothing to the cognitive mist of her soles. Her soles of souls. Within the green pools of this world, there were… things. Tiny things, little more than chemical strings, but things nonetheless. She felt a brief moment of concern that she wasn’t sure how they got there. Oh she knew, of course – it was in the description, as it were – but the exact details were foggy. It was like the beach on which she walked; she knew it was made of 123434776463 grains of sand; it was just that finding grain #100352834586 would be more than a bit of a bugger. The conscious rock had exploded, and that had, in some fashion, brought about this stuff, this essence, this life. Who cared quite how it had got there, it was the chance she had wanted.

She considered the next move. What she really wanted was something to watch, to be fascinated by, maybe even to talk to. But to just make it… that seemed wrong, too simple, too limited – she might just make a slightly different version of the angels, and frankly there’d been enough games of celestial charades where everyone played “the endless bounds of eternity” to last her, aptly, eternally. No, the best move seemed the least. She looked back at the planets, spinning in their full nothingness, and thought of the rules she’d put in place. She smiled.

 

And so it had been. A few simple rules had seen to it that survival begat survival, and off the little things went. And God sat, and she watched across the millions of years, and she wondered at the brilliant branching it all took, flying off in all directions. Here, a line had taken to the skies, soaring across the planet on limbs replete with feathers originally designed to cool the blood; there, life had stayed simple, but now ruled deep within the crust of the planet, all but unknown to its distant brethren above. All had come from those little squiggly lines; so much, so amazingly different, so fantastic. And God felt a little guilty to pick favourites, but there were favourites to be picked, and among them walked the funny little pale apes…

 

But, thought God, as he arose from the depths of the bath and shook the water from his silky fur, that was a story for another bath.

 

Sex, Gender and Sexuality

I’ve been thinking about sex for some time. In fact, I’ve been thinking about sex for about 11 years, and even more so recently (which I am attributing to the long-term effects of someone –who-shall-not-be-named giving me ant-flavoured hot beverages at the weekend), but that’s not what I’m referring to. It’s not even the same meaning, which is apt, as the meanings of sex is what this piece is about.

I’d always considered sex and gender the same thing, basically thinking the latter was a more formal and euphemistic synonym of the former. However, as I’ve now discovered, when you hang around psychologists, that bird don’t fly no more. Sex and gender become two different things; sex takes on a biological and deterministic meaning, while gender forms a more abstract, personal psychological concept, with inherent ties to the concept of self, and other such grandiose ideas that tend to send me scurrying for cover. It is this idea that drives the acceptance of transsexualism and gender-queerness, that such characteristics are indicative of conflict between one’s sex and one’s gender.

But my coffee-fuelled mind raises a couple of objections, or at least modifications, to this new idea. Firstly, sex isn’t deterministic. I don’t think it’s a bell curve as such, but rather two overlapping distributions forming a bimodal-like distribution, which I’ve described below:

 

Genetics define the two distributions; you are male if you possess a Y chromosome, and female if you do not. But it isn’t as simple as that. Sufferers of Klinefelter’s syndrome, for example, are XXY; they are phenotypically male, but textbook cases present with feminised features and often fertility problems. Sufferers of Klinefelter’s would fall in the cleavage of my graph (huh-huh it looks like tits), on the male side. However, maleness and femaleness needn’t be typified by conditions; there is probably a normal distribution across the whole population. If gene expression varies between individuals (which it almost certainly does), it stands to reason that some people may exhibit very high levels of one set of sex hormones, and very little of the others, and may fall at the edges of my graph, whereas those with more balanced levels (who may be more androgynous) would be in the middle. This androgyny would be separate to hermaphroditism, in that androgynes would be genitally one sex, but there degree of maleness or femaleness would be similarly low; the runner Caster Semenya comes to mind as an example of a very masculinised female. This complicates the sex-gender conflict; not only gender, but also sex, is a variable concept. Ms Semenya presumably identifies very strongly as a woman, which probably made her biologically ambiguous sex all the more distressing. This isn’t an abstract or philosophical argument either; fertility medicine must be concerned with a patient’s position on the sex dimension, regardless as to whether they identify as male, female, or transsexual.

 

That last word bugs me. I have nothing against transsexuals (I’m not Julie Burchill), although if I know one personally I am unaware of it. My qualm is with the word (still not Julie Burchill, don’t worry). I would much rather it were transgender, as it then lies on a gender continuum:

  The word transsexual confuses gender with sexuality. The two are definitely linked, and are also linked with sex in a three-way (obvious innuendo fully intended) interaction. However, being transgender does not preclude one from being heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual… hang on, there’s loads of these: this one’ll be a really FUN graph…

So, yeah. Those are my thoughts on that. You’d never guess I have real work that I’m supposed to be doing, would you?

Deus Servavi: I

It was a Tuesday, or so the humans said. God always felt strange on Tuesdays, which was itself peculiar, as for most of the previous fifteen billion years they hadn’t existed. But still, he’d always felt strange on Tuesdays. He filed the thought away for a later time, perhaps during one of the nice long baths Gabriel was adept at making. As much as God was always omniscient, it was so much more satisfying being omniscient in the bath.

 

But the bath could wait. For now, God gazed down at the world. His world, as much as any of it could really be called his. He thought back, back to the beginning, to the curious nothingness that had never existed, for how could anything exist without space? It had been a curious time, constrained but endless, eternal but without time. In short, it had been bloody boring. And all of a sudden he’d had an idea; stuff! That was what was needed. Matter! Of course, being both eternal and all-knowing, he’d had the idea ages ago, and wouldn’t think of it for quite some time; sometimes being God made his head hurt, or at least it would have if he had corporal form, or a gender for that matter. He found the baths helped.

 

But the matter thing hadn’t been easy, which would have come as a surprise to God without the whole omniscience malarkey. It wasn’t that he couldn’t make the matter, that was simple enough, but it wouldn’t stay. He made it, and within moments it would undergo catastrophic failure and implode, and it would be back to the nothingness. It would have been incredibly disheartening, but those brief moments, oh those moments! If God had been coarser, he would have found them orgasmic (except that he wasn’t vulgar, and so found them merely intensely and profoundly pleasurable – it had struck him, in the absences between the moments, as grossly unfair that he could be all-kind and all-knowing, but that omni-pleasure was denied him). He became addicted – he had to have more moments, more time. Again he tried, except that, in the nothingness, there was no again, only now and forever; but regardless, he tried again. And again. And again. And then, for some variety, he gave it another go. And finally, after a million and no tries, it worked; a perfect balance, matter with anti-matter, energy perfectly balanced. Nothingness defeated by nothingness; he’d enjoyed the irony so much he’d spent the first billion years in a celebratory bath. The hot water hadn’t been run for a while, and the boiler had given a considerable bang, which had scattered the matter about a bit, but that, at the time, had seemed a side-issue. Finally, there was something!