On Sex and Gender

While many Christians may see the idea that there are only two genders as so obvious as to not even require explanation, our society no longer sees it that way.  There is an increasing movement in society today there is an increasing movement in our culture and nation today to push for the celebration of and catering toward transexuality, especially toward those who identify as "non-binary"—neither male nor female.  Not many months ago, The National Geographic devoted an entire issue to discussing how our understanding of gender had been "revolutionized" to see gender as a fluid spectrum running from male to female, where individuals could move from one to the other or drift along somewhere inbetween as they pleased.  Bill Nye of "Science Guy" fame endorsed similar views with a tonedeaf dance number.  More and more major media outlets have followed suit.  Legal changes are beginning as well, and not just making it possible to identify as a non-binary gender on legal documents.  In Canada, Bill C-16 is set to define the use of gender binary pronouns (such as him or her) as "harassment" punishable by a fine.  Many of those who support it on the far left consider the use of him or her to constitute "hate speech."  Saying that there are only two genders and two biological sexes isn't just old-fashioned, it's painted as false, offensive, bigoted, and—if some groups get their way—someday illegal.  If Christians are to engage with this rising movement in our culture and in the powerful halls of academia, media, and politics, they must be able to explain why they believe what they believe on sex and gender.

So here is my attempt.

First off, I want to respond to some of the arguments employed by the proponents of non-binary gender.  Many of these arguments are emotional, accusing anyone who doesn't subscribe to their beliefs about gender (or worse yet voices a contrary opinion) of bigotry, hate, phobia (transphobia, specifically), and trying to "deny the existence of trans people."  While these arguments are often made very passionately, they are at bottom misinformation, empty rhetoric, and emotional manipulation.  Arguing that someone is not who they claim to be is not in any way a denial of their existence, even if the claim one disagrees with is central to that person's view of themselves.  For example, it is not a denial of the existence of Mormons to argue that Mormonism is not a Christian denomination but a cult.  Mormonism is very central to the lives of millions of people who shape their every decision throughout their entire lives around it, and they hold it to be a true representation of faithful Christian doctrine and themselves to be true Christians.  Saying it isn't so doesn't mean you think these Mormons don't exist—it means you think these Mormons are mistaken about the Christian religion and their place within it.  So also, denying the claims that non-binary or trangender advocates or individuals make does not erase these people or invalidate them as people: it just states that you believe they are mistaken about some of the things they believe about the world and themselves.  Likewise, arguing against these beliefs is not a phobia.  A phobia is an extreme irrational fear or aversion to something.  I have mild arachnophobia: if a spider were to come anywhere near me, or touch me, I would instinctively jump and try to brush it off in a pulse-pounding panic.  When a non-binary trangender sits next to me at work, I don't recoil in instinctive dread: I make small talk and ask them about work because I am not in any honest sense of the word a transphobic.  Disagreeing with someone isn't a phobia.  It isn't bigotry either.  The KKK was and is bigoted toward blacks, believing them to be an inferior race.  They fought tooth and nail to avoid even having to share restaurant counters with them.  But disagreeing with someone doesn't entail bigotry.  Two may disagree and share a meal or a table (as I have with some non-binary trangender folk).  Thinking someone else is mistaken does not mean thinking someone else is inferior—especially not for a Christian.  For a Christian one of the first tenants is that we are all sinners and continue to be so despite our best efforts, never coming to a complete grasp of the whole truth or a perfect application of it.  In Christianity, we are all of us mistaken on something, and none of us have cause to feel superior for a disagreement (that would be called pride, the mistake of thinking you're better and more important than you actually are).  Disagreeing with someone, even on a core belief, is not disavowing their existence, a phobia, or bigotry. Claiming it is one of these things silences other opinions and stifles any hope of really understanding gender, whether you believe it is binary and static or non-binary and fluid.  You cannot evaluate or appreciate the validity of your own belief until you have seen it contrasted with other points of view—and you can't do that if you label everyone who disagrees with you a hater to silence them.  If you really feel you must silence everyone who disagrees with you in order to feel safe, then the only one with real problems with phobia or bigotry is you.

Second, gender and sex are two sides of the same coin, not two unrelated topics.  Gender is defined as the state of being male or female: sex or the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex.  Sex is defined as either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species and that are distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs or structures (all definitions from Merriam-Webster, 2017).  While there is a trend to try to disassociate these terms and say gender is a social construction completely divorced from biological sex, such redifinition is misleading.  While there are aspects of gender which are socially constructed, such as gendered fashion (suits for men, dresses for women) and gender roles, there are other aspects of gender which seem to be founded in biology (like women tending to be more nurturing and men tending to be more aggressive).  Even the aspects of gender which are socially constructed are seldom arbitrary, and usually trace back to real differences between the sexes.  Take suits and dresses, for instance, in our own culture.  Suits are descended from military uniforms because militaries are overwhelmingly made up of men; dresses are descended from everyday tunics lengthened and modified to make them visibly impractical for work because most of the people sheltered from hard physical labor are women—and both differences come down to the general characteristics of the sexes, where men are generally stronger than women and therefore more fit for military service and better able to free up their female compatriots from manual labor.  Those who argue for gender as a fluid spectrum likewise prove that gender and sex are tightly interrelated as they fluidly move from discussion of gender roles to discussion of intersex conditions in their arguments and typically have the end goal of abolishing both gender and sex as categories entirely, making no real distinction.

Finally, I'd like to take a look at typical arguments for gender as a fluid spectrum and point out how backward their logic really is.  In nearly every argument made for this position, its proponent will begin by pointing out the fact that both gender roles and the clothing and hairstyles by which each gender is identified in day-to-day life vary from culture to culture and are socially constructed.  Having demonstrated this, they will use this point as a foundation for understanding every other difference between the sexes, rendering them mere social constructs by comparison.  Their first stop is typically to point out that the secondary sex characteristics which we normally use to determine the sex or gender of others can vary from person to person. Not all women are shorter than men or have visibly developed breasts. Not all men have deeper voices or facial hair.  The conclusion they draw from this is that male and female are arbitrary categories that we draw on the spectrum of true human sexual diversity. Similarly they point out that various intersex conditions can result in people having genitals, sexual organs, or genetic makeups that vary from the clear male-female norm.  They will call these conditions commonplace, normal, and healthy—and use them to sell the argument that the biological distinctions we draw in these areas are similarly arbitrary and artificial categories imposed upon a wonderful spectrum of human diversity.

But to anyone who has even a cursory understanding of and honest interest in these topics, such reasoning is entirely backward.  It's fairly ridiculous to draw conclusions about human genetics and biology from observations of human fashion.  The kind of clothes a person wears doesn't change their biology or genetic makeup, but rather is influenced by these deeper facets of who they are.

For a Christian there is another element to consider, the most important one of all, and that is God.  For an honest Christian, looking into the truth about gender and sex should start not with an examination of whether people wear pink or blue (the actual foundational starting point of one pseudo-scientific gender spectrum argument), but with the truths presented in the Word of God. To a Christian, God's perspective on things should never be an afterthought. So, what does the Bible say? The Bible says that in the beginning God created them "male and female." This is a distinction that the Bible carries all the way through with no mention of any spectrum of genders or allowance for people changing their own sex. According to the Bible there are only two genders—male and female—and they are not socially constructed, but created by God in the beginning and declared "very good."

Of course, we need not take the Bible's word for it. Science tells the same story. Any honest scientific discussion of sex or gender must begin not with who wears a skirt but with the discussion of biological sex itself. Biological sex is an aspect of sexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction is one of the most prominent forms of reproduction in the natural world and is the form of reproduction employed by our own species. In sexual reproduction, genetic information from multiple individual donors is combined to create the genetic code of a new individual of the species. The number of genetic donors determines the number of sexes in that species. In humans as in most species the number of genetic donors, and the number of sexes, is two. These are called male and female and are distinguished not by their style of dress but by the way in which they donate genetic and cellular material to reproduction. Males donate genetic material only using sperm cells whose sole function is to deliver the genetic material to the egg and then be destroyed. Females donate both the genetic material and the egg cell that will become the cellular foundation of the new individual. In some species (especially plants), a single individual can fulfill both reproductive roles or maybe able to switch reproductive roles during their lifetime. But for humans and most other mammalian species these roles are distinct and do not change.  In fact in many species, including humans there is a physiological difference between the two sexes beyond simply having different reproductive organs, causing males and females to have different sizes, builds, or colorations (called secondary sex characteristics).  These differences are lumped under the umbrella of sexual dimorphism, and humans are a moderately sexually dimorphic species—meaning that in humans sexual dimorphism is more akin to a bell curve of general tendencies as opposed to a strongly sexually dimorphic species where the differences are more black and white (such as in peafowl or anglerfish).

Of course, an individual need not reproduce or even be capable of reproduction to be considered male or female. The reproductive role of an individual is designated by their genetic code even if that individual is themselves, for other reasons, unable to reproduce. In humans, these reproductive roles are designated by the sex chromosomes X and Y. A normal male has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. A normal female has two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome. The chromosomal makeup of an individual is determined at birth and remains constant throughout their lifetime.  It cannot be changed. This makeup, known as the individual's genotype, determines the physical expression of that gender in the individual, known as their phenotype. It is this immutable genotype that determines what an individual's genitals and reproductive organs will be and what secondary sex characteristics they will develop. These characteristics are genetically, not socially determined, as an everyday expression of the real biological divide between male and female that is expressed in our genes.

At this point, an advocate of the gender spectrum view might object that not everyone falls into these genetic norms, and may attempt to assert that the mere existence of intersex people completely invalidates the scientific understanding of sex and gender. But the existence of exceptions does not disprove the rule.  No matter how many intersex conditions exist humans still reproduce sexually with only two genetic donors. We remain a species with only two biological sexes. To understand what intersex conditions are we have to understand where they come from. These conditions more commonly known as Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD) in the scientific community are usually caused by rare genetic disorders which caused an individual's phenotypical sex to develop in an unusual way.  There is a very wide variety of DSDs, and all of them are very rare.  While gender spectrum advocates like to play these conditions off as commonplace things everyone has, the reality is that the largest possible estimate of the population affected by these disorders (after lumping together every single abnormality of sexual development known to medical science, including those that are practically undetectable) is 1.7%.  The prevalence of even the most common DSD is only 1 in a thousand—comparable to your odds of dying in a housefire or contracting HIV (both 1 in 1,000).  Most effect far fewer people, becoming about as commonplace as being struck lightning during one's lifetime (1 in 13,000).  They are far from ordinary, and they are by no means medically normal.

The exact cause and nature of these abnormalities varies from condition to condition. Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome for instance is caused by a rare genetic mutation that causes the developing fetus's body to be unable correctly process the hormones involved in sexual development. Other conditions (such as Klinefelter Syndrome) are caused by an individual receiving too many copies of a sex chromosome, which is called polyploidy and is a genetic error similar to what causes Down syndrome (which is caused by having three copies of chromosome 21). In other cases an individual may receive too few sex chromosomes (such as Turner Syndrome) which is known monosomy as similar to what causes Cri Du Chat Syndrome. In all cases, these are not new sexes or new genders: these are medical conditions. While some are relatively benign, others can have a severe impact on an individual's life and require lifelong medical treatment to manage. Nearly all render the individual completely unable to reproduce, dashing any hopes these people may have of ever having children of their own. These are disabilities and can have a huge negative impact on the lives of the individuals they effect. With this in mind, I cannot help but think of it as callous and heartless to use such people as political pawns in an argument for gender spectrum ideology by trying to take advantage of them and trying to convince others that these disabilities are new gender identities to be celebrated and reveled in rather than disabilities to be treated and hopefully someday cured.

Irregularities with genitals are often the phenotypic expression of genetic disorders of sexual development. Even when they are not these irregularities are medical conditions and may be considered disabilities, and it disturbs me to see those who call themselves transexual advocates callously use these disabilities in an effort to win arguments on the nature of gender. This advocate, for instance uses survivors of cancer who have had their testicles removed as an example of a possible new biological sex. Just because a man is a survivor of testicular cancer does not mean he is no longer a man or suddenly some third sex. This is mild however compared to the case of David Reimer (born Bruce Reimer) who suffered from a botched circumcision operation shortly after birth. Rather than treating Bruce with compassion for the injury and permanent amputation he had suffered, Doctor John Money (a prominent proponent of the idea that gender was merely a social construct) chose to use him as a poster child in his argument for gender. Little Bruce was subjected to further surgeries without his consent in an effort to reshape is genitals to resemble those of a female. Doctor Money then directed his family to raise him as a girl (Brenda) despite the fact that he consistently identified himself as male, which was his birth and genetic gender. This situation caused a great deal of distress and harm for him.  Bruce eventually took the name David in an effort to reclaim his true gender, and eventually committed suicide at the age of 38—a tragedy which could have been prevented if Doctor Money had been more keen on helping his patient than politicizing the maiming of an infant.

Disturbingly, this trend of using people's disabilities to win arguments for political ends continues even with individuals who is disability is not physical. Many who identify as transsexual, such as prominent YouTuber and activist Blair White, has been diagnosed with a mental condition known as gender dysphoria which causes their brain to physiologically process information in a way more similar to the function of the brain of a member of the opposite sex then a member of their own sex. As a consequence, such individuals often feel like strangers in their own bodies and frequently identify as members of the opposite sex. The exact cause of gender dysphoria is unknown, and there is currently no cure, but it is not a lifestyle choice or a sign that there is more than one gender. It is a mental condition, a disability, and it can have a severe effect on an individual's life. Even after transitioning to life as a member of the opposite sex and being surrounded by a society that supports them, people with gender dysphoria suffer from a high rate of depression and suicide. Dishearteningly the only response from the so-called transgender advocates is to use these people as poster children for their gender spectrum ideology and trying to blame their continued suffering on anyone who dares point out that they are suffering from a mental condition and deserve real help.

Of course not all of those who identify as transgender have gender dysphoria.  Some have other unrelated conditions which make them want to distance themselves from their own gender.  One worker in a clinic in Sydney reports, "Often, especially with females, there’s child abuse in their background, a lot of mental health issues and challenges."  There is a certain sad logic to this, that an abused child may believe that "if only I was a boy, I wouldn't be molested" or "if only I was a girl, I would be loved."  But as the clinic worker goes on to say, these issues are not addressed in our modern climate of gender-as-a-fluid-spectrum: "You’re not able to say this is a psychological issue. There’s this push to refer them out and get them processed to [send them to] Westmead children’s hospital and into that [sex change] process" (from this article). Gender spectrum advocates aren't interested in helping these people address the root causes of their pain, though, only with pushing them into various transgender identities in order to promote their own ideas about gender as a spectrum.  As bad as it is that these "enlightened advocates" are willfully ignoring the real psychological issues these individuals are facing, it's worse still that they are pushing them—as children—into sex change drugs and surgeries, which can be dangerous and leave a permanent mark on the child's body.

There are other reasons why one might identify as transgender, however, and these reasons apply more to those who identify as non-binary than anything else (most people with a DSD, gender dysphoria, or other psychological condition want nothing more than to be considered fully a member of one gender or the other).  This final reason is that the rise of gender spectrum ideology has made transgender identities socially appealing.  On one level, this can come from kids or teens struggling with confusing years of trying to fit in or going through puberty.  In an environment where gender is a fluid spectrum, transgender identities offer these people a quick easy solution to any confusion they may encounter.  Rather than having to parse out the fact that its okay for a boy to do ballet or a girl to like arm wrestling and convince their friends of this, they can simply identify themselves as one of a growing number of "new genders"...and if their friends reject them for it, well, they can brand them as transphobic!  Of course, the "quick and easy" solution doesn't really resolve the confusion in the long run, and may lead to social or medical choices with long-lasting consequences in the meantime, but gender spectrum advocates are happy to swell their ranks with these confused souls and—rather than helping them work through their issues—exacerbate them and isolate them from anyone who may be willing to help them understand what's really going on (especially their families, who are often devastated).

On another level, this can come as a sort of fashion statement or form of social climbing.  After all, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, transgenderism, and especially non-binary identities, are a rising trend.  With more and more celebrities and media outlets climbing on the gender-spectrum bandwagon, transexuality is—as one socially astute teen told her doctor—"the new black."  It's in fashion not only to proclaim that gender is a spectrum but also to demonstrate it by declaring yourself a non-binary transgender person.  This becomes especially pertinent when one considers the huge  reach and influence of intersectional feminism.  Intersectional feminism emerged in 1989 as a growing movement within feminism which taught that the different identities a person possessed (racial, sexual, and such) were all divided into differing levels of being privileged or oppressed by society at large, and all intersected to make an individual person either more or less oppressed.  Thus blacks were seen as oppressed, and women were seen as oppressed, but black women were seen as more oppressed than either group.  Intersectional feminism also states that the more oppressed a group is, the more insight its experiences give it into how the world works, and the more it should be listened to above any other groups.  This is why at many supposedly socially progressive events it's common to see speakers from majority groups (such as whites or men) silenced in favor of speakers from minority groups.  While a full critique of intersectionality is beyond my scope here, the effect of the ideology on society in feminist-dominated circles (which includes higher education, media, and much of politics) is pretty easy to anticipate.  If members of minority groups are accorded special privileges and higher social status in these circles in order to make up for supposed oppression in their past, then it's easy to see why it would suddenly become very advantageous and very appealing to label oneself as a member of a minority group.  In fact, the best way to socially advance in such a group would be to claim membership in as many minority groups as possible.  Of course the obvious problem is that most minority groups are ones that people are born into and not easy to claim without proof.  Transgender status is something that happens after birth, though, and when combined with a non-binary or gender-fluid status it allows the claimant to simply assert their membership in an ostensibly very oppressed group without ever actually having to do anything to prove they are transgender.  They can just say they are non-binary and dress and act in exactly the same way as before with the exception that now they get to bully others about not using the obscure set of made-up pronouns they found on the internet.  Combined with the current massive popularity of gender spectrum ideology, it's inevitable that some people would start claiming non-binary identities purely for the fashion and power of it—it's human nature to try fit in and seize easy routes to power.  People who were genuinely transgender before it became popular have a name for these new comers seeking to appropriate their title: they call them transtrenders.

And ultimately, that's what we're looking at in gender spectrum ideology: a trend.  There is no real intellectual or scientific underpinning to the movement.  The truest thing it says is that men and women do not always dress or act in ways that conform with their traditional gender roles, and that this is alright!  Then, of course, it fumbles by trying to label self-expression as a new biological sex, and for evidence morbidly glorifies disabilities while pretending they're normal and healthy.  That, to me, is the most disturbing thing about it, the thing that really betrays the fad's complete lack of empathy for real people with real problems.  Like all trends, it will eventually end and fade away, but while it's here, I think it's important we speak the truth in love, and demonstrate compassion for those whose suffering gender-spectrum ideology ignores or blames on others.

Now Maps are Racist

In our modern, enlightened, and tolerant society, it seems increasingly evident that in the eyes of some people whites can't do anything without revealing what awful racists they are.  Apparently the list of things that constitute white supremacist crimes against humanity now includes drawing world maps.

This came to my attention when I overheard someone claiming that America is bigger than Australia on world maps "because of ethnocentrism."  This prompted me to do some quick Google searches, which revealed that the claim was completely unfounded.  For one thing, most maps portray Australia and the lower 48 (or contiguous) states of America as being roughly the same size—because they are.  In fact, the contiguous United States is a little bit larger, coming in at 3,119,884 square miles to Australia's 2,969,907 square miles.  If one discounts the 160,820 square miles of massive lakes included in America's contiguous borders, the result is a much closer 2,959,064 square miles of land—very close to the Australian total (which does include some large lakes, like Lake Eyre and Lake Torrens of South Australia).  So it was clear that portraying the United States as a close match and slight superior of Australia in size is a move rooted in geographical fact rather than ethnocentrism.

But looking up this claim made me wonder if there really were people out there who saw maps as racially motivated.  That led me down the rabbit hole that ended at the obviously enlightened blog "stuff white people do" which included this article on how whites allegedly use world maps (specifically the popular Mercator Projection) to "imagine the world as literally eurocentric"[sic].  It was not the only one to do so.  One need only search for "Mercator Projection ethnocentric" and dozens of results pop up, most citing episode 16 of the second season of The West Wing as their inspiration, and many of them from ostensibly academic websites one would expect to know better.  So the resounding answer is yes: in our modern world real people, college educated people, actually think that maps are racist.

No matter where you look in these articles, all of the same complaints are listed, all focusing on the Mercator Projection.  The map is ethnocentric because it literally places Europe near the center of the map.  The center line, the prime meridian, even runs right through it!  The map is white supremacist because it puts the countries of the white-majority Northern Hemisphere on top.  And of course, the final and most oft stated proof that the Mercator Projection promotes racism is that it depicts white majority Europe and the United States as disproportionately enlarged—and even depicts that European isle of Greenland as bigger than the whole continent of Africa, when it's actually only 1/14th the size!  The solution most of these writers will offer is the same: get rid of that abhorrent ethnocentric Mercator Projection and bring in the socially-conscious and far superior Peters Projection.

The problem is that in writing these articles the authors all really just proved one thing: they know less about maps than you can learn from fifteen minutes on Wikipedia.

Let's start with the size issue.  In the Mercator Projection, white-majority Europe, the United States, and (especially) Greenland are all shown as bigger than black-majority Africa.  Bigger equals better and more important, therefore the map is a clear product of and promoter of racism, right?  Wrong.  If this were true, than the biggest thing on the map should be Germany or Belgium, since its creator (Geradus Mercator) was Flemish.  But instead the whole of Europe, most of North America, and even Australia are dwarfed by the colossus which is Greenland—a far northern island which in reality is much smaller than any of them.  Was Mercator a secret proponent of Greenlandic supremacy then?  Hardly.  In Mercator's day Greenland was an almost total unknown, with only one coastline being portrayed with any accuracy on his original 1569 map.  While in centuries past Greenland had been colonized by Europeans (or more specifically, Vikings), those colonies had failed, vanishing into historical oblivion to the point that some Europeans didn't even realize they'd existed and erroneously thought the frigid isle their ancestors had written off as a backwater a mere hundred years ago was actually some newly discovered land.  Greenland was still inhabited of course, by native Inuit peoples, who make up 88% of the population of Greenland to this day.  Worse still for this theory, however, is the enormous size of Antarctica, which appears to be large enough to comfortably swallow every other landmass on Earth (when it's really smaller than both Africa and Asia, being roughly the same size as South America).  So unless the Mercator Projection is secretly a propaganda tool of Inuit supremacists and ethnocentric penguins, I think we can write this explanation off!

Instead of racism, the real explanation for the size inaccuracies of the Mercator Projection lies in the mathematics of cartography itself.  The Earth is a sphere, but most maps are rectangles.  Projecting a spherical surface onto a flat one presents an enormous challenge, and it simply cannot be done without some inaccuracies.  Cartographers approaching the task of making a world map must choose which inaccuracies they're willing to tolerate and which they will not.  Will they preserve the relative shapes and sizes of the contents at the cost of introducing huge gashes and discontinuities that make the map all but unusable for navigation?  If they keep the map whole, will they distort the shapes of the landmasses by stretching or squashing them in order to preserve their relative size, or sacrifice their relative size for fidelity of shape?  These decisions really depend on the purpose of the map.  The purpose of Geradus Mercator's map was to create a world map which could be used for reliable navigation by early sailors (one so reliable that iterations of it continue to be used by mariners of all nationalities to this day).  For that purpose, it was imperative to avoid as many gashes and discontinuities as possible (sailing off the edge of the map would mean difficulty finding where your course picked up on the other side).  It was also necessary to preserve the shape of the coastlines, since these shapes would be used as points of reference for ocean-going navigation.  To that end, size had to be sacrificed, but distorted size could easily be fixed by adjusting the scale—distorted shape and discontinuities would be much harder for a sailor to adjust to on the fly.  That explains at least why the sizes of the various landmasses on the Mercator Projection are inaccurate, but why choose to enlarge the places he did?  It's not a racial prejudice in favor of penguins.  Rather, Mercator, like many 16th Century European cartographers, was motivated by geographical accuracy.  While we in the 21st Century have adapted to the idea that many lines on our maps are arbitrary, the cartographers of Mercator's day were not prepared to accept this.  Mercator needed a line of latitude to serve as the center-line for his map, the line off of which the rest of the map would scale up to preserve shape.  He picked what was, in his view, the center-line of the world: the equator.  The equator, of course, runs through Africa and South America, but not through Europe (so much for a Eurocentric worldview).  Because these continents were the closest to Mercator's center-line, he was able to portray them with the greatest fidelity of size while maintaining the all-important shape of their coastlines.  But as lands became further away from the equator, to the north or to the south, Mercator was forced to scale up their size in order to prevent their coastlines from becoming distorted and useless for navigation.  As the map moved further and further from the equator, the necessary size distortions became larger and larger, culminating in a massive Greenland (due to its extremely high northerly latitude) and a mindbogglingly huge Antarctica (due to it being at the extreme southern end of the globe).

So the size distortions of the Mercator Projection were clearly not motivated by racism or European ethnocentrism.  Some might argue that, even if these weren't the cartographer's motive they were certainly the effect his size distortions have had on the minds of young children, who see the larger size of northerly white-dominant nations compared to Africa and interpret the map as reinforcing white supremacist worldviews.  To those people I would ask this: how many of these young children grow up to be Inuit supremacists or believe that Antarctica is by far the best and most important place in the world?  If children can recognize that the hugely distorted size of Greenland and Antarctica doesn't make these lands and their inhabitants (or wildlife, in the case of Antarctica) inherently better than everyone else in the world (in their smaller-scaled lands), then surely they can recognize that the relatively small size difference between Europe, the United States, and Africa isn't an endorsement of white supremacy.

But what about that prime meridian, passing problematically right through Europe.  The prime meridian—the designated line 0 in the longitude system—is, as we know, basically arbitrary.  Surely Mercator's decision to place this arbitrary vertical center-line in Europe is a clear reflection of his ethnocentric worldview, right?  Wrong again.  Espousing this view reveals a fundamental ignorance of the history of cartography.  While we today realize that where the longitudinal system begins and ends is an arbitrary decision, cartographers of 16th Century Europe did not.  In fact, they expected that, just like the equator, the prime meridian would turn out to be a global line with a real geophysical significance.  The consensus was that this line was somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, just beyond the shores of Europe.  Christopher Columbus fueled this consensus when he reported that in the mid-Atlantic his compass had pointed to true north (with no deflection due to the north pole and geomagnetic north pole not lining up), but the idea of a prime meridian in that area predated him by over a thousand years.  In the year 150, the Greek mathematician, astronomer, and cartographer Ptolemy produced the Geographia, which became the foundation of all European map-making when it was reprinted by the Italians during the Renaissance.  In it, Ptolemy became the first person to use a near-European Atlantic prime meridian.  As a Greek living in lands far from this line, he wasn't motivated by racism but by practicality: lines of longitude counted west to east with the positional changes of the Moon by which they were mathematically determined, but the mathematics of Ptolemy's day lacked a system for negative numbers.  The zero of the prime meridian was a necessary stopping point for his map, so he pushed it out into the western ocean to the farthest isles he'd heard about.  Over a thousand years later, European cartographers continued to place the prime meridians of their maps in the same general area, revering Ptolemy's legacy and trusting that he'd been on to something after all by placing the 0 longitude line where he did.  Mercator, as hopeful as any of them, followed suit, placing the prime meridian in the same general area as Ptolemy's, running through the Canary Islands, off the coast of Europe and West Africa.  This happened to place both Europe and Africa fairly near to the center of the world, but the reasoning came down to history and the legacy of a Greek cartographer, rather than a Flemish man's ethnocentrism.

But today the prime meridian has shifted east.  It now runs through Greenwich, England.  Surely this is the result of racism?  Well, not really, just an artifact of further history.  You see, eventually, the European cartographers realized that the prime meridian didn't have a geophysical basis, and that Ptolemy's line and every other line before or since had been essentially arbitrary.  The question then became whose arbitrary line would become the most widely used and thus eventually be adopted as the official prime meridian of the world.  The answer was English astronomer Nevil Maskelyne.  The reason wasn't that Nevil was white, but because in the 1760's he published a series of astronomical tables painstakingly charting the position of the Moon for use in navigation—which allowed cartographers and navigators to plot lines of longitude more accurately than ever before.  He placed the prime meridian of his work through Greenwich, England, and due to the importance and influence of his work, it became the officially adopted prime meridian of the world.  His choice of location wasn't entirely arbitrary, though, nor was it motivated by ethnocentrism.  Rather, it was a pragmatic choice: Greenwich was the town where his observatory was located, and thus was the easiest place to start his intensive calculations.  Thus, Greenwich became the prime meridian in his work and, by extension, the prime meridian of the adjusted Mercator Projection maps that would come after him.  No racism was required.

But again, one might argue that even if the location of the prime meridian came about through developments of history and science rather than racial prejudice, it still communicates ethnocentrism to children today.  Again, I would have to ask such people if they think these children will grow up to believe in the inherent superiority of Africans.  The prime meridian passes through Greenwich, England and Europe, but it also passes through Accra, Ghana and Africa, and Africa is a lot closer to the intersection of the equator and the prime meridian—putting it dead center on most world maps.  If the arbitrarily central location of Europe communicates white superiority today, then surely the even more central location of Africa fosters ideas of black supremacy, right?  If we find the latter notion ridiculous, there's no reason we should hold the former in any seriousness either.

Only one complaint remains, the "ethnocentric" notion of putting white-dominant northern nations on top.  Surely this idea holds, as the decision of which direction to put "up" is purely arbitrary, right?  Well, again, history shows this to be false.  Again, the idea of north being "up" goes back to Ptolemy's Geographia.  No one's sure why Ptolemy put north at the top of his maps, but the best guess is that he knew less about sub-Saharan Africa (with which there was little trade, due to the desert's natural barrier) compared to Northern Europe.  There wasn't any good racially biased reason for him to arrange the map like this, since the blacks of central and southern Africa would have been as strange to him as the blond Germanic tribes moving in from the northern reaches of Europe.  He certainly would have had no reason to consider them his superiors.  Of course when the Renaissance came, Ptolemy's work became the cornerstone of cartography in Europe and his every decision was seen as endowed with wisdom on the inner workings of the world, even the ones that later turned out to be arbitrary or made merely for convenience.  Putting north at the top of his maps was one of these decisions, and the discovery of a geomagnetic north pole that attracted the needles of a compass seemed only to cement the brilliance of Ptolemy's map orientation in the minds of Europeans.  Naturally, then, when Mercator made his projection, he did what every other European before (and most of them since) has done and put north at the top of his map—a decision determined by history rather than racial prejudice.

Still people might argue that even if Mercator's intentions were innocent, placing north on the top of the map still communicates the idea of white superiority.  Again, I have to question how familiar these people really are with geography.  Even if north did automatically equate to superiority once it was put at the top of the globe, the real demographics of the world would preclude children coming to the conclusion that white people were the best people.  Rather, they'd decide that some white people (those in Canada, England, Scandinavia, and northern Russia) were pretty good, some were terrible reprobates (those in Australia), and scientists and explorers were sent to Antarctica because they were absolutely the worst people on Earth.  And, of course, they'd be staunch Inuit supremacists, since Inuits are the predominant demographic on the most extreme northern areas of the Mercator Projection (along with the indigenous peoples of extreme northern Siberia, who would also be seen as better than whites).  Since there is no movement among today's youth demonizing Australians and promoting Inuit ethnic superiority, we can safely conclude that children can tell the difference between using North-as-up as a convention and enforcing ethnocentrism.

The real question is, why can't academics tell the difference between conventions of cartography rooted in math and history and the propaganda tools of ethnocentrism?  There the answer may be too much of The West Wing and not enough of real history.  Take the proposed solution: the much-touted Peters Projection which is going to iron out all the "problematic" aspects of the Mercator Projection and become the map of a new, ethnically tolerant and enlightened world.  If the authors of these pieces knew a little more about history and cartography (again not in-depth knowledge, just a very basic overview from a quick fact-check), they'd quickly realize they were being taken for a ride.  The Peters Projection is more appropriately known as the Gall-Peters Projection.  It was first created in 1855 by James Gall, who presented it along with a couple other projections.  It joined the line of many similar equal-area projections which were interesting for their ability to preserve the relative size of the landmasses, but not particularly useful or influential because they introduced such distortions of shape that they were impractical for navigation.  In 1974, however, the map was resurrected by German film-maker and multi-cultural historian Arno Peters, who claimed to have invented it himself and touted it as the most accurate and all-around best map ever made.  Unsurprisingly, the cartographic community saw right through these claims, recognized the map as something they'd rejected as inaccurate and useless more than a hundred years ago, and blew him off.  Peters, however, would not be dissuaded.  He went after folks who were more socially inclined and less map-savvy and tried to win them over with arguments that his map was the best because it showed the continents in the correct relative size, trying to persuade them to buy and use his map instead of the more popular (and more accurate) Mercator Projection maps everyone was using.  And why would they do that?  Because, Peters argued, the Mercator Projection was racist!  That's right, the TV shows, social justice warriors, and academics are all quoting almost verbatim from the sales pitch of a plagiarizing cartographer desperate to get people to buy "his" map.  The worst part is that absolutely none of Peters' claims were true!  The Mercator Projection, as we've seen, isn't racist in the slightest.  The vaunted solution, the Peters Projection didn't really solve any of the Mercator's alleged problems.  Oh, sure, it resized the United States and Europe to be less offensively enlarged—by making them some of the only places in the world were the map was accurate (the map distorts the shapes of landmasses more and more the further they are away from the 45th parallel, which runs through North America and Europe).  It didn't do a thing about any of the other alleged offenses of the Mercator Projection though.  The prime meridian is still running through Greenwich, England, and is dead-center of the map.  North is still up.  If Mercator's map promoted racism, Peters' did nothing to fix it.  And of course, it wasn't even his map in the first place: it was Gall's, and it was just one of a dozen other equal-area map projections doing the exact same thing (and most of them doing it better)!

Why do so many academics, college students, educated social justice warriors, and other supposedly enlightened elites fall for this?  Why are they still falling for it (the latest article I found, in my very brief search, was from June, 2016)?  This is what worries and bothers me more than the pushing of a narrative that everything white people do is subtly racist (which is saying something, because that's a falsehood that bothers me a lot).  These people are supposed to be a part of the best, the brightest, and the most educated in our society.  The one most essential thing they should have picked up in their educational experience is the ability to apply critical thinking and sift through the glut of information at our fingertips today to sort fact from fiction.  If anyone should be expected to have that skill, it is them.  And yet in this area and others, I see such people falling victim to haphazardly constructed propaganda that anyone with access to Google can see through almost immediately.  Even without access to Google, they should have been able to see through this one.  Come on, seriously: this map is Eurocentric because it places Africa in almost the exact center, and white supremacist because it depicts every country with a white majority as being dwarfed by an island overwhelmingly populated by Inuits—how do you not see right through that?!  The only answer I can think of is because they just aren't trying.  Peters' propaganda tells them a story they want to hear, and they just don't critically think about it.  It tells them a story about how all the white people before and around them are and have been racists, but they can fix it and bring about racial harmony by making a series of profoundly easy and basically meaningless choices with no impact other than to declare them as well-intentioned and ill-informed—choices like trading one distorted world map on their wall for another.  Frankly, it's disappointing.