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These are the things I want to say to you. The things I want you to truly hear. When I decided to conceive you, I changed my life. I studied. I gave up alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, sugar, processed foods, etc. I exercised, drank lots of water, attended to getting good sleep. You see, I wanted to give you the healthiest foundation possible. And you were born this perfect, achingly beautiful little being. A girl. My girl. I’ve tried to think of ways to refer to my children that don’t use possessive language, but now I realize that’s not helpful. You are my child. And Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, aka ROGD, doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
For the first two years of your life, we co-slept and you nursed. We cuddled through the night in a mother/baby dance that bonded us forever. I rejected all the advice to put you in a crib, to let you “cry it out”, to give you formula. Instead, when you were upset and needed comfort, I put you to my breast. I always came to you when you cried. I knew through instinct that I was your lifeline and you wouldn’t learn to trust if I didn’t respond to your cries. Child development experts would say we became “attached.”
It was hard. I convinced myself I wasn’t cut out to be a stay-at-home-mom. It was easier to think about a career and live the typical lifestyle that those around me had embraced. Dad got laid off, and I went back to work. In my tendency to get absorbed by my career, I became distracted from our bond. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the influences in your life. I saw you spending time on the internet teaching yourself artistic skills, to play instruments, to develop imaginative characters. I saw you and your friends bonding over shared interests like Anime, and…well, Anime. And your preteen angst seemed normal. When you told me you were anxious and depressed, I offered alternative framing and solutions instead of truly listening.
And now here we are. It guts me to know you’re binding the once healthy breasts needed to nurture your own future babies. My heart aches to think you want to have them removed and to take medicine that will sterilize you. I feel deep rage when I think of a culture that has groomed you to believe that your perfect, female form is somehow wrong, and that the self-harm you’re engaged in is somehow manifesting your “authentic self.” I am stunned by how our government, schools, media, and other institutions are fully captured by these misogynistic lies.
But, I have to also say that I am so very grateful. I had no idea our culture was being transformed by these poisonous ideas. That the safeguarding of women and children would be so easily sacrificed for the whims of a few powerful men. You brought this insidious movement into my awareness and now I feel compelled to be a soldier in the fight to stop it.
I also have to say that I understand. Since you opened up this world to me, I see the misogyny I truly didn’t realize existed. I see how scary it must be to imagine inhabiting womanhood. It makes perfect sense that, when given the opportunity, you would choose to opt out of the perceived horrors of being an adult human female in the fucked up world the internet has shown you. I also appreciate the allure of having full control over how you present yourself to the world, to be able to recreate yourself as a less vulnerable being, an avatar to shield your heart. I get it. I still see you. You can’t hide from me, but if you need to keep hiding from everyone else, I understand.
I also think you recognize and are intimidated by, even terrified of, the incredible power of the blossoming woman inside you. These entitled men see that power too. They recognize an elusive and beautiful state of being that their insatiable greed demands they conquer for themselves. It must be intolerable to know that a weak impersonation of womanhood is all they can ever accomplish. And so they’ve convinced themselves and others that they are victims and appeal to the generous nature of the hearts of women. They paint themselves as the “oppressed” because it gets them just a little closer to the experience they covet. These billionaires who throw their might around. They aggressively threaten to rape and kill us because they want us to shut up and stop reminding them they will never be women. Their testosterone shows. We see it. Some of us. Others are trying so hard to be virtuous. To be inclusive. To be good. And they’re so deep in it now, they can’t allow themselves to see what’s really happening. They’ll have to double-down because it will be too painful to realize the devastation that has spread because they allowed themselves to be groomed. Too painful to realize that they’ve participated in the grooming. She/her/hers. He/him/his. Beep/boop/bop.
I will be a soldier in this army. This is what I want to model for you. That womanhood is SO precious that I will fight for it. I will fight for your birthright to it even as you reject it. I will stand against this movement that is calling for the mutilation and sterilization of our children for the lie of “transgender.” I will not be shut up. I will not surrender women’s sports or safe places. I will not rest until the surgeons profiting from cutting healthy breasts off of teenage girls are held accountable. I will call for the dismantling of professional organizations that have shut down scientific inquiry that would illuminate their complicity in this monstrous movement.
I am also grateful for the call back to intentional motherhood. Your pain and your rejection of your female form has reflected back to me the work I still need to do. Nurturing our connection and being an example of a powerful woman who flows through Life’s exhilarating highs and tragic lows with as much grace as possible while also finding pleasure in the mundane. These are my priorities now. It’s a tall order, one that I know I fall far short of. But that’s it too, isn’t it? Modeling being an imperfect human with her own feelings and needs. You inspire me to continue to learn, and practice, and make mistakes, and ask for feedback and get defensive, and then come to believe that I failed you again, and feel the feelings that go with all of that because that’s what life is. It’s ALL OF THAT and so much joy and so much pain, and it’s the most amazing experience when you embrace the richness of it all instead of avoiding life’s intensity. I found ways to hide when I was your age too. Adolescence is precarious for the divergent thinkers; disintegration is inevitable.
Yet, I believe in the foundation I gave you. My therapist reminded me once, “She’s your daughter.” We are enmeshed whether you like it or not. When you harm your otherwise healthy body, it strikes me at such a deep level, it cannot be explained to someone who has not known what it’s like to nurture another human in her womb. I know you need to individuate. I also know our connection is deeper and stronger than the messages coming at you from a broken civilization. I know the intensity of your determination. I recognize strength and courage in you and I trust in your intellect. Will you break free of the cognitive dissonance that’s exhausting you before you “consent” to further harm your body? God, I hope so, but I don’t know. I know you will one day look back and see through all the bullshit and I hope you will not be too hard on yourself. You were a vulnerable teenage girl trying to shield your heart. I’m sorry I didn’t see it coming. I’m sorry I didn’t know you’d need me to teach you and keep reminding you what was always just obvious, basic knowledge throughout time. The difference between a boy and a girl. I’m sorry I didn’t know to protect you from the lies. There’s part of me that is sorry I can’t lie now.
We will both be forged in this fire.
Obtaining definitional clarity when dealing with the gender religion (ists) is like trying to find the gills on a chicken. But let’s look at what Genevieve Gluck has to say about the straitjacket that is conformity to gender roles and the misogyny that goes along with it.
“Gender ideology represents the literal embodiment of male entitlement to women, and the sexualized power hierarchy that feminists once described as gender, or sex role stereotypes. This eroticization of power and powerlessness has the effect of naturalizing women’s subordinate role in society. When men perform a parody of femininity and claim this farce is what women truly are, they are fundamentally deconstructing women’s humanity, reducing half the human population to a demeaning and objectified fantasy; but crucially, they are redirecting women back to the restrictive roles that afforded them power over the female sex in the first place.
The belief that womanhood can be attained through a combination of desire reframed as devout suffering, alongside the purchasing of products — clothing, cosmetics, surgeries — is, at its core, a belief that women are commodities which men are entitled to possess. It is a belief system that attempts to define women as fetish objects and reduces women to the Freudian castrated male.
As Janice Raymond explained in her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire, the definition of the word “fetish” reveals the connections between religion, objectification, and a sadomasochistic sexuality:
“Webster’s Dictionary defines fetish in several ways: First, as an object believed among a primitive people to have magical power to protect or aid its owner; broadly: a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence; an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion; an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification and that is an object of fixation to the extent that it may interfere with complete sexual expression. Second, as a rite or cult of fetish worshipers. Third, fetish is simply defined as fixation.
From these definitions, it is clear that the process of fetishization has two sides: objectification, and what might be referred to as worship in the widest sense. Objectification is largely accomplished by a process of fragmentation. The fetish is the fragmented part taken away from the whole, or better, the fetish is seen to contain the whole. It represents an attempt to grasp the whole. For example, breasts and legs in our society are fetish objects containing the essence of femaleness. Thus the fetish contains and by containing controls.”
In decades past, the overwhelming majority of those claiming to suffer ‘gender dysphoria’, or a strong wish to inhabit the body of the opposite sex, were adult men with transvestic fetishism. These days, gender dysphoria is used broadly to refer not only to a male preoccupation with his status in society and the size or shape of his own genitalia, but to a discomfort with one’s sexed body in general. In this way, the male sexual practices of feminization and castration — whether surgical, chemical, or metaphorical — have been expanded to include women and children.
Feminists had previously initiated a societal conversation about the ways unrealistic beauty standards and objectification led to body image issues. However, now it is taboo to acknowledge that women and girls account for the vast majority of those diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorders, or to suggest that in women and girls, what is called ‘gender dysphoria’ may be a modern rebranding of the self-loathing and self-harm seen in anorexia and cutting.
The reasons that women and girls experience discomfort with their bodies are profoundly different from the ways adult men express their desires to become “sissy sluts”, to “grow boobs” or get “girl skin”, or to otherwise inhabit female bodies for the purpose of arousal at being treated like, and degraded as, a woman. Therefore, I propose that what is really meant by “inclusivity” is the forced integration of women and children into male fetishistic proclivities in order to normalize them. In this, women and children are being treated as collateral damage.”
This is how pernicious gender ideology is – biologist blocking another biologist because they are backed into a corner about the biological definition of female. Imagine having to block as stay safe from biological fact.
Mia Ashton writes on Canadian Bill C-36 and its implications for women and feminists who have taken up the mantle of defending female rights and boundaries in Canadian society.
“There is the same complete lack of understanding surrounding this proposed hate speech legislation. Most people in Canada are not aware that a small subset of the population believes a simple statement of biological reality should be treated as a hate crime. Nor do they know that women’s groups fighting to maintain their right to the safety of single-sex spaces are considered hate groups. Furthermore, most people still have faith in our legal system. It seems preposterous to the average person that the legal profession could be captured by a political ideology, but a quick look at British Columbia shows that our legal system is far from immune. In December 2020, BC courts issued new directives requiring participants to introduce themselves with their titles and preferred pronouns, and in 2019 a BC Human Rights Tribunal ruled that a Christian minister referring to a trans-identified male as a male in a pamphlet amounted to denying the existence of transgender people. This is an argument one would expect to find among gender ideologues on Twitter, but not in a legal setting.
Love it or loathe it, social media is now the town square. It is where almost all political discussions take place, where people go to get informed, test ideas, debate and organise. Gender critical feminists already play the Twitter language game, in which a statement as simple as only women have a cervix is enough to earn a permanent ban. Therefore, we all carefully word our tweets in the hope of evading suspension, but until now the worst that could happen to us for accidentally stating biological facts was Twitter or Facebook banning us. Now Canadian feminists have a much bigger reason to fear speaking or writing what everyone knows to be true: the very real threat of hate speech allegations, a fine of up to $70,000, and a costly and stressful court battle.
If this bill is reintroduced and becomes law, it will have a disastrous effect on a movement only just getting off the ground. For Canadian trans activists, of course, that is the point. Earlier this year, a prominent Ottawa trans activist, Fae Johnstone, tweeted: “I actually do want a political environment in which TERFs are so vilified they don’t dare speak their views publicly, let alone act on them. Shut. Them. Down.” It is frightening to think that this bill would give those with such undemocratic, authoritarian beliefs the power to report feminists for hate crimes from behind a veil of anonymity.”
The notion that stating mere biological fact could be a ‘hate crime’ in Canada is chilling.
For the record these facts include the following:
1. Women are only adult human females.
2. Sex is immutable in humans.
3. Gender is not the same as sex, and gendered feelings do not overrule the common physical reality we all share.
C-36 is a dangerous bill if you value the marketplace of ideas and the idea of free speech.
From the Canadian Government’s news realease –
“The legislation proposes four new Criminal Code offences that would prohibit:
- causing another person to undergo conversion therapy
- removing a minor from Canada to subject them to conversion therapy abroad
- profiting from providing conversion therapy
- advertising or promoting conversion therapy
The proposed legislation would also authorize courts to order the seizure of conversion therapy advertisements or to order their removal from computer systems or the Internet.
This bill expands on Bill C-6, adopted by the House of Commons in the previous Parliament. It does so by protecting all Canadians—regardless of their age—from the well-documented harms of conversion therapy practices.
Conversion therapy practices aim to change an individual’s sexual orientation to heterosexual, to change an individual’s gender identity to cisgender, or to change their gender expression to match the sex they were assigned at birth. They harm and further stigmatize sexual and gender-diverse persons and undermine their equality and dignity. They reflect myths and stereotypes about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and Two-Spirit (LGBTQ2) communities, particularly that their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression are wrong. These harmful practices also reinforce heteronormative and cis-normative ideas, as well as gender-conformity on LGBTQ2 individuals.
The practice can take various forms, including counselling and behavioural modification. Conversion therapy practices are discriminatory and have been proven to be harmful to the physical, mental and social well-being of the victim, even for adults who consented to it.
Criminal law reform is an important step in protecting the equality and dignity of LGBTQ2 persons, but more remains to be done. The Government of Canada is committed to working with provinces, territories, municipalities, survivors and stakeholders to ensure that Canada is a country where everyone—regardless of their gender expression, gender identity, or sexual orientation—can live equally and freely.”
The Federal Liberals are going full steam ahead with the gender ideology bullshit. It just passed the in the House of Commons unanimously – because our Conservative opposition has jello instead of a spine.
It looks like we’re trying to codify the ‘gendered soul’ into law in Canada. Of all the nebulous concepts that don’t need the state backing them up, it at the head of the list. This bill had better not be lumping the therapy that actually helps children be comfortable in their own body without surgery of hormones into an unlawful category. The notion that watchful waiting and other material reality confirming therapies are unlawful is just fucking crazy.
From The Canadian Gender report:
“Ken Zucker, Ph.D. C.Psych and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto presented a discussion of the differences in developmental trajectories for children with gender dysphoria at the 24th Congress of the World Association of Sexual Health, in October 2019, Mexico City. The following information is summarized and quoted from his presentation.
Dr Zucker based his analysis on a review of a number of follow up studies for persistence and desistance rates. He categorized therapeutic approaches designed to reduce gender dysphoria into 3 different types:
- Treatment 1: Assessment, “watchful waiting”
- Treatment 2: Assessment, active treatment of many kinds (recommendations to parents to implement in the naturalistic environment, behavior therapy, play therapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy, group therapy, etc., etc.)
- Treatment 3: Gender Social Transition
“The follow-up studies summarized so far, by and large, collected data on children who were assessed (and sometimes treated) prior to the emergence, around the mid-2000s, of pre-pubertal gender social transition as an alternative type of psychosocial treatment designed to reduce gender dysphoria: a treatment that parents may have instituted on their own, in consultation with a clinician, or on the advice of a clinician or some other type of professional (e.g., a teacher).”
The very low persistence rates in the case of Treatments 1 and 2 show that gender identity becomes more congruent with birth-assigned sex in the majority of cases.
To compare the persistence and desistance rates of children who received a gender-affirming care approach characterized by social gender transitioning, Dr Zucker used data from Steensma et al. (2013) which reported a systematic follow-up study of children in which some children were classified as having had either a partial or a complete social transition prior to puberty.
The relationship between social gender transition and the follow-up persistence and desistance rates is striking. Among desisters, almost none of the natal boys had socially transitioned. Almost 45% of the persistors, however, had partially or completely socially transitioned, yet their gender dysphoria had not resolved.
Social transition in relation to persistence and desistance was not as strong among the girls. Almost 60% of the persistors had socially transitioned. A significant number of desisters had socially transitioned as well, although Dr Zucker cautioned that the definition of social transition used by Steensma probably captured some girls where the social transition metric may have been very broad (e.g., change in hair-style or clothing style).
Dr Zucker predicts that as new samples of socially transitioned children become available, the rate of persistence will be much higher when compared to the older studies, where most of the children received either Treatment 1 or Treatment 2. Of the 3rd type of treatment, social gender transition, he commented that it offers a different approach that leads to desistance: the gender dysphoria dissipates because the child is now living in the “desired” gender; however, for desistance to remain stable, it will often, if not always, require biomedical treatment (life-long hormone therapy with or without gender-affirming surgery).
There are many possible pathways to desistance, which leads to the parental conundrum: which therapeutic approach does one take to reduce gender dysphoria? This is what the contemporary parent (and clinician) must decide.”
This is some authentically scary shit. Parents could be arrested for wanting effective means of treatment for their children. This isn’t good my fellow Canadians, and let us hope that the Senate can add some clarity to this proposed nightmare of a bill.
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