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You can always tell in a argument with the gender religious when you are about to hit one of the many contradictions inherent in the ideology, it’s when the accusations of being a bigot or being transphobic or the slur ‘terf’ is leveled at you.
Here’s a big ‘ole controversial issue: Is being transgendered a mental health condition?
Actually it is, and often presents with a host of serious comorbidities that can drastically affect an individuals well being. But often, we’re not allowed to even get this far, as the word ‘transgender’ is almost always defined vaguely and uniquely in the moment and framing ‘trans’ in terms of the mental disorder literature is met with cries “bigotry & transphobia”. It shuts down conversation because who wants to be called a bigoted transphobe? Just imagine if people who have anorexia pulled the same evasive denial bullshit – you’d be a body-shaming bigot in seconds for rightly pointing out an obvious discontinuity between reality and the anorexic’s self image. The tactic is bullshit in both cases.
This returns to another one of the fundamental problems with transgender ideology – the absolute lack of definitional clarity. The terms “trans” and “gender-identity” are nebulous. Who qualifies as an authentic transgender person? Who the fuck knows? The person in question often doesn’t know. Does being trans require having gender dysphoria (sometimes)? Is it autogynephilia (in many cases)? It is a crap-shoot, but almost always you never get to the point to where you can nail down what being ‘trans’ is.
The evasiveness isn’t helping anyone, especially the people who call themselves trans as said earlier being trans comes with a host of linked conditions that can severely impact an individuals mental health. Yet here we are stuck arguing over definitions while people are injured.
Why? Because a small subset of the trans community demands that society renounce the physical reality we all share and adopt gender religious mantra’s like ‘trans women are women’. If you respect science, and material reality, then the previous mantra must be regarded as patently false.
Human beings cannot change sex. Men, cannot become women, no matter how much genderfeelings-magic they invoke. But rather than have a real conversation about how trans people fit into society the low road is taken and any questions or concerns with transgender ideology are shouted down and the person making the inquiries personally attacked.
A lose/lose situation for everyone involved.
A recent study from Denmark looked at 359 transgender patients. In 75% of them, cross-gender identification was interpreted as a byproduct of other psychiatric illnesses, notably personality, mood, dissociative, and psychotic disorders. Major mood disorders, dissociative disorders and psychotic disorders were reported in 79% of transgenders.
Likewise in Sweden, a separate study found that “Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior”
In fact, 30% of transgenders commit suicide. Suicide.org says that 90% of all suicides are the direct result of untreated mental illness. A 2013 U.S.-based study showed 90% of transgenders have mental disorders consisting of depression and anxiety–known causes of suicide.
The World Health Organization (WHO) states that transgender people often experience disproportionately high levels of mental health conditions.
The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS) is the largest survey specifically looking at the experiences of transgender people in America. 27,715 people responded from all fifty states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and U.S. military bases overseas. 39% reported serious psychological distress. Only 5% of the general United States population reports the same. Alarmingly, 40% of the transgender survey respondents indicated they had attempted suicide at some point in their lifetime.
The 2019 Trevor Project National Survey was the largest survey of LGBTQ youth mental health ever conducted. It had more than 34,000 respondents. The results indicate more than half of transgender youth have seriously considered suicide and that nearly 70% of transgender youth show symptoms of a major depressive disorder.
Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, says that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment. He also says that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder, rather than treating it. Dr. McHugh is no casual observer. He is the author of at least 125 peer-reviewed medical articles and six books.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) defines transgenderism as a mental disorder.
The American College of Pediatricians joins other experts in condemning gender reclassification in children. They mince no words, making the bold statement that transgenderism in children amounts to child abuse.
As a result, ThinkProgress, a left-wing activist group, labeled The American College of Pediatricians as a hate group. They aren’t a hate group. They are medical doctors who treat and speak with children every day. Their opinion, like this column, is not transphobic; they don’t fear transgender individuals.
I certainly don’t advocate bullying transgender individuals or anyone for that matter, and I’m sure the American College of Pediatricians doesn’t either, but as a society, we can’t look at a group of folks clearly exhibiting mental illness and ignore it. We can’t pretend it’s normal. It’s not. Any condition with sky-high incidents of suicide must be given care and concern, must be treated and must be corrected. Not bullied, not dismissed but most certainly not ignored under the pretense they are just fine.”
This excerpt from Paul Street’s essay over on Counterpunch.
Mr.Street tends to write in a hyperbolic manner, but this analysis by Gellman should raise concerns about the integrity of the next American election.
“Trump’s next coup has already begun. January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election. Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect…The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already. “The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”
For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response…Even in defeat, Trump has gained strength for a second attempt to seize office, should he need to, after the polls close on November 5, 2024. It may appear otherwise—after all, he no longer commands the executive branch, which he tried and mostly failed to enlist in his first coup attempt. Yet the balance of power is shifting his way in arenas that matter more.
Trump is successfully shaping the narrative of the insurrection in the only political ecosystem that matters to him. The immediate shock of the event, which briefly led some senior Republicans to break with him, has given way to a near-unanimous embrace…Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.’”
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.”
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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