You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Politics’ category.
Transgender ideology is being debated and discussed in legislatures. If you value material reality you need to get involved and show up and participate otherwise this bullshit will get even more of a foothold in public institutions.
So brutal. Let’s erase females from society in the name of ‘trans inclusivity’. Absolutely not. We will use terms that accurately describe the reality we all share.
This is an excerpt from Helen Joyce’s essay published in The Critic. It poses some answers to questions as to why our society is going the way it is, and what happened to the notion of people debating topics like adults and having adult sensibilities.
“More generally, this is a culture that encourages young people to regard themselves as traumatised. According to Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, US schools and universities have started to promote three pernicious falsehoods: that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; that feelings are a good guide to reality and action; and that life is a battle between good people and evil ones.
These dysfunctional beliefs, which Haidt dubs “anti-cognitive behavioural therapy”, promote mental fragility. They encourage people to feel fearful of ordinary words and to regard censorship as virtuous. The logic goes like this: being dis-agreed with makes you a victim; victims are good; people saying things you disagree with therefore deserve to be silenced and punished. This is the culture of “crybullying”: using claims of victimhood to harass others.
Haidt thinks social media, with its polarising and conflict-inducing algorithms, is largely to blame. Another culprit is the “post-modern turn” that was underway before the internet era, in which academics, activists and political theorists stopped thinking of reality as something that could be described objectively and studied empirically, embracing a radical subjectivity instead.”
The fragility of the next generation will be the doom of us all.
Is it the plan? I don’t know, but what I do know is that there seems to be a very real divide in the justice system. Women are regularly attacked for exercising their right to speak in society.
Could you imagine if a trans rally was crashed by women dressed all in black trying to silence them? It would be a media field day. Yet, when the leftist activists disrupt female led events, it is mostly radio silence.
>The leftist plan for transgenderist violence is simple: Kick the dog until it bites.
Progressives have used the media, educational institutions, and even the medical community to prime as many people as possible who are already mentally fragile with an ideology that tells them their very identity is under attack from every direction.
When your artificially constructed identity is at odds with every social norm and biology itself that’s pretty easy to do Take that already unstable construction and ramp it up with the lie that there’s an active genocide against transgenderist and the results are predictable.
The left is encouraging these people to arm themselves while labeling anyone who disagrees with the a fascist, this is why the “it’s okay to punch a Nazi” discourse was so important to progressives They’ve been looking to justify this escalation for awhile.
The left praises trans ideology after Nashville and talks about being fierce and fighting back because they want to encourage more violence, they praise the assaults on state capitals and the assault on a female athlete because they want a state of fear.
But MOST IMPORTANTLY, the left wants someone, anyone, to feel hopeless and lash out in retaliation They kick the dog with reckless abandon so the minute it tries to defend itself they can justify shooting it.
They want their George Floyd this summer, their casus belli, their justification to once again unleash a wave of state sanctioned rioting, security state crackdowns on their political opponents, or both…
The reason progressives are encouraging more violence is that they are hoping to trigger violence in return They own the media and the justice system, they know their side will pay little to no price and the slightest bit of retaliation will become the new January 6th.
The point being, stay safe and stay frosty out there You have a two-tier justice system whether you like it or not, don’t put yourself in bad situations, and don’t give these people what they want.
Having established norms and boundaries in society is a good thing. Is the balance between personal freedom and what is good for society perfect?
Of course not.
But the current system which is always under small scale revision, is a reasonable way forward. The basis of this incremental move toward a more just society is the ability of society’s inhabitants to participate freely in the decision making processes. Individual freedom and the individual freedom of expression are two of the main cogs in the machinery of successful society.
The freedom we experience in Western societies such as Canada is not absolute. We have reasonable limits and laws curtailing what citizens can and cannot do within Canadian society. These laws and limits change with society over time and if we proceed carefully we can usually arrive at compromise that ensures our rights and responsibilities remain in a reasonable place for most people.
So, what happens when we forgo discussion and debate about how rights and responsibilities work in society? In the case of Canada we get legislation like Bill C-16 which creates opacity and confusion for many Canadians.
Bill C-16 adds the nebulous idea of ‘gender identity’ to the protected list of rights and freedoms in our Canadian Charter of Rights. Unfortunately, gender identity is quite similar to astrology in terms of having little to no basis in material reality or being able to be empirically measured. Gender identity is completely – utterly – subjective and because of its subjective nature presents many quandaries with regards to the other protected characteristics within the Charter.
Sex is another characteristic that people may not be discriminated against in our Charter – and herein lies the problem – to protect both ‘gender identity’ (astrology) and ‘sex’ (empirical, material reality) is fundamentally untenable. Either women are adult human females, a discrete sex class or they are not. There is not a viable middle position to take.
Our current government seems to have forgotten about Canadian females and the protections granted to them under our Charter of Rights. This is perhaps best illustrated by the inclusion of males who claim to be women (via ‘gender identity’) being housed in female prisons. If we are to stick to reality based discussion – no man can ever become a woman -our distinct physiology is encoded into every cell in our bodies. Yet, because the government is currently prioritizing the gender feelings of males over the physical safety of women in female prisons we have quite a serious rights violation with regards to females in Canada.
This situation will not be easily resolved, but a first step would be the repeal of C-16 as the addition of gender identity into the charter is making society a much less safe place for Canadian females.
As for me, I was a progressive mom who purposefully avoided pushing traditional gender roles on my child. I didn’t know her sex until she was born. I didn’t care—I only wanted a healthy baby. I bought her comfortable, fairly gender-neutral clothes, and I adamantly avoided anything related to Barbie. I had grown up immersed in the unrealistic feminine beauty standards of the 80s, and I wanted my child to have the best chance possible of feeling whole and complete in her natural female body, however she chose to express it. As she grew up, I let her choose her clothes and hairstyles, as well as the toys she played with. I considered myself progressive, feminist, open-minded, and very much an LGBT+ ally. Her friends thought I was a pretty fun mom.
My child was 13 when she told me she thought she was trans. She had already been experimenting with male names and pronouns with her friends and therapist, who had advised her not to tell me until she was ready to fully come out of the trans closet. She was among the last of her small group of biologically female friends to socially transition. It was mid-pandemic, and she spent most of her time with her best friend, who had, unbeknownst to me, shown her hours upon end of transgender entertainment on You Tube and TikTok.
By 8th grade, here’s what her friends (and their TikTok feeds) were saying about me:
“Your mom is transphobic”. “She doesn’t want a son. She wants a daughter.” “She won’t let you be who you are.” “MY mom is so progressive, she buys my binders from a BIPOC trans company.” “Your mom doesn’t really know you.”
And even worse, a succession of therapists:
“You may not know your child as well as you think you do.” “Your son just needs your support.” “Your child doesn’t share your values.” “Your child is at risk of suicide if you don’t affirm.” “You just need some education on having a transgender child.”
So much for being the fun mom.
This child. I had nursed her, read to her, fed her healthfully, sang her to sleep, held her when she cried, played with her. I taught her to read, to count, to make brownies, to brush her own teeth, and to be kind to animals and elders. I had read parenting books and joined library play groups, studied her learning styles and tailored her education to them. My Christmas gift was always her favorite, because I knew exactly what toy she wanted the most. When she was little and woke up feeling sick, I had already woken moments in advance knowing something was wrong.
And now, expert strangers were telling me I didn’t really know her.
I affirmed her change in gender identity, at first. I thought it was an antipatriarchal movement, a rebellious play on artificial standards of attractiveness, a principled game of pronouns, clothing and hairstyles. I was an out-of-the-box, feminist Gen X-er. I was cool with that.
But I quickly learned this wasn’t about self-empowerment. It was about self -rejection. Self-loathing. Self-erasure.
Her friends considered natural breasts disgusting, so binding became a rite of passage. The whole body became a thing of shame, covered by thick, baggy clothes that would betray no feminine curves. A swimsuit was unthinkable, even to swim in the ocean, which we traveled thousands of miles to visit. The new trans-boi posture was rounded forward, with the attitude of a sad thug, black COVID mask firmly in place under a black beanie, so only the eyes were visible. Their given names – many chosen with great care and meaning by thoughtful parents – were proclaimed “dead” and replaced with the names of fandom and cartoon characters.
My daughter’s best friend (now an ftm trans child with two gender affirming parents) started calling her mother by her first name, and demanded the removal of all childhood photos from their home—to escape her past as a girl. Soon thereafter, she was admitted to a treatment program for suicidal ideation. My daughter started cutting her forearms, and her demeanor became dark and secretive. Her beautiful art became morbid and even cruel.
I drew the line at breast binding and said no. I could not rationalize the compression of a child’s developing breast tissue and rib cage. It made no medical sense to encourage a practice that would restrict the respiratory, circulatory, and lymphatic systems during a crucial physical development stage.
And, of course, the experts told me I was wrong. They said if I didn’t buy her a proper binder, she would use duct tape and ace bandages, which would be even worse. They said she would harm herself more. They said she would be at risk of suicide.
I cried for days. I meditated, I prayed, I consulted wise friends who knew my child well. I told her dad everything I knew, and spoke with her stepmom, who works as a child therapist. Everyone who ACTUALLY knew my child confirmed what I knew all along—this didn’t make any sense. And being trans wasn’t making her better. It was making her worse.
I still wanted my child to have the best chance possible of feeling whole and complete in her natural female body, however she chose to express it. If gender exploration necessitated my complicity in her self hatred, I wouldn’t participate.
So I stopped listening to the experts and took back my authority as my child’s first and primary parent.
I set new boundaries. I profoundly restricted online access, took long breaks from overzealous trans friends, checked daily to make sure she wasn’t binding. Her dad, stepmom, and my partner all concurred, and she was pretty mad at all of us for awhile.
So perhaps even more importantly, I added a lot of things that I realized were missing during the pandemic. I facilitated friendships with healthier teens, and had frank conversations with their parents to ensure we were all on the same page. I enrolled her in a music performance program and aerial silks classes. Over the summer, she went to camp and volunteered at a nature center. We took interesting trips, went to live music shows, and watched diverse movies about all kinds of people. We planted raspberries and went camping and brewed herbal moon tea to ease her menstrual cramps. I wanted to show her that the world was much bigger than her friend group.
It’s now been a year since she first announced her new identity. My work seems to have paid off. She has developed an identity outside of trans—she’s an aerialist, a musician, a good writer, an artist, a traveler, and she believes in a spiritual side to life. Consistent aerial silks practice has made her physically strong and flexible, and she likes what her body can do and how it looks. She’s phased out of the ultra-baggy clothes, and regularly shows her arms and collarbones. Sometimes she wears dresses or braids her hair. She doesn’t appear to have engaged in self-harm in months, and her art is brighter and even humorous. She stands taller, laughs easily, and speaks confidently with adults. She has new friends with similarly unique interests. She’s still quirky, artistic, and alternative in her style. She may be bisexual, and that’s fine by me.
I really do want my daughter to be her authentic self, and I know that she has to find that path on her own eventually. I will always support her in all her ups and downs. I’ll even love and support her if she decides, as an adult, to identify as a boy. But until she is actually an adult, I’m still the parent. I am a mature, educated, mentally healthy adult woman with many life experiences and learning under my belt. Many of my interactions with the mental health community undermined my legitimate questions, my knowledge of my child, the wisdom I’ve gained over nearly 48 years on planet Earth. I didn’t go to psychology school, but I do know many things. And I do, actually, know my kid. I’m reclaiming that.
I’m a much better parent for it.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…