“Soon, I learned about nonbinary identities, and that some people – many people – were literally arguing that sex, not gender, was a social construct. I met people who evangelised a denomination of transgenderism that I had never heard of, one that included people who had never been gender dysphoric and who had no desire to medically transition. I met straight people whose ‘trans / nonbinary’ identities seemed to be defined by their haircuts, outfits and inchoate politics. I met straight women with Grindr accounts, and listened to them complain about the ‘transphobic’ gay men who didn’t want to have sex with women.
All around me, it seemed, straight people were spontaneously identifying into my community and then policing our behaviours and customs. I began to think that this broadening of the ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ umbrella was giving a hell of a lot of people a free pass to express their homophobia.
At Columbia, I took classes on LGBT history, but much of that history was delivered through the lens of queer theory. Queer theorists appropriate French philosopher Michel Foucault’s ideas about the power of language in constructing reality. They argue that homosexuality didn’t exist prior to the late 19th century, when the word ‘homosexual’ first appeared in medical discourse. Queer theorists proselytise a liberation that supposedly results from challenging the concepts of empirical reality and ‘normativity’. But their converts instead often end up adrift in a sea of nihilism. Queer theory, which has become the predominant method of discussing and analysing gender and sexuality in universities, seemed to me to be more ideological than truthful.
In my classes on gender and sexuality in the Muslim world, however, I discovered something else, too. I learned about current medical practices in Iran, where gay sex is illegal and punishable by death, and where medical transition is subsidised by the state to ‘cure’ gays and lesbians who, the theocratic elite insists, are ‘normal’ people ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’. I privately drew parallels between the anti-gay laws and practices of Iran and what I saw developing in the West, but I convinced myself I was just being paranoid.
Then, I learned about what was happening to gender-nonconforming kids – that they were being prescribed off-label drugs to halt their natural development, so that they’d have time to decide if they were really transgender. If so, they would then be more successful at passing as the opposite sex in adulthood. Even worse, I learned that these practices were being touted by LGBT-rights organisations as ‘life-saving medical care’.
It felt like I was living in an episode of The Twilight Zone. How long were these kids supposed to remain on the blockers? And what happens in a few years, if they decide they’re not ‘truly trans’ after all, and all of their peers have surpassed them? Are they seriously supposed to commence puberty at 16 or 17 years of age? These questions rattled my brain for months, until I learned the actual statistics: nearly all children who are prescribed puberty blockers go on to receive cross-sex hormones. Blockers don’t give a kid time to think. They solidify him in a trans identity and sentence him to a lifetime of very expensive, experimental medicalisation.
I wondered how different these so-called trans kids were from the little boy I had been. Obviously, I grew up to be a gay man and not a transwoman. But how could gender clinicians tell the difference between a young boy expressing his homosexuality through gender nonconformity, and someone ‘born in the wrong body’? I decided to dig deeper into the real history of medical transition.”
Parents with Inconvenient Truth about Trans is a substack you should follow if you are interested in the pushback against transgender ideology and defending children from harm.
“If PITT readers each had a dollar for every time we’ve heard the much debunked, emotionally manipulative “live son or dead daughter” myth we’d all be very rich. We hear the “transition or die” trope from the media, schools, the government, misinformed family and friends, and from our own trans identified kids, who hear it themselves from the same sources as us and from fellow trans-identified peers in real life and on social media. I’ve heard it many times from Governor Spencer Cox of Utah, the state where I live. In February 2021 Governor Cox vetoed a bill that proposed to ban ‘transgender girls’ from participating in girls’ K-12 sports stating, “I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live… These kids are… they’re just trying to stay alive.”
A well-known purveyor of this harmful narrative is Diane Ehrensaft who is the chief psychologist at the UCSF Benioff Hospital Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic. In a widely circulated video of Dr. Ehrensaft giving a conference presentation she acknowledges that when children are given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as part of ‘gender affirming’ medical intervention, one side effect is infertility, and she wonders if children can really consent to this. She says, “The other issue that’s a showstopper now for many parents around giving consent to puberty blockers is the fertility issue. That if a child goes straight from puberty blockers directly to cross sex hormones they, at this point in history, they are pretty much forfeiting their fertility and so they will not have a genetically related child… The question is, can an 11-year-old, 12-year-old at that level of development, be really thinking and know what they want at age 30 around infertility?” Dr. Ehrensaft answers her own question by likening ‘gender affirming’ medical care to oncological care for children with cancer. “The answer to that is we don’t think twice about instituting treatments for cancers for children that will compromise their fertility. We don’t say, ‘We’re not going to give them the treatment for cancer because it’s going to compromise their fertility.’ For some youth, having the gender affirmation interventions is as life-saving as the oncology services for children who have cancer.”
Dr. Ehrensaft is, of course, insinuating that ‘gender affirming care’ is “life-saving” for children who identify as transgender because, if not affirmed, they might commit suicide. Her colleague, Joel Baum, states this more explicitly. “I’ll just add one thing here. When we’re working with families, what is the leverage point for that family?…The fact of the matter is at the end of the day, it is their decision and we just hope they’re going to make an informed decision. Just make sure you have all the information you need. Which includes, you can either have grandchildren or not have a kid anymore, because they’ve ended the relationship with you or in some cases because they’ve chosen a more dangerous path for themselves.”
Activists like Diane Ehrensaft peddle, and stooges like Governor Cox buy, the claim that ‘gender affirming care’ is like chemotherapy for cancer—life-saving and medically necessary. This is infuriating and deeply offensive to me because I am the mother of a trans-identified young adult daughter who thankfully seems to be desisting, and an older teenage son in active treatment for leukemia. Based on my son’s risk factors, his oncologist has given him an 85% chance of survival. His treatment is life-saving and medically necessary. Without it he would already be dead. The hard truth is that even with it he might still die. It is hyperbolic and shameful for anyone to conflate chemotherapy with ‘gender affirming care’, or to hold parents emotionally hostage with the words “transition or die”, “live son or dead daughter.”
It’s true that my daughter has been in great distress. She is a bright, socially awkward, mildly autistic girl with depression and generalized anxiety. But she is not going to die. In fact, how can she not be distressed when she has internalized what she’s heard repeatedly—that she one of the most marginalized, most oppressed, and most hated people on the face of the earth? That people are literally trying to erase her existence? That she must undergo extreme medical and surgical procedures and become a lifelong medical patient or she might kill herself? As she walks the road to desistance she told me recently that she believes she can relearn to love her body, but she is going to have to “unlearn a lot of stuff.”
Advocates of ‘gender affirming’ healthcare cite high suicide rates as evidence that medical and surgical intervention is “life-saving and medically necessary.” It goes without saying that every suicide is tragic, but there is no high-quality evidence to suggest that the often quoted overall attempted suicide rate of youth who identify as transgender is 41%. Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper who is the Chair of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health has stated, “As far as I know there are no studies that say that if we don’t start these kids immediately on hormones when they say they want them that they are going to commit suicide.. So that is misguided… in terms of needing to intervene medically to prevent suicide and doing it quickly. I know of no studies that have shown that.” There is also no evidence that medical transition decreases suicidality. In fact, one study showed that post transition adults were 4.9 times more likely to have made a suicide attempt and 19.1 times more likely to have died from suicide than the general population. No one is born in the wrong body. Our sex is written into the DNA of every cell of our body. People cannot change sex. It’s a serious thing to insinuate to someone that their healthy body is somehow wrong and might require extreme, irreversible cosmetic interventions to relieve mental distress. There is no right or wrong way to be a boy or a girl, a man or a woman.
Let me spell out for Diane Ehrensaft a few of the many reasons why it’s inaccurate to conflate cancer treatment and ‘gender affirming care.’ First, chemotherapy is given only after a confirmed diagnosis of cancer. We could not have brought our son to the hospital, declared he had cancer, and demanded chemotherapy. Demanding medication based on a self-diagnosis is something only my trans identified daughter could have done—because that only happens in gender clinics.
Second, pediatric cancer treatment is evidence-based. My son’s treatment plan was mapped out from the moment of his diagnosis based on exact protocols obtained over decades of research. It’s literally on a spreadsheet his medical team calls “the road map”. His hospital is part of a consortium of children’s hospitals that share data to further improve treatment and outcomes. ‘Gender affirming care’ is called the Wild West of healthcare for a reason. After a systematic review of the literature the countries of Finland, Sweden, the UK, and France, and the state of Florida have found the evidence for ‘gender affirming’ care to be of such low quality that they have abandoned the affirmative model of care. Even the much touted “gold standard” Dutch Protocol is now being discredited due to serious methodological flaws.
Third, outcomes for childhood cancers are well known, published, and updated. Post treatment my son will be followed for many years to assess his outcome. Outcomes for patients of ‘gender affirming care’ are mostly unknown. Clinics and providers rarely keep data and patients aren’t followed long enough to get reliable outcome information. Studies show that the average time to regret a gender transition is 8-10 years, but most patients are given follow up for much shorter times, if at all.
Finally, kids with cancer are given harsh, life-altering treatments because there is no other choice. Cancer treatment is truly life or death. ‘Gender affirming care’ however is iatrogenic, meaning that the treatment actually contributes to the condition. Eleven longitudinal studies have shown that, if just left alone, approximately 80% of dysphoric kids will simply outgrow the distress they feel and become comfortable with their bodies.
My family is very fortunate that childhood leukemia has a good prognosis, but the treatment is a grind. My son has faced his treatment with grace, good humor, and as much optimism as he can muster. One clinic day though my son just wasn’t having it. He was exhausted, nauseated, and facing a long day of treatment. When his nurse came in to get him ready for chemo he was sitting hunched over on the bed, hoodie pulled over his head, eyes closed, earbuds in. She asked him if he had done anything fun that week and he just rolled his eyes. Nurses work with these kids every day for their job but they don’t live the reality. It’s hard to do anything fun when you feel like crap.
After a few one-word responses from my son to her questions she asked him point blank “Are you having suicidal thoughts?” We felt ambushed by the question and I immediately jumped into the conversation. “Are you kidding me? Why would you ask him that?” She explained that per hospital protocol she has to ask that question monthly. “ Fine,” I said. “We get it. But please put the question in context.” My daughter announced her ‘transgender’ identity to us with the help of an adult my daughter felt she could trust. We all sat on the couch in our living room while this man called our daughter by the new name she had chosen and warned us of her “high suicide risk.” As shocked as I was I still remember thinking, “Why are you talking about suicide in front of her? She’s sitting right here!?!” I understand that one way to prevent suicide is to ask about it directly. I’m not discounting that. But why didn’t my son’s nurse say, “Look, I know things are really hard right now but it will get better. We’re here for you and are going to take very good care of you.” Why hasn’t anyone except PITT parents and allies thought to say these same words to trans identified kids? “Life is hard sometimes but you can get through this.” There are many detransitioners who have expressed that they wish someone had said these words to them.
Experts agree that suicide contagion is a risk. That’s why the media has strict guidelines in how they report suicide. It’s incomprehensible why all that goes out the window with ‘trans kids.’ Sociologist Michael Biggs highlighted this in a recent podcast interview. He stated that the “live daughter better than a dead son” rhetoric has been around for a long time, and that it is true that a large number of young people who identify as transgender claim that they’ve thought about or attempted suicide. Suicide and self-harm can be a real concern but, he explains, “…when you make suicidality a central part of the [trans] identity, that actually that sort of enhances the likelihood of making claims about suicide. Because ‘to be trans’ in some ways means ‘to be suicidal’ because ‘society is rejecting you’ or ‘your parents are rejecting you’. So it’s very important to actually know how many deaths result.” Data he obtained with a freedom of information request from the NHS in the UK showed 4 suicides out of 15,000 transgender identified individuals. That’s not 41%. I wonder if Utah Governor Cox would still think boys should be allowed to play in girls’ sports if he understood it’s really not a life-or-death situation.
PITT readers, we have to get this suicide myth stopped in its tracks. We must take back control of the narrative. Speak up and speak out whenever and wherever you can. Call out this emotional blackmail for what it is. Challenge your kid, your medical providers, your legislators, your schools, your friends, and your family. Debunk this untrue, harmful myth wherever it’s being perpetuated. “Transition or die” is one of the flimsiest reasons among a host of incredibly flimsy reasons for the chemical castration and genital mutilation of kids. Calling the suicide myth out for the harmful nonsense it is will help to bring an end to this horrible era of medical experimentation on kids. Proclaim the truth! We have live daughters and sons!!”
Justdad7 is another important information source to follow in Canada about the issues surrounding the unwarranted sterilization of children in the name of transgender ideology.
A Different Model of Care – justdad7’s Substack.
The major difficulty with the application of the mature minor doctrine in gender medicine is that the case law assumes that the minor is making decisions under the guidance of a doctor who is following the conventional medical model with clear diagnostic criteria and treatment goals. Practice in gender clinics is very different.
In the case of a disease like cancer, the diagnosis is usually confirmed by multiple objective tests including diagnostic imaging, laboratory tests and tissue biopsies. There are also objective measures of the effectiveness of treatments, such as shrinkage of the tumour. A doctor will recommend a treatment that is likely to cause sterility or other serious side effects only after making a firm diagnosis and concluding that the benefit of the treatment outweighs the risks.
In gender medicine, there is no known biological marker for transgender identity. The diagnosis of gender dysphoria under the DSM-5 depends entirely on self-reported symptoms which are largely tied to conformity to social stereotypes of male and female.
Furthermore, while a DSM-5 diagnosis may still be required in some places for insurance purposes, the WPATH SOC8 recommends relying in the ICD-11 diagnosis of Gender Incongruence. The definition of gender incongruence of childhood is similar to the DSM-5 diagnosis of gender dysphoria, but does not require the presence of distress. For older patients, the definition reads:
Gender incongruence of adolescence and adulthood is characterized by a marked and persistent incongruence between an individual´s experienced gender and the assigned sex, which often leads to a desire to ‘transition’, in order to live and be accepted as a person of the experienced gender, through hormonal treatment, surgery or other health care services to make the individual´s body align, as much as desired and to the extent possible, with the experienced gender. The diagnosis cannot be assigned prior the onset of puberty. Gender variant behaviour and preferences alone are not a basis for assigning the diagnosis.
The concept of ‘experienced gender’ is entirely subjective, with no possible test other than self-declaration. In other words, if a teenagers claim to have a transgender identity and wants medical transition badly enough, they should have it.
It is also difficult for a doctor to inform a patient of the prospects of success of a gender affirming treatment because there are no clear criteria for measuring success. The goal of transforming a body into one of the opposite sex is unobtainable but success might be measured in how close an approximation the treatment achieves.
However, patients seek to transform their bodies in the hope of relieving their mental distress. A good cosmetic result from a treatment is pointless if the patient still feels miserable and distressed by their body. The evidence that gender transition helps to improve mental health is low quality. Ultimately, the conventional measures of success are irrelevant to the new model of gender medicine where the “goals have shifted from reducing suffering to achieving personal ‘embodiment goals.’”
Informed consent in gender medicine therefore raises different issues from the conventional medical model. In conventional treatment, the minor’s decision making is being guided by a doctor who has made a diagnosis and determined that a treatment is in the patient’s best interest. In gender medicine, it is necessary to ask whether a minor should be entitled to proceed with risky and irreversible treatments based on a sense of personal identity which is unfalsifiable but may prove to be transitory.
Let’s file this under common sense facts we should all know.
- Cellphones are connected to social media one of the greatest detractors from long term attention span and focus.
- Children are not particularly good at self regulation and control
- Thus, we should enforce standards of conduct around the use of cell phones at school to encourage responsible use of said technology.
“When British Columbia school counsellor Tulani Pierce started noticing mental health trouble in some of her students last year, she said it gave her an idea: ban cellphones in the classroom.
They were distracted and they had a hard time putting their phones away, she said.
It’s been five months since students at Chatelech Secondary School on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast have been banned from using their cellphones without permission, and Pierce said they’ve seen promising results.
“We are seeing improved mental health, we’re seeing decreased bullying, we’re seeing more engagement in class, we’re seeing more social interaction, kids are playing again instead of being on their phones and we’re seeing increased academic success.”
Duh? Does it take a degree in counseling to connect the notions that distraction devices, erm… cause distraction?
“She said when the students were first told about the ban, some were angry and upset, while others “were extremely relieved.”
“We care about our kids that much and the reason why we did this was because of the mental health, academic achievement and equity issues,” she said, adding that not all families can afford cellphones for their children.
Robert Schumann, a physical education teacher at the school, said he has watched the gradual rise of cellphone use in schools for over two decades, and the ban is a turnaround for students.
They are joking around and actually engaging in classes, Schumann said, and he attributes the transformation to the school’s no-cellphone policy.”
Not being hyper-focused on the online world results in more real world interaction. This is ground breaking.
“However, former Vancouver School Board chair Patti Bacchus disagrees with a ban, saying it’s a “1960s solution to a 2023 problem.”
The education commentator said she has no doubt that cellphones could be a distraction in class, but over her last 10 years working in many schools, she doesn’t see phones as a big problem.
“I would not want to be a teacher tasked with enforcing this and constantly having to police somebody who brought their phone to school,” Bacchus said.
Students have lives going on outside of the class, such as taking care of siblings or doing part-time jobs and they may need phones to manage these tasks, she said.”
Students need to focus on learning while in the classroom. Teachers of even middling ability should be able to set up an environment that facilitates this basic requirement.
Students since 1960 and before have been able to function without being tethered to the digital world. Students will be fine.
“Bacchus said people also need to accept the fact that phones are ubiquitous components of modern life, and the technology is not going away.
Instead, she said teachers should perhaps take the opportunity to talk about addiction, list the pros and cons of using phones and leave it up to students to decide.”
Ubiquitous does not mean necessary. And again students are stupid and ignorant and will make self serving decisions not in their best interests. That’s why we have adults and not other students teaching them.
“Learn about it from that perspective, use it as an educational opportunity as opposed to, let’s just make rules and hide from it because that is not education,” Bacchus said.
Pierce said her goal is to see students across Canada taking a break from their phones in school rather than constantly checking social media notifications and responding to texts.”
Having rules, standards, and expectations is how effective education actually works. Making rules addresses problems/situations in the classroom and sets the stage for children to learn in a environment that is conducive to learning.
Pierce’s goals and methods are not coherent. I’m not seeing the path between “leaving it up for the students to decide” to “students [voluntarily] taking a break from their phones”. If you can see the way please let me know in the comments.
Cell phones are great, just not great in all contexts.
The RPOJ comes for thee “Nicky”.
Counterpunch needs to rein in the crazy, or at least find an editor that will actually edit for truth and veracity as opposed to the shout festival screed titled “The Time for Queer Revolution is Now” by Nicky Reid. How this ‘article’ got published is quite beyond me as it is rife with abject lies and hyperbole.
What the article and “Nicky” are though are prime examples of what passes for activism on the so called woke activist left. Notice there is never a positive solution offered only a ever growing grievance list that can only be satisfied by tearing down the society and norms that have given people like Nicky the opportunity to endlessly indulge in their specious narcissism in public.
This RPOJ (Red Pen of Justice) episode may run long as the bullshit runs deep and wide in almost every sentence.
The text in brown will be the quoted essay from “Nicky Reid”.
My commentary will be in red italics.
Outside (non fatuous) sources and quotes will be in purple.
So. Here… we… go!
““Why don’t you guys do something?” Those were the eternal words of Storme DeLarverie as the pigs hauled her away in shackles, bloodied but unbowed, after she threw the first punch of the Stonewall Uprising. “
Historical revisionism is one of the features of transgender ideology. Surprisingly(!) gender ideologues are fond of placing themselves at the centre of past events in order to gin up the baffle-gab narratives they use to hoodwink the public. Let’s get the actual history on the Stonewall riots –
“My research for this history demonstrates that if we wish to name the group most responsible for the success of the riots, it is the young, homeless homosexuals, and, contrary to the usual characterizations of those on the rebellion’s front lines, most were Caucasian; few were Latino; almost none were transvestites or transsexuals,” concludes David Carter in Stonewall, the definitive account of the uprising, for which he conducted hundreds of interviews. Carter quotes one of the bar’s owners stating that its clientele was “98 percent male.” As for the presence of transgender people, the Stonewall was “not a generally welcoming place for drag queens,” Eric Marcus, editor of an oral history of the gay rights movement, wrote in 1999. “The majority of the hundreds of people who crowded onto Christopher Street and jammed Sheridan Square were young gay men.” In his 1996 book American Gay, the sociologist and anthropologist Stephen O. Murray writes that “men familiar with the milieu then insist that the Stonewall clientele was middle-class white men and that very few drag queens or dykes or nonwhites were ever allowed admittance.”
Be very aware that someone who treats the historically record so maliciously will have no qualms about presenting lies and falsehoods about the present. This is one of the founding lies of transgender ideological narrative with the goals of painting themselves as the most oppressed group in the history of humankind. We’re only one sentence in folks…
“I feel like I’m screaming this to my people all the time lately and I still can’t seem to inspire the riot necessary for our collective survival.”
Ah yes, because the evil society does nothing but oppress you. Ever more the reason to burn it all down and remake the rules strictly based on your abject narcissism; sounds like a win for EVERYONE (this is how woke ‘inclusion‘ works btw).
I’m guessing this particular whinge is because parts of society (women who care about their rights, boundaries, and safety) have woken up to the bullshite that is being peddled by gender ideologues. Saying ‘no’ to the gender-cult is very distressing for them.
“We live in dangerous times. We have lived in them before but genderqueer people like me have never faced a creature quite like this.”
It is very important to establish how dangerous and oppressed you are (by your own metrics of course, we certainly cannot have empirical data muddying the waters. It is important to note that being transgender places you in one of the *safest* demographics in the US) .- especially in countries that, historically speaking, are the most free and most tolerant ones to exist. I’d like to see ‘Nicky’ spout this in China, or Cuba, or Iran. Then a few actual lessons about free speech and minority rights might be learned.
“As we reach an era when we have never stood farther outside of the closet, we face an open and brazen campaign to extinguish us from public existence.”
Umm. Reality is calling to you. Do you hear it? It’s the faint siren song of the truth trying desperately to breach your practiced ideological allergy to reality. A simple picture refutes yet another false transgender ideological construction (as does most of reality, to be honest).
Literally Extinguished…
” While popular right-wing ideologues proudly call for our annihilation, state governments across the nation are dutifully carrying out their dictates.”
I had to look up what ‘Nicky’ was talking about. I’m going to assume it was something to do with this clip.
Clearly, Michael Knowles is referring the ideology, and not the people. Accuracy in reporting, as Nicky keeps demonstrating, is clearly not their forte.
“Genocide is an ugly word, but I can’t think of a more appropriate description for the GOP’s war on “transgenderism.”
I am not particularly surprised that you can’t think of a more ‘appropriate description’ – because appropriate also usually entails the notion of comporting with reality. There is no trans genocide happening in the world outside of the unhinged ravings of transactivists hopped up on narcissism and fatuous ideology.
To see this risible claim of ‘transgender genocide’ demolished, please see Talia Nava’s full essay which I have quoted below on “There is No Trans Genocide”.
“For one, there is no clear intent to commit genocide against trans people, but additionally the trans comm unity is not of any particular nationality, ethnicity, race, or official religion (although one could argue that transgender ideology is a religion, it is not a recognized religious group). […] It appears the group that is most harmful to trans identifying individuals are the activists who claim to be protecting them.”
Confabulating again. Shocking.
“At a time when violence and suicide have never been higher in the transgender community, we are drowning in a deluge of openly bigoted legislation.”
I think ‘openly bigoted’ means in the real world legislation that comports with the material reality we all share. This from the Substack Parents With Inconvenient Truths About Trans:
Advocates of ‘gender affirming’ healthcare cite high suicide rates as evidence that medical and surgical intervention is “life-saving and medically necessary.” It goes without saying that every suicide is tragic, but there is no high-quality evidence to suggest that the often quoted overall attempted suicide rate of youth who identify as transgender is 41%. Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper who is the Chair of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health has stated, “As far as I know there are no studies that say that if we don’t start these kids immediately on hormones when they say they want them that they are going to commit suicide.. So that is misguided… in terms of needing to intervene medically to prevent suicide and doing it quickly. I know of no studies that have shown that.” There is also no evidence that medical transition decreases suicidality. In fact, one study showed that post transition adults were 4.9 times more likely to have made a suicide attempt and 19.1 times more likely to have died from suicide than the general population. No one is born in the wrong body. Our sex is written into the DNA of every cell of our body. People cannot change sex. It’s a serious thing to insinuate to someone that their healthy body is somehow wrong and might require extreme, irreversible cosmetic interventions to relieve mental distress. There is no right or wrong way to be a boy or a girl, a man or a woman.
I just want to pause here and draw attention to the two very different styles of writing going on. Nicky relies almost exclusively on personal narrative, raw emotions, and well…outright fabrications/delusions about how the world is. I (and other rational beings) present evidence and arguments based on said evidence for the reader to evaluate. ‘Nicky’ should try this ‘weird new methodology’ at some point in time.
“2023 is already the fourth consecutive record-breaking year for anti-trans bills in this country, with 498 hate laws in counting proposed in 49 states. 43 have already passed. This includes 12 states pushing laws that violate the rights of minors to seek what has been clinically proven to be lifesaving care, as well as three who have also expanded those bans to reach well into adulthood, banning the use of puberty blockers up to the age of 26.”
Nicky once again mischaracterizes legislation meant to protect children as ‘anti-trans’. We here at DWR like to classify this legislation as “pro-reality”. Children cannot consent to being sterilized, based on a self diagnosis of gender identity. It is a clown-school level of idiocy that certain medical ‘professionals’ have embraced the notion that young children can actively consent to make life affecting decisions. Justdad7 a Canadian Lawyer, characterizes and summarizes what is going on –
“The more controversial question is whether puberty blockers, which can be started as early as age 9, will result in sterility. Critics of medical transition have long argued that puberty suppression, which is almost invariably followed by cross sex hormones, will result in sterility. Gender clinicians generally reassure parents that puberty blockers will not necessarily result in sterility. They refer to research on cases of precocious puberty which have found that puberty will resume once the drugs have stopped. However, in treatment or precocious puberty the drugs are stopped at the beginning of the normal window for puberty. This is when they are started in gender affirming care. There is no reliable research on the effects of puberty blockers during the normal window for puberty on fertility. In private sessions, they do acknowledge that sterility is a serious risk.“
Yeah, so Nicky steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the other side of the story and hopes that his emotive language and hyperbole will win you over. (As opposed to facts and evidence.)
“This hideous campaign also includes a growing rash of so-called anti-drag bills the likes of which have already passed in Tennessee and Florida and are effectively written to police public gender non-conformity in a blatant violation of free speech and expression. In Nashville, a second attempt at “male or female impersonation” is a felony that could lead to over half a decade in prison. That is six years upstate for the crime of having a dick beneath your dress.”
The transgender piggy back is in play here and you will see many instances of this phenomena in Nicky’s essay. Trans ideology and transactivists will latch onto any other groups problems and use it to amplify their own concerns. Another favourite piggy-back target are individuals with chromosomal disorders or DSD’s or intersex people. They will regularly point to intersex people as some sort third sex which makes their specious argument that sex is spectrum “truthier”. While in reality, people with DSD’s do not constitute a third sex and almost all are unambiguously male or female. Anything to promote the transgender cause though, it really doesn’t matter how big the lie or who they have to toss under the bus. See the transgender denial of sex in action, and of course dismantled by fact in the video below.
“And these lawmakers aren’t shy about their intentions either. They have made it painfully clear that they consider the entire transgender tribe to be little more than an ideology that they fully intend to censor out of existence by any means necessary and they are targeting our children first, using the public school system for its original intended purpose to kill the Queer and save the child so as to protect the sanctity of their idealized concept of purified cisgender youth.”
The blurring boundaries and destabilizing children is being fought against. The original purpose was of the public school system was/is to educate them. This is not the goal of DQSH and similar operations as pointed out by James Lindsay on the New Discourses.
“It bears pointing out that so far we have heard that Drag Queen Story Hour exists to be generative for the following purposes: (1) to lead children to “livequeerly,” (2) to question sex and gender and their stability, (3) to break rules and want to break rules, (4) to see their usual teachers and school authority figures and potentially by extension their parents as boring by comparison to drag queens and “living queerly,” (5) to turn toward pleasure and desire, and (6) to let go of control, all in the presence of an adult man who thinks it is a good idea to dress and perform as a highly sexualized woman in the presence of children he hopes to influence. As we will see, we can add to this list (7) tempting them into “alternative modes of kinship” in the sense of the “queer ‘family’” one leaves their real family for and chooses “on the street.” (Calling this program “grooming,” it must be warned, will get you unceremoniously kicked off the largest social media platforms, by the way.)
At this point, it is legitimately a question as to why any adult would possibly consider Drag Queen Story Hour a good idea. DQSH surmounts this obvious challenge by selling itself deliberately as what it is not, both a necessary tool for increasing “LGBT empathy” and “family friendly.” Both of these designations are deliberate misdirections by the purveyors of Drag Queen Story Hour, who want to use it as a generative tool to lead (but not groom) young children into “queer culture” and “alternate modes of kinship” and desire.”
I’d highly recommend you spend some time at the New Discourses, there are many insightful and provocative essays to peruse.
“My people aren’t clueless to these facts. The word genocide is popping up like daisies in every support group and Queer bar across my little slice of rustbelt Americana, but I still can’t seem to inspire a single goddamn faggot to throw a fucking punch.”
I wonder why? Certainly not because your unhinged ranting is disconnected from reality.
“The stormtroopers are returning to Stonewall and every time I say revolution, my own fucking people stare at me like some kind of crazed heretic, telling me to simmer down and that this isn’t the appropriate time for such radicalism. Really? Then when? There is an open plot to erase us here. If this isn’t an appropriate time to arm ourselves to the teeth and batten down the hatches, then when is? I seriously want to know so I don’t miss the signal. Do we wait for the train cars to arrive at the gayborhoods? Or maybe we should just sing “We Shall Overcome” as they march us all into the fucking showers?”
I bet it is because they are tired. Tired of the cognitive dissonance. Tired of the constant ordering and reordering of who is “most oppressed” and what they can an not say based on some risible oppression matrix. Tired of meeting every objection with hyperbole (see Holocaust references above) and coercive tactics. It takes significant energy to be mad at everything all the time.
““Vote, march, be peaceful, repeat, vote, march, be peaceful, repeat…” this what they tell me over and over again. Hell, even the so-called radical Queers are simply peacefully marching to their local state capitols to demand that other powerful cis-gender people in Washington come to our rescue with the miracle of more useless legislation that no country sheriff or small-town principal is ever actually going to follow through on.
And they keep quoting Martin Luther King at me like braying birds, promising me with almost embarrassing sincerity that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice.” How do I politely break it to them that this is total fucking bullshit? First of all, King was quoting a 19th-century clergyman named Theodore Parker who was actually trying to console his fellow white abolitionists with the hollow promise that at least there would be justice in the sweet hereafter. Second, there exists no single clearer case that peaceful liberal democracy achieves exactly nothing than the endless struggle for anything that even remotely resembles civil rights in this country.”
Living in the country with the most freedom and rights the world has ever seen and makes the claim that system that has brought all these rights to fruition JUST DOESN’T WORK(?). We’ve gone full circle here and have returned to the constant negative complaining shtick.
[…] Skipping redundant ahistorical whinging.
“So, what happened to our precious liberal democracy? Motherfucker, this is your precious liberal democracy. I’ll let you in on one more dirty little secret. This liberalism gig is nothing but a bourgeoise drag show. The Age of Enlightenment occurred among the intellectual elites in the dark heart of Babylon during the height of colonialism, slavery and imperial genocide. From this same swamp of powdered wigs and pompous twats came the twin inventions of race and liberalism and both were devised for the exact same reason, to rationalize psychotic behavior.”
Trenchant class analysis with the solid argumentative support of “because I said so”.
“Like any other serial killer, the state desperately needs to believe in the benevolence of its own cruel existence in order not to crash like an idle shark. So, it replaced monarchies with congresses that hand out “rights” like gangsters hand out turkeys at Christmastime and it replaced puritanical crusades with the new secular religion of racial science, all in the name of the endless march of civilized progress.”
I wonder which editor at Counterpunch reviewed this copy and said, “Oh hey, this isn’t completely off the rails bat-shit crazy town speak. Let’s print it. I’d like to meet them and their purveyor of psychedelics.
“The gender binary was an invention of these same enlightened creeps too. More puritanical social conditioning masquerading as science. But the savages didn’t need to be fucking enlightened. Our pagan tribes were doing just fine before civilization came to brain us with the bludgeon of their historical arch. Pre-liberal societies from Africa to Atzlan existed for centuries without rigid gender boundaries, hierarchical racial caste systems and enlightened academic sociopaths. They also existed without prisons or monsters with badges to pack them full of broken children.
Searching for the Utopian vision that *obviously* existed in the past, and now *obviously* we have to burn down the current society to pave the way to return to the Utopian promised land… It’s obvious “Nicky” has no plan on how to organize society after the glorious revolution, only that – somehow – it will be better. Riiiiiiiiiiight.
“The few major achievements in social progress that have ever been made in this country weren’t made by Washington or Harvard. They were made by wild unassimilated savages in the streets when they finally stopped singing and started swinging. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was only signed into law under the duress of massive nationwide riots that came after Doctor King was assassinated, and a year later proud faggots like Storme DeLarverie and Marsha P. Johnson followed their lead by beating the police state stupid like a rented mule at Stonewall. The only reason that we didn’t achieve more is because we stopped short of the revolution that we needed to be free and the only reason that we stopped is because the state paid us to behave with temporary privileges that they call rights.
As long as the state stands, marginalized people will remain at the mercy of its enlightened aristocracy who will only ever give us just enough rights to behave and then replace them with more violence once we let our guards down. I don’t believe in coincidences because I don’t have the agency to afford them. Queer people became targets for genocide again the moment we began to assimilate into the same breeder state that Storme begged us to smash.”
*Yawn* – I hope that screaming into the Void is therapeutic for you. For the rest of adult society it looks like a ill conceived temper tantrum, but go ahead an vehemently soil your diapers. Keep doing you, you magnificent queer agitator.
“So, I’m going to ask you, people, one more time, as nicely as a bloodied but unbowed genderfuck bitch like me knows how to ask.”
All I’m getting from this is unbalanced and unwell man in dress vibes. But as with all activist leftist bullshit one must always consult the oppression matrix to ‘prove’ the worth of your insights and commentary. Never-you-mind those small details like comporting with the reality and history we all share…
“Why don’t you guys’ fucking do something? Justice doesn’t come from civilization, it comes from pissed-off freaks like you and me in the streets, and the arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend unless we grab it with both hands and wrap around the throats of the powerful.
When the state gets violent, reform becomes an act of mass suicide and I’m done with drinking that cult’s punch. It’s time to get fierce and it’s time to get organized. It’s time to finish the Stonewall Uprising and overthrow the government once and for all, side by side with every other tribe that refuses to conform to the institutional violence of liberal reform.”
You know that process… the incremental progress toward a more just and human society? Fuck that shit. Instead lets go full Tribalism and destroy that system that has made the US the most prosperous and most free nation on Earth. I’m sure that a polity based on group identity and oppression will be just as good. Somehow….
This is the problem with the marxist/maoist bullshit. They never lay out the plan for what success looks like. It’s always in a process of becoming so no metrics can apply because really, when is the revolution ever finished.
“The revolution” certainly never leads to dictatorial authoritarian states that devalue human life and liberty. That almost never happens…
“Queer revolution now!”
Not on my watch, or anyone else’s who happens to values rationality, liberty, and democracy. Come back to us when your utopian vision doesn’t end with an authoritarian nightmare.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…