Since the famed author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling, came up in my last post, I thought you might like to read her public letter from June of last year, 2020. In it she documents her “fall from grace” in the eyes of Gender Ideologues. And many of her fans. But she has gained new fans for publicly stating that “biology is not bigotry.”
Of course, unlike Canadian Nurse Amy Hamm who publicly defended Rowling and jeopardized her career for doing so, Ms. Rowling is a multi-billionaire and can “take the heat” as they say. Still, no one, no matter how rich, enjoys having their reputation unjustifiably sullied. I’m glad a popular public figure bravely spoke out on this issue.
I was particularly agitated by the news from Rowling that a brave young feminist and lesbian Magdalen Berns, who Rowling followed on Twitter, was castigated by the Trans-Activist “Twitter mob” for saying she “didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises.”
I’ve heard about similar attacks of other lesbians for refusing to accept Trans-women (with penises) as suitable partners. This is the warped logic some Trans-activists embrace and expect you to embrace as well. Or you will be publicly shamed. They must be accepted as who they say they are irrespective of biology.
Is this the world we want to live in? We better come up with some answers quick. Things are moving swiftly.
Rowling mentions a hopeful sign, though. She knew she was going to be attacked for publicly supporting someone fired from her job “for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets.” But she gratefully received an avalanche of support as well from the silent majority who also worry about today’s “climate of fear” generated by Gender Ideologues.
Following the link below you will learn another acronym coined by Trans-Activitists, TERF which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. I’ve already highlighted one Radical Feminist in a previous post. And will continue to do so in future posts. Many self-described Radical Feminists are convinced Gender Ideology is hurting women.
Read what Rowling had to say about our uncivil “toxic” age. Adults need to cease “cowering before the tactics of the playground.” She posted a very informed letter on her blog, succinctly covering most of the bases I’ve blogged about in the last few months. And has earned my respect. See if she can earn yours.
LINK DISCLAIMER footnote:1 Links from this blog to online resources don’t necessarily mean I support everything found on these sites. But as adults we should embrace viewpoint diversity. And make alliances where we can.
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If you’ve just found my blog and are intrigued about the issue and want to learn more, I highly recommend a book by Abigail Shrier.
Shrier is a graduate of Columbia College who went on to earn a bachelor of philosophy degree from the University of Oxford and a JD from Yale Law School. Her book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughterswas named a “best book” by The Economist and The Times of London. [2020, 2021]
I just came across a recent interview of Abigail. It is an excellent summary of the hypothesis of her book: the recent explosion of girls identifying as Transgender is because ofsocial contagion. This is must see for those concerned about this issue. Please check it out below.
For more than a year, I’ve been thinking that Online Porn is a key reason why so many young girls identify as “boys” in the Western world. If you think your Smartphone toting 12 year old son or daughter are not watching some of the most revolting sexual images you can imagine, then you are deluding yourself. Boys are learning at a very young age how to objectify and denigrate women. Porn is stunting healthy sexual development. You don’t need a professional psychiatrist to tell you this. If they are not getting porn on their phone because you think you have “locked it down” (dream on!) then they are watching porn on the Smartphone of a friend. And many young girls are saying to themselves, if this is what it means to be a woman, get me outta here! I think Online Porn is a reason why some of our girls are checking out other options. It helps to explain the explosive growth of adolescent onset gender-dysphoria among our girls.
There are other forces at play as well. Deep depression. Personal trauma. Anxiety. Autism. But these co-morbidities are rarely analyzed before “fast-tracking” youths to transition.
Also I think something else is in play. Girls from middle and upper middle class backgrounds are constantly being told they are the victims of Patriarchy and that men get all the breaks in our 21st century western world. Plus, they are being told that if they are white then they are members of the oppressor class. (The vast majority of teens claiming to be Trans or non-binary are white girls from middle & upper middle class “progressive” families.) So coming out as Trans or Non-binary lends social credibility to their existence. It’s very socially rewarding. All they need to give up is “a pound of flesh.” And perhaps future fertility (though this is hardly mentioned). But they will receive praise and affirmation for their new-found “authentic” selves. This is where the influence of social media looms large.
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The interviewer John Anderson and Abigail discuss Porn as well as the overall “affirming” environment that is “grooming” our girls and boys down the path toward exotic identity expressions. Unfortunately, unlike a tattoo or non-conforming hair and clothing styles, many of these expressions require medical intervention. We are witnessing the medicalization of identity. And our doctors, our technologists, our pharmaceutical representatives, who have mostly brought great good to our culture, must be asked some very demanding conflict of interest questions. We need to hold them accountable.
Because our children matter more than their bottom line.
Planned Parenthood’s new Cross-Sex Hormone revenue stream is not purely about “liberation.” In some of our states a 16 year old girl can walk into Planned Parenthood and without a note from a therapist or her mother can receive doses of testosterone 40 times the natural female level. I’m investigating “the money trail” argument and will be blogging about this soon.
But first this important interview.
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The interviewer John Anderson served as Deputy Prime Minister of Australia for 6 years between 1999 and 2005 under John Howard. I recommend you “turn on” the CC (Closed Captioning) since he has an Australian accent that may be a little hard to understand for some of you, especially those with hearing loss <grin.>.
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STANDARD LINK DISCLAIMER footnote:1 Links from this blog to online resources don’t necessarily mean I support everything found on these sites. But as adults we should embrace viewpoint diversity. And make alliances where we can.
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Again, Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters is a must read. She’s a fine and careful writer. And as she says in the interview above, the amount of vitriol sent her way for writing such a thoughtful book is shameful and also indicative of the fight ahead. But our children are worth that fight. Civil Society is worth that fight.
Of course, for my Christian Brothers and Sisters, we must fight the way Jesus fought. Silencing, deplatforming, cancelling, shouting down our ideological opponents is not Christian. We must listen to what they have to say. And then speak the Truth as we understand it. Unfortunately, the more I study this issue and the forces in play, I’m led to the conclusion that the Gender Ideologues are not terribly interested in dialogue or viewpoint diversity. For them, this is a massive Power Play.
If you disagree with them, as I do. You need to learn and take a stand. I hope to help you in that effort.
Full disclosure. I recently became an Amazon Affiliate. So I will receive a very small percentage of the sale of any books I recommend on my blog. Just so you know.
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I’ve studied this issue for the last 9 months, reading several books on the topic, scouring the Internet etc., and I’ve come up with only one physiological reason for why Gender Identity Activists insist thatGender is on a spectrum. And, counter-intuitively for most people, that Sex is ASSIGNED at birth, as opposed to recognized at birth. Which leads a growing number of Activists to claim that Sex too is on a spectrum. Because since sex is “assigned” it is therefore a social construct that can be reconstructed thus leading activists to claim you can change your sex. And even more radically some say there are more than two sexes. Yep. That’s what many are now saying. [See video in my next post.]
But before looking at the physiological reason, let’s look briefly at the philosophy and some real world consequences of what I’m going to call the Radical Disembody Movement.
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Gender Ideologues have philosophical reasons for pushing Gender Identity and Expression as valid categories not only for civil rights protection but also because many of them seek a fundamental restructuring of society. That philosophy, with its desire to restructure society, is usually joined at the hip with a Critical Theory offshoot called Queer Theory (I should explore that theory in more detail at another time, but fair warning, by design, QT is virtually an incomprehensible, convoluted mess.) For now let me briefly quote a satisfactory summary of QT from Wikipedia:
Queer theory and politics necessarily celebrate transgression in the form of visible difference from norms. These 'Norms' are then exposed to be norms, not natures or inevitabilities. Gender and sexual identities are seen, in much of this work, to be demonstrably defiant definitions and configurations.
Because this definition of queerness does not have a fixed reference point, Judith Butler has described the subject of queer theory as a site of ‘collective contestation’. She suggests that ‘queer’ as a term should never be ‘fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes’.
Fundamentally, queer theory does not construct or defend any particular identity, but instead, grounded in post-structuralism and deconstruction, it works to actively critique heteronormativity, exposing and breaking down traditional assumptions that sexual and gender identities are presumed to be heterosexual or cisgender. [emphasis mine]
Queerness in this sense is a very fluid way of assessing the world around us and interacting with it. Judith Butler, QT’s most prominent theoretician, says, Queerness ought to be characterized by “collective contestation.” This is all very much like other 20th Century Critical Theories, deriving as they do from a Marxist analysis of society and its ills. For example, Critical Race Theory like Queer Theory seeks to collectively overthrow “oppressive” narratives or discourses. In CRT racism is opposed. In Queer Theory that “oppressive” narrative is “heteronormativity.” (Remember Ms. Barnes?) All this fluidity has as its goal the destabilization of cultural norms, especially Western Capitalist and Religious cultural norms. You can see how a variety of philosophical motivations, social, economic, anti-religious, etc., energize their “critical” efforts.
If you’ve been following the recent social movements energized by the various Critical Theories, and after reading the Judith Butler quote above about “collective contestation,” you will understand why these various movements are so relentless to shutdown, shout down, and outright cancel, or “deplatform” any dissent. For many, fighting “oppression” by any means necessary is the animating dogma.
Previously relegated to feminist and gender studies departments of academia QT has now “hit the big time.” In the Western world, QT is reforming cultural consciousness and shaping public policy. Let me give just one example of the in-roads that Queer Theory has made in our popular culture by linking to the following 2016 CNN story “What It Means To Be Gender-fluid.”
CNN starts off the report by writing that gender identity and expression “can change every day or even every few hours,” and this fluidity “can be displayed in how we dress, express and describe ourselves.” Moreover, it added, “Everyone’s gender exists on a spectrum.”
Of course “expression” is variable. But I want to highlight “identity” here. This view of humanity explicitly states that our subjective mental state is the overriding determining factor of identity. And this mental state, as mental states do, can change as often as our shifting moods or needs dictate. If adopted, this point of view renders any effort to form rational public policy hopelessly problematic.
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Here’s one example of the practical consequence of aligning society with a movement that idealizes radical disembodiment.
Public safe spaces for biological women, spaces that were constructed so that men and women could work and recreate together outside the home will be threatened if today’s radical disembody movement proceeds unhindered. Those safe spaces were constructed with full recognition of the specific biological differences, privacy concerns, AND most importantly differences in vulnerability between men & women. If the radical disembody movement wins the argument public spaces like sex-specific intimate facilities such as restrooms, locker rooms, etc., could be entered by a biological male identifying as a female on Tuesday morning, and then by Tuesday afternoon that same male could revert back to a male identity and access the nearest male restroom “in an emergency.”
Under this logic, saying you are a trans-woman (otherwise known as biological male) with the right to enter female spaces is a totally unfalsifiable assertion.
Real world safety concerns and Law Enforcement problems proliferate under these “Gender-Identity-Based Access Policies” (GIBAPs). Kenneth Lanning, who for 20 years worked in the Behavioral Science Unit and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy in Quantico, describes this real-world problem:
Law enforcement officers and prosecutors will be less likely to record, investigate, or charge indecent exposure or peeping offenses in a GIBAP environment, because there is no objective standard for determining whether someone born a male can lawfully be present in a women-only facility. It would be more difficult to prove lascivious intent when self-reported gender identity drives access rights, and easier to accuse law enforcement personnel of discrimination. This is made even more difficult when that self-reporting need not be corroborated in any way whatsoever.1Expert Declaration and Report of Kenneth V. Lanning, Defendants’ and Intervenor-Defendants’ Brief, Exhibit M, 18.
Sometimes it is alleged that people like myself or detective Lanning are guilty of falsely ascribing impure motives to those who have actually gone through the transitioning process and truly identify as Transgender. Actually we are more concerned about the non-transgendermale sex offenders who are “driving a truck” through this very real GIBAP loophole in public policy. The examples are multitude!
As every law enforcement official knows, public restrooms are crime attractors. Women and girls are especially at risk in a GIBAP world. You don’t need a PhD in Criminology to know this. Again, it is not the truly Transgender person committing crimes but the opportunistic male predator who will in a world with “Gender-Identity-Based Access Policies” (GIBAPs).
Establishing criminal intent will be much harder in a world where biological males can self-identify “at any time” with the opposite sex and legally enter the safe spaces of women and girls.
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Here is another real world example. During an LGBTQ Presidential Forum in 2019 Joe Biden said the following:
"In prison, the determination should be that your sexual identity is defined by what you say it is, not what in fact the prison says it is."
Today, in the British prison system at least 1 in 50 male prisoners identifies as transgender. Because of a similar prison policy, like the one Biden supported, a convicted rapist and child molester in the United Kingdom was placed in a women’s prison and subsequently sexually assaulted four female inmates.
Is this totally subjective gender fluid world, the world we want to live in?
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Apart from a Queer Theory saturated worldview, I can find only one physiological reason for why Gender Identity Activists propagandize in this way and why they say “sex is assigned” at birth. And that reason has to do with DSD’s or Disorders of Sexual Development (A categorization that Activists want to relabel “Differences of Sexual Development”).
Let’s look at those for a few minutes.
Sometimes these disorders (I refuse to call them differences) result in the formation of two sets of sex organs, or an incomplete development of reproductive organs. They are sometimes caused by genetic mutations and at other times by chromosomal or hormonal defects.
But because we have people with ambiguous genitalia and chromosomal irregularities this is considered grounds for throwing the whole classification system up in the air and dispensing altogether with the male – female binary. As I just outlined above there are real world consequences to going down this path of eliminating the male – female sex binary as the overriding identifier of sex.
Unbelievably some prominent Medical Associations are playing along too. I think they have become politicized by radical Queer Theory Subjectivism. More about that in future posts.
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I’m trying hard to be fair about this issue. So I don’t want to misrepresent Gender Ideologues. But in all my research I can find only one objective reason for why they say sex is assigned at birth. It’s the only reason why our grade school teachers were instructed to abandon the “biological sex” section of the Genderbread Person for the “sex assigned at birth” section of the Gender Unicorn. [See my post Our Schools and Gender Ideology.]
They hang their hat on DSD’s which occur in 1 out of 5000 births.2This figure is found in Peter A. Lee et al., “Global Disorders of Sex Development Update since 2006: Perceptions, Approach and Care,” Hormone Research in Paediatrics 85 (2016): 159.
That’s it! That’s the only thing that grounds their ideology in anything remotely biological and scientifically objective. Everything else in their ideology is about the totally subjective lived experiences of the “disembodied”individual. Individual perception and desire are sacrosanct. Not to mention free floating. In other words nothing more grounded than “my truth and your truth.”
Again, I repeat from my “What is Sex” post, since biological sex is grounded in an organism’s organization for reproduction, DSD’s are not mere differences.
Here are some Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD’s).
Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) The most common DSD occurring in 1 out of 14,000 births is a recessive disorder caused by two parents who carry a faulty (mutated) gene which prevents the normal production of cortisol thus altering the development of primary and secondary sex characteristics of their child. This often leads to the virilization or masculinization of the female external genitalia producing obvious genital ambiguity. Internally these people develop and function as women.
Klinefelter syndrome: Instead of 46 chromosomes, someone with this syndrome has 47. They develop as males but with abnormal body proportions and enlarged breasts, infertility is common.
Turner syndrome: People with 45 chromosomes. Instead of having XX or XY they have only X chromosomes. They develop as infertile women because two X chromosomes are necessary for the normal development of ovaries. Causes numerous health and development problems, including but not limited to short stature, lymphedema, infertility, webbed neck, coarctation of the aorta, ADHD, amenorrhoea, and obesity.
Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome: “People with androgen insensitivity syndrome develop as normal-appearing but sterile women, lacking a uterus and oviducts and having internal testes in the abdomen.”
According to an article by Bonnie McCann-Crosby and V. Reid Sutton, “Disorders of Sexual Development,” in the journal Clinics in Perinatology 42 (June 2015): 403, a severe genetic mutation results in the testes never forming and therefore the body never masculinizes because of testosterone deficiency. These individuals develop as females who are infertile (because they lack a second X chromosome).
Ovotesticular disorder (also called true hermaphroditism) – A condition where an individual has both testicular and ovary tissue.
Mosaicism: People who develop from a single fertilized egg but because of a genetic mutation have a patchwork of genetically different cells. In other words two different sets of DNA, with some of the body’s cells being XX or a single X and some being XY. Klinefelter syndrome already mentioned is one kind of Mosaicism.
Chimera: When two different embryos combine early in a pregnancy. Again, some cells are XX and some cells have XY chromosomes. Fewer than 100 cases documented worldwide.
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Okay, after having waded through that, what should we conclude? These are disorders. Not differences. My brother was born with a cardio-vascular disorder which is why he died at the age of 21. His cardio-vascular system was incapable of working as designed and gave out way before the normal “expiration date.” Disorders of Sexual Development in almost all cases result in a short-circuiting of our reproductive system. It is a disorder. We should stop using DSD’s as an excuse for saying the male-female binary is obsolete.
Finally, and here is where the “assigned at birth” label gets attached, in the past when doctors were confronted with an infant having one of these disorders they had to make a careful judgment as to which sex the child was most likely to be comfortable with as the child matured. Sometimes in the past, but not so much today, actual surgical intervention occurred to assist the infants future development. Occasionally the doctor would “assign” either a male or female path forward, depending on the doctor’s professional judgement. Birth certificate sex was therefore “assigned” in these exceptionally rare cases.
This is why Gender Activists use their “assigned at birth” “social construction” language, providing some of the rationale for their radical disembody movement. (Apart from their philosophical rationale of course.)
Does that sound rational to you? Throwing out the male – female binary because a relatively low number of humans have one of these disorders which occasionally necessitates a sex “assignment” by a medical professional is not reasonable to me. Does that non-binary world sound reasonable to you?
It does if you want to fundamentally restructure society by tossing out all sexual norms, norms born out of biology and religious Truth.
Now of course most people are not agenda driven in this way. They just want to be considerate of “difference.” That’s completely understandable and loving. And we can still do that. We can still love people and embrace those with these disorders without buying into the radical social agenda being pushed on their behalf. And we can love people who are genuinely confused, who think it is possible and advisable to reject their biological sex.
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