Matt Walsh was featured in a previous post. Here is a portion….
If anyone needs a Primer on the question of what is a Man or Woman, please read my “What is Sex” post.
Essentially, we tell the difference based on reproductive capacities. Well, most of us do.
Again, this is not about loving confused people. But you are not loving someone if you affirm their false perception of who they are. Simply attaching ”marginalized” to a person or group is not enough to decide the matter, and shutdown debate. There is much more at stake here than someone’s feelings.
Matt Walsh is known for stumping transgender activists by asking them to define what a woman is. The author appeared on an episode of “Dr. Phil” in January and asked LGBT activists Ethan and Addison just that, tripping up the activist:
“What is a woman? Can you tell me what a woman is?” Walsh queried.
“No, I can’t,” Ethan admitted, “because it’s not for me to say. Womanhood looks different for everybody.”
Speaking to Addison, Walsh stated, “You stood up here and said, ‘Trans women are women.’ What is a woman?”
“Womanhood is … something that I cannot define,” Addison said.
“But you used the word,” Walsh pushed back. “So what did you mean when you said, ‘Trans women are women’?”
“I do not define what a woman is because I do not identity as a woman,” Addison responded. “Womanhood is something that is an umbrella term.”
“That describes what?” Walsh interjected.
“People who identify as a woman,” Addison said.
Walsh, again, pressed, “Identify as what?”
“A woman,” Addison said. “What is that?” Walsh pressed.
“To each their own,” Addison said, adding that “each person” is “going to have a different relationship with their own gender identity and define it differently. So, trans women are women.”
“You won’t even tell me what the word means though, so that’s the problem,” Walsh responded.
end of previous post….
Walsh has just produced a video on the conservative website Dailywire.com. Some of my readers won’t like that source, but as I frequently write:
Links from this blog to online resources don’t necessarily mean I support everything found there. But as adults we should embrace viewpoint diversity. And make alliances where we can.
Here are some snippets from the video “What Is a Woman.” This is how disconnected from reality we have become.
Coming June 1. My journey to find the answer to the great question of our time. You will not want to miss this film. #WhatIsAWoman
This is why they don’t want you to see #WhatIsAWoman. It’s because of moments like this. Gender ideology is an insane, incoherent mess. pic.twitter.com/p5m2RIbKff
Matt Walsh documentary shows pediatrician saying prepubescent kids are ready for trans hormone therapy 'whenever they ask for it' and claiming you can 'pause' hormones 'like music'https://t.co/bl1yTe7RFx
Scott Newgent is the hero of the film. Such a remarkable contrast between the raw openness and honesty in this interview and the evasiveness and defensiveness from the “experts” I spoke to.
Walsh interviewing Women’s Studies Professor “Truth is Transphobic”
Speaking philosophically, you’ve just witnessed radical individualism on display. According to the gender ideology advocates, individuals are entirely self-defining and autonomous. Their perceived ”reality” is purely subjective, with no unimaginative boundaries. Any genetic contribution made by someone’s male and female parents doesn’t matter. Neither does God’s contribution.
The radical individualist says: ”I can be whatever I want to be!”
No, actually, you cannot.
If you think you are a bird and can fly. You cannot.
If you imagine you are a penis-having, testicle-carrying, person-with-prostate, woman. You are not.
Come down off the ledge you’ve been encouraged to leap from. Plenty of people want to help you.
Speaking theologically, and as a Christian I must, there are two components to God’s created reality. Call them the invisible world and the visible world. Or to shrink it down to a more personal level, Mind/Soul & Body. The goal of any Therapist, Christian or otherwise, is reintegration of Mind & Body. Not a fictitious, perhaps technology assisted, separation of the two.
I remember as a young man when I first saw the landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt, I yearned to go west.
And so I have. Many times.
Here is the most important painting of his early career inspired by the Swiss Alps.
Lake Lucerne, 1858 Albert Bierstadt
Overview
Best known for his panoramic views of the Rocky Mountains, Albert Bierstadt began his career as a painter of European landscapes. In 1856, during a period of study abroad, he spent time in Switzerland and completed the plein air sketches he would later use to compose Lake Lucerne, the most important painting of his early career.
In the spring of 1858 he sent the painting to New York for the annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design. The picture caused a sensation. Bierstadt was hailed as a bright new star on the American art stage and was elected an honorary member of the Academy.
Bierstadt’s painting offers a sweeping view of Lake Lucerne with the village of Brunnen in the middle distance and the alpine peaks Ematten, Oberbauen, Uri–Rotstock and St. Gotthard in the distance. Though an image of mountain grandeur, Lake Lucerne also contains numerous pastoral vignettes—a harvest scene near the center, a religious procession at the right, and a camp of Roma people at the left.
One year after completing Lake Lucerne Bierstadt traveled to the Rocky Mountains for the first time. During the decade that followed he produced the western landscapes that brought him his greatest success. These views of the West, so often described as distinctly American, were born of Bierstadt’s experience abroad and frequently duplicate the composition of the first of his large-scale landscapes, Lake Lucerne.
Having been on the receiving end of student protests in the UK, philosopher Kathleen Stock in an important piece says the following about today’s all too often ”offended” Gen Z.
There’s a now-standard story about the psyche of the student that protests about speech, popularised by Lukianoff and Haidt’s book, and advanced by Frank Furedi before them. This story says: the parents of these students probably overprotected them in childhood and adolescence, smoothing their way through school and praising them to the hilt, whilst playing up the spectre of multiple physical hazards and risks outside the home. With fewer opportunities for independent interaction with peers, and with the internet as their main proxy for real-life experience, the students haven’t learnt the kind of resilience and confidence that would allow them to absorb the feelings of anxiety produced by hearing robust challenges to their views. Instead, they expect the adults around them to take care of their needs and to protect them from unpleasant experiences. They arrive at university as passive consumers in search of parental substitutes, revelling in their own sense of victimhood, and not as autonomous and effective self-movers. This, in other words, is Generation Z framed as Generation Safety Blanket.
I’ve also read Lukianoff and Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind in the past year. $9.99 on Kindle is a steal!
A timely investigation into the new “safety culture” on campus and the dangers it poses to free speech, mental health, education, and ultimately democracy.
The generation now coming of age has been taught three Great Untruths: their feelings are always right; they should avoid pain and discomfort; and they should look for faults in others and not themselves. These three Great Untruths are part of a larger philosophy that sees young people as fragile creatures who must be protected and supervised by adults. But despite the good intentions of the adults who impart them, the Great Untruths are harming kids by teaching them the opposite of ancient wisdom and the opposite of modern psychological findings on grit, growth, and antifragility.
The result is rising rates of depression and anxiety, along with endless stories of college campuses torn apart by moralistic divisions and mutual recriminations.
The subtitle is “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation For Failure.” But Stock isn’t sure they got it completely right. She has some other ideas about the dysfunctions of today’s youth.
All the talk today is about “safeguarding” “safe spaces” etc. And the desire to reduce “harm.” What about undeniable Truth? Is that available to us today? Not completely, but truly (verily, verily). Are some things, if not all things, certainly knowable by the community? And would that reduce, not increase harm?
Some say yes. Others say no.
As a Christian I would point to, for example, the creation of a bi-natured cosmos, Heaven and Earth, Male and Female, Soul and Body (I’m an equality dualist! Not a Platonic Dualist. Read more about that here.)
Stock would not follow me along those lines. But she would say:
The old idea of the University as a vibrant and cohesive community of individuals, forced into productive relation with one another in the shared pursuit of truth, is very old hat. For a start, nobody really believes in truth anymore.
Well. Some of us do. Including Stock.
She offers sound advice to isolated individuals (primarily social media denizens) and warns those who have “become far too cocky about (their) own moral judgements.” The reason for this precise warning is because “body and soul” interactions matter. There is no substitute for real body and soul community. For “shared communal activities with others face-to-face.” This will “not only help you to develop a full range of moral capacities, but also (give) you a sense of proportion.”
Because LIFE is not exactly as YOU experience it.
Civil interactions with those with whom you might disagree are a must in a civil society. Otherwise, we are reduced to power struggles, most often framed by today’s Critical Theorists as a struggle between oppressor and oppressed. Or cynical political activists more concerned with “winning” than true Justice for All, rich and poor. For them, there are no real Truths, just power relationships between groups. And if you are moral, in the sense they define morality, you will align yourself with marginalized groups (real or imagined) or with your political party and “win.” By any means necessary, if it comes to that.
Of course the classic Christian response (not Stock’s) is to remind everyone that all of us, white, black, brown, etc…rich and poor, male or female are broken people who frequently miss the mark of becoming truly human, which is to say human like Jesus. Our job as Christians is to humbly point toward a pathway of real recovery, body and soul. Only found “in Christ.” For rich and poor. Male and Female.
Stock reminds us that our own moral judgements need to be tested “in the crucible of daily human relations” where we can get “good feedback.”
For Christians, that must mean community dialogue with Scripture, the Church Universal and our Historic Traditions.
But far too often today’s social justice warriors are not interested in dialogue and feedback, certainly not with the past. Add to that the fact that so many kids today are fed an unending series of “catastrophic” possibilities UNLESS they get involved in rescuing the planet, or standing up for someone else’s “identity” they are told great harm will result.
So….
They shout. They cancel. They shutdown. Those cocky young “speech-sanitizers.”
Disrespectfully sure of themselves, they cancel their opponents. Ironically, all for the sake of “inclusion.”
By not wanting to cause perceived harm to expressive individuals (like themselves) or to the planet, they silence “immoral” dissent. For the pursuit of real and sometimes unavoidably messy communal interaction, which may assist in uncovering difficult to uncover truths, and tempering their own sharp edges, they don’t seem to care. They feel hurt themselves, or they virtue signal by “hurting” for others. Because they “know” enough to know that those who disagree must be oppressors, or on the side of oppression and therefore must be silenced.
The alternative of being open to disagreement, and allowing those who speak the Truth as they understand Truth, a Truth which may sometimes hurt. A Truth that may be critical of individual choices….simply cannot be allowed. Besides. For them, there is only “my truth and your truth.” And they have organized to see that their truth wins. They are vigorously for the “victims” after all. So they must be right.
Any deviations must be silenced by the speech-sanitizers clutching their “harmless” safety blankeys.
With this logic expressive individualists may only be “affirmed.” All 88 genders (at last count). At all costs. Unfortunately, as I’ve documented on this blog, those costs will be many.
