Blue Ridge Style & Beyond
Well there’s always a first time. I’m not a Richard Dawkins fan (he’s one of the so-called “New Atheists.”). But recently he interviewed Helen Joyce (big fan). Like Dawkins, I’m in favor of politeness except…..well, I’ll let Helen explain.
You can read my take on preferred pronouns here….
And Megan Kelly’s.
+++
Helen Joyce thinks she has landed upon a crucial motivation for some of those caught within the gender identity matrix.
And how those few often paralyze entire organizations.
…“A lot of people have done what is the worst thing you could do, which is to harm their children irrevocably, because of it. Those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for their own sanity, and for their own self-respect. So they’ll still be fighting, and each one of those people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups.
“Like, I’ve lost count of the number of times that somebody has said to me of a specific organization that has been turned upside down on this, “Oh, the deputy director has a trans child.” Or, oh, the journalist on that paper who does special investigations has a trans child. Or whatever. The entire organization gets paralyzed by that one person. And it may not even be widely known at that organization that they have a trans child. But it will come out, people will have sort of said quietly, and now you can’t talk truth in front of that person, and you know you can’t, because what you’re saying is: “You as a parent have done a truly, like, a human rights abuse level of awful thing to your own child that can not be fixed.
“There are specific individuals who are actively against women’s rights here and it is not known why they are, but I happen to know through the back channels that it is because they’ve transed their child.
“So those people will do anything for the entire rest of their lives to destroy me and people like me because people like me are standing in reproach to them. I don’t want to be, I’m not talking directly to them, and I don’t spend my time bitching to them.
“But the fact is that just simply by saying we will never accept natural males in women’s spaces, well it is their son that we’re talking about. And they’ve told their son that he can get himself sterilized and destroy his own basic sexual function and women will accept him as a woman. And if we don’t, there’s no way back for them and that child.
“They’ve sold their child a bill of goods that they can’t deliver on.“
Helen Joyce
[Transcript from Interview conducted by Peter Boghossian : timestamp 1:07:26]
These are not people who want to radically restructure society; the Neo-Marxists, Neo-Maoists, the Critical Theorists, the hard core ideologues who want to reduce ‘cisheteropatriarchy’ and capitalism to the dustbin of history.
These are parents who can’t possibly admit what they have done.
+++
Helen Joyce has “penned” a vigorous reply to our “traumatized” culture.
In their 2018 book The Rise of Victimhood Culture, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning describe how honour and dignity cultures are giving way to a moral code which elevates the oppressed. Call-outs and cancellations, they explain, are status-raising tactics, in which people claim to have been harmed by problematic views and to have suffered micro-aggressions in order to don the mantle of victimhood.
The spread of victimhood culture has helped popularise novel gender identities (non-binary, agender) and sexual orientations (aroace, pansexual) since they allow people to claim membership of oppressed groups without experiencing any actual hardship. It is also driving the self-diagnosis of mental illnesses, from quotidian conditions such as anxiety and depression, to boutique ones such as multiple-personality disorder or a novel form of Tourette’s transmitted by TikTok.
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.
Why do we give veto power to the weakest, most immature members of society? Why are they allowed to control what can and cannot be discussed? Or which words may and may not be spoken? What if they are not merely weak, or immature, but delusional?
When it comes to Gender Ideology we must love without submitting to bullying blackmail. And the denial of reality.
Adults. Resist. Lovingly. But resist. With integrity.
+++
Love Refuses To Affirm Confusion