A.R.T. for All & Sundry: Sterile Social Progress and Sexless Equality Nidra Poller
https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=190868&sec_id=190868
[This article is translated from the original French by the author. The article is a response to the debate in France on legislation that will extend access to PMA, Procréation Médicalement Assistée (or ART, Assisted Reproduction Technology) to lesbian couples and single women in France.]
Isn’t it heartless to block the flow of such tender desires? Where is the “why” strong enough to answer the “why not?”
Society is about to assume divine powers to compensate for the stinginess of a God who’s lost His glory. Enthusiasts only count the positive side of the calculation: the 1 + 1 = 2 love of the same-sex couple + their love for the wanted child cancels the minus-one of the father. And the absent mother of the child born by gestation pour autrui, known as GPA (inevitable authorization of surrogate motherhood) will be compensated by the sweet tale of the sperm-donator and the womb-lender, venerated like the mythical genitors of an ancient people.
How should we calculate the deliberate deprivation for the child born of these equations, of splendid male/female dynamics? Militants of the cause write it off as a sustainable loss. The father or mother of a “conventional” couple can disappear by accident or by choice, n’est-ce pas? So, it’s doable. No room for old-fashioned sexual differentiation hang-ups. Move over, buddy!
Transgenderism helps erase the father + mother = child formula by positing a range of possibilities that denies the essential difference between a man and a woman. An ill-defined aberration—dysphoria—becomes a sort of state of mind that will be soothed by “medical treatment” (that has nothing to do with healthcare), boosted by a proselyte ideology that seeps into society as a whole.
In one of the more grotesque variations on the theme, we have the “man” that claims to be the father and/ or mother of the child carried in the uterus she kept, at least temporarily, during the male-to-female transition.
A man has a miscarriage in a Boston hospital. He comes to the emergency room complaining of stomach pain, identifies himself as a trans, is left waiting for two hours, and gives birth to a dead child. Guardian journalist Freddy McConnell comes out better, and uses his communication skills to celebrate the happy ending in text and video, exploiting to the hilt his appearance as a man dressed as a man proud to be a man about to give birth. But that’s not all. He is now fighting a legal battle to be recognized as the father of the child born of his womb.
The Washington Post publishes an interminable love—comics-style— account of the materpaternal adventure of Braiden Schirtzinger who fulfilled two cherished dreams: to be a man, to be a mother. We learn that they (that’s the fabulous Braiden’s preferred pronoun) got together with an old boyfriend to conceive the child. Unfortunately, they (still Braiden) couldn’t breastfeed but they are relieved to be able to resume the testosterone injections and antidepressants. The author of the saga proudly remarks that The Washington Post began, 15 years ago, to use the pronoun “they” for non-binaries on the male-to-female continuum.
As for ART for single women who didn’t want or couldn’t find a partner, why should society be responsible for artificially satisfying the maternal desire without addressing the sequence encounter / love / fertility / survival of the species as in the old days, since the first days, everywhere and always? Is it less progressive or more outlandish than the illusory gender transition? Hah! They’ll laugh in your face if you say government agencies should find husbands for the hundreds of thousands of women yearning to be loved.
In fact, the “bioethical” progress about to be imposed on us relates to a tiny minority of the population: lesbians or single women seeking maternity plus a minute contingent of transgenders. Whereas hoping to be beautiful, handsome, seductive, agile in love, attractive, satisfied, fulfilled, fertile and stable is shared by the vast majority of our fellow women. What medical treatment, what legislation will bring them miracle solutions like those offered to dysphorics by the wizards of transition?
Erasing the name of the father
Fortunately, ramshackle social engineering by politicians under the influence won’t wipe out the family. But private life is also influenced by religious, sociological, literary and commercial fads & fashions. We’re told “it’s no skin off your back” when, in fact, “rights” granted to a very small minority entail a radical change in the narrative of love / marriage / procreation / filiation. We get aberrations like “parent 1, parent 2” [on official documents]. So as not to discriminate against the 1%, the 99% are deprived of the terms father and mother. It doesn’t make sense, especially when homocouples call each other husband and wife, and their children innocently recite, “I have two mothers” or “I have two fathers.” Unfair, illogical, but effective on the symbolic level.
If the female-male union absolutely necessary for procreation is deemed optional for ongoing family life, sexual identity also becomes free-wheeling. According to this ideology, being born a girl or a boy is just a hypothesis, to approve or reject. The twisted identity of a small minority is glorified by a marketing spiel that rebounds in the public mind. Transgenderism, still marginal in France, has assumed catastrophic proportions in the United States, comparable to the crises of collective hysteria that gripped adolescents in the old days.
The better to defend ART, surrogate pregnancy, or transgenderism, complex realities are reduced to simplistic caricature. The wish for sex change (now called “gender-affirming” surgery) is accepted as a healthy clear cut decision deserving of a high-tech solution. Fortunately, it’s possible … because that’s what they say: a bit of hormonal, surgical, and aesthetic touching up turns a man into a woman, a woman into a man; as if the Botox, silicone, plastic surgery cocktail ever turned an old woman into a young one. It’s sham. The human body won’t bend to such arrogance. A transitioned man is still a man, a woman doped up on testosterone will always be a woman. What’s the good of botching up a human being, mutilating her, giving in to his tragic intention? Her confused will? His misleading decision?
What corresponding desire will meet the transformed transgender? A “heterosexual” man that will choose a woman transformed from a man? A homosexual male who will finally get a real female/male, an improvement over an effeminate simpering parody? What becomes of the notion of homosexuality in this confusion, if same-sex partners, too, are seeking alterity? But not the real difference. The fake. Without delving into intimate details, without digging up statistics on all possible variations on the male-female theme, one might speak of perversion. But that is forbidden!
Gestation tabula rasa
In the brave new world of interchangeable genders, the airbnb / deliveroo womb is a means of bringing children to couples that are by definition sterile. Can the devotion of the “surrogate mother” compensate the shock of the infant that comes into the world as an orphan and refugee? To honor the generosity of the transport child-bearer, the intense, complete, sustained and infinitely rich complicity between the mother and the child in her womb is reduced to zero. Not to mention the intimate presence of the father—lover and genitor. The womb is nothing more than a handy container to deliver the baby to the purchaser. The contract signed on the dotted line is all that’s needed to deal with the issue of rupture between the woman and the baby she carried in her womb for nine months of deep intimacy. And, miraculously, children acquired that way always do well. Advocacy doctors, psychiatrists and journalists say so, so you have to believe them. I don’t. The newborn brutally torn from the body of his birthing mother is enlisted in a war against the truths of procreation. And, again, “it’s no skin off your back” in the service of tiny minority is an assault on carnal intelligence. The experience of gestation is reduced to zero. Tabula rasa.
A child when I want, if I want
Is it really a question of generosity? Inclusion? Bountiful medicine extending fertility to women (and soon to men) who want to be like everyone else while demanding respect for their difference? Is it the pride of our advanced society to alleviate a deficiency that afflicts a very small minority? To invent, out of the goodness of our hearts, a crypto-medical condition— “sterility due to a choice of sexual orientation?”
Militant feminism of the 60s came along with virtually 100% reliable hormonal contraception and abortion on demand. A world of professional and romantic possibilities opened to women liberated from biological fatality. Free to make love without getting pregnant, a woman can enjoy the promiscuity formerly reserved for men and tramps. Without the fear of unwanted pregnancy, a woman can study, train, and devote herself to a rewarding career. The results are there and all women, militants or not, have been able to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity. The difference is stunning! Women, too often confined to a narrow circumference, are able to flourish, become financially and intellectually independent, broaden their skills and master their emotions … there’s no question of backsliding to any “good old days.”
But we can ask how the slogan—a child when I want if I want—came to nest on the bosom of marriage and children for all. By a strange twist, maternity and feminine charm—vetoed by feminist leaders that were often closet lesbians—have been adopted by men and now carried all the way to the impossible transformation into women. You have to be blind to the infinite subtleties of a woman’s body, work of art and inspiration for artists, to believe it.
Why would a woman liberated from biological fatality and conventional practices, openly choosing a female spouse, want at all cost to have children? If the answer is that the maternal fiber is stronger than the choice of a partner incapable of satisfying it, then we can ask why militant feminism was able to stifle it where it was so strong … and often worked against our will.
On the individual level, on the level of intimacy, things are too complex to be encompassed by militant, journalistic, or common-sense rhetoric. But public policy can’t be based on individual cases. This male-male couple marvelously raises, we are told, children obtained by GPA, whereas we know of male-female parents that mistreat their 100% biological children. A woman married to a man might choose abortion to end a pregnancy that interferes with her professional ambitions while another, with no partner, would do anything to be a mother …
Society more or less smoothly manages universal impulses, defining normality and aberrations. Today in an overdose of generosity, it leans toward idolizing aberrations. The ravishing Valentina Sampaio, featured on the cover of Vogue France, is the first Victoria’s Secret transwoman model, chosen less than a year after Chief Marketing Officer Ed Razek dared to say that a trans wouldn’t appeal to the brand’s customers. Razek apologized profusely, the charming Brazilian took her rightful place and got her cover story. And yet, the photo of la Valentina in bikini reveals terribly masculine hips and thighs.
Perversion, sterility, and totalitarian thought
Setting aside the benefits promised to those directly concerned by ART-for-all and related forms of social engineering, we can recognize the obsessional nature of a trend that feeds on the distress of human beings faced with vital dilemmas of sexuality, love, family. A shift in focus from individuals to advocacy groups turns up some strange bedfellows. For example, this laundry list on a t-shirt sold online by the United States Campaign for Palestinian Rights: RESIST/ RACISM SEXISM ZIONISM HOMOPHOBIA TRANSPHOBIA ISLAMOPHOBIA ANTISEMITISM ABLEISM COLONIALISM. How about SPECIESISM? Not to worry, the UN’s GIEC preaches the no-meat orthodoxy that follows from its end of days ecologism.
Resist both Zionism and transphobia … under the auspices of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights? Believe in transgenderism and defend the rights of Palestinians … and homosexuals? Protect the planet, Palestinians, cattle, and the handicapped! Intersectionality is really bopping! You can proclaim yourself anti-Zionist and anti-antisemite on the same t-shirt. Advocacy gets an early start on the USCPR site, with newborn-size jumpsuits sporting the credo I Support Palestinian Human Rights.
What explains the articulation between ART for all and a totalitarian, antisemitic ideology? How are they related?
Two for one
The social engineering measures vaunted today would seem to favor love, fulfillment, and fertility. In fact, the impact on the birth rate is worse than negligible because these measures are the end results of policies that weaken the family. We have to go back to the early days of ideological feminism to understand how this came about.
Isn’t it about time to revisit and revise the liberated-woman kit, its excesses, unintended consequences, outdated methods, and conflicting career plans? In the 21st century, when artificial intelligence is developing in so many fields, we are still using a Stone Age club for birth control: hormonal pill and patch, IUD, abortion. The side effects of hormonal methods are minimized: harmful intrusion in physiological functions, problems of recovering fertility, effect on society of masculinized women, impact on children and their sexual identity. The IUD gently mistreats the reproductive apparatus month after month. Abortion is heartbreaking. Decreased fertility and long-delayed pregnancy all too often require medical assistance. More hormones, suffering and, too often, the famous two for one. The rate of twins in developed countries has doubled since 1970. Bearing twins, extremely difficult at any age, is particularly hard for a woman at the limit of the age of procreation.
It is easier to nourish the ambitions of a female truck driver than to reorganize professional life to allow a woman to pursue a high-level career while interrupting it for childrearing at the propitious age. It’s more convenient to make them think that the biological clock adapts to fashion and the business world than to tell young women that there is a disconnect between the surface, miraculously intact, and the reproductive system, antique and eternal. The face is still smooth and luminous, the eggs grow old.
Not to worry! (Performance enhancing) hormones prohibited for athletes, poured profusely into the veins of the trans in transition, are handed out like candy to women barely out of childhood and all the way to menopause, when the contraceptive formula is replaced by the eternal youth version. Rightfully wary of hormone-fed beef, we accept without a whimper hormone-fed women.
Deprived of the benefits of the lovely surprise, the modern couple has to squeeze the “have a child” rendez-vous into two overbooked agendas. How many of our compatriots in the 45-65 age group were, on the contrary, conceived by accident? Slamming the door in the face of those that would follow, these upstarts hand us a demographic crisis. Royally neglected. Or surreptitiously compensated by immigration. What’s to be done? Out of the question to go back to imposed maternity, agreed, but it’s not the ART that will keep us from shrinking.
Israel is the only developed country with an elevated fertility rate: 3.1. (Average fertility rate in OCDE countries: 1.7. Impossible to ignore the generous acceptance, in Israel, of the forms and reforms discussed here—LGBTQ+, ART, GPA, transgender … Israel has the highest per capita rate of vegans. How should we understand the progressivism of at least part of the Israeli population, in the light of the arguments above? Could this be a Trojan horse?)
Religion, nationalism, return of the repressed
Pedestrian crossings at the Gay intersection in the Marais, at the corner of rue des Archives and rue Ste-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, are painted rainbow. The colors of the Gay nation adorn cafés where, on Gay national holidays, the flag flies and parasols dance. A huge billboard invites men to discover the Gay version of airbnb. Nationalism, communautarisme, clannishness, decried elsewhere, are coddled here. Trendy neighborhood restaurants offer vegan cuisine here, gluten-free, lactose-free meals there. The no-meat religion makes its way, hand in hand with climate change millenarians. These true believers who might make fun of a Jew who keeps kosher, these proud Gays who absolutely had to penetrate the orifices of Jerusalem, preach their fundamentalism as the sole path to salvation.
Meat-eating will destroy the planet if toxic masculinity allied with white privilege doesn’t poison it first. The masculine, like beef, is rejected in its natural form: the New Man is a woman. The brain doesn’t need animal fats, a child doesn’t need a father, demographic survival doesn’t need fertile heterosexuality, civilization doesn’t need ancient values … and the Jews don’t need a sovereign nation. How strange to find these scattered elements combined in an armored configuration. Totalitarian.
At a recent Green Weekend in Paris, the director of a Greenpeace think tank recommended demographic chastity to the young adults gathered around him in a circle of admiration. Reproduction adds to the pollution of a dying planet. These are the same activists that aid and abet illegal—primarily African—immigration. Fertility rates for sub-Saharan Africa? 4.7.
Transgression/ antisemitism
Infanticide disguised as birth control—partial birth abortion, full-term abortion, authorized in at least seven American states—is defended tooth and nail by militants that consider the slightest restriction as an all-out attack against abortion rights. Heads, they kill the living, tails they make a business of assisted reproduction derivatives: an “Amazon catalogue” for ordering gametes, uterus-rental, expensive transgender mutilation of adolescents … or children. And the confusion spreads to pronoun madness, transgender public bathrooms, vegan orthodoxy … all wrapped up in the RESIST t-shirt.
If reproductive LGBTQ + militantism is largely imported from the United States, where it develops more rapidly and more radically than in France, the antisemitism that plagues us here since the turn of the 21st century is now spreading in the United States. The assault comes from all sides: academics, Islamists, Leftists, neo-Nazis, militant Blacks, antizionist Jews, and unaffiliated thugs.
This is happening in a context of crisis of American democracy, where bipartisan politics has given way to brutal, uncompromising tribal clashes. The president—Obama, Trump—is idolized by his supporters. Debate is stifled by political correctness, rational thinking is shaky, public discourse is degraded under the combined effect of an abiding anti-intellectualism and idiotic social networks.
We should understand that the misnamed antisemitism is not racism, not discrimination against the Other, not scapegoating; it is linked to the madness of transgression in a society in the grips of an existential crisis. Without examining here the deep and ancient roots of genocidal Jew hatred, we can recognize in today’s antisemitism the need to sideline or eliminate Judaism so as to revel, unfettered, in the demolition of civilization. Blur sexual identity, deny the male-female alterity essential to reproduction, concoct false filiations, weaken the taboo against incest, demean the fleshly reality of gestation, manipulate the language to make it say all that is normal … why? What the devil is going on? Tampering with language and reality just to “give” children to a few thousand people? Growing babies in heterosexual fish farms and offering them to adults who freely chose biological sterility?
What if this semi-divine generosity is just a pretext? Because we can’t understand it without looking at the antecedents of this artificial fertility—that is, the authentic sterility encouraged, almost imposed on the liberated woman. Unlike “primitive” forms of birth control—condom, diaphragm, rhythm—the IUD and hormones make a woman, temporarily, sterile. And, coincidentally, veganism decreases fertility and provokes precocious menopause. And apocalyptic ecologism adds its own pro-sterility arguments.
Compromising natural fertility only to fabricate artificial fertility… is perversion. To deny biological filiation and invent fictional filiation—e.g. “mother by intention” —is perverse. When we create confusion about corporal gender only to slop up our language with gender overkill—écriture inclusive, refusal of the masculine neuter, feminization of professions and trades—isn’t that perversion? Auteure? Ecrivaine? Féminicide! [authoress, writeress, femicide,] Why not êtresses humaines! And what about the gender of common nouns that has nothing to do with their sexuality and, by the way, trips up foreigners like myself?
Can we look at the full picture?
Antizionism: geopolitical perversion
The womb is the keystone of our survival. Judaism is the foundation of our democracy. And Israel stands on the front lines of defense of the free world. Instead of anchoring progress to the foundations of civilization, our societies are adrift. The sirens of antisemitism sing at large and the soldiers of antizionism seduce idealistic youths, proud academics, true believing progressives, and tikun olamist Jews.
The genocidal violence that now strikes Jews in the United States comes as a surprise to many that thought the outburst of antisemitism in the early 2000s was the replay of a particularly European evil: The Shoah. But the origins are global. This time around it is happening in nations bent under the thrust of a multipronged jihad assault. Yes, as always, constructive and destructive domestic forces are at play, individuals and the collectivity are torn between tyranny and freedom, but these ongoing conflicts are exacerbated by a well-advanced project of Islamic conquest. “Terrorist” attacks, target immigration, infiltration, seduction, proselytism, deceit … Whether it’s a Parisian banlieue, the US House of Representatives, or Gaza in the Middle East, jihad strikes the Jews, Islamic conquest burns with Koranic Jew-hatred and genocidal fury against the Jewish state. Jews and their Judaism stick in the throat of Islamic conquest. The sovereign state that protects Jews everywhere in the world must be destroyed, support for this state has to be undermined in the free world, in the Diaspora. The Jewish obstacle must not block the path to conquest. Allahu akhbar.
This is the nexus of a frightful diversion; a free world that can’t defend itself against jihad conquest is preoccupied by reforms on the fringes of the fringe, obsessed with unrealistic unrealizable desires, pushing transgression to the hilt, cherishing it, embracing it, favoring it to the point of erasing the bare biological minimum that ensures the survival of the species, mothballing the terms “father” and “mother,” meddling with filiation … all the while passively awaiting the eventual imposition of sharia law?
To put it starkly: are we going to play children’s games, let it all hang out, faint in ecstasy at the feet of the beautiful transgender … until the whistle blows to announce the transition to Iranian style moral policing?
*A.R.T. = Assisted Reproductive Technology
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