RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2020/02/02/i-may-have-gender-dysphoria-but-i-still-prefer-to-base-my-life-on-biology-not-fantasy/

Feelings and opinions have displaced facts and evidence in many areas of the liberal arts. This is nothing new. A more recent phenomenon, however, is the extension of this trend into the realm of biology, which has fallen victim to the idea that men can become women—and vice versa—merely by reciting a statement of belief. It is an insidious movement that combines the postmodern contempt for objective truth with pre-modern religious superstitions regarding the nature of the human soul.

The subordination of science to myth was exemplified in the recent British case of Maya Forstater, who’d lost her job after pointing out the plain truth that transgender people like me cannot change our biological sex by proclamation. “I conclude from…the totality of the evidence, that [Forstater] is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate,” concluded Judge James Tayler at her employment tribunal. “The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

I’m not sure where that leaves me, a British transgender person who agrees with Forstater. As I know better than most, sex is immutable. I may have transitioned socially, medically and surgically, but I am as male now as I was the day I was born (and the days I fathered each of my three children). As a scientist, I know this to be a fact. It’s Judge Tayler who’s the absolutist here: Under the guise of tolerance, he’s put the force of law behind a cultish movement that treats biological reality in much the same way that the Catholic Church once treated Galileo and his heliocentric ideas. Just like its medieval forbears, this neo-religious crusade demands that adherents chant an absurdist liturgy—in this case, “Transwomen are women. Transmen are men.”

In July 2019, before the Forstater controversy broke, I made up a t-shirt with my own slogan: “Transwomen are men. Get over it.” It caused considerable outrage. But my question was sincere: Why can’t we, as trans people, just get over it? It’s merely another political slogan. What does it matter if we are men or women in some technical sense, so long as we can live our lives in peace, free from abuse, harassment and discrimination?

In recent months, I have been accused of hate speech and reported to my professional colleagues, while newspaper reports suggest that I am at risk of being banned from an LGBT committee connected to my trade union.

By now, many readers will be familiar with the basic elements of the officially enforced system of dogma that sometimes is referred to as “gender ideology,” and which is now legally encoded in many jurisdictions under the policy known as “self-identification” or “self-declaration”:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/a_british_feminist_says_men_who_dislike_woke_women_are_destroying_the_world.html

British actor Laurence Fox became a target when he refused to accept allegations about overarching white racism and toxic masculinity in Britain. He recently earned additional ire from the left when he announced in a Sunday Times article that he does not “date woke women.”

Woke woman Vicky Spratt was outraged. In an article at Refinery29 entitled “The Dangerous Rise Of Men Who Won’t Date “Woke” Women,”* she wrote,

Laurence Fox – who you perhaps only knew as Billie Piper’s ex-husband because you’ve never seen Lewis (what?) – does not date “woke” women who he believes are being taught that they are “victims”, irrespective of whether they are right or not.

[snip]

Not wanting to date “woke” women, far from being laughable, is actually one of the more insidious aspects of it. Spend an afternoon on any major dating app and you’ll come across (generally white) men saying openly sexist and misogynistic things. They might say “no psychos” or that they “fucking hate big eyebrows” in their bios. And, by and large, they also tend to hold extremely right-wing views and see themselves as victims of liberal thinking.

To Spratt, men who won’t date “woke” women are far-right wackos who like Jordan Peterson even though he denies white privilege and urges millennials to stop being social justice warriors. Worse, aside from the “incels” (heterosexual men who have given up on women), Spratt says that evil anti-woke-woman men are becoming right-wing!

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-tattoo-a-sign-of-the-times/

Tattoos are not new. What is new is their ubiquity and extent of body coverage. They meet the eye with livid starkness everywhere one looks, turning the atmosphere and the culture positively fluorescent. What was once a niche market has expanded exponentially. Practically everyone of a certain age group, say, late teens to early fifties, seems to flaunt these decorative glyphs and totems on every visible part of their bodies, including the head and face. (Actress Amanda Bynes and rapper Post Malone are recent celebrity examples.) And judging from my experience in the change room of the gym where I work out, these chromatic blemishes, particle illustrations of a much wider significance, appear on the less visible parts of a person’s anatomy as well.

It’s a phenomenon that continues to puzzle me. Every era, of course, is marked by its own fashion anomalies once considered normative or appealing, which we often tend to regard as quaint, ridiculous, garish or merely amusing—to take just one example, the dandyism of red waistcoats, green wigs and blue hair in 19th-century Paris. Today is no exception, though we need not look back to find them absurd or grotesque. How one can appraise sumptuary excesses like the fade cut, pink hair, septum rings, tongue studs, navel piercings, and the prevalence of the orgulous tattoo as in any way attractive boggles the mind.

As the World Journal of Psychiatry points out in a methodological case study focusing on statistical distributions and issues relating to epidemiology, tattoos were traditionally associated with deviance and psychopathology, typically criminals, gang members and “others belonging to marginalized and counter-cultural groups.” (One recalls those Grade B gangster films featuring Russian mafia members, their arms, backs and chests slathered with lurid insignia rankings.) The tattoo serves “to align the wearer with a specific group,” offering comfort, protection and a collective identity. Tattoos are often also used as a kind of rebus meant to “bolster low self-esteem” or “repair a crippled self-image.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/01/banning-alternatives-to-child-gender-experiments/

“It is important to look more closely at the effects of ‘puberty blockers’ and cross-sex hormones because their use is fundamental to medical intervention in childhood gender dysphoria. Proponents maintain they are ‘safe and entirely reversible’ when they are nothing of the kind.

The Labor government of Victoria is in the process of drafting legislation to ban so-called “conversion therapy”, which it defines as “any practice or treatment that seeks to change, suppress or eliminate an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity”.

On the face of it, this would appear to be a good thing, given the effect of the so-called “Safe Schools” program, and other initiatives, which, under the camouflage of anti-bullying, have planted seeds of primordial confusion in the minds of many children with their doctrine of gender fluidity, which preaches there is no such binary entity as a boy or a girl. The ideology asserts that everyone is somewhere on the intervening rainbow, depending on their feelings at the time.

The Victorian government could have been applauded had it decided its Education Department was no longer permitted to promote the ideology that has caused hundreds of Victorian children to be submitted to attempts by members of the Health Department to eliminate gender identity determined by chromosomes, and to change bodies to suit mental orientations.

But no: the Andrews government has no intention of stopping the evangelism and practices of the new ideology. To the contrary, with Orwellian Newspeak, it intends to ban any attempt to “convert” or re-orientate a confused child back to a gender identity congruent with its chromosomes.

Failure to comply with the ban will be punished by criminal or civil law, or both, whether committed by omission or commission. Omission will comprise failure of a therapist or teacher to refer a confused child to the Gender Service at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne where it may undergo “affirmation” of a new gender by means of hormones and surgery. Commission comprises attempts to “make the child comfortable in the skin in which it was born” by means of family and individual psychotherapy: the former mode of therapy that was associated with success, but is now derided as “abhorrent”, and is to be banned as “conversion therapy”.