For centuries shunned, persecuted, killed, slurred, and separated by the ruling classes of politics and religion, gays and lesbians clawed their way out of censorship to be able to openly love, and openly participate in society. The current gender dysphoria is making a mockery of those struggles with a pseudo-identity, self labeling of prepubescent teens and and young men and women who are the majority pretenders—bandwagoning their way in a social media experiment popularity contest.
My older daughter got in on this fad early and came out as lesbian. “Very well”, I said, “sounds like you’re finding your way”. She is now married (to a nice man) with two kids. She had no idea what she was at that age, but the allure to follow the fad was just too strong.
Most children are too early on this decision to be anything at all, but today we have it—gay, lesbian, non-binary, trans, neutral pronouns I’ve never heard of now enforced and endorsed by school districts and the law.
I took my youngest (11) to audition for a play last week and the first greet of the director was this; “so what pronoun do you prefer? She said “um, just call me by my name”. I was impressed she deferred to a more reasonable path. She hasn’t yet requested a name change, but some of her school friends change them weekly.
If you don’t want to be a girl or boy, fine, but why do you need a label at all? Can’t you just be you?
This current situation is as absurd as the Flying Spaghetti Monster getting religious exemption and acceptance. But our neofascist, inclusive, yet litigious and sensitive society is now too intimidated to call it for what it is.
Those that decry cultural misappropriation are currently the most guilty of all—making a mockery of the real struggle for equality and those that are truly oriented in a way that took centuries to liberate. Or am I missing something?
TheCommonAtheist 
I identify with much of what you wrote; however, I think Scottie would go bananas.
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I would like Scotties input. I think some of this is very accurate and other portions are my cultural upbringing. I do know within my own circle of nieces and nephews it is changing daily depending on which you tube videos they watch. Maybe that type of experimentation is good. I don’t know
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When my kids were kids, they each played with cars, dolls, dress up, sand, mud, playground equipment, no gender mentioned. They were kids!
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I think many young kids feel the social media pressure to identify before they even know what that is.
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Scottie is VERY adamant about the topic and is a full-blown supporter of the “letters.” If you want, I’ll direct him to your post. But be prepared.
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Sure. No worries Nan
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He’s off-line right now … but I’ll get a message to him.
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I thank the gods I don’t believe in my two are grown up and have grown past this ‘fad’.
I really don’t know how I would react if faced with this situation.
As the pop group Slade once sang:
“Mama, we’re all crazee now.”
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My daughter comes home with questions she is forced to contemplate that moments before she had never even questioned.
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Well golly gee whiz, you haven’t been properly indoctrinated yet, Jim. I mean, come on. You think Christianity makes sense with out terms like ‘soul’ and ‘afterlife’ and ‘savior’ and ‘sin’… you know… the lingo. With this whole critical theory stuff like ‘gender’ the first thing you need to do is learn all the inverted language lingo… religious terms like ‘gender’ and ‘cis’ and ‘normative’ and ‘intersectional’ and ‘terf’ and ‘queer’ and ‘non-binary’ and ‘fluid’ and then the correct political terminology like ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion’ and then the cultural terms like ‘justice’ and ‘anti-racism’ and ‘tolerance’ and ‘trans rights’… I mean, sure, the list is long but, with Scottie’s help, you’ll be fluent AND virtuous in no time at all!
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I denote a small dose of sarcasm? Haha.
I imagine this is how the indigenous felt when they first encountered Christianity —wtf are you talking about, really?
My daughter has homeschooled the last three years since COVID and completely unaware —although we have some close relatives who are claiming something new each week or two. I’ll stay open to see what Scottie has to say, but for now this coattailing on a genuine cause has made a joke out of the struggle, IMO.
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I think you do have a valid point. I’m accepting of whatever one chooses to call oneself, but so far I refuse to add pronouns to my email signature. As your daughter said, just call me by my name.
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Eilene Lyon—WriGenHist ?
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Yeah, agree with your point.
We’ve been through this before though. During the 70s glam wave fans of Bowie and T-Rex would ‘come out’, until the fashion moved on and they went straight again. I think Bowie also returned to heterosexuality when being bisexual stopped getting him media coverage.
What’s complicated things this time is the inclusion of trans identity. To fully ‘transition’ physically, transwomen must start on hormones at the onset of puberty when their own gender identity is probably still in flux. If you deny them treatment until they’re 18 and they reaffirm their trans identity they’ll likely be permanently resentful of those who denied them the opportunity to fully physically inhabit their female identity.
Mind you, with all the estrogen-mimicking pollutants in the environment and food-chain now (and the corresponding reduction in sperm counts) hormone treatment for transwomen (or not) might soon be redundant.
One of the most ridiculous manifestations of the ‘celebration of sexual diversity’ I’ve seen lately is the standing ovation received by a Yorkshire principal upon telling the assembled school he was gay. Because, like, the kids really needed to know what goes on in his bedroom so they could cheer him for it. I imagined some dissident kid down the back refusing to clap and yelling out “That’s nothing! My dad fucks the cat!”.
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That is an interesting correlation bringing up Bowie. I just read an interview he did in Slate. He says, “The biggest mistake I ever made,” Bowie told journalist Kurt Loder over some beers in Australia, “was telling that Melody Maker writer that I was bisexual. Christ, I was so young then. I was experimenting …”. He also dropped hints to get attention and said later in life he was always a closeted heterosexual, but playing gay and dressing it was fun. Take that however you want, but ultimately he used it as a tool and I think mostly, not all, is what we have going on today.
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I’m just glad I missed the boat on this one. My kids are all old enough to be past it too.
I’ll be honest, I was slow to even catch on to the reality of people being gay, I mean I heard about it. My friends would use gay as a dig or a slur. I knew what it meant, but I never knew anyone that was gay, or admitted it. Not being gay, I just had no interest in the topic. It wasn’t till I was an adult that the reality set in that people “are” gay, they have relationships, and they live their lives as the rest of us do from day to day. I simply accepted that people could do whatever the hell they want in the privacy of their homes and it really wasn’t any of my damn business. To be honest I really don’t understand why most people don’t see it that way.
I also knew that any of my kids could have been gay, and I’d have been fine with whoever they turned out to be. I’d not have loved them any less.
I’ll admit I am not up to date on all of the current terminology. Again it just isn’t my thing, my time is well needed in other areas of life. I’m absolutely wiped out this morning after a two day diving blitz. I’m not even sure how I was able to roll out of bed this morning. My band mates will be here in a few hours for practice. I’m about to drive my wife to work, the car is still in the shop. It’s always something. One of these days I’ll catch up on the terminology…
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You better hurry! The terms are gender fluid too…
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I couldn’t hurry right now if the house was on fire!
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Yeah, you can’t afford to fall behind. This week’s up-to-the-minute PC terminology is next week’s bigoted slur.
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I tend to agree with pretty much everything you said, Jim. The whole situation has become more than a bit strange. We had a case here at a local school in a town called Kiel that made the national news. The school was actually going to bring charges against two students who refused to use the preferred pronouns when referring to a classmate. It resulted in lawsuits, bomb threats that closed the school down for days. In the end the school dropped the charges and the whole story dropped out of the news as the media went on to the next crisis of the day, but I’m sure it left a lot of anger and animosity and confusion in the halls of that school.
I really feel sorry for the teachers who have to deal with all of this. I taught night classes for high school seniors at the local church for five or six years and I worked at the public school district in building maintenance for twenty years so i know how difficult the job is even without dragging all of this into it as well. Teachers have a hard enough job without having to deal with politics, gender issues and all the rest of this, but they’re the ones who have to deal with this on a daily basis. Make one tiny mistake, accidentally cay one wrong word, and you can end up with screaming parents at school board meetings or even losing your job.
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The other end for the teachers here, dealing with this—they are not allowed to reveal the gender wishes of the student, to the parents. So if the parents are in the room you have to pretend she is still a girl, or he is still a boy, unless it’s noted that the parents are allowed to know.
No wonder school is crippling its students.
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The fundamental belief you are told you MUST accept is that everyone has a ‘gender’. Now, granted, many of us presume we’re talking about biological sex but that’s not the case. Like a ‘soul’, one’s gender is ineffable… but somehow related to biological sex. And this supposed ‘relationship’ between the body and this nebulous notion of possessing or ‘experiencing’ a ‘gender’ means there is – or should be – some alignment between them, that this alignment can be out of alignment. And the tool to measure this alignment is ‘feelings’.
So then we come to the Great Big Faith-based Belief presented as if a biological fact: some people are born in the WRONG body!
Yup, it’s never, ever, a question that can be asked about this belief, whether perhaps it may be a psychological condition or a set of feelings that misaligns feelings with ‘gender’ (in this case, OBVIOULY we have to pretend gender and biological sex are synonyms… until a magical element of fluidity – again, based on feelings – enters the picture). Nope. It is ALWAYS about altering the body to magically ‘align’ with the gender FEELINGS.
You must assume the truth that ‘gender’ is actually a classification for something other than but also synonymous with sex AND that it’s ALWAYS the body that is at fault for misaligning ‘feelings’ with ‘gender’.
This is what is being indoctrinated into children, that ‘gender identity’ is a spectrum that is true and that biological sex is a social construct.
Like all other versions of Critical Theory, it’s the meaning of certain language that becomes inverted and whjose irrational claims must now be considered true while simultaneously being bullied into going along if you’re not a Terrible Person. If you dare question any of the fundamental assumptions you MUST believe are true about gender ideology, you will be a Very Bad Person in the same way not believing in some religious notion makes you a blasphemer and a heretic and someone less than human because your character is damaged beyond repair. You must go along that Up means another kind of Down and White merely a shade of Black, that kids are born in wrong bodies and that sex is not binary. You MUST believe a male can be a female simply by assertion and you MUST go along with this lie. That’s what the takeover of language by this ideology produces. (And this confusion is absolutely central to the fundamental reason for Queer Theory: to sow confusion and drop all boundaries for common words.) And that’s why Orwell pointed out in 1984, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Gender ideology is just that: go along or you’ve broken this most essential commandment. And besides, don’t you want to be ‘nice’ and ‘tolerant’ and ‘accepting’?
See how this works? It’s religious to a tee.
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My sympathies, but I hope this nonsense remains within your borders.
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I’m sure we have enough to spare. Sharing is caring—you just don’t know how good it is to be woke…
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Well, the term ‘woke’ was invented by right-wing extremists to mock people who, at heart, are just trying to be kind to others. That’s a good thing, Jim. It should be promoted. What I don’t think most kind people (and it is the overwhelming majority) allowed for was the lack of common sense in some people. Case in point: the YMCA hiring that trans woman (a man) to work in the pool’s female change rooms. That’s just idiot. And so is trans women (men) competing in female sports. Insane. And to be honest, I don’t even understand what the fuck all this pronoun business is about.
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Maybe Scottie can clear up this whole thing, but I doubt it. Thanks boss!
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How so?
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I was told he is an adamant supporter of this use of the correct pronouns, etc. I’m curious about his take on this. Nan offered to reach out to him but he’s been offline.
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Scottie is all in on gender ideology. It’s all good and anything contrary or questionable about any part of it indicates at the very least a Very Bad Moral Character.
In religious terminology (which I think is quite apt) he’s as fundamentalist a gender believer as they come. And, like any firm believer, he welcomes doubt and questions… as long as they all lead to the One Correct Answer. He is utterly convinced that ‘science’ completely backs him up in this (and he’ll scour the internet for anything that appears to do so) and that anything else regardless of source (including world renowned researchers and even national health policies of the very countries that first proposed aligning the body with ‘gender’ feelings and have now altered their policies out of caution and care) MUST BE a right wing talking point because ‘my dog loves gravy’. I know… I know… you’ll have to ask him. And he does this all on behalf of the victims of bigotry and discrimination with which he is all too familiar. He sees his job as addressing mis- and disinformation that in any way, shape, or fashion digresses from full on gender and queer ideology. (I wonder if he even knows what he’s supporting? I sincerely doubt it.)
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The term arose in the 1930s and 40s referring to greater awareness of African American issues. It was not a slur at all but a precursor to the rise of the civil rights movement. Just as religions steal everything to pretend to be relevant, so too does ‘progressive’ ideology steal everything from liberalism, claims ownership of its virtues, and then inverts it in meaning under cover of the old terms. Hence, the use of the single term to describe this regressive, anti-reality framework under cover of the old term. Woke in the progressive sense is the opposite of of the civil rights meaning of the term. It’s not a right wing term: its an accurate demonstration of the ideology’s linguistic thievery.
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Well, I’d never heard it uttered once until only recently, and always out of the mouths of the right wing, and always as a slur.
The intention behind it is fine, but idiots (and I will call them idiots because they don’t seem to have a grasp of even basic common sense) have turned it into a HUGE target and means to paint the entire left.
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I agree. And when anyone uses the word in its “historic” use (per tildeb), they are immediately identified by the left as a right-winger. It’s getting so a person can’t say/write much of anything without being “judged” … and bottom line (IMO), it’s all related back to the media and their sensationalism.
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100%.
Just look at last week. Biden had a bloody HUGE week of victories, and the American people benefitted enormously. But what was the weeks news cycle? It started with Trump wanting Nazi-like generals, and rolled all the way to Trump stealing nuclear secrets.
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I also don’t know what to call this HUGE movement by both political anti-liberal extremes to replace respect for reality bringing people together with obedience to some narrative meant to drive people apart. I wrote a post a few years back saying just this about this social shift with: “It’s not a Right wing/Left wing problem at all but a Postmodern problem under populist leadership.” And so I identify what empowers these narratives is belief of the religious kind, a decision that some narrative is true first and then trying to fit reality into it and discarding whatever doesn’t fit while claiming the narrative is supported by evidence from reality. It’s the same thing. It’s the fundamental and necessary aspect behind tribalism, behind the Us/Them framing of the world. And it’s all such a HUGE distortion that cannot help but cause HUGE harm to real people in real life.
I usually call all this postmodern faith-based archaic partisan/tribal drivel ‘progressive’… again, a complete reversal of what the term actually means so, hence, the single quotation marks. It’s actually quite regressive, a return to tribalism. I also think there’s merit calling these positions ‘alt right’ (because the narrative really is an alternate reality) and ‘ctrl left’ (because control is central to enforcing obedience to this narrative). But I will also use the term ‘woke’ because it is considered pejorative specifically because it now means exactly opposite what it was meant to mean.
I don;t think enough criticism is brought forward to reveal what’s true, that both of these ‘sides’ are the same coin and both just as reprehensible. The disguise of these narratives are hidden behind liberal terminology and I am dismayed at just how gullible most people are to not see through the charade. I am particularly disappointed in atheists who should recognize better than most the SAME thinking by religious extremists, the SAME demands for allegiance and obedience to be considered ‘good’ and ‘moral’, the SAME kind of faith-based belief that empowers religious authority. But most importantly, I am gob-smacked at how few atheists recognize the same imposition of some narrative on the public utilizing the authority from public offices to force what is not true on people using the power of the state. I mean, seriously, we are to believe men are women if they say so! The election was stolen! Reality doesn’t get much more inverted than that! And yet… let us all bow our heads in prayer, all bend the knee in submission, that if we could just get the ‘other side’ to submit and just believe hard enough, reality will fall into line and – POOF! – utopia will be ours.
And the cost is the same from both narratives to advance: all we have to do is give up our fundamental rights and freedoms… and brains.
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I don’t get any of this. You either are attracted to the opposite sex or the same sex and it shouldn’t matter. And you could be equally attracted to both. None of this should matter. And you either feel OK with the sex you were born into or you don’t. And if you don’t and you can, you have surgery and /or hormone treatments to try to make that change permanent. You can also feel you represent neither sex or both interchangeably depending on the circumstances.
Why all these names , pronouns etc. I don’t get either. If you want and are able to change sex then go for it and call yourself the sex you change into. After all that’s the goal. None of this is rocket science and some kids will experiment until they mature and figure it out for themselves..
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So here’s the thing, maryplumbago: all of this is just as you say… a private matter. Who cares? This is the right to swing your fists as much or as little as you want. No harm, no foul.
But that’s NOT what’s going on. Now the swinging of the first connects with your nose. And that’s not okay. It;’s NOT okay to impel people to use then pronouns YOU prefer. It’s NOT okay to bump a female off a sports’ team for females and insert a male who identifies as female. It’s NOT okay to put serial rapists into women’s prisons or rape centers. It’s NOT okay to keep smacking into female noses… and it’s ALWAYS females who get the fist in the face and are expected to yield to their male counterparts. Being impelled to believe a lie – that a transwoman is a female – is NOT okay. It’s actually unconstitutional.
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I must say I could make absolutely no sense of your comments as to where you stand on any of this, your gripe with Scottie, who seems a perfectly nice fella to me or your reply to my comment. All I sense is sarcasm and anger, but I could be wrong, as I’m not a mind reader.
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What is gender?
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Maryplumbago, have you ever heard of Title IX? It’s the federal legislation that prohibits sex discrimination in educational institutions that receive federal funding.
So what?
Well, the Democrat administration under Obama interpreted this to mean discrimination on the basis of assigned sex (not recognized sex), gender identity (not recognized sex), and transgender status (not equality rights under the law but special consideration imposed on everyone). In effect, this interpretation (written and passed to create the legal means to confront discrimination against women) altered women’s rights to include gender ideology and then promote it from a fringe belief to a recognized ‘fact’. This is why I asked you if you could tell us what ‘gender’ means, to show why it should be considered as much a ‘fact’ and yhet somehow different from biological sex (which is binary in almost all cases -m 99.98% of humans – between carriers of small and large gametes and used to identify biological sex across ALL species and not just people).
Of course you can’t because gender is not a thing, a biological aspect; it is a construct that has something to do with socialized meaning about femininity and masculinity within cultures and ethnicities, which varies widely across the human spectrum.
This understanding matters because the law determined it was a fact by fiat, by executive order, without a SHRED of evidence from reality that it was real, that it was physical, that it was a part of our biology. Nowhere is there any compelling evidence that ‘gender’ was then and is now different from biological sex. So what the hell is a ‘gender identity’ if not biological sex and why include it in federal legislation?
To answer the first question about what gender identity means, we are to believe that gender (apparently) is a feeling regarding one’s biological sex to which one then identifies. But, of course, this so-called identity is vague and could be just about anything having to do with tendencies and preferences regarding personal understanding of what constitutes masculine and feminine traits and behaviours. So under this interpretation you could identify as a man on Monday, a lesbian on Tuesday, a front hole person on Wednesday, a chest feeder on Thursday, a gay person on Friday, and so on.
Now we come to answering the second part about why include it in federal legislation? To impose it on everyone and give the state the legal authority to do so.
Armed with this legislation, if any school refused to go along and not properly affirm each of these identities that such ‘identifiers’ demanded from others (that is to say, so called ‘trans’ people), the schools could lose their funding. And did. So schools began to ENFORCE the ‘right’ for people to identify however they wanted whenever they wanted in whatever way they wanted and demanded that everyone else go along with it. This is what ‘affirmation’ means. Everyone had to affirm the identity on pain of punishment for failing to do so. Many teachers were fired for refusing to go along with this insanity. Many students were dismissed form colleges and universities that didn’t bend the knee. School administrators simply proclaimed discrimination had occured by refusing to affirm and so people lost jobs or enrollment or funding.
So there’s the imposition I was talking about because government agencies and government funded hospitals ALSO were expected to do the same, to enforce on everyone using the authority of the agencies and institutions to impose the fluid identities on everyone that some individuals wanted to be reflected back to them in all ways, from paperwork to licenses to directories to patient files to enrollment lists to all official documents. And then be addressed using the ‘preferred’ pronouns! (This is when Jordan Peterson gained fame – or infamy – by publicly announcing he would not submit to compelled speech as a University of Toronto professor but would go to jail.)
So everyone was to let everyone know which pronouns each of us was using for each encounter (that’s why in introductions the institutions and companies and offices use include the ‘mandatory’ pronoun alert) and DEMAND other people go along with this – affirm it – or face legal consequences. This is called ‘compelled speech’ and it is unconstitutional because it infringes on free speech.
So now free speech is under attack as a value because ‘words are violence’. So, more importantly, YOU were not allowed by law to question this identity but obligated to AFFIRM it, that whatever someone SAID was their identity YOU were obligated to obey it. YOU were discriminating against a ‘trans’ person’s ‘rights’ if you noticed the person’s sex was different from the feeling that person had about it at that time and acted in any way on this difference without preapproval from the ‘trans’ person! Hence, men in women’s sports, men in women’s prisons, men in women’s bath- and changerooms, hence ALL health related institutions and professional Colleges forced to AFFIRM gender identity, hence no guardrails against ‘transitioning’ children other than age of consent for SURGERY (but, let’s teach kids in schools starting in kindergarten that this ‘gender journey’ begins at birth and so starting various kinds of drugs and hormone treatment by age 10 is just fine and dandy).
But so what if some kids want to question their ‘gender identity’ by medicalizing their biological development starting before puberty just like the schools teach them? Well who cares unless it’s YOUR kid thinking of taking chemical castration drugs and ordering T (testosterone) online and binding and taking puberty blockers which, if followed by hormone treatments, will ensure sterility, bone loss, and heart issues.
But who cares? Why should anyone care all of this starts in childhood where the ‘patient’ gets to self diagnose and receive medical treatment based on legally protected ‘feelings’? So what? Who cares that by legislation non affirming parents can and DO lose custody if they don’t go along with the wishes of their child, a child who has been indoctrinated in classrooms with the active support of school staff and medical professionals that altering this ‘gender journey’ based on prepubescent ‘feelings’ is something to celebrate!! Who cares that all of a sudden there was NO SUCH THING AS A FEMALE! Who cares that this was an erasure of the term, of an entire class of humans erased by executive order, a term gutted into meaninglessness by this legislation ESPECIALLY by schools that received federal funding.
The Trump administration determined that the question of access to sex-segregated facilities should be left to the states and local school districts to decide. Bad, bad, bad, because Trump, donchaknow.
Biden’s administration is reversing this reversal, once again inserting gender identity as if an unquestionable biological fact, and we’re right back to Title IX bullying and imposing by executive order. That’s why New York’s Gay Pride Women’s march leadership had not one lesbian woman on it, why no Democrat will dare answer the question, “What is a woman?” But then again, why should anyone care about any of this institutional capture by a toxic and incoherent ideology? Can’t we all just get along? Yeah… until that ideological fist connects with your real world nose in some way and you LOSE rights and freedoms in order to COMPLY. And if you raise any concern at all about any of this YOU are a bigot, a hater, a Very Bad Person, a transphobe and someone probably worth of death. You know, like JK Rowling who funds women’s centers but has committed the great sin of calling women adult human females. Oh, the hate!
The proposed changes under Biden’s watch brings up enormous questions about the value of due process, free speech and the right to dignity and privacy. These changes enshrine gender identity as fact, as opposed to belief, and privilege them over biological sex, which has profound implications that Americans really should be free to discuss. And Biden’s proposed changes, if adopted, mean that schools and businesses and institutions and organizations and non profits that don’t comply are in danger of losing not just their federal funding but becoming criminalized for not complying.
Welcome to the world of transactivists. How do you like it so far?
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I don’t read long comments…nothing wrong with them, I just can’t focus that long. So please explain it to me like I’m a third grader in just a few sentences and I don’t care what the politicians are trying to do or not do..I’m just trying to figure out if you personally, are anti the whole LGBTQ community or just the trans people. And why the issue of how they want to refer to themselves bothers you so. I think it’s a little extreme, but it’s not a biggy for me. I’m not gay, but I have two men friends who are and I slightly know one trans male who is married to a woman and they have two children and he would like to be a women. His wife supports him. None of them insist on being called any pronoun and the trans does not want to get into sports. All of them just want to live their lives in peace and enjoy their families and friends, as we all do.
I don’t understand your obsession with all this and why it matters so much to you. I say live and let live…
This will all be a moot point in 25 years or so and all the hullabaloo will be long forgotten. We all live, try to do our best, be who we are, be kind and then we die…
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Mary, I think part of this whole situation is the fact that the average individual is being “forced by law” to recognize, accept, and honor a dictum they do not agree with. But then… what else is new?
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Yes I agree Nan, but then we are all forced to accept a lot of policies and laws we do not agree with like dismantling women’s rights, laws that are exempt for the rich and powerful, Christian beliefs put into laws, wars young men are coerced to fight in that only benefit arms manufacturers, large companies that are allowed and exempt from polluting the waters we depend on…etc.
This just seems small potatoes to me considering the looming bigger issues. But then this issue of this post is not something I’m familiar with or have ever noticed in my everyday life dealings. But I get your point.
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1) In the legal sense, individuals own shared rights and freedoms with every other individual… right up until one set takes away the same from another. (That’s why I mentioned swinging fists and noses.) Trans ideology compels obedience, demands affirmation, and disenfranchises females. The state now supports this. This is wrong.
2) In the social sense, belief in gender and from this belief comes gender identity and ‘born in the wrong body’, all of which are religious beliefs. In other words these claims are considered ‘true’ as a matter of faith-based belief and not evidence-adduced likelihood of being true. Religion has no place in the public domain and certainly should not pretend to inform public policy. That’s what gender ideology is: a faith-based belief now imposed on the public. This is wrong.
3) In the educational sense, this belief is passed along through indoctrination of vulnerable children by means of public education. This is wrong.
4) In the medical sense, trying to make this belief real becomes the reason why so many children are being medicalized to alter the body for no other reason than to address ‘gender dysphoria’. Never the gender part; always the body part. This is today’s western version of female genital mutilation. This is wrong.
5) In political arena, supporting the imposition of this belief system on everyone and taking over public institutions to promote it fuels any political alternative. Anger and resentment by helpless parents against this belief system imposed on their children in particular has and continues to fuel Republican electoral success by gaining many of the votes of middle-of-the-road centrist voters. Because they have no other political alternative if they wish to vote against this hostile takeover of the public domain by those who have belief in gender ideology, they then vote Republican not because they support Republican policies but because it’s the only means to vote against gender ideology. This is a HUGE problem and may very well end liberal democracy as we know it and replace it with an authoritarian populist government.
I have absolutely no problem with anyone of legal age capable of informed consent altering their body by whatever means they want to whatever ends they choose. As I wrote originally, no harm, no foul. No business of mine. That person is just as deserving of respect and dignity and tolerance as I wish for myself. My criticism is for the ideologues who wish to cause me harm. And those are the trans activists. They are wrong in every way to attack my rights and freedoms this way and deplorable for helping children irrevocably harming themselves in the name of fucking religious belief.
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Short form of the issue: a woman is an adult human female. For or against.
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I am a lesbian trapped in a man’s body.
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No surgery required!
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No ma’am sir!
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Remember, gender ideology is but one single branch of the whole ‘identity’ movement, which is critical theory in a nutshell. Look at what this belief system is doing to medicine:
“According to the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges), newly minted doctors must display “knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities and how each identity may present varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice.” Faculty are responsible for teaching how to engage with “systems of power, privilege, and oppression” in order to “disrupt oppressive practices.” Failure to comply with these requirements could put a medical school’s accreditation status at risk and lead to a school’s closure.”
What effect does this have to justify why anybody with an illness might be concerned?
“The proponents of the systemic racism hypotheses are making a large bet with potentially lethal consequences. In accordance with the idea that racism causes racial health disparities, they are changing the direction of medical research, the composition of medical faculty, the curriculum of medical schools, the criteria for hiring researchers and for publishing research, and the standards for assessing professional excellence. They are substituting training in political advocacy for training in basic science. They are taking doctors out of the classroom, clinic, and lab and parking them in front of antiracism lecturers. Their preferential policies discourage individuals from pariah groups from going into medicine, regardless of their scientific potential. They have shifted billions of dollars from the investigation of pathophysiology to the production of tracts on microaggressions.”
Yes, the advocates – the True Believers – of this ideologically driven change insist that it is essential to improving minority health. So here’s the billion dollar question exactly the same for gender ideologues:
What if they are wrong?
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Is this whole thing gaining traction in Canada?
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Traction? It’s the fucking law!
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Well, Canada needs to innovate somewhere… I know this is a small sampling, but I would think the consensus being what it is on this blog, which is mostly left leaning people, I would think Scottie would have to reconsider his position.
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Scottie feels !strongly! that tildeb is a Republican for his approach to this issue.
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You know, Nan, reading all the commentary from so many ‘progressive’ leaders NOW about the importance of free speech in the wake of Rushdie’s stabbing, I keep returning to something I heard that author, essayist, and cultural critic William Deresiewicz said recently about these leaders’ attainment of wealth and position and authority:
” …what was the point of all of this? Just to live in a nice house? Be a university president? Just to think well of yourself? Be an editor of The New Yorker, The New York Times or whatever? You know, now is the time that history is calling you. I know that sounds grandiose, but I think it’s true.”
I agree so strongly with this sentiment. And I ask myself, where have all our intellectuals been?Will our writers and thinkers now, finally, stand up to the illiterata mob? Or have they all gone away and found cover because of the constant vilification and very real threats to their careers and families for being principled? That’s why I think all of this IS personal.
Something to consider, anyway…
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Well I agree with you. But when this loses its attention getting shock value, what next? Great breakthroughs are fueled by bad times. The dark ages led to the Renaissance, Carter led to Reagan, and I suppose this clusterfuck will lead to something better. Physics keeps me hopeful and as ugly as it is socially, there are some great minds getting ready to turn the clock on it’s head.
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No sir. Like any good creationist when presented with evidence for evolution, he just doubles down in his certainty of belief over and over again. He owns all the facts that matter, you see. Everything and anything that, and anyone who, disagrees with his full blown belief in all things gender in any way, shape, or fashion is a lie, and those who offer mounting evidence from reality contrary to the incoherent faith-based ideology he and any other True Believer supports is immoral and guilty of spreading intentional disinformation to further the lies and bigotry of the extreme right wing.
I SO wish I were joking.
But I’ve found more and more that today’s ‘progressive’ True Believer is in all likelihood an atheist, but one who CLEARLY does not recognize the identical faith-based thinking religious folk use to support their reality-denying ideology. I find that quite interesting, that so many have now found the right faith to gain their awarded and rewarded virtue.
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Doctors, therapists, and counsellors who do anything other than affirm ‘gender dysphoria’ in a teenybopper’s demand for blockers, binding, or T can be and has had the license to practice medicine pulled and brought before the College of Physicians and Surgeons to outline how they are going to ‘do better’ to have any chance of regaining their livelihood.
We now have prisons reporting on the number of rapes occurring in women’s prisons by ‘trans women are women’ serial rapists, pedophiles, and murderers. Plural! We have men insisting and often winning at the Humnan Right Tribunals that as women they be allowed to staff rape crisis lines, to staff women’s shelters and rape centers, to be rape counsellors, and so on. We have the publicly funded CBC championing woke ideology on EVERY SINGLE ISSUE and weaving narrative fictions in place of reporting facts. We’ve had a government doubling down on false narratives and not just suspending all civil rights because some truckers erected bouncy castles and held free BBQs for homeless people but have many people from all walks of life who were fired when banks, GoFundMe and other funding sites handed over the names addresses and all financial information of anyone who had donated any amount to this seditious Trucker’s Convoy. We have Bill 67 In Ontario that puts political commissars into classrooms to determine if teachers are producing enough identity activists to warrant the continuation of their licenses and transvestites, sorry, drag queen story hour readers touring municipal and school libraries to let children know that there are Q and T letters in the LGB movement advocating that unlike the LGB side of the sexual preference aisle, the QT+ side is all about gender feelings. Hence the gross female attire but without the typical raunchy dialogue and songs used to entertain adults. We even had the Toronto school board cancel a Nobel prize winning young woman who had survived years of ISIS captivity out of fear that her speaking truthfully to graduating young women might prompt an increase in ‘islamaphobia’. And we can’t have any of that. It’s okay to offend those who respect what’s true and who dare to stand up to a false narrative; it’s not okay to offend the liars and deceivers and ideologues. Expect a Conservative majority government for years to come from all this foolishness.
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Today is ROGD Awareness Day (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria) per the international parent and professional group Genspect. Through their videos here, you can learn about the differences between current and past populations with gender dysphoria and how an ideology affected healthcare. Most interesting are the videos (there are a set of 9? short videos in the explanatory series) embedded in the twitter thread and I think they very much worth watching if one wishes to understand what is going on here.
Of particular interest should be the videos by Dr Bell, ex-governor of the now defunct Tavistock gender dysphoria ‘clinic’ (it’s an entire hospital in England that was dedicated to the treatment of this dysphoria and was* considered after the ideological capture by transactivists the ‘leading’ facility for transitioning people from one ‘gender’ to another ‘gender’. In other words, they were considered the global authority.) His criticisms and concerns for real people in real life have been fully informed by reality and recent history. His front row seat watching the ideology permeate every aspect of Tavistock’s healthcare demonstrates the perniciousness of the gender identity approach.
* This past month, an interim report on Tavistock revealed such shocking deficits in both health care and record keeping and follow ups that it was immediately closed by the government. In the meantime, referrals were now to be handled by regional healthcare facilities no longer bound by a team of transactivists pushing an ideology on every client. Equally interesting is how gender activists have tried to paint this immediate closure as if it were somehow a victory for expanding their version of gender treatment! It’s not. Like Sweden, Denmark, and France, Britain will now follow suit (Scottie will assure everyone that none of these country’s nationalized healthcare policies regarding the caution for transitioning young people is based on good ‘science’ and not a single world renowned expert on gender dysphoria who disagrees with transitioning as quickly as possible have any clue what they’re talking about except as hate and bigotry and trying to support right wing extremism). Patient caseloads from Tavistock will now be referred to regional healthcare teams rather than be set on path to transitioning treatments by gender identity ideologues. This notion of victory is Scotties take, too, and it reminds me of typical creationist arguments involving ‘design’, in that the response to any scientifically informed argument against the Just So god-did-it storyline is always a heads I win, tails you lose… no matter what contrary evidence is presented nor how strong it may be nor any scientific level of expertise. If it doesn’t agree and support the narrative, it must be wrong and supported only by the Worst Possible People.
Anyway, the series is very informative on this issue and well worth watching.
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Maybe this link will work.
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Quite frankly, I’ve had it up “here” with all this gender dysphoria talk. I tend to think people in general would be more accepting if it’s not shoved in their face at every turn. Look how long it’s taken for the gay/lesbian community to come to ANY kind of acceptance. And face it … there are and will be some people who will NEVER support anything but male/female relationships.
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The point, Nan, is to understand that the institutional capture by ‘progressive’ ideologues is HUGE. It’s not a small thing. It’s not a particular thing. It is an idea that involves every aspect of western government, agency, institution and throughout the public domain. Gender ideology is just ONE branch of a very large tree. And it is TOXIC to our shared rights and freedoms.
We’re standing back and standing by as contrary voices are first vilified and eventually silenced, people fired, careers destroyed, institutions perverted, (writers stabbed on stage if not first drowned out or cancelled or deplatformed) and almost all of us going along and keeping quiet and allowing this capture to unfold piece by piece by piece presuming it is deserved regardless of harm. We tend to dismiss it as not as important as this OTHER THING HERE… especially as important as vilifying Them for THAT while exempting the collaborating US for THIS. And it’s happening ON OUR WATCH.
There’s a level of personal responsibility here that is being swept under the rug… for all kinds of rationalizations. That is what needs to change to stop this movement, one person at a time.
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Why would anyone want a label anyway? Isn’t the whole point to not be anyones expectations of you, but to be yourself? So they choose a label that comes with expectations of behavior.
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HA! And then there is the “Christian” label!!??! 😄
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Speaking of making a mockery of gay and lesbian rights to non discrimination by the intentional insertion of ‘gender identity’ as if an equivalent civil rights issue, just follow the money. Gender identity has zero to do with rights and everything to do with imposing synthetic sex identities (SSI) on everyone and demanding privilege at women’s expense for doing so.
Don’t believe me? Good. But take a look at Port Townsend, WA, yesterday (August 16/22) where mostly white men bearing symbols of LGBTQ+ (some armed and many dressed in antifa costume) shouted down, intimidated, and threatened not just a black woman pleading for her civil rights but senior women linking arms to attempt to protect a rape victim trying to speak. Their crime? Having the gall to protest a woman banned from the YWCA for lodging a complaint against a man in a women’s change room at the YWCA staring at girls dressing and undressing. That man claimed he ‘identified’ as a woman based on his supposed ‘feelings’ – I mean, who cares about the feelings of those girls when a MAN’S feelings is involved? – and so therefore HE had the ‘right’ to be in that room staring at little girls. The senior citizen woman who complained about his presence? She was a bigot and a Very Bad Person for trying to protect girls in various stages of undress from male viewing and deserved to be banned from that facility for life.
This is gender identity rights in action: removing an entire class of people from reality because of the ‘feelings’ of a few, and replacing it with a fiction, with SSI. Adding insult to injury, this ideology then piggybacks on the erased class’ rights and freedoms by then stealing them in the name of non discriminatory of their supposed ‘civil rights’.
Gender identity is an obscenity when acted upon.
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Don’t think this takeover of institutions by those aligning with this ideology of identity motivates people to vote against those who support it? Consider medicine. These are the organizations Scottie refers to as having ‘scientific consensus’ about gender transitioning (nobody knows how to transition a gender, but hey…) and insists we should respect these experts. But where the American and Canadian consensus lies in medicine is not scientific but ideological. Ideological agreement about identity by the governing boards of these major medical institutions is not synonymous with ‘scientific consensus’ but in spite of it.
If people on the left fail to criticize and stop this nonsense by convincing other liberals within their own ranks that this nonsense is as extreme as anything the theocratic right can offer, the country as a liberal democracy will be lost to one illiberal extreme or the other. That’s our battle. And one we as a people are losing badly convinced it is virtuous to do so. This is the generation to whom the torch of liberty has been thrown and we’re breaking faith with those who threw it to us. That’s on all liberal democrats.
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Let’s change the focus from gender to islamophobia… from ex-Muslims of North America president Sarah Haider:
“Believers who wish to see state-sponsored force enacted against blasphemers can point to the harm it causes to their social standing and, therefore, inner state. In this way, they are no longer extreme dogmatists depriving others of their freedom of speech, they are victims of hate speech by islamophobes.
Amazingly, it is working.”
Think this doesn’t affect you?
When the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the resolution introduced by Pakistan declaring March 22 to be the “International Day to Combat Islamophobia”, Imran Khan applauded. Khan, whose time as Prime Minister saw an alarming rise in mob violence and lynchings of religious minorities, saw a path to victory: “Today UN has finally recognised the grave challenge confronting the world: of Islamophobia, respect for religious symbols & practices & of curtailing systematic hate speech & discrimination against Muslims. Next challenge is to ensure implementation of this landmark resolution.”
There’s the call for activism. It’s just another version of Critical Theory like gender and race.
This is how group identity ideologies absolutely toxic to liberalism find a secure and righteous home and then grows in the west. By believing it’s true and virtuous to support. And the ONLY staunch critics of them are not from the ranks of Democrats held in esteem: in every case, they are from Republicans. This is a HUGE problem when it comes to swaying the 10% of voters in the center of the political spectrum who swing their votes based on the negative effects that come with ideological activism. They will reject this activism every time. That’s how Democrats keep reliably and consistently losing so many elections.
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For those who think gender ideology is a tired topic, the issue is really about allowing faith-based in the ideology of identity to tear down liberal democracy. That may sound like hyperbole or an overstatement but it isn’t; it’s an understatement of what’s going on today.
The all important ‘feelings’ of Westerners (yup, the same ‘feelings’ that magically justifies sending a serial rapist and murderer to be housed in a women’s prison) are being expertly manipulated in many ways against the West. And people are cheering this on. Haider does a good job explaining how this done here (I forgot to include the link above) and why it is so effective using the terms of liberalism (the terms ‘progressive’ ideology uses) to similarly disguise anti-liberal activism… in this case how the west is supporting anti-liberal Islamism that if not approves then certainly promotes and excuses the sinking of a knife over and over again into a writer of fiction. And so we can see how so many of us are utterly duped by this repeated linguistic inverting tactic and then thinking so very highly of our virtue for doing so.
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Sorry… I failed to close the link after the word ‘here’.
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For those of us that want to just enjoy life, it’s only a matter of time before this will affect you directly. Even by accident. I have a dear friend already that was fired as a teacher at the LA school district (taught 35 years) for failing to get this right even after sensitively training. It’s a tough transition even if you intend well, students will lie. He was fired over a girl/he lying about him.
Even Scotty who supports it with the best intentions because of his past experiences as a young Jehovahs Witness and being gay, is supporting his own demise.
For some reason the reminds me of a line in The Cowboys, where Bruce Dern puts on the little boys glasses and says “say look at that. I can see myself back home now—and all them carpetbaggers calling me mister”. It never happened. In fact the opposite did.
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I have never doubted the sincerity and good heart of most people who are ‘progressive’. Of course, I also think the same of most Republicans! Sometimes it’s hard to remember we all have far more in common than our highlighted differences.
But…
This stuff is really important to get right. Selling a narrative as if true rather than respecting what reality has to say regarding our beliefs about it is boilerplate faith. And it’s my experience that terrible things follow steadfast belief in Us v Them no matter what it may be called. Liberalism, by stark contrast, is all about We. I have overwhelming evidence from reality that liberalism, for all its shortcomings, is the best system globally to enhance unity and human well being. Any ideology that attempts to solidify an Us v Them framework – like all postmodernism including ‘progressivism’ and all its various incoherent branches is unapologetically hostile to that goal, that striving for ‘a more perfect union’. That’s why it needs to be seen for what it is and rejected: a divisive and deplorable faith-based belief system that abuses the authority of public office to be imposed on everyone. It doesn’t matter if it’s called right or left, Democrat or Republican, victim or victimizer; it’s still a pig regardless of the color and hue of the applied lipstick.
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