Well, that blew up. Welcome all of you who have arrived here via my CWR piece and the follows and retweets by (be still my heart) Kara Dansky and Helen Joyce.
New visitors may not agree with everything that’s published here, and that’s fine. Sometimes I don’t agree with myself.
For an intro to these topics from my perspective, go here. I will warn you, though – it’s sort of a mess. I didn’t set out writing about this with a schema in mind, and there’s just a lot of brain spillage there. My main points are really just:
- Sex is a material reality, mammals are binary and you can’t change sex. Can’t be done.
- What needs to be closely examined is the desire to change or even present as and be treated by society as the opposite sex. There are innumerable reasons that people experience this, but none of them, no matter what we are told, are rooted in an actual, real gnostic division of body and identity. Actual body dysphoria, social anxiety, confusion about and rejection of traditional gender presentation, trauma, parental pressure, paraphilia – yes – but there is no skirt-go-spinny “lady brain” that gets mistakenly put in a male body. Sorry.
- Misogyny drives a great deal of the present trans moment.
- The great unspoken motivation in the present trans moment is sexual fetish. (This is another topic I wish Walsh had at least touched on.)
- Medical experimentation on minors should be banned. It is not optimal that government should have to legislate these things, but if the medical profession is not going police its own, and is going to allow profiteers and butchers from its ranks to make money off of amputating children’s healthy body parts and give children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, well, I guess The People have to step in to protect kids.
- Males, whether they feel “trans” or not, will use gender self-identification and trans-sympathetic policies to harass, harm and victimize women. No “will” about it – “do” – as in, right now.
My goal is to bring this to a primarily Catholic audience which is really not getting any information about this issue from traditional news sources or Catholic leadership. In other words, there is far more to this than Be kind and welcome our trans friends!
So now that we understand each other, a couple of quick notes from the news. I post items like this a few times a week.
Related to the last item on the list above, from Graham Linehan’s substack focused on these issues, a post along the lines of “This Never Happens” – a common category title in discussion boards on this issue (Ovarit, Mumsnet – there was a big Gender Critical board on Reddit, but of course it was deleted.)
The point is that men can pose a threat to women and children however they ‘identify’ and women have every reason to fear male violence. Since it’s impossible to tell which males are harmless and which are not, basic safeguarding means we exclude all males from women’s spaces. Even the ones who claim to ‘identify as women’. The list below demonstrates that we are right to do so.
It is far from an exhaustive list – these are just some examples of which I’m aware – but there are 100 names on it. Look how easily violent, dangerous males can claim a trans identity and be believed, accommodated, enabled. I’d like to ask all those shouting at us to be ‘inclusive’, how many victims do you deem acceptable collateral damage for prioritising male feelings over women’s safety?
With each case described in more detail below, here are 100 examples of trans-identified males who have raped, assaulted, abused and/or murdered women and/or children. The thing that never happens…
Doctors interviewed in What is a Woman blithely assert that puberty blockers are reversible. Like a little pause on development. Of course, this is ridiculous – especially when we talk about hormones and puberties, we are not just talking about secondary sex characteristics. Among other aspects, bones and brains also develop and are impacted by these hormonal changes, and no one knows how blocking these hormones will impact those. We can guess, though.
Here’s a Substack from an Australian pediatricial, published this morning, presenting a partial case against “reversibility.”
In Norway, a woman has been investigated by the police for asserting that men cannot be lesbians.
A Norwegian feminist could be facing up to three years in prison for allegedly “hateful” tweets directed at a male who claims to be a lesbian woman.
Christina Ellingsen, a representative of feminist organization Women’s Declaration International (WDI) is being investigated under hate crime charges for tweets she made between February 2021 and January 2022.
The tweets in question were replies directed at Christine Marie Jentoft, a representative of trans activist group Foreningen FRI. Jentoft is a male who identifies as a lesbian woman.
Ellingsen’s charges are centered around her questioning why FRI promoted the belief that men could be lesbians. While police are still investigating, if she is found guilty, Ellingsen could face a prison sentence of up to three years.
Norway introduced “gender identity” into the hate crime paragraphs in January 2021. At the time, WDI Norway (formerly WHRC Norway) warned that the introduction of the concept into law would result in persecution of women for stating biological facts.
Which brings me to my final point of the day:
This is not just a boutique issue or obsession. If successful, the trans moment would have immense consequences because remember – the goal is: self-declaration of sex/gender. No surgery, medication – anything – required except one’s self-assertion.
That’s “gender identity.”
It’s not just a battle of words either, and there is something we can all do to fight. In the United States, the Biden administration has proposed amending Title IX regulations to include “gender” along with “sex.”
Remember: gender=self-identification.
Look for that particular angle to heat up in the next month or so – and that is something that all of us can do something about if public comment is required to make the change.
Amen