…while Rome burns

Welcome, Big Pulpit readers. Here’s a new (8/6) post on these issues.

Well, we don’t, for some reason, have Camille Paglia to eviscerate this stupid moment in time, but American-born, now UK-residing novelist Lionel Shriver (who is female, btw – here’s a brief review of one of her novels), is able to fill some of the gap here. In the UK Spectator, she writes on the Tavistock decision, but runs gender ideology through the gauntlet in a general way. It’s:

Anti-reality. Astonishingly, fanatical activists have brainwashed many otherwise, you would think, intelligent people into reciting like zombies: ‘Trans women are women.’ I can’t be the only one who reflexively translates when reading ‘trans women’: ‘Oh, right. “Men”, then.’ Thus our activist motto decodes: ‘Men are women.’ We might as well recite ‘Lamps are carrots’ or ‘Knitting needles are tractors’…

…

Anti-nature. Screen junkies forget this, but we live in bodies. They are not our invention. They’re not toys, like Barbie and Ken. They’re not infinitely malleable, mere canvases for our fantasies. It can’t be a coincidence that so many young people are suddenly determined to change their perceived sex during the digital era. But our bodies aren’t video-game avatars and cannot be rearranged at will with a pull-down menu. In elevating the subjective experience of self above the physical reality of us breathing, rutting bipeds, trans activists express an utter alienation from nature, to which the same younger generations claim to be so attached.

Anti-science. The notion that some people are ‘born in the wrong body’ belongs right up there with belief in phrenology (the Victorians), ‘wandering wombs’ (ancient Greece) or the vital medical balancing of ‘the four humours’, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile (Hippocrates). We’ve come a long way, you say? Maybe not. Having embraced wrong-body folklore, ideologues are pumping children full of puberty blockers with no clue about the long-term consequences of this experimental off-label medication for their patients. No one really knows the results of cross-sex hormones over a lifetime delivered at scale. The drugs are distributed like Smarties anyway.

According to the above conceit, I was born in the wrong body. I am 5ft 2in. But inside? I feel tall. My soul is tall. I experience myself as 6ft 5in. And because a terrible mistake was made when I was born and ‘assigned’ as this short person, I’m going to force everyone to look me in the eyes by staring 15 inches over my head.

We’re not nearly as sophisticated as we imagine. We’re as prey to nonsensical manias, untruths and superstitions as we were in the 1600s. You’ve got to wonder, too, what’s wrong with a culture obsessed with pretending to switch sexes when hardly short of genuine problems. We’re fiddling with our genitals while Rome burns. And the trans fetish is doing untold, often permanent damage to children who deserve the protection of proper grown-ups.

Looking at her next-to-the-last paragraph, that’s a notion I’ve taken up here as well as, more recently, here, in a reflection on an article on a female artist’s self-portrait of her aging self:

My spirit looks nothing like my body…

Well, proclaims the modern age, fix it up! Become the self you know you are inside! Lift, tuck, go to the dermatologist and the surgeon, get a makeup and hair consult, and let me tell you about the best filters!

Or…just accept? Accept not only the reality of who we are and our physical state, but accept the dissonance we live with in these bodies, on this earth, in this life.

Sorry, it’s not going to “match.” Ever. It’s just going to be. That’s the curse, that’s the gift.

More from me on this issue

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Not like other girls

A lot of us know the feeling. We’ve had it since girlhood, and for many of us, it’s never gone away.

Not like other girls.

I wasn’t a so-called “tomboy” as a girl, and as I’ve written before, growing up in the 60’s-70’s – well, the so-called “gender divide” wasn’t actually that wide for kids. I just don’t recall a whole lot of pink or sparkly stuff in anyone’s childhood back then. As I’ve said before, my main memory is of brown-backgrounded plaids, turtlenecks, and bikes.

I was also raised an only child in an academic household. Not hippie liberal, but, at least at the beginning, solid Kennedy Democrats (who, like many, as time went on, transitioned into Reagan democrats and who know what they’d be now if they were alive, which they haven’t been, for a while.) who raised me mostly to be able to articulate my opinions and live a life of the mind. My mother would have termed herself an old-school feminist: think Amelia Earhart and Rosalind Russell. But, then, that’s a repeat.

But growing up, what’s also true is that when it came to feelings of “fitting in” – while I did have close female friends and a female bestie at every stage – in terms of groups – group talk, group thinking, group interests – I never did fit in with the girls. I was always more comfortable with the boys. I’ve thought a lot about this over the years, and I think much of it has to do with the ways girls are socialized, which perhaps reflects most girl’s instinctive interests. I don’t want to dive too deeply into this, but to consider, reflect on the traditional boys’ and girls’ toys – girls’ toys tend to be related to life in the home and boys’ toys tend to be related to life outside the home.

And so it was with conversation and the wisecracks that’s a part of pre-teen and teen life in school. I wasn’t interested in talking about boyfriends or clothes or makeup (not that that was much of a thing in the 70’s) or social life. But the boys? The boys I hung out with – most of us worked on the school newspaper, and that was our main hang-out time – talked politics and issues – probably not very intelligently, and no, this was no Agora and who knows what they talked about when I wasn’t around – it was probably disgusting – but honestly, it was all just so more interesting with the boys than it was with the girls. An argument, in a way, for single-sex schools, where no doubt, if I’d worked on the school newspaper, I would have been with like-minded young women who were deep into arguing about the ERA and Jimmy Carter, too.

And I had short hair!

Gee. Was I trans?

This is a big topic of conversation in gender critical circles. Women my age down to the mid-20’s musing how as girls we didn’t feel “like other girls” and never felt quite a part of intensive Girl World Life – maybe even excluded. For various reasons, of course. Some, like me just had no interest in what the girls in our lives were fixated on – others were “tomboys,” others athletic, others bullied by Mean Girls, and so on.

What would culture say about us today? What would we be pressured to feel and do?

Because, guess what? It wasn’t great. Yes, I did feel left out. Yes, I was resentful at times. Yes, I did wonder if there was something “off” about me as a female. I didn’t wish to be other than what I was, though. I was content with my interests. But still. In that context – small Catholic high school of mostly white Catholics in the South in the 70’s – I didn’t feel completely comfortable.

But did anyone? Does anyone who’s 15 feel at ease, comfortable and “themselves?”

It seems that of late, the most popular way of signaling I’m not like other girls is to declare oneself non-binary. Every day a new celebrity takes to Instagram to change pronouns. The latest, today, is Emma Corin, a British actress who plays Princess Diana in The Crown. (I don’t watch it, sorry.)

A couple of days ago, she posted an image of herself in a makeshift binder, but in the text, tags a company that makes binders – an account with almost 200K followers.

What’s a binder? It’s a wrap to compress breasts. To nothing, preferably.

“Designed with the true you in mind.”

It’s more than a bit ironic that Corin plays Diana, who lived her adult life in a subculture of high intensity and expectations, some of which was related to her sex. It’s almost a natural progression.

I saw this on Twitter the other day, and though it was apt:

Not like other girls.

So many of us have felt this. In the present moment, it’s a feeling that’s deepened and exacerbated by a culture in which the value of the individual is tied to appearance, and for females, the value of that appearance is linked to implied sexual interest and availability, and all of it – every bit of it – is woven through with pornography.

Who wouldn’t want to check out of that culture and what it demands and expects of females, especially young females?

Who wouldn’t want to say – no, not me. I’m not like that. Not like other girls. Let me the heck out.

Which is really, in this context, a cry from a sea filled with the drowning.

So, I will run with this internalized misogyny – for that’s what it is, full stop – to the nearest “gender-affirming” clinic that will suppress my estrogen, give me testosterone instead, I’ll research mastectomies and hysterectomies and set up a Go Fund Me for it all.

But even if I don’t want to go that far, I’ll still want the world to know that no, I’m not like other girls, so I will ….cut my hair (cut my hair? Really?) and then maybe I will wrap my breasts tightly – so tightly I’m at risk of hurting my lungs – and press, press, press down so that these things on my chest – these things that apparently stand between me and being treated as just – a person – will be gone. Just gone.

Do you want to have evidence of the failure of 2nd and 3rd wave feminism? This. That this – young women by the thousands in the West seeking to suppress and amputate the visible signs of their sex, and saying I’m not a “she” anymore …Just “they.” I’m “they” – not “she” – please not “she” – isn’t seen as the crisis that it is.

Me. Christmas. 1963 I guess.

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The Revenge of the Blogs

I tell you, it’s coming.

I’ve been telling you for years, when it comes to social media, put not your trust in princes.

This has nothing to do with political preferences, but with other issues I’ve been contemplating, in my usual haphazard way, for years, and which I’ll set down later today.

Here.

Not in an Instagram or Facebook post. Not on Twitter. Not on a podcast or a YouTube video.

Here.

Yes, this space is prone to censorship and deplatforming as well. We’ve seen it. One of the best “Gender Critical” (i.e. anti-trans movement) blogs was completely removed from WordPress a couple of years ago. Including the archives, I believe. Google owns Blogger. You know what that means.

But for the moment, this is what it’s always been. Mostly mine.

For the moment, at least.

Update: How strange, but appropriate to see news, right after posting this, that Kathy Shaidle, pioneering blogger, both in general and in the Catholic arena, has died:

Following a tedious rendezvous with ovarian cancer, Kathy Shaidle has died, wishing she’d spent more time at the office.

Her tombstone reads: GET OFF MY LAWN! 

She is relieved she won’t have to update her LinkedIn profile, shave her legs, or hear “Creep” by Radiohead ever again. Some may even be jealous that she’s getting out of enduring a Biden presidency. 

Kathy was a writer, author, columnist and blogging pioneer, as proud of her first book’s Governor General’s Award nomination as of her stint as “Ed Anger” for the Weekly World News. A target for “cancel” culture before the term was coined, she was denounced by all the best people, sometimes for contradictory reasons

 

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We’ll start easy.

So this happened.

(Ladder next to piano is part of our very professional setup for the remote piano lessons. Guitar is his own purchase with his organ-playing money.)

Someone was giving it away. Saw it on (okay….I know…shut up) FB Marketplace. As it happens, the family lives just a few houses down from our house before this one – just a couple of miles away. No way we could transport it ourselves, so I figured paying someone to move it + free fully operational organ (- one key, as you can see below) still = pretty good deal.

And for the record, these small organs from the 60’s and 70’s are items which, these days, you can really only give away. They have zero resale value. In fact, one organist discussion board I read said that the benches have more resale value than the instrument themselves – and yes, it’s a nice looking bench.

Organ Guy is delighted. It only has one octave of pedals, which makes it less than optimal for home practice for church pieces, but at least he can work with the manuals. And he’s having fun doing it. I had wondered before getting it, if it was really worth it, considering that he has a pretty nice digital keyboard already, but I can already see that yes, it’s different, with other, good reasons to decide to spend time with it, rather than the new shiny keyboard.

He remains noncommittal on a music career, but he does enjoy it, spends a lot of time practicing and then fooling around with various instruments, so as far as I’m concerned it’s money well spent.

Actually, my goal is for him to fill our house with sounds like this.

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One ticket to Girl World, please

Via another blog, I happened upon this trailer for a new movie streaming or showing somewhere. It stars Justin Timberlake and it’s about this ex-con who returns to his southern (of course) hometown and somehow ends up taking care of a young boy who’s having troubles because (you know it) he wants to wear dresses.

It’s the next step from the Magical Negro and the Magical Gay – the Magical Non-Gender-Conforming-Minor (not creepy at all) , who showers wisdom, self-understanding and tolerance upon all in his now very Magic Circle.

And yes, the trailer enraged me. But not, perhaps for the reasons you expect. It enraged me, not for the boys, who can and will do whatever they want and then profit while the rest of the world praises them for it, whether starting wars or wearing dresses, for that’s the way of the world – no, not so much for the boys.

But for the girls.

I’ve only watched the trailer, and that’s all I’ll ever watch, and perhaps I’m off base, and perhaps the movie tells a different, more subtle story, but this is what I got from the trailer.

This boy-child is outcast and bullied because he:

• Spends times with the girls, affecting dance moves like a drag queen
• Plays with a Barbie
• Joyfully imitates the moves of girl cheerleaders
• Viewing some Disney-type princess cartoon declares that not only can he be one of them, he can be the first like him to be one of them.

It’s unclear from the trailer whether the issue is that the boy wants to become a girl or if he wants to remain a boy but be free! to do “girl things” and present in “girl ways.”

I don’t care. Any or all of those choices are repulsive, and again, it’s not because the story presents the (stupid) story of a boy who wants to do them.

It’s repulsive because of what it all says about girls.

I’m going to keep repeating this until I drop. The transgender moment is a war against females. It is built on rigid gender stereotypes and ultimately communicates that women are better off as men and men make the best women.

This, the trailer implies, is Girl World: A world of young human beings defined by fey, coy, sexualized dance moves, of cheering on males in athletic combat, of dressing up dolls with unrealizable physiques and, of course, ruled by wide-eyed, curvaceous (but not too curvaceous) princesses.

And oh! Let us pity and cheer on the brave, misunderstood person with a penis who simply seeks to enter this enchanting and fun Land of Cute!

Screw this. I am so tired of this. Exhausted. Confounded. As I’ve written before. Absolutely confounded.

Come on, little boy, do you want to learn about Girl World? Here. Listen up. Look. Watch.

Girl World is a place where there’s blood, and pain and, more often than you would expect, fear.

It’s a place where most of us, for most of our lives, bleed and cramp and are emotionally tossed up and plunged downward regularly, once a month, for days. I once had to leave a final exam in college – right in the middle – the pain was unendurable. And that, my young friend, was a normal month, a regular, bloody, body-bending part of life.

And when the time of bleeding stops, in Girl World, it’s a time of heat and racing hearts and depression and dryness and more, different kinds of pain.

What else happens in Girl World? We grow people inside of us, and through history, have died in great numbers as we strove to push those people through our bodies. When we survive, we spend years giving suck to those people we’ve grown and birthed, but not at leisure, but hours every day while keeping at the hard work of our life in the world, whether that be in fields or at the hearth or the office. All day, every day. And night.

Oh, Girl World. That place where human beings called girls and women can’t walk down a street, can’t sit in a café or bar alone without being catcalled, bothered or worse.

Girl World, A History: Are you a girl? Can’t vote, can’t own property, can’t live outside of male supervision. But you can wear makeup if you want! You go!

So no, little boy, you can never be a part of that even if you wear a dress and learn to swivel those hips, and I suspect, knowing the truth, you probably don’t want to. You just want to play, to perform, to act, to act out – something. Some loss, some desire, some yearning that’s real, even if the solution the world presents you is not.

And damn the culture and society that lets you believe that this imaginary Girl World of Cute and Princesses and Cheering on the Boys, wiggling asses, jiggling breasts and shiny clothes is the place for you – or for anyone – to live and pretend.

So yes, the Girl World of this kind of garbage infuriates me because it’s not about the real lives of girls and women, but about fantasies that serve other, more nefarious ends – economically, culturally, and personally.

But it infuriates me for the real girls of the very real Girl World, not only because it devalues their unique experience, but also because it reinforces that insidious, horrendous definition of femaleness that I thought we had killed off, but has resurrected, so bizarrely, over the past two decades, it seems.

I like swiveling my hips, playing with dolls, cheerleading and princesses – it’s my ticket to Girl World!

I’ll give you your ticket to Girl World. Here you go. And now, what do you see? The young female human beings who actually do have tickets to the real Girl World – don’t be fooled. Don’t get off at the Potemkin village they’re selling you. Wait a little longer. You’ll see who lives here.

Where do we start?

Athletes, astronauts, governors, senators, vice-presidents, prime ministers, colonels, captains and generals,

scientists, CEOS and plant managers, engineers, attorneys, nurses, doctors, surgeons, homemakers, ministers, teachers, farmers, cashiers, archaeologists, pilots, chefs, coaches, nuns and artists….and that’s only the beginning.

These females – these real, biological females who live in this Girl World – the real one – are just like you. They’re short, tall, thin, heavy, have high voices or speak in low tones, giggle or guffaw, laugh a lot or just when something is really darkly funny, think princesses are wonderful or think they’re silly or never think about them all, love cheering, love playing on the field or even both, want to have kids, can’t stand kids, wear makeup and go without, spend time on their hair or get it cut twice a year, wear dresses sometimes, all the time or never, maybe want to be cute or maybe don’t give a damn.

So sorry, young dude. Affecting a cute demeanor doesn’t get you into Girl World. And a culture that encourages you is telling you a lie. But of course, those hurt the worst by the bizarre, insistent lie of the performative, superficialities of this supercute, glittery, hip-swiveling, chest-thrusting, pouty-lipped land of cheering, dancing pink-encased princesses are, of course, as always.…girls.

Source

But not if we don’t want to be….

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Peak…peaking..peaked?

Yeah, I’m fed up. 

Time to return to trans issues. Why now? Because while it seems to be something that’s sucking all the air out of every single room every single day, over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen an uptick in the news:

• The Democratic gay-themed town hall. Most candidates in attendance (exceptions: Sanders, Gabbard, Yang, Williamson). The town hall was dominated by trans issues.
• The Supreme Court heard a case last week on the application of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to “gender” rather than simply “sex.”
• There’s always stuff going on across the sea, but notable this week was the victory of male-to-female (sort of) cyclist R. McKinnon in a competition, claiming a “woman’s” victory – setting a “woman’s record.”
• The Always nonsense.
• The story from Texas about a jury awarding a mother full custody of her son she claims wants to be a girl and banning the boy’s father from any say in his life, requiring him to refer to the child as a girl and so on. There’s a lot of outrage about this one – go to Rod Dreher’s site for the picture – and I share it in a general way, but hesitate to go all in here specifically because there do seem to be questions. It was a messy divorce, and both sides seem to have problems.
• Today, that J. Yaniv character up in Canada lost his case – remember this is the guy demanding that any and all female aestheticians with women-centered salons give him a Brazilian. 

But the general picture is being painted in pretty bright colors, isn’t it? (Although pastel – not bright – blue is the trans color).

Here’s what I have to say – resist. 

This is a bizarre, deeply damaging moment we’re living in, driven by a tiny minority of people suffering various forms of mental illness. And yes, there are various forms. Once you start looking into this world, you come to understand that there is really no such thing as a monolithic gentle group of “trans folks” we’re gently reminded to welcome by gentle Fr. Martin, all gently seeking understanding for their differences.

No – there’s a little more to it than that.

There are different iterations and roots of this type of dysphoria, obviously, like any mental illness, not all understood.  There are men who experience this desire, frankly, as a fetish. It’s called autogynephilia, and it’s a thing – a male being aroused by the idea of himself as a woman. There are young people who have been abused, who are on the spectrum, who are deeply influenced by what they see online, there are pre-teen and teen girls who are confused, disturbed and revolted by the physical changes they’re experiencing. There are teen girls and boys, young adults, who look at this weird world of strict gender conformity, the land of pink and the world of blue, and think…I don’t fit here. I’m different. Maybe I fit….there. 

There’s a lot to say and lot to do and much to resist, but here’s where it starts – here’s the bottom line:

Resist and reject gender self-identity in all spheres of life, including the law. 

That is to say: You are not a woman because you believe you are. You’re not a boy because you’ve decided you are.

Don’t let the law budge an inch on this score. 

This – the notion that one can simply decide what gender you are and then merit treatment and rights on that score – is the root of all current trans activism, including political activism, embodied in this country in the so-called Equality Act – endorsed by all the current Democratic candidates for president and passed by the House last spring. (You know your constitution, so you know that “passed by the House” means nothing unless it’s also “passed by the Senate” and signed by the President. But still – it’s there.) Most people don’t understand this. They think that transing is all about people who have gone through counseling and years of medical treatment and surgery – right? Nope. Not at all.

At the core of the Equality Act and similar efforts in England, a person should be treated according to the gender he or she (?) claims, even if they are still physically intact, have never had surgery – and maybe never even intend to. It doesn’t matter if they “pass” or not or what they look like to you.

You’re a girl because you say you are.

No. Resist.

Resist attempts to change the law, resist the intrusion of this into your schools, your public spaces  – snort derisively  when you’re asked your pronouns – and never stop being deeply and annoyingly logical. So if your community passes some sort of Self-ID in terms of gender, the next time you go to the DMV or have to fill out a form indicating your identifying characteristics – go crazy. If you’re Asian with straight black hair, demand to be accepted as an Irish redhead. If you’re obviously a woman, calmly claim that you’re a dude. If you’re 60, put down 1982 as your birthdate. And don’t let go – demand to know why – if that guy over there can be named “woman of the year,” can win women’s sporting events, can be awarded a woman’s spot on a committee – it is perfectly logical that I, too, can self-identify in any way, respect or category I decide. 

There is no logical argument. None. 

It is mostly misogynistic, crowd-driven, profit-fueled gnosticism. 

And those of you who call yourselves feminists, take note here. The greatest energy in the trans movement is of biological males demanding access to women’s spaces: restrooms, athletics, locker rooms, shelters, prisons and honors. You do not see female–to-male individuals making the same demands. As I’ve said before, I see this movement in part as Peak Misogyny, enabled by medical technology and profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies. (Because if you do physically transition, guess what? You’re on medication…for the rest of your life.)  Peak Misogyny which is trying to create a world in which actual girls and  women hopefully commit to their own erasure and the best women always turn out to be  men.

Yes. Erasure of actual women, is what it all seems to be about, in the end.

From a great column in the UK Telegraph a few days ago, by Celia Walden:

“This cloakroom may be used by any person regardless of gender identity or expression,” reads a notice on the toilet door of the bar I’m in on Saturday night. This is designed to give me a hit of self-importance. I have choices, options, both in terms of who I am and how I decide to express that all-important self to the world: a world waiting with bated breath for me to tell them why I’m special.

And yet I don’t feel reassured by this open-minded toilet, because everyone in the bar is drunk, the corridor it’s situated in is dimly-lit – and the only other people queuing outside it are men. So instead what I feel is uneasy, undignified, un-safe.

I’m guessing younger women are getting used to the feeling of vulnerability I felt so acutely on Saturday night. Just as British schoolgirls are getting used to their Mao-esque, gender-neutral uniforms, and “holding it in” all day at school (with the risk of contracting infections): anything to avoid using the gender-neutral toilets.

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But this is an attack on women. And I don’t think the leading feminist campaigner, Julie Bindel, was exaggerating when she said on Sunday: “We’re now moving towards the total elimination of women’s biology.”

This isn’t about feminists, activists, sociologists and the deliberately impenetrable jargon they all choose to use in their very public duels. And it’s not about who gets to claim periods, with all their paraphernalia, either (but have them, please, along with stretch marks, the menopause, and the certainty that you’ve been ripped off by every MOT guy you’ve come across).

This is about fragile young girls still struggling to come to terms with their own changing bodies being forced into preposterous intimacy with boys. It’s about transgender athletes like Rachel McKinnon – who won the Masters Track Cycling World Championships on Saturday for the second year running – killing women’s sports.
It’s about the series of future crimes, assaults and intimidations that will have to happen before someone works out that having a load of drunk men and women using the same toilets in bars and clubs was Not A Smart Move. It’s about rapists being indulged and coddled by the police while their victims are effectively mocked.

And it’s about knowing when we’ve reached peak gender insanity. Please God, let this be it.

“This” will not be “it” all by itself. It won’t be “it” unless human beings stop it.

And it needs to stop – and the law could play a part in stopping it – or opening up the floodgates. Either way. The citizens of this country – who make the laws, remember – could demand, for a start, that their state and federal representatives ban medical transitioning of minors – no drugs, no puberty blockers, no hormones, and God help us, no surgery. No teen girls lining up for binders and mastectomies, no boys, their genitals shrunk by years of puberty blockers and estrogen, having their penises and testicles sliced off, the remaining skin tucked in to form what amounts nothing more than an open wound that must, for the rest of their lives – the rest of their lives  – be dilated daily for….what? 

Start with banning that in your state. Don’t allow it and run the medical professionals who profit from it out of business. And then stand firm against the Equality Act. If you have the opportunity to interact with one of the Democratic candidates, ask them about it and don’t let go. Don’t accept platitudes. Ask, over and over – Should any biological male who says he is female be granted access to women’s spaces such as locker rooms? Well, we need to be an inclusive society, welcoming of all people. Great. Should any biological male who says he is female be granted access to women’s spaces such as locker rooms and restrooms? Trans folks experience a lot of discrimination, you know. That’s too bad. Should any biological male who says he is female be granted access to women’s spaces such as locker rooms, restrooms and prisons? I’m for equality for all people. Good for you. Should any biological male who says he is female be granted access to women’s spaces such as locker rooms, restrooms, prisons and shelters for abused women?

As noted above, I’ve written about this before – links at the bottom of this post. I want to end, though, with a lengthy excerpt from a column by Janice Turner in a September issue of the UK Times, reproduces here at the Fair Play for Women FB page:

The Oscar-winning singer Sam Smith, a gay man, has “come out” as non-binary because, rehearsing a dance routine, he discovered a “vivacious woman inside my body”. He said of his fat-deposits: “There’s a bit of a woman in me who won’t let me look like that. I put on weight in places women put on weight. That spring-boarded everything.” So Smith knew his “gender identity” wasn’t male because he frets about his figure like us ladies. Just as Eddie Izzard believes that he has “girl genetics” because he paints his nails.

This is progress, I’m told. Feminists must embrace the idea that womanhood is predicated upon hoary old stereotypes while flamboyant or “vivacious” gay men must accept they are not really male. That I refuse to call Sam Smith “they” is not from disrespect (I never misgender trans people) but because the concept “non-binary” is sexist, homophobic and, above all, damaging to the mental health of fragile young people. And we should have the courage to say so.

Yet because policymakers and broadcasters prefer to surf rainbow flag approval than suffer a Twitter storm, in just a few years, with zero debate, public institutions have converted to a new state religion: the magical, wholly unscientific belief that biological sex does not exist while “gender identity” is real.

Let’s start with the Office for National Statistics, whose definition of “sex” includes “something that is assigned at birth”: ie a child being male or female is not an observable fact even in utero but randomly allocated and therefore provisional. The ONS also notes “gender is increasingly understood as not binary but on a spectrum . . . along a continuum between man and woman”.

“Increasingly understood” suggests some scientific breakthrough when it is merely a fashionable theory. Because postmodern academics such as Judith Butler believe sex can be erased, the government may change the census question from birth sex to “lived sex”, thus undermining the very integrity of government data.

Gender religion has now swept into schools as shown in a leaked Equality and Human Rights Commission report, which proposes that male pupils who identify as female should be taught sex education with girls. Not only would they remain ignorant of their own developing bodies, but such classes are supposed to spare shy girls from talking about periods among boys.

The EHRC states that natal male trans pupils must use girls’ changing rooms: any girl upset about this should use, say, the disabled lavatory. Sports should be divided by gender identity, even if girls will no longer win their own races. All these plans breach the 2010 Equality Act where sex is a protected characteristic — but they preach the new gender liturgy.

Even more zealous is the BBC Teach website which provides classroom materials. In a film for key stage 2 pupils — seven to 11-year-olds — a small child asks a teacher: “How many gender identities are there?” The teacher replies that it’s a really exciting question: “We know we have male and female, but there are over 100 if not more gender identities now.” (Note the “now”, implying cutting-edge new research.) The unease and puzzlement on these kids’ faces — what are all these genders? which one am I? — made me furious.

The government’s own No Outsiders programme simply teaches primary kids that some families have gay parents, and boys can like mermaids just like girls. Yet the BBC believes nine-year-olds should go googling the supposed 100 genders. Which include “Perigender: identifying with a gender but not as a gender” or “Vapogender: a gender that feels like smoke”. In other words, they are made up, mystical nonsense: gender Pokemons.

At puberty, developing a new sexed body can distress many children. Girls, especially, hate their breasts, are appalled by periods, loathe the sudden attention from men. Ruth Hunt, the former head of Stonewall, told me she thought teenage girls often declare themselves “non-binary” as a temporary holding bay, while they come to terms with their bodies and a world which expects them to look like Love Island babes. A fair point.

Watching videos by “non-binary” young people, I was struck by their reasoning. “I can avoid beauty standards of either sex,” one crop-haired girl said. “I always hated rough sports but my dad made me play,” a fey boy said. They saw the problem: a constricting world, but their solution was to identify out of it. Instead of challenging rigid ideas about masculinity, say you’re not a man.

The non-binary fad would be as harmless as goths or punks, if social media and peer pressure weren’t pushing so many towards medical transition: if you don’t fit with society’s gender rules, change your pronouns or ultimately, via hormones, your body. Besides, is it wise to send vulnerable young people out to battle against our very language, telling them that anyone who fails to call them “they” is hateful, has even committed a crime? How can this not amplify, rather than lessen, your anxiety and alienation?

Better to understand that your sex is immutable, that you don’t need some off-the-shelf gender identity because instead you have a complex, unique personality. “I’m not male or female,” says Sam Smith. “I think I flow somewhere in between.” Darling, don’t we all.

My posts:

An introductory post.

The Feminine Genius of the Cowgirl in Red

But Look How Much I Gained

Peaked?

Peaked yet? – if you want to read a shorter summary and skip all my meanderings, go here.

It’s called dysphoria. It’s about not feeling quite right. It’s about not feeling at home in your body or even in the world.

I am careful in speaking about mental illness, because it really is a challenge to understand and discuss. Who among us is “normal” or “whole?” Who relates to themselves and to the world with complete clarity? None of us. Not a one.

So I am not sure how to talk about this – what is not normal, what is clearly mental illness – without being required to define what normal is. You feel as if you are not a woman? Well, let me tell you what you should feel like.

Who can do that? I don’t think it’s possible. That was one of my points in those previous posts.

But clearly, body and gender dysphoria are forms of mental illness. They are rooted in various factors, they can present in different way for varying lengths of time, and healing, if it comes, is as varied as the individuals involved.

Now, honestly – once you accept that – this is a form of mental illness – much of the present moment clicks into place, especially if mental illness has ever played a part in your life:  the insistence of putting oneself and one’s felt needs in the center of every, single conversation and issue, the unblinkered focus on the self and trying to find a way to feel okay and then being affirmed, from every corner, in that okaynes. No matter how difficult it is to define “healthy” and “ill” we do know that healthy people, in general – don’t act this way. 

So yeah, that’s what’s going to happen. If you’ve ever been part of a group – a class, a workplace, a family, a neighborhood – where there’s someone who’s struggling with mental illness, quite often, those struggles tend to dominate everyone’s lives and every gathering, don’t they?

Understand that, and the pieces of that puzzle – how has the issue of such a tiny, tiny minority come to dominate the culture, and so quickly and why do they act like this? – click right into place.

They’re not well.

***

Finally, to close up this tedious Wall of Text with some philosophizing.

For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.  And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

Add to my list above: an affluent, sterile, leisure-oriented, performative culture – a material one stripped of the transcendent, with no road but an earthly one and no destination but a grave.

And being taught from the beginning of your life on this earth that fulfillment and happiness are not only possible, but expected. That a great deal of this happiness and fulfillment lies in just who you are and the wonderfulness that you are and being accepting of the marvelous being that you are.

But what if you’re not feeling it? What if you’ve had horrendous experiences in life that have made, it seems, a sense of self – much less a contented, whole self – challenging? What if what’s inside doesn’t match what your family, your community or even the big world tells you is correct and normal?

Raised in a material, appearance, emotion and achievement-oriented culture – despair for the dis-oriented might seem to lie just on the other side of every door, around every corner.

But consider another way – formed to value this life and who you are, but also understanding that, because of weighty mystery, you – along with everyone else on earth – is broken, sees through a glass darkly – including yourself – and that as hard as it is, it is also okay, because this is not your home. 

Oh, the suffering remains, and strangeness. But one just might be spared the perceived need to fix oneself right here and right now and make what’s outside “match” what’s inside.

And the older you get, the more true you see this is.

I turned – unbelievably – 59 this week. A few weeks ago, on our way back from Spain, I spent time with my friend Ann Englehart, who also turned 59 this summer. Over great Greek food in Astoria, I looked at her and asked the question that had been weighing on me:

“Do you feel fifty-freaking-nine years old?”

“NO!” she exclaimed, clearly relieved to hear someone else say it.

What does it even mean? we wondered, articulating the same thoughts aloud. What does it mean to be “almost sixty” – but to feel no older than, say forty, and to wonder – was I ever even 45 or 52? I just seem to have leapt from still almost youngish adulthood to AARP discounts without blinking. My appearance is changing, and I look at women two decades older than I and I know – God willing I make it that far – that there will be a day when I, too, will be unrecognizable to my younger self.

It’s very, very weird. It’s challenging. I completely understand why people – especially those in the public eye – get work done to stave off the sagging and the wrinkles. It’s so strange when what you look like on the outside doesn’t match what you feel on the inside. It’s disorienting. You might even say it’s dysphoric, if that’s a word. Centered in those feelings, living as though this were the only reality and all that matters, the temptation to use all the technology at one’s disposal to fix it – to make it all match up – might be very strong.

But understanding that disassociation and sense of dislocation in another way, as an invitation. An invitation, a hint to listen to the heart that seeks and yearns for wholeness and unity, to understand that while it’s not perfectly possible on this earth, the yearning for it is a hint that somewhere, it does exists, and it waits – and the hard, puzzling journey we’re on does not, in fact end where the world tells us.

For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come.

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The Feminine Genius of the Cowgirl in Red

Hey there – thanks for the good comments. Let’s all gather round in our earth-tone plaids and do Spirograph and eat Burger Chef, shall we?

In a gender-neutral kind of way?

****

You can probably tell where I’m going, but it’s going to take me a couple more days, simply because there are a few stages I have to work through to get to the point at which I can effectively articulate what is, quite frankly, something close to rage.

****

If we’re going to think about sex and gender, I suppose we should talk about them. About men and women.

Remember one of the motivations here: Genesis 1-2, forming the first readings this week at Mass. 

I hope this post won’t be as windy as the last one.

So, here we go:

I’ve been married twice, have four sons and a daughter and have taught hundreds of adolescents, male and female, have a mother and a father, have many friends and acquaintances of both sexes, and here’s what I think the differences between men and women are:

Women are always cold.

That’s really it. I can’t pin it down any more than that.

Because in every classroom, every office situation and in my home, that’s the crucial, unmoving divide: the guys always want the air conditioning turned way, way down, and the ladies are always freezing. (Including me.)

Just last evening, I went to the Piggly-Wiggly. Called “The Pig” in these parts. I walked down one aisle, and there was a woman about ten feet ahead of me. Another woman was headed our way in the opposite direction. As she passed the first woman, they exchanged words, and the subject was clear. One of them responded to the other saying something like “So cold.” And, joined with them and to the cycles of the moon, probably, I immediately glommed onto the meaning and added my two cents, “Always. Coldest store in town.” And we all smirked in agreement.

And beyond that – I got nothing.

It’s a joke, yes, but it’s not. Because this is what I know: Men and women are certainly different. Clearly, obviously. But to delineate those differences and try to figure out how?

Go for it. Good luck.

And really, I’m okay with that. I’ve read extensively, thought about it, lived it, and concluded – the mystery is okay.

We can – and do- say various things about these differences. We say that women are more emotionally attuned and nurturing, that men are able to distance themselves from emotions, etc. Women listen, men state things, want to fix things, and on and on and on.

Perhaps – maybe –  most of that is true for most men and women, but you know what? The other truth is that whenever you try to abstract from that or categorize actual human beings according to those traits you immediately run into exceptions and outliers.

And since books have been written about the subject, I’m certainly not going to attempt to summarize hundreds of years of thinking on it in a blog post.  So I’ll try to be brief about the particular angles on this that will pertain to my bigger point – coming in a day or two.

• Male and female persons are different.
• Why is this? Nature? Nurture? Socialization? Well, like everything about human life, the best we can say is: both.
• Sex and gender are different things. Every human being is either male or female. That’s our sex. The way we live that out – the dispositions and expressions associated with that are gender. What we refer to, in part, in our binary way as feminine and masculine traits or expressions. Gender, rooted in sex, is certainly culturally and socially reinforced and conditioned.

There is, of course, no lack of discussion and teaching on this score in Catholic tradition. But here’s the funny thing.

Catholic reflection and teaching on sex and gender affirms difference. It has a very developed understanding of the relationship of body/soul/sex (more on that tomorrow). Catholic reflection on human anthropology also affirms what Genesis implies: some sort of male-female complementarity.

But what – aside from sex – defines or describes “man” or “woman” – what is “masculinity” or “femininity?” 

Contrary to what you might assume, Catholic tradition doesn’t dogmatically decree on the matter. Certainly Catholic thinkers and theologians with great authority have explored the matter and Catholic institutions and traditions have expressed various perspectives, usually managing to both reflect and challenge the social structures in which the Church is existing in that particular culture.

But for the most part, when it comes to the core of Catholic teaching, the mystery is allowed to be a mystery.

Looking at the Catholic landscape of the past few decades, you might not know that. Pope John Paul II wrote quite a bit about sexuality and the family, and many have found his teaching helpful – and it’s become the center of formation efforts and movements. John Paul II did reflect on male and female identity, elevating the idea of complentarianism and specifically the “feminine genius.”

His apostolic letter on women would be a place to explore this and, in a shorter form, his 1995 “Letter to Women.” 

His thinking has been quite influential. What does John Paul II suggest the “feminine genius” is about? Basically, a stance of receptivity, acceptance, sensitivity and generosity. You can read all about it in the links above. Maybe you’re really into it and you can teach the rest of us about it.

For my part…I’m just not a fan. Again, if it helps you, great. I’m just way too attuned to the outliers of any abstraction or generalization to climb completely on board. I also experience extended, anxious, deeply-felt attempts to assure me of my full humanity as, in the end, condescending.

Are we again, back to the personal context? Perhaps. Perhaps being raised in a family by an  emotionally distant mother and a warm, friendly approachable dad has given me a healthy hermeneutic of suspicion when it comes to generalizations about “femininity” and “masculinity.”

As, perhaps, did my own childhood and adolescence of feeling not quite attuned to girls as a group. I certainly had female friends – some of my best friends were girls!  – but you know what? When it came to high school, I was always the girl who drifted towards sitting with the smart, issue-minded boys, because none of the girls in my (admittedly small) class had any interest in issues outside of school or their social circle or personal concerns.

When I was a freshman in college, I, as many good Catholic girls did and do, consider religious life. I was guided towards an order that, I was assured, was “the female Jesuits.”  I visited a convent in Washington – this would have been 1979. There were a few aspects of the short visit that revealed to me that perhaps this was not my vocation, but the most vivid emotion I experienced, sitting there at lunch with these very nice women was a reality, descending like a bolt: If I join, that means the rest of my life  and my identity will be centered on a group of…women. 

The idea of that – the prospect of it, was, not to put it too strongly, almost repellent to me.

(Which is pretty much the opposite reaction my daughter had in college when she joined a sorority. It struck me as a bizarre, out-of-character choice, but I finally understood it when – this young woman, the only sister in a family with four brothers – posted on Facebook after she was accepted: At last! I have sisters! )

But did any of this ever make me question my femaleness? Nope.

The Catholic world has met contemporary gender questions and turmoil with its own set of movements and gathering spaces, where feminine and masculine virtues are celebrated and reinforced. Fantastic. One of my own sons has benefited greatly from one of these groups, and I’m deeply grateful.

But to recognize the risks with all that. There’s no Catholic doctrine or dogmatic teaching anywhere that insists on a particular set of “feminine” or “masculine” virtues or even characteristics. Yes, dive into JPII’s Theology of the Body and extrapolate from that and find benefit in it, but – deep breath – the insights of the TOB on this score are not dogmatic. They are rooted in dogmatic truth – the creation of man and woman as male and female by God’s will and the role of the family in the created order – but the notion that “femininity = innate receptivity,” for example,  while helpful, is not anything that anyone is required center their thinking on  – about women in general or themselves in particular.

So, if you are a woman who looks at the current feminine-genius-you’re-beautiful-every-woman-is-a-mother-in-some-way-love-Jesus-love-makeup-too landscape and thinks….not me. 

You’re fine.

We’re fine. 

And we’re still women.

Dig back into Dorothy Day, Teresa of Avila, Hildegard, Flannery, and all the other quirky Catholic women and feel right at home again.

We have to be so, so careful, in our determination to fight what’s wrong in the culture and celebrate the truth of the beauty of the human person, male and female, to not communicate a whole other set of expectations and assumptions that might, indeed, have some foundation in authentic Catholic thinking, but aren’t actually normative for every single person.

“The Real Catholic Woman” can be a mother of ten or none. She can be really interested in fashion or absolutely, totally indifferent to it. She can be hoping for a spouse or she can be fully content without one. “The Real Catholic Woman” can find “beauty” a helpful personal and spiritual concept – or not. “The Real Catholic Woman” can be ambitious and entrepreneurial or she can live more quietly, oriented to serving those around her in simple, ordinary ways.   “The Real Catholic Woman” can find deep connection and nourishment from being with other women – or she can find that from hanging out with the guys, or professional colleagues or in her garden or heck, with her cats. I guess. “The Real Catholic Woman” can be deeply into Church-y things – or she can hit Mass once a week, say her prayers and do her best in life.

***

Now you know what?

I’m going to swing right around again. I’m going to come full circle to the beginning of this post, and hopefully not into total incoherence.

Sex is binary.

Sex differences are real.

Gender is real and the result of both nature and nurture. Masculinity and femininity are complementary. I do think that there are qualities more associated with men than women, and vice versa. Defining them too specifically, however, is a minefield, fraught with exceptions and the risk of unjust judgment.

And finally –  the only – the only – logical and authentic way to understand gender is rooted in the roles of male and female in reproduction. It remains a deep mystery (see above), but any other foundation is arbitrary and ultimately oppressive and destructive.

So what’s our conclusion?

When you separate sexuality from procreation, you do, indeed, lose your definitions. 

When you sterilize a culture, gender does, indeed become a game of appearances and affectations.

Incoherence? Mystery? It all, as usual, depends on where you start.

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Gender Week at Charlotte

Welp, so much for the “week” thing. Also, apologies for those who either read the unfinished post earlier after I accidentally scheduled it, or came here looking for it. Here it is. 

I’m going to talk about gender this week. Probably not every day. Because every time I do that I end up either getting caught up in something else and breaking my promise or…keeping my promise and letting it take over my life.

So why this week?

Well, these are notions and thoughts that have been peculating for a while. As is the case with almost everything these days, there’s just so much – it’s paralyzing for those who want to write or talk about such things. You think you get a grasp on one aspect of it, you settle on an angle – and thirty minutes later, some other news story or perspective pops up and blows it all to hell. Again.

But as I looked at the Mass readings for this week, I was struck by the fact that this week – this fifth week of Ordinary Time – we’re starting, with our first readings, with Genesis 1.

(And Mark 7 in the Gospels.)

So, it seemed to fit.

But don’t come here looking for restatements of takes you’ve read elsewhere. I have my idiosyncratic way into these issues. You won’t find hardcore social analysis here.

For sure you’re not going to read rhapsodic celebrations of complementary natures or the feminine genius. If that’s your thing, go for it. It’s just not my thing – it’s not the way I think or experience being a person.

I’m puzzling through some things and trying to say some things out loud that I’m not hearing many other people say.

So we’ll begin, as one does, with the personal angle.

Where I’m coming from. 

I want to talk about gender (and sexuality) because it’s an issue that’s fracturing our culture and fracturing social and political movements – which is rather entertaining to watch. My reasons have nothing to do with any sort of personal, passionate interest in gender issues or investment or attachment to a cause.

Briefly:

I’m 58, going to be 59 this summer. That means I was born in 1960 and grew to adulthood in the 1960’s and 70’s. I’m an only child of academically-minded parents. My mother almost got a M.S. in Library Science and my dad was a Ph.D. in political science. I grew up in college towns from Bloomington to Lubbock to DeKalb to Lawrence to Knoxville. Small families on both sides, mostly educators and business people on both sides, male and female, father’s side southern minimally-practicing Methodists, mother’s side French-Canadian Catholics, mother specifically very sour on post-Conciliar Catholicism by the early 70’s, stopped going to Mass. Highly intelligent parents, politically and socially middle-of-the-road, constant conversations about issues in the home, exposure to the life of the mind, etc. , etc…..

Why is that relevant?

I think because, as I reflect on how I think of myself as “a woman” that background might go some distance in explaining why I have a hard time doing just that –  thinking of myself in terms of  “a woman” who’s part of this group called “women” that is supposed to have particular interests and characteristics. Or at least – defining myself primarily in terms of “womanhood.”

I just…can’t.  I don’t even know what that means, really. I’ve never had any driving desire to attach myself to other “women” in women’s groups because we’re women and that’s what women do. I suppose in part it’s because I’m not a joiner, period, but I do sometimes wonder if it’s because I was raised in this household where a) I didn’t have a brother for comparison – either by my parents or myself, and so my existence wasn’t delineated against any male family member peer and b) the expectations my parents had for me and their sense of who I was had nothing to do with being female – it was all about learning and ideas and accomplishment (to some degree) and living a decent life as a person in a family and in society. No one ever talked much about being female or male or what that meant or what was right or appropriate. I was just a person.

I went to a small Catholic high school in the South in the 70’s, so consciousness-raising was really not on the menu. I mean – no one cared. When I got to college – in 1978 – at UT, I did venture to the Woman’s Center. I was a politically minded person, but I’m really not sure what I thought I was going to find or why I was going – I do know that one of the musicians in the folk group at the Catholic student center was a part of it. Perhaps she invited me? Well, for whatever reason, I went to some meeting, and heard, right away, a focus on abortion. It was the center of the conversation. So I stepped away and didn’t return.

Later on, I did get involved in the national organization Feminists for Life – at a pre-internet era when involvement in national groups was a lot more challenging than it is now. But I did, and knew all of the leadership at the time and their writings and the writings they promoted were very important to me.

Every few years, it seems, people rediscover the possibility of progressive/liberal prolife views – it’s good that it gets rediscovered, but also puzzling to me how short our attention spans are now. Every time someone raises a proverbial fist on Instagram and proclaims in wonderment, “Yo! I’m pro-life and – ” wait for it, you’ll be shocked and amazed – “a feminist!” – aren’t you amazed? I just feel old and grumpy. More so than usual.

Okay, let’s look at that word: feminist. It’s not a big deal to me. You want to call yourself a feminist? Sure. You want to avoid the term? Sure. I don’t care. You want to write for pages or talk for hours about why you do or don’t call yourself a feminist? Then I’ll probably find something else to do.

Once, probably in the early to mid-70’s, my mother, who was born in 1924, went on a rant about feminism. She said something like, “Sure, I’m a feminist. I’m an old-school Amelia Earhart, Rosalind Russel, Katharine Hepburn feminist. We all were.”

 

 

 

And if there were any late 20th century feminists who had any role in my intellectual formation it was first, Germaine Greer, and later, Camille Paglia – although Paglia is not as serious a thinker as Greer. Reading The Female Eunuch and Sex and Destiny blew my mind in my late 20’s and early 30’s. That as well as pro-life feminism, and various feminist critiques of developing reproductive technologies – critiques which were standard and pervasive – provided the framework for any most of my political and social framing of women’s issues.

So that’s the essence of my growing-up-as-a-female: Raised playing in neighborhoods with boys and girls, mostly outside, reading whatever I felt like reading, all of us wearing shorts and t-shirts and jeans and tennis shoes, my toys a jumble of Barbies, games, a dollhouse, contraptions like Spirographs and this Fun Flower Thingmaker, a firetruck, a dump truck and lots of Matchbox cars. Expectations? Mostly that I’d be a professional of some sort, probably an academic. And that I’d try to live a good life.  I wasn’t raised in a household that articulated or even assumed any particular female-identified choices or behavior.

Was that strange or unusual? I honestly don’t think so. The girls and women I grew up with – we didn’t feel any particular need to assert any roles that we felt denied.

Nor – and this is my focus right now – did we feel any pressure to dress or comport ourselves in a “feminine” kind of way.

Perhaps others have different experiences. No doubt they have. But that’s just mine.

Discrimination, exploitation and worse exists and always has. The powerful use and repress the less-powerful, and this happens in a web of racial, sexual, socio-economic and cultural identities. Ask any woman or minority group member trying, say, to work in predominantly white male environments in the past or in the present. It’s real. The harsh, contemptuous, lurid male gaze cast upon women is real, something most young women can tell you about in distressing detail.

But what this rambling post is about is not that. It’s not about workplace discrimination or social exploitation. I’ll get to that in a couple of days.

No, what this is about is simply setting the stage for my …confusion and puzzlement about how we got from there to here, particularly in regard to gender “roles” as expressed culturally and socially.

Quite often those kinds of questions are posed by older folks looking back and wondering how a seemingly more restrained past became so loose. My observation takes me in the opposite direction.

And really – honestly – I’m angry.

I reflect back on the 60’s and 70’s and I see a casual, relaxed landscape in which kids and young people are exploring and figuring things out,  and it seems, everyone is wearing earth-toned plaids.

And at some point – I don’t know when – the pink and blue shelves sprung up. Sprung up, exploded and closed us in.

You know what I mean, right? How you go into a toy store or even the toy section of a department store, and you can tell the “girl toys” from the “boy toys” simply by color? The girl section is all – all – pink and the boy section is, if not baby blue, dark blue and black?

For contrast, take a look at vintage Christmas catalogs – here’s a great collection that will definitely take you down some rabbit trails. I looked at a few from the 50’s and 60’s and the FAO Schwarz 1967 catalog.

Yes, toys are, to some extent “gendered.” But perhaps partly because they catalogs aren’t in full color cover to cover and employ fewer human models, you don’t have your oppressively pink-and-blue division. In fact most of the toys and games are just that – toys and games for kids. There’s an acknowledgment of realities – no matter their source in nature or nurture  – that more girls than boys like dolls and household-related toys while more boys than girls lean to toys that echo life outside the home. But it doesn’t strike me – nor did it growing up in it – as oppressive or restrictive. As I said – I had a lot of cars and trucks and science kits and yeah, I think I had a cowboy gun and holster

Even the kids’s clothes are – yes, obviously made for female and male tastes – are for the most part, simple and straightforward. And, yeah, plaid. Not super gendered either in the direction of Girl Power or Tough Guy!

Oh look, – here we go. No more words necessary. I was probably four years old here and look what I got for Christmas: a fire truck. A baby doll carriage. And a freaking punching ball. 

 

Chaser – 3rd birthday. Look at my big present.

And guys, this wasn’t a political statement. This was 1963, pre-second-wave feminism, which my family didn’t get into anyway, despite being academics. My parents were, at the time, good Kennedy Democrats, and this was the Durant, Oklahoma home of my conservative Southern Methodist grandparents. It was just not a big deal. 

****

As I said, this is an intro.

My typical, discursive, wandering intro to get my brain to a more focused place.

And that place is, quite simply, wondering how we – to use a common phrase – transitioned  – from:

…a landscape in which expressions of “gender” were downplayed or even discouraged as stereotypical and limiting

to..

..a landscape in which “feminine” and “masculine” stereotypical preferences and expressions have become pathologized.

Where little girls who like short hair and to play outside in the mud or tween girls who are uncomfortable with their changing bodies are being told that this is clearly a sign that they aren’t a “real girl” and then shot through with puberty blockers and given mastectomies and then boys who don’t like sports and present effeminately are being told they are obviously really girls– because, you know…

…you can always tell a girl by how much she likes girly things.  

****

Come back for more.

I’m already thinking it’s the Reformation’s fault.

But you predicted that, didn’t you?

 

 

 

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7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Guys, this is random. I have been doing a lot of staring at pieces of paper this week and attempting to get my head into a particular mode. I’m almost there.

So: linkish takes. That’s it. In the mess, I’m sure you’ll find something to interest you.

From William Newton – about a…performance artist…at…Lourdes:

When these sorts of stories come up in art news, as they occasionally do, it’s very easy to become angry. Leftists behave like this because they know that it’s a cheap and easy way to offend a significant number of people, and get press attention for themselves. However with age comes wisdom, and with wisdom comes the knowledge that Ms. de Robertis is quite powerless, having no idea what she has just unleashed in her life.

In her prior performances, Ms. de Robertis targeted the world of fine arts, such as the leadership of prestigious museums like the Louvre and the Orsay. But now, she has targeted the Virgin Mary before pilgrims to Lourdes. These pilgrims are devout Catholics, suffering from painful disabilities or chronic, often incurable or fatal illnesses, who are accompanied by family, friends, and volunteers, all of whom have gathered together to pray together for God’s Grace through the intercession of Jesus’ Blessed Mother. These are not people to be trifled with.

I can guarantee you that somewhere in Lourdes, right at this very moment, there is a group of pious Catholic grandmothers and nuns who are praying to the Virgin Mary to intercede with her Divine Son for Ms. de Robertis’ conversion and redemption. Such a conversion will be far more effective, and of far greater worth to the artist, than any public attempt to criminalize her bad behavior. If she had just left the ladies of Lourdes alone, she could have continued in her rather bestial way of life, but now she is going to be made into a special intention for the prayers of others, and particularly that of the Mother whom she rather foolishly chose to insult.

Sorry, Ms. de Robertis, but you’ve finally met your match.

 

 — 2 —

Charles Collins on the 1908 Eucharistic Congress in England:

Despite the cardinal’s assurance, anti-Catholic sentiment was still common in early 20^th century England, and the proposed Eucharistic procession was opposed by many Protestant groups.

Schofield told Crux the radical Protestant Alliance claimed that the procession breached the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), which prohibited Catholic priests ‘to exercise any of the rites or ceremonies of the Roman Catholic religion, or wear the habits of his Order, save within the usual places of worship, or in private houses.’

The archivist pointed out this “might have been true on paper” but the law wasn’t really enforced, and several churches held public processions every year in England for Corpus Christi.

However, the prospect of a procession even worried some establishment figures.

“It is impossible to deny, however, that this assemblage of princes of the Church and of lesser members of the Roman hierarchy from all parts of the world wears the appearance of a demonstration, and almost of a challenge, which excites apprehension in respectable quarters, and has given rise to regrettable effusions of bigotry in others. An unfounded idea has been disseminated that the Congress is a move in the campaign for the restoration of the temporal power of the Papacy, and for the re-establishment of direct diplomatic relations with the Vatican,” said the September 12, 1908, edition of The Spectator, a London-based weekly.

— 3 —

On Dr. Beau Braden’s attempts to open a small rural Florida hospital – and the forces arrayed against it. 

A few doctors have offices in town, but patients say their hours are unpredictable. One afternoon, an older man who had been waiting outside a locked doctor’s office slid off his walker and curled up on the shaded pavement under an awning. He just needed to rest, he said.

“There’s huge need,” said Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, the area’s Republican congressman.

Dr. Braden, 40, said he realized this soon after he and his wife moved in 2014 to Ave Maria, where they are raising five children. He specializes in emergency medicine and frequently flies himself from Immokalee’s tiny airfield to pull overnight shifts at nearby hospitals.

When he started pulling together the hospital application to the state, letters of support flowed in from the fire department, county commissioners, local businesses, developers and nonprofit health providers.

The hospital would be built on the edge of Ave Maria, about seven miles south of Immokalee, on land now owned by a development company that supported the proposal. But the hospital still exists only in blueprints and paperwork.

After years of work and spending about $400,000 from a family trust on lawyers, consultants and state filing fees, Dr. Braden submitted a 2,000-page application to Florida’s health care regulators this spring, seeking a critical state approval called a certificate of need.

Update: When I read this story, I immediately spotted what seemed like what Terry Mattingly calls a religion “ghost.”  I passed it along to him, and he writes about it in the Get Religion blog today:

If you have followed GetReligion for a decade or so, you know that one of our goals is to spot “religion ghosts” in mainstream news coverage.

What’s a “ghost”? Click here for our opening post long ago, which explains the concept. The short version: We say a story is “haunted” when there is a religious fact or subject missing, creating a religion-shaped hole that makes it hard for readers to understand what is going on….

….

So we have a young doctor – with five kids – who is making a high-stakes, risky effort to start a small hospital that will provide care for an area with lots of low-income people and a controversial Catholic community.

What do we know about this man’s background? Might there be a hint there about his motives? Well, a quick glance at his online biography shows that he is a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College in California – a small, very doctrinally conservative Catholic liberal arts college in California.

So we have a rather young, clearly idealistic Catholic doctor who moves, with his semi-large family, to the Ave Maria area to start a clinic to serve the poor and others near a controversial Catholic town.

Might religion have something to do with this story?

 

 

— 4 —

Hilary Yancey on her son’s prenatal diagnoses, suffering, and God:

I prayed in that room while lying in an anxious horizontal position. God spoke one thing back, something I proclaimed for a week or two, until the diagnosis, until the end and the beginning: “She can never tell you something about this person I do not already know.”

When we think about God’s foreknowledge, we are tempted to run so far out, foreknowledge trailing behind us like a kite. We cannot do, say, think, be anything but what God has already seen, already ordained, already determined. We think in terms of past and present and future, and God contains them all in his knowledge, a bucket of truths about us. We think, “God already knows,” and we often translate this as “God already made it to be the case that …” or “God already did.” At least we think, It can’t be anything except this.

But I think God’s foreknowledge might be better understood as an action. God foreknows because he is in all the places where we will go, because he stands next to us and near us before and after we get there. He hovers over and in and through time, and here the descriptions feel thin, unable to pin down the truth. God stands where we will stand. God moves where we will move. God sees what we do not yet but will someday see.

— 5 –

And now…the Tyburn Monks:

The priests met Mother Marilla and her assistants in Rome that year, certain of their vocation as Tyburn Monks. But the nuns were hesitant, having no idea about how to establish a male order. In Colombia, the priests would also soon experience opposition from their bishop, who was reluctant to lose two of his finest men.

Negotiations continued tentatively for nearly four years until the archivist at Tyburn Convent discovered among the possessions of a recently deceased Sister a document from 1903 which changed everything. It was entitled “The Monk of the Sacred Heart” and was written by Marie Adèle Garnier. Over 33 pages it set out in detail her vision for the Tyburn Monks, even down to the colours of their habits and scapulars.

— 6 —

A French illustrator obsessed with Byzantium:

Helbert, who only made his first visit to Istanbul at the age of 35, has put in that amount of imaginative work and much more besides. “Since then,” writes Risson, Helbert “has taken great care to resurrect the city of the emperors, with great attention to details and to the sources available. What he can’t find, he invents, but always with a great care for the historical accuracy.” Indeed, many of Helbert’s illustrations don’t, at first glance, look like illustrations at all, but more like what you’d come up with if you traveled back to the Constantinople of fifteen or so centuries ago with a camera. “The project has no lucrative goal,” Risson notes. “It’s a passion. A byzantine passion!”

— 7 —

 

Don’t forget – The Loyola Kids Book of Signs and Symbols.

 

NOTE: If you really want a copy soon – I have them for sale at my online bookstore (price includes shipping)  Email me at amywelborn60 AT gmail if you have a question or want to work out a deal of some sort. I have many copies of this, the Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories, the Prove It Bible and the Catholic Woman’s Book of Days on hand at the moment.

Also – my son has been releasing collections of short stories over the summer. He’s currently prepping his first (published) novel, The Battle of Lake Erie: One Young American’s Adventure in the War of 1812.  Check it out!

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!

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7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

This is a time of transition, as school begins. Lots of new experiences on the horizon, and no matter how much we plan, each day full of surprises.

A very moving post at the Bearing Blog on this theme:

Like all diarists and memoirists, I am an unreliable narrator.  I have been telling my story for years; maybe he was six or so when I started?  Kindergarten, or first grade?  In any case, I still felt fresh out of school myself.  (He was three and a half when I walked across the stage with his younger brother in a a baby wrap.) 

But the thing is, wherever I have written about my son, that first oldest boy, I have not really been writing the story that belongs to me.  My perspective is limited, by necessity and design,

If I myself had been a character written by a master, then the perceptive reader would have been able to see the true story between the lines, the story that managed to elude me even as I spooled it out in my own words.  But I am not so well-crafted as that.  

He has a story, and I am not the truthful narrator, and when I have tried to be one, I have fallen short.  I cannot even see where to bring the seams together, let alone stitch it up neatly for show.  And you cannot look through the seams.

 

 — 2 —

I always point you to this blog post this time of year: Why I don’t hate football. 

 

— 3 —

Dan Hitchens on “Two Resisters of Nazism” 

Von Hildebrand told his friends that, even inwardly, one must beware of adopting a neutral stance: Opposition must be “unconditional.” But that carries a risk, he adds, of sinking into bitterness and dejection. 

Here again Haffner’s account complements von Hildebrand’s. Haffner points out that, even among those who hated the Nazis, there were false “remedies.” Some, he says, especially the older generation, retreated into “superiority”: They mocked the childishness and stupidity of the regime. When the Nazis consolidated their power, and produced statistics about their success, many of these people collapsed.

Another temptation is “embitterment”—becoming addicted to gloom and rage. For the embittered, “The dreadful things that are happening have become essential to their spiritual wellbeing. Their only remaining pleasure is to luxuriate on the description of gruesome deeds, and it is impossible to have a conversation with them on any other topic.” This can drive people to madness—or to a despairing surrender. 

A third temptation, which Haffner says was his own, is the opposite: to flee from embitterment into illusion. According to Haffner, German literature of the mid-to-late 1930s was dominated by nature writing, childhood memoirs, and family novels. “A whole literature of cow bells and daisies, full of children’s summer-holiday happiness, first love and fairy tales” accompanied the rallies, the violence, and the blare of propaganda. For most of these escapist writers, Haffner relates, it ended in mental breakdown. 

Such are the psychological trials of resistance. Such trials may be the reason neither author finished his memoir: Both manuscripts were left unfinished and only published thanks to their families. That should be a warning to us not to make any thoughtless Nazi comparisons. And von Hildebrand and Haffner were the lucky ones. 

— 4 —

Here’s a great feature from one of our local television stations on Holy Family, our Cristo Rey high school: 

At Holy Family Cristo Rey Catholic High School in Ensley, the business model is based on students working one day a week at a company in the Birmingham area, which helps pay their tuition. This was first put into action in 1996 in Chicago and has grown to 35 schools across the country.

“Cristo Rey itself is actually a 20-year-old model of Catholic education for serving low-income, urban communities,” Chalmers said. “The model is complex; there really isn’t anything like it. It’s a combination of academic college-prep education and experience in a corporate work study program, where each one of our students shares in an entry-level part-time job at a local institution or corporation.”

 

 

— 5 –

I’m in Living Faith on Saturday, September 1. Go here for that. 

— 6 —

This coming Monday is the feast of St. Gregory the Great.

Here’s a page dedicated to Gregory the Great’s influence:

The influence of Gregory the Great is so widespread that the great scholar of exegesis, Henri de Lubac, dubbed the period from Gregory’s death up to the thirteenth century “The Gregorian Middle Ages.” Preachers were everywhere citing, referencing, and, generally, re-using the work of one they affectionately called “our Gregory” or “the homilist of the Church.”

And he’s in The Loyola Kids’ Book of Saints. 

 

— 7 —

 

Don’t forget – The Loyola Kids Book of Signs and Symbols.

 

NOTE: If you really want a copy soon – I have them for sale at my online bookstore (price includes shipping)  Email me at amywelborn60 AT gmail if you have a question or want to work out a deal of some sort. I have many copies of this, the Loyola Kids Book of Bible Stories, the Prove It Bible and the Catholic Woman’s Book of Days on hand at the moment.

Also – my son has been releasing collections of short stories over the summer. He’s currently prepping his first (published) novel, The Battle of Lake Erie: One Young American’s Adventure in the War of 1812.  Check it out!

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!

Read Full Post »

Found it

(Welcome Catholic Herald/Big Pulpit readers. Please see a post on the current situation from earlier in the week here. )

 

It wasn’t Mauriac or Bernanos. It was Peguy, of course. 

… it will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of looking insufficiently progressive.

Keep this in your mind as you read commentary – of any kind, really.

Of course, one can replace “progressive” with any ideology that fits the particular moment, but I do think that “insufficiently progressive” has a broad truth to it. In the contemporary world, too, with our crazy pace of news and commentary, I think we can simply add “motivated by the fear of not virtue-signaling with my Hot Take.”

That’s a problem, too.

And please remember that Peguy was no conservative, even in the context of late 19th century France. He was a fascinating character. 

Amid various struggles for workers rights and relief efforts, Péguy became a socialist of sorts because he believed that true socialism sought real brotherhood and respect among men. He was young, and the world had not yet seen any socialist regimes. But he intuited the true spirit behind socialist movements when he came into contact with actual socialist practice. Péguy was by nature incapable of the kinds of lies and partisanship that make up most party politics. His verdict about such things is a phrase known to many people who have otherwise never heard of Péguy: Everything begins in mysticism (le mystique) and ends in politics. This formula summed up more than twenty years of political experience.

Péguy the socialist also became a supporter of Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer wrongly accused of spying for Germany. He started a journal, the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, to defend these and other just causes because he discovered at an international convention that the socialists practiced the same kind of partisan lying and injustice that he had associated with bourgeois conservatives. Journals like his were forbidden to criticize positions taken by the movement. The socialist mystique was betrayed by socialist politics.

For Péguy, the root of any mystique was remaining fidèle (faithful) to truth and justice despite party commitments. He would refuse to impose an orthodoxy even on writers for the Cahiers: A review only continues to have life if each issue annoys at least one-fifth of its readers. Justice lies in seeing that it is not always the same fifth. Without support from either right or left in a sharply ideological France, his fidelity led to a passion in a more Christ-like sense, persecution and gradual economic strangulation by established powers.

Another truth about human behavior that might help some of this click for you is this:

More people than you suspect are motivated to make more of their choices than you could imagine not so much by what they are for, but by what and whom they are against. 

Basically:

I am not sure what I believe, but Those People believe the Wrong Thing, so I must be against everything they say and do. 

In this post-Vatican II world of Church partisanship, this drives a great deal. It’s just another way of expressing the reflexive reliance on ad hominem that we see in reactions to events.

It’s pretty basic:

Asking: What did members of the hierarchy, including Pope Francis, know about the misdeeds of clerics and how were these misdeeds dealt with?

Is not attempting to cause a “rift” in the Church as this astonishing statement from Ave Maria University President Jim Towey recklessly claims. [Update – original statement has been removed. See below for another statement.] Can we put him and Archbishop Cupich in Remedial Logic 101?

Update: Another, follow-up statement from Jim Towey. 

 

 

 

 

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