Welcome (many) new readers. Please check out my other posts on this topic (linked below) and stick around. I blog every day about…something.
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.
I’m going to take a few minutes on this Friday afternoon and revisit some, er…gender-related issues.
Readers might recall I addressed them in my usual discursive, rambling way a few months back.
Intro post
The Feminine Genius of the Cowgirl in Red
But Look How Much I Gained
Peaked?
***
I’m revisiting today because news items related to these issues have been popping up in the news over the past week. I actually have been intending and hoping to revisit the matter for quite a while, but honestly – there’s so much out there and the pace of news is so crazy, that every time I’d think, “Okay, this is a good pausing place – I’ll write something about this – ” Something else would happen and blow out a whole other angle.
Kind of like with this current papacy. Oh, here. Things will calm down. Time to think and reflect and write.
Hold my Mate.
***
My main sources that I read for news on this issue are this SubReddit on Gender Critical Feminism and this board at Mumsnet, a British discussion board – and the links they both pass on. Both tend to the left, with the Reddit board, the radical left. Just know that before you dive in. If you dive into the Gender Critical Subreddit, maybe start with the “Peak Trans” board and scroll through a few hundred of those posts to hear how women (mostly) who were initially “live and let live” and “respect the pronouns, sure” got “peaked” – that is, pushed over the edge into seeing transgenderism as an essentially anti-woman movement and well, insane – – by things like: guys “winning” women’s sporting events; parents insisting their two-year old sons are actually girls; the insistence of non-transitioned dudes who’ve decided they’re actually ladies pushing into women’s spaces, from restrooms to shelters to prisons to simply language; the notion that if you’re a biological female not into “girly” things…well…you must be a guy!
But if you’re interested at all, diving in is important. As I tried to say over and over back in February, it’s not just “right wingers” and social conservatives who are aghast at this. Old-school feminists, radical feminists and many lesbian activists are boiling about transgender activism. And, increasingly, clinicians.
***
So what are this week’s news items? Many, but these two are most likely to have hit your feeds:
- This guy
winning cheating to get gold medals in the women’s division of a weightlifting competition in the Pacific Games.
- This just broke through various media blockades over the past day – the weird, perverse saga of the man in British Columbia, claiming a transgender identity, who has been trying to force – via discrimination charges – women to, er wax him.
This last case has been going on for a long time, but has been challenging to discuss publicly because the person at the center is lawsuit and banning-trigger happy – and TPTB at Twitter have been happy, for some reason, to accommodate him. There have been repercussions for people who have identified him in social media and the press. But this week, in a hearing, it was ruled that he could be publicly named and discussed, so here you go – read the distasteful tale of Jonathan Yaniv here and here.
This Twitter user was the only press in the hearing for most of the time, and posted her observations anonymously and avoiding specific names in order to skirt the wrath of this crew.
And to balance out the radical feminist voices of the Gender Critical Subreddit, here’s Brendan O’Neil of Spiked, taking on the case today. Language alert! But hey! What are we talking about anyway?
There is a temptation to view Yaniv as simply an eccentric transactivist. But in truth this case is entirely in keeping with the cult of gender self-identification where one can now become a woman simply by declaring it. The logic of such a flight from reason, of creating a situation where anyone can be a woman regardless of how they were born or what bits they have, is that blokes will intrude on women’s spaces. There will be born males in female changing rooms; burly trans-women, who have benefited from the testosterone carnival that is male puberty, taking part in women’s sports; born males putting themselves forward for all-women shortlists in politics; and people actually saying ‘I am a woman and therefore you must wax my testicles’. Pure Newspeak. ‘Wax this woman’s testicles’ – can we hear ourselves?
This is the logic of gender self-ID. It’s the logic that has seen male rapists being sent to women’s prisons because they now self-ID as women. It is the logic that means a trans-woman who went through male puberty can now be winning gold medals in the women’s world cycling championships. It’s the logic that leads to people using actual phrases like ‘female penis’ without ever thinking to themselves, ‘What the hell am I talking about?’ The Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy, who has been central to drawing attention to the Yaniv case and to critiquing the cult of gender self-ID and its dire impact on women’s spaces, describes it well. In an interview on my podcast a few months ago she talked about how gender self-ID necessarily erases women-only spaces and also devastates the idea of womanhood itself. After all, if anyone can be a woman, then being a woman becomes a pretty meaningless, hollow affair.
The suggestion that these Canadian female waxers are ‘transphobes’ because they refused to wax a dick confirms the cynical, sinister nature of that term ‘transphobic’. It really is just a way to demonise and punish anyone who refuses to bow down to the ideology of genderfluidity.
So basically, folks – when you hear about legislation for “gender self-identification” – this is the consequence. Don’t fall for it.
****
I grabbed this quote from somewhere – one of those boards, probably – and I can’t track it, but I think it puts the matter in possibly the most succinct way possible, and while it’s harsh, I’m thinking: she’s not wrong.
Trans is complete BS, and it is mainly men who find presenting as a woman to be erotic, and women who are reacting to a patriarchy and violence which makes them want to abandon their womanhood. This I believe is the true underlying reality of trans issues.
My own version is:
In the future – hopefully not the too distant future – people are going to look back at this transgender moment in the same way they look back at the lobotomy moment or the satanic-childcare-abuse – moment. They’re going be amazed and maybe a little embarrassed for humanity’s sake.
They’re going to see in this moment the culmination of the worst aspects of patriarchal, misogynist thinking, aided by technology and profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies: the moment in which the best women are men and women are better off by becoming men.
It’s also – although no one will probably see this, because we’ll be deep into Brave New World/1984 territory by then anyway – absolutely the consequences of a contraceptive, sterilizing,affluent culture.
When human beings are sterilized and approach sexuality as sterile beings in a sterile landscape, when procreation has no necessary connection to sexual activity and everyone has – relative to what human beings have had through most of history – loads of free time and money – what does “sex” and “gender” become?
A costume to wear during the pleasure-seeking performative exercise called Life.
****
Right before I wrote all those posts in February, I read this obscure sociological study of an early 20th century Quebec community called St. Denis. I wrote about it here, and had intended to bounce some gender stuff off what I read there, but it slipped on by, and here we are.
So as I read about this community, which, like most traditional communities, there were some sex-related roles and functions – most related to childbearing, child-care and general strength – and many duties shared across both sexes – running farms, homes and businesses – I contemplated how the question of figuring out if you were male or female would fly in that culture.
Hahahaha.
Just, maybe, look down? Bien sur?
Oh, sure, there are always edges and odd places where people who don’t feel quite right, who can’t feel as if they fit – live and breathe and struggle. Sure. Always and everywhere. But in general, the question is not fraught. Why? Because you can’t strip your body of its natural reproductive functions, and while people certainly were normal and did what they could and what they believed was licit to engage their sexuality without conceiving (or confessed when they tripped up) – you can see that in a community where people have to work dawn to dusk in order to survive, where much of that work is physical, where people are always having babies and those babies need care, including nourishment from female breasts, where physical strength and endurance is needed for all sorts of work that sustains the community –
–there’s no time or space for someone to stare at the moon and think….wow…I feel so girlish this evening. I do think I might have a Lady-Brain in this boy body I was assigned at birth.
So – part one. Affluence, privilege and procreation-free sexuality.
Part two: pathologizing normal pre-adolescent and adolescent bodily discomfort for financial gain, because parents are stupid and other people are frankly, perverts.
There’s a lot of disturbing aspects to the contemporary trans trends, but most disturbing to most normal people is the expansion of this obsession down to childhood. We have some mass Munchausen-By-Proxy-Gender-Style going on here, and a disturbing number of “medical” and mental health professionals on both sides of the Atlantic (this is a hot topic in England as well – read this) willing to be co-opted.
Simply put:
It is absolutely normal for girls and boys to be uncomfortable with and even horrified by the changes in their bodies, and to wish that it would just stop and go away.
This is especially acute, I think, in a culture like ours which has become so oversexualized, in which an individual’s worth, particularly among young people, is judged by superficial standards of hotness and desireability, in which sexual activity has become transactional and recreational, in which the body and your use of your body and how you display your body has become the primary way in which you are and are valued in the world.
It’s out there, a young person sees this coming, and it’s frightening, especially, I’d say, for young women – who may well look at the expectations for appearance and performance in our sexualized, pornified culture and say…no thanks. I’d rather be a dude. Cut ’em off so maybe the creepy guys will stop staring at them.
There is, thankfully, a little pushback happening – but not as much as there needs to be. I imagine we won’t see anything dramatic for ten years or so, when the malpractice suits start rolling in. And believe me, they’re going to be killer. For a primer, take a look at the Twitter feed of this NYU endocrinologist:
Another, related Twitter thread.
Moving back further into childhood, I spent a lot of time writing before about how frankly bizarre it is, to a person who grew up to womanhood in the 60’s and 70’s – to see the crazy thinking on gender roles that characterizes this transgender moment. I can’t tell you the number of posts I have read from less-than-stereotypically-“feminine” women who look at this present moment with horror and say things like:
I hated wearing dresses when I was a girl – still don’t like them. I’ve always had short hair. I never really liked dolls, I loved playing outside, and always liked hanging out with boys more than girls – I know for a fact that if I were a kid today, people would be asking my parents if I was trans.
The puzzling thing is – the truly illogical conundrum is – if gender roles are constructs, then how can you innately feel that you’re really the wrong gender deep inside and need to change your body to match?
***
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.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Read Full Post »
book of Bible Stories
reason or we were on our way to Canada. Solanus Casey has been important to our family, and I find him such an interesting person – and an important doorway for understanding holiness.
Charlotte was Both 