Everyday reality will scratch any sane person’s itch for the lurid, the twisted, the ludicrous. Sometimes the spectacle is funny, sometimes baffling, but often it’s genuinely sinister.
This by John Zmirak on stream.org.
Perhaps the most outrageous recent exchange in our public life took place in Senate hearings, when the pro-family patriot Sen. Josh Hawley was questioning U.C. Berkeley Professor Khiara Bridges. As The Guardian reported:
During the judiciary committee hearing, Hawley, who has previously co-sponsored a bill which would prevent transgender children from competing in sports, questioned Khiara Bridges, a professor at U.C. Berkeley School of Law who was invited to testify on reproductive rights.
Hawley said:
You’ve referred to ‘people with a capacity for pregnancy,’ Would that be women?
Bridges replied:
Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy, as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy.
Hawley said:
So, this isn’t really a women’s rights issue. It’s … it’s what?
Bridges said:
We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups, those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley.
She added:
I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them.
This, of course, is madness.
We know with all the certainty of biological science and thousands of years of human civilization, plus the testimony of Scripture, that the divide between the sexes is real, crucially important, and tied to reproduction.
But that’s not enough.
We face a new ideology that bears all the force of an evangelizing religion, backed by activist billionaires, which has captured all the high ground in our culture.
So, we must think through clearly, “even ruthlessly, the full implications of the dogmas taught by the Transgenderist cult”
[W]hich public school teachers are preaching to our children—and [democrat-communists] are enshrining into law.
Note: This is another element of the Left’s intentional tearing of the fabric of American (Western) culture.
[We can also expect] Establishment Republicans will be obediently repeating the same superstition, just a few years later. They always do.
Be aware Patriots. For we must follow the truth relentlessly, without flinching for fear of triggering thin-skinned activists.
And we absolutely must parry the heavy rhetorical cudgel which Bridges wielded at Hawley. Namely, that some opinions may not be expressed, and must be simply censored, because airing them “opens up … people to violence.”
Let the truth be told: We must not live by lies and cannot let the government use its bayonets and bullets to cram lies down our throats.
That’s how countries end up with gulags, as Solzhenitsyn warned us.
The author lays out the background of his central argument in the following clear, inexorable points:
- Transgenderism is incoherent and its claims are literally meaningless. Its political demands are arbitrary and shifting precisely because it is grounded in mental confusion, willful obfuscation, and a pride-driven hatred of God’s creation. That is, of material reality, the world, and our human place in it.
- Transgenderism demands, with the force of a powerful Oligarchy which includes social media giants and the State, that we repeat lies and force ourselves to believe them. It further demands that we strip people (real, biological women) of God-given rights they really have — in order to confer fake, made-up rights on fake, transgender women.
- Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, period. Like anorexia and bulimia, it entails a person accepting and embracing false claims about his body, then engaging in self-destructive behavior as a result. We are naturally repulsed when we see the starved bodies of anorexics, and likewise when we see the botched, grotesque results of transgender surgery and hormones. This is natural, and good. It does not mean we intend violence toward the victims of these disorders. Nor that we fail to love them as Christians should.
- Real love for people suffering from gender dysphoria would not entail encouraging them to mutilate their bodies and medicalize their entire lives — becoming addicted to dangerous hormones to force their mortal frames to conform (if unconvincingly) to their mental delusions. If your daughter were anorexic, the loving thing would not be to agree with her that she looks fat, even though her ribs are showing like a concentration camp victim’s.
- Real love for children would not entail encouraging them to develop gender dysphoria, by making it fashionable, inserting inappropriate material into school lessons, or otherwise “grooming” and sexualizing them. But this is what Transgenderism demands.
Some great books are available to help unpack all these points. Such as Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally, and Abigail Shreir’s Irreversible Damage. And also, testimonies “from people who carried the heavy cross of gender dysphoria, unwittingly subjected themselves to medical malpractice at the hands of today’s lobotomy doctors, and now regret it.” Walt Heyer is perhaps the most eloquent among the “ex-trans” community.
Point of note herein: Transgenderism is incoherent, and its claims are literally meaningless.
The author wrote a column on this topic to mark the sad “transitioning” of the gifted actress Ellen Page. The following are key quotes then added reflections:
Is Page going to have her perfectly healthy breasts removed? Will Page use some crude simulacrum of male genitalia to render her lesbian “marriage” now suddenly heterosexual? Will Page dose herself with male steroids, and undergo all the health risks? I hope none of the three, for her sake.
But we know that none of these things are necessary for greedy, shameless biological males who wish to scoop up all the prizes in women’s sports. Or lurk in their locker rooms. Or leave a male prison where they’re locked up for raping women, and move to a prison full of women whom they can rape.
No, precisely because biology is irrelevant, you need do none of these things to be a “trans.” You just need to … declare it, and everyone else must honor that choice. But what are you choosing, exactly? If you’re not making dangerous, destructive efforts to mutilate your body, what are you doing? What are you identifying with, or as, and how?
If the capacity for real motherhood or fatherhood is not part of “gender” then what is? Lipstick, high heels, and a high-pitched voice on the one hand — and lumberjack shirts, work boots, and unashamed farts on the other? By “identifying” as some gender at odds with your genitals, are you simply indulging a stereotype? If so, must strangers honor that? Must we blow up women’s sports, strip women of privacy, and subject some to physical danger (like the fellow prisoners of a suddenly “female” rapist, or girls on a rugby field mowed down by a 6’ 3” “girl”)?
All so that a few mentally ill people can LARP? And we as a society have to nod along with them and agree to pretend to believe them? At this point I insist on saying two things: “No,” and “H***, no!” A society that can force us to say that Bruce Jenner is a woman and Ellen Page is a man can force us to say anything at all. Including that 2+2=5.
Nobody asks whether a chicken, or a gorilla, “identifies” as the opposite sex.
Only fallen human beings, with our big, complicated brains, come up with sophisticated delusions like gender dysphoria. Or paranoid conspiracy theories about “the Jews.” Or bizarre means of mental self-torture like Scientology.
When Transgenderists and their dupes demand that we respect the “gender identity” of a “pregnant man,” or a bearded “transwoman” rapist in prison, what are they telling us to do?
They’re insisting that we must cater to false cognitions, to psychological distortions.
That we must remake all of society, and change how we speak and [how] we act, to placate people trapped in illusions—who wish to conform to external stereotypes of the opposite sex. And ruin their health, mutilate their bodies, and trample on the rights of others to accomplish that.
Let us hope and pray commonsense prevails sooner than later. Let us also hope and pray this transgenderism is merely a fad, a psycho-social experiment gone to extremes which under conservative leadership will be banished to the extremity of the Left Coast or some other physical and mental far-off place.
