the bastards' last stand

I have been conducting ongoing conversations with people I've known for years on Facebook. To a person they insist that my positions are anti-trans or somehow harmful despite my insistence that I'm talking about an ideology and the connected attempts to make reality irrelevant. I'm going to excerpt the long email sent to me in order to respond to the misconceptions that frequently come up. I'm assuming without asking if I can share, because he offered to make the discourse public on Facebook. Frankly, I'm beyond frustrated and becoming angry with all of the people implying that I'm being bigoted, arrogant, and intellectually dishonest over something they've accepted without thought.  The irony is that they mean that I am being a heretic. They don't understand that their assertions are no different from religious declarations. I'm a heathen for not accepting gender (the soul) as an important thing. It doesn't matter that not one of them can define

I've been thinking more about how meaningless Critical Race Theory is in the sense that proponents can't say what it entails. Instead they note that critics are being unfair with what they include to attack it. My writing plans have taken a somewhat unplanned detour. I had an experience which grows more disturbing with distance. I posted an image on Facebook from USA Today's Twitter account using intersex people to promote the idea that there are three sexes . I said the following: I wonder how much money needs to be invested in a campaign to change biological fact. There are two sexes because there are two reproductive strategies in humans-- impregnate or be impregnated. "Intersex" isn't a third sex it's an umbrella term for over 40 congenital conditions in males and females. It's incredibly dehumanizing to tell people they are not really men or women because of a medical condition. It's not clear how denying biological fact benefits society just

If transwomen are women, at what point does a person born male who identifies as a woman become a woman? What are the steps? Is it with surgery? Is it after a specific time on hormones? Is it just when he feels like it? What would a person born male and a person born female have in common that they can both be called women? If a person born male can be a woman, what does "woman" mean? Asking these questions is often portrayed as erasing trans people (meaningless) or transphobic. How do trans people benefit by redefining "woman" to include men? How are they hurt if we refuse? If someone is "hurt" by a reality they dislike or cannot accept how does it benefit society to pretend that our reality is different? It's a discourse for controlling discourse, and by extension for utilizing power to control our shared reality.  What makes this especially perverse is that people with clear psychological delusions are having their delusions affirmed. By delusion I

Take a moment and consider the phrase "trans child". What does that mean exactly. What defines a trans child separately from a child? The current clinical practice for trans children promoted by the Endocrine Society and other major medical associations centers gender affirming therapy. This is a protocol focused " on affirming a patient's gender identity and does not try to "repair" it ." The protocol may begin with puberty blockers at 14, cross sex hormones at 16, and sexual reassignment surgery starting at 18. In essence, if a child feels like she was "born in the wrong body", the protocol is to halt puberty, to avoid secondary sexual characteristics, induce an artificial puberty with hormones, and then transform the body through cosmetic surgery. All this to affirm the gender identity claimed by the child.  The title comes from a question posed by journalist Jo Bartosch on Twitter . "Imagine if the word 'transexual' was still

But we are very, very reserved about this treatment. Hormonally speaking it's safe. But psychologically speaking, did we do the right thing? Do people of 13 never have second thoughts of what they are doing? Professor Louis Gooren                     Endocrinologist                    There are currently two extreme approaches to dealing with gender identity confusion and gender transition for adolescents and teens. One approach sees gender affirmation therapy as a right for transgender and non-gender-conforming youth. At its extreme, this is the approach taken by British Columbia as established by the BC Infants Act. It is also the approach taken for children in foster care in California with adoption of Assembly Bill 2119. The opposite approach is to ban medical gender transition outright. This is the approach taken by the Arkansas legislature after overriding the governor's veto of Arkansas House Bill 1570. South Dakota passed a bill banning teaching about gender identity an

One of the things I accepted on face value when I started regularly using Twitter was that people were called transphobic or TERF for antipathy towards trans people. It was common knowledge that JK Rowling was a trans exclusionary radical feminist. I wasn't sure what that meant but I was assured that it was bad. I also heard repeatedly that I should avoid the work of notorious transphobes like journalist Jesse Singal. I was never given a reason why Singal was transphobic, memes lose their power once explained, he just had a weird obsession with the genitalia of trans people. After realizing that few things are what they seem on their face on Twitter I did a bit of digging. I came to understand that a TERF was often a woman who believes that trans women are still males and that women need sex segregated spaces. A transphobe is usually someone who supports trans people without accepting all the claims of trans activists. Rowling wrote a long 3400 word open letter in June 2020. In it