Tag: trans

Common Sense, annotated

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HeterodorxPodcast🍂🧑‍🦳 Tweeted (Exed?) this on X yesterday. It is sane advice which we can expect will be ignored. I supply the link since you may also wish to see any responses.

(The following is my neutral advice, not a list of my preferred policies)

To: Transgender Influencers and Leaders
From: A Trans Elder

You have really screwed the pooch. Let me offer this set of recommendations to fix some of the damage.

1. Immediately concede on the issue of males in women’s sports. Instead, push for male sports from k-12 all the way to college to be more inclusive of gender non-conforming men. Start with one sport (cycling? disc golf?) and build a partnership to show trans athletes being welcomed and accepted in the “open” divison. [sic]

Nice try, but they wouldn’t be happy even with their own separate division. That would not humiliate females.

The motivations of the Males Pretending to be Females (hereafter MPtbF) are not aligned with this idea. Those who deliberately encourage outrage wish to compete against females because they can dominate females, a biologically defined group of humans. They intensely resent females (I think you could say hate), because females are the scientific affront to their claims. That is, they hate the reality females represent. They’d have to give up on “transwomen ARE women.”

Fanatic TRA atheletes cannot fulfill their goal of humiliating women if they still compete against men. This proposal simply asks men who admit they are men to be tolerant of MPtbF in-your-face declaration of their “right to be seen.” Sitting on the bench is not the goal. From the sports establishment’s POV, it would drive fans away from significant sports like football and basketball. I already wondered in Dec/21 why womens college basketball is not under assault by MPtbF: hOOPS! and Dominatricks.

Finally on this one, the K-12 sports spectrum doesn’t actually include any men or women. So without (perhaps impossibly) strict enforcement of point 2 and 5 will only become another flashpoint. We have too many flamboyant TikTok teachers bragging about how they lie and deceive.

2. Align your messaging on “parents rights” on child transition. This means vocally opposing schools and protective services from transitioning children without parent consent. In fact, go further and demand that parents should always be informed about the mental health risks for their children.

Bravo!! That would also represent them as potentially good parents.

And 3. Immediately adopt the message that violent criminals, particularly ones who have committed sex crimes, can never be housed among vulnerable women. Stop accepting violent felons into the activist milieu. Stop demanding access to surgery, hair removal services, access to “gender affirming” accessories like makeup and underwear for any transgender inmate.

Add the military. This is a National Defense issue.
Remove the word “violent.”

4. Begin marginalizing “queer” activists from the highest and most visible activist positions. Most Americans are accepting of transgender people as long as they are seen as being just like anyone else. When you center activists who clearly state they want to destroy “cisheteronormativity” then you make an enemy of the majority. And frankly, most of us just want to get along and go along.

Yes. Jeffery Marsh and Dylan Mulvaney are examples of why this is necessary. It’s asking for the flamboyant bullshit to be confined to people who want to consume it. ALLOW everyone else not to care.

5. Clarify that schools should NOT be pressuring children to declare or define their “gender identities.” Support the removal of all types of SOGI materials from classrooms for children under 12. Acknowledge that identity formation in adolescence is fluid and that pushing children to commit to a trans identity is ultimately harmful to the child’s development.

Bravo!

If you follow my advice, you’ll change the direction of public acceptance. You all have screwed up. I’ve just given you some workable positions. I hope this helps.

It would help, but the fact that 2 examples rate a Bravo… This even had to be said?!

Delusional Devaluation of Women and Children

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The New York Times recently published this essay:
Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created

It’s gated, but you can probably get to it here.

The headline accurately reflects a straw man definition of “maternal instinct” no reasonable person would take seriously.

“All around her swirled near-rapturous descriptions of the joys of new motherhood. They all celebrated the same thing — the woman who is able to instantly intuit and satisfy her baby’s every need, and to do it all on her own.”

First, it makes intuition into omniscience and omnipotence. Second, it argues most women are idiots. They believe that.

I’m quite sure that anyone who has spent time around a new mother – a new father perhaps – knows it’s bullshit. That’s why wise women seek mates who will stick around after the baby is born. Faithful, protective, providing fathers are prized by mothers because they support and protect mothers and children. Call it pre-maternal instinct.

Like devotion to their children, prudence in reproductive partner selection is not always displayed by all women, even though the negative consequences of failure to do this are numerous and evident from five hundred thousand years of human evolution.

Which raises another problem with the definition: It assumes (“all on her own“) that a father’s contributions of food, shelter, and defense do not satisfy any (“her baby’s every need“) need of a mother or infant. It also asserts no women help. This defies all our experience. But the NYT claim is that women who feel a special, protective bond to their child are victims of their own false consciousness. And it’s not just humans. At very least it’s mammals. Animals whose females are built to suckle their young.

A mammal’s progeny are expensive, and a much larger percentage of the survival budget for pre-literate hunter-gatherers. Nurturing and protecting a child is a huge investment that for much of our evolutionary history paid off only sporadically. Relatively slow development of mammal young means time spent and resources diverted. The opportunity cost of carrying and caring for a human child is highest of all. Every psychologically coherent human values children, AT THE LEAST, because of the investment in creating them and maintaining their lives. More so when food took the fittest of your tribe huge amounts of time and significant risk to secure, shelter was precarious, and death was lurking in the next tree, behind the next bush, or slithering along in the grass.

Five hundred thousand years of this biological imperative have shaped human psychology. NYT denials notwithstanding.

The burden does fall more heavily on those whose investment is highest: Women, and especially mothers. How can this existential necessity, recognized by all human societies, be detrimental to human well being? Recognizing this is a discovery, not an invention.

I posted this on Twitter in response to the NYT headline: “Try telling that to a Grizzly.”

Other animals were mentioned in others’ Tweets. I was surprised that I saw no responses to the effect that Grizzlies, dogs, etc. aren’t human so the NYT story is still correct. I expected a bunch of whataboutism: “Whatabout animals that abandon their young even before ‘birth’?” Well, a frog, or an ant, has a very low investment in the hundreds or thousands of eggs she lays.

I think “hatching” would be the proper term for these examples, not the bonding experience of live birth, but the TRA cadre is as likely to think about that distinction as is a turkey. What’s the gestation period for turkeys?

“Hatching,” IAC, isn’t pejorative in this context. Many birds treat their young as more important than themselves. Avian mothers will chance death to draw predators away. Female birds instinctively act to prevent species extinction, but the NYT tells us human females demonstrating any such tendency are victims of patriarchal conspiracy.

If human maternal instinct is a patriarchal myth, are Grizzly bears, dogs, and chimpanzees (especially that Bonobo ‘matriarchy’ we’re supposed to be instructed by) mammal outliers?

We are considering homo sapiens, however, and I can’t name any mammal that does not nurture its offspring. If maternal neglect _wasn’t_ a psychological aberration in mammals, there would be no mammals. Characterizing human females as duped out of a heightened sensitivity, of caring deference, to their children is a clear attempt to rewrite five hundred thousand years of evolutionary biology and the psychological consequences. That is, it rejects reality.

Consider the denial of biological fact necessary to say “transwomen are women.” Transwomen don’t have any possibility of bonding with a child they have carried. So women can’t be allowed to either.

Consider our plunging birth rates. Is denigrating female regard for children as a patriarchal plot existentially more threatening than climate change? The climate change people will tell you fewer humans is a good thing. Interests converge.

Consider the insistence on normalizing the sexual fetishes of a small minority. Salacious drag queen performances for toddlers and porn in middle school libraries suggests treating children as acceptable sexual targets; disposable toys.

It is a fantasy consistent with, and necessary to, transphilic dogma. The assertion’s base utility today includes denigrating protective mothers who show up at school board meetings with pointed questions, “Yours is not a natural human reaction, it’s a fascist ideological abomination which the DOJ must call out as incipient terrorism at the behest of Randi Weingarten: Human mothers superior devotion to their children is an invention of the patriarchy. Your children belong to us.”

Why publish this tripe? Because it supports the anti-humanist radical transphiles, abortion absolutists, “all sex is rape” feminists, pedophilia apologists, and climate apocalypse fanatics.

The idea that mothers’ special relationship with their children is a human invention, rather than molded from five hundred thousand years of existential success is patent nonsense. That males invented it is not simply ludicrous, it is actively anti-woman and anti-human.

Transactivism is misogyny… wearing ‘womanface’

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Trans Right Activists continue to ramp up their vilification of anyone who objects to the erasure of women. Males-pretending-to-be-females (MPtbF) and anti-TERF feminists encourage the silencing of women by violence. For example, attacks on Posie Parker and Riley Gaines.

There are threats to sue anyone who refuses to use TRA’s Lysenkoist pronouns. For example, from the prancing TikTok doyen (NOT doyenne) Dylan Mulvaney.

There’s even a cadre of the TRAs insisting that heterosexuals are bigots if they refuse to call themselves ‘cis.’

TRA should be BIT, Biologically Ignorant Thugs.

All is proceeding as Jordan Peterson predicted in 2016. I’ve selected a snippet that you can watch for just a minute and a half. People scoffed at it in 2016, but is now accepted wisdom in our blue cities and states, on most university campuses, is promoted by our President, and the default opinion of NBC’s talking head Chuck Todd: “Basically, it’s not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex.”

That 55 minute video has 10 million views, and you may well have seen it. It’s well worth watching if you haven’t, and worth watching again if you have. A refresher on what we were told as the BITs were initiating their assault. TWT:

I plan to snip a few more items in subsequent posts.

The new heretics

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In G.K. Chesterton’s day, it was not necessary to qualify the word “Liberal” with “Classical.”

Culture and political designations have changed. Verities, by definition, have not.

Five score and seventeen years after it was published, this resonates. It requires a careful reading:

“Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.”

― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905

It is indeed strange that by 2022 courage is required contend that 2+2 is 4. The idea has been declared racist and patriarchal. We’re told simple arithmetic is an artifact of white privilege.

One may speculate that the hue of the impossible grass has been excluded from Progressive contempt only because that color is ‘green.’ And/or because neither white nor asian heterosexual males have mentioned it lately.

As to strange courage… How can it require courage to oppose those who declare men to be women?

Why is courage needed to suggest government profligacy tends toward inflation?

From whence could courage be summoned to contest those who think human life begins only after a full 9 months gestation?

In what reality does the idea that self-defense is a natural right become a courageous position?

What’s even stranger… these ideas have public support. In ‘safe’ districts hoary politicians run on these these ideas. Their wannabe successors echo the themes. Many of them are elected in spite of it. In fact, because of it.

What we can conclude is that our practice of democracy has proved Tocqueville right, and Benjamin Franklin’s fears accurate.

The existential threat of the Perfumed Princes

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Our President has lately been fear mongering about climate change as “a clear and present danger.” A “threat to national security.”

He wouldn’t recognize such a threat even if his handlers wrote it on his mentalprompter. And stamped it on his palm with a branding iron.

He seeks to invoke emergency powers to accomplish AOC’s Green New Deal. That ‘deal’ our Federal legislators will not countenance.

Joe Biden is valorizing higher energy costs (and the consequent disproportionate suffering from food and goods shortages, employment shrinkage, and lessened government ability to respond)… as a defense of democracy.

He is playing the race/transphobe/climate-catastrophe cards all at once.

‘Climate change’ is the magic intersectional trump card – it’s claimed to disproportionately affect people of color, the 51% of our people who are actually female, the shrinking proportion of our population who are children. A group the President has abused in person, over decades, with his sniffing fetish; and now generally via his promotion of puberty blockers.

An actual threat to national security posed by the President’s governance (and I use the term loosely) is the cadre of Perfumed Princes in the Pentagon

General Mark “Thoroughly Modern” Milley is the Patchouli poster child for those military CNN gig seeking, poseurs, wokies, stalwarts the President encourages to focus on proper pronoun usage, critical theory, and free transgender transition surgery for service members. If you missed the ‘member’ pun, assume it wasn’t intended.

Salon, a lefty rag, noticed the trend as long as long ago as 1999:
How the grunts are betrayed by the U.S. Army’s “perfumed princes”

Our ability to maintain a volunteer military has suffered since.

America’s woke Army is facing a recruiting nightmare

No one wants to join the military anymore

US Army Abandons Recruitment Goals, But Not Its Woke Policies

The Great American Military Rebrand

The Next Republican President Must Fix the Military First

Priorities: U.S. Military Base Is Hosting a Drag Show

West Point is going woke, alumnus warns

That is all.

Dominatricks

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I remain mystified. How has NCAA women’s basketball avoided a tsunami of Males Pretending to be Females? That’s MPtbF, for short.

NCAA is an organization that moves tournaments and championship games out of states daring to impede the destruction of women’s sports by trans ‘women’. They are fully committed to this phantasmic policy. They have abandoned any defense against MPtbF who want to play basketball against females in NCAA sanctioned contests.

When will MPtbF start seeking some of the billion dollars in NCAA women’s basketball scholarships?

My puzzlement was not reduced by discovering that the first MPtbF to play women’s basketball in the NCAA won’t be the first, by a longshot, to play at a college. Mission College, Santa Clara, CA had a male playing for their women’s basketball team nearly a decade ago. Under the aegis of the California Community College Athletic Association.

He was 50, so his implied lack of speed and/or stamina could have accounted for his less than stellar first season.

In that 2012-2013 season he wasn’t very good. In 18 games Gabrielle Ludwig never started and averaged 5.9 points, 4.4 rebounds, and just under 11 minutes playing time. He got a lot better in his second season: In 26 games Ludwig started in 23 and averaged 18 points, 20 rebounds, and 28.5 minutes playing time. And “In the 2013-2014 season Gabrielle was voted First Team All-Conference player…”

In the 2013-2014 season not only did some female fail to make the team, another sat on the bench. To indulge Gabrielle Ludwig.

Here’s Ludwig compared to ‘her’ ‘peers’:

That physical difference above is not distorted by the perspective:

Alas, the time when you could get away with the sneer quotes around ‘woman’ is past:
50-year-old transsexual ‘woman’ makes college basketball debut

Central Valley Conference, Commissioner Logan McKechnie said, while Luwdig is tall, his state certification as a female is all that matters. “I don’t think, frankly, fairness enters into it,” he said.

Another commissioner, Dale Murray of the Coast Conference, believes Ludwig is evenly matched with his competitors and “just happens to be a bit taller than everyone else.”

Others question whether a player with Ludwig’s attributes belong in an all-female sport.

One of the people Ludwig faced off against in a recent game described his style as “real physical.”

Ya think? He’d be pretty physical just standing there if you were 5’5″ and 115 pounds.

He was 6’8″ and 220 pounds. A foot taller, and twice the weight of most of his opponents. If it was a typical 18 year old of any sex against a typical 12 year old of any sex, they’d call an administrators meeting to decry bullying and hire another diversity officer.

Fairness, indeed, isn’t a word you could employ. Nor ’embarrassment.’ Nor ‘shame.’ Narcissism? Sure.

There’s a sympathetic USA Today story that indicates Ludwig wanted to play because he loved competitive basketball. I don’t know about you but my definition of competitive includes a large dose of ‘fair’.

Playing against women, in front of spectators, was at least as important to him as a love of the game. He could have played in a pickup league.

I don’t care about Ludwig’s perception of his body, it’s his business. I do care that he, and the state of California, felt he had a right to play basketball against shorter, smaller, weaker opponents – by taking the place of another. He is not a woman physiologically, so his mental state was what was made to matter for his opponents, teammates, and CA taxpayers.

Check out Save Women’s Sports for the physiology point. No amount of testosterone deprivation or surgery could make Ludwig a woman.

hOOPS!

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I don’t want to give anybody ideas here, but I am sorely puzzled by NCAA women’s basketball.

Last Sunday I surfed TV looking for a summary/highlights of the Michigan Wolverines pasting of the Iowa Hawkeyes in the ‘B1G’ men’s football (that sex qualifier may seem redundant, but I await the demand for a women’s football program under Title IX) conference championship game.

I settled on the Big Fourteen Ten network as a likely intelligence source on the assumption they’d be less likely, immediately post-football championship, to be screening reruns of women’s field hockey or some tour of the conference’s campus restaurants.

I was disappointed to find myself watching Michigan State vs Iowa women’s basketball. It was late in the game so I hung around to see if the men’s football news would appear when it was over.

I don’t know if women’s collegiate basketball is just Title IX messing with me, but “throws like a girl” has to take an insult back seat to “shoots like a girl.” I know women who are pretty good softball players, they could play on men’s teams without embarrassment.

None of the women playing basketball for Michigan State or Iowa could spell ‘jockstrap.’ This paucity of talent seemed unlikely to be concentrated in these two presumedly elite teams, so I went straight to the most elite women’s basketball source. Was WNBA talent any better? This video (5 min), admittedly cherry-picked WNBA lowlights, suggests not so much. But it was like watching MSU/IU.

I was led down a rabbit hole of research, since I haven’t watched a pro basketball game featuring either sex in twenty years.

There are ~144 WNBA players (~450 in the NBA), and the top 10% or so of WNBA players are conceivably good enough for limited play in the NBA. This small number explains the collegiate women’s basketball ineptitude. Females, on average, just aren’t very good at basketball. I sympathize. Neither am I.

For example of a player, here’s Elena Delle Donne, a 6’5″, 187 pound power forward and perennial WNBA star. An NBA equivalent might be Kevin Durant (6′ 10″ 240 lbs).

Comparing the NBA and WNBA is not apples to oranges, these are both apples. However, it’s like a Granny Smith vs. a Golden Delicious. The NBA, for example, has a smaller ball to hoop ratio, shorter shot clock, longer 3-point range, a longer game time, longer season, and longer play-offs. I digress. Back to the actual point of this post.

We know why males pretending to be females are not playing women’s football.

But, I asked myself, why aren’t MPtbF playing women’s basketball? The impact would be huge. I can’t figure out why there is no trans assault on NCAA women’s basketball.

Third rate males could change, read ‘destroy overnight’, female basketball. Where are they? MPtbF are ruining track and field, weight lifting, rugby, Mixed Martial Arts, and swimming for female athletes. Why aren’t they eliminating females from women’s basketball competition?

Can it be that women’s basketball is protected somehow by our Universities?

Well, not because it’s a cash cow. NCAA men’s 2019 basketball revenuewas $933,000,000 vs. women’s $266,000. Women’s revenue does not rise to the level of a rounding error. Still, scholarships for each are a billion dollars. There is an approximate total of 4300 scholarships offered in Division I Basketball for Men. There are 5025 scholarships available across women’s Division I basketball. There’s money on the table for MPtbF.

Maybe because basketball is popular enough to have a higher embarrassment profile? Watching men play basketball against women on national television would create much more negative publicity than swim meets of which very few are even aware.

But why would that stop them, and how would they get away with stopping it?

Can there be some aspect of the sport so repellant to MPtbF as to prevent even one from suing over their exclusion?

Anybody have a suggestion? I got nothin’.