Thursday, December 28, 2023
This gender ideology is nothing less than a crime against a generation
By JULIE BINDEL
When I was a child in the 1960s and 70s, I wanted to be a boy. I could see from a very early age that boys were given very much more freedom than girls.
They didn't have to wear uncomfortable tights and dresses, they got better toys and, best of all, they didn't have to play within sight of their parents because of 'stranger danger'.
My brother, meanwhile, wanted to be a dinosaur and even used to tell people he was one. No one seemed to mind because everybody knows children have rich interior lives – which is why the fantasy worlds created by the likes of Roald Dahl and JK Rowling have attracted such massive followings.
This is all healthy and good as long as the children concerned are happy, loved and supported.
But I know from four decades of campaigning to end child abuse and hearing heartbreaking individual stories that children who are unhappy often try to run away from their pain by divorcing themselves from reality.
Such behaviour is often observed in girls who are being sexually abused. Others do it simply because they feel they don't fit in. If they have been picked on for being more interested in football than Barbie, they might convince themselves that all their problems would be solved if only they became a boy.
Similarly, many boys are not interested in the physical and stereotypically male world of rugby or climbing trees and might prefer being at home cooking or crocheting.
It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them, or even that these kids will grow up gay or lesbian, just that they think differently.
Over the last generation, our society has thankfully moved away from compelling children to be 'proper' boys and girls. But now all that has changed in a very disturbing way.
Because what is this current mania for gender reassignment, genital mutilation and harmful hormone treatment but a return to the bad old days of forcing children into gender-specific roles – only now, any sign of being 'different' is medicalised.
That's why yesterday's revelation in the Daily Mail that more than 70 children, aged just three and four years old, have been referred to the controversial NHS Gender Identity Development Service has shocked me to my core.
It's crazy to think that children of that age will have any clue about gender identity or gender dysphoria. Ask them what they identify as and they'll say the first thing that comes into their heads. Of course, some kids will say they want to be the opposite sex, life has always been like this. But it's simply wrong to think that 'tomboy' girls or boys who reject rough and tumble in favour of traditionally 'feminine' pursuits need medical intervention.
All they really need is care, understanding, support and the freedom to be themselves. Even those rare children with more serious problems need psychological help, rather than be sent on a path that almost always leads to being prescribed puberty blockers and subsequently cross sex hormones and surgery.
But shockingly these pre-school children are being set on a path that could ultimately lead to them being prepared for either castration or irreversible genital mutilation when they reach the age of 18. It's nothing less than a crime against an entire generation.
Advocates of early intervention point to the fact that the number of people seeking reassignment has increased more than 350-fold in the last few years as evidence of pent-up demand.
But it's nothing of the sort, it's a kind of social contagion fuelled by activists, right-on parents, social workers and, naturally, social media sites such as TikTok.
Do-gooding adults who refer their children for gender reassignment would hate to be described as back-to-the-1950s bigots. But what other explanation could there be for seeking to socially transition a child aged three and begin to refer to it as the opposite sex?
Even worse is the plight of troubled children whose social workers make the decision for them. The statistics show that the town with the most young people referred for gender dysphoria is not trendy Islington or Brighton, but working-class Blackpool.
The seaside resort has a lot of social problems, including very high numbers of children in care, shocking teen suicide figures and a disproportionate amount of children who have social workers supposedly looking after their best interests.
My research (and that of others) has found that social workers often buy into gender ideology, and therefore can seek to 'solve' the problems of troubled children by suggesting they might be trans.
It's hardly surprising that these impressionable, mixed-up youngsters would grab on to the latest fad they think can solve their problems – gender reassignment.
Sadly it's not surprising either that ideologically driven social workers push them towards the Tavistock Clinic, which seeks to pathologise their confusion and unhappiness and often suggests that pausing puberty with drugs is the answer when what they really need is support, love, understanding and help to work through their problems.
It's a national scandal that hundreds of our young people are being pushed towards irreversible surgery in the name of progressive ideology.
***********************************************
Senator Blocks Air Force Colonel’s Military Promotion Over ‘Divisive DEI Policies
When the U.S. Senate unanimously approved 425 military promotions earlier this month, one person was missing from the list: Col. Ben Jonsson, the Air Force officer who espoused controversial views on race and diversity.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., stepped in to hold Jonsson’s ascension to brigadier general after a 10-month blockade of all military promotions by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. When fellow Republicans threatened to join Democrats to circumvent Tuberville by changing Senate rules, the senator withdrew his objection.
As a result, military officers who were singled out for their “woke” views on race, sexuality, and COVID-19 had their promotions swiftly approved Dec. 5—except for Jonsson and about a dozen other high-ranking generals. Senators then voted Thursday to give the promoted military officers retroactive pay for the time they waited.
The Daily Signal first reported in August on Jonsson’s views on diversity, equity, and inclusion—and his endorsement of a book on critical race theory. The story prompted The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project to request and obtain a Defense Department “climate” assessment of during Jonsson’s leadership of MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
The assessment included blistering criticism of Jonsson from his subordinates at MacDill, where he served as commander from 2020 to 2022. It paints a picture of his tenure and concerns about his views on DEI and CRT.
Following publication of the November story, The Daily Signal obtained more information about Jonsson’s time at MacDill, including an official DEI policy memo and email from a field-grade officer promoting a diversity agenda to his wing. For the first time, both can be read in full below.
“I worked under Col. Jonsson when he was the wing commander at MacDill Air Force Base and witnessed many troubling things,” said a veteran Air Force officer, who asked for anonymity to speak openly without facing retribution. “When [President Joe] Biden was elected, he said elatedly in a meeting with all squadron commanders, ‘Now we can start doing diversity training again.’ He also forced the COVID vaccine and masking harder than any other commander I am aware of. At a time when no one in Florida was wearing masks off base, he routinely would keep the base in heightened state of Health Protection Condition.”
Missouri’s Schmitt, in a statement to The Daily Signal explaining his decision to block Jonsson’s promotion in the Senate, said he objects to military leaders who promote DEI.
“It is long past time to root out divisive DEI policies and their advocates from our apolitical military,” Schmitt said. “Leaders must emphasize unity of mission and purpose, not our immutable differences, if we are to maintain our military as the greatest meritocracy in the world. I cannot in good faith allow the confirmation of individuals who advance this divisive DEI ideology to proceed by unanimous consent.”
************************************************
Gender Dysphoria Is About Confusion. So Is Its Latest Claim for Disability Status
Many individuals who underwent gender-transition procedures are now warning others against using puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery.
Despite these warnings and the solid empirical evidence demonstrating the harms of “gender-affirming care,” there are those who insist upon mislabeling the psychological issue of gender dysphoria as a physiological disability that requires physiological intervention.
One of the latest twists in this unfolding story occurred in Missouri, one of 22 states whose legislators have enacted laws to protect children from irreversible medical interventions.
Even though Missouri’s law grandfathered in patients currently being treated, University of Missouri Health announced in August that it would no longer provide puberty blockers and hormones to minors for the purpose of “gender transition.”
That set the stage for a lawyer filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of two minor female patients in the midst of “gender treatment” to appear more like boys.
Filed on Nov. 16, the suit seeks to force MU Health to resume prescribing puberty blockers and testosterone for the “gender transition.” One girl has been taking testosterone for 18 months; the other has been taking puberty blockers since she was 9 years old.
Their prescriptions are running out, and neither MU Health nor any other provider in Missouri will refill them.
The suit argues that gender dysphoria is a disability causing “physical impairment.” But to be clear, the gender dysphoria diagnosis was created to describe a psychological condition, not a physical one. Those formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria are supposed to have been given this designation based on psychological distress, not a physiological condition.
In reality, the “physical impairments” associated with a simple determination of gender dysphoria are the result of the off-label use of drugs that are dispensed in service to the diagnosis, not because the body is missing a necessary chemical or because of an abnormal growth that must be removed.
Puberty-blocking medication and cross-sex hormones have never been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in the treatment of gender dysphoria.
Its use is an experiment on children, based on speculation that it provides some benefit. In fact, recent studies have shown no benefit in minor patients who took them for this purpose. Instead, the drugs have shown to have serious and injurious side effects.
The lawyer and his clients in the Missouri case seem to be unfamiliar with those effects. The risks and harms of using puberty-blocking medication include the following:
Liver damage, bone thinning, and skeletal damage. Mental health problems.
Brain swelling and vision loss in children (FDA 2022).
Infertility, osteoporosis, and cardiovascular disease.
The risks and harms associated with cross-sex hormone use include:
For females taking testosterone: heart attacks and strokes, liver dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, male pattern baldness, deepened voice, and facial and body hair.
For males taking estrogen: blood clots, heart attacks and strokes, breast cancer, weight gain, and insulin resistance.
The effect of using puberty blockers followed by long-term use of cross-sex hormones is near-certain sterility.
Given these harms, the only real case to make for a disability claim is for detransitioners. Those are the girls and boys, men and women, who were subjected to “gender-affirming care” and must now live with the resulting damage to their bodies.
********************************************************
Christianity is not dead yet
Here’s one way of looking at Christmas. In order to get our attention, eternity, in the person of Jesus, pierced the veil of time. CS Lewis said that God entered the world so quietly, so secretly, because he was, in entering the Roman Empire, the empire of temporal power and earthly cruelty, infiltrating behind enemy lines.
Theologian Teilhard de Chardin had a different image, that God came into the world as an artist enters his studio. GK Chesterton imagined human life as a play that has gone wrong, so the playwright comes on stage to get it back on track.
I take the first two images from a sublimely handsome volume, the Word on Fire Bible, produced by US Catholic bishop Robert Barron.
It’s a truism that in the West, Christianity is in social and statistical decline. In most of the rest of the world, religion is on fire. But the West, mainly North America, Western Europe and Australia and New Zealand, have trapped themselves in a strange, dark little oubliette of paradoxical credulousness, in which they’ll believe anything at all except the religious realities almost all humanity hungers for all the time.
Feminist Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, argues that Western society is repaganising. The folks who typically do worst in pagan societies are the least powerful, the poor, the dispossessed, the weak, childless widows and, compared with men, women and girls generally.
But this strange, atomised, denatured cultural moment in the West produces its own prodigies and wonders. Among these are the countless green shoots of new Christian life.
One such wonder is Bishop Barron and his Word on Fire mission. No one, really, could be designed worse for becoming a social media sensation reaching hundreds of millions of people than an orthodox Catholic bishop whose habitual attire is the black suit and Roman collar of Catholic clergy, and who is, by profession, an academic, specialising in the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, with a deep expertise in Augustine of Hippo, the fourth century North African bishop who wrote formative texts for Christianity. Though, to be honest, Barron is a pretty handy authority on Martin Luther King, Bob Dylan and Clint Eastwood too.
Remark these figures. Barron and his WOF mission have sold more than five million of their books, while they’ve had more than 150 million YouTube views, many more than 22 million WOF show video views. Barron has more than three million Facebook fans, 400,000 Instagram followers, nearly 700,000 YouTube subscribers, a quarter of a million X (Twitter) followers and more than half a million regular email recipients.
Those numbers don’t prove Barron’s message is true, or that he’s a super genius, or has stumbled on some secret formula. Lots of bad folks, spreading bad messages, have huge social media numbers. Nonetheless, Barron is the most successful and probably important Catholic communicator other than the Pope himself, and one of the half-dozen most influential Christian communicators of any kind.
The WOF media story started small, in 1999. It started with a complaint. Barron was grousing to a fellow priest that Catholics were rotten at media communication, the legendary Fulton Sheen, a bishop with a huge TV following in the 1950s and ’60s, was great but there hadn’t been much since then. The friend replied: so what are you going to do about it?
Barron was a seminary academic and working priest. He went to WGN radio station in Chicago and they told him for US $50,000 he could have a weekly sermon show of 15 minutes at 5.15am on Sundays. He raised the money to do it for three years.
It was an astonishing success. A colleague told him he should promote it through a website. Barron had no idea what a website was. Friends set one up for him and they agreed to call it Word on Fire. And it caught fire.
Barron still expected his life to be mainly that of an academic priest. Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George had different ideas and prevailed upon Barron to turn down prestigious academic posts at prestigious universities, to become instead head of his seminary and to keep on with Word on Fire.
I achieved an ambition of many years standing to meet and talk to Barron in London a few weeks ago. Barron was the surprise star at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, convened by Jordan Peterson and Australia’s John Anderson. Barron’s quite scintillating address argued that many contemporary social problems derive from old theological disputes.
The West, he argued, is obsessed with freedom but misunderstands its nature. Thomas Aquinas asked the question: if God is all powerful, can he sin? The answer is no because God’s will is perfectly attuned to his nature and his nature is goodness.
A later theologian, William of Ockham, stressed God’s unlimited power. He can do whatever he likes, even sin. Under Aquinas, freedom and goodness are united, under William, they’re divorced.
“Freedom,” Barron argued, “is about the discipline of desire to make the achievement of the good first possible, then effortless.”
He illustrates his point. If we speak English well we’re free to say anything we like. How did we get that freedom? Not by a lack of rules and purpose but by listening to good English spoken, reading good English well written, internalising its rules and rhythms. When we learn a language, at first we’re not free to say much at all because we haven’t learnt its inner rules. We don’t master them simply by being free of outside influence.
“Look at our culture today,” Barron told the conference.
“The default position is that I am the sovereign source of value, of meaning. Why are so many of our young people so lost, depressed and unhappy? It’s because freedom has become divorced from truth and from responsibility. If we’re the inventors of all value, we’ll live in an increasingly dull and dangerous world.”
These are deep intellectual waters but represent Barron’s characteristic style. He speaks clearly, in a conversational way, with great warmth and friendliness, but he doesn’t dumb things down, he gives you full value intellectually.
There are roughly 1.3 billion Catholics in the world. I thought the ARC conference was clever in picking the right one to address them. Barron is neither pompous nor unapproachable, or an egomaniac. But a lot of people want a bite of his time. He’s hard to get. He had just travelled to ARC from the Pope’s synod in Rome, which consisted mainly of selected bishops but with some lay people too.
I kidnapped him in the ARC green room and wickedly, ruthlessly, exploited his innate politeness and sense of compassion. Can we do the interview here, he suggested.
No, Bishop, we’ll be constantly interrupted. Let’s go across the road to a nearby hotel where we can talk better. I think there’s a lunch I’m supposed to attend, he offered plaintively to his aide. No, no, no, we can get some lunch at the hotel, I assured him.
Naturally, being London, and God always enjoying a mild joke, it poured with rain as we trudged across the open air to the nearest hotel. No good turn, as the bishop must surely know, goes entirely unpunished. He didn’t even get lunch, just coffee and a biscuit.
Barron is a normal sort of person. He’s learned, clever, very relaxed now in front of a camera, but he doesn’t come across as a force of nature hurled down from another planet. Many of the things he does could be emulated, in some manner, by other folks.
So here’s one question, among many, I’ve always wanted to ask him. What lessons does the astonishing success of his WOF mission offer for other Christians trying to win a hostile culture?
It’s a tribute to Barron that he doesn’t have a pat formula for that. Instead he thinks a bit, then offers this: “I’ve been talking and thinking about the rise of the ‘nones’ (those who express no religious belief). In the course of my lifetime (he’s 63) it’s gone from about 3 per cent of America to about 25 per cent claiming no religion.
“The (church) scandals of the last 25 years certainly haven’t helped. They’ve accelerated the institutional decline. And there’s a general decline of trust in institutions.
“But here’s where I find your question interesting. There are just so many people who do respond to something like the Word on Fire mission, to the work I’m doing. When you put religion out there in a fresh way, there’s still an audience. They might be sceptical, but yet they’re paying attention. There’s something so self-defeating about the self-invention culture, as I call it. There’s a responsive audience. People will return, they will come back, to these great values.
“Religion’s just got to be there, even though people are mocking us, and for ages they’ve been predicting our decline.”
****************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
/>
Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
No comments:
Post a Comment