It's not hate to allow women to have their own spaces and their own events
The desperation of the elites to look good lies behind this suddenly invented "trans" war. The elite are aware that others envy and dislike them so grab at anything that will make them look good and wise and noble. So the poor old trannies have suddenly been elevated to an important group requiring support at all costs
For a while "women" were a big cause to the elites but women were just a convenient group for them to use to show that they cared. The fact that they all along did not care about women at all is now so clearly revealed that they are not even prepared to name them. It must be quite a shock to genuine advocates for women to find that they have gone overnight from friend to enemy in the minds of the insecure Leftist elites
And once the elites have set the ball rolling and given the latest issue big support, lots of other attention seekers climb on board in support of the issue in the hope of also becoming seen as good and wise and noble. They too seize the chance to be seen as virtuous
There are two issues at stake in the transwars that are again finding their way to our shores with ‘Posie Parker’s’ (aka Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s) Australian Let Women Speak tour. These are: children’s bodily integrity, and women’s rights including the need for single-sex spaces. These issues have very different histories, politics, and ontologies but they coalesce around transgenderism because this is the point at which the conflict of interest arises.
On social media and in the legacy media this week, this critique has been presented as tantamount to Nazi ideology. What we have is a classic case of reductio ad Hitlerum, defined by Leo Strauss as a type of ad hominem used to derail arguments by creating a ‘guilt by association’. In other words, ‘playing the Nazi card’.
This means if neo-Nazis are on the steps of the Victorian Parliament, ushered around by police and with excellent camera crews capturing their Sieg Heil, and you happen to be in the vicinity, you’re ‘guilty by association’.
If you’ve been so propagandised as to assume that there is no legitimate discussion to be had around these issues, then you’re a victim of a corrupt media that has ceased to do its job. The Third Estate has well and truly died if a smallish group of women, including MPs, teachers, doctors, and philosophy professors, can’t gather in a public place to discuss matters of cultural and political importance to women.
When Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and progressive party leaders such as the Greens’ Adam Bandt define these women (or their protest) as associating with ‘neo-Nazis’, we have a gross misrepresentation at play and one that anyone participating in this charade should be ashamed of.
This whole mess is an orchestrated misrepresentation that amounts to propaganda.
It is obliterating the legitimate concerns of women regarding the safety and privacy of women and girls in rape crisis centres, women’s shelters, women’s prisons, women’s changerooms, and toilets. It is sabotaging the discussion around how women can possibly compete against natal males in sport, and of the gross inequality of quotas, prizes, or shortlists for women being filled by trans-identifying males.
It is also about the loss of meaningful language for motherhood, including the removal and replacement of words such as pregnant woman, mother, and breastfeeding (with abominations such as ‘vulva owner’, ‘birthing people’, and ‘chest feeder’). These are important conversations, nothing more, but also nothing less. It is not and never has been about the violation of trans people’s legal, civil, or social rights. It is about the recognition of women’s rights.
Sure, feel free to disagree but don’t engage in this false and indeed defamatory characterisation of the gender-critical feminist voice. There are two sides to this discussion; not one legitimate side (trans) and a motley assortment of neo-Nazi bigots. Moreover, we have seen misogynist overtones from male leaders who appear to dismiss women speaking about issues of fundamental importance like equality, privacy, safety, and the well-being of children.
The neo-Nazi optics are undoubtedly appalling, and one can’t help but wonder how this came about. At the very least, this alignment serves the status quo very well, as every polite mainstream-media-reading centre-Left, small ‘l’ liberal who, having never left their media ecosystem, assumes that ‘Terfs’ are a bunch of scary bigots with radical ‘far Right’ views. Political goal achieved.
A quick lesson in protests: not all who attend a protest are in agreement. Some are widely divergent politically. Moreover, ‘outside agitators’ can and are planted to stir up trouble and/or to alter the public’s perception. A quick lesson in propaganda: the truth doesn’t matter if the lie has been accepted. Certainly, in the public’s mind, ‘gender critical feminism’ and the important political issues this argument represents, have been thoroughly besmirched.
In the public’s mind, Kellie-Jay has a kitsch Norma Jean aesthetic going on and seems to be showcasing more star-spangled nylon and sequins as her social media following grows (and concomitantly, as we descend into the ‘bread and circuses’ era of the culture wars). Moreover, in my opinion she has failed to overtly distance herself from the far Right, as some local feminist groups have rightly pointed out.
Nonetheless, her message is direct and simple, delivered in a working-class idiom: ‘men can’t have vaginas’, ‘men can’t give birth’, ‘men can’t be women’, ‘men shouldn’t be in vulnerable women’s spaces’, ‘men can’t (or shouldn’t) compete in women’s sports’, and ‘children aren’t old enough to surgically remove their primary and secondary sex organs, or make decisions about adult sexuality or fertility’.
These were all uncontroversial statements not long ago. Indeed, the first three statements were common knowledge in all cultures, in all places, and across all time until maybe five years ago (that’s a pretty big sample!). At this point, inner-urban, educated progressives extrapolated an obscure set of gender ideologies localised to arcane corners of university Arts departments and gaslit or bullied anyone who disagreed.
Magically, and in lockstep, governments the world over introduced legislation and policy to allow self ID, to outlaw ‘conversion therapy’ (i.e., newspeak for adopting an exploratory approach to gender dysphoria rather than uncritical affirmation), to update the protected category of sex in law, and to revise statutes regarding sex discrimination so that sex-category was replaced with gender identity.
This effectively created a mandate around the acceptance of transgenderism with no capacity – politically or socially – to disagree. If the ‘choice’ is to agree or be an incorrigible bigot with few job prospects, except perhaps as Mark Latham’s cleaning lady, then most people are going to shut up and go along with this agenda. This is the coward’s bargain; it is not agreement.
Let’s stop pretending this doesn’t have the full force of the corporate-state and captured media and academia behind it. Let’s stop pretending that there are two sides to this ‘debate’: there is one side and a maligned minority of women bravely fighting for the right to have a conversation. As I have said before, what we are owed is more and better disagreement, not slogans and abuse.
Until a moment ago we all understood what a woman was, and we understood that men were physically stronger than women. Most also understood that women had been historically excluded from political rights with ongoing ramifications for their civil standing in liberal democracies. Feminism was the movement for women’s rights that began with married women’s property rights and culminated in suffrage and access to education and the professions. It was the movement to end women’s legal and political subjection. From second-wave feminism onwards, larger questions were asked concerning women’s role in society, the family, sexuality, and psyche as women entered into paid work en masse and redefined what it meant to be women.
That the ‘category of woman’ is now being jettisoned (or revised beyond all recognition) at the precise historical hour that women in the West have gained a political and cultural voice is disturbing. Moreover, in redefining women’s rights almost entirely in terms of queer identity politics, crucial issues such as women’s poverty and homelessness, sexual and domestic violence, and mothering and care work, fade from view. These issues barely raise a mention as sex-class transmogrifies into gender ID.
Assuming this debate is like other debates between say, liberals, and conservatives, or between opposing philosophical paradigms like positivism and hermeneutics, is sadly mistaken. This debate, like so many in the contemporary culture wars, is on an entirely new epistemological terrain: what is at stake here is nothing short of reality itself!
The ‘priors’ therefore of either side are no longer shared; we need rather to understand this issue (as with several other contested political issues) as a disagreement, not on a shared understanding of reality, but rather a disagreement about the nature of reality itself. The question pivots, interestingly enough, on what it means to be a woman.
A poignant example to illustrate this point can be seen in the nomenclature used: one party refers to themselves as ‘gender critical feminists’ and sympathetic media outlets adopt this terminology, sometimes situating it in the longer history of feminism. This side suggests that ‘transwomen’ are better understood as ‘trans-identifying males’ to locate both the person’s natal or biological gender and their preferred identification.
However, the other side, the trans activists and their allies, refer to gender-critical feminists as ‘transphobic’ and as committing dangerous ‘hate speech’. These are such egregious accusations that, if true, require punitive action and redress. Thus, a position itself is defined by one side as ‘gender critical’ and based on women’s ‘sex-based rights’ and by the other as ‘hate speech’. The issue pivots on the ‘category of woman’ which is defined by one side (the gender criticals) as a political class – a ‘sex class’ – founded in biology and given its contemporary meaning in society.
That is, from a classical feminist perspective, the category of woman is a biological category with political implications, namely subjection within a patriarchal society. The newer definition replaces gender with sex and defines the category of woman (or man) as one that can be opted into, it is a subjective state or a feeling. Thus, we haven’t even made it out of the paradigmatic gate before we find ourselves fighting over the nature of reality itself. The category of sex is the site of the struggle. If we cannot agree that sex exists or is materially, politically, and linguistically distinct from gender, then we are not arguing about the same thing. To invoke Smith’s famous aphorism regarding the two women arguing from their respective balconies: they were arguing from different premises!
To suggest that any discussion which assumes natal women have a claim on the sex category woman is a priori an act of discrimination is effectively to quash the discussion. It is to define it as an abominable act of hate speech before it is even out of the gate. How is this a fair discussion? To suggest that gender-critical feminists are neo-Nazis is transparent bullying and it’s coming from the top – literally the leader of the Victorian government – not from minorities as we’re being told. It has the sanction of the mainstream media who are hacks failing in their duty to the electorate to fairly represent the issues from all sides.
Parker’s Let Women Speak Tour gives women an opportunity to speak about their experience of this inflamed political and cultural conflict without being silenced.
In the sinkhole of partisan politics and propaganda this act of discursive generosity is defined as ‘far Right’. In the real world of heterodox politics and culture, Posie Parker’s message cuts across the increasingly defunct Right/Left divide and indeed speaks to women and men across the political spectrum.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/guilt-by-association-2/
*******************************************The Grotesque Motives Behind Transgenderism
Concerned parents and politicians, as well as the rapidly growing group of outspoken detransitioners, have actively engaged in bringing to light the troubling practices behind the progressive version of “gender identity.” The reality is that, behind the curtain, this trend of abandoning binary gender labels is not about the love and tolerance claimed in the marketing.
Your child’s first grade classroom is decorated as a rainbow-flooded utopia, there are tampons in your son’s middle school bathroom, and there’s a boy in a dress who is now allowed to undress in your high school daughter’s locker room. Parents are being forced to battle between what their child says they want and being afraid to reel them back in by questioning it, not wanting to appear as the hateful presence in their lives that their activist teachers have told kids they are.
Parents have given in to what seemed to be a new trend of self-discovery, wanting to ensure that their child is learning about different lifestyles, believing that this exposure will contribute to a well-rounded generation of young adults who understand love and tolerance at a level that society had never previously achieved.
However, the brazen rantings of unhinged left-wing activist teachers, the recommendations by medical and psychological experts to introduce material beyond just the exposure of different identities to young children, and the aggressive agenda to influence every child’s sexuality before they’re old enough to grasp these concepts has mobilized numerous parents and investigators to expose the true intentions behind the slogans and flags.
The background of some of the “experts” who are at the center of the policies surrounding sex-change surgeries and puberty blockers for children has been exposed — and it is nothing short of grotesque. The organization that they convene under to form these guidelines is known as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH.
In September 2022, WPATH released new guidelines under “The Standards of Care” (or SOC8) for children seeking potent, life-altering drugs and surgeries. The guidelines changed the suggested ages for hormones from 14 to nine, and when it comes to procedures like mastectomies or the construction of a non-functioning penis on a biological woman, the guidelines reduce the recommended ages from 15-17 for the former and 18 for the latter to basically no recommendation or restriction at all.
As disturbing as the new SOC8 updates are, the motives that drove these supposed authorities to make such drastic changes should stop any parent in their tracks before they consider sacrificing their child to this mutilation campaign disguised as scientific proof that the youth of today just need us to “support” them in living as their “true selves.”
Several of the WPATH panel members reportedly have a decades-long involvement in a fetish site called The Eunuch Archive, a forum that holds over 10,000 pornographic stories, surrounding sadomasochistic themes such as child rape, castration, and torture.
To those of us who have been following the history of gender ideology, it should come as no shock that the movement of the last few years is just as motivated by the pedophilic fantasies of twisted adults now as it was at its inception.
Dr. John Money was a prominent and well-known figure in the sphere of gender identity. As a doctor in the 1960s, he became a leading voice pushing the idea that binary gender expression is a social construct, and that it’s possible to socially construct gender stereotypes out of human beings simply by nurturing them otherwise.
In 1965, Janet and Ronald Reimer brought their seven-month-old twin boys to be seen by Money after a botched circumcision left one of the boys with irreversible damage to his penis. Money’s “expert” solution to the issue was to have the parents raise the injured twin, Bruce, as a girl — insisting that doing so would eliminate any notion of the boy’s biological sex within himself.
The “care” provided throughout the twins’ childhood included annual checkups with Dr. Money to monitor the progress of each child; sexual experiments beginning at age seven, wherein Money had the boys role-play sexual activities that might be carried out between a husband and wife; and taking nude photographs of the children, for which they were provided very specific instructions by Money on how to pose.
The parents believed that this “expert” had their children’s best interests in mind. They trusted that the “care” he was administering was to achieve the objective of feminizing their biologically male son and to lead him to be content with who he was. However, it is unclear if these parents understood that Money was truly conducting his own social experiment to prove his theories about gender identity, with no compelling proof that what he was doing would result in the intended outcome, and to also act out his own fantasies of child sexualization under the guise of healthcare.
(Some might have called this “gender-affirming healthcare.”)
Later in life, when both boys were informed of the truth behind their life experiences, the unaltered boy developed schizophrenia from the trauma, eventually ending his own life — and the twin who had started life as Bruce, then renamed as Brenda, returned to his male identity and was able to live in true contentment for a time, knowing who he really was. But due to trouble stemming from the lies spread by Money of the experiment on his identity being a success; the suicide of his brother; instability in his marriage; and the underlying struggles of his childhood, he too ended his life at age 38.
The foundation of this ideology set 60 years ago, the experiences of the Reimer brothers and the motivations behind their “care” are eerily similar to the mindset of today’s current policymakers and the numerous stories of detransitioners that are flooding social media every day.
Most people who buy into the “love and tolerance” slogan have honest intentions for just that. But the love and tolerance the activists are trying to create is not for children as they’re trying to figure out who they are. The love and tolerance being sought after is for those who wish to indulge their own desires with the most vulnerable among us, to be carried out without restriction or judgment.
What John Money hoped to accomplish almost 60 years ago is being played out before our eyes: Pedophiles granted access to children in the masses, with their parents being the prime enthusiasts for handing them over.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/95854
*********************************************The Left’s Long March Into Despotism
Author and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis once wrote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own consciences.”
We are witnessing the consequences of this insufferable and pernicious ideology, primarily on the political and cultural left. The American right and left have often disagreed about societal objectives, or the best method by which to achieve those objectives, but they at least shared a commitment to certain principles: the sanctity of life and of the nuclear family, the protection of children, the primacy of truth, the importance of the rule of law and due process, the punishment of criminals, freedom of speech, religion and other civil liberties, the dignity of work, and a free press charged with the responsibility for holding the powerful accountable.
Over time, however, the Left has become so certain of its moral superiority that those previously sacrosanct principles have been sacrificed, one by one, on the altar of whatever utopic visions Leftists have for perfecting society. The hills Leftists have decided to die on now include abortion and infanticide, pornography and gender confusion in schools, exploiting children in dangerous and irreversible medical experimentation, homeless encampments and drug use in our cities, incentivized theft and other unpunished crime, open borders and unlimited illegal immigration, lack of election integrity, censorship of medical professionals, scientists and journalists who dare to question the prevailing government narrative, the politicization of law enforcement, and political persecution.
An overly powerful government is eventually populated with arrogant, greedy and unprincipled people who will stop at nothing to get what they want. The Founders understood this, which is why they drafted the Constitution to leave most power within the state governments (and thus more accountable to the people), and to further diffuse federal power by dividing it between three more or less co-equal branches.
The moral busybodies on the Left, to their chagrin, are not omnipotent; they resent that their objectives for a perfected society are continually thwarted by the limitations imposed by the Constitution; therefore they seek to undermine the Constitution wherever possible: by eliminating the Electoral College, changing the composition of the United States Senate, “packing” the U.S. Supreme Court, federalizing elections and removing laws that protect election integrity, permitting illegal immigrants to vote, bypassing Congress and having a president issue countless executive orders.
The country’s descent into destruction and depravity is being facilitated by leftists in media who defend the crooks and malfeasors, even as they grab power and engage in oppressive and unlawful practices without fear of legal sanction or citizen pushback. Millions of law-abiding Americans who oppose the Left’s takeover nevertheless do not realize the risks of our current trajectory; ordinary people never think things will get that bad — until they do.
In fact, American media has a long history of cheering for leftist movements and ignoring or justifying their grievous human rights abuses. They supported Lenin and then Stalin in the former Soviet Union, covering for their political purges, mass imprisonment and murder, the starvation of their own people. (Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Walter Duranty infamously defended Stalin’s actions, saying, “To put it brutally — you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”) They cheered for Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution in China that cost tens of millions of Chinese people their lives. They celebrated Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba. They praised the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia — at least until that army of university-educated malcontents and barely post-pubescent adolescents armed with Kalashnikovs drove millions of their countrymen into rice paddies and Phnom Penh prisons, where they were starved, tortured and shot to death, their bodies left to rot in piles in the “killing fields.” They praise Venezuelan dictators Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, despite their socialist policies having driven the country into abject poverty.
So we should be suspicious when today’s Left — including and especially the media — demands support for movements dressed up in lofty language and pithy phrases like “antiracist,” “Black Lives Matter,” “diversity, equity and inclusion” and the big kahuna, “climate change.” These ideologies share a number of disturbing traits with their Marxist predecessors:
No. 1: Their adherents insist that implementation of these policies requires the dismantling of our constitutional order, including the elimination of freedom, individual liberties, private property and the rule of law.
No. 2: Their leaders do not live by the standards they demand of everyone else; instead, they grow rich on guilt-driven donations, corporate sponsorships, and book deals; they purchase expensive real estate, travel around the world on private jets and enjoy first-class accommodations.
No. 3: Argument, disagreement and proof of the failure of the proffered policies is never permitted; the theories are treated as religious dogma, and the authors are viewed as prophets.
C. S. Lewis was right — the moral busybodies never sleep. They already have too much power; history shows us what can take place if they acquire more.
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/95969 ?
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Progressives’ ‘good cause eviction’ bill spells doom for NYC housing
It’s hard to imagine making New York City’s housing market even worse, but the progressives in charge of the Legislature aim to do just that.
The city has more public and subsidized “affordable” housing (both in total and per capita) than any other — yet it’s in a perennial housing crisis. Nearly a million apartments are “rent-stabilized” — under a regime so onerous and discouraging of investment that some 60,000 are just being left vacant by their owners, rather than lose money on them.
Nor is there a way up and out for squeezed tenants: Thanks to zoning and NIMBY-ism, New York state as a whole has built less new housing than even other Northeastern states, let alone Texas and Florida.
Now the progressives want to distort this housing “market” even more.
Their “good cause eviction” proposal threatens to discourage new housing and drive existing landlords out of the business altogether.
That would probably please the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Julia Salazar of Brooklyn, a proud Democratic Socialist.
But she’s far from alone: Both the Assembly and state Senate proposed budgets include the idea.
Obvious good causes for eviction include not paying the rent, or causing disturbances.
But that’s not what the “good cause” bill has in mind. It would prohibit evictions if rents become “unreasonable” — specifically, raised by more than 3% or 1.5% above the Consumer Price Index, as determined once a year.
This is statewide rent control by another name — with all the distortions it brings with it.
Beware NY progressives’ push for universal rent control
In a period of raging inflation, a snapshot of the Consumer Price Index may well not reflect a property owner’s rising costs over the course of the year. Not that progressives are concerned about the costs of the numerous small, “mom and pop” landlords, many of whom are new immigrants using property ownership to aid their upward mobility.
A 2019 law barred rent increases in regulated units even if owners have to make major capital repairs.
The cost of a new roof must come out of their profits — even if they have none.
That’s why units are being left vacant.
More broadly, controlling rents suppresses price signals, the means through which supply and demand are balanced.
It encourages tenants to stay longer in apartments larger than what they might need — limiting the turnover that a healthy market needs.
That’s why you can find aging Baby Boomers knocking around in Upper West Side apartments with empty bedrooms, while young New Yorkers are doubled up in shoeboxes.
New York University’s Furman Center has found that rent-regulated tenants remain in their units three times as long as those in non-regulated units — and are better off, as well.
Rent limits are also why there are long waiting lists for public housing units; more than a quarter of current tenants are “overhoused”— meaning they, too, have more bedrooms than they need.
Housing “advocates” believe we should effectively transfer property rights from owners to tenants and let the latter stay put as long as they’d like — and even pass along their apartment to younger family members.
Their model is the city’s dilapidated public-housing system, where tens of thousands of residents have lived in their units for more than 40 years.
Salazar and her fellow travelers have a dread of gentrification — the wealthier driving out the poor from the Brooklyn neighborhoods she represents.
Reality check: There are a limited number of hedge fund managers even in New York, and lots of them are following Citadel’s Ken Griffin to Miami, as New York has apparently made “tax the rich” its official state slogan.
Moreover, property owners in many parts of the state — think depressed Syracuse, Rochester or Utica — are not likely to be keen to evict a tenant having trouble paying the rent; there may not be another one ready to move in.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, to her credit, has promoted the idea of new housing construction in New York’s suburbs — a good way to lower prices when so many state residents are fleeing and the population has fallen.
But she pushed an idea guaranteed to inspire maximum resistance — a state super-zoning board that could override local decisions.
That’s predictably inspired pushback. She needs to find the right mix of incentives to persuade, rather than coerce — a challenge for tight housing markets across the country.
To her discredit, Hochul might cave to the Legislature and sign a budget that includes “good cause eviction” regulation to get the rest of her plan passed, too.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will seek the presidency on the basis of what he’s done to make his state a magnet for newcomers.
Meanwhile, Empire State lawmakers are doing all they can to make their state ever less attractive.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/24/progressives-good-cause-eviction-bill-spells-doom-for-nyc-housing/
****************************************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
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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 Buckley. See 