Way back when I was struggling to support myself as a 20 something-year-old who had already failed at one career, I got myself a part time job teaching English as a Second Language at a local community college. It seemed well within my intellectual abilities and perhaps not too stressful to bear.

It turns out it was stressful – I didn’t realize how terrified I was of people – but it was also exhilarating to serve the mature adults who had come to Canada for new lives and were juggling jobs, children and school. Under the influence of a fellow teacher, I pretty quickly ditched the available ESL texts to focus on using students’ life experiences as the center of my classroom work.

I would come up with a topic – scariest experience in life, a decision that changed my life -- and we would have a class discussion about it before they would write short personal essays. Then would come the workshops, in which they would critique each other’s writing (and find out a lot about each other). I found that students could be exceptionally engaged in learning when the learning centred on writing their own autobiographies in the miniature format of the personal essay and discussing them with classmates.

I had always written stuff – short stories, poems, lots of poems – so I naturally kept a diary of my journey into myself when I began therapy in my late thirties. By that time I had also moved to a different college where I was teaching remedial reading and writing skills. I used a lot of personal essays in those classes. So it was almost natural that I would transform my journal entries into short personal essays.

After a few years of digging into what I called a “wound” left by a childhood of sexual and physical abuse, I had enough essays for a collection. I prepared to send it off to book publishers. A few of my colleagues in the English department where I was teaching by then were kind enough to read the manuscript, and one of my colleagues who was a published author recommended my manuscript to her own publisher.

Their response was disturbing. They wrote to tell me they had already published one such book and that was enough. And they told me they received about a thousand such manuscripts each month. At about the same time the mostly male book reviewers had coined the mocking term “viclit” to categorize what was emerging as a new genre of literature.

I sent my manuscript to all of the Canadian and American publishers that had already published one memoir of a woman’s recovery from childhood abuse and met with the same response from all of them. One was enough; they didn’t want to become “known” for publishing such documents of the ramifications of cruelty to children inflicted by parents, caregivers and “friends of the family.”

A couple of the publishers were impressed with my manuscript, but it made no difference. So sorry, they said, we can’t take it on.

I tucked the manuscript and my disappointment away, but continued writing personal essays. Two were published by small literary magazines. One was awarded first place in a Federation of BC Writers’ competition. They now appear in the expanded book.

In the following years I developed a creative writing course on the personal essay and began teaching 22 students a year to write personal narratives. They wrote about difficult events and experiences: getting an abortion, entering prostitution, contracting a serious illness, starting rehab, dealing with death. I found I was teaching people the importance of personal stories to effect personal transformation, and to bring attention to social issues, and seeing again and again the power of the personal to affect other people.

All the essays were workshopped by students in the class and they achieved formidable skills, I thought, in giving tough criticism to the expression of a student’s life experience while avoiding judgementalism. These classes were the most intense of any that I taught, both sobering and exhilarating, and both I and the students gave much more time to them than we could afford.

They kept me inspired to write about my own evolving life of recovery, and I wrote essays on those “milestones” of western adult life – buying my first condo, then my first house, falling in love, falling out of love, fighting against and coming to terms with the politics and norms of my society. My responses to all those events were, of course, inflected with the long-term effects of childhood abuse. Everything I did was part of my recovery, and everything that I wrote was a coming to fuller understanding of the past’s effects on me.

My therapy, with or without the assistance of a therapist, continued, blossoming into a life of recovery, of “rebirth” experiences, as I saw that I was constantly regenerating, again and again being renewed after the processing of increasingly brutal memories.

It was becoming clear that my father, the primary abuser of my earliest childhood, was trafficking me into gangs of both men and women who shared their children and in the heightened dynamics of the group, escalated the abuse they inflicted.

Out in the world of the 1990s all hell was breaking loose as other adult survivors claimed similar memories. What was once taboo – revealing that fathers sometimes raped their children – had escalated into what was even more taboo – that neighbours might get together to brutalize children in rituals of torture. A backlash followed swiftly. A curtain of silence descended.

But behind that curtain a field of knowledge was growing, particularly how to identify and treat the extreme dissociation suffered by survivors. War survivors were diagnosed with a new psychiatric disorder they called post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, which also fit adult survivors of sexual abuse and domestic torture. When possession of child pornography became a criminal offense in 1993, law enforcement could discover for itself what some adults would do to children.

New technology both enabled the spread of filmed child torture and revealed the extent of it to organizations mobilizing to fight against it.

The major distributor of porn worldwide, Pornhub, was located in Quebec where the Canadian government was content to let it take in billions of dollars for the filmed rape of minors and child sexual torture. And with the advent of the dark web, there is no longer any doubt that a disturbingly large percentage of men are involved in pedophile rings and group torture of children, in filming it and distributing it for profit, in live streaming it.

In the early aughts two Canadian nurses who had been helping victims of such abuse got together with American women to begin lobbying the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW) to get sanctions against what they were calling ritualized torture by non-state actors. They subsequently shortened this to Non-State Torture (NST) and have been speaking and lobbying ever since.

In 2007 they succeeded in having torture included in the UNCSW outcome document “as a form of violence against the girl child” (UN Commission on the Status of Women, 2007). Still, the Canadian government refuses to make NST a criminal offense. The most the perpetrators can be charged with is sexual assault against a minor. In 2021 the women, Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald, launched their book, Women Unsilenced: Our Refusal to Let Torturer Traffickers Win, which is helping to raise awareness.

Here is a slide from a presentation they gave to an organization for domestic shelters in 2023.

I was motivated to compile all my essays, write some final thoughts, and publish the manuscript partly as a response to the work these women are doing to expose the crimes carried out against me and so many others. It is part of the activism on behalf of women and children that I’ve been engaged in since I retired.

Group ritualized torture of children is on the rise, as documented by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. Changing cultural norms as a result of various social justice movements are being exploited by powerful predators who are increasingly claiming that children should be regarded as fully autonomous human beings capable to initiating and consenting to sexual contact with peers and with adults. To regard children as subject to the guidance and control of their parents is a violation of their human rights, they argue.

If adults, if mothers, are prevented from safeguarding their children, I think we will descend quickly into a nightmare world of unchecked depravity and brutality.

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My book is a testimony of abuse, but more than that, it is a testimony of the power of healing. It documents the possibility that the self-loathing, shame and guilt of survivors can be transformed into righteous anger, which can fire social change. I offer it as hope to other survivors. We can achieve peace, and even forgiveness as we demand these crimes be recognized.

Social denial of the worst cruelties humans can inflict is strong. Most of us prefer to think that our fellow citizens, our neighbours, are basically decent people and when crimes against women and children are reported, we most often avert our eyes and ears. And so such crimes metastasize. We can’t fight against what we refuse to see or name.

While my book is for sale as both an ebook and a paperback on Amazon, my plan is to disseminate it through little free libraries. I’ve already distributed dozens to the little libraries in my west coast city and hope to recruit other women to distribute them in cities across the country. I also did a little guerilla librarianship, putting the book on the new releases shelf at my local library.

For me, the healing continues. Publishing the book led to multiple repeated flashbacks, which gave me insight into how the perpetrators of my abuse taught me never to tell. By clicking “publish” on the Amazon KDP website, I told the entire world.

Is the world willing to hear?

If you’d like to buy the book, or just read/listen to a sample, click on the link below.

a little bit of god

If you’re in Canada and might be persuaded to join a crew of amateur book distributors, get in touch!

Don’t be alarmed that the author’s name is a little different then the one I use here. We are the same person.

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You know what it’s like when you get a sliver in your finger, or maybe in the sole of your foot? If it’s driven in so deep that there’s nothing a tweezer can get a grip on, it can just stay there for a long time, not bothering you until something accidentally presses against it.

That’s what religion has been in my life. A thorn that just won’t budge.

I was raised a Calvinist. That won’t mean much to younger generations. John Calvin pretty much invented the Protestantism that served as the origin for most of the Christian denominations that now exist around the world. If you’re not Catholic, you’re probably sitting in the pews of a Calvin-inspired church. Or more likely, you sat in them occasionally as a child, but haven’t visited in years.

I lost my faith, as they say, in my early twenties. Then I was stuck with nihilism, which is not a pretty place for a young person. Life is meaningless and empty? How am I supposed to get up in the morning? I imagined myself as one cow in a field of cows, just hanging out purposelessly, chewing the cud. At least it stopped me from pulling out the kitchen knives.

Thankfully I discovered other religions, and began my pretty much life-long investigation into them. I checked out Buddhism, spent years chasing yogis and gurus on their spiritual paths, took a trip into Sufism.

It was in the teachings of Sufism that I discovered the most beautiful names of god.

The Sufis, the mystics of Islam, say the world was created from the ninety-nine most beautiful names of God. Ninety-nine is just a number that symbolizes many, and “names” means attributes or qualities. They speak, for example, of “God the merciful”, in which the characteristic, “merciful,” is one of the names of God. If the entire universe – including but not limited to humans -- is formed of divine attributes, everything is made up of unique combinations of an assortment of these attributes. In this way the divine exists within the atom and is the gene within the gene. Our genetic heritage stretches beyond matter.

All the divine attributes, they say, can be divided into two almost limitless categories: the categories of beauty and of majesty. The category of beauty contains attributes that attract us, that give us a desire for closeness with the divine (or any of its multiple manifestations), and the category of majesty contains attributes that we need to be cautious about, that keep us at an appropriate distance.

Those that give us a sense of closeness include names like God the beautiful, the tender, the gentle, the loving, the merciful. Those that keep us at a respectful distance include things like God the strong, the wrathful, the judgmental, the violent. For Sufis the divine invites people to intimacy with itself, while at the same time reminding people of the importance of boundaries.

These are categories of movement, toward and away. In this they parallel all the movement of the universe. Everything alive moves toward and away, contracting and expanding. The tides come in to kiss the beaches and embrace the ocean cliffs, then withdraw to their deep and distant regions again. The ventricles of the heart close and open again to give us our pulsing veins and arteries. Subatomic waves crash into their particle-ness, which throw off their bonds to unleash their wave-ity again.

Think, for a minute, of babies being born, each with an individual, unique selection of divine attributes -- of desires for and barriers against. We have to learn to weave between for and against, desire and withdrawal, all the pushes and pulls of our jar full of beautiful names. We can’t find ways to harmonize our pull toward intimacy and our retreat into separation until we can harmonize those forces within our own selves.

Beauty and Majesty, intimacy and separation. The child grows in the womb, almost at one with the mother, then explodes out in defiant separation. From familial bonds, we mature into our own separate places, then create familial bonds again. Expand, contract.

In western cultures we divide the characteristics we call human – we don’t think of ourselves as divine in any way – similarly, but we call them “masculine” and “feminine”. They are static qualities. And they are oppositions. They are boxes symbolizing an idea and we then try to squash the real world – real males and females – into those boxes. We demand that males align themselves with the masculine, and females align themselves with the feminine.

If you’re biologically male, your caregivers, acting in the name of society, are going to squash all the qualities associated with closeness, beauty, intimacy out of you, and try to squeeze in the qualities of strength, fierceness, independence whether you have them in potential or not. And the reverse if you’re female. From a Sufi perspective, society tries to kill some of the divine in us as soon as possible.

But how can a being trapped in independence and autonomy even make an approach to an other? When all desire for closeness has been weeded out, how does he even know what he wants from an other? The best he can hope for is stimulation, something to make him feel alive in his aloneness and separation.

And how can someone with no sense of autonomy and independence and separation approach an other without dissolving her own boundaries and losing all sense of herself? The best she can hope for is never-ending romantic delusion of union.

The western way of dividing provides for no relations between the sexes except that of domination and submission.

And it’s almost impossible for people to be authentic.

It’s been too hard for women for too long, of course, and so there have been “women’s liberation” movements again and again. Women have only to find their god-given strength to start lobbying, maneuvering, fighting for the right to be accorded equal status, as human beings, with men.

Men, on the other hand, gain too much from their inauthenticity. Those who do not have the divine names of “strength” or “ferocity” or “leader” have to pretend to those qualities. That makes them brittle, and, frankly, dangerous in the way that men who have to prove themselves always are. In exchange, they get to set the rules of all the games, they get heard when women are not, they get to speak when women don’t get that privilege, they get higher pay, or they just get the job. A man who’s good at faking it can have a good life.

Too many women still fake it too, because no movement can liberate the individual from an internalized prison. Movements can only make change in the body politic, not necessarily in the psyche.

Some days I am beyond believing that whole societies, whole civilizations can prefer such fakery of their members to authenticity.

Can you even imagine a world in which men can commonly invite closeness by their natural warmth, empathy and willingness to listen? And a world in which women can effortlessly command attention and respect because their intelligence, charisma and problem-solving skills make them the obvious leaders?

The Sufis also say that we each worship a god of our own creation. Since god (if there is such a thing) isn’t out walking and visible to all, we have to conceptualize a God to worship. And we conceptualize based on what we’re familiar with. Mostly religious people conceptualize some version of their own fathers. If their own father was distant, cold, withholding of approval, quick to punish, well then that’s the God they worship.

I like a short passage from the biblical book of Hosea, in which the Jewish prophet has a vision of the divine speaking to him. The divine presence seems to say “I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.” Is the divine not describing itself by the attributes of motherhood?

It's time we returned to worship of both beauty and majesty, divine father and divine mother. And to the rhythm of push and pull, expand and contract. And to the joys of intimacy and separation in harmony with each other. To an understanding that justice and mercy are not in opposition, but fluidly intertwined.

We’re out of synch, all of us now, with each other and with ourselves, twitching to music we can’t hear. And it’s killing us.

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Check out my memoir, a collection of personal essays about living in the aftermath of childhood torture, with a feminist perspective on the society that enables the rape and pillage of children.

The following is a cleaned-up text of the talk I gave to WDI’s Feminist Question Time on July 5, 2025.

There was a federal election in Canada in April. The Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, were expected to win, as Liberal support had tanked. As a result of that tanking, the wildly unpopular “feminist” Justin Trudeau had stepped down and been replaced by Mark Carney, former governor of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada.

Prior to the election there were two leadership debates, the first in French and the second in English. Scrums for the journalists were scheduled for after each debate, in which journalists could ask whatever questions they wanted. All journalists had been vetted. At the scrum after the first debate, some journalists from the independent media – that is from conservative online platforms – surprised the members of the mainstream by getting to the microphones ahead of everyone else. They asked questions on subjects the mainstream media has been suppressing for years. In particular, Alex Zoltan of True North asked Mark Carney how many sexes there are. Carney replied there were two. Zoltan then asked him if women, biological women, were entitled to their own spaces, sports, changing rooms, etc. Carney gave a word salad sort of answer culminating in “this is Canada, we value all Canadians for who they are and will continue to do so.” Carney has a daughter who identifies as “non-binary.”

The mainstream media were so incensed by the temerity of these independent journos to bring up a subject they didn’t want to cover, that while they were all waiting in a media room prior to the next debate, the English language debate, one verbally attacked the indies for hogging all the question time. As Ezra Levant of Rebel News pointed out, the indies got four questions and the mainstream got four. Later in a corridor there was an actual physical altercation, or there may have been, video evidence is pretty murky. The debates commission responded by cancelling that evening’s scrum. The two major TV networks, CBC and CTV, broadcast that this was because of “safety issues”, implying that the indie media had caused an environment that was no longer safe.

It’s worth mentioning that the indie media, Rebel News and True North, had sued the debates commission in previous years for the right to be accredited and they had won. But the mainstream media accuses them of being profit-driven advertising platforms, or platforms driven by ideology rather than “true journalists.” (I’ve seen both criticisms) But what is the mainstream media in Canada? The three largest television networks, CTV, Global and CBC, get huge government grants – the CBC is actually a public broadcaster. The press in Canada is likewise indebted to government for funding to keep publishing. This has led to so much bias, or potential bias that former journos are starting podcasts and substacks where they advertise that they have refused all government funding so that they can remain independent. One such podcaster, Trish Wood, former host of the prestigious documentary series Fifth Estate, now calls the MSM “Cartel Media” who work together as a block to suppress free speech.

There is no critical coverage of gender medicine or gender ideology, or the policy changes that resulted from the government’s adoption of gender over sex as the major means by which people are categorized – and has not been since the liberals, under Justin Trudeau instituted these changes in 2016. The CBC in particular is fond of running sob stories about poor young men who claim to be women trapped in male bodies.

The cancellation of the second scrum at the debates, caused by MSM outrage over the indies asking “illicit” questions, strongly suggests that the MSM is in league with government to create the only agenda, the only narrative that is allowed. In Canada that narrative is that men can be women, women can be men, and it’s imperative that children be allowed to become their “authentic” selves through injections of puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones and mutilating body modifications that will render them infertile, inorgasmic, and unlikely to find romantic partners among the sex of their choice. (But nobody in Canada is allowed to choose romantic partners by sex anymore. That would be transphobic. We choose our partners based on gender.)

The media, as a bloc, decided that the important election issues were the ones that Carney was campaigning on, which were economic issues, particularly the threat of US President Trump and his tariffs. In their coverage they resembled a circle of schoolboys cheering on a fight between two others, in this case Carney and Trump. Again and again Carney flipped the bird at his opponent in a display of male aggression-posturing. When he hit on the hockey term, “elbows up,” he was successfully able to elbow the actual opposition leader, Pierre Poilievre, aside and hook hockey-loving moms and dads into rooting for his team.

This was not an election about issues – it was about which man could man-up enough to beat up another man who was not even running. Conservative leader Poilievre couldn’t even enter the ring, being painted as the runt version of Trump. When the dust settled and Carney had won the election, conservative commentators could blame the moms, the boomer women who voted for him, as the problem. There’s always a mom to blame, isn’t there? For liberals, Carney was the hockey dad, the backyard barbecue Dad – I was waiting for them to put him in a cardigan, but then they dressed him up in a hockey jersey for the win. It wasn’t an election, it was a virtual Canada vs US hockey game.

This is what patriarchy looks like. “Good dads” are still powerful patriarchs and they exercise their power by dominating other patriarchs. The issues are not important, the impression of toughness and power is.

For many, many Canadians, particularly women, the election was about women’s rights – our rights to be sole proprieters of the term “woman”, to exclude all males from this category, and the rights of children to grow up with the truth about sex and bodies, and the relation between the body and sex. Both the conservatives and the liberals had platform items about gender, the obstacle to these rights.

The Liberal platform made multiple references to “diversity” on its election platform. More specifically, it listed:

1. Standing up for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, protecting the values it was founded on – which are under threat – and ensuring the protection of women, people with disabilities, racialized and Indigenous communities, and 2SLGBTQI+ people.

2. Investing in women’s sexual and reproductive health care and health research, including for those within the 2SLGBTQI+ community.

3. Making funding permanent for the 2SLGBTQI+ Community Capacity Fund.

4. Adding additional funding for the LGBTQI+ International Assistance Program.

The Conservative platform contained a tiny splinter in the plank it labelled “Restoring Public Safety”. Specifically:

What these two platforms show is that for the Liberals, gender as a category includes women and trans-id people with no recognition of conflict between those groups, or of incompatibility between them. The Conservatives on the other hand recognize that women are in danger from gender id policies that lump women in with trans-id males.

However, neither leader wanted to talk about this subject, nor did the mainstream media. Poilievre could have come out against trans ideology, or for women’s sex-based rights, as the most recent conservative convention had passed two resolutions on the subject, one of them initiated by our Coach Linda Blade. The two resolutions were: to limit transgender health care for minors (69% support) and to ensure single-sex spaces for women (87% support), defined as “female persons” to exclude transgender individuals. These policies aimed to prohibit “life-altering medicinal or surgical interventions” for gender-diverse youth and protect spaces like women’s prisons and bathrooms.

Canadian gender critical women did everything we could on social media, particularly twitterX, to persuade Poilievre to speak up about this tiny portion of his platform, but to no avail. If leaders don’t want to bring up a subject, and the media don’t want that subject advertised or promoted, then silence wins out.

In one of his first speeches after winning election, Carney warned that “online American platforms” are becoming “seas of racism, misogyny, antisemitism, islamophobia and hate in all its forms” and promised his government would act. This was a reference to the Online Harms Act, which the previous Trudeau government had been attempting to pass.

As Amy Hamm wrote in The National Post:

“Carney has hinted that his Liberal government will bring back some iteration of Trudeau’s tyrannical — there is no other word for it — Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, which was killed when the former prime minister prorogued parliament this January. You will recall that this now-defunct legislation would have granted judges the ability to mete out life sentences for hate speech, and would have created a government “Digital Safety Commission” to police Canadians’ speech, and impose life-destroying fines upon those whose speech was deemed hateful by our government censors.”

Information was also provided by a law firm analyzing the repercussions of the Bill:

“Bill C-63 introduces significant changes to the Criminal Code, including a new definition of “hatred,” a new hate crime of “offence motivated by hatred” carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, and stronger sentences for existing hate propaganda offences (including a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for advocating or promoting genocide).

“It also amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to add the “communication of hate speech” by means of the Internet or any other means of telecommunication as a discriminatory practice. The amendments will provide individuals with the right to bring a related complaint before the Canadian Human Rights Commission and authorize the Commission to assess penalties of up to $50,000. These amendments focus on public communications by users, and do not apply to private communications (e.g., direct messages), nor to operators of social media services, broadcast undertakings, telecommunication service providers, or intermediaries hosting, caching or indicating the existence or location of hate speech.)

That means any individual can bring forward a complaint against any other individual, who could face a $50,000 fine.

Just this week, Global News reported that the Carney government was indeed considering bringing back the Online Harms Bill, perhaps as is, perhaps with changes.

In another article a couple of weeks after Hamm’s article, journalist Tristan Hopper wrote about the upcoming implementation of the Online Streaming Act, a 2023 law that gives the federal government the ability to control the content of the internet in Canada. Basically it requires them to follow the same rules for Canadian content as radio and tv.

But the language of the Online Streaming Act also goes beyond mere Canadian content by hinting that streamers may also be subject to “inclusive” mandates on their content. It specifically requires broadcasters to produce content that reflects “Black or other racialized communities,” as well as Canadians of “diverse … sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions.”

So, the government is poised to impose censorship with regards to gender ideology, and to force the creation of propaganda with regards to the same thing. Ban the facts, force the fictions.

In the real world, Carney’s government continues along the trajectory of the Trudeau version. In June, the liberal party X account put out this message:

Notice that it’s about Pride Season – not just Pride month.

Carney raised the Progress flag on Parliament Hill and wished Canadians Happy Pride. His government gave extra funding of $1.5 million to the Fierte Society to enhance safety and security at Pride events, “reflecting a response to increasing backlash against LGBTQ+ rights”. NO QUESTIONING OF WHY THERE IS A BACKLASH.

Rechie Valdez, the new Minister of Women and Gender Identity (WAGE), issued this communique on Pride:

“The Government of Canada is removing barriers still faced by 2SLGBTQI+ communities — from safe access to gender-affirming care to opportunities in entrepreneurship and skilled trades. Through the Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan and Canada’s Action Plan on Combatting Hate, we’re funding solutions that improve safety, support mental health, and strengthen community resilience.

“That includes a $25 million federal investment in Canada’s first-ever 2SLGBTQI+ Entrepreneurship Program — launched in partnership with the Canadian 2SLGBTQI+ Chamber of Commerce.

“Pride is both a celebration and a call to action – and the Government will continue to stand with 2SLGBTQI+ communities to build a safer, more inclusive, and more equitable Canada for all.”

WAGE’s Departmental Plan for 2025, also issued by Valdez, incorporates 2SLGBTQI+ into it’s mandate.

From the plan:

“Addressing discrimination against 2SLGBTQI+ communities continues to be a key focus. In times where 2SLGBTQI+ rights are being threatened, WAGE will lead the rollout of Canada’s first 2SLGBTQI+ national survey to further understand the current needs of the community. As well, we will provide $1.5 million in funding to meet security needs for Pride festivals and continue to promote the 2SLGBTQI+ anti-stigma campaign: Unity.”

All the trans/queer initiatives are located within the department that is supposed to be about and for women:

This placement reflects a governmental belief that there is no conflict between women and men who claim to be women. Support for the 2SLGBTQI+ falls naturally to women, support for one is support for the other. Nothing could be further from the truth, but that is where we still are. And one could be forgiven for thinking that WAGE is more than that, that it is the department of non-white, non-straight, non-men. Has everyone in Canada other than the dominant demographic been dumped into one “other” category in which the differences between us don’t matter?

Carney has appointed former Justice Minister David Lametti as his Principal Secretary. Lametti shepherded the anti-conversion therapy bill through parliament, the one that criminalizes all therapeutic interventions for gender-confused children and forces Canadians to “affirm” the lie that they are the sex they’re not, and importantly to have NO PREFERENCE for natural children. He also had a role in the Emergencies Act invoked to stop the Covid protestors and freeze the bank accounts of the truckers -- in other words, to criminalize protest.

So, what has changed since I last spoke here on FQT in 2022?

The government’s position is intractable. It still holds to the beliefs it held in 2016 when Trudeau brought his plan to replace sex with gender for all legal and administrative purposes out of hiding through Bill C16. It was a government coup against the people.

One promising new organization is the Free Speech Union of Canada, led by Executive Director Lisa Bildy, the lawyer who has been working on behalf of Amy Hamm in her interminably long employment tribunal. In an interview with Meghan Murphy, Bildy laid out the four areas of engagement that the Free Speech Union will pursue: it will build a community of people aware of the need for freedom of expression and the dangers that will follow if it’s lost, create a legal network of lawyers with the desire and experience in pursuing court cases when someone’s freedom of expression seems to have been curtailed, campaign against harmful legislation, and work with international sister organizations. All of these things are vital at this time, when it seems people just aren’t aware of the need for vigorous debate about all kinds of issues. Democracy hinges on it.

The National Post, one of two national newspapers, is increasing its coverage of criticisms of gender ideology, moving from tentative efforts to offer “balance” to outright criticism. It now platforms both Amy Hamm and Mia Hughes, author of The WPath Files, in addition to intermittent others.

Hamm, Hughes and Bildy are women to watch. Linda Blade is still a force too, but she is currently living in India. We need people, particularly women with voices, with the ability to be heard. That’s what we have not had. We can’t change minds in Canada as long as our voices are censored. That’s where we have to focus our attention. The lies and falsehoods of the trans cult have been exposed in the US and the UK – with the help of the right-wing press. We don’t have the rabid far right media that they have in the US, and I don’t think anybody seriously wants it -- but we need to find ways to force our governments to listen. And we need to do that before they clamp down via an Online Harms Act, more hate speech legislation and forced propaganda.

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felicia rembrandt comments

From Death to Life

Sometimes a spiritual journey requires a descent into hell. So it has been for me. And yet . . .then I have been to hell twice. The first time in real experience, the second in remembrance. Maybe that's always how it has been. Maybe those who know of the "valley of the shadow of death" have been there, like me, to pick up their lost inner selves, the ch…

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10 months ago · 4 likes · felicia rembrandt

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Sometimes a spiritual journey requires a descent into hell. So it has been for me. And yet . . .then I have been to hell twice. The first time in real experience, the second in remembrance. Maybe that's always how it has been. Maybe those who know of the "valley of the shadow of death" have been there, like me, to pick up their lost inner selves, the children within who were still trapped there. We never escape until every piece of us escapes. And we never make a clean getaway at the time. There's always the journey back.

There's a story in the east about a saint and one of his disciples. It is said that a saint will never leave his follower until the end of time, but a follower is perfectly free to leave his saint. This one had and proceeded to live such a life that, on the day of his death, he found himself in hell. His Master heard about it and dipped his thumb into the burning fire to cool it down enough so his follower could be rescued.

In a way it has fallen on me to do the same for my lost selves. Some part of me that I cannot really lay claim to has taken charge of the rescue operation and kept the temperature down low enough so that I could do what had to be done without further damage to myself. This greater Self has been responsible for bringing me to life. For that I am profoundly grateful.

My spiritual journey began l5 years ago. I say began, only in a manner of speaking, for what life is not a spiritual journey? My metamorphosis, then, began on a specific day, with a specific event. I was reading a volume of collected talks by a yoga Master. I had been reading this book for a few days, but on this day I quite suddenly became aware of the great love this Master had for humanity ‑‑ his message was filled with compassion, kindness and tenderness. This awareness did not come in an intellectual way; rather, I felt as though waves of love were beating against my chest, breaking down the walls surrounding my heart. I felt wave after wave of something that I had never felt before. It was painful, as my heart, previously virtually frozen, was forced to feel.

For a week, I held the book in my hands and wept. Then I knew that, until that experience, I had been one of the walking dead, living in a limbo world, neither really alive nor physically dead. I knew that love and life were synonymous, that without the one, the other did not exist.

I'm not claiming that ink on a page had miraculous powers ‑‑ I've since felt similar compassion and love for humanity vibrating from a taped talk by a Buddhist monk. Love emanates from the words and is present in the messages left by those who are filled with it. I was brought to life by the presence of love in the traces left by a saint.

Until then I had protected my heart from the absence of its necessary food by building thick walls around it and inside that airless environment, what should have been a fire of love ‑‑ my and every human being's natural birthright ‑‑ had been reduced to one glowing ember. I do believe that if that ember had been extinguished, my body would not have remained alive. But love provided the breath of life, and the pain of a heart awakening was intense.

From then on, love was present inside me, almost as a separate entity. I have been aware of it both from within and from without, as a physical sensation in my chest, every day. I have tried to nurture it, and I have watched it grow. Ultimately, I believe it was this love that led me to the story, the true story of my childhood. This story is more than just events, it is the emotional story of a heart deprived, of suffering, of loss, of horror, and of shame too intense to bear. Then it is the story of secrecy, of hiding, of covering up, of replacing the real self with a false one. (Don't call me by name. If I answer, I'm lying.) And then it is the story of shut‑down, of emptiness and depression. It is the story of psychological and cognitive adjustment and readjustment to a world too cruel to see squarely.

It is not a story that unfolded neatly from beginning to end, nor is it a story that can be told by one voice. The voice that you hear now is not the sole narrator of my story. Think of me as an explorer making forays into the depths of my own psyche, shining a light on stored sensations, pictures, emotions and thoughts, each associated and attached to a time and a place and a child that I was, then collecting and arranging and making sense of those living artifacts. I don't like the sound of that word, “artifacts.” No, not me -- someone who shares my body and mind rejects the word. Think of me then as undertaking a journey to the past, but being met constantly by smaller versions of myself travelling forward to greet me, offering their stories in small gestures, creating a journey backward and forward simultaneously. It has been in establishing communication between all these lost and hidden parts of myself that I have been able to recreate a whole self out of fragments, and re-enter the present, freed from the prison of the past.

One result of these multiple journeys has been these essays, each a collocation of the messages transmitted by voices of the past, wound together by me, the adult. Parts of these essays were told by child selves to me, other parts were told by me to them. And that is what my story is -- a telling of multiple tales by multiple selves to multiple selves, spinning unity out of multiplicity of experience, perception, and time.

The saints of the east say, and I believe it to be true, that it is the mind that separates us from our divine origin, from our soul. When the mind is twisted, we cannot experience our essential self. When it is twisted enough, we become the living dead. Ultimately, this is the story of one soul's ability, when fuelled by divine love and grace, to renew itself and create for itself a whole mind with which to experience itself. Like the journey into the underworld spoken of by so many mystics, it is a story of rebirth, a book of life.

Thank you for reading. The book, a memoir of recovery and discovery, is now available on Amazon.

a little bit of god

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For 35 years, give or take, I have been writing about my life as an ongoing process of recovery from childhood abuse. I didn’t know if I would ever finish it, or ever publish it, but when my mother died 18 months ago, the chapter I began writing about her death seemed to be an obvious conclusion. Publishing the book feels like closure. And friends who read the manuscript argued that others whose lives have been altered by harmful childhoods might find my story helpful. So here it is.

The Ebook is available for pre-order now until June 27. The paperback will also be released on June 27. Type my “other” name, “felicia klingenberg” into the Amazon search bar to find the listing.

I will post excerpts from the book here between now and June 27 to give you a better sense of whether you’d like to read it :)

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In her 2022 book, Cannibal Capitalism, political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues that Marx was wrong to regard capitalism as merely an economic system. It is, she writes, an institutionalized society-wide System.

The economic aspect is just the front face of it – in the background lie the four “inputs” to the economic system. These are the social/reproductive, the ecological, the political, and the imperialist core/subjugated outlier paradigm. All of these “inputs” are actually zones which exist within any civilization. All intersect with the economic front face, but within capitalism, all are unacknowledged and disavowed – even as they are cannibalized by the capitalists of the economic zone. Hence they exist in tension with economics, predictably and regularly needing to be realigned to keep the whole civilization running.

She points out that the covid pandemic , just fading as the book was published, had “revealed capitalism’s structural contradictions for all to see: capital’s inherent drive to cannibalize nature, up to the very brink of planetary conflagration; to divert our capacities away from the truly essential work of social reproduction; to eviscerate public power to the point where it cannot solve the problems the system generates; to feed off the ever-decreasing wealth and health of racialized people; to not only exploit but also expropriate the working class. We could not ask for a better lesson in social theory.”

In the book Fraser argues that we have reached another in a long series of crises brought about by this cannibalism, and that this time the crisis is epochal and threatens all civilization.

She doesn’t have a solution, only the belief that the capitalism system that prioritizes economics must be replaced. I argued this myself in my last article and suggested that it can only be replaced by re-placing women at the centre. Another way to put that is to use Fraser’s term, and advocate that the social/reproductive zone of human society, which Fraser notes is largely occupied and run by women, be prioritized.

The capitalist system has always refused to require the financial/economic zone of society to pay for its maintenance – it refuses to pay for the maintenance of people as people, as citizens, as workers or as consumers. And that is largely because capitalism has relegated the social/reproductive to a side ally, away from the thoroughfare where males still dominate, the traffic lanes where money circulates. The public world and the private world, men have decreed. One belongs to women and should best be seen and not heard, and the other, the important one, belongs to men.

In a similar way the world’s financiers choose to regard nature from a distance, as a site where the natural resources necessary for profit-making production can be dug up or harvested (preferably for free), and another site where the waste resulting from that production can be dumped (again for free).

No society can prioritize economic interest – still largely coded masculine -- at the expense of the interests of the other zones. Social constructions, whether tribes or industrial nation states, exist to support reproduction, the continuance of the species, and that means that the needs of the social reproductive zone – even though it’s still largely coded feminine -- must occupy the dominant position.

Capitalism organizes society around the well-being of males. It makes no sense. Male-dominated systems, patriarchies, fail because they turn the tables on the natural order.

The capitalist patriarchy is failing so catastrophically now because the financial zone has all but consumed the ecological zone, the social zone and the political zone. Ecologically we are on the verge of making large portions of the planet uninhabitable; socially we are in all out wars of men against women, religion against religion, ethnicity against ethnicity, value against value; politically the elite profiteers of the world claim their “stakeholders” can replace voters and hold elected politicians in their pockets.

Now some prominent men are growing alarmed over falling birth rates. Why? Because the economic zone requires growth, which requires both workers and consumers be constantly replenished. Yet the planet’s health would benefit from a reduction in the human population. It looks like we can choose money or a habitable world. Which will it be?

Evolutionary psychologists and fertility experts are hard at work trying to figure out why birthrates are falling. This means they have to address the question of why women aren’t having children. Norwegian author Mads Larsen, who specializes in human mating ideologies, recently spoke to podcaster Chris Williamson about it.

Larsen identifies two “bottlenecks” to reproduction: finding suitable partners and deciding to have children in environments where women’s equality is a high priority. (Reproduction is higher in countries where women are not regarded as equal to men). Where women are empowered and can choose their own partners, they are choosey enough to pick high quality men who share their values, including monogamy. In Norway, women consistently complain that men are not good enough to trade in the perfectly happy lives they can have as single women.

Yet Larsen dismisses the reasons Norwegian women give for rejecting men as “minutiae” as well as the idea that maybe the solution requires men to get better. It is just as unfair to tell men as a group to improve themselves as to tell an entire ethnic group to get better he says. After enumerating all the ways that women are supported in Norway, he concludes that merely giving women more money to have children doesn’t work. It’s an intractable problem that the freer and more empowered women are, the less they want to pair up with men. Even more puzzling to him is the fact that surveys show women typically aren’t concerned about the falling birth rates.

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(Evolutionary psychologists might want to consider that the deepest feminine instinct might be, not kindness, but the refusal to procreate when the environment seems toxic to the continuance of life.)

What’s missing from the conversation (aside from a woman), what neither man brings up, is the single most important thing that has debased men as a group – inexhaustible access to violent woman-hating pornography. This is what has turned up the heat in the war between men and women. It is making life increasingly unpleasant for women who face increasing rates of femicide and violence. It has led to men even usurping womanhood in a fetishistic ploy to gain entrance to all women’s private spaces, to colonize the social/reproductive sphere in such a way as to destroy it. And to claim that women’s increased presence and power in the economic zone justifies it.

We need only look at South Korea’s 4B movement for a vivid example of women shouting NO to marriage, dating, sex and childbirth. Sakshi Deshmukh reports in a Harpers Bazaar India article that in South Korea “digital sex crimes were on the rise, with hidden cameras and AI-generated deepfake pornography disproportionately targeting young women.” It was a femicide “in which a man killed a woman in the restroom of a Seoul karaoke bar and later testified he did it because she had ignored him all his life” that kicked off the movement, according to DW.com. Larsen predicts that in South Korea, in three generations, only four people will be alive where there are currently 100.

Fraser distinguishes between exploitation and expropriation as she describes the way the financiers of the economic zone use the inputs of the other four zones. To pay workers a wage that can’t sustain them is to exploit them; to forcibly enslave them is to expropriate them. For generations men have exploited women in the social/reproductive zone. As men enter that zone pretending to be women, speaking on behalf of women, dominating discussions and reducing actual women to menstruators and cervix-havers, it should be clear that they have moved beyond exploitation to expropriation.

We should note how elite capitalists are dealing the impending ecological disaster. Having exploited and expropriated nature they are now looking to move people out of the wasteland they have created. Some of the most elite financiers are plotting to move people out of the physical world entirely, to upload human consciousness to the cloud. Others are calculating how to move humanity onto satellites ringing the planet, or onto another planet entirely. These are their visions, no doubt taken from virtual reality games, of how to solve the environmental problem they have created.

If men succeed in expropriating the social/reproductive realm to the point of laying it to waste, how will they deal with women? We’re already seeing what they’re doing. First they’re promoting surrogacy, exploiting women’s desire to be kind to persuade young women to undergo harmful medical procedures to harvest their eggs. They’re paying women in poorer countries to gestate fetuses that are not genetically related to them – to avoid any bonding between surrogate mother and child. They’re conducting laboratory experiments in human cloning, in creating eggs from stem cells, they’re imagining growing babies “ex vivo” (outside the body), they’re giving or selling babies to men, who are praised for “chestfeeding” them.

Some of these experiments exploit women, but others expropriate reproduction, eliminating women entirely. And, although Larsen swears that Norway will never give up its egalitarian mores to force women to reproduce, women know that men still do not accept a woman’s “no.” If their attempts to reproduce without women fail (and heaven help us if they don’t fail) and women refuse to procreate, we can ultimately expect men to enforce their demands for growth.

In South Korea the government has already spent more than 150 billion to persuade Korean women to have children, without acknowledging that money can’t solve the gender war. Korean men are responding as so many men do to women’s complaints— not with self-analysis but with resentment. In fact they are growing so resentful of women they elected a president who promised to eliminate the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Coercive measures have begun.

What if they experimented instead with shutting off all access to porn for, say, ten years as an experiment? Would men become again the kind of people women would be willing to set up house with? Would the social/reproductive zone become a nurturing and safe place for children?

We have to ask what men want most – isolated but unlimited masturbation to porn imagery, or emotional and sexual intimacy with a living, free woman? I have a feeling that our continued existence as a species may depend on how men answer that.

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I haven’t paid much attention to the field of economics, what Yuval Harari calls the first “universal order” that humankind created. Taking care of my own finances was enough of a chore. Yet in this new war that men are waging against women, against nature, and against our democracies, which also seems to be universal, I am having to learn whole new subject matters. We are fighting a multi-pronged enemy. One of its names is Capitalism.

I’ve had a bias against it since I first entered university, but it was an unexamined gut reaction more than anything. To me it was just so … male. Men chased money and women did more interesting, creative things.

It didn’t escape me, though, that left-wing anti-capitalism was also all about the men. One couldn’t be alive and breathing even in the prosperous post world war west without having been exposed to the ruinous horror of Soviet-style communism and the grim desolation of Maoism. In America women left the sexist misogyny of left-wing movements in droves in the 1960’s to create the Women’s Liberation Movement.

So while I am questioning the basis, function and utility of Capitalism,  I’m not under any delusions about communist alternatives. True communism – a system where the collective makes economic as well as social decisions and reaps the consequences together – is incompatible with patriarchy, which requires a “ladder of success”.

Patriarchy is the unacknowledged totalitarianism that has eaten the ideals of communalism, aka community. Capitalism is the glove it wears in the west, but I do wonder if there is any other kind of economic order with fewer downsides than broken bodies at the bottom of a status and wealth hierarchy. Has anyone noticed yet that Capitalism is not compatible with democracy?

Another word for capitalism is usury, which is the lending of money at interest. Money that’s lent at interest is called capital – to distinguish it from money that’s used simply to buy things. Karl Marx pointed that out, but he quoted Aristotle who had pointed it out a few thousand years earlier. Most of us have money, at least enough to pay for shelter, food and clothing. Only some people have capital, which is money left over that you can invest in something that might provide you with a profit.

It might surprise some people that it was illegal in the west’s early form of Christendom.

The laws of Moses, sacred to both Jews and Christians, had this to say about lending for the sake of acquiring more money than you lent:

“If any of your kin fall into difficulty and become dependent on your, you shall support them …Do not take interest in advance or otherwise make a profit from them” (Leviticus 25:35-6).

“You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent” (Deuteronomy 23:19).

Christians who might have wanted to claim the rights of non-Jews to charge interest were admonished by Jesus to “lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35). In one of his few recorded fits of anger Jesus threw the moneylenders out of the temple.

As the AI helping in my internet search helpfully noted, the church’s ban on lending for profit prevented the establishment of credit systems and may have delayed economic development. No shit Sherlock. What we have to investigate is, what does “development” mean?

Usury is also forbidden in Islam. I lived in Iran for a short period where I discovered that when people buy houses or apartments there, they pay cash up front. Housing prices in Tehran at that time were relatively on par with prices in Canadian cities. How did they do it?

I would like to ask that question in a more abstract way: what would our world look like if money had never been transformed into capital, if people who had more than they needed lent it without interest? If acts of kindness or mutual benefit were not transformed into financial transactions?

Capitalism, then, is usury sanitized and regulated. The industrial revolution could not have happened without it. Nothing that western civilization has created could have happened without huge amounts of capital. Western civilization itself rests on a foundation of capital.

And what is the problem with capital?

It should be obvious, as it’s not hidden. Capitalism, involving more money coming in than had gone out, is all about growth. You “grow your money” when you invest it. We constantly hear financial analysts discussing “economic growth.” Has the GDP grown this year? Has the economy grown? If the answer is yes, all is well.

For years after the end of the last world war, industrial growth was spectacular.  In the 1970s that growth slowed. Instead of creating new industries, the system consolidated. And we saw the true modus operandi of capitalism, which is not competition but monopolization.

As globalism and neo-liberalism have increasingly shown us that Capitalism works by sucking everything that’s not nailed down in the world into one giant maw, it is also showing us that there is a looming problem, the growth that capitalism needs has just about overtaken the host – the workers and consumers -- that this growth feeds on. Deprive a cancer, or a parasite, or even a beneficial protein of fuel and it will shrivel up and die.

Capitalism requires things to invest in. It needs the introduction of new products, factories to produce them, workers to operate the machinery of production, consumers to buy the goods produced.

The world has a glut of things.

 Economists noted this in the last decade of the 20^th century but then the tech revolution of the aughts created whole new industries. The mobile phone became the smart phone,  dial-up internet became wired, became wireless. Plugged in headphones became earbuds, became wireless earbuds. Microchips shrank and television screens ballooned. And that’s just to mention a few adult toys.

That communications-centred tech industry has just about run its course. And the arc of invention is leaning to biotechnology and artificial “intelligence”.  Like so many other human (I should say “male”) inventions, biotech – the merging of natural beings and manufactured objects -- promises heaven. Who can complain about artificial limbs that can be moved merely by thought? How about animal hearts that can be modified to serve as replacements for human ones? The human body is so subject to illness, injury and defect that anyone might ask if it might not be better to replace it all with silicone and microchips. Wouldn’t it? The techprenuers are drawing up the blueprints already. When it does, hell will have arrived.

Those of us fighting for organic reality, including the reality that humans come in two sexes, need to realize that the problem is not just one entrepreneur, say a pharmaceutical manufacturer, willingly selling a product, say Lupron, to a child to permanently stunt his development – the problem is that entirely new industries are required to keep capital circulating, to keep it growing. Capital without a place to invest is just money.

This is why whole governments are pushing gender ideology on their citizens – not to protect the rights of a few individuals who’ve been tricked into believing they can become the sex they’re not, either by invasive drugs and surgeries, or just by saying the magic words. That is why ILGA has sent scouts into every country on the globe documenting the legal situation of “transgender people”, preparing the legal challenges to implement all the demands of the Yogyakarta Principles, why the WHO and EU are carrying the battle lines forward, why laws are being enacted in country after country making dissent from gender ideology illegal. It’s why there must be no exceptions, not in sports, not in prisons, not in rape crisis centres. It’s why the littlest children have to be led to believe only their gender id matters, and their sexed bodies are irrelevant.

And this is the problem with Capitalism as it has metastasized. It is cannibalizing the people it relies on to be workers and consumers. We are all that’s left as raw material.

And it’s why we have to find another economic system. Capitalism has to be replaced before it replaces us.

We’d better start thinking of alternatives.

Who better than women to take the lead? Men squandering their intellectual capital on computer games and porn are simply not capable of imagining an engaging natural world anymore.

Men have themselves been stunted by their need to justify their lives in ways that women don’t. As the less important sex, they justify their lives in three interrelated ways: war, games and invention. Games are necessary preparations for war and inventions are necessary to stay ahead of the enemy. Often the inventions are useless – who needs home theatres and video games? And sometimes they are destructive. But this is how men have wrested control of humanity away from women, how they have centred themselves and even succeeded in downgrading women out of humanity entirely. Women, of course, don’t need to justify their existence. In addition to being able to do everything the other humans, the non-women, can do, women create the next generation.

Maybe it’s the lack of need to justify their lives that makes women less aggressive and self-assertive than men.  Maybe the male need to constantly prove his worth is something for the evolutionary psychologists to consider. In that case they should view all male inventions from that perspective and begin a process to evaluate them in terms of how beneficial they are to women and children, who are the core of any society. Maybe everything that men do should be thus evaluated. Does war serve women and children? Does a nuclear bomb serve women and children? Does sterilization and castration of children serve women and children? How about gestating babies in plastic jars?

It is the job of women who have learned again to centre themselves and children to answer these questions. Would it be so bad if women were the overseers of everything men wanted to do?

Elon Musk thinks people need to colonize Mars to save civilization. I think his imagination has been stunted by the video games he plays. Imagine if all the money he spends on a boy’s wet dream went to revitalizing this planet and the creatures who live on it. Would you rather live in a climate-controlled glass bubble on a barren red rock, or in the environment we evolved in – lush with plants and animals, oxygen-rich breezes and cleansing rains?

Skin is the largest of our organs. The experiences that make us human are all mediated through it. It is the site at which end-stage capitalism has begun to devour us. And maybe so many are willing because they are already living in conditions that deprive the skin of contact with anything but indoor air, indoor light. Nothing to make it tingle.

Alternatives to an economic system that privileges the demands of capital must exist. Some people are already considering the idea of a universal livable (or basic) income. Not welfare, but dividends payable to the humans without whom money cannot circulate.

What sorts of societies would be created if adults could prioritize the things that would make civilization welcome and safe for women and children, and pleasant for men too? People -- both women and men -- want purpose and meaning and we all have so much potential that is not used in the meaningless jobs so many of us have. Really, is there meaning in selling shoddy clothing to women whose closets are already full? In selling nutrient-free food to people too overworked and poor to cook a bowl of stew?

A society could prioritize emotional and psychological and social well-being rather than financial status. Imagine if people devoted their time to activities they felt passionate about, or that served others in real ways, if children were taught to search for and develop their unique interests and talents, to create community at the same time as they sought personal fulfillment through being the best human they could be.

I’m trucking in utopias now I know. Is there any other choice though? We can have the dystopia of mutilated, sterilized eunuch populations and robot “intimacy”. Or we can learn to live again as multi-dimensional beings in a natural world.

It took 2500 years to successfully wrestle humanity away from women and centre men in all its concerns.

Will we need another 2500 years to stop sucking at the man tit of patriarchy?

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I’ve been vaguely uncomfortable with what’s called “allyship” for quite a long time. It’s touted as a good thing. When people without skin in any particular game decide against disinterest in favour of taking a stand, they are typically thought of as noble. They’re standing up for people other than themselves, when they have nothing to gain by it, right?

They understand there’s no such thing as an innocent bystander, that “if you’re not with me, you’re against me.” Right? In the war of life, you can selfishly take care of yourself and your own, or you can be a social justice warrior, fighting on behalf of the vulnerable, the marginalized, the victims.

So far so good. We all want meaningful lives, or at least productive ones. This is particularly true of those whose lives have only begun, who are still tentatively setting out to assault  time and eternity, figuring out how to leave a footprint as they walk toward their own death, which is still so far away they can deny that is their destination. We’re talking about the youth here. Teenagers as we used to say back when I was one.

If they’re not in the grip of despair, they’re in the grip of idealism. Surely there is more to living than what their parents do. Surely the banality of earning a living and raising a family and worrying about upcoming necessities like car repairs and dental appointments is not all there is.

I fear that I have been an idealist myself for most of my life so I understand the impulse to contribute to something Important, something Good, something that Will Make a Difference to Others. Let’s leave the world a better place than we found it, okay?

What I have not done is follow that impulse. And that is because I have smelled danger in it.

Let me tell you a story of something that happened to me when I was a child.

The girls that I hung around with at elementary school were led by a pair of friends. Connie and Diane were athletic country girls. They’d been together since forever, playing on the same softball team, skiing together, probably poring over the Eaton’s catalogue together as they looked for new jackets and shoes every autumn.

Then, in grade eight, they fell out. They fought. Shakespearean-level tragedy ensued as the eight or ten other girls in the gang had to “take sides.” All of them except me chose Diane. That was it for Connie. For a month or so she was an outcast.

But what had the other girls done? In taking a side, they had adopted the role of allies. They had allied themselves with Diane. They were in her corner. What I discovered was that there was no point in discussing the morality or the ethics or even the basic facts of the disagreement between Connie and Diane with any of Diane’s allies. They didn’t ally themselves with Diane because they agreed with her position. Only because they preferred her. Or they had an inchoate sense that she’d been hard done by. Maybe they didn’t like Connie’s tone of voice or demeanor as she entered into a fight with her best friend. Maybe they were moved more by Diane’s stricken face than by Connie’s.

Though I had only the vaguest unsure grasp of what I know today as “conflict resolution strategies,” I did find out you couldn’t persuade any of them to change their minds. That’s because it wasn’t their argument. They didn’t know the fine points of it and it wasn’t up to them anyway to end the dispute. They would stay away from Connie as long as Diane did.

I was troubled then by the knowledge that attempts to persuade were useless. If you can’t argue the merits of a case then all you have left is war – until the principals, the only people with something to lose, resolve their dispute.

Something similar had directly involved me the year before. I was, you might say, an object played as part of a group effort at compromise. I was always an outlier in this gang of girls, hanging on the fringe of it by the grace of, well, Connie. I don’t know why. I can’t say she liked me. But she was good-natured enough not to want to get rid of me.

Anyway some time in the middle of winter another girl in the group, a girl who was jockeying for higher status within it and who might have sensed her star was rising, told Connie and Diane she didn’t like me and would really prefer me not to be part of the gang.

They had a group huddle and then someone, it might have been Connie, approached me as I was heading to their part of the playground and told me the problem. “We’ve decided,” she said kindly “that you can play with us Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, but not Mondays or Tuesdays.” Fair, right? Accommodating both sides. NOT taking sides.

Being excluded from a group because one member of it wanted me excluded didn’t seem right to me then, and it doesn’t seem right now. They should have taken sides, not with me against her, but with righteousness (sorry for the old-fashioned word).

And this is what troubles me about allyship. It’s always about allying with people, whether they’re right or wrong, and ethics, righteousness, morality, whatever word still can serve to describe the Good, the True, the Right, is not part of the equation.

And that is exactly what all Canadian institutions from the federal government down are demanding – they are demanding that everyone within reach of the agents of indoctrination become an ally. To “trans people.” Forty five million of us have to pledge allegiance to 100,815. Not to a just cause – how can there be a just cause when no one knows – or cares – what a “trans person” is? Some people have complied and they form the mob that howls at women and men who protest, who try to drown us out, who fight with the smug self-righteousness of those who remain ignorant of what exactly they’re fighting for.

We’re being told to be allies to an anonymous collection of people that we’re assured are “marginalized” and “vulnerable.” And we are told not to ask questions, not to ask even about the justice of the cause. They name the cause “inclusion” and “diversity”. That’s supposed to be good enough.

Our government could be telling us to be allies to murderers or rapists or aliens, to be allies to people whose values we know nothing. Is inclusion by definition justice? If it is, we have to stop excluding all those types of people currently residing in prisons and jails. Why should thieves, fraudsters, murderers be excluded from society? How dare we judge?

We, the “privileged”, sitting on our high horses, how dare we judge the rabble at our feet? Excuse me, I meant to say how dare we judge those who are different than us, those who don’t have the resources we have?

Soon enough, I suppose, we will be told no actions will be recorded as crimes, no one will be tried or convicted of anything, prisons will be empty and police forces abolished.  Because allyship is about extending goodwill to everybody, irrespective of anything.

Except those who refuse to ally. We refuseniks are the new enemy.

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In the beginning, Hesiod Theogony wrote, God created only men. But when Prometheus stole his fire, Zeus punished the beneficiaries of Prometheus’ theft by creating women. Ever since, men have been forced to co-habit the earth with these “nagging burdens.”

Writing in the 7^th/8^th century BC, Hesiod wasn’t writing at the dawn of patriarchy, but he’s the author  Nancy Tuama begins with in her book, The Less Noble Sex, published in 1993.

Why should we pay attention to a random Greek writing 3000 years ago? People were much more primitive way back then, right? And women have since claimed their rightful place of equality with men so we can stop worrying about ancient myths created by cranky men whose wives said “no” once too often.

Except …

As Tuama shows, men have been teaching each other similar nonsense generation after generation. Hesiod remained in the curriculum and is no doubt still there for philosophy or history students interested in the period.

Maybe Plato (428 – 348 BC) studied his works a few hundred years later? He also posited a world initially without women. Men’s destinies were determined by how they dealt with their emotions and sensations, he wrote. If a man failed to control them, he would be reincarnated after death as a woman. Women were created basically as failed men. Easy to see why people (men) revere Plato as a great thinker.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was more “scientific.” He labelled woman a “monstrosity”, lower on the hierarchical scale of being than the male. Her intellectual faculty is not developed, she is controlled by her desires and passions, and her role in generation of new life is limited to nurturing the soul implanted in her womb by the male semen, he wrote. He’s still taught at universities of course – and is known for his logic and ethics. Oh and hierarchical scales.

Then there was the Judeo-Christian book of Genesis in which women’s inferiority really took off with the story of Eve, created from Adam’s rib. The first century Jewish philosopher, Philo, came to the obvious conclusion that creation from a bone made one inferior to those (men) created from dust. The logic of that may be impenetrable to a layperson.

Churchmen like Augustine in the 4^th century CE and later Thomas Aquinas in the 13^th reiterated and embellished the old saw that women are more sensual and passionate than men. Uncontrollably so, they argued in defiance of their own all too eager erections. And Aquinas also pondered deeply why a woman was created as a helper to Adam. It didn’t make sense and I think both women and men might agree. If God wanted to create a helper for the first man, he should have created more men. Eventually it twigged to Aquinas that God meant women could help men by creating more humans. And so woman’s (sole) place was under her man, getting knocked up.

It was depressing reading Tuama’s book but I soldiered through it on the grounds that it’s better to know the whole truth, even when that truth exposes the blind determination of men in the pursuit of a pretty much exclusive place in the human world.

Tuama takes us right up to the second half of the 20^th century – oops, I guess that’s a spoiler. Nothing changes but the justifications. Here’s John Calvin, father of most branches of Protestant Christianity, teaching that while men were created in the image of God, women were in the image of God only in “the second degree.” Damn, an image of an image.

Paracelsus, the founder of alchemy, might have said it better. Man is the microcosm of the universe, but women is the microcosm of man. Aren’t we blessed?

Eventually, thanks to better technology, like steam-powered ships, someone like Darwin could develop a theory of evolution based on observations from all around the world. Finally “the science” would settle women’s place on the shelf right there beside men. Except it didn’t. Darwin noticed that sexual differentiation increased as animals evolved. The greater the difference between the sexes, the more evolved the species.

The Victorian society that birthed Darwin was one of culturally prescribed major difference between the sexes, especially among the middle classes and higher. Interesting that this theory perfectly mirrored his culture and validated the imperialist countries’ belief in their superiority.

He found a nice “evolutionary” answer to explain men’s superiority over women too. Because female humans must expend so much of their energy on fetal development, they have little left over for developmental variations – those accidents that enabled evolutionary change.

Since natural selection required men to maintain themselves and their families, men were programmed to increase their mental powers. (Evidently pre-historic “cavemen” had already sorted themselves into nuclear families with stay-at-home wives.) Thus human females were less evolved than males. In fact, he proposed, women fell on the hierarchical scale somewhere between men and children. You can see his debt to Aristotle.

Following Darwin, Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931) who founded social psychology, wrote:

“All the psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women … recognize they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and are much closer to children and savages than to civilized adult males.”

Note that this was a mere 100 years ago -- that a man generally regarded as intelligent and educated could arrive at such a conclusion  and publicize it without fear of ridicule. And teach it to another generation or two of young men (women still being mostly excluded from higher education).

In case you’re wondering why I’m reviewing the history of male perceptions of women transmitted down through the centuries, it’s because  when second wave feminists claimed women were men’s equal, this is the position they were arguing against. That men were human and women were not is the difference between male and female that feminists claimed did not exist.

In the late 19^th century the growing feminist movement argued that any inequalities between the abilities of the sexes resulted from socialization and education. That was the beginning of women “talking back” to the male intellectual elite.

Men countered with a theory of womb-brain opposition. If a woman channelled energy to her brain, it would drain necessary energy away from her womb, they said. Clearly the threat was not just to the individual woman foolish enough to pursue education, it was a threat to the entire human race. Men had to do everything possible to prevent women from destroying humanity. Naturally.

Then Freud introduced Europe to a new field of psychiatry. Initially providing “talk therapy” to young women traumatized by incest,  he was himself traumatized by the knowledge he was uncovering about his friends and peers. He turned his attention to the fiction of the oedipal complex, which made women morally deficient because they suffered from lack of psychological development. The oedipal complex led to the creation of the superego in boys, allowing them to transcend subjectivity for the objective realm of morality and justice.

In contrast, the female oedipal stage leads to passivity, narcissism, vanity, a need to be loved, envy, a lesser ability to sublimate the instincts. Since girls can’t rise above their passions and become moral, they must be raised to suppress their otherwise rampant sexuality. Same old, right?

To sum up, for Freud, the male is the ideal human, the female is an incomplete male. Anyone who has ever watched a Woody Allen film knows that Freud was huge in America through at least the 1970s. Now we’re talking less than 50 years since men were educating each other about women’s deficiencies.

In the views of male intellectuals over thousands of years, woman lacked something essential to humanity. She lacked a superego, she lacked self-control, she lacked creative power, she lacked a soul, she lacked rational intelligence.

These claims have been a massive psyop meant to exclude girls and women from the human race.

When the current crop of male influencers claim that women’s repudiation of difference between women and men led to transgenderism, to men believing they could be women, to interchangeability of the sexes, we should note their duplicity. To claim to be human is not to claim men and women are interchangeable. This is simply another way of excluding women. If women are human, then men can be women. Er, no. Logic??

Today we can see both the right and the left struggling mightily to pretend women don’t exist. For the right, women are just functions and roles, all of which are meant to serve men. For the left, women are “sex characteristics”, meaning bodily parts and bodily functions. Ergo, we are menstruators, cervix-havers, the lovely language of dehumanization that we’re being forced to tolerate.

What’s really chilling is that the vast industry of transhumanism, already in full gear developing substitute body parts and cultivating synthetic biomaterial in Petrie dishes, is also driven by men who at some level don’t believe women are human, or if they are, they’re just men with different body parts. Eliminating the body parts is just as cost-effective in humans as in any other machinery. Streamline the product, increase the profit. No need for two sexes at all. Just men.

What we need to realize – and this is only possible if we have access to women’s scholarship – is that the claiming of humanity for men only has been the plan right from the start.  Not just the plan, the blueprint of patriarchy from its inception and imposition wherever humans lived.

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Merlin Stone wrote in her 1976 book, When God Was a Woman, that once upon a time before history, waves of brutal men descended from northern regions into the settlements around the Mediterranean where women lived on equal footing with men, running their own businesses, passing their property down to their daughters in matrilineal patterns.

The highest God in all those areas was the creator mother god, known by many names in the many locales where she was worshiped. Inanna, Ishtar, Isis, Cybele and other of her names appear in tablets going back 40,000 years. Was it a coincidence that in all those same locales the act of sex was held sacred, that it was women who chose with whom to mate, and when?

The northern tribes ripped this highest god away from women, forcing the worship of male deities, calling the worship of the maternal creator blasphemy.

Whatever we may think of gods, they are above all symbols of the meaning we give to our own lives. To hold a god up is to hold up an image of ourselves in a universal ideal. In order to enslave a free people you need to strip them of their god, of that which gives them meaning in their own eyes. That’s what these male invaders did to the women in the settlements.

And we are still without a god we can call our own. Without a god of our own to look up to, to see ourselves reflected in, to aspire to, we don’t know who we are. We still don’t know. Without a god as our model we have no basis on which to esteem ourselves. And so we don’t – not collectively as a class. Without a god to accept us and challenge us, we have nothing to aspire to.

Men have made us godless women and through Christianity replaced our god with the passive, vapid Mary who functioned merely as a channel to guide Father into Son. We have been told for millenia to model ourselves on her, to imitate her passive helplessness, creatively named “mercy”. That the height of a woman’s power was on her knees, begging Father to #bekind.

The creator mother god was both creator and destroyer, a fierce maintainer of all living things. To mirror her, to be in her image, doesn’t require all individual women to be mothers, just to know ourselves as archetypal mothers of all things, defenders of all life, fierce destroyers of all that threatens and corrupts life.

Of course I’m not saying that women’s future rests in any god’s hands, or requires that we believe that god/s exist. We will never know whether there is anything divine in the universe, so maybe we should stop obsessing on that question, and simply try to live as though divinity does exist. As though we have it within us.

Do we deserve, at this end stage of male-dominated civilization, when men have abandoned their own gods to declare themselves god, do we women deserve to live? As scientists experiment with external gestation pouches – to unburden women of the labours of procreation, of course – we have to ask if there is some purpose to male and female that transcends procreation.  This is a question we will have to answer soon.

I think there must be men, millions of them probably, who are happy they get to share their lives with living human women, different than them in some ways, maddening in their own self-will at times, disagreeing with them at times, showing a different perspective, refusing to cooperate sometimes, but able to bestow what only they can bestow – love.

If this is what you want, men, then its time for you to step up, to fight against the desexing of women and children, the replacement of genuine female subjects, with something like a wifebot, who’ll provide you with whatever you want -- except companionship.

Cover it with a burqa and that will end the culture clash between fundamentalist Muslim man and post-Christian enlightenment man.

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UPDATED version.

Back in 1989 when she was still a lesbian and a young PhD student at the University of Washington, about to begin her teaching career at the University of Victoria, Holly Devor picked up a contract to teach inmates at a men’s prison. Most of them were convicted sex offenders. She enjoyed the experience, and described how she “made it a priority that they understand how feminist propositions offer them both increased adaptability in a changing world and increased freedom from the restrictions of their own gender roles” (Abbotsford News, Sept. 13, 1989).

She told the newspaper that “We raise men in our society to be ignorant of the lives of women” and “men have few legitimately masculine ways to learn to understand women and sexual offenses are one result of that state of affairs. I believe that much masculine hatred and fear of women comes from men’s need of feminine acceptance and their concomitant vulnerability to rejection by women.” She concluded that men had to learn to be more responsible for their own emotional lives.

Jump forward to 2003 and Devor (now renamed Aaron) is described by Victoria Times Colonist columnist and Globe and Mail correspondent Vivian Smith as “ happy to conform to a conservative image more typical of men who run $3-million enterprises: Striding into his spare, elegant office, Mr. Devor projects confidence and control. He wears a dark grey suit and black tie with a blue shirt just over-large enough to hide any shape that might suggest he was once a woman... In the manner of men used to commanding space, even at 5-feet-6, his hand gestures are expansive, the right leg crosses the left widely when he sits, he shrugs his shoulders loosely. Aaron Devor is a man in full, if not in anatomy.

This description is stunningly sexist – so much so that we have to wonder what cave Smith was sleeping in through the 80s and 90s, those decades in which women thundered into Canadian universities to occupy as many seats as men, led men in starting up businesses, and entered all the professions. But maybe Devor herself was projecting this sexist image for all she was worth. Afterall she was claiming to be a man based on masculine stereotypes like these. Maybe Smith was just overwhelmed by the Devor’s “will to power.”

Screenshot: Aaron Devor

Leaving aside the sexism, we have to wonder what changed for Devor in the intervening 14 years – aside from getting married (to another woman) and converting to Judaism.

In 1995 she expressed approval of cross-dressing, calling it “healthy”. When it is suppressed, “the result is male shame”. By this time, she would rather see “masculine” and “feminine” as innate genders, with cross dressers expressing both genders together, rather than look for at cross-dressing as a symptom of a psychological disorder (Van Sun, Aug 19, 1995).

In 1996 Devor described pedophiles as “ideal teachers” because they are people who “understand children, who know what children want, who know how to relate to them on their own level” (Victoria Times Colonist Sept. 7, 1996). She comes close to blaming their victims when she says they are often needy children who may give in to some adult demands to get the love and attention they crave.

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By 1997 Devor was weighing in on the medical treatment of people born with ambiguous genitalia. She deplored the practice of surgically altering such children based on the size of the phallus, to make them more clearly male or female.  She was already claiming that scientists were confronting the idea that “there can be more than two sexes, more than two genders.” “What we should celebrate,” she said “is that there is a whole spectrum of human diversity – a splendor of genders, a rainbow of genders” (Vancouver Sun, April 7, 1997).

In these comments over a span of a few years, Devor is following what is becoming a discernable and predictable path for gender ideologists. It involves approving of  (male) sexual kink, sympathizing with pedophiles, and extrapolating from people with disorders of sexual development to the general population.

She’s also on record that year [1997] for not wanting to eliminate masculine and feminine gender roles, but only to add a lot of other options (Times Colonist Jan 10, 1997) .“I have become convinced that not only can men and women live in bodies of any sex but that we go against reality when we insist there are only two sexes and two genders,” she said in a public lecture at the University of Victoria.

Perhaps her change of position is best exemplified by the two books she wrote prior to “becoming a man”.   In 1989 Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality compiled the experiences of 25 women who were regularly mistaken for men.  Then In 1997 FTM –Female to Male Transsexuals in Society consisted of interviews with 45 trans men – women who had mistaken themselves for men. Only the latter has been reprinted (in 2014).

In 1999 Devor went to work for the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association -- which later became the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) -- as coauthor of its standards of care (SOC). She has continued her association ever since, and also joined the research committee of the Canadian Professional Association for Transgender Health (CPATH) in 2014.

Lisa MacRichards has written extensively on WPATH. In her article for Canadian Gender Report in 2019, predating the release of the Mia Hughes report on the WPATH Files by five years,  she wrote:

WPATH is not the typical professional organization that develops clinical practice guidelines.  WPATH is a hybrid professional and activist organization, where activists have become voting members and have served as president. In fact, it can be argued that WPATH is activist-led rather than evidence-led, as witnessed at their conferences. Their guidelines are just following what is being performed in gender clinics based on informed consent.

Not only that, but members of the WPATH SOC Committee revealed massive conflicts of interests.

When looking at the WPATH committee who worked on the current SOC document [2011], a cursory examination of the members reveals that every one of the members have significant COIs.  All of them either receive income based on recommendations in the guidelines, work at clinics or universities who receive funds from advocacy groups, foundations, or pharmaceutical companies who heavily favour a certain treatment paradigm, or have received grants and published papers or research in transgender care.

As Chair of Transgender Studies and owner of the Transgender  Archives, Devor’s  career is dependent on a large and growing population of “transgender” people. The conflict of interest is obvious.

Jennifer (James) Pritzker

WPATH is funded by prominent trans activist Jennifer (James) Pritzker, a member of the powerful and influential American family of billionaires and politicians that has been promoting and funding the gender industry for several years. Jennifer Bilek has written exhaustively of the multiple recipients of their largesse across the US and in Canada.

Thus, already in Pritzker’s employ since 1999 and immersed in gender ideology through her work with WPATH, Devor finally petitioned her employer, the University of Victoria (UVic), to create a Chair of Transgender Studies. She had a million dollars in her back pocket to seal the deal. The media reported:

 The position emerged largely from the efforts of Devor himself [sic]. As a gender non-conforming person, he has always been interested in gender. “I saw the need for [the position],” he  said. “I set out to make it happen . . . [and put] a proposal before the Senate and the Board of Governors.”

Devor said that UVic proved to be very welcoming and supportive of the proposal for a new Chair, and he faced no trouble while trying to establish this position. “When [the proposal] came before the Senate [on Oct. 2 last year] . . . the vote went through unanimously in support. And there was a very big round of applause, followed by [President Jamie Cassels] making some lovely comments . . . You couldn’t get a better experience.”

The chair was funded by Pritzker’s Tawani Foundation, to the tune of $1 million, with a further million available through matching funds. With that kind of money on offer, it’s not surprising UVic was pleased.

In 2016 Devor was named the first Chair in Transgender Studies. Sitting beside her at the official opening ceremony was her near neighbour, New Democratic Party (NDP) Member of Parliament (MP) Randall Garrison, architect of Bill C16, which added gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act the following year.

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One of the regular marketing activities of the chair is hosting a biennial Moving Trans History Forward (MTHF) conference which has been running since 2014. Devor hired Martine Rothblatt, millionaire trans-identified man and proponent of transhumanism as her featured speaker in 2016, and followed that up by awarding him an honorary degree in 2019.

Transgenderism is logically seen as a stepping stone to transhumanism, in which the biological will be merged with the synthetic. Rothblatt writes about human brains eventually being housed in robotic bodies. With transgender ideology we are encouraged to dissociate from our bodies and see them as products we are free to cut up as we wish.

The Chair’s website says its work is fostering research and scholarship in Transgender Studies

• Encouraging both existing and new scholars to pursue careers in Transgender Studies and building local, national and international linkages with others working in Transgender Studies

• Hosting visiting academic and community scholars

• Proactive community outreach and knowledge mobilization

• Teaching and mentoring related to the area of Transgender Studies

• Assisting faculty to integrate Transgender Studies content into their courses

• Subject matter expert of the Transgender Archives

• Fundraising in support of the Chair in Transgender Studies and the Transgender Archives

In other words, if the money flowing north across the Canada/US border can be visualized as a pipeline, Devor  functions as a shower head, watering the gender ideology field in Canada through community outreach, fundraising, propaganda and networking. Her CV, available online, details media appearances all over the country. Even the tiniest references to her are included. Through the MTHF conferences, the Youth Panels and the scholarships and fellowships in particular, she is grooming the next generation of Canadian trans+ leaders.

 And so, step-by-step, credibility and authority are manufactured. A woman working for a lobby group calling itself a medical association, funded by a man who calls himself a woman and is financially invested in the medical equipment sector, is eventually handed a million dollars by the same man to get set up as a highly prestigious chair at a university – instant credibility.

Devor has attracted substantial government support from Canadian governments on the strength of the credibility created as Chair of Transgender Studies at UVic. Her online CV shows that her average grant amounts jumped from five figures to six in 2014 -- from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), The Vancouver Foundation, The BC Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction (SPDR), the Silver Gummy Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Research & Teaching Grants Received

2020-2025SSHRC Insight Grant Collaborator, “The LGBTQ+ Oral History Digital Collaboratory: 2.0”$303,381.

2020-2023Silver Gummy Foundation Grant. Co-Principle Applicant, “Trans+ People in Forced Labour in Canada.”$197,100.

2020-2022BC Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction Grant.Principal Applicant “Improving labour market participation for Trans+ people.”$200,000 ¹

2020-2021CIHR Operating Grant: COVID-19 May 2020 Rapid Research. Co-Applicant, “The COVID-19Pandemic Among Sexual and Gender Marginalized Populations in Canada: Physical Distancing Impacts,SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence, and Health and Wellness Needs.” $661,542.²

In 2019 she appeared before the senate committee to speak about putting males in women’s prisons. After referencing her experience of 30 years earlier, she speaks of her happiness that men are being placed in women’s prisons. As for the women?

What I hear is that we need to protect women in the prisons — cisgender women in the prisons, non-trans women in the prisons — many of whom have histories of abuse by men, sexual assault by men, and that they will be triggered and fearful if someone comes into the prison as an inmate who appears to them to be a man. I completely agree that we need to take that very seriously, and there are ways to take that seriously without throwing those trans women into a prison where they will be raped and physically assaulted. Trans inmates are no more likely to violate cisgender women in women's prisons than any other people in those prisons, and we have procedures in place to deal with those who do violate. [italics mine]

What she is saying is that women violate each other as much and to the same degree as men violate women. Among all the forms of denial embodied in this statement, Devor ignores former Deputy Commissioner for Women, Kelly Blanchette,[who] reported that of all transfer requests from men’s prisons, 50 percent came from sex offenders who offended as men. 50 percent! This number overrepresents sex offenders who account for 20 percent of the male prison population overall.

After a lifetime of apologizing for men, Devor has at last come to giving them free rights to prey on captive women.

 In 2003, she told Vivian Smith there was only one thing preventing life as a man from being completely happy, and that was : “He [sic] will miss the intimate friendships women have in which they talk about their feelings openly…’That's a big price to pay’." It seems in the intervening years she has learned to stop listening to them.

Devor is arguably among the most prominent gender activists in Canada. Might it be fair to wonder if she was groomed by two “sugar daddies”, Rothblatt and Pritzker, to be a female voice for the gender industry?

The billionaires pushing gender ideology wear their breasts like others wear branded t-shirts – to promote their product, which in this case includes poisonous drugs, hormones and increasing varieties of surgeries to create manufactured “men” and “women”.

Devor’s beard accomplishes pretty much the same thing.

In 2022 Devor’s contract as Chair was renewed for another five years, and she was given an award by the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, another recipient of Pritzker funding. Ho hum – thus the machine keeps churning out certificates of ersatz authority on ersatz identities with very real consequences on the material reality of women and children. All to ensure the very real profits keep rolling in.

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This is a repost of an article originally published in Gender Dissent. It calls attention to the fact that the gender industry is a largely American-led global initiative attempting to convert every country to gender ideology. It uses Canada — Canadian organizations and individuals — in pursuit of this goal.

With the recent creation of the International Trans Fund headed by Torontonian Broden Giambrone, it is becoming clear that the massive American Medical Industrial complex is using Canada as a staging point in its drive to push synthetic sex identities into every country on the planet -- and using women as the principal almsgivers.

The International Trans Fund (ITF) looks suspiciously like it was created by the Arcus Foundation itself, with an origin story that cloaks the reality, and a director who is simply chief almoner, Canadian division, of the Arcus syndicate.

Broden Giambrone

The Arcus Foundation is registered as a philanthropic organization, although it might better be described as the marketing arm of the Stryker Medical Corporation. It is run by Jon Stryker and funded primarily by Stryker Medical.

According to  A Gender Variance Who’s Who, Giambrone was born in 1982 in Toronto of Italian immigrant parents who settled first in the US but moved to Canada to avoid the war in Vietnam.

She completed a BA in Sociology at McGill University, Montréal in 2006.  In 2007 she was part of a “G/B/Q Trans men HIV Prevention Working Group” (now QueerTransmen.org) which wrote the health guide Getting Primed: The Back Pocket Guide for Transmen and the Men Who Dig Them.

She then became a volunteer with the social justice organization OPIRG at York University, Toronto, followed by a stint with Ontario’s Trans Pulse, working on HIV health issues. In 2010 she completed a Master of Public Health at the University of Toronto.

Interviewed by The Toronto Star, she said she became uncomfortable with her body when she entered puberty. She started wrong sex hormones when she was 22 and had surgery a few years later. She claims a synthetic male identity.

In 2011 she went to Dublin where she became CEO of the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI) until 2017. According to its website, she was instrumental in transforming a volunteer-run organization into a professional body, and in getting the Gender Recognition Act passed through parliament there in 2015.

Then, in 2017 the ITF was calved from the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, with Giambrone named director, and TENI’s Chairperson, Sara R Phillips, named treasurer. The company is headquartered in Toronto. Its website states:

The International Trans Fund (ITF) is a trans activist and funder-led initiative that aims to increase the capacity of trans movements globally to self-organize and advocate for trans people’s rights, self- determination, and wellbeing. The ITF works to mobilize sustainable resources to help build strong, trans-led movements and collective action, and to address and eliminate funding gaps impacting trans groups across the globe.

Giambrone is the “trans activist” parachuting millions of dollars from primarily American funders into small countries to stimulate -- and simulate -- local grassroots organizations who lobby their governments for justice. The synthetic sex industry is no longer hiding the fact that this is a top-down initiative seeding trans activism is tiny countries throughout Asia, Africa and central and south America.

Exactly what relationship exists between Giambrone’s ITF and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice is murky. The Astraea Lesbian Foundation was founded in 1977, and by 1996 had morphed into an “LGBTI” organization. In 2012 it was the recipient of the US government’s first significant financial contribution to international “LGBTI rights” and has been receiving Arcus funding since 2007 as well as regular donations from George Soros’ Open Societies Foundation (OSF). The Gender Critical Woman blog has further information on them.

The Astraea Lesbian Foundation received a half million dollar grant from Arcus in 2016 for the new ITF organization. But in 2018 the OSF again gave the Astrea Lesbian society $150,000 to support the ITF. This was the same year that Arcus gave the ITF $500,000 directly.

In one of its grants, Arcus described the ITF as part of a Global Trans Initiative. The  Global Trans Initiative (GTI) was a five-year initiative begun in 2015 and funded by Arcus and the NoVo foundation, which is part of the NoVo Nordisk pharmaceutical company of Denmark. According to the Arcus website:

In addition to Arcus’ own increased level of grantmaking to trans organizations, the Global Trans Initiative committed at least $20 million in trans-related funding—a goal it surpassed. The NoVo Foundation gave $1.125 million to the Fund for Trans Generations at Borealis Philanthropy. The International Trans Fund also launched during this period with $4.5 million from other funding partners, including philanthropist Mackenzie Scott.

Mackenzie Scott is the divorced wife of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who has publicly vowed to divest herself of $45 million USD.

In 2019 Arcus donated another $500,000 and in 2020 $1 million spread over two years.

In 2017 the ITF funnelled money from its western donors to 29 organizations in 23 countries. By 2021 it was funding 50 groups in 41 countries, from Russia to Ecuador, Tajikistan to Burundi, Mongolia to Paraguay.

Giambroni and ILGA

In 2016 the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) interviewed Giambrone for its 2017 Trans Legal Mapping Report, produced by the ILGA World Trans Secretariat. The purpose of the report was to “draw attention to how laws in different countries recognise the rights of trans people to change their identity markers on official documents.”

Speaking about the success of TENI in Ireland, she said:

Ultimately, what is the most likely to sway national legislatures is the "hearts and minds" stories (e.g.getting people to share their personal narrative). However, if you are trying to make an advocacy and legal argument (particularly in terms of human rights), it is really helpful to have UN level jurisprudence reinforcing what you are telling the government.

In other words, her advice to “trans” organizations was to deploy the sob stories so prevalent in the mainstream media, and leapfrog over the national government to some putative UN document. Often that document is the Yogyakarta Principles (YP), never signed by any UN agency.

In 2020 ILGA World joined 200 other organizations in something called a Women’s Rights Caucus to create a “Feminist Declaration” meant to supercede the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which was reaffirmed by the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women the same year.

This alternative Feminist Declaration makes the claim that the goals of the trans cult are those of true feminism. In section 14, it demands that governments:

Respect the rights of all individuals to exercise autonomy over their lives, including their sexualities, identities and bodies, desires and pleasures free from all types of discrimination, coercion and violence, and fully realize sexual and reproductive rights, and ensure bodily autonomy, integrity and sovereignty, by taking the following actions:

a. Eliminate all laws and policies that punish or criminalize same-sex intimacy, gender affirmation, abortion, HIV transmission non-disclosure and exposure, or that limit the exercise of bodily autonomy, including laws limiting legal capacity of adolescents, people with disabilities or other groups to provide consent to sex or sexual and reproductive health services [emphasis mine] or laws authorizing non-consensual abortion, sterilization, or contraceptive use;

 b. Put in place affirmative measures to reduce violence, stigma and discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics, [emphasis mine] enact legal protections for LGBTQ, gender non-conforming and intersex people, and take other legal, policy, and educational measures to support individuals to exercise autonomy over their bodies and lives . . .

This is a document that demands everyone be available for sexual use, including those we currently consider unable to give consent due to either immaturity, or intellectual disability. At the same time it demands those same people be available to the synthetic sex industry for body modification drugs and surgeries.

Its anti-discrimination clause uses the language of the Yogyakarta Principles, which replace the two sex categories with gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics. It fails to demand measures to protect women and girls from discrimination.

 It seems significant that, although the website of the Women’s Rights Caucus provides a link to its Feminist Declaration, that link is non-functioning. The only functioning link is on the website of Arc International, the Canadian company that organized the Yogykarta conference and holds the YP.

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Incidentally, ILGA held a world conference last May in Long Beach, California, hosted by the It Gets Better Project. According to the conference program, members were interested in Canada’s Bill C4, the Anti-Conversion Therapy Bill that demands that “affirmation” be the only response to children who are confused about their sex.

Just last year when Bill C4 was being debated, It Gets Better Canada garnered 127,104 votes on a petition in support of the bill.

Dozens of Canadian organizations are members of ILGA. Aside from the expected  LGBTrans+ organizations, they include : the Canadian Union of Public Employees,  the Canadian Labour Congress , Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario , Ontario Public Service Employees Union, Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, Ontario Federation of Labour.

 According to its website, all members must support the aims of ILGA. If the aims of ILGA and of the Women’s Rights Caucus are the same, then these public service institutions support the elimination of all laws regarding who can engage in sexual activity and who can be available to the synthetic sex industry.

Giambrone and the Global Philanthropy Project

In 2020 Giambrone moved to the Global Philanthropy Project (GPP), which is hosted and “fiscally sponsored” by the Astraea Lesbian Foundation – although what exactly happened with the “move” is unclear.

Although her Zoominfo page lists her as leaving the ITF in 2019, Giambrone is still listed on the ITF website as director. The same zoominfo page lists her as a “partner” with the GPP. However, it is the ITF rather than Giambrone who appears on the GPP site, as a member rather than a partner.

The GPP website explains:

Global Philanthropy Project (GPP) is a collaboration of funders and philanthropic advisors working to expand global philanthropic support to advance the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people in the Global South and East. 

Established in 2009, GPP’s 18 member organizations include many of the leading global funders and philanthropic advisors for LGBTI rights.  As the first international cohort of LGBTI funders, GPP is internationally recognized as the primary thought leader and go-to partner for donor coordination around global LGBTI work.

Global Philanthropy Project is organized through a core Executive Committee and three member working groups, which are focused on Government/Multilateral Funding, Individual Donor Funding, and Trans* Funding. GPP is a key source of strategic research and analysis for global LGBTI funders. GPP also plays a central role in convening philanthropists and human rights activists for opportunities to increase knowledge, skills and capacity towards expanding global LGBTI funding. These convening spaces includes donor pre-conferences during regional LGBTI convenings, funder webinars, and report release events.

The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice serves as host and fiscal sponsor of GPP.

The GPP has 22 members, including the Astraea Lesbian Foundation, the International Trans Fund, Arcus, and the Open Societies Foundation.

 It also has a similar number of partners, divided into “donor partners,”  “research partners” and “programmatic partners”. Both member and donor lists contain the “who’s who” of multi-million dollar synthetic sex industry backers.

The GPP is clearly an umbrella organization which shelters a number of organizations that fund each other in complex, multi-layered ways. You can read more about them in the Gender Critical Woman blog here.

The GPP is currently embarked on a propaganda campaign to discredit the growing movement that seeks to protect women’s sex-based rights, and children’s rights to grow up naturally as opposed to surgically and chemically castrated.­­­­

In what seems to be counter-intuitive, the executive director of Elevate Children Funders Group (a GPP partner), Heather Hamilton, and the GPP have formed an alliance to defend against claims gender ideology harms women and children.

In a document incredibly titled “Manufacturing Moral Panic: Weaponizing Children to Undermine Gender Justice and Human Rights,” they warn  their members and partners about the gender critical movement, which they reframe as “gender restrictive,”  calling it the “wide transnational movement of religious groups, politicians, secular researchers and civil society organizations who oppose what they call ‘gender ideology’ , a pejorative term they use to describe efforts to support women’s, LGBTI and sexual and reproductive rights.”

Note that they are now claiming the synthetic sex industry in partnership with the trans cult is the real protector of women’s rights.

The GPP has also formed a “Responding to Anti-Gender Ideology Task Force” whose goal is to:

 strengthen and expand philanthropic support for a robust, coordinated, and well-informed response to “anti-gender ideology” (AGI) forces that transcends and connects across philanthropic sectors. The objectives are to identify and map the progressive philanthropic actors responding to the AGI movement, evaluate the health of that funding ecosystem, and deepen the knowledge, skills, and capacity of progressive philanthropic response through research, public programs, and information-sharing.

These are the people and organizations Giambroni is partnering with, so many of them women or run by women, claiming to be the champions not only of “trans” people, but of women and children, claiming the mantle of feminism.

In 2007 Giambroni told The Star’s reporter she was “passionate about changing society's perception of transgender people but it won't necessarily be his [sic] life's work.” That she is now affiliated with the world’s largest organizations to market gender ideology and synthetic sex identities around the world is testament to the role that women can play when they fall in line behind a men’s rights movement. They are collaborators now, but how long will it be until they find they have been pawns in their own destruction?

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The Yogyakarta Principles continue to be invoked by governments around the world. What are they? Who created them? And why are governments adopting them? Find out in this repost.

In 2008 the Arcus Foundation, which bills itself as an American philanthropic organization,  gave its first large donation to ARC International, a Canadian corporation located in the tourist town of Dartmouth, NS (pop 92,000).

Its first two donations of $198,000 in 2008 and $200,000 in 2009 were both routed through the go-between Tides Foundation. Then in 2013 it gave another $400,000 and in 2017 another $100,000. On both those occasions, the money went directly from Arcus to ARC International.

Canadians might wonder why such large sums of money are being pipelined across the border, to a tiny organization, ostensibly for charitable purposes.

 ARC’s official name is  Allied Rainbow Communities International and it is registered in Canada as a tax-exempt private corporation. Its executive director is Kim Vance Mubanga, who founded ARC in 2003 with John Fisher (now Geneva Director of Human Rights Watch)  to promote “LGBT” rights. Its website states that it:

played a key role in the various phases of the Yogyakarta Principles. We initiated the project, convened a coalition of NGOs to implement it, facilitated meetings of the coalition, worked closely on the preparations for and conduct of the experts’ meeting, worked with partners to successfully launch the Principles, prepared backgrounders and advocacy materials to support regional launch initiatives, developed a website, track the ongoing use of the Principles, are participating in the development of an activists’ guide, and conduct ongoing training and support for organizations using the Principles.

Kim Vance Mubanga     

                                                  John Fisher

The Website also makes clear how the first two donations were used. It states that “2009-2010 was a pivotal period, as we moved into the implementation phase of the UN human rights reform process, and work with NGOs to address the implications of these reforms for LGBT equality rights, build global support for the Yogyakarta Principles, and develop a coordinated strategic vision for advancing these issues through the years ahead.”

This tells us that ARC International is a propaganda and lobbying firm, and that the first two donations financed the propagation of Yogyakarta Principles around the world.

 The Yogyakarta Principles outline a list of rights for homosexuals, lesbians and “trans” people. Created in 2006 by a select group of individuals primarily from non-western countries -- including Botswana, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, South Africa, Thailand and Turkey -- who met in Indonesia specifically because it is a Muslim country, the principles mirror human rights language that the UN has affirmed.

John Fisher and the Irish rapporteur of the Principles, Michael O’Flaherty explained in an explanatory article published by Oxford University Press:

On 26 March 2007, a group of human rights experts launched the
Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of Human Rights Law in
Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (the Yogyakarta
Principles). The Principles are intended as a coherent and comprehensive
identification of the obligation of States to respect, protect and
fulfil the human rights of all persons regardless of their sexual orientation
or gender identity.

The crucial addition The Principles make is to assert the existence of “gender identity”, and this is why they are a problem. There is no scientific basis for the idea that people are born with an innate sense of gender. Many people dispute the idea. And if gender means socially constructed roles and expectations associated with the sexes, which has been the definition for 150 years, then it’s illogical to claim anyone is born with it.

So the Yogyakarta Principles are claiming human rights for something that cannot be scientifically or logically shown to exist. But without the assertion of innate gender identity, there can be no claim that anyone’s gender does not match their sex, thus no transgender identity.

The ARC International website states that the Yogyakarta Principles are “a universal guide to human rights which affirm binding international legal standards with which all States must comply.”

But the principles are not a UN document, and have never been discussed or ratified by any UN body. This is made clear  in the document detailing how they came to be created, available at Outright International Org.  The Wikipedia entry for them also states that “the attempt to make gender identity and sexual orientation new categories of non-discrimination has been repeatedly rejected by the General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council and other UN bodies.  

Thus they are not binding, and have no more weight than any child’s Christmas wish list.

Nevertheless ARC International’s mission, its sole mission, is to spread the document’s influence around the world by targeting top level institutions -- policy makers, institutions, courts, parliaments, constitution makers, law enforcement, justice departments as well as influential NGOs.

The company has been wildly successful in its mission.

The Yogyakarta Principles were expanded in 2017 to add gender expression and “sex characteristics”, which explains the purpose of the 2017 Arcus donation. According to international women’s rights expert, Anna Zobnina, the ultimate goal is to eliminate the categories of sex and socially-constructed gender, and replace them with the artificial categories of gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics. These last are the qualities that together determine sex – genitalia, chromosomes, hormones. So sex will be a defunct legal category,  replaced by chopped up bits of human biology.

With the addition of “sex characteristics”, it seems we may assume that words such as “man” and “woman” will  be replaced by such terms as “menstruator”, “gestational carrier”, “uterus-haver”. Such terms are already in use on social media, although the category “men” has yet to be replaced by “ejaculators” or “penis-havers”. As trans people mask the sex they are, sex itself will be masked.

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But who is behind this? The Arcus Foundation is owned by Jon Stryker, heir to the American  medical device company, the Stryker Corporation. Its money comes from the Stryker Corporation. Four years ago the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that Stryker had donated "at least $336.3 million" primarily to his foundation. InfluenceWatch reports that he has given more than $500 million to Arcus.

 Arcus donates up to half its money to projects in support of great apes; the rest – 100% of the money it donates to human causes -- goes to the sorts of organizations that might provide a market for the family business – LGBTQ centres and charities. This leads to a question that sounds like the start of a very bad joke – what do trans-identified people and apes have in common?

A scroll through the information provided on the Arcus Grantee site for grants given to members of humanity’s closest living relatives -- gorillas,  gibbons, bonobos and chimpanzees -- reveals repeated references to diseases, including human diseases and covid-19.

The bad joke, then, is that both the ape and human populations served by Arcus require ongoing medical interventions and pharmaceuticals. To regard Arcus as anything other than a marketing organization for the American medical industrial complex – tasked with sustaining and creating markets -- is clearly naïve.

As Jennifer Bilek has repeatedly demonstrated, "As the example of the Arcus Foundation shows, the LGB civil rights movement of yore has morphed into a relentless behemoth, one that has strong ties to the medical industrial complex and global corporatists."

When a tiny Canadian corporation and citizens of the global South are nominated to craft the principles and lobby for them, we can legitimately regard them as the vehicles of an imperialism meant to hide that gender ideology is an American invention being sold with American financial backing for the ultimate profit of American companies. Like all imperialist nations, American employs “the natives” as front-line soldiers in the war against their citizens.

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From its office on the edge of parkland that cradles 50 lakes, where birdsong laces heaven to earth, ARC International’s team has ensured that Canadian primary schools teach children to uncouple themselves from nature.

Their bodies have nothing to do with their sex, SOGI school curriculums insist. They can be boy or girl regardless of their sex characteristics. Their bodies are theirs to cannibalize. If they experience psychological distress as they transition from child to adolescent to adult, drugs and surgery are a quick solution.

And ARC has paved the way for Canadian doctors to step forward to become the drug dealers that ensure children will not have the time to work through their discomfort. Perhaps the scalpels they finally wield will bear the imprint, “Stryker”.

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This is a repost of an article I wrote previously. It seems appropriate to republish it now that the knot of the western civil war, a war on women, on children, on all the binaries of humanity — right and wrong, good and evil, private and public, fact and fiction — is starting to loosen up. We can see the strands that make up the knot more clearly now. This article is about one of those strands — western men’s desire to escape the body and its ties to the earth.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Something otherworldly is happening in America.

The February 2022 edition of Harper’s Magazine featured an examination of attempts to create sealed human biospheres. The author, Jessica Camille Aguirre, wondered whether “we as a species would be compelled to seek some new terrain, a foreign place where our appetites might grow, expanding and expanding, like the universe itself.”

 The March issue followed up with Hari Kunzru commenting on dreams of “the betterment of humankind through the conquest of space”. Elon Musk, through SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos, through Blue Origin, are both intent on developing technologies allowing humans to leave the earth for good. As Kunzru observes, “For good or ill, they are powerful enough to impose their dreams on the rest of us.”

An article on cryptocurrency in the same issue noted that Miami “has long seemed intent on denying the reality of death. A transhumanist capital …it has more recently become a center for nootropics and life-extension startups, echoing new resident Peter Thiel’s public stance against ‘the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual’.”

American male billionaires are planning to jump ship.

 When the planet explodes in fire and flood largely due to alpha males’ careless avarice, their presumed right to acquire whatever their ever- expanding appetites desire, they’ll be sealed up in capsules heading for green pastures in an unknown elsewhere.

The major obstacle is the human body, that relic from pre-digital times, that passé flesh bag that needs constant nutrients and fluids, that excretes inconvenient waste, that wears out over time – so BCE! so first millennium! – which is why new Canadian Martine Rothblatt, sci fi fan, virtual reality gamer and “person” who confessed he changes his gender as often as he changes his hair, has been busily developing “mindcloning” tech and associated sales propaganda.

              Image:  https://www.unither.com/company-leadership

In 2014 the father of both transgenderism and transhumanism outlined the future for humanity in his book, Virtually Human – The Promise and the Peril of Digital Immortality. The title is overlong, as there is no real peril in this vision of a new world where humans in flesh bodies, in digital form in the cloud, and in robot bodies all coexist. A new human trinity. If “God” can be father, son and holy spirit, then so can men created in his image.

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The first advance over life as an organic body, the simplest and cheapest, is the mindclone, which is a brain made of computer software filled with the “thoughts, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, preferences and values” (10) of the donor human mind. Rothblatt envisions people choosing this both as a way to extend themselves across two platforms (one flesh, one digital) and as a form of immortality. The more expensive advance will be to deposit the mindfile into a robotic body.

How will the contents of our mind be duplicated? Not from a Vulcan mindmeld. Not even from the brain itself through some as yet undiscovered form of photocopying, but simply from all the online data we have created through emails, SM messages, photos, tweets, instaposts, pinterest posts, LinkedIn bios,etc.  

Rothblatt argues that we already exist in digital form through our various online postings and all that remains is the relatively simple task of collating our data into a mindfile. A mindclone will be “one part mindfile software to collect data and one part mindware software to process that data” (5). Mindware will create a psychology of the clone based on the evidence offered by our digital files. Presto, we have a clone.

And even more presto, entrepreneurs stand to make millions: “the mass marketing of a relatively simple, accessible, and affordable means for Grandma, through her mindclone, to stick around for graduations that will happen several decades from now represents the real money” (11).

Rothblatt is much more interested in discussing ways to create suitable mindware then he is in the seemingly simple construction of the necessary mindclones. But I think this preliminary construct is the biggest problem. Think of it as the appearance vs reality problem, which is both a problem philosophers have been grappling with since they first learned to question and a necessary life skill. We must be able to tell the difference between a snake and a rope, a log and a crocodile.

When we interact with other people, in real life and even more so in social media, we perform a version of ourselves we want the world to see. Even in 2014, when the book was published, people were aware that a social media persona might bear very little relation to the real person behind it. We post the positive. We posture. Cowards make threats of violence, the timid show off.

But all social interaction involves roles we play. If you don’t believe that, try farting or picking your nose next time you’re with friends. Most will find they can’t as the role they play doesn’t allow it. In a  more sombre example, people who experience the  death of a partner or child know how quickly their social circle slims down – few people can bear to be around such profound reality as a weeping and grieving human. And the bereaved feel terrible pressure to resume their social persona as soon as possible.

Maybe the only time we are radically authentic is when we lie awake in the solitude of dawn, alone with our fears and insecurities, our depressions, our despair. These moments do not appear on our digital platforms. We may not even share them later, over breakfast, with our intimate others. If we do, we can have recourse only to the flatness, the paleness of words. Words about feelings or about thoughts are not the same as the feelings or thoughts themselves.

So all the world is a stage and we but actors, but when the curtain falls and the audience disappears and we are alone on the boards, do we drop the performance? And are we alone? It’s more than likely we are confronted then with an inner world of voices representing anyone who has ever had an influence over us – the voices of  critical parents,  of peers who resented or envied us, of judgemental teachers. Our minds are typically far from empty -- but none of those voices make an appearance in our conversations with others.

What about the lies we tell ourselves, the performance of ourselves to ourselves? Pretending we are what we’re not, denying we are what we are. Much of this is not accessible to our conscious minds; none of it is accessible to our social media personas.

Rothblatt shows himself to be aware of this several chapters into the book when he discusses  constructing mindware that can keep certain things secret, other things “unconscious”. But for the purpose of compiling mindfiles for our mindclone, he is willing to accept that representations of reality and reality are the same thing.

“If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it probably is a duck –” this commonplace is meant to be a lesson in reality. If a duck should pretend to be something other than a duck, we can have recourse to our senses for a reality check. Rothblatt would use it to validate illusion: if you dress up a machine (or a fox) in duck feathers, bill and feet and teach it to quack, then it is a duck. To plausibly appear to be a duck is to be a duck. And, ultimately, it doesn’t matter – as he explains in the section entitled “There are Doubles, but no Duplicates” (74). Grandma, then, will be a plausible double, no more.

This is also the “philosophy” of gender ideology. Dress a man up in “woman-costume” and give him walk and talk lessons, and he becomes a women. All that matters (or did in 2014) is that he “pass” as a woman. The reality that he is male-sexed in every cell of his body, and that his personality has been created under the powerful influence of the kind of social conditioning brought to bear on male people only, is irrelevant.

So at the individual level, I and my digital persona are one and the same, he says. But at the species level, he is also saying consciousness and the appearance of consciousness are one and the same.

 As he writes, “If a mindclone phenomenologically appears to be conscious, then he or she very probably is a conscious being with a subjective experience of the world”(42).

A mindclone that gives the appearance of being conscious is conscious -- and therefore human.

Rothblatt knows of criticism of his thesis that the appearance of consciousness is consciousness. In a later chapter he quotes the contemporary philosopher of mind, consciousness and language, John Searle:

“The essence of consciousness is that it consists of inner qualitative, subjective mental processes. You don’t guarantee the duplications of those processes by duplicating the observable external behavioural effect of those processes … To  try to create consciousness by trying to create a machine that behaves as if it were conscious is similarly irrelevant because the behaviour by itself is irrelevant” (Searle in Rothblatt, 129)

But Rothblatt doesn’t engage with this criticism in his certainty that mindclones are conscious. (In his later virtual talk at the University of Victoria’s “Moving Trans Forward” conference he points out that software that can “recapitulate consciousness” will also be needed and concedes that it doesn’t yet exist.)

 Who will judge the humanity of any given mindclone? Rothblatt favours an idea first suggested by Alan Turing, “that software was humanly conscious if it successfully passed itself off to humans as being humanly conscious” (18). He proposes a consensus of three or more experts in the field, such as psychologists or ethicists: “…if others, especially experts in the mental health, see so much of themselves in a mind clone as to say ‘that one is human,’ then that one is human”(43).

This ignores the fact that neither psychologists nor any other mental health professional’s remit is to judge the totality of consciousness. There are no experts in the field.

I am reminded again of transgender ideology, and its early and frequent insistence that men in makeup and dresses could “pass” as women. Women protested loudly and just as frequently that we could tell a man from a woman. Were our protestations as “experts” – surely women are experts on women -- enough to stop the craze? Not at all – TRA’s simply decided that passing was not necessary after all.

This is a highly likely scenario in the case of transhumanism as well. The men with the money pushing both these ideologies on the rest of us from above will see to it that a jury will be created who will accept mindclones as human. And if that should prove impossible, they’ll change the goalposts. Perhaps, as men with “special identities” now claim to be better women than women, mindclones will claim to be better humans than humans.

Rothblatt is already pre-empting the discrimination he forecasts against mindclones by arguing they must be given human rights, because “if we don’t treat cyberconscious mindclones like the living counterparts they will be, they will become very, very angry” (6). This too should remind us of  trans ideologues, who claim to be the most oppressed group on the planet, while receiving support from almost all media, governments, academic institutions, major corporations, and financial institutions.

The trans movement has proven itself to be, not oppressed, but an extension of the oppressor class. Men with “special identities” have all the power that dominant well-off white males have and are extending that power into places they never could before they claimed to be women. This will be true of mindclones as well, as they will be extensions of people who can afford to create them and who dream of immortality.

 The underclasses will be forced to give way to them, as women are forced to give way to men who claim to be women. Just as women’s protests against the erosions of our rights is labelled phobic oppression, resistance against mindclones will be repackaged and sold as oppression.

It should be clear now that not only is the trans movement being used to dissociate us from our bodies and to teach us to see our bodies as consumable products in preparation for transhumanism, but that the trans movement is an experiment being conducted to research human reactions to the impossible, and from there, ways to manipulate those reactions.  Pseudo men and faux women are in that sense scouts for the army of digital/robotic clones to come.

Our ability to tell male from female and to tell appearance from reality are both necessary for survival. If we can be manipulated and coerced into believing we do not have the skill to tell man from woman, then maybe we can be manipulated into believing that appearance is reality.

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Rothblatt says in passing in his chapter on kinship (reconfigured to include plastic and software spouses and children) that “since the mindclones are the continuation of their biological selves, they are either male or female or transgendered” (203). This is curious. Since the concept of “transgender” relies on a misfit between the body and the mind, how can it persist after the body has decayed and all that’s left is the mindclone? Without bodies, we can all choose whether to be recorded as male or female.

Given the definition of “woman” in gender speak as the submissive sexual partner, women thinking of achieving immortality through a mindclone might do well to take a page from female gamers and assign themselves male. Failure to take that precaution could subject them to an eternity of sexual harassment.

But not to worry, we can all be “birthing parent”, robotic son and holy ghost-in-the-cloud in the new virtual world order where actual human birth will be kept to a minimum and women’s role as mother will be finally unnecessary. There will then be only one role for women, as the object of male sexual pleasure. (Rothblatt assures readers that robots will be equipped with the full suite of human-like senses.)

The big winners will be data harvesters like Google, Amazon and Facebook. The profits to “Big Data” from selling our data to advertisers are mere chump change compared to what they’ll make when they sell our data back to us for our mindclones. And even more insidious, all that data from the billions of humans who have contributed to it can be stripped from the original creators, aggregated and sold by the terabyte to makers of “from-scratch” digital/robotic beings.

As Rothblatt elaborates:

“Imagine the potential for the company or group of entrepreneurs who can figure out how to capture and organize all that data that has been collected and posted about you (and by you) over the years and deliver it to you neatly organized to upload into your mindfile with mindware. Certainly this is a business opportunity that won’t be overlooked by data-collection companies” (59).

As the precursor to transhumanism, transgenderism is teaching us to cannibalize humanity for Midas’ dreams of gold.

Image: Screen Capture https://www.ted.com/talks/martine_rothblatt_my_daughter_my_wife_our_robot_and_the_quest_for_immortality

What Rothblatt is demonstrating is that, like Victor Frankenstein, he wants to create human beings – albeit in plastic and steel and software format. But all that tech can create is a very “lifelike” doll. While people have witnessed the last sputtering out of consciousness since time immemorial, no one has yet seen it bloom into being. Regardless of what he calls it, a mindclone must come to life to be alive.

And here is the most insidious aspect of his plan. When life is severed from biology, there are no markers to indicate whether life is present — no pulse, no brainwaves. No one will ever know whether the life-like mindclones in robotic bodies are alive or not. When “grandma” has passed over, having paid heftily to transfer her consciousness to her mindfile housed in a robot her kids can keep in a kitchen corner, she can’t shout from the grave, “get rid of that doll, it’s not me, I’m dead!”

This is the perfect scam, its fakery unprovable. And we homo sapiens may end up extinguishing ourselves as we replace real people with insentient robots because we stopped caring about the difference between the real and the image.

All quotations are from: Rothblatt, Martine. Virtually Human The Promise – and the Peril – of Digital Immortality, St. Martin’s Press: New York, 2014.

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UPDATED

In Canada the entire weight of the federal government, broadcast through its federally-funded media arm, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) and enforced by a growing list of anti-hate, anti-free speech legislation bears down in support of gender ideology and the “trans queer” (TQ+) population.

In order to understand why Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have in a few short years replaced the category of sex with that of gender identity for all legal and practical purposes, and lavished millions of dollars to promote these alternate identities, we need to look at who the liberals hang with.

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Back in 2017, award-winning journalist Anne Kingston wrote a lengthy article for Maclean’s Magazine on Canada 2020, “the Ottawa-based enterprise that bills itself as ‘Canada’s leading, independent, progressive think tank’.” This was the entity that she credited with bringing the Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau to power in 2015.

Both Trudeau and his best friend Gerald Butts, who later took the fall in a different scandal, were on the founding board of Canada 2020 in 2006. Its website says it is an “active member of the Global Progress Network.”

What does that mean? It means Canada 2020 has links with a triangle of American organizations created to bring Democrats back to power after years of Republican domination – Centre for American Progress (CAP) founded by John Podesta, Global Progress Initiative (GPI) also founded by Podesta, and Precision Strategies, run by a group of Obama strategists. CAP is funded by a who’s who of American billionaires, corporations and their affiliated philanthropic foundations, including George Soros, through his Open Societies Foundation, the Pritzker family, Blackrock and Arcus — all major donors and promoters of TQ+ organizations around the world.

While opensecrets.org keeps track of Soros’ spending on political parties in the US, it’s almost impossible to know how much Soros spends on trans+ rights action around the world. The Open Societies Foundation describes itself as “inclusive” and lists 137.1 million spent on “equality and antidiscrimination” and 81.9 million spent on “human rights movements and institutions” in 2020 on its website. How much of this goes to TQ+ organizations (still frequently referred to by the outdated designation “lgbtq+” ) is hard to know, but the OSF funds the Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Watch, Planned Parenthood and the Tides Foundation, all of which emphatically champion the ideology that “transwomen are women”.

Jennifer Bilek has detailed in a 2018 Federalist article how after his election, with the help of CAP et al,

Obama made transgenderism a pet issue of his administration, holding a meeting at the White House (the first ever) for transgenderism.

The administration quietly applied the power of the executive branch to make it easier for transgender people to alter their passports, get cross-sex treatment at Veteran’s Administration facilities, and access public school restrooms and sports programs based on gender identity. These are just a few of the transgender-specific policy shifts of Obama’s presidency.

In a 2015 Toronto Star review of a Soros biography, written by Anna Porter,  Carol Goar writes:

His greatest claim to fame as a hedge fund manager was that he broke the Bank of England in 1992 by short-selling the pound. He made a $1-billion killing. He was shrewd, mercenary and merciless. He created the Open Society Fund (the predecessor to his Open Society Foundations) as “a very interesting tax gimmick” that allowed him to pass on its fortune to his heirs untaxed. He told interviewers at the time that he did not believe in philanthropy.

But after triggering Britain’s currency crisis, his attitude changed. He set out to achieve nothing less than changing the way people think and influencing the course of history. He became convinced that by spending enough money and intervening at the right moment, an individual could buy a better world. By Porter’s tally, he has now spent about $12 billion.

What sets Soros apart from other philanthropists . . .is that he uses his money to achieve his personal goals. He has no qualms about meddling in other nations’ politics. His mission is to be a pro-democracy force, changing public policies to reflect liberal democratic values.

According to Influence Watch, Soros’ “OSF’s operations are notoriously complex, and in 2016 the foundation was labeled the least transparent ‘think tank’ in the United States reviewed by NGO Monitor, an OSF-funded transparency group.”

There should be no question why Obama’s VP, now President Joe Biden, is aggressively taking up the baton after the four-year Trump interregnum. In the meantime, Trudeau, as the beneficiary of Soros’ influence, quietly baptized Canada in the pink and blue trans waters from coast to coast.

 As Kingston wrote:

CAP began with a multi-million-dollar budget, thanks in part to donations from financier George Soros, and now has a staff of hundreds. No Soros-like figure bankrolled Canada 2020, which has a full-time staff of three, says [co-founder Tom] Barber. There was a “Founders Circle”, but he doesn’t talk about it.

No doubt that circle included co-founders Tom Barber, Susan Smith and Tom Pitfield.

One person we do know who may have acted as matchmaker for Trudeau and Soros is Chrystia Freeland.

When she entered politics, she had a book deal to write an authorized biography of her friend and backer, George Soros.  She first interviewed him in 2012 when she was editor of Thomson Reuters Digital for a profile that appeared in ForeignPolicy.com.

As Adam Radnowski in a Globe and Mail article on Freeland from 2017 wrote of the former financial reporter:

Few people who know Ms. Freeland have any doubt that she enjoys keeping high-flying company. By the end of her time in New York, some of her colleagues at the business-news service Thomson Reuters – where she landed for the final stop in her journalism career, after earlier tenures at the Financial Times and The Globe and Mail – called her "the billionaire whisperer."

Chrystia Freeland and George Soros

But Soros is not the only American billionaire the liberal government cosied up to. Trudeau was in talks with Larry Fink, owner of the mega asset management company, Blackrock, back when he was first preparing to create the Infrastructure Bank.

In January 2016,  Trudeau met with Fink at the World Economic Forum in Davos at a time when Fink was also calling for increased infrastructure investments by governments and private interests. Trudeau met with Fink again in March 2016 in New York.

Trudeau and Fink (second from right) at 2021 Bloomberg Global Business Forum

Founded in 1988, Blackrock manages $5.4 trillion (US) in assets, about 10% of world assets. Jennifer Bilek has noted that amongst those assets:

Black Rock owns the lion's share of stock in 38 of the companies donating to Planned Parenthood, which has become the largest provider of cross-sex hormones to young people. They are also among, or, the largest share holders, along with Vanguard Group, of Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, United Therapeutics, GlaxoSmithKline, AbbVie (the makers of Lupron), Merck, and Novartis. It would be easier to list the pharma giants not owned by BlackRock.

And, as retired British academic and researcher, Alan Neale, has pointed out:

He [Fink] is Co-Chair of the trustees of NYU Langone Health, which runs a Transgender Youth Health Program offering support for “gender-affirming medical interventions, including puberty suppression, gender-affirming hormone treatments, and gender-affirming surgery.” For the latter, young people are referred on to NYU Langone’s huge Transgender Surgery Services unit. Alongside plastic and reconstructive surgeons, urologists, psychiatrists and endocrinologists, the Transgender Surgery team includes 3 paediatric specialists.

Neal has also identified Blackrock as a “platinum partner” on the website of a small UK charity called “Just Like Us” that seems intent on  ”normalizing the erosion of sex boundaries for under-12s.” It is also “a member of ILGA World, an international organization that lobbies governments to lower the age of consent.” This is a reminder that pedophilia has always lurked in the underbrush of men’s sexual liberation movements.

Also according to Neal, “BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, is famed for promoting socially responsible business, not just within his own organization, but in all the organizations that BlackRock invests in.”

When those organizations include governments, whose voice is most important, a CEO with ideological “values” he wishes to impose, or citizens of a state? It should alarm all governments in partnership with Blackrock that:

In October 2021, the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that BlackRock was pushing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to adopt rules requiring private companies to publicly disclose their climate impact, the diversity of their boards of directors, and other metrics.

About the same time as he was talking with Fink, Trudeau set up the Economic Advisory Council, appointing two Blackrock associates who are also friends of Freeland. Mark  Wiseman was employed by Blackrock at the time of his appointment. After being fired for violating the company’s “values” by having a consensual relationship with another employee, he founded  FCLTGlobal (formerly Focusing Capital on the Long Term), “an organization that encourages longer-term approaches in business and investing, which was set up by BlackRock, CPPIB, Dow, McKinsey & Company and Tata in 2016.”

The other was Dominic Barton, later Canada’s ambassador to China, but then managing director of McKinsey and Co, “ a US$6-billion juggernaut operating in 50 countries” which Canadian Business described in 2011 as, “The world’s pre-eminent management consulting firm, whose employees whisper in the ears of government leaders, international regulators and chief executives of 95% of the world’s largest corporations.”

According to Canadian Business:

McKinsey is painstaking in choosing new recruits, subjecting candidates to gruelling series of up to 15 interviews. A key part of the process is ensuring potential hires hold its values, which are celebrated and analyzed on an annual Values Day when McKinsey takes a hiatus from client work to study itself: well-handled situations, ambiguous calls, how to ensure adherence to its principles in the future. “I gotta tell you, I’ve been inside hundreds of companies, and there’s nobody that has values like McKinsey,” says Kelleher. “It’s taken very, very seriously.”

These values have been referred to as a corporate religion. This might not be a problem if corporate values matched societal values and if there was transparency in the way corporations chose them and spread them out into the world beyond their own walls. That this is not the case was recognized by Barton himself, who noted that as the firm works more and more closely with government “people are leery of power that hides its face — that there’s something sinister about the mysterious adviser who sits in a corner taking notes and is never introduced.”

McKinsey and Company released a lengthy report last November called “Being Transgender at Work” which “provides first-time insights into the participation, plight, and precarious existence that transgender people have experienced in the workplace and in their lives.”

These then are the financial juggarnauts that Trudeau and his liberal government are playing with. When the likes of Blackrock and McKinsey have trillions of dollars to manage, how does a small country with a GDP of only 1.9 trillion assert any weight?

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Canada 2020 has also sponsored meetings that link pharmaceutical companies with government. Again, this excerpt from Kingston’s article reveals the connections and the problems:

Concern about Canada 2020’s influence and tight ties with the federal government has already become an academic sub-genre. In his new book, Doctors in Denial: Why Big Pharma and the Canadian Medical Profession Are Too Close for Comfort, Joel Lexchin cites a two-day “health summit” sponsored by Canada 2020 and the Canadian Medical Association in September 2016 as running contrary to public health interests. The event, “A New Health Accord for All Canadians,” attracted a who’s-who of the health insurance and pharmaceutical sectors, including representatives of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the largest U.S. pharmaceutical lobby group. Jane Philpott, then the health minister, attended with senior Health Canada officials, with Philpott speaking of the importance of improving Canadian accessibility to pharmaceuticals. Alliances between government, industry and the medical profession run contrary to public health interests, Lexchin, a professor emeritus at York University, tells Maclean’s. “Drug companies have a long history of actions damaging public health,” he says, “either in the prices they set or the facts the drugs they are interested in are the ones that generate the largest revenue, not those that meet highest public health need.”

Big pharma may have initiated the astroturfing of gender ideology, but with the global size of the “lgbtq” consumer market now pegged at $3.7 trillion USD, what financial advisory or management firm can ignore the medical industrial sector that takes the largest portion of that amount? Tobacco’s reliable return on investment is gone, and most addictive drugs are illegal. An ideology that requires lifetime medication seems a perfect and perfectly sinister solution.

As one attendee of the recent Bloomberg Global Business Forum wrote: “The message to the audience was clear: it is time for businesses, government and philanthropy to work together to solve big issues affecting us all.”

When self-aggrandizement is renamed “philanthropy”, when the most ravaging gazillionaires who fund it are renamed “leftists” and think they can impose their own ideologies on people around the world, then we are no longer citizens of nations, but merely consumers in delineated sales territories.

Days after the federal government announced it was employing Blackrock to help with Covid-19 recovery, all members of parliament stood up to unanimously approve an anti-conversion bill, Bill C4, that would make it illegal to stop the transing of children. The senate followed suit days later. Coincidence, or corporate command?

Lest anyone think that Trudeau, having won election, has drifted away from the“think tank” he co-founded back in 20006, he, Chrystia Freeland and Melanie Joly all attended an international Global Progress Action Summit organized by Canada 2020 in collaboration with the Centre for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action) in Montreal last fall. The purpose of the summit: to convene “global progressive leaders from within governments, think tanks, and civil society organizations for unique high-level discussions . . .”

Sounds like WEF lite. And given Trudeau’s ties to Canada 2020 right from the beginning we have to wonder if he isn’t going to use its connection to CAP as a lifeline now that he is the most reviled Prime Minister in the history of Canada. What can such a heavily funded and influential lobby group do for him? I think we’ll find out soon enough.

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In honour of yet another “Celebrate Trans People or Else Week” I’d like to introduce readers to the apple maggot.

About 150 years ago a new type of tiny fruit fly evolved in the eastern US to feed on tree fruit, apples in particularly, but also pears, cherries, plums and apricots. It has since spread down into Florida and has recently been found in the western states. The female flies puncture the fruit with their needle-like ovipositor and then deposit their eggs deep into the fruit. Each egg contains about 300 larvae, and when the eggs hatch the larvae swarm through the flesh to fatten themselves. Left untreated the fruit of an entire orchard can become so wormy it is unfit to eat. This is the apple maggot.

It is the best metaphor I can think of for trans ideology and the activists who propagate it.

Most of those following developments in the culture war (the war against women, the war against humanity) know about the forced teaming advocated in the notorious Denton playbook. What has happened is far more than forced teaming, and it’s more than a virus too – it is the  destruction of the host to feed the parasite that replaces it.

Call it the trans larvae, or the gender worm.­­­­­­­­­­­­

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The infestation began with the lesbian and gay community, robust from success in fighting for gay marriage and for decent medical attention to AIDS. That community was a beautiful fruit, it had brought lesbians and gay man together, it had nursed empathy in the straight culture for people it had previously had a distinct distaste for. It was the  product of democratic values that had taken a hundred years and more to ripen.

When the T was added around 2015 the hole was bored and the egg laid. Now look at the 2SLGBTQII+ “community”, a community in name only, a destructive trans-centred cult that despises same-sex attraction and works actively to replicate more of its own parasitic kind by seducing children.

Having consumed that fruit, the worm moved on to womanhood,  hollowing it out, leaving behind nothing but a shell, a name that means everyone and no one.  Read about a woman now, and it might be a man who raped another woman, a man speaking on behalf of women on International Woman’s Day, a winner of a beauty competition or a woman’s sports event. You never know. But women are left with nothing but functions and body parts – we’re gestators or menstruators or uterus-havers. We’re the skin left behind when the worm has finished.

The trans worm also bored deep down into the various feminisms meant to serve the needs, rights and interests of women. The newly hatched parasitic transfeminist movement supports the men who exploit women through prostitution and surrogacy, and calls for the reduction of the age that children can consent to physical desecration by the medical industry and sex with men.

The parasite has been burrowing in the political left as well. Founded on ideals of solidarity, the belief that people could work together to pry goods out of elite owners of all the world’s wealth, it now fights against solidarity in the name of the rotten fruit of the TQ+. Critics decry the politics of “identitarianism” without identifying the real problem, which is that the left has been consumed by a false “identity” group.

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On an international level, the worm has burrowed into the environmental movement, through its inclusion in the World Economic Forum’s ESG mandates. Klaus Schwab was the inventor of “stakeholder capitalism”, a form of government-corporate control in which citizens with voting rights are replaced by corporate-nominated special interest groups deemed stakeholders in the new planetary economic order.  You can check out a previous post I wrote about that here. The Environment Social Governance (ESG) index guides the invention of favoured special interest groups. The S is the nest of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), the egg of the parasite.

The WEF is now in partnership with the UN and its sustainable development goals (SDGs), its ESG scoring enforced by WEFs other partner, the mammoth Blackrock asset management firm which deals only in Larry Fink‘s parasite-infested financial instruments.

While the WEF comprises 1000 heads of the largest corporations in the world, plus the heads of multiple NGO, charitable and service organizations, plus as many politicians as it can indoctrinate into its mantras through it’s Young Global Leaders and Global Shapers forums, it appears to be pursuing the digitalization of humanity itself.

As Michael Rectenwald writes in his new book, The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty, the WEF’s “public-private partnerships entail the networking of corporations, states, NGOs, influential individuals and national and international governance bodies into what has become an effective global hegemon.”

Thus the WEF is the inheritor of the “old boys network”, which now includes some women, and men of every ethnicity and skin colour. What it retains is its focus on empowering its own identity group (elite people of power and wealth) while pretending to represent humanity.

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Schwab has bragged that half the Canadian government are members of WEF, and there’s no reason not to believe him. Chrystia Freeland sits on its Board of Trustees, along with Larry Fink of Blackrock. When Justin Trudeau announced awkwardly on his first election as Prime Minister, “welcome to the first post-nation state” he was announcing his allegiance, not to his country, but to the People of Power, the POP cult of Davos, the incubator of the gender parasite.

The WEF’s grand plan is the 4^th Industrial Revolution, which will include, according to Rectenwald:

… a ubiquitous internet, smart cities, cenral bank digital currency (CBDC), digital identities, the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Bodies (IoB), smart implants, nanorobotic  brain-cloud interfaces, algorithms undertaking governmental tasks, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), the metaverse, and transhumanism.

Robots, both soft and hard, both single and swarming, are on the menu to augment or, if some fantasists have their way, to replace humans, so inadequately protected by our “meat suits,” so dependent on a natural world for our survival. And so the trans worm may consume the entire human race as its final act of destruction. For more on what that might look like, have a look at this article I wrote a year or so ago, Trans Vision: Through a Glass Dark and Distorted.

We’re already seeing hosts of transvestic fetishists spreading their wings, preparing to settle on yet more fruit, preparing to insert their ideological offspring into the institutions, governments, communities of the planet. If the next Democratic presidential candidate is a drag queen, or if Trudeau or one of his heirs comes out as an enby, everyone will see that the end of western democracy is near.

And it will have been destroyed by the richest men of the world — for profit — using the simple tactic of biological and ideological warfare.

The apple maggot, because it spends most of its life inside the fruit, can’t be eradicated by normal methods. It can best be destroyed during its pupa stage when it can be found among the leaves and litter beneath the trees. We need to do everything we can now to destroy this maggot wherever we find it — in schools, in university DEI departments, in government LGBTQ+ secretariats, in sports organizations, in political and community organizations. And we need to go after the Davos nest.

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Wherever Mary Harrington’s columns appear, whether on Unherd, or on her own substack, Reactionary Feminist, men flock around like pigeons pecking at the cobblestones beneath the statuary of some medieval public square.

That should arouse suspicion.

Could it be that men love the premise of her 2023 book, Feminism Against Progress, that feminism is responsible for transgenderism/transhumanism?

In the book Harrington posits a timeline that begins with women’s responses to the industrial revolution, which “negotiated a tension between individual freedom from the ways we’re shaped by our biology, and woman-centred accommodation by both sexes of our embodiment.” So, she sees a tension between women’s desire to be free of the consequences of having a female body, and their desire for male and female society to find a way to support women in their bodies. (This is all about pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.)

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It’s free and always will be free.

The first she calls “Team Freedom” or “bio-libertarianism” – freedom from biology. Freedom from the consequence of fertility via the Pill, naturally leads to total freedom from biology for all, she says. She calls this “meat lego,” where men and women are interchangeable and we can all add or subtract bits of anatomy depending on personal preference.

For Harrington, “this is a logically consistent feminist stance,” but I submit this is really going from zero to a hundred in ten seconds flat, flying past the potholes of logical fallacy, and puddles of red herrings.

For one thing the Pill was not a replacement of biology with technology. The Pill tricked the body into believing it was pregnant already, so conception would not occur. This is more like using beneficial insects to control crop pests than like dumping man-made chemicals onto them. It made use of biology to control biology, much as women in the past made use of breast-feeding to delay conception.

She might as well have said that the first human use of the stick to dig up grubs or to fight led step by step to transgenderism.  Sure, human ingenuity has taken and will take us to many dark and dangerous places, especially when that ingenuity doesn’t solicit or respond to women’s needs and interests.

Harrington is also postulating that women are pretty much solely responsible for our headlong rush into our own erasure. In blaming the Pill without considering the underlying cultural context, which I will call “patriarchy” as a sort of short cut, she has written a curiously woman-blaming book.

Like other inventions, the Pill was developed neither by women nor in consultation with the sorts of feminists who could measure it against women’s needs, desires and interests. It was created by the labs of the patriarchy with a distinctly masculine agenda, and presented to women on a platter of lies.

Women were never told the side effects on emotional or physical health. Women were told we now had what we had always wanted, and the male agenda to quickly have access to all the “good” women previously kept from them by the threat of pregnancy was hidden.

A men’s sexual rights movement slid in right behind the Pill, using the false banner of “free love.” But love had nothing to do with it. The Pill made it almost impossible for women to refuse sex.

I suggest there is a reason for that. Most civilizations had strong motivations for women to remain chaste until marriage. In the west, religion was the most powerful agent of female repression, both preaching the “sinfulness” of female lust and punishing women who disobeyed with exile from their families, from polite society, from any kind of livelihood except prostitution. Rape was not distinguished from consensual sex and the best a violated woman could hope for was forced marriage to her rapist.

In that context how could women develop an ethics of sexuality? How could women, who had always used the threat of pregnancy as an excuse not to have sex, find other motivations for not giving in to their own sexual appetites, or to men pushing them to give in and “give it up”?

It didn’t take long for most women to realize that casual sex was often unsatisfying and demoralizing. And to realize that many men mocked the women who gave in, and even condemned the women that had said “yes” to them. It didn’t take long for women to give up the whole project of saying “no” and develop an ideology of bravado in the face of the inevitable. That was third-wave feminism, celebrating women’s “agency” and “choice”, pretending there was no power asymmetry or no difference in how women and men experienced the sex act.

But for Harrington, men seem to bear no responsibility for what I am going to call the descent of women into masculine patterns of sexual license. They are peculiarly absent, even at the sentence level.

Look, for example, at this sentence: “The expectations set by free-access porn now routinely result in teenage girls enduring acts they don’t enjoy, in exchange for the barest signs of affection.” Someone has expectations, someone commits acts women don’t enjoy, someone gives little sign of affection – but who? Where the word “men” should appear, there is only a ghostly vacancy.

The next sentence is even more torturous. Try to find the agent, or in the language of crime fiction, the “unsub” here: “One teenage girl was reported in 2019 to have been left with anal injuries so severe, after trying to imitate pornography, that she will need a colostomy bag for life.”

Was she alone? Was she, herself, trying to imitate porn by shoving inanimate objects into her own anus? Did she do this to herself? It takes work to produce a sentence that so totally eliminates the destructive agent, and I have to wonder why.

It is illustrative of her thesis, in which the patriarchy is itself almost, well, castrated.  While she acknowledges the role played by millionaire individuals, foundations and NGOs, by online sociality and Marxism in universities, she insists that none of these bear sole responsibility because this obscenely wealthy, global but nevertheless impotent patriarchy requires the ministrations of women -- “the truth implicates all of feminism.”

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And by feminism, she means well-educated, financially successful women: “for a minority of women the idea that we really can detach self-realisation from biology remains both plausible and compelling.” These are the beneficiaries of second-wave feminism, the women who found themselves liberated from the domestic sphere, free to pursue education and careers within the still fully functioning patriarchal public world.

Why should this phalanx of female beneficiaries of patriarchal privilege have instigated such a huge “disruption” of “cisnormativity” that has remodelled every single institution in multiple countries?

Harrington’s answer is that “the contraceptive revolution cemented as a core feminist objective a vision of personhood premised on the right to be separate, to not be encumbered, interdependent…”

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She offers as an example of such a visionary, Sophie Lewis, a German-born British woman whom she describes as “an accomplished cyborg theologican.” Harrington writes:

From this vantage point [that of bio-libertarianism], pregnancy appears as a monstrous, cancerous, invasive aberration. In the stylised and carefully de-sexed language of an accomplished cyborg theologian, Sophie Lewis captures this revulsion for the visceral, gory, dangerous strangeness of Motherhood. ‘No wonder philosophers have asked whether gestators are persons,’ she says.

So, the desire for liberation from the fact of pregnancy led to the desire for liberation from the physicality of pregnancy and from the ties of motherhood. The Women’s Liberation Movement is stripped of any desire for liberation from patriarchy.

It is true that reproductive control allowed more women than ever before the liberty to pursue their full humanity through education, sport and career. But have a majority of women repudiated the desire for mother-child bonding?

The vocal attempts by mothers to “have it all”, to juggle work and homelife, to find good childcare, to persuade their mates to take on more of the burden of childcare and housework, to lobby for maternity leave suggests this is just not true. Harrington recognizes this herself and details it in a section of her book subtitled “stubborn bonds.”

Nevertheless, she says, there are diehard “bio-libertarians” like Lewis, for whom:

 feminist liberation can only be attained by de-normalizing first the ‘natural’ heterosexual mode of reproduction, second the idea that gestation affords a mother any particular bond with a baby, and finally the idea that gestating, birth and nursing are in any unique sense something done by women.

I think Harrington has misjudged a sequence of events as a causal relationship. Just because reproductive control preceded “cyborg theology” (transgender/transhumanist ideology to the rest of us) does not mean the first caused the second. Lewis is a queer theorist, married to a man who claims a woman-identity (and defends looting), and has been employed as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies (FQT Centre) at the University of Pennsylvania.

To call Lewis, who questions whether mothers should even be regarded as persons, a “feminist” is a stretch. It has been suggested that she and her partner are trolls, turning out clickbait for coins. If more young women than before are frightened of pregnancy, the cause may well be that pregnant women are no longer ubiquitous. If you’re not pregnant yourself, you could go years without seeing a pregnant woman much less interacting with one in your social circle.

Women’s liberty to manifest their full humanity including intellectual attainment and motherhood requires a liberation from patriarchy, indeed the transformation of “father”- dominant society into a human, humane civilization. To replace the feminist goal of “smashing the patriarchy” with smashing the mother-child bond is a deception of the sort practiced routinely by an ideology that has been appropriating feminism at the same time as it has been appropriating womanhood. It is a form of giving in to patriarchy, and to a masculine (mis)conception of a free woman as just a man with a vagina.

Harrington proposes a small portfolio of solutions both to the sterility of sexual license and to cyborg (surrogate) motherhood, which includes de-emphasizing romance, supporting single-sex spaces for both men and women and “re-wilding” sex.

Sex needs to be made dangerous again, she says:

For in de-risking sex, this technology has made it ubiquitous, and in the process stripped desire of anticipation, excitement and mystery: in a word, emptied it of eroticism. In its place we’re offered an increasingly coarse, commodified and grotesque landscape of all-you-can-eat lust.”

Again, we need to ask, where are the men? She says technology has made sex ubiquitous, but is it not more accurate to say that men, beneficiaries of liberated lust enabled by the Pill, are responsible?

Harrington does acknowledge that just as men have lost interest, women have been brutalized to the point of wanting change. By taking the Pill out of the equation, we can return to a more natural sexuality and “heal our polluted erotic ecologies.”

As she points out “pregnancy risk is, after all, a cast-iron reason to reject having sex with anyone out of politeness.”

 In a world in which pregnancy can so easily be prevented, it is also an immature and cowardly excuse. Harrington is suggesting the re-imposition of an external barrier, a crutch, rather than the development of meaningful, ethical reasons for rejection. It does not require women to stop being compliant to patriarchal demands. It does not require women to grow up.

Women can, possibly for the first time, choose to develop an ethics of sexuality that would give them internal, meaningful criteria for choosing whether to be sexually active and choosing whom to be sexually active with. The repressive teachings of religion have waned, the Pill (as well as other devices) makes pregnancy preventable, decades of unsatisfactory sex have shown women the limits of sexual licence, or “sex-positivity”, and the pornification of sex has made it even less desirable. What better context for a serious discussion about why and why not to have sex?

A woman should be able to say “no” for absolutely no reason other than that she doesn’t want to. She should be able to say that confidently, without shame. Why is that still not possible?

I am with Harrington, in that I too believe we need a renewed feminism. We need a feminism that takes up where the second-wave left off, that recognizes women can be equal in some ways without being free; a feminism that refuses to accept the strictures and parameters of a world constructed hundreds of years ago by men and that does not suit women’s needs, desires or interests.

We don’t need to re-wild sex; we need to re-wild women, to transform ourselves from timid domestic mice into fierce lions so that our lives give us self-worth enough to partner with men in mutually nourishing ways. That is the only kind of world that will allow children to flourish and divert us from the death that man-made technology now promises.

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Every once in a while, predicable as a summer drought, some bearded jackdaw swoops into twitter space cawing that “it’s all feminism’s fault,” “it’s all feminism’s fault,” or “it’s all women’s fault,” “it’s all women’s fault.”

It’s okay, we crones and witches toss our loaves and fishes in the air anyway, all day and all night – the sun never sets in twitter space – offering the Way and the Truth and Sustenance to all who suffer and are weary, jackdaws and songbirds alike.

On the one hand these critics say that transgenderism was the natural result of feminism’s claim that there was no difference between men and women. And on the other hand they say feminism created the first identity politics, which led to all the others and the queering of everything.

These seem contradictory claims. If there’s no difference, how can there be a politics of difference? If there’s no difference, imagine men as a field of yellow and women also as a field of yellow. What does anyone transition to or from, and why?

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Matt Walsh was the most recent to cackle his animosity toward feminists, maybe because they pointed out his theft of women’s ideas for his movie, “What is a Woman.” Best counter-argument: women have no ideas.

I studied his proposition: feminists claimed there was no difference between women and men except for the (really insignificant) physical differences. And his conclusion: so therefore men could be women.

There’s a logical leap there equivalent to the cow jumping over the moon, and I finally realized I shouldn’t even take it seriously. It’s simple male animus toward women.

But I would like to explore the idea that women may have felt a need to make the claim that there is no difference, except the physical, between the sexes.

Does anybody remember that for thousands of years men in a variety of cultures insisted women were different than men in ways that justified enslaving them for male needs and wants?

Aristotle claimed that, unlike men, women had no souls. This would have reduced women to the level of animals, who were also regarded as soulless. It’s hard to imagine anyone could claim that the two sexes of the same species could be differentiated that much. The logical extension of that would be that humans (male) mate with animals (female), sometimes resulting in human offspring and sometimes in animal offspring.

Time and again men have claimed that it was dangerous to permit women to have the sort of education that would introduce them to ideas. Using their minds too much would affect their wombs, men said, and from there loop back to their minds to render them mad. Hysteria was a disease of the womb and because of the womb, women were too fragile to be allowed the full range of human experience. Women were to be kept relatively mindless in order to protect their reproductive capacity and their ability to serve men, raise children and maintain a home.

Feminists, even in mid twentieth century, were making a claim against a belief with a long tradition that women were lesser than men, lesser in our humanity. Men were human. Women were “not-quite.” What feminists were saying was that while our bodies might be smaller, weaker, and slower than male bodies, our minds were not.

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We – I mean all animals, possibly fish, and even very possibly plants --are embodied consciousness. In humans, consciousness includes our reasoning ability, our emotions, our will, our imagination, our memory, our intuition. Feminists have argued that neither male nor female has a greater capacity, ability or scope in any of these functions. We are therefore equally human.

This was a very important claim to make and is one that we must continue to make. Because of that claim, the public world finally opened up to women in the west, in the 1960s and 1970s. We were allowed into universities and from there into workplaces and careers. From this position we can wonder what came first – the claim that women were less then human (which led to their confinement under the care of a man), or the claim that women’s place was the prison of the home under the care of a man (which led to their apparent ignorance).

In the civilizations that have left records, which have all been patriarchies – meaning the institutions, structures and laws were designed by men, from a male perspective and for the benefit of men -- men are required to compete with each other and to sort themselves into a hierarchy of good, better, best.

What would they gain by having to compete with women as well? And what would they lose? I think we are seeing very clearly, possibly for the first time, what men lose when women compete with them for knowledge, status, and rewards. They lose a lot. They lose jobs, top spots in almost every category of human endeavor, money, opportunity for advancement and – perhaps most importantly, their choice of mate from the women competing for them in the wings.

Women have proven in the last 50 years that they can be better than men in most fields of endeavor. They have proven they don’t need a man to maintain them financially. And they have proven they can choose motherhood without choosing husbands too. All of this has been very disturbing to some men. For them, their worst nightmare has come true and we are watching the multiple avenues of revenge as well as multiple avenues of adaptation.

Who would have thought that a woman’s movement exposing workplace sexual harassment would be checkmated by a male movement that claims “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is.” 

Benjamin Boyce thinks this too is women’s fault. Who would have thought it was women’s role to tell men how and why to live?

He means this vision has worked for men. Did anyone ask women?

Women’s status as equal to men’s in terms of human potential and ability is now unarguable. Yet, there are differences between the sexes beyond the merely physical. These are personality differences, sometimes also thought of as psychological differences. How important are they? And why are a breed of social scientist – the evolutionary psychologist or biologist – so obsessed with them?

Feminists have argued that our psyches/personalities are constructed through our interaction with outside forces. They call this social conditioning, but academics like Stephen Pinker have labelled this “blank slateism.” I think this must be a strawman. Most feminists have borne and raised children, and so they know that children are not blank slates when they emerge from the womb, but come with pretty distinct proto-personalities.

Social conditioning is not a one way process, messages are not transcribed like music onto blank CDs. Imagine for a moment a dysfunctional family – the dad kicks all of his three kids (or if you prefer the mom routinely humiliates them). The three kids all respond differently, with one withdrawing, one kicking other kids in turn, one blaming the non-offending parent. The parental message has interacted with the developing personalities of living humans and altered them all, but differently.

How our personalities develop depends on how others respond to our proto-personality traits as well as how we respond to the outside world. One thing is certain – the world that girls occupy is markedly different than the world boys occupy. They may look the same, but if you think of the myriad messages boys and girls are sent as audio files, the sound boys hear is as different from the sound girls hear as Beethoven is from Joni Mitchell.

And that’s how no male is ever conditioned as a girl is. If you were subjected to acid rock, even it you hated it, even if you rejected it, you were not raised on the music of Nina Simone. And you can’t pretend you were. Even if when middle age comes, you  listen to Simone non-stop for a year, you cannot be a person whose soundscape was nothing but Simone for the first 16 years or so.

I think social conditioning is still a pretty unpopular hypothesis. “Experts” have argued within recent memory that advertising toys and candy to children is harmful and should be banned, and that watching violent video games is harmless and should be accepted. In the first case they have acknowledged that children are influenced and shaped by messages directed at them, and in the second they deny such influence or shaping.

Millions of dollars are spent by advertisers to influence people while these advertisers simultaneously claim their advertisements have no effect on people and are not responsible for human behaviour.

I think western individualism has led many of us to idolize personalities. We form personality cults, and we also lionize our own. I’ve heard so many acquaintances brag about their love of chocolate, or of stick shifts, as though it says something definitive about them, as though it’s part of their uniqueness. Never mind the fact that had they been raised in Vietnam, for example, they might not know anything about chocolate or automatic transmissions. Many of us hug our preferences to our chests, loving what they say about us.

I suspect we would like to think we emerged fully ourselves from the thigh of Zeus, like Dionysius, or from his head, like Athena, quintessentially ourselves from the moment our foot touched earth. Unchanging and unchangeable, never to be mistaken for anyone else who has ever lived. Maybe never so vulnerable as a human infant.

And I think that is the nub of it. A person under the influence of another is weak. The louder we claim to be uniquely ourselves and impervious to others, the more we deny that we were ever that weak.

We allow ourselves to be inundated with advertising – purposeful, targeted social conditioning – and claim not to be influenced by it. The same people who benefit by this denial benefit by the targeted marketing of gender ideology to children, claiming kids are not influenced by bright colours, glitter, unicorns and cartoon gingerbread people.

We buy so much when we deny that we are being sold.

It’s not a spiritual perspective, if I can use the term “spiritual” to refer to having meaning or purpose. To look for meaning in our lives invariably means aspiring to be something we apprehend we could be, but are not yet. Becoming that requires undoing some of what we are and transcending some of what we are to find something we might call “wholeness.”

It is in part a psychological journey and the best resource that I have found is not in a feminist text, but in a psychotherapeutic work.  Therapists know they have to help survivors of childhood abuse, for example, face the specific details both of the abuse and of their responses to it. In the 1980s and 90s there was a lot of talk about the “scripts” we carry in our heads and how to change them.

But the field of evolutionary biology/psychology is hard at work trying to find elements of our personality that are coded in our genes, a result of evolutionary improvement. Watching Gad Saad in conversation with Jordan Peterson on his Youtube channel recently I heard evolutionist Saad complaining about why people don’t believe evolutionary psychology instead of social conditioning is responsible for who we are.

Then he remarked to Peterson – it seemed a non sequitur -- that if you want to know everything about a woman’s sexuality all you have to do is study romance novels. They’re all the same, he said, there’s an alpha man – superior in physique, intellect, finance and breeding – who is reckless and needs to be healed by the love of one good woman.

Peterson nodded sagely, “ah yes, the beauty and the beast archetype.”

Well, if we’re going to use the junk entertainment churned out and marketed to women as evidence of innate female psychology, then surely we also have to look there to find evidence of innate male sexuality. I could say everything we need to know about male sexuality is visible in the porn they watch. It’s all the same, one or more men viciously attack a young woman or adolescent, spitting contempt on her, until he orgasms.

I don’t see how breaking down a young women so that she is unfit for purpose after two or three years is an evolutionary strategy. Nor do I see how chasing after reckless men to save them with your love is an evolutionary strategy for females. Can men not see this?

Both these behaviours and the attitudes that prompt them are most easily accounted for as pathological responses to some form of abuse or neglect or negative messaging. To call them part of our evolutionary heritage is to truck in mystical essences that seem awfully similar to the mystical essence of “gender”, unprovable and unfalsifiable.

When I was in school, my teachers told me genes control biology, not behaviour. If behaviour, or the attitudes that guide behaviour, are genetically programmed, then humans have much less free will than we like to think. Women are doomed to agreeability regardless of the danger that might put them in, men are doomed to risk-taking even if it leads to high accidental death rates.

As innate qualities they’re unchangeable and no one can do more than shrug. We just have to accept a certain amount of male violence and a certain amount of female self-destructiveness. Oh well. So who benefits from this belief? Those who might otherwise feel a responsibility to enact societal change.

I wonder if, among other motivations (huge profits, misogyny, sexual fetishism) genderism is actually a reaction against the self-care, recovery and therapeutic movements of the eighties and nineties.

I remember when everyone gave up alcoholic spirits in favour of a glass of white wine, took up jogging and founded health food stores. A desire for self-improvement was in the air. Self-help books filled the bookshelves and finally incest was revealed as the pervasive harm that it is. An unnerving predilection on the part of scout leaders, priests, music directors and athletic coaches for sexually abusing boys came to light. A growing therapeutic movement developed eclectic techniques from gestalt, art therapy, family dynamics therapy, EMDR and focusing. Returning soldiers were diagnosed with dissociative disorders and then survivors of childhood abuse were understood to have the same set of adaptations. That explained a lot. If outright cures were not in order, much mitigation was possible.

People were taking responsibility for their lives. Maybe they couldn’t stop others from hurting them, but they were the only ones who could reclaim themselves from the wreckage. Some feminists objected, asserting that society in general was the cause, and society was responsible for fixing it. But damaged women don’t engage in politics – they self harm, they struggle just to survive, or they succumb. Politics can’t cure the psyche, but it can and should prevent the damage.

Genderism seems simultaneously an extension of the “take charge of your life” ethos and a parody of it. It grants children the authority and autonomy to diagnose their “unhappiness disorder” and choose the “cure.” This is an abdication of societal responsibility. The cure turns out to be just another symptom, but instead of helping the child to overcome, society now demands that everyone conspire to placate the damaged child. We all have to change, not to prevent such damage, but to maintain an illusion that there is no damage. That’s the politics of genderism.

Boys and girls are not that much different in how they deal with suffering. Boys tend to act outwardly and girls tend to act inwardly. That just doesn’t seem as important as understanding that they are reactions to suffering, and working to lessen the ways we harm the young to allow all of us to achieve our full potential, our full human potential, which anyone, male or female, has in abundance.

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So who is to blame? All who have created a world where we are told happiness is within our grasp and failure to take it is a personal fault. All who allowed American imperialism to grow to monstrous proportions after the collapse of its rival – genderism is an imperial project. All who allowed pornography to saturate the “airways” because “kids aren’t affected by what they experience.” All who reduced rape to a minor misdemeanour. All who turned a blind eye to the excesses of the wealthy. All who gave their children over to the predation of the marketplace because it was easier than parenting them. All those who told girls they didn’t quite count as much as boys, and all those who told boys they could easily be emasculated.

All those who created a society whose collective nervous system is stretched so tight that people alternate frantically between excess stimulation and oblivion. All those who deny we live in a tightly woven web of interconnection where what affects one affects all. All those who shrug their shoulders and say “live and let live” because they don’t want to differentiate good from evil.­­

We are living in times when all of us, male and female, are all being told not to think. Thinking is dangerous. Don’t strain your pretty little head, or you might find yourself judging, and you can’t do that!

God forbid we should judge what’s good and evil, right or wrong, male or female. Better to stay ignorant and obedient children in a pretend paradise.

Mindlessness is the safest way to be.

I used to love the song, “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” the way husky-voiced Roberta Flack used to sing it back in the 1970s. I understood it as a quintessential woman’s dream, the romance of finding a man who understood his woman so well he could tell her story, “killing” her with his empathy.

I heard he sang a good song

I heard he had a style

And so I came to see him

To listen for a while.

And there he was this young boy

A stranger to my eyes

Strumming my pain with his fingers

Singing my life with his words

Killing me softly with his song

Telling my whole life with his words

Killing me softly with his song. . .

He sang as if he knew me

In all my dark despair.

And then he looked right through me

As if I wasn’t there.

And he just kept on singing

Singing clear and strong.

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 But the song is fraudulent. Pretending to represent a woman’s desire, it was written by a pair of men, so it is they who are speaking, creating a fantasy of a woman creating a fantasy of a man.

Um hmmm.

Until the line “And then he looked right through me as if I wasn’t there.” Once we understand that the speaker behind the speaker is a man, we can see this as a sort of male “gotcha”, the author aligning with the singer to pull the carpet out from under a woman who assumed an intimacy that didn’t exist. Leaving her out in the cold. A woman who is sandwiched between creator and performer, who is herself the passive recipient of both, who is constructed as “yearning helplessness” by both men.

Women eat it up.

A culture’s literary canon tells us about the people who create and cultivate the canon. The canon, the collection of works deemed essential mirrors of the culture, doesn’t just come about by chance. Or by popularity. The works are chosen by gatekeepers who have historically been just as male as the authors they elevate.

Literary scholars have noted that the entire history of American literature fits one “anti-domesticity” narrative. For anti-domesticity, read anti-woman, anti-family. All the great American literature written by men is about men who escape women and their need for intimacy. Think Hemingway, Hawthorne, Melville, Norman Mailer, all shooting animals in the woods or hunting whales to the death of whichever. Think Thoreau, who proudly wrote about his years of solitude in a cabin by Walden Pond, but went home to his mother’s home-cooked meals when the sun went down. Self-reliance is the great American male fantasy.

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Requiem for the Corpse of History

It’s been at least 40 years since feminists defined and condemned patriarchy in any systematic way. Women seem to have given up on trying to smash it and are happy with “equality”, or “equity”, whatever that means. They’ve decided that since women have “choice” and “agency”, we’re free. No more need for women’s liberation…

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3 years ago · 1 like · felicia rembrandt

It's not a bad thing; of course it’s not. But it’s only one human desire and exists more in the aspiration than in the practice. We all need people. That includes those most rendered invisible – the shoemakers, cloth weavers and clothing sewers, growers of crops and makers of meal, and of meals. Manufacturers of transport vehicles. Without other people most of us would be naked, unfed barefoot wanderers. Both the desire for intimacy and the desire for independence are universal and are as related as two halves of a whole. All people, male and female, want both these things. To be able to flow from independent action to mutually dependent intimacy in natural rhythms is the epitome of individuation. But western men have constructed a scenario in which it is women alone who want intimacy, and men who need to escape into masculine solitary independence. These constructed beings may be the dregs of patriarchy, created when people were becoming urban and male hunting and fighting for survival a more or less distant memory. What do you imagine women did during those times when they were responsible for keeping everyone safe and fed without able-bodied men? No, what kind of women would they have been? Would we even recognize them?

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The Problem with Women

Thank you for reading felicia rembrandt comments. This post is public so feel free to share it. The Problem with Women (and a tiny little bit about the problem with men) By felicia rembrandt . The average woman, until art comes to her aid, is ungraceful, misshapen, badly calved and crudely articulated, even for a woman. If she has a good torso, she is almos…

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3 years ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · felicia rembrandt

How do you maintain the illusion of an ancient masculinity when you spend your days in an office? In part you create an illusory femininity of dependence and neediness. Or, in the newest male craze, a femininity of “agreeableness”. There’s nothing new about this at all, of course, it’s just repackaged “nice” and “kind”. Agreeable women are the “angel in the house” as (male) British authors named her 200 years ago. 

It’s a very appealing aspiration for many, many women because, I think, it calls for the greatest human achievement – self-sacrifice for the sake of others. Men risk death in battle if the cause is just, or if the survival of their tribe demands it. Women deny themselves. It seems highly moral. But who do women deny themselves for? It’s one thing to sacrifice for the sake of one’s children, or for the preservation of the species. It’s an entirely different thing to deny oneself for a man. 

But this is what women seem constantly to do. 

I want women to understand that this is not a moral act. It serves no valuable function at all. If your first instinct in a social setting is to be nice (to men), you are not exercising your ethical muscle, you are simply doing the easiest thing you could possibly do – reacting mindlessly out of your conditioning. 

Being “nice” or “kind” should take a struggle. Making the ethical decision should take effort. It requires overcoming all the easier, lazier, more self-indulgent, ego-satisfying possibilities. The cashier gives you too much change, do you keep it or return it? Someone shouts insults at you, do you return the favour, or restrain yourself? All of us encounter such choices pretty regularly, and it always takes at least some small effort to do the right thing. 

“Niceness” as a feminine characteristic is newly visible on social media, where we all see women treating men with synthetic sex identities as if they have the right to pretend to be a woman.  Many of us are appalled at all the women supporting such men as they take over women’s spaces, money and awards,  and tweet disapprovingly en masse about the “be kind” crowd, or the “choose me” gang.

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And then we watch it happen again and again, and find that even gender critical women are not immune. Recently a man claiming to be a woman infiltrated Canadian twitterspace, offering himself to everyone as a “reasonable” “transwoman,” saying all the things women love to hear. He opposed the social transition of children without parental knowledge, he said. He boasted that he refused to wear pronoun badges – everyone knows what I’m going for, he said, his hormone-enhanced cleavage on display.

When pronouns are compelled, everyone calls him “they”, he lamented. When they’re not compelled, he can count on the kindness of women to call him “she”, even -- he gushed -- without being asked! Women will be nice without being asked to be nice, how nice is that, he enthused in wide-eyed wonder. Imagine that!!

And even those who know that men can never be women, who bridle at wrong-sex pronouns, called him “she”! How can kindness hurt, they asked, as they modelled capitulation to all their followers.

But here is the truth. If a woman has to be asked to be nice, she has already failed. Feminine niceness must be offered before it’s demanded. A woman who has to be asked to be nice is not a nice woman. Our social conditioning works to eliminate any gap between the opportunity for kindness, and the decision to be kind. Eliminate the gap, eliminate thought, eliminate conscious decision-making. And you eliminate moral agency.

I still remember, with some shame, walking along a sidewalk near my home when a man uttered the one word, “smile” as he passed me. I automatically lifted my head and the corners of my mouth. Automatically. I was in my fifties. I smiled because a random man had casually commanded it without even stopping as he continued the march of his own life.

Much of the time when I see women choosing nice instead of real, I think of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem about  African Americans in post-slavery America.

We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Women  hide our real selves, dare I say our “authentic” selves, behind our smiles, our niceness, our agreeableness. And men believe us when we lie.

That, that is the reason we have to stop. When the choice is between truth and kindness, we have to choose truth.

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Is Hogwarts the Model for the Trans Glitter Utopia?

One of my favourite authors, American memoirist Annie Dillard, wrote somewhere “If you like metaphysics, throw pots.” I adore that line. As it happens, I like metaphysics, so I immediately imagined pulling pots and pans out of the kitchen cupboards and throwing them against the walls. It suited my mood at the time. The frustration of metaphysical inquir…

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3 years ago · 7 likes · 3 comments · felicia rembrandt

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It’s been at least 40 years since feminists defined and condemned patriarchy in any systematic way. Women seem to have given up on trying to smash it and are happy with “equality”, or “equity”, whatever that means. They’ve decided that since women have “choice” and “agency”, we’re free. No more need for women’s liberation.

This is a disastrous perspective. It has blinded us to the newest wave of patriarchal power that promises to destroy humanity for good and all. And women are being swept away even as we cheerfully encourage the men in their sweep.

We need to reacquaint ourselves with patriarchy to see that though it may have shifted in shape and form, it is still a death cult, and it is more dangerous now for years of being ignored here in liberal western democracies. We are on the cusp of our own destruction.

So here is an allegory, a simple model of patriarchy and how it was constructed to begin with. It’s for newbies, those women and men fleeing the rampant gender industry, looking for a solid footing – an explanation and a way forward. Please note that no children were harmed during the creation of this fiction.

Take a playground.

Populate it with children. Not a crowd, but enough. Put some shady trees in it, some slides and swings, a cleared area for playing games with balls.

The boys play loud games of chase and fetch and grab.

In a while the boys start to claim their space. This is mine, one will say, and then another. You can’t come here, one will say. Some will jump to his side to defend the claim. In almost no time the playground, one large open space, will be divided into invisible zones.

This is my territory, a boy will shout joyfully, and others will join him as his followers. He has become a leader. He is king of his piece of the playground.

So this playground is now divided into, let’s say, four zones: the north, the east, the west, the south zones. All the boys have chosen the zone to stake allegiance to. Each zone has a leader.

Then the boys play war games, attacking across invisible boundaries, being forced back. Waves of boys pushing forward, falling back. They are playing games of physical power, loving being shoved as much as tackling an other. They shout across the boundaries, exulting in the power of their voices.

This is the story we all live inside – a globe divided into nations, power pitted against power. This is patriarchy, or at least part of it.

What’s missing are the girls. This playground is as full of girls as of boys. Did you notice they weren’t part of the story?

The girls have been sitting in small groups, chatting, talking, sharing information and points of view, speculating on why this and why that. They have been creating families out of clods of earth, odd-shaped rocks and rootful weeds. When they’re tired of sitting, they stroll hand in hand, or skip to another group.

They cross the zone boundaries, which they know nothing about. The playground is one large open space.

A boy notices. He might be a leader, spotting a new way to assert his power. Or he might be a follower wanting to crank up the game and keep it going. Hey, he shouts, she’s not following the rules. Stop her.

Boys leap up to stop the girl, to turn her back. You belong over there, they say. And to other girls they say you belong here, and there, and there. Wherever girls are sitting or standing, the boys tell them they belong. From now on, you can’t move, they say.

They’ve made the girls their … property.

Girls ignore them. They get up to go to the swings, or to shelter in the shade of a tree, or to visit a friend.

Some boys get angry, the girls are spoiling their game of kingdom and kingship. These girls need to see the invisible boundaries, they need to be made to see the zones. They need to see the leader, and to see he is their leader and they have to follow.

But this is not a game the girls play. They don’t have single leaders. They aren’t followers. If they did have leaders, they might not choose this boy, or that boy as leader. They might choose girls. Anyway, who cares? The whole playground is their world.

So they ignore the boys and refuse to see the invisible barriers. Now the boys get rough with the girls. When they cross their borders, they push them to the ground. When the girls get up and start across again, they kick them. They punch them.

Why can’t they just follow the rules like anyone else – like boys? Some boys feel the joy leave. This is supposed to be a game and all the girls have to do is play along and now some of them are bruised and crying. They get angrier because the girls have stolen the fun, the pleasure, the joy of body against body, the exhilaration of winning followers.

Sooner than you would think, girls are bleeding bodies on the playground.

A few are still standing, looking frightened, confused, traumatized.

Now a boy sees these last girls must be made to submit. He speaks to one girl, commands her to fall on her knees in front of him. She does. She obeys! Him! And all the other boys are watching. He has done what no boy has done before, forced obedience from another child who did not want to obey.

What must he do with this obedience? Everyone is watching. A girl on her knees is nothing. He has to make her do something. But what? Everyone is watching. What can he make her do that will show them his power? Fear is crawling up his backbone. If he doesn’t think of something, they will turn their backs on him, the other leaders and their followers. They’ll play their games without him, a boy who didn’t know how to follow through.

At last, sweaty with fear, he commands her. He uses his first obscenity. Or it is the first time he has made an obscenity of his body. He commands her to lick it. Or suck it. Or kiss it. He pulls his body into parts for her to lick, suck, kiss. A foot! A buttock! A . . . a . . . a penis!!?

And the boys join in. A raucous laughing chant. They chant the new obscenity, again and again.

And the darkness that was edging into his vision fades away again. They’ve accepted this new twist to the game. He’s a leader still. He tries to ignore the place where his innocence used to lie, the pinprick hole where shame is seeping in.

This is the world we live inside, right? All of us, male and female, men and women. This is patriarchy, a game for boys, playing with power. And a game forced on girls. An obscene game.

When I watch the television news with all those men from countries they claim to represent, gathering for this conference or that media debate, I see packs of boys acting like they own the playground, like they can divide it up, and fight over the pieces of it. Like the girls don’t also own the space.

And we don’t, not anymore.

What would the world look like, if the boys understood their game was just a game, their boundaries temporary, to be dis-imagined at the end of the day? If they understood they didn’t actually own the playground? And if they understood the space belonged equally to the girls, who play their own games?

It seems to me we desperately need to imagine such a world – one where male ownership was not legitimated. We need to imagine alternate worlds and spread those visions around so that women’s rights are more than demands for mere “equality”, which only allow girls to join the boy followers in the playground zones.

In a hundred years of feminist activism, that’s all we’ve done – clawed our way from servicers of men to the crowd of followers. And we’ve let the majority of women stay where they are – on their knees, servicing men as sex receptacles, cooks, word-processors, nannies, cleaners.

But our place as followers, those of us who’ve managed to claw our way there, is suspect and equivocal. Women are not natural followers of men in the same way boys are. We don’t create heroes, like boys do. We don’t cloak ourselves in a man’s glory the way boys do. We don’t wrap ourselves in team colours. Men know this and regard us with a wary eye.

Men know this and periodically demand we drop down into the service role, just to reassure them we know that is our real place. And the service role is the same for women judges, police officers, artists, accountants, professionals of all sorts and of all economic grades – it’s on our knees, licking someone’s ass. Want to keep your job? Suck my dick.

We need to swing the gates of our imaginations wide open and imagine a completely different world, one where the men know all their games of war and conquest and territorial expansion are just temporary games, where they collect their weapons and free their slaves when the school bells ring. Where they leave women alone to play our games and don’t expect us to honour the boundaries they’ve created.

What games would we play if men and women lived in parallel worlds?

Or how would the world look if men and women took it for granted that the planet belonged to women as much as it did to men? Imagine if men planned their games and then took them to women for approval or disapproval so that all choices were shared choices?

And imagine if women still saw the world as one big, open space where they could hold hands with one another as they skip from place to place? We look at the world too much now as men do, and we see ourselves as ‘natural’ supporters of men. Too many of us cannot see the world anymore from the perspective of women who have not been subjugated. I wonder what the world might have looked like to women who had always been free and whose authority was taken for granted, before the concept of male power was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

But let’s imagine, for example, if those men who designed the machinery that instigated the industrial revolution 600 years ago had had to show those plans to women before they could build the engines that ended hand spinning and weaving of cloth, that drove men, women and children into inhumane factories for fourteen hours a day, that filled the cities with polluted air, and that made a few men obscenely rich?

Would women have said, “um, the human cost looks too great. No.”?

Almost non-stop women’s protests across Europe right until the Great War shut them all down strongly suggests they would have. Millions of people, after all, died as societies transformed from agricultural to industrial.

And what would the world look like now if the industrial revolution had not been allowed to proceed? If families had not been broken up into wage-earners, men being paid a “family wage” and women pin-money? If men hadn’t been driven into the pubs to find community and drunkenness? If millions of African men, women and children hadn’t been driven onto ships to service the cotton and tobacco plantations of the new world?

We are still dealing with the residue of that terrible time, those terrible decisions, though (male) historians insist the steam engine was an invention that rocketed us all upward into the “arc of progress”, that proved men are worthy of the adoration that men yearn to bestow on manhood. A great reset, they called it, with regrettable losses, but, well, all for the best in the end.

We have not progressed. We have not left the charnel houses of the wars, revolutions, and conquests western men have constructed over the last half millennium. The stink of all those deaths is in our loneliness, our isolation, our fractured towns, our hordes of “undesirables”. Our inability to love. Our ever more desperate need for ever more demanding stimulants.

 We can’t free ourselves from the past until we can see the past clearly. This is as true for the collective as it is for the individual suffering from a private trauma.

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We need to rewrite the history books and change them from propaganda for male glory to a proper science – the analysis of patriarchy. If we haven’t learned from history, it’s because history, as written and compiled, is trying to teach us the wrong things. Instead of teaching us how power is gained and held and lost – the recipe for heroism -- it should be teaching us the consequences for all humans of the decisions made by the powerful few for their own self-aggrandizement.

If we looked at those consequences, truly, we could not repeat the actions of the “great” men of history.

We need imagination enough to envision a different kind of world.  

This world would be one in which it is understood that women’s perspectives are as important and relevant to all decisions as men’s. And our perspectives are different not because of some essential difference from men, not because women are morally superior, but because our monthly sloughing keeps us connected to material reality, and because that same cycle makes us always cognizant that pleasure can lead to creation, and what is created must have room to thrive. And because we understand that our lives are bound by people physically stronger than us on one side, and weaker and more helpless on the other.

We need a world in which men never gather in conference rooms or in tents to make decisions for all humanity. Not even one in which a few women participate as tokens. Because there is really not enough difference between G7 or G20 men in suits and ties, and tribal men in turbans and robes.

We need a world where women gather together to consider together the consequences of actions on all of us. Men won’t look at the price. It’s up to us, we who are required to have a different point of view.

So this is a call to women to call out the true history of the world – a history of domination by the powerful to appease their lust, their greed and their envy. And a history of men given free licence to invent technologies without consideration of the costs. And when we have replaced the heroic mythologies created by men with reality, we must create blueprints for a new kind of world.

We’re running out of time. With no more playgrounds to capture and colonize, men are turning to cannibalism. Still failing to see women as separate human beings with wills and desires and needs of our own, they fetishize the “femininity” they have assigned to us and pretend to replace us as the sexually desirable ones.

And they are snapping their jaws at the children, eyeing them as imperfect constructions that can be stripped for parts, made more available for male gratification, but deprived of the ability to have their own sexual pleasure. They contemplate sterile plastic “wombs” where children can be gestated in silent isolation.

If we don’t learn how to authenticate the power of women, and check the power of the masculine, we’ll be left with nothing – no children, no women, no earth, and finally, no men either. Maybe the artifacts of male invention will remain – humanoid robots click-clacking and buzzing as they endlessly circle a barren rock.

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Is Hogwarts the Model for the Trans Glitter Utopia?

One of my favourite authors, American memoirist Annie Dillard, wrote somewhere “If you like metaphysics, throw pots.” I adore that line. As it happens, I like metaphysics, so I immediately imagined pulling pots and pans out of the kitchen cupboards and throwing them against the walls. It suited my mood at the time. The frustration of metaphysical inquir…

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3 years ago · 6 likes · 3 comments · felicia rembrandt

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One of my favourite authors, American memoirist Annie Dillard, wrote somewhere “If you like metaphysics, throw pots.” I adore that line. As it happens, I like metaphysics, so I immediately imagined pulling pots and pans out of the kitchen cupboards and throwing them against the walls. It suited my mood at the time. The frustration of metaphysical inquiry!

It actually took a few months for me to realize she meant that if you are prone to metaphysical speculations, you should get your hands into some clay and become a potter. The cure for head-in-the-sky is hands-in-the-mud.

My task today, though, is to analyze the boy, Harry, who when we first meet him resembles nothing so much as a cracked and dusty pot abandoned on the reject shelf in some potter’s studio.

Given all the transactivists who claim J.K.Rowling is betraying the ideas and ideals of her Harry Potter novels, it seems past time for an in-depth analysis of the world of wizards, the world of muggles, and the relationship between those two worlds.

I had never read the books, which came out in the late nineties when I was already making my living teaching literature to young adults. Children’s lit? Not for me, thanks, but I’ll take something metaphysical, something mystical, something from the pen of Jalaluddin Rumi, say, something like the Song of the Reed Flute:

 Ever since I was cut from the reedbed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone apart from someone he loves, understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back . . .

That’s the good stuff, yup.

 But since I joined the battle for the inexplicably disappeared women’s rights on social media, Rowling has been, not to be delicate about it, in my face. Almost daily.

 So when I spotted a used copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in one of my local free “little libraries” last year, I snapped it up (along with a rather big hardback by some guy called Robert Galbraith).

The Prisoner was fine, an enjoyable enough read for an adult of my years, better than the bits of movies I encountered from time to time as I scrolled through late night television listings. But The Prisoner of Azkaban is volume 3, and I thought I was missing important things by jumping in mid-series, so I ordered the first two volumes from my library.

I had at least one expectation of the novels, based on trans-activist claims that Rowling was betraying her own books.

I expected that there would be a clear delineation between the world of “muggles”, average Joes and Josies living on the wrong side of platform 9 ¾, and Hogwarts, the magical home of the special people who could commune with ghosts and ghouls, cast spells and generally enjoy a life not as constrained by material reality as the muggles’ world.

 I thought that Hogwarts would be a utopian ideal, populated only by the beautiful and the good. No need for rules, for child safeguarding, for the word “no”. A safe world, in other words, of glitter and rainbows and magic unicorns.

There are unicorns, but in every other respect I was wrong.

I realized my error first when Rowling makes it clear Hogwarts is no different than the ordinary world in its number and distribution of people who behave badly. When Harry is called to Hogwarts to begin his wizard studies, he gets to escape from his uncle and aunt who deprive him of almost everything necessary for life. He also escapes his cousin, the porky Dudley, who bullies him relentlessly.

But he no sooner arrives at wizard school than he is confronted with Dudley’s doppelganger, Draco Malfoy, who comes with two beefy sidekicks. Harry will also have problems with one of the professors, Snape, who hates him for the simple reason that he hated Harry’s father.

 Instead of a utopic world, this one is more or less the same as the other. Injustice coexists with justice, compassion with hatred. And it’s up to each occupant to find a way to cope – no one is there to rescue them from petty abuses.

But still, the novels must portray Hogwarts’ inhabitants as above ordinary mortals, right? Surely muggles would be portrayed as, well, “cis”, straight, white bread kind of people -- soccer moms, barbecue dads, (or maybe in the UK that would be takeaway dads) suburban duds to be held in contempt.

It turns out there isn’t a clear separation between muggles and wizards. Some wizards, like Hermione, are offspring of two muggle parents. And some children of two wizards show little to no evidence of wizard talent. A government department is responsible for making sure muggles aren’t accidentally harmed by wizards or their wizardry, and students can take muggles studies at school.  Safeguarding of muggles is taken seriously.

Voldemort’s crime, which is duplicated by Malfoy, is to believe in the superiority of “pure blood” wizards. They believe the gulf between them and wizards with muggle parents (whom they refer to contemptuously as “mudbloods”) is so great, that they must be expelled. And violence and trickery are acceptable in pursuit of that goal.

What really struck me – hard – as a difference between the magical world of Hogwarts and the glitter paradise of the trans cult appears in book two, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, when Harry is in deadly confrontation with Tom Riddle. Riddle tells him, “So. Your mother died to save you. Yes, that’s a powerful counter-charm.”

And in book three, Harry is saved by the apparition of his father, in the form of a deer, nicknamed “Prongs.” Dumbledore tells him:

You think the dead we have loved every truly leave us? You think that we don’t recall them more clearly then ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him . . . Prongs rode against last night.

This is no Jeffrey Marsh “go no contact” seduction. The bond between parent and child is both life-giving and life-saving, even when the parents are dead.  Those who have, or ever had, a parent’s love will never be alone.

All the bullies, from Voldemort down, are attached to the Slytherin House (one of four school houses). And all of them are shown to be controlled by their hatred, unable to process old griefs. Tom Riddle was so twisted with hatred for the muggle father who abandoned him, that he transformed himself into the arch villain, Voldemort. His hatred destroys many other people, but finally it destroys himself.

If the trans cult has any place in the Hogwarts world, it seems to be in this house where actions are determined by intergenerational hatred, where sons hate their fathers and grown men hate sons. It may not be so much that trans activists misread the Potter novels, as that they misread themselves. They imagine themselves to be “stunning and brave” Gryffindors but are actually Slytherins in the mold of Riddle/Voldemort.

The young victims of the trans cult though, the ROGD kids, may be too much like Harry, with their noses pressed against the Mirror of Erised, longing and longing for a past torn away from them, or for a future of illusory dreams.

Maybe it’s our job, as adults, to dumbledore them, to pull them away from a mirror that “will give us neither knowledge nor truth,” to tell them, “Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.”

As Dumbledore says, the happiest people are those who, when they look into a mirror, see themselves exactly as they are.

That’s no small feat.

J.K.Rowling is surely a graduate of Harry’s Gryffindor House, where those with courage, talent, intelligence and a thirst to prove themselves go. So, by the power invested in me, I award Gryffindor 50 points for each of her novels.

And another hundred for the work of that Galbraith guy.

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