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What if there were no witches?

Well of course there are no witches, you say! No one in their right minds believes that witches exist. No one believes that people are conversing with the devil to get power over others. No one believes that people will sell their soul to the devil for worldly gain. So obviously there is no point in extracting confessions through torture because witches do not exist, right? Nor for that matter does the devil. (Despite what some might like to think about political leaders).

I use this thought experiment to draw attention to the European witch craze of the early modern period 1600-1700 because it relates to a comparable problem of modern society. Though the penalties may differ, the modern equivalent of the witchcraft craze is all around us.

Transgenderism is the latest mania of collective delusion sweeping society.

A very few people of mature age believe they have been born into the wrong sex (as if that were a possible or meaningful statement). They engage in sexual reassignment surgery.

The idea spreads and takes new forms. (Which requires a history of its own).

Some body decides that, in their sovereign and autonomous will, people have a right to declare themselves male or female and further, and, because this assertion is in tune with the spirit of the times, laws are passed that oblige all others in the universe to recognize the right to change “gender”, despite the bearers of this new bundle of rights displaying the inevitable marks of sexual development as a former male or female, as the case may be.  Ideology or self will trumps not merely biology, but all previous social conventions. Obvious genetic males invade women’s sports and, thanks to having passed their earlier years as a genetic male, break previous women’s sports records. Thus their performances prove the genetic consequences of testosterone  while simultaneously society insists they are female, so denying the reality of genetic consequences.

Moreover, parents apparently have the right to determine that their children, before the ages of puberty or consent, are “transgendered”, and have the right or even obligation to have their sons castrated and dosed with female hormones and surgically altered to mimic the sexual apparatus of a female, however inadequately. These children have never reached the age of consent. They are not allowed to vote or drive a car. Yet they have been compelled to undergo radical alteration of their biological natures for the sake of  gender ideology, or as some may prefer,  the right of a person to affirm their identity under any and all conditions.

At the same time laws are passed, custody judgments are rendered, and regulatory agencies rule in such fashion as to make it impossible or illegal to draw attention to the obvious facts of sex that might prevail over the self identification referred to as “gender”. Conformity is imposed upon society. Speech is controlled. To permit  biologically based arguments against transgenderism otherwise is an impermissible affront to the evolution of our understanding of human rights. Being, in blunt terms, the right to castrate or spay your children and seek to change their sex by invasive surgery and continuous lifelong dependence on drugs to maintain the illusion that people can change their genetic nature to conform to gender ideology.

I know I have presented this in the crudest possible terms because future generations  of man (if they are to exist at all) will look back on this age with the same distaste and inability to understand as we look back on the European witch crazes if the 16th and 17th centuries.

The analogy does not hold in all respects, I grant you. Instead of murdering witches we surgically and chemically castrate them. Instead of condemning them, we celebrate their autonomy of will to become who they truly are. Instead of believing in supernatural entities like the devil we believe that people have rights (other forms of metaphysical entity) to affirm their identities at almost any cost imposed on the rest of society.  We are forced to abrogate immemorial customs that have governed the relations between the sexes, and  people are compelled to violate the plain evidence of their senses.

Yet the essence of the matter is the same: society has become deluded on a massive scale. There are no witches, and never were. Likewise there are no “transgendered” people, and never shall be. No one is born into the wrong sex. The term “gender” as applied to sex is a neo -Marxist null category, an empty set, pure cant.  Gender is what you apply to nouns in French and similarly gendered languages (le ou la; der, die,oder das). Gender is a construct of the mind, sex is a construct of billions of years of evolution. One is an epiphenomenon of contemporary craziness, the other the basis of life.

The transgender cult believes that society is on the cusp of recognizing new rights of self affirmation and seeing them recognized by social convention and law. To the contrary, society in contemporary North America is going mad. And a lot of apparently sane people are among them. But there are no witches, just as there are no transgendered people.

Many people are deluded into believing they are Napoleon or Jesus Christ or other culturally specific figures. I imagine the looney bins of China are occupied by many who think they are Mao Tse-Tung ot Chinghiz Khan. We put them on drugs and confine them if necessary. But if I declare myself a female, when I am a male, I am celebrated for my bold self affirmation. We should look on such people with the  compassion we have for the mad. Yet contemporary society is rife with enablers affirming that the transgendered delusion is not merely a fact but the newest form of civil right.

It is the enablers of this pernicious nonsense who owe themselves a long talk in the mirror. Madness is not confined to the actually insane, it appears. Otherwise rational people actually find it convenient to believe in transgenderism, the latest phase of progressive moral posturing.  Nevertheless, they are factually and morally wrong, and they will do a great deal of harm before they recover their senses.

 

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

From Jonathan Kay in Quillette

“Genderwang is something completely different. It’s a quasi-religious ideological movement that demands public acceptance of the claim that all humans are infused with a soul-like ether known as gender identity—a spirit whose nature trumps the objective reality of biological sex when it comes to policymaking and even interpersonal relationships. Genderwang channels the magical thinking of Christian transubstantiation by demanding that acts of verbal attestation and other sanctified rites serve to literally transform men into women and vice versa. It also casts small children, even toddlers in diapers, as savants whose unfalsifiable pronouncements in regard to their “true” gender identity must be affirmed by doctors as holy writ.”

 

“One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.” ~ Gustave Le Bon

further reading:

The European Witch Craze of the 16th and 17th centuries, by Hugh Trevor-Roper

 

Sex is biological. And why is it impossible to say so?

The gays are waking up to the biological nature of sex. Andrew Sullivan writes in New York magazine this week about how some lesbians have started to object to the invasion of their spaces by penis-less males, such as Caitlyn Jenner and other males similarly transformed by surgery.

“It might be a sign of the end-times, or simply a function of our currently scrambled politics, but earlier this week, four feminist activists — three from a self-described radical feminist organization Women’s Liberation Front — appeared on a panel at the Heritage Foundation. Together they argued that sex was fundamentally biological, and not socially constructed, and that there is a difference between women and trans women that needs to be respected. For this, they were given a rousing round of applause by the Trump supporters, religious-right members, natural law theorists, and conservative intellectuals who comprised much of the crowd. If you think I’ve just discovered an extremely potent strain of weed and am hallucinating, check out the video of the event. “

The panel discussions involving the aforesaid radical lesbians concerned a federal non-discrimination bill, called the Equality Act. The bill

” would add “gender identity” to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, rendering that class protected by anti-discrimination laws, just as sex is. The [lesbian exclusivist] argument is that viewing “gender identity” as interchangeable with sex, and abolishing clear biological distinctions between men and women, is actually a threat to lesbian identity and even existence — because it calls into question who is actually a woman, and includes in that category human beings who have been or are biologically male, and remain attracted to women. 

I find this kind of discussion to be healthy. When radical lesbians and Jordan Peterson are on the same page it is a good sign, I reckon. Sex is biological. Everyone knows this except the fanatics.

Sullivan’s article illustrates a much more important point than the argument he presents. If it takes lesbian separatists to argue that sex is primarily and preponderantly biological, then we have reached a dire situation. It shows the relative powerlessness of the 99.999% of normally constituted people in this discussion, gay or straight. I include all those as normal who do not wish to alter their sex by surgery. If Sullivan had covered the discussions at the Heritage Foundation without the lesbians, it would have been a miracle. It took a sexual minority – a minority within a minority – to authorize Sullivan to cover the debate.

“If this [argument of the lesbians] sounds like a massive overreach, consider the fact that the proposed Equality Act — with 201 co-sponsors in the last Congress — isn’t simply a ban on discriminating against trans people in employment, housing, and public accommodations (an idea with a lot of support in the American public). It includes and rests upon a critical redefinition of what is known as “sex.” We usually think of this as simply male or female, on biological grounds (as opposed to a more cultural notion of gender). But the Equality Act would define “sex” as including “gender identity,” and defines “gender identity” thus: “gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or characteristics, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.”

“What the radical feminists are arguing is that the act doesn’t only blur the distinction between men and women (thereby minimizing what they see as the oppression of patriarchy and misogyny), but that its definition of gender identity must rely on stereotypical ideas of what gender expression means. What, after all, is a “gender-related characteristic”? It implies that a tomboy who loves sports is not a girl interested in stereotypically boyish things, but possibly a boy trapped in a female body. And a boy with a penchant for Barbies and Kens is possibly a trans girl — because, according to stereotypes, he’s behaving as a girl would. So instead of enlarging our understanding of gender expression — and allowing maximal freedom and variety within both sexes — the concept of “gender identity” actually narrows it, in more traditional and even regressive ways. What does “gender-related mannerisms” mean, if not stereotypes?”

Indeed, and well argued. Passing into law what amounts to ideological claptrap is common enough in these insane times. The reason that the forces of madness can get away with this dangerous nonsense is that opposition has been crushed in advance, silenced, made impossible, by political pressures on free speech.

Why does it take – why must it take – a bunch of lesbian separatists to be the only people authorized to object to this madness? Said one of them: “We may be lesbians but we are not confused about biology”.

A social contagion is at work. It is the akin to the witchcraft craze of the 16th century. It is assumed that transgender people exist, just as we once thought there were witches. One era penalized them, another lauds them. But the delusion is that there are such people, children even, who must be accommodated on pain of legal penalty.

[I have been listening to the lesbians on the panel. You should do so too. A steamroller of fashion, assisted by medical establishments, is pushing young people into irreversible physical changes, without adequate follow-up, long-term studies, to the cheers of the fashionable].