A left-affirming Missouri circuit court is responsible for destroying one of the most evidence-based gender-affirming laws we've seen. Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay It’s interesting that there was no such thing as a ‘trans kid’ until about the last fifteen years, and probably no one older than 35 or 40 knows of any child or teen who committed suicide because they couldn’t, for one reason or another, medically transition to the sex they weren’t. I actually can name one. A boy I knew in high school became a ‘transsexual’ after he graduated. Back then, it took several years. He didn’t commit suicide because he wasn’t allowed to transition overnight, or before graduation. I’m the only person I know who knew a ‘trans kid’ before it became cool. I doubt many other Gen X’ers, and probably the first of half of Millennials, can remember a single ‘trans kid’. I define ‘trans kid’ as one self-defined as trans, not one who, in retrospect, seemed like ‘they might have been’. Who simply might have been gay or just a little effeminate, or butchy, and otherwise non-birth role gender-conforming. I mean a kid who said, “I’m not a boy, I’m a girl,” or vice versa. They just didn’t exist. Even my schoolmate didn’t claim it; I learned about it through the grapevine. In the ‘Teens, transgender became a veritable epidemic, infecting young people across social media along with older men, avid watchers of transgender porn and later ‘sissy porn’, who suddenly found their ‘inner woman’ the way people used to find Jesus. Critics of the ‘new normal’ have come most publicly from the right. But they’re quietly supported by growing allies on the Level Left and the center who have begun to acknowledge the illiberal Bizarro World we now live in: Conservatives on the right side of science, and far-lefties flipping it the bird. The prevailing scientific voices in North America are still out on whether so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ is scientifically sound, supported by leading medical organizations and science publications, but growing evidence overseas favors a much slower and cautious affirming approach than the insta-transition American model. The science is looking more crickety than it did 10-12 years ago. Meanwhile, back in North America, medical professional apparatchiks bow and scrape to transactivist masters rather than examine the latest findings from western Europe for which transgender support has been much less contentious. Why North Americans believe in gender-affirming care In April, Missouri introduced a ban on gender-affirming care, and the state’s Republican Attorney General added an ‘emergency rule’, adding the most rational and comprehensive rules we’ve seen so so far in the U.S. for such care. It started out as a ban on anything medical for children, then Democrats added provisions for kids already seeking treatment, but unfortunately the emergency brake provisions AG Andrew Bailey added for both children as well as adults got struck down. The rule required the patient: Must receive at least 18 months of therapy beforehand Must be screened for autism Must provide documented evidence of clear gender dysphoria for at least three years prior Must be screened for signs of social media addiction and ‘social contagion’, i.e., from their peer group Physicians also had to present a lengthy list of negative possible side effects short-term and long-term. That last part is a little troubling, given the historical Republican/conservative hostility to science and evidence-based policy. They have a tendency to get it wrong, or just make shit up if they can’t find any half-assed science to support what they want. They tried to argue several years ago that abortions were connected to an increased risk of breast cancer; it was utter fiction . A whole book was written called The Republican War On Science . The historical conservative hostility to evidence is well-established, encouraged further by the Religious Right and its naive commitment to Bible mythology. But this was pretty sound, based on the lack of hard evidence for the efficacy of gender-affirming care, and for the very real ethical and moral alarms it raised for children and teens. Should this include adults? Maybe. While adults have the right to decide what to do for themselves, it’s perhaps a better idea to return transitioning to the more cautious, systematic process that was in place decades previously. The American medical profession is primarily responsible for publicly supporting gender-affirming care and preaching the science is sound. Some skeptics wonder if doctors might have, shall we say, alternative motivations for uncritically supporting gender-affirming care besides the welfare of others and suicide prevention. You know who besides the political right supports banning or limiting gender-affirming care for kids? The most liberal, progressive countries on the planet. Sweden. Norway. Finland. They’re joined by France, the UK, and the Netherlands. As I’ve written before, the latest news coming out of Europe, which is always a few years ahead of North America, is that systematic literature reviews of the science behind gender-affirming care shows it to be almost completely based on low-quality, unreliable research. The ‘Dutch Protocol’ model, the default standard for gender-affirming care, has come under serious scrutiny , and in Holland, from whence the Dutch Protocol originated, even one of the co-authors of its studies has noted that the world is ‘blindly adopting their research’, which is outdated, having coming from a different time (2011 & 2014) and with small samples, and hasn’t been replicated. Yet North American pro-affirmation supporters can point to countless science-based organizations and publications and note that they all support gender-affirming care. This includes the American Medical Association, The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Nurses Association, the American College of Physicians, and the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry. There are plenty of others. This also includes so-called science-based publications like Scientific American, which appears to have gotten ‘wokenized’ a few years back. SA published an article, Stop Using Phony Science To Justify Transphobi a, which resulted in a backlash and the Paradox Institute’s highly scientific return volley, A Response to SciAm’s Stop Using Phony Science. Then there’s the Springer Journal, which accepted and published Lisa Littman’s peer-reviewed paper on the connection between social media and peer groups to the rise of adolescent transgenderism, which the Journal pulled under pressure by transactivists. (I highly recommend the research article, by the way.) Nature and its sister publications have now published guidelines for censoring politically incorrect research . Even our scientists are drinking the trans Kool-Aid except for those who still bravely support objective reality. It’s hard not to doubt one’s self when so many reputable organizations and publications assure us the science is there, making us feel like bad people, or maybe Trumpy fanboys and fangirls, because we might be hurting others by resisting this. But with European countries pulling back on affirming care, based on what they’ve found to be shoddy science and the discredited Dutch Protocol behind it, it gives us skeptics space to pull our heads out of the rainbow-colored clouds and ask some fairly obvious, no-science-required questions. Like Where were all the trans kids before? And, How come no one ever committed suicide before, say, 2007, because they were stuck inside their birth body? And, Why do people think you can change sex when no biological male hominid has ever gotten pregnant, and no biological female can fertilize a womb? As the King of Siam would say, “Is a puzzlement.” What’s behind the Missouri law? The proposed legislation was a brake for both kids and adults. Like with automobiles, brakes reduce speed, but the car can still move forward. Let’s break down the four main points: Must receive at least 18 months of therapy beforehand The rise in mental health problems, including drug and alcohol addiction, along with a spiralling suicide rate in all age groups including children and teens, long predates the rise of transgenderism. The lack of proper screening for pre-existing psychological co-morbidities in transition patients has been a hallmark of gender-affirming care. Is gender dysphoria the problem or a symptom? If the latter, then it would as foolish to medically transition someone as to treat them with chemotherapy if they haven’t got cancer. The therapy requirement seems a little onerous; not everyone can afford it. But Millennials have been described as the most depressed generation ever, and their younger Gen Z brothers and sisters may arguably be in even worse shape. Pre-screening may identify better, less expensive, and less permanently life-altering treatments better suited to the patient. Must be screened for autism People who identify as transgender or non-binary are six times more likely to exhibit autistic traits, or have diagnosed autism. Parents of children on the spectrum have complained for many years that the transgender movement is taking advantage of their kids , recruiting them into a movement with medical treatments they believe will ultimately harm their child. Properly diagnosing, evaluating, and treating conditions like autism or pre-existing psychological issues makes perfect sense. Must provide documented evidence of clear gender dysphoria for at least three years prior Only in the last fifteen years has ‘trans kid’ taken on the appearance of a social contagion. It’s already well-established that anorexia is socially contagious among teens as is suicide, and the now-debunked trans claim that kids who don’t get immediate ‘affirming care’ will commit suicide may teach children and teens that’s the typical, ‘appropriate’ response to parental resistance. Most will outgrow it. Any kid who meets the Missouri criteria can begin transitioning when they’re legal adults. If they even want it by then. Must be screened for signs of social media addiction and ‘social contagion’, i.e., from their peer group The Lisa Littman study and others draw an ever-darker potential correlation between the concurrent rise in popularity of transgenderism with social media. Jonathan Haidt, he of The Righteous Mind , is working on a new book about the harm he believes social media generates in children, teens, and young adults globally. In his Substack newsletter he shares some of what he and his team have found. He hasn’t mention transgenderism so far, but he’s making a very strong case for how much social media induces depression, anxiety, narcissism, anorexia, and other mental health struggles for young people, the most affected by far being young progressive/liberal women. Interesting. Strange times Unfortunately, a great, caution-based approach to gender-affirming care was ended by a circuit court judge on the grounds that Bailey had overstepped his authority. The Missouri ACLU celebrated the decision as did many other pro-affirming care groups. It’s a shame, because this sort of caution is desperately needed for a debate grounded more on ideology, feelings and the highly unreliable ‘lived experience’, than it is on actual evidence and genuine science. I wonder how tolerant progressive parents would be if their daughter decided she ‘identified’ as a Disney princess and insisted she’ll commit suicide if she’s not altered to look like Jasmine, or Belle, or Ariel (“Mommy, I need a fishtail. Also, I need to be black!”) We live in strange times, indeed, when the left denies gender-affirming care for so-called ‘trans kids’ is experimental, and Republican politicians point out the care is far too rushed and the science, not so good. There is so much wrong with the left’s uncritical evaluation of kids’ claims they may be ‘transgender’ or ‘non-binary’, with so little attention paid not only to the clear contradictions in leftist thinking, but also the naive belief that kids know what’s best for them. Go ahead, let them eat all the Twinkies, cookies and candy they want. Here’s a sheet Oregon Democrats stole directly from the Republican playbook: Attaching an unpopular rider to a bill that requires one to pass a something they find repugnant in order to get what they want. In this instance, they tied gender-affirming care to a reproductive rights bill. They were willing to throw women under the bus (of course) to continue their medical experimentation on children. Oregon and Texas Democrats also blocked amendments that would have required health insurers who cover medical transition to also provide detransition care. Because one is covered and one is not. Guess which one? And in this Bizarro World I find myself siding with a state’s Attorney General I probably couldn’t stand on any other point of public policy, a man who belongs to a party I largely regard as being on the wrong side of almost everything else. But this is the Bizarro World we now live in. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Which means there's no shame, even for bigots, when human label-bots drop pejoratives like pinatas and candy "I'm a Nazi, you're a Nazi, he's a Nazi, she's a Nazi, wouldn't you like to be a Nazi too?" CC0 Public domain image by George Hodan The snippet alleged ‘dog whistle racism’ in the post…I couldn’t see the rest. NextDoor ’s email notifications only include maybe 7-8 words to pique one’s interest. But when I clicked on View comment, it ‘couldn’t load’. Pretty sure it was my post someone had responded to. I made a good-faith effort to find it, but the whole post and thread had disappeared. I could load no part of it, so I suspect either the original poster had deleted theirs, or maybe someone complained, and NextDoor ended it. What I’d done is respond, unemotionally, to the OP who'd lamented the end of affirmative action in the U.S. I stated some arguments in favor of the decision by paraphrasing earlier discussions by American black intellectuals I’ve been reading this year, specifically Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, both of whom make a case (decades ago!) for how affirmative action policies perpetuate the racist notion that blacks aren’t good enough to get into prestigious schools on their own merits, that some may not be psychologically and behaviourally prepared to get into an Ivy League school with a very good SAT score, when their Asian and white counterparts have to score much higher to be considered. And also, that affirmative action never helped poor black people. I was straightforward and honest. Perhaps what may have gotten up people’s nose is that I said blacks might have to work a little harder - not because of racism but to get the same high SAT scores expected of others. I relayed uncomfortable observations from these two authors - one of whom noted that “Asian Americans who benefited from the end of racially discriminatory policies are now criticized for being 'white supremacist' [i.e., 'acting white' - brackets mine] rather than lauded for being the grand academic and economic successes they are.” Although I can’t be certain, I’d bet the ‘dog whistle racism’ comment was meant for me. After all, white people aren’t supposed to challenge marginalized groups. Not even when they quote smart black people. It didn’t bother me. Had I been able to respond, it would have begun, “Stop it already with the dog-whistle racism. I’m not racist just because you don’t agree with me.” It didn’t bother me that perhaps, for a few hours, I was publicly labeled a racist. The label doesn’t mean much anymore. Neither do any of the other pejorative labels the left and right hurl at each other. Nazi, homophobe, transphobe, misogynist, misandrist, hater, fascist, woke, TERF, troon, blackface, womanface. They all mean only one thing: “I disagree.” Them’s not fightin’ words I don’t understand why some get so easily triggered, still, when someone pastes an irrelevant label on them. I know I’m not a racist, so if someone called me a racist because I summarized what two black intellectuals said decades ago and added I agree, and hey, isn’t it weird how Asian-Americans who succeed are now accused of being ‘white supremacist’, so what? People with brains who aren’t prone to ideological extremism can see the accuser for what they are. Especially if they’re a coward hiding behind an anonymous profile, with a gray head for a profile photo, and a careless-sounding name like empene19404636, the hallmark of someone whose account gets shut down fast, a lot. The sad fact is racism and white supremacy are real, words for very serious political and social cancers, that used to carry a lot of punch, but now land with the power of a baby’s fist. ‘White supremacy’ is a once-powerful epithet that should only have ever been applied to genuine white supremacists, rather than everyone who doesn’t agree with the Critical Race Theory narrative. When antiracists defined it more broadly, and claimed it was ‘baked into’ everything, they unintentionally normalized it. Since it’s everywhere, but we don’t see it, how bad can it be, right? Real racists are the KKK or the Nation of Islam. Both believe their respective races are superior to another and will not allow that ‘inferior’ race to join. One is more violent than the other, and I won’t say neither is better than the other (although I can say a few good things about the Nation) but they’re both racial supremacists. On the feminist front, rape, as Matt Damon pointed out quite rightly, is very different from a butt grab but Minnie Driver and Alyssa Milano #MeToo’d him right off Twitter by sparking a flame war because they didn’t know the difference. And of course ‘TERF’ means ‘feminist’ since there’s nothing the slightest bit radical about pointing out simple biology: You can’t change your sex, and women need to be protected from certain male bodies and psyches. ‘TERF’ is just a silly word that never meant anything substantial anyway; invented by men to marginalize feminists who stand up to them and continue to tell them, ‘No’. Attack of the Nazi-bots I got added to another ‘Nazi sympathizer’ list the other day on Twitter. It was compiled by what looked like some young (of course) guy. So I blocked him. I have no patience with these people. Oh yeah, that sure showed me. There’s a whole army of human Nazi-bots on Twitter who toss the word at others like apes flinging their feces. Don’t like someone? Call them a Nazi, or just throw your poo. Most of these little social justice sparkies wouldn’t know a real Nazi if one goose-stepped into their living room and Jahwohl -ed them while they watched Queer Eye . And I’m quite certain they’d never fight actual Nazis, they’d quiver in their closets like frightened kittens. ‘Nazi’ used to mean real-world Nazis. Anthony Crider; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:37, 9 April 2018 (UTC) - Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally (Wikipedia) Nazism, and genuine white supremacy, are as serious as a nuclear war. Both are dangerously close to achieving real power as so many have in governments around the world. Genuine Nazis and racial supremacists (they’re not always white, depending on the country) are never good for those who aren’t born with the Chosen Ones’ skin color. Careless use robs critically important words of their power. Now there’s no shame in being called a Nazi because everyone can write them off as just another hysterical ‘woke’. Or an idiot MAGA, since Nazi Tourette’s Syndrome isn’t just an ailment of the left. Politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene compare face masks to WWII Jewish stars, and for decades anti-abortion activists have compared the practice to the Holocaust. In fact, many people lose the argument the moment they open their mouths - or set fingertips to keyboard - if one invokes Godwin’s Law that the first person to compare their opponent to Hitler or the Nazis loses the argument. “You know, Nazis were the National Socialist Party,” Greene said . “Just like the Democrats are now a National Socialist Party.” Nazis to the left of me, Nazis to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with Jews! Even if one is anti-Semitic, that doesn’t make them a Nazi. Historical footnote: Anti-Semitism long predates Hitler’s Reich. I doubt the Charlottesville Nazis - real Nazis, carting the schwag and the swastika that defines those who clearly hew to Nazi values - give a rat’s patoot what people call them. It’s okay now. It’s been normalized. It’s a joint effort by the left and right to make Nazism okay again. Special kudos to the post-modernist left’s efforts to erase word meanings: Not only do we not know what a real man or woman is, we also can’t tell a fake Nazi from a real one. Or Marjorie Taylor Greene. Do the work Impugning ugly motives to one’s opponents isn’t just a way to ignore genuine grievances; it can also be used to avoid uncomfortable self-examination if one belongs to a marginalized group. Let’s return to ‘dog whistle racism’, which often crops up in marginalized groups’ speech who’d rather not self-examine too deeply. The point I’d made on NextDoor was that not everyone believed affirmative action was a good idea, or was perhaps a good idea past its expiry date, and now held many back, and that I was hardly alone in noting American blacks may need to develop themselves more. Some black students got into good schools on their own merits because they did score highly, thanks to immigrant parents who didn’t schlep the entire family to the Promised Land in the U.S. so their kids could wear their jeans around their hips, spout shit about cops and pretend that black authenticity is dying young and profoundly ignorant in a street gang shootout. Maybe black parents could push their kids harder, like middle-class and upper-class white parents do. This is an opinion shared by many on the left, not just the right. And not just white liberals, either. Personal responsibility. It’s a concept despised by those who prefer victimhood to power. I reminded NextDoor how women, like blacks, were once considered ineducable, and how we hyperventilated decades ago about the lower numbers of women completing college and whether they could compete with men and now—we’re graduating in higher numbers than men. If the chickie-boo girlies can do it, so can American blacks. Not all lefties subscribe to the soft bigotry of low expectations, nor do all black antiracists. So I smiled when I saw ‘dog whistle racism’, because I might have struck a nerve. There’s nothing unthinkable about what I, Sowell, Steele, and many others of all colors, and partisanship, have said already. Black Americans need to compete on their own merits, just as women have had to do. It’s hardly racist to suggest they can do the work. It’s not implying the old stereotype they’re ‘lazy’; I see the same fear holding them back that hold back many women. The other day I was in a Zoom brainstorming session with a friend who’s trying to establish her European-based business in Canada helping companies train the right women to be leaders; she shared with us how women resist leadership training because of Imposter Syndrome; fear that they can’t compete with men; and that no one would listen to them. She said male managers have shared their frustration with her that good, strong, female candidates reject the idea because they themselves don’t believe they’re ‘leadership material’ regardless of what anyone else thinks. That’s one big freakin’ honkin’ reason why we don’t see more female leaders, but you’ll never hear that from the victimhood feminist brigade. And similarly, some black Americans are unwilling to relinquish the training wheels the Supreme Court just removed. Pejorative labels applied to those whose speech one doesn’t like, because it threatens one’s self-worth, or highlights internalized feelings of inferiority and group Imposter Syndrome, are a psychic Bandaid. They make you feel better but you’re still as sick as you always were. Or self-defeating. Add ‘dog whistle racism’ to the lexicon of words that no longer mean anything anymore. Yay, teams MAGA and woke. No one any longer knows what an actual racist or Nazi looks like. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Maybe we should remind them how lucky they are to have what they've got Photo by Keira Burton on Pexels When I ruminate, as I am wont to do (Regrets—Oy’ve had a few-ah as Sid Vicious put it) and I need to stop self-obsessing, I consider those who’d do anything to live the sane, routine, boring, often tedious post-pandemic forever-changed life I am privileged to live. After all, no one’s bombing the shit out of my country in an effort to regain the alleged glory days of forty years ago, nor do I leave my apartment every day wondering if I’m going to wander into a mass shooting. I have good, mostly steady, freelance sales work that keeps me off the streets and out of the pool halls, and I have good healthcare available - much of it covered by the province of Ontario. I’ve begun to appreciate my previously taken-for-granted and oft-unappreciated body. I don’t know how many of us don’t value our healthy, functioning bodies until they’re not. At sixty, I’m feeling my age more, although not like my parents did. While I hefted a heavy bundle buggy of groceries off the bus the other day I considered how my parents might have done it more carefully, how my mother would have asked a stranger for help. My parents’ generation didn’t do physical exercise like we do. My dad’s ‘exercise’ was volleyball once a week followed by a big bowl of ice cream in front of the TV, and, as fathers have done for millions of years, fell asleep in front of it. A friend in his late fifties told me how his doctor expressed surprise he wasn’t on any medication. Nothing to manage a heart condition, cholesterol, depression, anxiety, blood pressure, excess stomach acid, or the heartbreak of golfer’s elbow, mostly because he doesn’t play golf. I’m not on any prescription meds either. Our healthy lifestyle isn’t the whole story; we just got lucky with good genetics. So far, anyway. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes I have a friend in Australia with body dysmorphia. She wishes she hadn’t been given the body she has. She would happily trade it for someone else’s as long as it didn’t hurt all the time, if she could go back to having a normal life, like she did before her manageable, but not curable, physical conditions set in. If only she could change her body. I have another friend closer to home, whose life is a constant stream of health issues. She lives in doctors’ offices for herself and her senior mother. She hates living in a regularly malfunctioning body. We joked a few years ago about a woman we knew who managed Type I diabetes. “I’d happily switch bodies with her,” my friend said. “Only having to manage diabetes would be a cinch.” How is it so many aren’t happy with the bodies they’ve got, especially if everything works in accordance with the way our physiology has evolved? The gender-blending movement is only the most recent iteration of a millennia-long campaign by humans to improve bodies never good enough for us. The dissatisfaction is too often between the ears rather than in physical well-being. Nothing hurts, everything works—so how does it not ‘feel right’? Humans have tattooed, body pierced, and otherwise adorned themselves with body ‘enhancements’, the same we engage in today, not to mention modern body mods we criticize and debate - bigger boobs, surgically-enhanced pecs for those too lazy to go to the gym, cheek implants, tummy tucks, liposuction, and many other medical treatments to ‘fix’ bodies that may otherwise be seen as ‘imperfect’. Boob Jobs & Butt Bleaches & Brazilians, Oh My! Sometimes our body mods are more practical and life-affirming, done to treat a painful condition or disability that reduces quality of life. But mostly, people look in the mirror, frown, and think, “My life would be so much better if I just changed blah blah blah.” Body doctors for brain ailments A lot, but not all, children are born in fine, healthy bodies. Or their bodies are fine but their brains, like all human brains, can become depressed, anxious, stressed and delusional. Today they’re directed to body doctors when what they need are brain doctors. They’re told if they’re unhappy, they were born the wrong sex, and if so, why not fix it? Why should you have to live in a body you don’t want? Wouldn’t you be better off with different one? (I wonder if some black people were born with skins who’d be ‘better off’ white. Just a devil’s advocate thought.) Adolescence is a rough time for everyone, but also a ridiculously human life transition everyone must pass through if they’re lucky enough not to die from leukemia at age four, as a childhood playmate of mine did. It won’t be much longer now before the U.S. and Canada are whacked upside the head with a clue-by-four coming from Europe that there’s near-zero science behind ‘gender affirming care’. We resist, but in the immortal words of The X-Files , ‘the truth is out there’. Like, on a plane leaving right now from Stockholm. The North American medical profession lies to people of all ages about what’s known about the long-term effects from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and adolescent surgery. (Answer: Fuck all.) Much more research needs to explore the short- and long-term effects of transgender healthcare, but not only is anything that threatens the trans narrative career-destroying, it’s also a punch in the ol’ Bulgari wallet, since the industry is estimated at $2.1B USD in 2022, projected to $5B by 2030 . Parroting debunked kiddie suicide threats, these doctors wonder why they get compared to Josef Mengele. Related: STUDY ANALYSIS: Transgender Identity and Suicide Attempts and Mortality in Denmark We don’t even know what percentage of patients have de-transitioned after regretting their previous decision. Estimates range from 1-1.5% by the medical profession that’s making mountains of cash off troubled people, to 25%, based on the small assortment of clinical studies. It’s a big, vague football field of a spread. Many detransitioners don’t tell their doctors what they’re doing out of a sense of embarrassment and shame, and they don’t go public; that’s as socially destructive as conducting non-transactivist-approved scientific research. As I watch this medical-scandal-to-be unfold, I wonder why the hell so many ‘progressive’ parents who worry about anorexic daughters otherwise teach their kids at ever-earlier ages that they’re ‘imperfect’ and that somehow evolution, which has brought our sexually dimorphic species to apex biological dominance over millions of years—has somehow horribly fucked up with so many newer humans. The kids who don’t grow up Do these parents ever thank God, Darwin or their lucky stars that their children aren’t suffering from real health problems? I don’t remember Dorothy much - my only memory is standing in her bedroom, as she regarded me cross-eyed, a consequence of the chemotherapy to treat her leukemia. I don’t remember actually playing with Dorothy before she got really sick but I remember regretting she was no longer there to play with. She lived in the hospital while we visited her mother. My mother provided as much moral support as she could to a grieving parent. Dorothy passed away on Christmas Eve, 1967. She never got to open her presents. I don’t know if her parents talked to her much about Christmas. I sort of hope Dorothy passed not regretting the presents she’d never get to unwrap. Christmas Day was a particularly joyous one for my parents as they had a new baby son. While they celebrated my brother’s first Christmas and my fifth, Dorothy’s parents planned a funeral. Do today’s ‘progressive’ parents ever read or hear about kids whose childhoods are a series of painful medical treatments, often restricted to homes or hospital beds to keep them alive? Do they ever read about some child who bravely fought cancer or a heart condition or a blood disorder to the very end, bravely smiling and bald, withered, with tubes stuck up her nose and think, Thank God my child is healthy ? Is ‘self-acceptance’ an obscene word? If it’s okay to be fat, is it okay to be thin? If it’s okay to be gay, is it okay to be straight? If it’s okay to be trans, is it okay to be ‘cis’? Are parents trying to perpetuate a toxic culture of self-hatred and body dysmorphia? It’s the very apex of privilege to just schlep them off to the doctor, instead of exercising parental authority (Does it even exist anymore?) saying No, you can’t be a boy, you’re a girl? Or take away their phone, so Johnny and Janie can’t compare themselves to others on Instagram or learn the newest goofy identity label . Will privileged parents allow Barbie-obsessed eight-year-olds to get boob jobs? I mean what the hell, she can cut ‘em off when she’s sixteen and decides she hates how much boys like big boobs. There was an old Bloom County cartoon from the ‘80s in which some stupid college student interrogates Cutter John, the Vietnam vet in a wheelchair, about what he really wants to do. Is he angry? Does he want to kill people? What does he really want to do? “Walk,” Cutter John replies. I wonder what people with real disabilities, leading limited lives in a society for whom they are always a burdensome afterthought, think when they look at grown-ass adults running to the doctor. “Fuck, I’ll take any body, no matter the sex, no matter the race, if only I could (walk, see, hear, move, bathe myself, pee in a bathroom rather than a plastic bag).” I try to ‘fix’ my ‘imperfections’ too. I lose weight, but I’m not Jack Skellington. I dye my hair. I wear makeup. But that’s it. I’ll age naturally, like Brigitte Bardot. The wrinkled face of old age: It’s a privilege! I have so many school friends who weren’t as privileged as I. I miss them. A lot. Plastic surgery carries real risks and complications but gender transition ‘healthcare’ is performed too much on the young and with uncritical acceptance of whether the patient truly knows what s/he wants. It may eventually teach a horrifying, no-backsies-allowed lesson about just how good they had it when their worst problem was what every human being longs for - whatever they don’t have. Before 2014, transition for all ages involved a much lengthier process. Now you can get your McTopSurgery done practically as a drive-through. Yeah. Just wait until you want a baby. It strikes me as singularly ungrateful to not cherish the luck of the birth lottery for a well-functioning body rather than for t’other side of the fence where there’s a dick or a vagina you don’t have. I read recently the searing story of a mother’s pain caused by her transgender son. What had once been a lovely, happy little girl got recruited by the ‘trans cult’ and turned into an angry pseudo-man, hooked on anabolic steroids and prone to intense rage against all those who loved her. The mother says she screamed in horror and cried to see her daughter’s breast-less chest. She raged silently for her own sister, dead from breast cancer, who would have given anything for two healthy breasts. I don’t begrudge those who really are gender dysphoric, who may require medical intervention to change their sex. Some gender dysphoria may be real in ways we don’t yet understand. I support gender-affirming care for adults, but I believe it should be a long, slow process like it used to be, with lots of self-evaluation with the help of mental health professionals required , and mandatory screening for autism. It will not kill progressive parents to tell their ‘trans’ kids, “No,” or at least “Wait, you can’t transition now. The law requires you to be 18. You can live how you want until then.” Their kids won’t kill themselves, either. It’s just not happening in Europe, or America’s red states. It didn’t happen prior to 2014 when gender transition moved from slow and steady to fast-track. Not happening. If there’s one word missing from public discourse, it’s ‘authenticity’. I note it’s least common in trans discussions on social media. I wonder why. I’m appalled by the horrific thanklessness of neurotic adult patients, and parents who don’t value their beautiful children as they are, who refuse to challenge their sick mental perceptions the way they would if their daughter was a 60-pound Instagram influencer with millions of fellow ‘Ana’ followers. What if they said, “No. You’re fine the way you are. Why don’t we go visit a pediatrics sick ward at the hospital so you can see how goddamn lucky you are to have the healthy, mobile, functioning body you have?” Photo by Ivan Samkov Robin Williams killed himself because he was suffering from dementia and Parkinson’s and didn’t want to be a burden to others, or suffer the horror of a slowly paralyzing body that would have left him like a babbling baby in a cradle. I can’t say I blame him. How can you live a life of freedom and fulfillment, then be told by your traitorous genes, “That’s enough, no more fun for you! One day, you will only be able to stare at the ceiling.” Now how bad is your life, trans-gender-queer-non-binary whateverthefuck? Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

We libs *can* work with the right on some issues without assimilation into the Mar-A-Borg-o cult Which wing are you? From Public Domain Pictures Pejorative labels are meant to control us via the fear of shame. But they have only as much power as we give them. There’s a quick ‘n’ easy way to officially lose an argument on social media with your first post or tweet. If a label bothers me, it’s my job to examine it. Is it accurate? Am I guilty? Do I resemble that remark? There’s one label that’s bugged me a bit, more than the now-tired racist, Nazi, white supremacist, transphobe, TERF, closet Michael Cohen groupie, etc. but which I’ve now faced down and realize I no longer need fear. While the other labels now leave my blood pressure at a comfortable 139/68, calling me a ‘right-winger’ has made me want to run for the exit like a little girl. “You morons don’t realize you’re shills for the right wing!” the tran-scult crowd crows. Before, I fell over myself protesting that I was NOT in fact a right-wing shill. Perish the thought! How dare they! But I found a certain level of denial: A kinship I find sometimes with the right—even conservatives like fundamentalist Christians I would otherwise eschew, and against whom I was a liberal gadfly for many years when I wrote for an alternative newspaper in Connecticut. That was before progressives abandoned liberal principles and embraced authoritarianism, censorship, and demanded unquestioned fealty to their illogical ideologies. Public domain photo Now my blood pressure hops like an anemic frog at the ‘right-wing’ accusation and returns to my customary resting state. Buddhism kicks in and says, “It’s just a label, this is XTwitter, so whaddaya expect?” I don’t have to agree with Those People on much, but I can tweet a supportive comment once in awhile to a PATRIOT CHRISTIAN GOD BLESS AMERICA THESE COLORS DON’T RUN XTwitteratus profile when she comments about not supporting laws that deny puberty for children. We can agree on that, at least. She and I won’t follow each other, but I may get a like or a supportive comment in return. We’d never kaffeeklatsch if I lived in her ‘Murican ‘hood and it’s best if we don’t talk about guns, free trade, income inequality, immigration, abortion, Jesus, Trump, Canada’s Freedom Convoy, MAGA, the 2024 election, indictments, Lauren Boebert, MTG, or gay kids, but we can figuratively bump fists in passing as we both support what we agree to be one of the greatest evils and failings of the so-called ‘progressive left’ - the uncritical acceptance of the misogyny-fueled trans movement. It’s gone far beyond normal rights for non-conformists to a hate-on for women and a sick obsession with medically changing children whom we wouldn’t trust to smoke, drink, vote, or drive, but whose words we treat as though they issued from granite tablets under Moses’s armpits when they say, ‘I want to be a girl.’ I’m not a shill for the right, but I will sound like it when I state what is verboten to the ‘woke’ left: At least on this one particular issue, the right is right and the left is wrong. Hold your nose and extend your hand I speak treason. “Fluently!” Here’s some more treason for ya: The right needs the left and the left needs the right. One speaks the truth when the other side won’t. If you really want to know what’s going on with Donald Trump’s alleged (or confessed) crimes and his indictments, consult the left-wing media. If you really want to know what’s going on with the growing evidence of the transgender movement’s toxicity and lack of scientific evidence for gender-affirming care, consult the right-wing media. We’re coming to a place where we must work with people we don’t like very much - or at all - in order to rein in two toxic cults gone mad. This isn’t as bugspit insane as it sounds. We used to do it like this in the olden days of the twentieth century. We even do it sometimes now, when something like a financial collapse or a killer pandemic has us by the short ‘n’ curlies. Back in the olden days, transgender meant folks who had transitioned for any number of reasons and left it at that. When it became politicized by misogynist men it greatly resembled what feminists have always had to contend with—self-centered male backlash in response to expanded rights and growing power for women. Invade my boardroom will you, you uppity little rhymes-with-runt? Fine, I’m coming for your bathrooms! A woman stole my job, because she couldn’t possibly have gotten it through merit. Penis, for gods’ sakes! It adds like 65 points to your IQ! Okay bitch, I’m coming for your sports trophies! I know the right wing has never been much of a friend to women, and yeah, it’s their fault American women have to jump through ever more—now illegal—hoops to access an abortion, but fighting the excesses of the transgender movement and especially its horrifying attack on children’s bodies is every bit as critical. It means conservatives will, whether they want to or not, fight for women’s rights, power, and bodily autonomy, which could bite them in the ass later with a different Supreme Court. Forcing male athletes back onto male athletic teams will boost Title IX sports once again, giving young women an opportunity to compete fairly, achieve, win and take that killer confidence into the adult world. So who knows, maybe some will accuse them of being shills for the left. The spectrum Public domain image by Nicklas W Bjurman on Wikimedia Commons Not all liberals wave the Pride flag, and not all conservatives wave the Confederate one. Both can be selectively pro-science. One side can’t acknowledge climate change despite living on our planet, while the other denies the biological differences of their own eyes. So, like, ludicrously blind stupidity is bi-sectual. There are Nazis and Communists and Fascists and Antifascists and Libertarians and monarchists and socialists and Social Democrats and Market Liberals and whateverthefuck Jordan Peterson is this week. Some conservatives know climate change is real and a gigantic threat to humanity; I hope Greta Thunberg and others will accept their help and support if they want to work toward a cleaner planet before it burns to a crisp or turns Miami into an underwater snorkel park. My sister-in-law’s dearly departed sister-in-law, a cherished member of our blended family, was a conservative Christian who worked with women to choose alternatives to abortion. But she still supported choice, even though she thought it was the worst one. She couldn’t in good conscience tell a woman she must have a baby. She also didn’t think you must accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour, which is why we enjoyed many digestion-boosting post-Thanksgiving walks and chats before she died. People don’t fit the neat little peg holes we create. They especially don’t fit our childishly simplistic dichotomous pits of moral certainty, the ‘wrong’ side defined as anything less than 100% purity in one’s commitment to a dogmatic narrative. As the ‘progressive’ left descends into chaos, ‘eating its own’, creating dangerous conspiracy theories and turning its back on science and evidence-based policy, I find myself looking over to the other side to see with whom I can commune, who are as repulsed by the excesses of conservatism gone wild and Trumpian authoritarianism. So I look ‘right-wing’ to minds that can’t see a swathe of blended shades of beliefs, values, ideologies, religious beliefs, and understanding of humanity. I can agree with the right—the rational-minded ones—without joining Mar-A-Borg-o. No. Not happenin’. Wouldn’t be caught dead at Mar-A-Borg-o. Photo by Alan Santos/PR on Wikimedia Commons, CC0 2.0 Just as they agree with me on some issues, if not on everything, they may not want to subscribe to my Substack. The mark of a true progressive is evidenced by someone close to me who recently said, “My husband and I are almost to the point financially where it would make sense for us to vote Republican. But I won’t do that; I won’t forget those who don’t have a seat at the table.” She recognizes her privilege and doesn’t blame others who couldn’t accomplish what she and her husband have. They got lucky in the birth lottery. How many of us are that strong a liberal? If you found yourself making enough money that it would be in your best interests to vote for all those juicy Republican tax breaks, would you do it? How much of an economic political whore are you? You may never have to find out. The other day, someone threw the ‘right-wing’ label at me for a snarky comment I made. The iron-poor amphibian hopped like a feeble old man. The label no longer burns because I’ve confronted my own role, and gotten honest with myself about engaging with ‘the enemy’. Not all of them are. We need them if we’re going to change anything. Not all the anti-democratic dangers are on the right. I was surprised to learn from a podcast featuring Greg Lukanioff, the inspiration for The Coddling of the American Mind , that of the top ten schools in America, the left has a 75% success rate in getting a professor punished or fired. This includes not just losing one’s job but suspensions, extended investigations, ‘sensitivity’ training, and having your paper or syllabus censored. He also notes we don’t know what’s happening at the schools outside the top 400 because their cases rarely, if ever, make the news media. But threats from the right result in punishment less than half the time. Lukianoff further notes that on most college campuses, there’s not much chance of being cancelled by the right, unless you teach at a religious college or a state university in a red state. Overall, attempts to get people fired come from the left 60% of the time, and from the right 40%, with right-wing organizations like Fox News pitching many of the tantrums about ‘offensive speech’. You may not like what Ron ‘Don’t say gay’ DeSantis is doing in Florida, but you can’t ignore the left either. Écrasez l’infâme! Opposing political sides have never been wholly at peace with each other; mudslinging political attacks are as old as the rise of politics many thousands of years ago. Ancient Romans accused their political rivals of murder, incest, greed, impiety, sacrilege, effeminacy, drunkenness and public vomiting, just to name a few. Cicero really pissed off Marc Antony when he accused him of having had a love affair with a young man during his misspent youth. Oh please. That’s a Democratic campaign slogan! But an empire divided is ripe for conquest, which is why dictatorship was such a popular form of government back then. Sometimes, you needed one super-strong proven dude to lord over the rest and tell them how it will be, and send anyone to the gallows or the torture chamber who gave him any shit. We can still work across the fence. Like, even, believe it or not, right now. Both parties in America have come together in the last few years on legislation to support military sexual assault prevention, on reforming the police after the George Floyd tragedy, and this summer to suspend the debt ceiling and set federal spending limits. I guess no one in Congress wants their daughter getting raped by her C.O. and prefers to reform the police before the far-left garners enough support to defund it. Cross-partisanship can happen. We need to find our common ground with the other side on issues we agree are important and, uh—not talk about a lot of other stuff. Republicans and conservatives who want to see Donald Trump kept out of the White House will find plenty of support in the liberal wing. They may not have enough support on their own side - Republican Congresscritters display an appalling lack of balls or labia to stand up to the Trump Train(wreck) - and will need reinforcements. Others can back them up when the MAGAs start throwing tomatoes, rocks or pipe bombs. Democrats and liberals who want parents to understand there’s no real science behind ‘gender affirming care’ will find plenty of support from the ‘Murican flag-wavers and cross-wearers. We may not agree on much, but at least we can on: Hell No, Trump Must Go Home, And Fer Fuck’s Sake, Leave Kids Alone! Here’s the deliciously subversive part: We might even make some odd new friends. Because not all Christians are rigid Bible thumpers, not all pro-choicers are on the left, not all liberals want to abolish the police nor all conservatives the FBI. There’s a Silent Majority in the middle, somewhere between MAGA and woke, where we can work together, perhaps even talk together about politics without downtowns nesting in glass-shattered streets and cop cars burning like a Canadian forest. Where, if we can listen to each other, we can find commonalities, and perhaps integrate some of our compatible beliefs and values to incorporate some good ideas we got from those other guys. Like: They respect authority and we respect science. Make Evidence-Backed Doctors Great Again! Because here’s the thing: The other Republicans are trying to seize power illegally since they can’t win enough votes, and the far left preaches we must ‘burn the system down’, and some of them may try. They sound frighteningly similar. Will this be the left one day? Photo by TapTheForwardAssist on Wikimedia Commons, CC0 4.0 The rest of us look at both extreme alternatives, shake our heads, and say, “Nuh-uh.” It’s up to us, folks. The bird can’t fly with only one wing. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

''Critical Social Justice' has infiltrated the mental health industry and spreads rather than contains wokeness's harmful ideas Public domain photo from Rawpixel Well this explains everything, I thought to myself. The fox is coaching the henhouse! Author Lisa Selin-Davis explains the perpetuation of wokeism in her recent The Free Press Substack article, How Therapists Became Social Justice Warriors . I had no idea social justice had infiltrated the mental health industry, which makes me rethink whether greater resources for affordable mental health help will alleviate or multiply pervasive societal mental illness. Because wokeness is a primary driver. Selin-Davis traces the short history of how therapists got ‘woke’ and trained to view the patient as a collective part of a greater group, whether it was a ‘dominant’ group or a ‘marginalized’ one, rather than treating them, as therapists have historically have, as an individual. God help you now if you’re unfortunate enough to be white, male, or ‘cis-heteronormative’. Because you and your privilege are ground zero for what ails others. And their antidote to your mental distress is woke mind poison. The therapist training Selin-Davis describes sounds frighteningly like those hellish DEI corporate workshops we read and hear too much about. First, start with a dictatorial commitment to ‘antiracism’, whatever that means this week. Then be sure to give all the ‘right’ answers in class, or risk being shamed and penalized. What galvanized the social justice-izing of mental health counseling was the rise of Donald Trump, the death of George Floyd and street protests . One student described a ‘civility pledge’ she had to sign toward the end of her training, stating her commitment to acknowledge all the social justice warrior evils: Racism, ableism, sexism, classism, nativism, heterosexism, politically incorrect country music , etc. Vulnerable, unhappy people, oppressed by mental health struggles, come to these freshly-minted head specialists and pay for more mental poison. Mental dis-ease begins with social justice One woman in the article illustrates how Critical Social Justice ideology creates and perpetuates pre-existing mental illness. The social justice warrior cared deeply about diversity and equity, but found herself struggling with her ‘whiteness’ and her constant fear she was oppressing others without even trying. Critical Race Theory teaches a hopeless narrative for everyone, but particularly for white people: They’re born into white supremacy and can never escape it, and oppress others simply by existing. The woman felt guilt as a lesbian, too, as Queer Theory teaches ‘cis’ is “associated with colonization and white supremacy and oppression.” WTF? She’d internalized social justice’s self-hatred lessons that the only acceptable authenticity is that of the marginalized. If you’re not—and apparently someone granted privilege to lesbians when she wasn’t looking, your only permissible response is a never-ending demand for public confession for your sins of being born ‘privileged’. Instead of working to achieve genuine social justice, and existing happily lesbian with her girlfriend, the woman became consumed with CSJ-manufactured guilt as she anguished over her alleged ‘internalized white supremacy’. Social Justice created her unhealthy pathologies that diverted her from a path of helping others, to counseling she might not have otherwise needed, and, as it turned out, might have been better off without. She found a black therapist to help her with her race and gender issues and all went very well for several months. It went tits-up, ironically, when she began making real mental health progress. Getting better weakened her ‘wokeness’ which threatened her therapist’s social justice commitment to a victim-centered identitarian worldview. When the patient criticized cancel culture the therapist accused her of assimilating ‘white supremacy culture’ and making the black therapist feel ‘unsafe’. If there’s one word that must never pass a mental health professional’s lips unless the patient has turned on them with a knife, it’s ‘unsafe’. That’s a social justice distortion most often applied to challenged ideas for which the recipient has no rational answer. Eventually, the therapist ended the relationship with the patient for being insufficiently attentive to her presumed birth-granted skin power, which was even more harmful for the patient. She was in essence ‘cancelled’, the very worst punishment for the non-conforming social justice warrior, by someone she’d trusted with her psychological vulnerability. Social justice activism drove the patient both into and then out of therapy, when the good it did her did so-called ‘harm’ to the therapist. Interestingly, a therapy modality that perpetuates the problem it seeks to reduce results in a prolonged financially remunerative arrangement for the therapist which can last for years, even decades. It’s an ironic position for a mental health professional: If you do your job well, success is rewarded with profit loss. I can’t help but think the patient could have saved herself many months, and a lot of stress and money, by reading books outside her social justice bubble that might have challenged and illuminated her in more psychologically healthy ways, especially books challenging the myopic social justice self-flagellating prison. The therapist, treating her patient as a presumed ‘oppressor’ rather than an individual with her own unique neuroses and traumas, worked to reinforce the pervasive ‘woke’ ideology of helplessness and hopeless oppression. She told the patient, ‘You’re not free because of homophobia and sexism. You’ll never be free.’  What a supremely bleak and depressing view of one’s future, not to mention humanity. How utterly demoralizing it must be to believe that ultimately, struggle is useless, including against genuine oppression - so why even bother trying? Why protest in the streets, why bother striving to become a better person, if you remain forever either an assigned victim or an oppressor, regardless of your most sincere efforts? Ideology vs empowerment Under the old therapy modality, the patient was guided toward healthier mental perceptions, coping, and resilience skills, along with a growing inner strength, the exact opposite of the victimist mindset, the very definition of powerlessness. In fact, it’s victimhood that often drives people into therapy, the point being to not allow whatever makes her feel like a victim control her life. In the proper setting, one is encouraged to grow mentally stronger and develop personal power, which is what the aforementioned therapy client did until her therapist pulled her back from the cliff edge of psychological health. Selin-Davis’s article notes that some ideologized newbie therapists claim they could never take on a Trump-supporting client. I can’t imagine another group of people as much in need of real mental health help as the MAGAs. They’re subject to their own toxic, victimizing, self-defeating and self-destructive ideologies, greatly resembling their social justice antagonists. MAGAs, like SJWs, need to challenge their self-perception as victims, whether they were victimized against their will with a neglectful childhood or an abusive partner, or whether they agreed, consciously or not, to adopt identitarian victimhood. But ultimately, if you can’t find a marginalized group to join, simply make up your own label! If you’re a group of one, congratulations! You’re marginalized! So none of it is your fault! Empowerment, genuine empowerment, not woke-warrior lip service, is the sworn enemy of victimhood ideology. The less you see yourself as a victim, the less you act as a victim. The more you see your power to change your life, and you engage that power, your life will most likely improve. It’s a direct threat to those who prefer to reject personal responsibility because they’re marginalized. The message of covert disempowerment promoted by emotionally unintelligent social justice warriors self-oppresses and benefits those with real power unwilling to share any of it. I wonder if the SJW’s therapist felt threatened by the very freedom from psychological pain to which she’d led her patient, perhaps longing to seize some of that freedom herself but risking her job and potential ostracism when her peers found out she questioned the core tenets of social justice ideology. It would lay to waste everything she’d been taught and believed in. Donald Trump and his lackeys play to this same mindset for Team MAGA, blaming everyone for the working class’s plight without ever challenging them to aspire higher, educate themselves, to take charge of their lives more, or to demand better politicians to address their real interests. It benefits Trump and the Republicans to keep their base feeling victimized - if the voters took charge of their lives rather than blaming immigrants and progressive elites, they might not need the GOP anymore. Who needs a saviour when you can save yourself? The futility of eternal victimhood Mental un-health is socially contagious. It includes anorexia, suicide, and depression, but happiness is also contagious. One study found that having a happy neighbor increases one’s happiness probability by 34%. Hanging out with a more positive crowd and taking breaks, whether it’s vacation or just some time off from thinking about systemic racism, rape culture or colonialism, might be more beneficial, not to mention time and money-saving, than a therapist with an unexamined sense of her own self-imposed victimhood. It’s frightening to think that people in real mental distress visit professionals who feed their pathologies and turn them away from the timeless skills of empowerment, self-challenge, coping and resilience that results in stronger psychological health. The Buddha, 3,500 years ago, taught human beings the secret to happiness and mental well-being not by wallowing in the injustices of the world, but in learning to co-exist with and alleviate it with good deeds, to strive not to contribute to others’ unhappiness, and to challenge one’s own self-harming mental perceptions. He deconstructed how our beliefs can cause us as much, and arguably more, pain than any actual victimization we’ve experienced. The more new-ish mental health treatment Cognitive Behavior Therapy, or CBT, closely resembles Buddhist teachings. CBT seeks to challenge ‘cognitive distortions’, the ‘mental constructs’ Buddhists encourage followers to root out. It challenges thoughts, beliefs and attitudes that may or may not be real, that may hurt us. One such cognitive distortion in the social justice movement (and Judaeo-Christianity) is the distasteful notion of original sin - that you can be born into a negative state through no fault of your own. It was the putative basis of the Genesis tale of Adam and Eve, purporting to explain why humanity is so ugly (it’s our fault for disobeying God!) and it’s extended into CRT-based antiracism, which teaches the cognitive distortion that you can be born into an inescapable white supremacy, just as Jews and Christians believe you can never escape the taint of Adam’s and Eve’s original sin, and all you can do is strive ever harder to be a better person. Ideological victimhood dies without validation from others, and people who abandon victimist thinking and take charge of their lives, are deeply threatening to those who won’t. The ‘woke’ and the MAGAs each hew to a toxic, self-limiting, self-destructive self-image in which nothing is ever their fault. Rejecting victimhood is the Kryptonite of ‘wokeness’ and MAGAtry. Evidence, logic, rationalism, reason and hard data are their sworn enemies. Mental health is the primary tool in the arsenal of The Silent Majority, those of us who want to take back our power from the perma-victims of modern discourse, who hold themselves, not to mention others and their social justice causes, back. Therapy can still be beneficial, and Selin-Davis’s articles lists the rebel therapists banding together to offer un-woke therapy for those who don’t want their therapists to dictate some issues are ‘off the table’ because it makes them feel ‘unsafe’. If you can’t afford therapy, no problem! Good books will challenge what you think you believe to be right in social justice. You can read them for free from the library or order them on-line, used copies super-cheap. I just saved you a whackload of money, and maybe hastened your journey to a healthier mental outlook. You’re welcome ;) Not all mental health struggles can be addressed with a few books, so if you need a therapist’s help Selin-Davis’s article offers non-woke therapy sources to start. Also research and interview potential therapists to make sure they won’t undermine your progress. It’s okay to be liberal or progressive or supportive of social justice, but the key thing to remember is they shouldn’t be pushing any particular political worldview on you. If your mental health issues come from your social justice work, start with a few of these books: The Righteous Mind - Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion - Jonathan Haidt Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody - Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay Woke Racism: How A New Religion Has Betrayed Black America - John McWhorter I Feel, Therefore I Am: The Triumph of Woke Subjectivism - Mark Goldblatt The Content Of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (this book is over 30 years old but it’s as fresh and relevant today as it was in 1990) - Shelby Steele Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality - Helen Joyce My Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars - Meghan Daum The Morning After: Sex, Fear & Feminism - Katie Roiphe War Before Civilization - Lawrence Keeley (On how violent pre-colonial Indigenous cultures were) Emotional Intelligence 2.0: Harness the Power of the #1 Predictor of Success - Dr. Travis Bradberry & Dr. Jean Greaves This last is one of the best damn books I’ve ever read that will put you on the road to more highly fortified mental health. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Over-inclusivity endangers women and opens the door to sexual predators intent on eroding female agency. Stop being so *nice*, girls! This is the most important word in the female vocabulary. Practice it until you can say it firmly and with finality. The 1996 movie The Crucible highlights a lose-lose Puritan ultimatum: Tell the truth —that you were not a witch and practiced no Biblically-forbidden dark arts—and be ostracized, not for witchcraft but for ‘lying’; and if you lied and ‘confessed’ to preserve your communal life, you forever damned your soul to eternal hell in accordance with Puritan belief. The truth was hateful to the Puritan community; it wasn’t the narrative they wanted. They chose—preferred—to believe in witches. When far-left blogging platform Medium declared war on truth I wondered how it could have allowed itself to become so subsumed by illogical woke idiocy. When Canadian Pride transactivists began attacking libraries I wondered how Pride let itself get hijacked by fetishistic heterosexual men. When so-called ‘progressive’ activists attacked not just libraries but bookstores and Amazon , I wondered why they practiced censorship themselves when they labeled right-wing censorship as Nazism. On the Orwellian far-left, free speech is now as verboten as on the far-right. How did we get to this place? I think progress stopped when progressives, and especially Third Wave feminists, gave up the ability to say ‘No.’ The Patriarchy thanks them for their support. Leda and The Swine MeToo dragged consent out of the bedroom and into the public square and turned ‘rape culture’ into a household phrase. A recent Unherd article debated whether the Noughties (the decade with central double-zeros) enabled Russell Brand to become a hypersexualized misogynist and alleged perpetrator of sexual assault. It’s really about rape culture. When feminists use the term they almost always mean male words or actions. They fail to consider how much women contribute to rape culture too. Like not saying No when you’re not in danger. Unfortunately, many women are raised to be nice , and far more considerate of others’ feelings than men are. It’s not entirely men’s fault when they’re raised to be the way they are, too. We all have to strive to do better after our parents’ inevitable mistakes. Women can be more forceful and assertive, and men can stop and consider how their words and actions affect others. Progressivism has jumped the shark with its obsessive largely female fetish for inclusivity: No one claiming to be from a ‘marginalized’ group must ever be challenged or considered worthy of exclusion. It’s incredible that an age that can condemn Russell Brand and Louis CK for not listening when women said No, now insist women can’t say No to more fashionably-dressed sexual predators and opportunists, and shame their sisters who do. The feminist trick, as clever misogynists have discovered, is to slap on thicker eyelashes than thou, steal their sister’s bra and stuff it like she did when she was eleven, and and whine on TikTok about how hard their appropriated ‘marginalized’ lives are. The silly little chickie-boos will suck it right up! You can even get them to ignore their fine-tuned sense of danger from strange men in enclosed, private spaces, and assure other women they should not fear transwomen in changing rooms or public restrooms. This, despite mounds of research showing the same levels of violent criminality between transwomen and men, and the growing list of busted cross-dressing sexual predators. These dizzy dames have even been persuaded we should reward convicted sex offenders who find their ‘real woman’ with female prisons, a level of punishment for female prisoners I’m guessing runs afoul somehow of the Geneva Convention. No, no, nothing to see here! These poor dear souls just feel comfortable ‘coming out’ now! Image by Long Phung from Pixabay This is not good for women. Gavin de Becker notes in The Gift of Fear, “No animal in the wild suddenly overcome with fear would spend any of its mental energy thinking, ‘It’s probably nothing.’” Animals evolved over millions of years to hightail it at the approach of a hungry predator. So, to, have women developed a highly-attuned sense of danger, whether their mate came home angry from a poor hunt or drunk from the local pub. The smart human female animal gets the hell out of the way. A violent transactivist faction dictates to women that they will complain no more when penised people demand (in the historical tradition of entitled men) that women grant them access to all their female-only spaces, including even sex-segregated spaces originally conceived to protect women from male predation. Worse, women, real women, comply like good little girls and do what these men want. Because it’s always men - however fashionably dressed or passably female—who make these demands. Women are femsplained by Regressive Lefties that they should say No to some men - the ones they don’t want to have sex with - but yes to the ones who want to penetrate women’s-only spaces - regardless of how unsafe it makes women feel. Like, it’s a major colossal global human rights crisis if they don’t. This even includes rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters, absolutely the last places the be-penised should ever be. Until a few years ago, they were genuine safe spaces for women directly abused by penises who could count on not encountering another one. No more. Get over your transphobia, girlfriend! The Ghislaine Maxwells of the left ‘Fauxminists’ are as dangerous to women and women’s rights as the Freedumb Convoy and red-state politics. Fauxminists are a manifestation primarily on the left, since anti-feminist women on the right are largely honest about it. Fauxminists consider themselves feminists but support anti-feminist causes, and I can’t think of anything more anti-feminist than throwing imprisoned women to the rapists, or telling mothers and their young daughters that they should just accept transwomen in women-only spaces because ‘they’re not going to hurt anyone’. This is criminally ludicrous. It directly contradicts women’s lived experience with male stranger danger, and even the ones they know. It even contradicts central progressive belief that we are who we are via environment and culture rather than anything innate. Never mind that it’s a belief contradicted by countless anthropologists, biologists and neuroscientists, but the left’s resistance to inconvenient science and recognizing contradictory hypocrisy has a lengthy history along with the right’s. We believe what we want to believe . If feminists believe we’re the product of our upbringing rather than our sex, do they really think a human male will toss out the window his prior experience growing up male in a violent, sexist society? Especially a convicted sex offender? Do they honestly believe he stops thinking like a male because he realized ‘he always felt like a woman’? And do they believe everything a man tells them? One of the biggest psychological weak spots in the female brain is the nature and nurture drive to be nice, to help others, to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, especially men’s. This is a sound evolutionary response as some men can become violent if they feel shamed or rejected, and letting them down easy is a survival tactic that hopefully prevents one from killing her. This is where the ad hoc lie “Sorry, I’m a lesbian,” comes from. Or, “Thanks, but I’m married,” when she’s not. They don’t always work but they offer the less emotional suitor plausible deniability: She’s not rejecting me, it’s nothing personal. Fauxminists naively believe that everything changes when a man claims to be female, which directly endangers others when they demand all women collaborate with primarily heterosexual transvestites and autogynephiles who are in it for the woodies. They’ll argue on X’s #MeToo that women have to be wary of all men because they don’t know which are the rapists or killers. Unless they’re transwomen. Why do they turn their brain over to Da Patriarchy when blatantly opportunistic men demand access to a rape crisis center? Not only must real feminists and progressives battle vicious misogynists on the right, now we have to battle their fauxminist allies on the left. If you’ve ever wondered why resistance to extreme trans rights get charged with being a ‘right-wing’ effort, it’s because it is. Because the right supports sex-segregated spaces, and the left, well—it supports rape culture and male sexual predation. Full stop. Fauxminists are the Ghislaine Maxwells of the left. Isn’t it interesting that Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous list included, as far as I can tell, almost exclusively Democratic politicians and progressive-leaning actors and celebrities? The left just cain’t say no. Not even to victimizing underage girls. Besides Jeffrey Epstein, the far-left and its fauxminists have a long record of enabling and supporting male criminal sexual behavior: The ILGA’s conscious inclusion of NAMBLA into their ranks; England’s infamous grooming gangs which fauxminists and Regressive Lefties ignored. Notice they condemn Epstein more than his Chief Collaborator? And now they instruct women to ignore their most critical instincts and pretend there’s no danger when a big galoot like Lia Thomas is taking his pants off. “It’s just nothing,” they tell women. If victims of sexual assault feel uncomfortable with a ‘woman with a penis’ listening to or overhearing their story at the rape crisis center, or that some guy who sort of looked like Dame Edna commented at the pool what a beauty their little daughter is, suddenly the fauxminists abandon #MeToo and tell these women to ‘just get over it,’ because, you know, women don’t molest children , and ‘transwomen are women’. Maybe this explains the real reason the dodo bird died out. Every time they thought they caught a whiff of a human in the breeze they told themselves, “Oh, it’s probably nothing. Humans are non-violent just like us.” Well, that’s what a human told her, anyway. CC0 2.0 Photo by Ed Schipul on Flickr Just Say No To No Where is this leading? Social psychologist and relationship expert Dina McMillan describes the many types of controlling, abusive men in her book But He Says He Loves Me: How to avoid being trapped in a manipulative relationship. She lists the sort of women controlling men look for. Some want the easily manipulated victim susceptible to doing whatever it takes to please the man. The ones with the lowest self-esteem are the easiest to reel in. Others want higher-value women who may require a little more work. Some prefer a real challenge: The strong, independent, feminist woman. “How well does that work?” I thought dubiously as I, a strong, independent, feminist woman read the book. Better than I might have expected. Women who think they can’t be controlled or abused by men are a World Series-level grand slam if he can get her to submit. It requires much more investment in ‘training’ her for the relationship but it can be quite successful, from his point of view. I see this same dynamic playing out in the unquestioning fauxminist support for the trans narrative. Transactivists, like other abusive males, exploit their adversaries’ weakest link. Which, on the left, is its over-inclusivity and inability to just say no. To anyone. Social psychologist Dina McMillan extrapolated the connection I just made to all of the ‘woke’, who she says are using ‘all of the tactics from my abuse series…It’s really quite frightening….It’s an absolutist totalitarian religion…I can’t even call it a social movement.” They’ve won the hearts and minds of the easiest pickin’s of the progressive chickens. They’ve persuaded misogyny’s cock blocks to stop saying No to men. And to oppress any sister who refuses to submit. What’s their next step? Not saying No to men who force themselves into women’s-only spaces puts them one step closer to no right to say No to sexual access. It’s what the incels have been preaching for years: Women shouldn’t have the right to say no to sex with any man. Even certain sexually successful men would agree. You can have sex with more women if you don’t have to waste a lot of time with consent. ‘Progressive’ feminism’s willingness to lift critical boundaries on traditional predatory male sexual behavior is why fighting trans rights has come to be identified with the right. Many of us on the left join after watching the horrifying spectacle of predatory grooming tactics by men pretending to be something they’re not. Fauxminists are silent when transwomen complain of the ‘cotton ceiling’ that prevents their penile sexual pleasure because real lesbians, unattracted to male bodies, jawlines and genitals, refuse to have sex with these pseudo-dykes with pikes. When the ‘minor-attracted persons’, the people formerly known as pedophiles come for the children, we know the Regressive Left fauxminists will do nothing to stop them. They never have before. The pedeophiles’ self-marginalized argument will stem from the far-left’s widely-accepted conviction that even children as young as three or four, ‘know’ what gender they’re supposed to be, and that no adult should stand in the way of transitioning. “Who are you to tell your child they can’t have sex with me? Children know what’s best for them! They can make up their own minds who they want to have sex with. Now get out of our business!” And the fauxminists will. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing!

Have you ever reverse-engineered your life? What didn't you realize before? The Digital Artist, Pixabay “You have a time machine, you can pick one thing in your life to go back to. Where, when do you go, and do you just observe it from afar, or do you change something?” Well, THAT was easy. “Piece of cake,” I responded. “I know exactly what I’d go back and change. The worst mistake of my life.” The question came via my friend’s weekly Friday evening Virtual Cocktail Hour, a tradition she started during the pandemic. After chit-chat, we answer one interesting pre-chosen question of the week. So, so many times I wished I could return to the spring of 1993 and just be friends with Jerry instead of embarking upon a just-over-seven-years relationship, with a middle-break when he dried out and sobered up. So much sturm und drang before I realized he had a drinking problem. So much hope and comfort after he got serious and kicked the bottle. I thought now it was forever. It wasn’t. He waltzed in one night and said, “We have to talk.” Those ‘Bob is God’ details I love backward-engineering my life’s turning points, good or bad. This started, as I discovered, with the ‘Bob is God’ trash can in college. Ten years prior to meeting Alkie Boy, walking around campus drowning in a cloud of angsty depression over some guy and the certainty I would never be noticed by a man again, I often passed a trash can in the Psych building upon which someone had mysteriously etched ‘Bob is God.’ One afternoon the guy behind me in Psych class asked a fellow student, “Who is Bob and why is he God?” I pivoted around, blithely oblivious to the greater symbolism of escape from blander conventionality and much later, from the hell of a failing country. We laughed along with them as we speculated about a trash can. Jim was my first real love. Through him, I met a new crowd with whom I’m connected to this day. My life pivoted with new friends and an intro to geek/fan culture via a medieval re-creation society. Graduations and life travels created breaks in the friendships B.F. & A.F. (Before & After Facebook) but my life digressed from a more conventional path saving me, as I see it, from the tragedy of the commonplace. I’d been a weirdo in high school who craved ‘normalcy’ and found it in college; who knew returning the ‘weirdoes’ were my tribe? The college wallflower became a belly dancer, i.e. the post-high school equivalent of the Head Cheerleader, via the road taken. Bob, or Trash Can Vandal, you have no idea how you changed a life! Blame it on Buffy. Or Jerry. Or Ireland. For twenty years I’ve dealt with the fallout of Jerry’s ‘We have to talk’ moment. It would be unfair to lay the next fifteen years of misery on him since I’ve struggled with depression and anger issues from my early adolescence I can’t fully explain. I remember pre-school feelings of self-doubt and quiet inferiority I can’t pin on my family or, back then at least, non-existent school bullies. For the last seven years I’ve been climbing out of the mental pit I dug. Jerry handed me the shovel, but I’m the one who insisted on digging so deeply. We humans possess the most marvelous computers in the Universe between our ears, creations more complex than our most sophisticated technology, and boy oh boy it’s a shame we can’t periodically reboot, because brains ‘blue screen’ more than a Windows 98 beta. Although Jerry is behind me, he hurt me badly enough that, unlike other past lovers or partners, I want nothing to do with him. Ever. While I’m friends today with ex-boyfriends who once hurt me, if I find I’m sharing a social media platform with Jerry I block him in case he gets any dumb ideas about contacting me again as he has in the past — I’m convinced, just to be friends, but fuck you. The friend-ship sank in flames twenty years ago. I’ve kill-filed his email address and name. But… While watching the Ignited States slouch toward Gomorrah , as a great book title once put it, I’ve pondered what a favor Jerry did for me, even if I didn’t see the benefit for two full decades. He was another catalyst who changed my life. Today, I’m in a more stable place rather than what Donald Trump might call a ‘shithole country’, thanks to ol’ Jer. It’s a longer reverse engineer, beginning two years after the breakup: I tried to move to Ireland after reading a news story saying it wanted to become the Silicon Valley of Europe, and I was in I.T. Moving away for awhile appealed because I was chronically depressed and wanted to escape my nowhere life in Connecticut. When I couldn’t get into Ireland (they’d just opened it up with an EU-first policy, and every Eastern European was trying to move anywhere that wasn’t Eastern Europe), my cyber-friend near Toronto encouraged me to move to Canada because I couldn’t get into Ireland. I’d gotten email-friendly with him after we met as fans on Usenet’s alt.fan.buffy.the.vampire.slayer back in 1997. And I began watching Buffy because of—Jerry. The idea of an entire TV series based on a poorly-performing 1992 movie the critics hated sounded like a supremely stupid idea. Jerry had said, “Oh, we have to watch it! It sounds really good! Joss Whedon, the creator, hated what they did to his movie. The TV show is what the movie was supposed to be. Darker. More serious.” “I’m tired of vampires,” I said. And this was well before Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, and the endless succession of boring beautiful bloodsuckers stalking the early decades of the new century. “Let’s just watch the first few episodes,” he said. It was way better than I’d guessed, and I fell in love with Giles. Then Spike. Buffy is why I started hanging out on the Usenet group and cyber-met Larry near Toronto, eh? We transferred the friendship to email. His mother died, then Jerry and I split up, and when Ireland fell through, Larry encouraged me to come to Canada. Why did I immigrate rather than move temporarily? Canada wants immigrants, not half-assed will-they-stay-or-will-they-go semi-perms. Also, blame it on Bush. “You had the right idea! You knew what was coming all along!” Actually, I didn’t. I look terribly prescient to my American-imprisoned friends with 20/20 hindsight. Okay, I knew the country was ambling down the Highway To Hell under George W. Bush. When I saw the famous Abu Ghraib photo in the newspaper, I thought, “This is not the country I grew up in.” Public domain photo from Wikimedia Commons We tortured prisoners now. Political prisoners. Republican politicians and reactionary xenophobic mouth-breathers bobbled their slack-jawed heads in terrifying approval. “I want to get out of here,” I said. My devolving countrymen weren’t the only reason why, but it added urgency. I never foresaw the state of the States today. I never imagined we’d be dumb enough to elect a moron like Trump. Or that we’d prefer conspiracy theories and fake news over reality, even as a killer virus ripped its way through a country whose collective IQ more closely resembled a residential neighborhood speed sign. During the pandemic, I counted the number of American COVID-19 deaths by units of Vietnam: 1 Vietnam = 50,000 American deaths. One little, two little, three little Vietnams, four little, five little, six little Vietnams… Today, we still lead the world in all COVID-19 statistics , as always, now at 23 Vietnams and change. We’re #1! Words fail to describe how grateful I was not to be living in the COVIDed States anymore. Now I happily go about my business every day without worrying about taking a bullet in a mass shooting. I’m barely on speaking terms with my mother country. What would have happened if Jerry and I had stayed together? I might have died in Trump’s AmeriKKKa as my compatriots committed maskless, mass suicide, pitching tantrums over social distancing and a shut-down economy, dragging out their own torturous death throes as the world slammed shut its own borders to America. Remember when Americans worried about people trying to get in? That was, like, that January. The reverse-engineering exercise Reverse engineering is figuring out how a device works by starting with what it does and tracing backward to its beginning. When you apply it to your life it can reveal hidden insights can change your perceptions. I’ve been thinking about Jerry differently since I realized I have him to thank for my life in Canada. I’m not going to send him a fruit basket or anything, but I’ve experienced a little psychological relief as a result. What would have happened if I’d never left the U.S.? I might have been mired in near-hopeless, perhaps suicidal depression. Maybe unemployed, staring down poverty with a gossamer safety net, thanks to decades of Republican meddling, and a president who didn’t care about anything that wasn’t him. I’d be surrounded by hateful Americans from both political sides whose lives had always sucked and who wanted everyone else’s to suck too. Misery loves company. I might well have felt like those remaining Jews in Nazi Germany, no longer allowed to leave, realizing they’d waited too late to follow the smarter ones out the door. Stuck in a sea-to-shining-sea prison, goose-stepping toward totalitarianism, mindlessly chanting “Make America Great Again!” instead of “Seig heil!” What would I do if I could go back in time and change one thing? Maybe I couldn’t risk messing with my life and staying in America. Maybe I’d have to let that first ill-fated dinner date with Jerry take its natural course. Maybe this was the only way my headspace could lead me to a civilized country before it was too late. If I warned 1993 Nicole about what was going to happen if she persevered with Jerry (once she stopped screaming at the sight of Senior Nicole), would she—I—have listened? What if I could go back and be Nicole, but with my 2023 brain? I suspect that scenario would work out far happier, because I’d always know I needed to move to Canada as soon as Al Gore threw the election to Dumbya by not challenging its end game at the Supreme Court. Part of me is horrified at adding thirty years to a 60-year-old life on stop of the thirty or so years I still expect to live. Who wants to live to be 120, even when you don’t show it? But—I could remake a lot of mistakes, and the breakup with Jerry launched A Series of Unfortunate Events that I can mostly blame myself for. But it doesn’t really matter, because we can’t go back and fix the past. The worst thing that ever happened to me was the best thing that ever happened to me. Who knew? Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing!

Is this the same conversation as weightlifting and swimming? Are women at a biological disadvantage competing against men in chess tournaments? Them’s fightin’ words for many feminists. Those familiar with science must acknowledge men’s biological advantage over us in physically competitive sports which is why the world’s weirdest controversy rages over transwomen on women’s athletic teams. But chess? No physical advantage required, unless it’s sitting in a chair for hours on end. Then, points for women with more fat in our butts. Mostly, women and men compete regularly in chess tournaments, and no one questions this. We know that intellectually, there’s virtually no difference between male and female brains, although it was a male conceit until the last few hundred years that male intelligence outranked pinkie-boo brains. It’s kind of hard to fault them when they didn’t have sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists armed with MRIs to refute their contention. Women’s intelligence had been oppressed and marginalized for so many thousands of years it truly must have sounded bugspit insane to suggest otherwise. History offered a few intelligent, capable, and sometimes despotic women to challenge that view, but were largely regarded as outliers. Even today one might suspect it’s the truth if you’ve ever watched—or been—that woman who folds under male authority or succumbs to a crappy male argument without enough information or confidence to properly challenge or refute it. Hell, I sometimes more cynically wonder about it myself as I watch so-called intelligent, enlightened, otherwise feminist women fall into line like good little girls under the spell of far-left narratives that marginalize, stereotype and patronize women just like men did before Second Wave feminism. A woman’s job was to be pretty, hygienic, dress well, wear uncomfortable shoes and possess the waistline of an 8-year-old. Public domain image History’s widely scattered accomplished chickie-boos with seeming outlier brains include Ada Lovelace, who powerfully contributed to Charles Babbage’s early pre-computing Analytical Engine, and recognized it possessed uses beyond mathematics; so of course the Babbage Machine shares no hyphenated glory with her. Hedy Lamarr, one of the most beautiful actresses in Hollywood, pioneered today’s WiFi, invented a tablet that could turn a glass of water into a soda drink, and improved traffic light design. She spent her off-time in her workshop rather than nuzzling Clark Gable or guzzling champage at star-studded parties. And let’s not forget the black brainiacs who helped put white men on the moon in Hidden Figures. Katherine Johnson in 1966. She died a few years ago at 102 and she was STILL smarter than most of us. Public domain photo by Adam Cuerden on Wikimedia Commons Given a fair shot, intellectually and cognitively, women can often go toe-to-toe, or maybe cortex-to-cortex with the boys. Although there’s no sex parity in the STEM professions yet, and may never be for reasons that may or may not have to do with cognitive ability (the jury will be out on this for awhile), women’s undeniable achievement in science, business, education, and on the Supreme Court indicate that what we lack in weightlifting and swimming speed, we make up for in cognitive competition. So why, then, has the International Chess Federation placed a moratorium on transwomen competing with women? Are transwomen worthy competitors? I can’t stand Will ‘Lia’ Thomas, but if he wants to compete with women in chess, as a man or a woman, I support his right to do so. He’ll probably get his ass kicked, since it’s not his thing, and identifying as a woman won’t alter his advantage. The chess article on a Reality’s Last Stand Substack argues women may not ever be truly competitive chess players against men, supported by a clearly established cognitive skill men customarily have over women. A female Harvard evolutionary biologist speculates that “males have a large spatial-ability advantage over women,” and offers legendary hockey player Wayne Gretzky’s visualization skills as one superlative example. I acknowledge men customarily have this advantage over female brains; which themselves possess certain advantages over male brains, like with language processing and emotional expression, not all of which can be explained by socialization and growing up in ‘patriarchal’ culture. Neuroscience has come to show that parts of our respective brains work differently , including the hippocampus and the amygdala. But I find the RLS article unpersuasive that women may not have just the right cognitive skills to defeat men in this challenging game of the mind, despite never having won a world championship, and the very best female player only ranking 116 worldwide. Women have been competing with men since the ‘80s without political drama, and while there’s still a big performance gap, we can’t say with any certainty that female brains simply can’t comparatively perform. Of course, we can’t say that they can, either. I find unpersuasive the argument’s ultimate contention that perhaps transwomen, and ergo other men, shouldn’t compete with women, because it fails to address questions I considered while reading the article. Let’s start with the least persuasive, in my own opinion (bearing in mind that I don’t play chess). Women’s brains may not be as refined and optimized as men’s The Patriarchy wasn’t built in a day and it’s been only 150 years or so since women began chipping away at the fortress. I’ve never seen evidence women are less smart than men, but thousands of years of organized civilization designed by men, for men, and assigning women to serve men, lays out valuable skills exercised by men that I don’t see in women, and I have no reason so far to believe it has to do with brain matter rather than evolutionary mapping . Like: Women may not yet have the confidence to win Testosterone production in men may fuel the commonly observed male desire to compete, dominate, and win at all cost. The RLS article cites a child prodigy and chess champion as the ‘Terminator’, who ‘will not stop, ever, until you are dead’. How many women have this drive? How many of us hold ourselves back, valuing wanting to be ‘liked’ and approved of, often preferring to preserve relationships over achieving what we really want? And do we have the confidence to win? We certainly witness countless female sports champions exhibiting the same drive and relentless desire for victory, and it’s absolutely critical they cultivate the ‘growth mindset’ male athletes exemplify to achieve it. But until recently they only ever competed against other women. Removing the Lia Thomases, the drive to win may well work better psychologically against female competitors. Global chess champion Gary Kasparov beat Deep Blue, an IBM-designed chess player in 1996, although he lost to it in a rematch in 1997. I wonder how women might compete against it? CC BY 2.0 Generic photo by James the Photographer on Wikimedia Commons For chess, where the physical advantage is removed, does perhaps the subconscious female fear of challenging a man, wired into the female brain for protective purposes over thousands of years, play upon her? Does the knowledge that the world’s eyes are upon her in this ‘battle of the sexes’, that she’s letting her ‘sisters’ down if she loses to her male opponent (including trans) play upon her? Does, deep within the recesses of her brain, she fear losing to a man? Are his ‘psych out’ strategies more successful, especially against her own skills to do the same? And does she even have those skills? Women may still have some unfortunate catching up to do I’m not convinced that certain clear male cognitive advantages (like spatial visualization) mean that women can never learn them. Men must surely have doubted Catherine Elizabeth Brewer Benson, the first American woman to receive a college degree, in the years leading up to her graduation in 1840. They must have laughed their asses off forty years later, while Mary H. Graham worked toward her philosophy degree, the first American black woman to earn a university diploma. Now women attain more university degrees than men. But men still earn more STEM degrees, and many valid theories hold both the nature and nurture hypotheses. It’s possible women simply have a lot of catching up to do. We don’t have the long established history of female accomplishment as do men, often misunderstood by traditionalists who point to men ‘having invented everything’, forgetting that they had time to do it because their wives were busy with the household, and even if they had servants, women weren’t allowed the education or employment efforts to acquire the knowledge, skills and experience men customarily did. God only knows where Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamarr and Katherine Johnson got it. I don’t know if women will ever achieve parity in chess, and I’m as equally uncertain whether we will in STEM professions. It’s possible that male brains truly are more adept, overall, at both. Perhaps the goal should be not that women must be equally represented everywhere in order to acknowledge we’re equal, but that each individual be permitted to achieve whatever their talents are best suited for. We know that countless ridiculously bright people will achieve, given the opportunity, but nevertheless will likely never achieve the heights of accomplishment as Albert Einstein. Where does that bring us with women’s chess and competition with men, regardless of how they identify? With as much information as I have, I lean towards women’s chess performance gap possibly being rooted more in long-established brain wiring affecting their confidence, underdeveloped strategy skills and behavior under pressure. I suspect ingrained (but not permanently rooted) self-doubt residing like a negative little Terminator in their amygdala’s fear center. There’s a clear male competitive advantage in physical sports that female athletes can never overcome, but perhaps women’s inability to even approach the global chess championship finish line is a longer-term goal requiring several, or many generations of progress. There’s no better way for women to do so than to compete with men regardless of pronouns. I don’t know that parity is the real objective, in either chess or STEM professions, as long as every female brainiac is given the opportunity to maximize her brain’s potential, and thrive in an environment, however short on females, that’s not a boys’ club. Can we develop Gretzky-level visualization skills? Can we compensate by developing other strategic skills? Can we become better psych-out masters than the guys, trans or not? After all, women are downright evil at manipulating others when we want to be. A skill developed over thousands of years of patriarchy in which it was the only way to get what we wanted or needed for ourselves or our families. Stay tuned, for the next couple of hundred years or so. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing!

The failures of Black Lives Matter Chicago, Ibram X. Kendi, gender-switching doctors and impotent Scottish transactivists suggest common sense may be at the gates. Finally. Once they finish off what’s left of the woke idiotology, we can get back to the business of progress. CC0 public domain photo by Jean Beaufort on publicdomainpictures.net I can’t say there’s any good that can have come out of Hamas’s indefensible intentional slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7th, but a by-product may be the beginning of the end for wokeness. The authoritarian political ideology from which genuine social justice and plain common sense departed several years ago appears to have jumped the public acceptability shark. The hard left’s uncritical applause for terrorist perpetrator Hamas, under the guise of ‘supporting’ the Palestinians, leaves many of us on the right and left shaking our heads like wet dogs. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE??? Whether it’s just-below-the-surface anti-Semitism that has always lurked darkly in the hearts of virtue-signalling leftists, or just a dimwitted allegiance to the essential tenet of what passes for Critical Race Theory - dark good, white bad - the ‘woke’ left, which always assumes ‘marginalized’ people are victimized angels, looks deeply deranged to those of us who haven’t filed for moral bankruptcy. I guess the woke left is having its ‘there are many good people on both sides’ moment. Hamas groupies should ask themselves, “Would I approve if these actions were taken against ‘oppressors’ and ‘land-stealers’ I like more?” Like, say, if the aggrieved were America’s Indigenous? What if a band of well-armed, well-trained Indigenous terrorists wasted a New Mexico town, swarming in on hang gliders to gun down New Mexicans running through the desert - let’s bear in mind that white people are only 36% of New Mexico’s diversity - and mowed down everyone white, black and brown running from the Albuquerque, say, annual balloon festival? That the ground troops moved in and brutally raped New Mexican women and girls so hard they broke their pelvises? Burnt families alive in their homes, slaughtered without mercy everyone from babies to grandmothers, tortured others and kidnapped a few to be tortured, raped, or murdered for later? Think about it, wokies. What I’ve noticed, just within the last week to ten days, is that with or without Hamas, encouraging signs indicate ‘peak woke’ may be declining like Donald Trump’s net worth. Here are a few indicators I’ve observed recently that a frightening siege of common sense may be amassing outside the Wokeness Wall. This will be easy, guys! They won’t have guns! Image by AmeliaNVS on Deviant Art, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 DEED Wokeness is cancellable, especially for being a terrorist-loving butthead Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: When it’s possible to cancel far left deplorables without having to be on the far left one’s self. Turns out over-privileged, entitled, money-grubbing little college campus shits scurry like cockroaches when one of them loses a plum law firm job offer because, well, she publicly supported violence and terrorism. Even more ironically, their First Example is a more-marginalized-than thou black female ‘non-binary’. In a sign of how weird the world’s gotten, none other than a hedge fund billionaire emerged as the hero to offer chemoscare-apy to treat Stage 4 metastasized wokeness. Bill Ackman discovered an open letter signed by over thirty student groups at Harvard blaming Israelis for Hamas’s mass slaughter. He quickly accrued a mob of his own, a dozen CEOs who asked Harvard to release the names of all signatories of all the groups, and the names quickly circulated among Ackman’s powerful buddies. Subject line: Let’s make sure we never offer any of them a job! Then the law firm who had extended a job offer to the non-binary human rescinded it—who the hell wants a terrorist lover working for them?—and the woke woke up to the other side of the cancel culture bully cannon. The signatories scampered to remove their names from the letter, their commitment to the Palestinians extending only as far as the looming prospect of living with their parents until senility, saddled with crippling student debt. It’s called ‘accountability’, children. And remember: In accordance with your own values, you must never, ever be forgiven. No matter how much you apologize, grovel and cry on TikTok, no matter what you do or accomplish after this, the only thing that should ever define you is your youthful, ill-considered applause for mass slaughter and rape culture. The BBC calls a man in a dress accused of raping a woman ‘a man in a dress’ To be fair, Kay Georges, né Andrew Miller, gave the Beeb permission to refer to him in their news reporting as he/him for ‘simplicity’s sake’, which goes to show you how committed he was to the whole ‘I’m a chick’ thing in the first place. The Beeb reports Miller is accused of abducting and repeatedly sexually assaulting a teenage girl while dressed as a woman after he offered to give her a lift. It would have been more laudable had the Beeb had the balls to take a stand for hard science and truth-telling without permission, which is supposed to be their job, but hey, it’s a start. We should encourage, oh fuck it, high-pressure journalists to tell the truth about rapists appropriating womanhood: If it has a penis and shoves it into an unconsenting orifice, it’s a him/he-man. Calling a man a man? Further evidence peak woke is crumbling. Speaking of men in dresses, transactivists fail to shut down a feminist event in Glasgow or to terrify J.K. Rowling The FiLia group, part of a larger Scottish feminist organization, scheduled a women’s conference at the Glasgow Platform, which, being as pussy as any other venue that deplatforms women’s conferences at the last minute when hopelessly male-looking guys in dresses stomp their feet and threaten to rape and murder everyone in the United Kingdom if the conference isn’t cancelled, backed down like frightened little girls. At least until FiLia lawyers cited a recent favorable decision for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association against a different Scottish venue who canceled the Billyboys. The result? The conference went on as planned and J.K. Rowling showed up to look bored while she listened to the usual rape, bodily harm and death threats we’ve come to associate with ‘the most marginalized people ever’ and later spoke at the conference. Washington University makes it hard for aspiring boy/girl wannabes because, I dunno, the threat of detransitioning lawsuits on the horizon? Scientifically deficient ‘gender-affirming care’ is in the cross-hairs of Republican politicians and circling lawyers in what is shaping up to be one mother of a medical scandal in North America. St. Louis’s Washington University gender clinic announced in September it’s discontinuing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for everyone, not because they realized they don’t have enough data to determine whether these treatments are safe on otherwise healthy children, but because of the ‘unacceptable’ threat of legal liability. Here’s where the rubber hits the road for ‘gender-affirming care’ doctors and hospitals: Missouri’s new emergency rule makes it harder for medical professionals to prescribe life-altering treatments willy-nilly for both minors and adults, and returns the transitioning process to the much lengthier and considered path that worked beautifully for decades before 2015. Otherwise, script-happy docs could find themselves on the business end of the existing Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, designed to prevent and prosecute fraudulent business practices. It’s about damn time. And a little Republican Attorney General shall lead them. Ibram X. Kendi goes down when he can’t explain where the money went Hey Dr. Kendi, have you erased racism yet? No? Well how about $43 million? The author of How To Be An Antiracist, Stamped From The Beginning and Antiracist Baby, who could find white supremacy in a basket of kittens, can’t ‘splain what happened to all the money lobbed at him by corporates with catapults to fight racism. Junior members of the Kit Klaws Klan. Image from Public Domain Pictures Boston University is investigating Kendi’s Center for Anti-Racism Research which just laid off over half their staff, and it’s not like no one ever saw this coming. Many at BU raised concerns whether the extent of Kendi’s anti-racism research was producing anything other than fuck-all. Instead, he delivered, while on an ‘extended leave of absence,’ and all of which earned him money, a graphic novel detailing racist ideas, a podcast called Be Antiracist and an embarrassing five-episode TV show for ESPN that went viral when black Olympian athlete Gwendolyn Berry, interviewed by Kendi, remarked that “Athletes are literally the new slaves,” and compared sports contracts to ‘the new slave chains’. Fortunately for her, this iteration of slavery is more voluntary than the last, so she is free to throw off her chains, give the finger to The Man and get an honest job at Wal-Mart. None of the above was in the Center’s stated objectives. Kendi finally found his way back to the Center without explaining where he left to or leaving anyone in charge since it seems he’s allergic to delegating authority. It’s important to note he isn’t accused of stealing the money; just squandering the fuck out of it. What makes this story particularly galling is finding out podcast host and writer Coleman Hughes, famously common sense-y about fighting racism, was invited by TEDx to give a talk on the need for more conscious color-blindness , and which looked suspiciously downranked by TEDx when a small group of woke staffers allergic to ideas that require them to entertain an alternative view, complained it was ‘racist’ and ‘dangerous’. TEDx: “Ideas Worth Downranking’. Meanwhile, throw more money at the guy who claims you’re a racist if you say you’re not racist. Just don’t ask where it goes. Black Lives Matter Chicago told by X to STFU for demonstrating Israeli lives don’t matter After the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, the civil rights group formed to protest the killings of a few dozen black men a year tweeted an image of a hang glider as their knee-jerk response to omni-victimized dark people slaughtering 1,300 whiter-skinned people primarily belonging to a religion long unpopular with many Americans, including black Americans. When the shit hit the terrorist fanboys, they quickly walked it back: What a wussy ‘We’re not, strictly speaking, sorry for that image,’ response, and while they could be talking about the grieving mothers and rescued babies from one side or the other, I’m going to take a Scientific Wild-Ass Guess and suggest they’re still really only thinking of the side that cheered and danced for Hamas until the IDF and Israeli civilian settler thugs reminded them of Part II of violent terrorist attacks. I wonder how tolerant Black Lives Matter Chicago would be if the #BlueLivesMatter set tweeted an image of a knee and ‘BACK THE BLUE’. That is all that is it! You guys should go grab a coffee together American hard-right conservatives severed their last tenuous ties to common sense and reality when they voted for, and continue to support, Donald Trump. His bottom-feeding fan base still support him, and threaten violence against anyone daring to hold him accountable for anything. They’ve even invented a new, more humane form of torture: The non-violent molesting ‘like you’ve never imagined’: “We are now antifa….We’re gonna, we’re not like the left, we’re not violent [!!!] but we’re gonna follow your ass…you’re gonna be fucking molested like you’ve never imagined. And again, non-violently.” The American left could always crow: “We don’t believe sex is real, we do believe economy-sized white supremacy can be purchased at the Bulk Barn for all your systemic oppression baking needs, and we expend way too much energy on pronouns, but at least we’re not violent.” Excusing violence in others is one step closer to embracing it one’s self, and with the wokies’ new-found terrorist love in the guise of ‘supporting the Palestinians’, they’ve now sunk to the same moral level as their Confed’rut-lovin’ adversaries. Je ne suis pas Hamas. If there’s nothing else that screams the left has hit peak woke, it’s hating Jews as much as the right hates Muslims. It’s no longer hard to imagine left-wing ‘woke’ extremists could, in fact, instigate Nazi-era pogroms, eagerly joined by members of a particular religion famous for its historical hatred of Judaism long pre-dating the creation of Israel. There’s so much that’s gone wrong with the left; one must wonder where it all went, if you’ll pardon the expression, tits-up. Perhaps it disintegrated along with the poor mental health of young women and girls hailing from progressive-thinking families whose parents couldn’t say no , or the unemployed kids on social media devising endless, evermore divisive labels to suit every quirk, mood or ugly thought that flittered through their fevered over-educated brains. Other suspects include universities who sought to retain spoiled children who’d never been challenged by critical thought before and weren’t about to start now, who therefore decided they were customers rather than students, and the customer is always right. Let’s not forget those who treat ‘intersectionality’ as a bottomless grievance well, and who feign endless victimhood while bullying others into submission; while others squat under the bodhi tree aspiring to ‘marginalization’ rather than spiritual enlightenment. The anti-Buddhas. I know the Israelis aren’t pure-hearted themselves. They’ve inflicted many heinous crimes against the Palestinians for generations. They HAVE stolen their land. They HAVEN’T made as good-faith efforts as they could to bring lasting peace. They HAVE inflicted many atrocities and human rights abuses against them. I don’t believe they’re willing to make the sacrifices to accomplish that, nor will the Palestinians. It’s all for nothing for both of them. The Palestinians hail from a violent culture and religion. To pull an anti-Trump, “There are bad people on both sides.” But when you jump on the social media terrorist train to blame families for their own slaughter and proclaim your allegiance to a filthy, specifically genocidal terrorist group and cheer their heinous brutalities against civilians, however you feel about their righteous cause, you have jumped the shark. You have met the enemy and he is you. Shake hands with your compatriots in MAGAland and Canada’s emerging right-wing extremists, the Freedom Convoy. Maybe you guys should all go grab a coffee. Yeah, there are some real Nazis in those groups. Look in the mirror, ‘progressives’; you’ll find plenty there, too. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing!

It's about gratitude and giving thanks, not beating yourself up over the what-they-did-to-the-Natives narrative. Especially since they were pretty awful, too. Especially to each other. Two turkeys conspire to murder Farmer Brown before Mrs. Brown gets home from the Piggly Wiggly with the cranberry sauce. The one on the ground was a mole for The Big Guy. So they iced him. Photo by Public Domain Pictures on Pixabay Only the Regressive Left could take issue with a holiday promoting arguably the most sublime, uplifting, most selfless of human virtues - gratitude. Regressive Lefties frown on Thanksgiving; they live in a world much darker than ours; their sworn enemies are humor and fun. You can’t even enjoy your dinner because they find fault with everything on the table. They’ll claim white supremacy is as baked into the social structure as the pumpkin in your Thanksgiving dessert (Heads up: pumpkin spice is an emblem of white privilege). And of course there’s their obsession with Native conquest. We all know the first Thanksgiving story is a highly sanitized version of a much darker history that ended very poorly for the existing inhabitants. Howevermuch the original dinner party guests may have gotten along with each other with a few ground rules (‘Thou shalt not bring up the heretical new version of Our Lord’s Bible the King is working on back in England or there shalt be another Hundred Years War. Nor shalt the young men try and slip the roasted eel down thy sister’s dress”), felicitous feelings deteriorated soon after and hundreds of years of genocide and mass buffalo destruction ensued. I think we can all agree that was an especially embarrassing development in European history, coming as we were off of our very most vicious phase, the late medieval period. Not exactly our finest moment. Mild, hygienic, highly sanitized museum re-creation of one of medieval Europe’s most popular torture devices, the iron maiden. European Christians raised the practice of torture to a literal high art form in the 15th century, in which the very best torturers understood human anatomy and the applications of agony to a degree we can’t comprehend today. Although to be honest the western North American Comanches could have given the Inquisition a real run for its money. CC BY 2.0 DEED Photo by Cliff on Flickr But still: Thanksgiving is needed more than ever at a time when gratitude is one of the few demonstrated, scientifically-backed responses to hardship, depression, stress, and difficult times that actually makes us feel better. Instead of cavilling about how the Indigenous were treated by the new settlers, we can be grateful for what we have today, and work to be better humans than we’ve been. Even if we failed the original Thanksgiving mission about as badly as can be imagined. So, too, can the descendants of yesterday’s Natives self-reflect. Because their ancestors weren’t exactly peaceful little angels themselves. It’s not 1621 anymore…thank God(s)! We’re not slaughtering Natives for fun and profit like our ancestors. In Canada, we move slowly toward reconciliation with the First Nations, Metis and Inuit. In the U.S., whole chunks of land in many states are set aside for Indian reservations and the Natives are left alone (finally!) to govern themselves. ‘Progressives’ should acknowledge the injustices of the past and work together to help those descended from the original victims without turning a holiday that takes the focus off our own narcissistic selves for just one friggin’ evening a year, fer Goddess’s sake, and turn into a political nightmare. Enough already with the hoary moral flagellation. At a time when others may have a helluva lot less to be thankful for than years past, we need to recognize our blessings, however great or small. This includes the Indigenous, too. Let’s move beyond the absurdity of the sinlessly-conceived holiday and recognize pretty much anything humans ever endeavored was almost always accomplished with mindless violence and slaughter. C’mon, Abel couldn’t even sacrifice his sheep without getting murdered. By his own brother. It wasn’t exactly Apocalypto before Columbus, but neither was it Pocahontas. There aren’t many books detailing how vicious pre-Columbian humanity was, but a classic in the field is Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, and a more comprehensive global history of human suckage is Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The first details not exactly the finest moments of Indigenous people, everywhere, when they had only each other to slaughter, mutilate, rape, torture, enslave and, occasionally, cannibalize, and the second details how pre-state societies were overall far more violent than we are today . How pre-Columbian Mexico was a dangerous place with a 5% murder rate, but only about a third to a fifth as violent as many of its neighbors. If a mad time machine inventor wanted to drop you in either a hunter-gatherer society or an ancient civilized one, pick the latter. Even it it’s bloody ratbastards like the Romans, your risk of dying a violent death is only 2.7 percent, but 13.4 percent in the woods or on the plains with the locals. Those archaeological figures are based on 900 Native skeletons from the top of Canada to South America, all pre-Columbian. This isn’t ‘whataboutism’, this is historical honesty. This is about recognizing that what happened four hundred years ago happened everywhere, in one capacity or another, for nearly half a million years at least. The world’s oldest murder victim would be 430,000 years old today if some asshole hadn’t whacked him upside the head with a blunt weapon. Native societies today have a much lower violent trauma and murder rate than they did before the arrival of You-Know-Who. I’m not justifying, excusing, or nullifying any horrors visited upon the Indigenous by Europeans. We stand accused: We sucked. But so did Indigenous people, and today everyone’s got something to be thankful for, this year, right now, no matter who they are. Natives can be grateful we’re not still trying to kill them all off (or ‘kill the Indian’ anymore in residential schools), but just as much, they can be grateful they no longer have to fear each other : The hideous cruelties inflicted by the most warlike Native tribes around them including the Apaches, the Seminoles, the Iroquois, the Comanches, the Plains Indians and others. Just to put things in perspective, according to Keeley’s book, raiding other settlements has been one of history’s most time-dishonored methods for effectively reducing the land population of one’s Indigenous resource competitors. Whether it was the Bering Straits Eskimos attacking villages at dawn while everyone was asleep, or British Columbia’s Chilcotins killing everyone in the village for their food, or the relentless murderous hate-on Quebec’s Cree had for the Inuit, life was as brutal and tenuous for Native tribes living near other Native tribes as it was for the palefaces who arrived centuries later. This is all going to go pear-shaped the moment someone asks the Chief where their church is. Public domain photo on publicdomainclip-art.blogspot.com Prehistoric burials in central Washington state reveal projectile points embedded in skeletons, believed to have been implanted there by foreigners for 1,500 years. And if you think South Side Chicago is a dangerous ‘hood, what’s now central Illinois contained ancient human remains of which 16% were clear victims of violent deaths. Keeley notes the pre-Columbian murder rate there was 1,400 times higher than that of modern Britain and about 70 times that of the United States in 1980. And massacres? Well there’s South Dakota’s not-so-famous Crow Creek debacle, a mass grave of 500 men, women and children, mutilated, scalped, murdered, and left to be eaten by scavengers before their enemies finally piled them all into a hole and buried them. This is like 150 years before the Italian’s galleons. Northern Canada’s Dogribs, who were pretty damn fed up with the Yellowknife band’s chronic raiding shit, wiped out a Yellowknife camp with the intent to get every last one of those murderous bastards. They missed a few, but the Yellowknifes never recovered and the few survivors were absorbed by other bands. The Kutchin, elsewhere, intentionally left one Mackenzie Eskimo alive during their genocidal spree, so he could warn any other humans he met not to fuck with the Kutchin. Every evil that Europeans have visited upon each other, the Indigenous everywhere have done likewise. That goes for the Asians, the South Americans, the Africans (those inveterate slave traders!), the Pacific Islanders, the Papua New Guineans, and just about everyone else. There were a very, very small handful of tribal humans in a few parts of the world who weren’t plotting raids and genocide every spare minute, but only because they were so isolated they didn’t have any neighbors. We don’t suck as much, but we do steal cars Today’s Natives can be quite thankful they will never witness the Comanches roasting their loved ones alive, or be raped, enslaved, or their hearts gouged out by the Aztecs, or be displaced by the Chippewa as happened to the Sioux in a pre-Columbian Trail of Tears tale. Nor will any Natives today suffer death by torture over several days as practiced by the Iroquois over any warriors unlucky enough to a) Lose a battle to the Iroquois and b) Survive long enough to be captured. Don’t let progressives tell you this shit didn’t happen until the white man showed up, and they learned it all from us; they did not. They invented this shit all on their own, without any training from Europeans. Or space aliens. If North American virtue-signalling land acknowledgements demanded as much honesty from the Indigenous as they require of white people they’d read something like this: Today’s Europeans and their descendants can remember that we don’t suck nearly as badly as we did just a few hundred years ago when we believed the only good Indian was a dead Indian. We can remind ourselves that even though Natives did a lot of the shit we did back in the day, it in no way excuses what we visited upon the New World, especially as we were supposed to be all enlightened and shit with Christianity. Given how brutal the fifteenth century was back home, spearheaded and administered by so-called men of God, seventeenth-century Europeans had no goddamn business judging the Indians. But humans really are alike. We will always steal each other’s stuff. Which is why you get to drive your new car off the dealer’s parking lot into your driveway, where it stays for maybe fifteen minutes until it gets jacked. I’m thankful this year I don’t own a car. Perhaps, as we sit down with our loved ones tomorrow, even the ones we can’t stand, maybe, after saying grace, we should present the family with a list of words and phrases thou shalt not use or utter so as not to ignite yet another Hundred Years War over the sweet potatoes. Israel Hamas Dobbs decision Trump Biden AOC Mark Johnson AR-15s Ukraine carbon tax election feminism Jesus transgender woke MAGA Elon Musk indictments AI Khardashian they/them Image by Monika from Pixabay Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing!

Twice. You owe me big-time for this, dude. "Can I have a growl with my agent, please? WTF did she get me into?" If George Lucas had had his way, the whole damn show would have been about Wookiees and nothing but. Public domain image from Rawpexels The gawdawful, highly execrable, seriously damaged, WTF-were-they-thinking 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special is a TV extravaganza best watched with friends who are as seriously damaged as yourself. Preferably with lots of beer, which is what Darryl and Dev and I did. Problem is, I drank too much and couldn’t remember most of it. The next year, Darryl found the Riff Trax version. We invited Dev, but he declined to join us. So it was just me and Darryl facing a horror worse than hostage-holding by a morbidly obese slug-blob thingy that eats live frogs, while wearing a copper bikini and becoming wank material for two generations of sticky-fingered adolescents who probably won’t lose their virginity until well into their thirties. Well, we had the lifesaving beer, at least. No magic brownies. But I tell you, O my brothers and sisters and non-binary fellow Star Wars fans, if you watch this in an altered state of mind, it’s best left to the psychedelics set. Seriously, this thing is beyond marijuana. It demands magic mushrooms or hardcore acid. The SWHS combines the very worst of glitzy, low-budget 1970's-era variety show special effects with a trippy appearance by Jefferson Starship, sans Grace Slick. She’d left the band a few months earlier, while it was still Jefferson Airplane, after an embarrassing drunken rant at a concert in Germany. Thus she was spared embarrassing herself further. Diahann Carroll appeared as Wookiee wank material in a pseudo-porn viewing experience, because I guess Itchy, Chewbacca’s grandfather, was into cross-primate porn. Watch THIS in an unaltered state and you may be damaged for life. You’ve been warned. I’d include stills from the SWHS if I could find any that are free, but I can’t, and if I do anyway, Darryl, an aspiring movie producer who knows more about loopholes than I, says Lucasfilm will sue the snot out of me. Look, I put my mental health at serious risk for you. I’m not going into bankruptcy for you, dude. So instead here’s a perfectly legal still of Darryl and I before detonating a disco-era nuclear bomb of a bad trip in our brains. What I can offer you is... Answers to the SWHS burning questions you don’t have “How would you like to go through life with your name synonymous with sewage? ”―Art Carney WTF? Like, seriously, where’s the actual Star Wars? The biggest WTF is why the characters from the actual movie get very little screen time as the story revolves around Chewbacca’s family in their big-ass treehouse preparing for Life Day, which is like the Wookiee Thanksgiving or something. (This show in its one broadcast moment of vainglory aired mid-November.) George Lucas would have you believe he had little to do with the making of this Wookiee Dookie, and he’s sort of right, although he found Wookiees far more compelling than most. Wikipedia notes he wanted a “film just about Wookiees, nothing else.” The SWHS was cadged together by about a bazillion people and he received the dailies for approval. He wasn’t happy with this magnum oh-please but he’s implicated as an accessory. If you’re old enough, you might remember a Sunday-only Star Wars newspaper comic that began with a storyline about Wookiees and Life Day. It sucked. WTF, Harrison Ford? He looks pretty embarrassed the entire time and you can almost see the ‘This is going to ruin my career and I’ll be on Hollywood Squares [Millennials: The era’s equivalent of Dancing With The Stars ] for the rest of my life’ thought running behind his pained expression. WTF Did they do to Mark Hamill? He looks like Rocky’s younger brother. Horror, not Balboa. Hamill sports surfer dude hair and someone had to hide his plastic surgery work after a recent auto accident. Why this necessitated mascara or eye liner or some damn thing is between Frankie’s new squeeze and the makeup artiste he clearly pissed off. WTF was Carrie Fisher on? She looks like high in every scene. I can’t confirm she was doing drugs while making SWHS (I would have stipulated it in the contract if I’d read the script first) but it’s likely, since she had a notorious drug problem. Suspects: Cocaine, marijuana, LSD, HDACi . WTF? Is Harvey Korman in BLACKFACE??? Harvey Korman, then from The Carol Burnett Show , played several roles including a multi-armed TV chef. Is it just me, or does he look like he’s in blackface? This was one of my biggest WTF moments. You decide! How’d they get an Oscar winner to agree to this? Did he get into Fisher’s stash? Academy Award-winner Art Carney may have lost a bet or did this at gunpoint. His unbuttoned shirt is straight-up 1970s Larry the Lounge Lizard. He plays an electronics salesman who hooks up Itchy, Chewbacca’s pervy grandfather, with a hair dryer-like thingy so he can watch Diahann Carroll do a dance as forbidden as was permitted on TV in Carter country. It went on for longer than the Clone Wars unless you had a major jones for Carroll or had downed some good shit for the integrated kaleidoscopic special effects. Darryl and I debated whether she was wearing body glitter or sweating like a stevedore. Diahann Carroll: She’s got what your hairy old granddaddy wants! “Ohhhh yesss…I can feel my creation! I’m getting *your* message, are you getting mine?…Oh! Oh! We are excited, aren’t we…Now…we can have a good time, can’t we?” It's actually remarkable how porno this was for 1978 broadcast TV. Are Wookiee families otherwise all this barf-cutesy? Then there’s Chewbacca’s annoying, cloying family. As you well know, Wookiees convey ridiculously complex communications with grunts and growls. Much of this stupid story revolves around Lumpy, the irritating kid with Darth Vader’s stooges’ and stormtroopers’ home invasion, looking for the Walking Carpet who’s stuck in galactic traffic somewhere with the scruffy-looking nerf herder. Maude? Seriously, Maude was in this? Oh, and let’s not forget Bea Arthur, a singing bartender getting macked on by Harvey Korman, who ditched racist Julia Child and is now a lovestruck sleazebag who pours alcohol into a hole in his head. How were the Nielsen ratings? If you’re old enough to have looked forward to, then felt righteously skunked by this disappointment lo these many years ago, you probably bagged out long before the end. My brother and I, rabid fans, were so bored with Wookiee-speak and Lumpy’s holographic toy acrobats that we, like millions of others, switched the channel. Nielsen ratings showed a big chunk of the audience departed for The Love Boat at the start of the second hour, right after the inexplicable WTF-is-this-doing-in-the-middle-of-this-Wookie-soap-opera cartoon that introduced Boba Fett — Vader lackey and Han Solo stalker. It’s considered a fan classic, for reasons Darryl and I don’t understand as its only saving grace was no damn Wookiee family. Because everyone furred off so early, almost no one saw the culty grand finale, where the Wookiees in creepy Buffy-style let’s-sacrifice-the-naked-virgin red robes walked into a bright strobe light, without having to die first. Twenty minutes before the end I got up to go to the bathroom and Darryl said, “Hey, you want me to pause it for you?” and I was like, “No, no, don’t pause it! I’ll be right back!” While I no longer have to worry about being an acceptable sacrifice those red robes looked kind of Inquisitorial and us Pagans are allergic to burning stakes. So when this thing was finally over, about eighty years later… Wait! I’ve got one more question! Okay, go ahead. Why did Princess Leia sing a saccharine Life Day song at the end? Maybe she did it to show up Bea Arthur's performance. Carrie Fisher insisted on singing, although she didn’t like the song they gave her. So be careful what you ask for, the network gods may grant your request. Because it sucked. Here’s a side fun fact about someone who wasn’t cool enough to be in the SWHS. David Acomba, the original director who had the good sense to dump this disaster and leave the mess for replacement Steve Binder to clean up, or not, wanted to feature a talented but relatively unknown comedian named Robin Williams. However, he wasn’t famous enough. I’m not sure whether the guest stars casting began before Williams’s breakthrough appearance as Mork from Ork in Happy Days , an episode which aired in January 1978. Sucker casting may have been completed, or Williams might not have been famous enough yet. Here’s a grand irony to that fateful decision The Mork Happy Days episode was born because Garry Marshall’s Star Wars-obsessed son kept bugging his father to do a space episode. The comedian signed to play Mork was so bloody awful, and the rehearsals so atrocious, that the entire cast grew depressed because they had to ‘put something in the can’ and it was too late to ditch it or fix it. Then, the comedian himself, understanding this was going to monumentally redefine the term ‘suckage’, dropped out two or three days before air time, leaving them Morkless In Burbank. Cast member Al Molinaro mentioned a talented kid in his improvisation class who might be able to sub, and Robin Williams so impressed them with his ability to riff on damn near anything and go off-script so hilariously that he got the role and the rest is history. That Happy Days episode, which occurred during the season where ‘jumping the shark’ became a cultural reference to something having hit its peak and sliding downhill, became an all-time classic Great Moment In TV history rather than, ironically, the Star Wars Holiday Special of TV sitcoms. Mork the Dork. (Wikimedia, public domain) The dropout comedian was John Byner, who Boomers and Gen-Xers mostly remember as the guy who put the ‘square’ in Hollywood Squares. Could Robin Williams have saved the SWHS from its Night That Will Live Forever In Infamy? We will never know. This is an old post from Medium I wrote in 2019 and republished here with only a few minor changes. If you liked this post you can always subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! I only write goofy stuff like this only once in a while but you can find my other humor pieces under the Silly Science, Humor category. Otherwise, I mostly write snarkily about the nation's culture wars.

Just like their adversaries on the right. Even I didn't think they'd embrace violent extremism this quickly. And it's gotten pretty racist. Let your anti-Semitic freak flag fly. CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED Creative Commons image of a protest at Trafalgar Square by Alisdare Hickson on Flickr I’ll admit, when I predicted earlier this year that the far left was showing early signs of a growing willingness to adopt violence as political expression, I didn’t expect it to take the penultimate, all-at-once giant step, like, before Thanksgiving. An armed lefty went gunning for Brett Kavanaugh last year but lost his will to kill him. While some point to this as evidence the left isn’t as violent, it might also offer evidence it’s becoming emboldened, taking a cue from the right and embracing gun violence as political expression. Our side just isn’t very good at it. Yet. - Me, It’s Getting Hard To Tell The Left From The Right Anymor e - March 2023 I thought it would be several baby steps toward standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their then-distant MAGA-capped competitors, the Jan. 6th insurrection gang, but no, it was only two—one very long stride and now, and we’re waiting with held breath, just another quick hop over the line. The left’s incomprehensible love affair with Hamas and their deeply flawed pawns, the Palestinians, expose further its facile Holy Dogma that the world is divided into two camps, oppressors and oppressed. Ye shall know them not by the color of their hats but by their biology: White skin (the bad guys) and dark skin (the good guys). Hamas’s little cheerleaders’ brains have been been baked with imbecilic critical race theory’s obsession with biologically-assigned power and hierarchized victimhood: The more weak-ass ‘marginalized’ groups you can self-claim, the more paradoxically powerful you are. This is why we’ve got fake racial white people - pseudo-African Americans and ‘pretendians’ like Joseph Boyden , Jordan Peterson , and Buffy Sainte-Marie , along with appropriated men and women. The horrific support by so-called ‘social justice’ warriors for the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7 has laid bare the truth about woke ideology: It’s no better than Trumpism. And they’re every bit as vicious and racist and lacking in compassion as MAGAs. Whether one’s sympathies lie more with Israelis or Palestinians, it should be an unequivocal no-brainer to condemn Hamas’s vicious attack on civilians, and to stay faaaaaar away from associating one’s self with this demonstrable vicious, soulless, fanatical and genocidal death cult. One with no compunction against using Gazans as human shields and locating their command center or a weapons cache under a hospital or a school because they score soooo many brownie points when Gazans die after the IDF bombs a hospital to eliminate the terrorists. (Did Israel bomb a Gazan hospital or did Hamas do it? Was it even in Gaza? Or in 2023? Liberal media, drink the Hamas Kool-Aid!) Mindless, witless ideologues lap it up from uncritical legacy and social media like grateful doggies, wagging their tails with gratitude. You’d think the ‘progressives’ who claims to favor racial equality, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and who are fond of comparing everyone who disagrees with them to ‘Nazis’, would find fault with a terrorist group whose original charter explicitly called for the extermination of Jews and whose 2017 update sanitizes the language by fuzzing the goal of ‘eliminating Israel’. Never mind that charter or not, Hamas leadership has many times since called for the killing of Jews. Just like, you know, the you-know-whos. That’s how you get a young man calling to brag to his father, “I killed ten Jews today!” Social justice warriors woke up to their inner Nazis. Pro-Palestinian protests around the United States have been peppered with violent calls to action. This has resulted in a steep rise in hate crimes against Jews and to a lesser extent, Muslims. And speaking of Jan. 6th, the Democratic National Headquarters had to be evacuated on Nov. 15 when a rally of pro-Palestinian protesters turned ‘chaotic’ and six police officers were treated for injuries - this from a crowd of about 150. Well, at least they didn’t try to hang the Vice President. The role of woke racism and ‘anticolonialism’ Protesters, especially on college campuses, are bleating on about ‘decolonizing’ the Gazans so they can ‘live free’ or some such bullshit. Blissfully un-self-aware how their support for burning people alive, #MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew , turning children into unrecognizable mounds of bleeding meat, terrorist-documented atrocities on video uploaded to Israeli families’ Facebook pages, applies a yardstick North American Indigenous might utilize against Canadians and Americans if they cadged terrorist tips from Hamas. Colonizers, settlers and other left-wing oppressors waving their Nazi freak flags to support eliminating an Indigenous population while supporting a death cult 10,000 times more toxic than the Trumpanzee gang is about as 180-degree, anti-liberal as they can get. The left’s New Nazis never tolerate Christofascism from America’s Bible-thumpers, but they’re all squooshy-wooshy for Islamofascism. The Oct. 7 attack was not, as the Loony Left would have you believe, because of ‘colonization’ and ‘oppression’ and checkpoints and yaddayaddayadda. This shit has happened before, before the existence of Israel, with many strong similarities to the Oct. 7 massacre, primarily the sheer brutality and desire to inflict as much human suffering as inhumanly possible on Jews: The 1929 Hebron Massacre . Including rapes, beheadings, torture, castrations, and burning people alive, no matter the age. When Palestinians hate you, they want you to die screaming in prolonged agony. How much can you hate another people so badly you would commit, or support the commission of, brand new Nazi-worthy atrocities like Oct. 7? I don’t know. Ask a college student. They understand this stuff better than people with morals. Jews, the left’s new white people, are in the left’s cross-hairs as these increasingly racist Hamas groupies and Palestinian apologists ramp up hatred that may soon expand to other white people. Woke racism plays a substantial role in uncritical support of the Islamic fanatics. The anti-Western ‘postcolonialism’ madness has inflamed many academic departments and germinated the culture wars of the last fifteen years, particularly with the help of race-baiters like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo: White supremacy is everywhere, only white people can be racist because they have all the power, anyone who says otherwise is a racist. For them, white people possess near-magical powers of domination while denying personal agency, resilience and strength for everyone else. Lord Voldeblanc vs Harry Pathetic. In fact, Kendi believes that in order to balance the books, POC should discriminate against white people. Kendi redefines ‘antiracism’ to be, paradoxically, racist. Since the dark side of antiracism has already established appropriated innocence by stating that ‘black people can’t be racist’, it clears that path for the real agenda: Anti-white racism. Directly in contradiction to how Martin Luther King Jr. fantasized in 1963 about his four little children etc. etc. For so-called ‘antiracists’ like Kendi, people who believe that shit are, in the parlance of King’s time, ‘chumps’. For today’s kaffiyeh-clad protesters on North America’s college campuses, painting Jews as ‘colonizers’ ignores their indigineity to the land and that many of the Palestinians’ ancestors, coming from the historically imperialist and oppressive Isl amic empire, settled and colonized the land themselves in the seventh century. Members o f both groups have existed there uninterrupted for thousands of years, regardless of how or when the newer residents got there. It ignores that non-Native Americans and Canadians, including nearly every single loudmouthed protester, regardless of color, is an eeevull colonize r who should be pushed out of North America, by their own standards, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Let’s repeat: Palestinians and Jews have been there in one capacity or another for 3,000 years; and they share DNA . Empty-headed college protesters, with near-zero understanding of history or other human societies, or Middle Eastern genetics, blanket-ascribe white skin color to Jews in general and darker skin color to Palestinians. Remember, oppressors are white and oh-pressed are not in Ignorantland. Let’s review more recent history, like why that part of the world is so jam-packed with Jews. Many of Israel’s inhabitants came from Europe in the last century, but the Middle East also pushed plenty of population there too. While Ashkenazi Jews fled post-war Europe, nearly a million Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews were pushed out of their birth countries by hostile Muslim governments in Africa and Asia. Today’s college kids know the least about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, with the sheer arrogance of youth (I remember it well), think they know everything about it. Their puerile critical colonialism theory ignores volumes of historical data on the oppression and imperialism of Indigenous cultures and societies who dominated whoever they could. Including and especially the 1,400-year-old Islamic Empire, founded by a military commander. For a non-magical explanation for why white Europeans emerged to dominate the world, consult the Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies to understand why some human societies ‘evolved’ farther than others; and why the latter didn’t develop technologies to our level or move past hunting/gathering or farming culture. The short answer is not all human societies grew up with the same resource advantages: Early regional ‘privilege’ was accorded to those living in Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent, from whence white people emerged, and the fewest to the Australian Aboriginals still living in the Stone Age when Europeans landed. There simply wasn’t much to work with on a largely desert continent. The greatest insight I received was the realization that humans from Mesopotamia to Australia were remarkably innovative no matter where they landed; they made the most of what they had and evolved and progressed as far as they could given the resources haphazard birth fate dealt them. White people came to dominate the world not because we were the smartest but because we began with the most animal and farming resources available to us; human civilization would likely have been little different had anyone else emerged, instead, from there. So not all Jews are white, some Palestinians are, and the Mizrahi Jews are darker overall. Yet WokeWorld identifies oppression not by the content of anyone’s character, actions or values, but by what they look like. And ignore the ones who don’t fit. Which is how they can condemn the Trumpers as ‘Nazis’ while jumping up and down with excitement for genocide. Just like so many Germans eighty years ago. Wokeism’s big lies and their hard-on for people who hate them Palestinians are some of the most homophobic people on the planet, and there is no sight more ludicrous in America today than the alphabet soup gang waving their multicolored signs and flags in support of people who think nothing of decapitating a gay man . Then there’s the classic Middle Eastern misogyny: Gazan women face not only the threat of violence from Israel but also from their own men : Patriarchal norms and intense misogyny define their lives. Wokies who bitterly criticize conservative Christianity clearly have no idea what conservative Islam looks like, especially fuelled by the mindless violence ideology of groups like Hamas, where the noblest act one can commit is dying in the cause of killing others, especially Jews. Six dozen virgins await one in the afterlife. It’s why the rest of us have woken up to wokeism’s Big Lies: That they’re liberal, progressive, or socially just. They’re self-boiled frogs; they slowly moved toward extremism and radicalized themselves, and they can’t even see it; they now believe their illiberal beliefs and values are progressive. They’re not; they’re regressive. And reactionary. They’re not antiracist; they’re racist. Not KKK, neo-Nazi, lynch all the blue-eyed white devils racist—yet. But they’re flirting with it. If those of us closer to the center, whether right-thinking righties or levelheaded lefties, challenge and stand up to these illiberals and their proto-left fascism, we can perhaps rein them in before they form their own Proud TransBoys. They’ve got the far-right’s blueprint for violence, including a few more recent lefty-ish mass shootings from the LGBTQ set . Sure, today most mass shootings are committed by right-wingers, but remember when they were exclusively white? That was awhile ago! Eventually, mass shooters and other domestic terrorists may not be exclusively ‘cis-het’, or right-wing. Hell, lefties just cos-played Jan. 6th at Democrat Central. Don’t be too surprised if future racist murders target Jews, and not by Team MAGA. I don’t worry about my white ass walking down the street; I live in Canada. But I wonder whether, for white Americans, the day will come that my Jewish friends in both countries now face: Fear of being identified as THAT ‘OTHER’ when you go to the grocery store and get chased out by a bunch of violent left-wing bigots. Today the Jews, tomorrow the you’s. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing!