He likes Trump and has a massive gun collection. But we're all more than our political beliefs. Including even WWII Nazis. And ex-boyfriends. “I’m now the highest level of NRA member you can possibly be,” George told me over sushi recently in Canton, Ohio. “I’m a Patron. That’s Charlton Heston-level.” As we exited the car going on a ‘hooch run’ afterward I said, “I’m okay with responsible people having guns. What I’m against is idiots with guns. My problem with the NRA is they’re in favor of idiots with guns.” George didn’t respond. I don’t know if he agreed or he just didn’t want to get into it but I suspect the former. He’s heard it before. We’ve been talking for awhile. We dated during my college freshman year. There was an early weird little love triangle between he and I and a friend who had a big thing for him; we vied for his attention and I won, but later, they married, as I knew they would after I broke up with him. I never reached out earlier because I thought I should leave them alone. Now I’m sorry I didn’t because a few years ago she passed away, so I wrote George a condolence letter and a few days later he called me. I wish I could have talked to Diane too before she died. George has changed since 1982. As have I. The partisan divide Some ‘liberals’ believe I should hate George, a Trump supporter, although he doesn’t bring him up a lot. He became a Ronald Reagan fan post-me. As dumbass college kids at a Kent State University satellite campus, we were all mostly liberal and beer-soaked. If he held conservative views back then, he kept them to himself. George has amassed a prodigious amount of guns and in fact, when Diane died, his family and friends worried he might shoot himself. George and I would never have cut it even if I’d been inclined to marriage at the tender age of 19. Diane was his unquestionable soulmate. His young commitment to marriage was perhaps an early sign of his incipient conservatism; I, on the other hand, was an emerging ‘80s hippie chick who romanticized the ‘60s, who preferred to play the field. When I finally was ready to settle down no one wanted either me or marriage anymore. I never saw that coming. Now, forty years later, Americans hate each other with not-so-Civil War loathing, and if you disagree with a friend on anything you’re supposed to disavow and spit on their memory, because differing opinions harbor pure evil. I’ve been working to embrace or at least accept people who don’t agree with me. Grow Some Labia has evolved from helping women avoid or reject domestic abuse and male control to exploring the culture wars and how to bring people together again. Which especially means learning how to come together on what they agree on and leaving the rest at home. Now I encourage my fellow libs to come together with right-wingers—and vice-versa—in service to our own mutually agreeable goals: To limit ‘trans rights’ in places where male bodies don’t belong and put an end to kiddie sex change operations. They’re modest demands, but transactivists aren’t famous for their common sense or compromise. The right isn’t famous for its commitment to science, but it’s on the correct side of it for a change. Instead of defining George as a ‘fascist’ (i.e., conservative), and myself as a liberal angel, I sought common ground. I have a history with George. He was a good guy when he was 19, and he still is, having loved his wife passionately and having raised three fine and all-married sons. The more I explore t’other side of the partisan divide, the more I see ways in which liberal thought and policy has tempered some of the less laudable conservative impulses and treatment of others. I see, too, how conservative thought needs to do the same for the excesses of liberalism, which has resulted in kaffiyeh-clad Nazis terrorizing Jews, and a lack of commitment to marriage and a two-parent family that looks a lot less avant-garde than it was when I was a hormonally-charged college student with a wandering eye. So hanging with my Republican, gun-loving ex-boyfriend for a few hours was an opportunity to spend time with someone I didn’t always agree with, but who wasn’t evil because, well, geez, I don’t date evil people! Mending fences: Start with a friend To work on de-partisanizing yourself (is that even a word?), it’s not advisable to visit a Trump rally or your city’s Pride parade. There’s testing the waters, and then there’s jumping into a political riptide. If George was a hardcore Trumper, full MAGA and screaming about immigrants as though any immigrant sounded the death knell for the white race, I couldn’t be friends with him. It’s near-impossible to be friends with anyone whose disagreements outnumber agreements, although I guess never say never. Maybe I’ll one day be so Buddhist that I can see the good in everyone no matter who they are. I strive for it. To remind myself that we’re all flawed, and we don’t always recognize that. I know I can be judgemental. The first step, as we all know, is acknowledging the problem, like they tell you in AA. Where I may go one day to find common ground is with my bitter, lifelong enemies the Christian fundamentalists. Even so, I’ve been friends with highly conservative Christians. Why? Because I knew them first as friends, and later as Christians. Decades ago I discovered people I ‘knew’ to be ‘horrible’—weren’t, when we met IRL. In the ‘90s I wrote for a small, free alternative newspaper in northwest Connecticut, as did many conservatives and born-again Christians. We regularly did battle in its pages. I ‘knew’ they were horrible, awful people I had to set straight. Then one Christmas, the paper organized a party and I met several of them. They weren’t as monstrous as I’d imagined. Not even Sam, the literalist, women-should-be-submissive-to-men Bible thumper and self-admitted virgin. He was always going on about his struggles not to masturbate and how women should be subservient to men because God sez so. It was harder to hate him when I spoke to a roly-poly forty-year-old dork whose hostility to female independence might not have been entirely Bible-based. He’s married today, with a stepchild, to a Christian, but who I suspect may not take his Biblical shit. Or maybe he’s mellowed. He wasn’t a horrible human being, just a flawed mortal like all of us, and nearly thirty years later likely a much different person than he was back in 1994. I wasn’t such a great human being back then either. As a self-impressed thirty-year-old I often surprised older people with my advanced wisdom about love and relationships but I was also antagonistic, judgemental and unnecessarily sarcastic to anyone who was ‘wrong’ about anything, meaning they disagreed with my superior and mostly-unshakeable point of view. I cringe to remember some of the things I wrote in the pages of that newspaper. When I came across my old articles a few years ago, I was horrified at how mean-spirited I was (this newspaper didn’t censor anything. ) As soon as I saw one headline, Bull Paddy Religion , (a response to Bible Thumper Guy), I threw it in the trash pile. It was my vilest article. I can’t remember what I wrote but I remember it was vicious. I’m still ashamed of it. My world isn’t as us-and-them as it was even five or six years ago. I don’t see all Trumpers as devils, after witnessing the death throes of progressive morality. Even the worst examples of humanity in the media probably aren’t horrible either. Because I know that even filthy Nazis have souls. Yes really. Years ago I read a book a Jewish friend lent me about letters sent back home from Nazi soldiers, leaders, and bureaucrats during the war. They spoke lovingly to children who would miss them at Christmas, or hoped they might yet make it. They expressed genuine love for their wives even as they were working for one of the most loathsome murder machines. But they genuinely loved their families. Yes, even Nazi murderers can feel love. A man who can feel love isn’t 100% monster. We don’t like to acknowledge that. Or that there’s a little bit of monster in all of us. Later, I read Hitler’s Willing Executioners to learn about the everyday Germans, like you and I, who partook in the Final Solution, because they’re closer to all of us than the masterminds or the ridiculously incompetent little narcissist who launched a world war. Some showed compassion to the people they murdered; one man shot Jews who fell into a pre-dug pit. A victim raised his arm and waved for attention; he then pointed to his chest. Someone took pity and finished him off rather than bury him alive. I wouldn’t want to break bread with either executioner but it’s a reminder of what the Dalai Lama teaches: Every single human being has a Buddha nature, a part of their soul that is inherently good. No one is impossible. No one. Remember Daryl Davis , the black man whose best friends are Klansmen. It includes even the filthiest serial killers. We imprison them because we can’t fix them. Maybe future generations will, and they’ll ruminate uncharitably on how we treated these people. Science may one day show how they couldn’t help being what they were and be as appalled at our lack of compassion the way people with mental health problems were treated in asylums of yore. George isn’t evil, and neither am I. German Nazis loved their families, as do the despicable Islamofascists agitating in cities everywhere. If one dares to look closely, one sees how toxic and damaging the left’s Critically Ridiculous Theory is and how academia is teaching and indoctrinating hatred, bigotry, and violent action to impressionable youth the way white nationalist families do. Can we completely blame the kids for what they’ve become? I’m sixty-one; they’re forty years younger and I was a freaking idiot too when I was their age, although I certainly never advocated genocide. Everyone has grains of decency in them. The ones we think are evil may simply not listen to us because they’re as rock-solid in their flawed beliefs as everyone else, or may suspect underneath that you have better arguments than they, and none of us likes to be proven wrong. Or maybe they know how logically fallacious and evidence-free your arguments are, and you don’t. So reach out to people you can’t stand, find your common ground. Become the solution, rather than the problem. And start with a friend. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

The right's 'Project 2025' is at least partly in response to the earlier social justice project of infusing every level of society with woke ideology. Where's Project 2012? The right’s so-called ‘Project 2025’ seems almost karmic, a right-wing wish list for remaking America the way God, White Supremacy and Da Patriarchy intended. Crafted very likely without input from Trump, but extremely likely with his knowledge, Project 2025 seeks to implement a real-world pseudo-Christian hellhole with the attendant contradictions we’ve come to expect with the Religious Wrong: Don’t abort unwanted babies, starve them to death after we cut money to the poor! They’re coming for your porn, too, with updated rationales other than, “God will make your weenie fall off because He doesn’t want you looking at naked ladies.” Their censorious methodology may sound frighteningly familiar to their sworn enemies, the woke: The New Right may define ‘pornography’ over-broadly just as the woke define their own social pet peeves to include whatever ‘offends’ their oh-so-fragile sensibilities. Project 2025 accuses pornography of propagating “transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” for example, and may view it necessary to imprison anyone who teaches about trans people. The porn prohibition, though, may be the document’s introduction writer’s personal opinion, rather than a real aim of the Project, which names porn only once, in the other 990-odd pages, in relation to child-specific pornography. What is not in Project 2025, despite some online claims includes: Banning birth control Banning abortions without exceptions Teaching Christian beliefs in the schools (Keep an eye on this one; they were trying to mandate this forty years ago, when I was fighting the Religious Wrong in the States, and they will want to replace ‘social justice’ and Critically Ridiculous Theory with something ) Ending no-fault divorce Banning Muslims from entering the country (although Trump himself has called for it) Abolishing the FDA and EPA (Trump supports both of these, and it’s been a Republican wank dream for decades, but it’s not in the Project) To be clear: What is and isn’t in Project 2025 may be confused and conflated with what Republicans have historically desired and activated for. Which is not to say that any of this can’t be added later. Or implemented apart from it. The Republic of Gideon it ain’t, but it’s a good start. Project….2010? 2012? 2014? The more I read up on Project 2025, the more I come to recognize similarities with the successful less-well-outlined takeover of American institutions by the correspondingly smug and holier-than-thou mirror competitor: Woke social justice. If there’s a doorstop of a manifesto for remaking America in the image of a humourless, racist, misogynist, homophobic, drag queen God, I don’t know where to find it. But it’s hard not to see the comparisons between what’s proposed in the event of a Republican victory in November, and what has already ‘successfully’ been implemented in America to remake society according to others’ vision which clearly doesn’t match up with what many Americans say they want. Those ‘many Americans’ are the ‘Exhausted Majority’ in the middle, between the MAGAts and the social just-us warriors. I’m going to name the woke warriors’ scheme Project 2012, because I’m not sure if 2010 or 2014 are too soon or too late. Many others and I have already covered the ‘evolution’ of modern wokeness over the decades, beginning with French post-modernists in the mid-twentieth century. Some if its earliest elements gestated in the civil rights movement, particularly the notion that black Americans were ‘helpless’ in the face of white supremacy that was disappearing as many Americans came to ‘wake up’ and reform the racist reality faced by so many fellow citizens. The pendulum, as my mother was fond of saying, always swings too far. Authoritarianism breeds counter-authoritarianism, and ‘political correctness’, the earliest manifestation of the Holy Bulls that have come to police our social media speech and political expression, emerged in the early Clinton administration after twelve years of Republican White House rule. The Christian Right, which grew greatly in power, fell into disrepute with the unfolding Catholic priest scandals, the equally-scandalous sex lives of television evangelists who mandated purity for their flocks, and the dawning realization that many of the so-called pious were ‘Christians In Name Only’. Meanwhile, on the left, no one noticed the earliest signs of Creeping Authoritarianism. Gender, race studies, and radical fat chicks I took a few ‘women’s studies’ classes in college in the early ‘80s. Humorless and self-serious in consonance with the times, we didn’t dissect patriarchy or misogyny. In one class we explored gender dynamics in our primate cousins based on Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s now-classic The Woman That Never Evolved. In another class, The Female Hero, we read eight books written by women about women, which is where I discovered Jane Eyre and Tess of the D’Urbervilles were awesome, and Tolstoy sucks. At least Anna Karenina did. Women’s Studies birthed the notion that ‘the personal is political’, questioning the primarily patriarchal male views and interpretations of the world and history, and even came for the scientists, revealing a distinctly male lens through which the boys had interpreted anthropological, archaeological, and biological learnings. Women’s Studies remade those same mistakes in women’s own image: Primarily, interpreting artifacts from pre-literate times through a gendered lens when no one truly knows why our cavecritter ancestors created what they did. Are all those chubby figurines truly goddess fetishes? How do they know spirals signified eyes? Its counterpart, Race and Ethnic Studies, developed along similar lines with an emphasis on social change, and a more in-depth exploration of what non-white women’s experiences and histories were apart from what was essentially a primarily white feminist movement. The earliest analyses of race studies questioned whether there truly were ‘races’ and the different experiences of different people, an early exploration of what is now called the ‘intersectionality’ of oppression and experience. What ultimately emerged, though, are movements aiming for social change and justice which identified early with victimization and victimhood and which hobbled themselves with self-defeating notions of powerlessness and non-resilience. Once the identity of ‘victim’ solidified, in the early 2000s the trans movement, quietly operating in the background post-Christine Jorgensen and Dr. Renee Richards, came out of their sisters’ clothes closets and began to agitate for a world in which they were accepted for who they were. I see now the early manifestations of ‘social justice’ in online engagements I experienced in the 1990s. When I first joined localized computer bulletin board systems and later, the Internet, I remember being dressed down by a ‘fat acceptance’ activist for insensitive remarks I made (and they were) about fat people. She was the editor of an activism magazine for fat people and she attempted to educate me. Which she did, both in ways she intended and also did not. She was the second person to dress me down for being a fat-insensitive idiot (and I was) so I paid more attention, and ever since, to my thoughtless words. She educated me about the many reasons people are fat, not all of them because they overeat and are lazy. She was right; there were many valid reasons why fat people couldn’t always control their weight; body type and genetics being just two. Later, I made friends with a large woman with the then-uncommonly-diagnosed condition Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, with which she gained weight or stayed stubbornly where she was no matter what she ate or how much she exercised. Once she was diagnosed and put on the proper medication, the fat melted off her like butter in a saucepan. But I experienced some cognitive dissonance with the fat acceptance lady. She made it sound like no one was ever responsible for their weight. A few years later, when I was on the then-infant public Internet, I delved into the movement when I encountered fat people who denied there were any health problems associated with obesity, which clearly was not backed by reams of medical and scientific research, and their arguments that the medical profession was just trying to make money off the obese didn’t ring true. It was an early lesson in the self-infantilization and excuses of the many ‘acceptance’ and ‘anti-’ movements to come. From theory to application The French philosophers who birthed post-modernist thought never advocated implementing their ideas in real life, but in the mid-1980s social justice activists adopted many of its lessons and moved it into an ‘applied post-modernism’, embroidering it into community and society. They began interpreting the world through power dynamics and various ever-narrowing identities. The early signs of a religious, Christian-familiar framework appeared long before we critics saw it coming; capital-T ‘Theory’ as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay called it in their book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Social justice disseminated The Truth, and thou shalt not question it, especially of ‘marginalized’ peoples’ ‘lived experience’, however whacky, questionable, and downright delusional they sounded. The Truth, like any other religion, turned its back on reason, rationalism, and evidence. Its framework was that of Western culture’s: Judaeo-Christian, although now we’re seeing an Islamic framework interwoven with the Gazan protests. The history of the long tortured evolution of woke ideology, stemming from traditional liberal thought (later abandoned) is lengthy, and the Pluckrose-Lindsay book provides the best history and analysis of it I’ve seen so far. What’s critically important is that while everyone was stressing over right-wing takeovers, the left was quietly changing society, weaving their vision into all American institutions to the point where you almost can’t escape it. What occurred in a nutshell was the rise in power of the Regressive Left, defined by British commentator Majiid Nawaz in 2012 to describe those lefties who aligned themselves with cultural relativism and repressive Islamic theocracies. The ‘woke’ turned hypocrisy, like their right-wing role models before them, into a cardinal virtue. The primary example today is the LGTBQ supporters for Palestine, people who famously toss gay and trans people off buildings (and the rest of the Middle East, apart from Israel, ain’t any more supportive). Others include feminists who damn Donald Trump for pussy-grabbing or predators like Harvey Weinstein, but turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the terrible conditions of their Muslim sisters subjected to heinous patriarchal violence every damn day. And, pretty arguably, if one is in favor of censorship by one’s own group, but not for your enemies, that’s about as hypocritical as it gets. The backlash is brewing. It’s a coin toss at the moment as to which presidential team will prevail. ‘Wokeness’ has been cited by many disaffected Democrats to explain why they won’t vote for Harris. It’s not the only reason, but it’s close to the top. The conundrum it poses for those in the middle is feeling like choosing between Stalin and Hitler. Not literally, as we don’t anticipate purges or gas chambers, but both sides of the extreme have historically demonstrated a willingness to implement both, so perhaps the fear is, “Not yet.” Project 2025 is frightening, but so too is the woke Project we’re already mired in. As a lifelong liberal I’ve always wanted to see society remade more in accordance with liberal values, which has been highly successful in many ways—it abolished slavery, got us out of a pointless war in the 1970s, and birthed civil rights, and gave women the vote. Just because it’s gone too far doesn’t mean it’s a wholesale failure. Conservatism isn’t all bad either, and will be critically important in rectifying some of the Regressive Left’s mistakes. Biden’s open-border policy has clearly been a failure, and the hippie free-love-for-all from the ‘60s looks far more tarnished today, with male-dominated ‘polycules’ reifying the male sexual playground, which has never worked well for women. And then there are ‘ divorce parties ’ thrown by women abandoning their husbands and families to show that women can be just as heartless, irresponsible, and self-obsessed as some men. The Republic of Gideon can come from either direction. The Exhausted Majority needs binocular bird vision to watch out for freedom predators. Because one has a proposed Project for download and the other has already established theirs. It’s possible the far left was the smarter of the two, because, in the immortal words of Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.” Implementing Project 2025 won’t be as easy as many imagine. But it may just need the time Project 2012 has had. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

It's no longer an oxymoron. Conservative humor speaks truth to 'woke' power, which is what those humophobic bitches fear (and need) the most! Just imagine if the opening ceremony for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics had featured a blackface ensemble re-enacting a slave auction or suggesting Native Americans had it coming. Paris would have been in flames. Radical Wokery, like radical Islam, has no sense of humor, and it’s not afraid to set fire to that which it doesn’t like. Not that the ‘Last Supper’ re-enactment was either funny or appropriate. The Olympics are meant to bring the world together, not tear it apart further with ugly identity politics. Maybe for the 2026 Winter Olympics they can let the Proud Boys re-enact the January 6th attack in drag or the 1968 Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention, re-imagined with the NRA there to greet the hippies. You gotta wonder what brainiacs on the committee authorized the opening ceremony global debacle. “Hey, mes amis, you know what we should do? Re-enact Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper with a bunch of drag queens, but we’ll pagan it up enough that we can pretend it was a re-enactment of a Dionysian orgy.” Except that Barbara Butch, the plus-sized lesbian in the center of the tableau (she’s a real lesbian, not a late-middle-aged sissy porn-inspired autogynephile), admitted on Instagram it was inspired by Da V, as did a statement from Paris 2024. It was an unforgivable exercise in bad taste and poor judgement, and gee, it didn’t exactly improve the image of drag queens, a formerly fairly obscure peninsula of entertainment most people had zero awareness of until it was dragged out of gay clubs by heterosexual woody wankers on TikTok. Great humor speaks truth to power What will defeat wokeness faster than putting to pasture hoary old Democratic politicians like anti-Semites Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman who are so 2023, will be holding it up for ridicule. There’s nothing the powerful fear more than finding themselves in the gun sights of comedians and critics locked and loaded for calling out social just-us hypocrisies, their pretensions and especially their arrogant but bogus claims of high-minded morality. Left-wing bigotry no longer looks much different from the right-wing brand, just essential disagreement over who to hate. Whether it’s fear and loathing of the so-called ‘oppressor’ groups or xenophobic forgetfulness that everyone’s ancestors came from somewhere else, and didn’t look a thing like the natives, it’s bigotry whichever way they skew. It doesn’t appear conditions for diminishing American freedoms are set to change in January as we will either preserve the wokeocracy tyranny currently in place, or exchange it for a return to Republican MAGA tyranny. Making fun of the powerful will still be difficult, regardless of our new overlords, because the right has begun to embrace ‘cancel culture’ more openly. Publicly stating that one wishes Thomas Crooks had killed Donald Trump can get you as fired as calling a transwoman a man. ‘Cancel culture’ has always existed on both sides since loooooong before the term was invented, but with right-wing populism on the rise around the world, including the United States, the Radical Right has nicked the ‘progressive’ playbook on how to destroy anyone who disagrees with them or ‘offends’ their own pearls-clutchers. The right-wing Libs of TikTok have activated to deplatform and fire those who state or make jokes about Trump’s near-brush with death. Cracking a joke won’t be any less dangerous under Trump Part Deux. Welcome to the world thou hast wrought, Wokies! But the good news is it’ll be less dangerous to poke the woke social just-us set. The tables are turning. Dave Chappelle, your country needs you! I’m a little reticent to call on Chappelle to be our New Savior for taking the piss out of the supercilious insufferables, not because of the kerfuffle over his alleged ‘anti-trans’ remarks a few years ago , but because he’s re-embraced ‘punching down’ by taking on the disabled. I’m not sure what to make of that yet; some of his material is funny, frankly, and he does joke that he’s taking them on because he loves ‘punching down’ (←making fun of his critics) and the disabled are less-organized than the trans set(←making fun of trans power). I’m not sure all disabled folks will hate him, either. Like everyone, some have a sense of humor about themselves and know that exclusion from joshing humor can be as hurtful as a building with no front door ramp. Others won’t like it. That’s the nature of humor. Someone, somewhere, or something is the joke. Don’t watch, listen to, or read it if you don’t like it, but don’t pretend you’re under violent attack because someone pointed out your ideological slip is showing. Chappelle is a damned funny guy, and his trans jokes in The Closer were spot-on, while liberals like Jon Stewart and others struggle to be funny in a tight-assed world where their every joke can be their last. Dave Chappelle is the man who can help us dissect woke values, beliefs and practices ripe for ripping. Stewart has become a hapless wokeweenie. Chappelle might be ready for it. He’s got fuck-you money, just like J.K. Rowling, whom the transactivist community created. Jerry Seinfeld is interviewed by The Free Press’s Bari Weiss on the humorlessness of the woke left Conservative comedy and critique is on the rise and—it’s getting really f’n funny. And on the nose. You don’t have to be conservative to see the humor and desperate need for piss-stealing from the illiberal woke left. Conservative humor is still struggling but it’s beginning to understand that for political humor to truly work, you have to understand the hypocrisy on your own side first. Where can humorists and comedians confront the less-marginalized-than-advertised and take back all our power from our wannabe cultural dick-tators on the far left? Let’s see, there’s Black Lives Matter, which purports to be ‘antiracist’ while lobbing ‘genocide’ accusations at Israel and supporting Hamas, an explicitly genocidal terrorist group. If BLM was any more racist they’d Jawohl. There’s the related resounding ignorance of All Things Middle Eastern among the campus protester set. Call me a cranky old grandma from the post-Sixties if you like, but at least the hippie protesters could mostly locate Vietnam on a map. How about taking on ‘feminists’ celebrating women’s accomplishments almost entirely with men in drag? How about a forthcoming American election fronted almost entirely by DEI picks - like one chosen because she’s female and, bonus, several different race thingies? And she picked a white man for her running mate, to assure the racists on both sides that she’ll have something to temper all that Black Lives Matter Radical Violent Energy white people often imagine is simmering just beneath the surface with black Americans? Not to mention Republican DEI fave J.D. Vance, because who else would Donald Trump pick except a white man? His little toadstool would fall off if he chose a woman. Or even a black guy. Not that there are many to choose from in the Republican party, or who would be willing to put up with him as their boss for four years. (To be fair, most white people don’t want to work for him either. He went through most of us trying to assemble a Cabinet after his first election win.) ‘Colonization’? Let’s talk about non-white colonization, and the black African love affair with slavery still going on! Slavery! Yeah, let’s speculate on how many woke ‘antiracist’ black people love porn and prostitutes, much of it supplied by human trafficking! ‘Colonization’ of Israel: How come campus protesters never talk about the Arab invasion of the land 1,300 years ago? And speaking of ‘decolonizing’, if that means pushing the traditional oppressors out of places they don’t belong, why can’t we ‘decolonize’ males—the Original ‘Oppressors’—out of women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, sports teams and prisons? And as for ‘privilege’, it’s time to highlight and rub in the wokies’ insipid faces that class is the ultimate privilege: It trumps race, sex, culture, religion, sexual preference, and all other so-called ‘marginalization’ pretensions. S/he who has the gold makes the rules. And let’s not forget the most ridiculous woke social just-us community of them all: The hate-all-TERFs trans community. ‘Nuff said. Conservative humor: It’s getting better ‘Offense’ complaints often really mean, “Someone just shish-kabob’ed my hypocrisy.” Was it really ‘punching down’ when Dave Chappelle skewered trans-identified men’s hyper-masculinity when he joked about a transwoman ‘slamming her dick on the table,’ at a board meeting? Is there any doubt this group is one of the most aggressively male—and violent —movements ever? How often do transactivists physically assault feminist protesters? Who has the real power when the transactivists - invariably male - invariably get away with it? Some formerly untouchable humor has already been touched. The comedy duo Key and Peele have made fun of—a slave auction. The Libs of TikTok does a great job of highlighting woke stupidity, although if Trump and his DEI pick get elected, we’re going to need a MAGAs of TikTok. Conservatives are getting better at humor, or maybe it’s just level-headed liberals who can see their side’s hypocrisies, but I suspect far-left extremism has helped conservatives finally see the light of what humor’s main function is: To take the piss out of the powerful, the high, the mighty, and the insufferably ill-humored. Kinda harder to see when historically your lot has been so high on the power apex that you thought the poor were ants. But now, the folks bleating the loudest about powerlessness are clearly the most powerful; their plaintive wails sounding remarkably like conservatives during the Reagan and First Bush Reigns of Error. Conservative ‘humor’ has suffered a well-deserved drubbing over the years for coming across as mean-spirited and ‘punching down’. One early attempt, the conservative comic strip Mallard Fillmore , about a duck who worked as a conservative political reporter, attempted to poke fun at liberals and came across badly because the left hadn’t yet gone completely off the deep end back then, and because so many conservative values themselves were genuinely mean-spirited. It’s hard to find the humor in their dislike of birth control education for children when their idea of birth control was ‘close your legs’ (but only for girls), not to mention their ongoing love affair with enforced childbirth. There certainly was hypocrisy on the left back then, but the right fished around and came up with little better than bait. As lefty comedy gets unfunnier and more boring for fear of being cancelled, right-wing comedy is finding its groove and is getting, well, sorry to break it to you, funnier! As Martha Stewart would say, it’s a good thing. We should welcome the larfs no matter who they come from—as long as they’re genuinely funny and make a real point. You may not agree with it, but if a joke really pisses you off—you probably deserved it. You’re the one they’re making fun of. For good reason. Time to time-out and spend some quality time on ‘self-reflection’. The reason there are so many ‘politically homeless’ voters who comprise the real wild cards for both parties in the forthcoming U.S. election is because we see the hypocrisy and bankrupt morality on both sides. We don’t know who to vote for because neither party convinces us they can do a better job than the other guys. They’re both proven hot messes: We’ve seen a working (ha!) Trump administration and now, with Joe Biden retired, younger, more intentional wokeocrats. But one thing’s clear: The way to take down the powerful far left is, having infected and infested the media, academia, political power, entertainment, sports, and many other arenas and institutions, is to make fun of it. Take the piss out of it. Anonymously, if necessary, and it will be (including protected free speech the Trumpies will surely go after since they don’t value First Amendment rights any more than the wokies). While liberals stress out over the far-right manifesto Project 2025, we all need to ask ourselves whether there’s an opposite version somewhere on the Internet we never found, but which has successfully made itself the new-ish law of the land. Something to think about. And another battle to fight, too. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Mindless, thoughtless breeding isn't the only way to 'have a stake' in America. And why don't Republicans also damn neglectful, MIA 'sperm donors'? If I was still on Usenet’s alt.support .childfree, they’d be losing their minds over J.D. Vance’s three-year-old Fox News interview in which he asked, “How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” He complained the United States was run by "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." I am childfree by choice, as we preferred in alt.support .childfree. I’ve owned two cats total, and not at the same time. I am not a Crazy Cat Lady. I’m a Crazy Cat Video Lady. I believe there is no such thing as too many cat videos. Sorry, J.D., I made my choice at eighteen and have never regretted it. It beats being a Pathetic Porno Pud-Pounder, which is what I might imagine some single men are like. Okay, he didn’t make the comment during his nomination acceptance speech. But still, he needed to defend it. So what did Vance do? He went into Woke Snowflake Mode. Waaah waaaah waaah , someone’s holding me accountable! The account-holder was Jennifer Aniston, who knows a thing or two about childlessness. She’s struggled and failed for many years to have a child she now wants after being damned in the media during her heyday because she wasn’t getting pregnant. She cared about her career more! they accused the virgin womb-monster. Which they never say about the millions of men who care about their careers more than they do making babies or, more damnably, the families they fertilized. What did she say to enrage J.D. Vance so? She made a respectful reference to his daughter, so it looked an awful lot like the common snowflakery that characterizes the right as much as the left. “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” she said on an Instagram post. “All I can say is… Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.” Touché. Republicans removed abortion rights and now they’re going after IVF treatments. In MAGAworld, women should be forced to have babies they don’t want, and not allowed to have babies they do. Every child an unwanted child. The Sperm Donors of MAGAworld If one applies Republican motherhood measures equally to fathers, Trump fanboy Elon Musk is one lousy, shitty father. He’s a sperm donor, nothing else. Why Do We Only Judge Successful Men On Their $$$? Musk suffers from the delusion that the world faces an underpopulation problem. He’s got ten surviving children from three baby mamas and he runs (poorly) three large companies. If ever there was a sperm donor who in no way can possibly be anything approximating a decent father, it’s Elon Musk. Republicans agonize over mothers who work rather than take care of their children from home, conveniently forgetting the complex world that now necessitates a two-paycheck household in order to barely make ends meet, and which they themselves helped forge after destroying unions , the primary reason so many Americans were middle-class mid-last-century. They never ponder the long-term absent father effects unless said father is black. All such ‘fathers’ are merely sperm donors. Hop on, hop off, handle it, babe. Musk plays with his bio-toys when it’s convenient. Comedian and television talk-show host Nick Cannon is even worse: He’s got twelve children by six baby mamas. It’s not enough to be rich enough to keep all one’s progeny in a reasonably accommodating style; parenthood, as preachy Republicans remind us when they’re talking about mothers, requires parental attention. They emphasize the importance of a father in the family and the need to bring respectability back to marriage; I agree. But that’s all they think a father needs to do; he can essentially be married to a single mother who raises the kids by herself, and who keenly feel their father’s seeming ‘rejection’ as much as any poor kid with a disappeared dad. They never, ever, obsess over single mothers as long as they’re married to a sperm donor with little time for the family who values his career over being an actual, present father. The only way to induce a sperm donor to do that, it seems, is for some crime or sexual imbroglio to shame him into stepping down from his exalted position to learn the names of his spermseeds. If the Republican obsession with the two-parent family is as all-fired important as they claim, why do they never question the effect of paternal truancy? Because, of course, it’s always been about returning to a patriarchal family structure in which the man makes all the decisions and women submissively comply. “Father deficit” as a public health issue Let’s talk about the countless ways absent fathers—married or unmarried—affect their co-creations. According to a Psychology Today article , the list of pathologies children of sperm donors suffer include (and I’m really editing down here), feelings of emotional abandonment; maintaining an intimidating bravado to cover feelings of insecurity; periodic self-loathing; dropping out of high school; poor academic performance; delinquency, youth and violent crime; jail time; promiscuity and pregnancy; girls may become susceptible to exploitation by men; feeling rejected by their fathers; drug and alcohol abuse; running away; physical problems; mental health disorders; homelessness; lousy job prospects; and early mortality, including childhood. PT calls this ‘father deficit’ a public health issue. The article speaks mostly of non-residential and non-custodial fathers, but as it turns out, the rich aren’t like you and me, they’re much more similar to the poor. According to a Guardian article by a man who’s interviewed many wealth managers of the insanely rich, they have much in common with the opposite end of the economic spectrum. They don’t work; they express insane beliefs; they’re drug addicts and philanderers with a particular yen for other men’s wives; and they’re really quite lazy: Trump’s day when he was President, for example, began at 11:00am. An LA Times op-ed notes that the U.S. is run by crappy fathers (pathetic porno pud-pounders?) who don’t see their children any more than Nick Cannon or a tenement tomcat. Absentee parenting, as it notes, is the price of success. We give the rich a free pass and damn the poor for the same sins: Absentee fatherism. We give sperm donors a free pass to neglect their families but not their egg producers. I’m not arguing for giving mothers a free pass; the PT article notes that American society isn’t set up to support parental fulfillment responsibilities, and notes that at least some of the inequity results from “non-custodial” or “non-residential” fathers forcibly removed from the homes (I’m assuming they’re not talking about violent, abusive fathers). The LA Times op-ed quotes a National Marriage Project spokesperson regarding the toxicity of extensive travel by Dad on children. “There’s no question that the research would indicate — including research on military families, military fathers in particular — that spending long periods away from your children is harmful.” The poor, meanwhile, don’t see their kids as much because they’re working multiple jobs attempting to make ends meet. Rich dads have much more time on their hands, yet often make little time to see their families either. Does anyone think the Trump kids (five children, three baby mamas) seem happy and well-adjusted? Maybe Tiffany, who stays with Baby Mama #2 behind the curtains. Trump is finally making time for youngest child Barron, who’s attained adulthood and who, it appears, is finally interesting. But let’s be honest: J.D. Vance’s new boss is mostly a sperm donor. To be fair to Vance, he noted in his acceptance speech, “My most important American dream was becoming a good husband and a good dad. I wanted to give my kids the things that I didn’t have when I was growing up.” I will pump my fist for him for that, and hope that means his personal time and not just a fat paycheck. I wish he’d acknowledge the problem in his own backyard; crappy fathers are not just the problems of his childhood poverty in Middletown, Ohio. Fathers are either critical to the family or they’re not; and if they’re not, leave working mothers alone, especially since most of them have to work whether they’ve got a residential partner or not. Especially those educated and privileged enough to pursue real careers outside of blue- or pink-collar professions. A mother, for the MAGA bunch, who works long hours at a law firm or hedge fund is far more condemnation-worthy than a high-producing sperm donor. How much time is Vance spending with his children now that he’s campaigning with Trump? I don’t know, or if he’ll have much time if he and the sperm donor win. Given his boss’s aversion to work, he may have more time on his hands than most Vice Presidents. Unless he has to step in if his doddering boss dies or is Amendment 25’ed. The spotlight is on Vance’s family now, and Aniston’s comment isn’t likely to be the worst thing said about his daughter as a running mate and perhaps a Vice President. I strongly encourage him to put her in touch with Amy Carter and Chelsea Clinton. Short shrift for responsible parenthood I never had children for the best of all possible reasons: I didn’t want any. I genuinely believe parenthood is THE most important job in the world. Parents are tasked with raising another human being. It doesn’t matter whether that baby human is a kid in a trailer park or or another one of Elon Musk’s hop-on-hop-offs: Every child should be wanted and valued. If you’re not up the to task, don’t do it! I would have made a lousy mother. I didn’t want to do it. Just as I gave up on radio and journalism work, which I’d thought I wanted to do but changed my mind after I worked for a few radio stations. It wasn’t what I expected. I wasn’t up to the task. Children are not like poorly-chosen careers. The problem is those baby humans depend on you. You are their mother or father. The child is half your genetics. I don’t believe you can abandon a child as easily or morally as a career choice. J.D. Vance, and so many other privileged Republicans, don’t get that. They pay only lip service to the importance of children and raising them properly. If they did give a crap, they’d work with the other side to forge a better society that supports both parents. They’d recognize that not all women want to stay at home full-time; some would like to work a little outside the home but not entirely; and some simply don’t want to do the Mama Thing. A career-driven woman with a ‘barren womb’ is as acceptable as a Master of the Universe with ‘wasted seed’. The drudgery of stay-at-home mothering and housewifery is what drove the Feminist Revolution in the first place: Betty Friedan was the first to name the unidentified malaise and depression driving so many so-called Happy Homemakers to the liquor bottle and prescription drugs. Some men have recognized that, like women, they ‘can’t have it all’; they can’t be a high-powered executive and a good father. They can, however, be a good breadwinner and a good father, as can be his wife. Many men discovered over the pandemic that they loved spending more time with their families; it’s why there’s been so much pushback for companies mandating you have to be in the office when you can do your job just as easily at home. There are more real fathers and fewer ‘sperm donors’ in the world than there were ten, twenty, or fifty years ago. There are far fewer ‘crazy cat ladies’ than J.D. Vance imagines. So many times over the decades I’ve said to myself, “This is why I’m glad I don’t have children.” Procreate only if you’re truly committed. But let’s hold all procreating humans responsible and accountable, and accept parenthood isn’t for everyone. Some are childless by choice while others, like Jennifer Aniston, are not. Let’s support the folks who want to be parents, and stop trying to force the rest of us square pegs into your round little holes. I hope J.D. Vance will walk the parenthood walk rather than just talk the talk, especially if he becomes our Vice President—and, it’s entirely possible, President before January 20, 2029. ‘Coz his codger boss ain’t gettin’ any younger. Or more mentally coherent. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

The disgraced CanLit author collaborated in her own daughter's hell. Because stand by your man and it's always the woman's fault, eh? Canada mourned when revered native daughter Alice Munro died in May. The renowned short story author famously never wrote a novel. Although I never became a Munro fan myself, I will likely look for her short stories as I’m curious as to what I missed when I was young, dumb, and full of cheap beer. Yes, I’ll read her, even knowing she valued her pedo husband, Gerald Fremlin, over her own daughter when she learned what he’d done to her. Many artists are deeply flawed human beings who nevertheless produce great, moving work. I regard Michael Jackson as one of the greatest dancers and entertainers of all time. His dancing is second to none. Suck it, Astaire! Munro’s dirty little secret is tremendously disappointing: That she Stood By Her Man when she learned how her husband had molested her daughter (his stepdaughter). In the time-honored fashion of juvenile incest victims, Andrea now-Skinner didn’t break the silence until 1992, at age 25, when she finally told her mother. Munro didn’t leave Gerald Fremlin, her second husband, not even when he entered a guilty plea and avoided a trial at age 80 after Skinner filed charges. Munro left him, briefly, in what amounts to little better than an emotional tantrum at the initial revelation; it became all about herself and how humiliated she felt. Others learned of it but one one talked about it. The confederacy of silence extended to the Canadian media, which chose not to report the trial to protect the cherished literary icon. Munro knew Fremlin’s abuse wasn’t just a one-off; friends informed her that her darling hubby had exposed himself to their own teenage daughter. She asked him about it, and, as Meghan Daum notes on her Substack, he denied it, and when she asked if he’d ever done it to her daughter, he claimed ‘She’s not my type.’ Fremlin once drove Skinner to the airport after molesting her and tried to get her to expose herself to him; she refused. He tried to get her to tell him details about her ‘sex life’. She was nine years old. He lost interest when she turned into a woman in adolescence. When Skinner finally told the truth, he, in the time-honored manner of child molesters, blamed Skinner. She “invaded my bedroom for sexual pleasure,” he claimed. He compared her to Lolita and called her a ‘homewrecker’. Munro let it go. She learned of other allegations of exposure in ‘friendships’ with other children. But it was always all about herself rather than her daughter’s insane trauma and the filth she was married to. Munro felt betrayed by her daughter, and suspected her husband had made everyone keep the secret to ‘humiliate’ herself. Munro stood by her man in the time-honored manner of many mothers with pedophile husbands. Everyone protected her. The ‘love of her life’, himself emotionally distant to Munro, was of greatest importance. The public wasn’t told the truth until weeks after her death. “Let me tell you something about the rich. They are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked, and the same is as easily said about the famous, rich or not. When you’re widely loved and revered, your many allies will circle the wagons to protect you from your sins. Alice Munro didn’t know about the abuse as it was happening, but she knew she was sleeping with a practicing pedophile. It’s unlikely she did any more to try and protect others than she did her own daughter, who she must have known was at risk. Her post-crime sin is not uncommon for women of her generation. A man is more important than your daughter’s safety or right to a sane, happy life. Mamas can be such good little allies Andrea Skinner and I both came of age as children of the 1970s, teenagers and young adults of the 1980s. I learned an ugly fact at age fourteen: Incestuous relatives, especially fathers and stepfathers, were far more common than was commonly known. It might have been a small act of God that I should just happened to have read a Reader’s Digest article on incestuous parents during the summer of 1977, just before I entered high school. The article stated that step/father-daughter incest occurred more than people generally understood, and that the percentage of families with this problem was estimated to be as high as 25%. Twenty-five percent??? I talked to my mother about it. Shortly after, it came as less of a shock in my freshman year to find the article’s evidence: I knew girls who claimed they were being molested by their fathers. The late ‘70s marked the beginning of the end of the silence of the lambs. Other articles about the prevalence of incest began peppering the American media and later, in the early to mid'-80s, the Catholic pedophile priest dam broke and the deluge hasn’t stopped since. Incest was happening right where I went to school in my small midwestern town. It began with my friend Paulina who confessed to me in the smoking area that her father was coming to her bedroom at night. Then it was others. And more. I told my close friend Bobby about it. Bobby was the school Rona Barrett who knew everything about everybody. He added two more names to the list of girls I knew, or knew of, who were being molested—if not by a father figure than a brother or cousin or not-so-funny uncle. I learned how prevalent thoughts of suicide were in other teenage girls; my mother and I called the Suicide Hotline together to ask how we could support these girls better. They encouraged us to tell them to tell others. I did. I told Paulina to tell her mother. She did. Her mother called her a liar. Paulina’s family went to church, so I told her to tell her minister. He didn’t believe her either. The confederacy of silence and denial encircled Paulina at the same time as it enveloped Andrea Skinner across Lake Erie, on the other side of the border. I only visited Paulina’s house once, and barely glimpsed her father, who I avoided, but he saw me. He told Paulina—as she repeated with a grin the next day at school, having no clue how sick and screwed-up it was—that he’d said I was pretty cute. I wanted to vomit. She wasn’t the only one who wasn’t believed. I imagine the truth back then seemed too horrific, especially within one’s own family. Adults were still plausibly in denial about this formerly dirtiest little secret. My mother had told me briefly about incest during my pre-adolescent facts of life discussion. She told me—because neither she nor anyone else knew better—that incest was actually quite rare. It struck me as one of the most horrible things that can happen to a kid, the worst sort of betrayal. I couldn’t imagine my own father doing that to me. How could any other? I graduated high school and moved on to college. By then, the mainstream media had latched on to the not-so-rare horror. In fact, it became suspiciously too common; stories proliferated of women divorcing their husbands claiming he was sexually abusing the kids. I began to wonder whether all of them were telling the truth, knowing how contentious divorce is. Some divorced their husbands because of it, others seemed to drag it out as an allegation later as if to convince the court their soon-to-be-exes were monsters. The tales of terror continued from the Catholic Church. Pedophiles, it seemed, were everywhere. Right where you were. I was outraged to learn how many mothers learned about the abuse at the time and did nothing to stop it! They said nothing. They did nothing. Some took out their rage on their daughters, blaming them rather than their loathsome husbands. (It’s always the woman’s fault!) I was especially outraged to learn that some were even a little relieved, as their own burden of sexual duties decreased. How can a mother allow this to happen to her child? Isn’t rape supposed to be, like, a fate worse than death or something? How can mothers look the other way, and why do feminists who damn him, nevertheless defend the guilty collaborator wives with all the classic disingenuous feminist cheesy excuses? She was afraid of him, she was too financially dependent on him, she loves him, it’s hard to believe, she doesn’t want to believe. All understandable feelings. How do you reconcile the person you married with a monster? But this is female collusion. Damning the perps while giving their enablers a free pass ignores the other half of the problem: The women who nevertheless allow this to happen. Alice Munro didn’t know of the abuse at the time, but she should have had a damn good idea her daughter was in danger. Instead she chose to believe Fremlin when he claimed her daughter ‘wasn’t his type’. What more did she need, to find him in bed with her paralyzed daughter? He all but admitted Skinner, and countless other little girls, were in danger from the man whose bed she shared. How can a mother continue to allow it, after the shock is over and she’s had time to process the feelings? Not all wives are in danger for leaving a man. Although back then fewer women were able to carry on financially. So I’ll spot them that. But if she knew it’s going on, if it’s a center of panic in her solar plexus on the verge of eruption, how can she do nothing? How do you have sex with that person, knowing he’s pushed his penis into your daughter? Or your niece? Or the little neighbor girl? Women, even today, have always collaborated in other females’ private hell. One story may be just an allegation, but two or more are wake-up calls to investigate further. Children can lie just as adults can, and some do; but many, many kids are telling the truth and, like Paulina’s adult collaborators, some mothers choose not to believe. I know. Paulina wasn’t the only girl I called the Suicide Hotline about. Skinner’s biological father learned about the abuse from Skinner’s stepmother, whom she told. He ordered another daughter never to leave young Andrea alone with Fremlin when they visited. Skinner’s absent father did something, at least. In the end, the circled wagon owners were many: Skinner’s mother, her siblings, and her extended family. Surely others knew: The neighbors who kept their kids away from Fremlin, but who respected the Canadian Literary Icon too much, or were afraid of the blowback for ‘making a fuss’. At some point after learning the truth about her own daughter’s abuse, Munro fully understood what she was married to, what was sharing her bed. She never gave up on Fremlin, valued his presence more than she did her daughter’s well-being. The private scandal was always about Munro herself; she was annoyed that she couldn’t see her grandchildren across town. Her only ride was her husband, and Skinner had prohibited him from coming anywhere near her kids; not even to drop off their mother. There was no such thing as taxis back then, of course. It outrages me still, fifty years after Paulina, to find people who consider themselves good human beings circling the wagons to protect child molesters, whether there’s a celebrity in the family or not. It outrages me that the Canadian media didn’t report on Fremlin’s guilty plea (he avoided a trial) to the indecent assault charges that had begun in 1976, so that people could know while Munro was still alive that she was a protector of a child molester, that she valued the ‘love of her life’ over her own flesh and blood. Fremlin spent no time in jail because, probably, he was Munro’s husband. Munro died eulogized around the world by those who didn’t know she protected her pedophile. The feminist confederacy of silence and collaboration What message does it send about pedophilia when women collaborate so easily to protect the abuser rather than the victim? Especially their own flesh and blood? Did these women never imagine how it might have felt had their own father come to their beds late at night and threatened them not to tell? It may have been too painful to consider; but if something sparked the contemplation, then they should have stood up and said, “Not my daughter!” How traumatic must we believe pedophilia is, really, when so many women and feminists actively collude to protect both the abuser and the collaborators? Girls aren’t the only victims; plenty of boys are too, especially in the Catholic Church. If we’re going to damn the perpetrator, we must equally hold the feminine collaborators responsible too. Especially today. This is 2024, not 1976. I don’t know if Alice Munro was a ‘monster’, as Meghan Daum and others have alleged. If she was, there are a lot, and you know plenty of them. You just don’t know it. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Because when Queen Elizabeth I is mis-transed, today's intellectually non-conforming children can't be safe from stereotyping sex changes While it’s unacceptable ever to ‘misgender’ a deluded living person who thinks they’re the opposite sex (or no sex at all), it’s perfectly legitimate in the trans cult to misgender dead people. I was wildly offended when a then-Twitter trending discourse suggested Queen Elizabeth I, Louisa May Alcott and others were ‘trans’. Because, you know, it’s simply not possible for a chickie-boo like Lizzie to be a powerful, competent, confident leader whose first agenda item after ascending the throne was to pull England back from economic ruin. Not to mention bringing—who’da thunk this from a female leader???—a 44-year reign of peace to England and Ireland. She even got the damn Catholics and Protestants to stop killing each other, although it resumed after she died. (Blame a dude, James I, who then went on to revise the Bible.) She defeated the Spanish Armada— the Spanish Armada, fer crissakes!— and patronized world exploration and the arts. While it’s quite questionable she was a lasting ‘Virgin Queen’, she had love affairs with her courtiers, but her modern genderqueer detractors theorize Queen Elizabeth was trans, a ‘transman’, or at the very least ‘non-binary’. Because, come on, a girly can’t run a couple of countries all by her pretty little self, can she? It’s simply inconceivable for the gender-addled for a woman to be that accomplished. Only a man, or a woman ‘born in the wrong body’, infused with a man’s warrior spirit, could be as successful and historically iconic as Queen Elizabeth. Then there’s the curious case of Louisa May Alcott , a suspiciously lesbian and feminist American literature icon who has been ‘transed’ by the living because she often wished she’d been born a male and claimed she felt, “I am more than half-persuaded that I am, by some freak of nature, a man’s soul put into a woman’s body.” Alcott was an outlier for sure; she never married, had close friendships and possibly a relationship or two with men several years younger than herself, but unlike certain other female literary icons, left behind no passionate communications with other women. Her most famous literary character, Jo March, was a ‘tomboy’ in modern parlance; headstrong and assertive and would rather write than take care of children. Jo was based on Alcott herself, of course. Alcott deliberately annoyed her chick-lit fans by refusing to let Jo marry Laurie, the handsome young man in love with her. Instead Alcott married her off to an older, bearded, decidedly unsexy man called Professor Bhaer. It’s glaringly obvious that growing up in the highly strictured Victorian culture may have inclined women like Alcott to long to have been born male simply so they could be free to live the full, rich, and less restrained lives men did. After all, men weren’t excoriated for not getting married and making babies, if they chose to sail the seven seas or seek adventure in African jungles. If Alcott was in fact a lesbian—who “always had more sympathy for & interest in them [males] than in girls,” she may not have had the understanding or vocabulary to verbalize what she was truly feeling—“I’m a woman but I fancy women more than men.” Perhaps wanting to be a man was how it felt if you had no idea what a lesbian was. Or maybe she just wanted the freedom. I can understand the latter theory. This is one reason why I had such an aversion to dresses growing up. My parents loved dressing up their little living doll when I was a toddler and I have vague memories of enjoying it, especially for church with my bonnet and gloves—“Mommy, I can’t go to church without my glubs!’ When I entered grade school I was forever enjoined to not get dirty or mess up my dress, but no one worried about the boys’ clothes. The message was clear: Boys had more fun and freedom. Dressing like a girl was the exact opposite. Dresses were stupid. Trans-ing the stereotypes It’s well-established now that for all their pretensions to ‘queering the normies’, Trans World abhors real gender rebels, not the pretenders in service to the cult. They misgender the rebels who traditionally and historically defied gender stereotypes, the strong, capable women, the chicks with brains, and the men who dared to be soft and feminine, who didn’t care to build cathedrals or trouble themselves with athletics or military pursuits . The Facebook group Transing The Dead takes to task the Rainbow Gang revisionists who comb the annals of history seeking to bolster their bogus sex-changing narratives with ‘examples’ of mavericks, deviants, bohos, and dissenters who didn’t live the strictly gendered lives of their peers. I find it repulsive that people get fired for properly gendering living people who can’t change their sex but get a bogus certificate from the government saying they have, yet get away scot-free with misgendering people who are no longer alive to defend themselves. “Fuck off, you pseudo-bitches! I like chicks, not dicks!” - Louisa May Alcott “Why do you think I need a vagina? What’s so terrible about riding the Hershey Highway?” - Alan Turing Homosexuals are being erased from history and modernity just as women are in Trans World. It leads me to wonder if and when the Next Great Transition Craze will commence—for children, of course. What’s the deal with those ‘smart girls’ and ‘dumb boys’? In accordance with the traditionalist, right-wing, uncritical acceptance in Trans World that women are actually created to be dumbly submissive to men and cater to their every whim, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a brain, desire, ambition, and motivation, must be in want of a de-sexing. She was born in the wrong body. As is a man or boy who doesn’t do well in school, nor talk and think about sports and beer, who never aspires to resolve once and for all how the universe will end. If he fills his head with ‘silly little things’ like fashion, he must really have been meant to be a woman. Is this the next phase of trans-ing the world? Restoring males firmly back in intellectual jobs and women back at home and hearth where they belong? I have to wonder. Maybe, instead of trying to drag more girlies into STEM fields, we should turn them into boys instead! Because boys are good at math and science, and girls are good at—doing what they’re told. Being ‘good’. Not fretting their pretty little heads about finances and inventing a better mousetrap. Boys with fluffy brains need to be ‘fixed’ so they can become good, compliant little handmaids. Smart, capable chicks and kind, genteel guys are freaks. Historical figures like the equally brilliant Queen Elizabeth and Alan Turing challenge gender stereotypes and remind us not all girls like pink nor are made of sugar and spice; neither are all boys made of snips and snails or like rassling in the dirt with their mates. While I was never surprised, as some are, to find how misogynist ‘progressive’ politics are, I’ll admit I’ve been hornswoggled in the last few years at discovering in progressivism classic, right-wing homophobia. If it was obvious to others, it wasn’t to me. Especially not on Team Rainbow, which was formed, fer pete’s sake, to fight for gay rights when police attacked public bathhouses back in the day (and which would eventually be destroyed not by the law but by the AIDS epidemic). No, I had no idea the far left hated gayfolk so much they were willing to ‘trans’ even small children showing clear signs of homosexuality before they were in pre-school. The woke left, it seems, are not so unlike their compatriots on the far right. And they manage to stereotype non-conformers worse than Team MAGA ever has. The Christian right has long sought to ‘convert’ gay kids through ‘Christian’ counseling, but at least they never went so far as to advocate sex change and attack their genitals. Not since the Victorian period, anyway. As the far left marches into oblivion (which may come sooner with one helluva backlash if the trans-aversive and now assassination attempt hero Donald Trump wins in November), the transgender medical profession must be scrambling to make as much money as they can from 'transing’ children who fail to conform to stereotypes. And surely, a little girl who aspires to become a CEO is really asking to become a male, right? Since how could a silly woman possibly become successful and make billions if she wasn’t a man? The drive to return society to a more traditional world may differ somewhat in vision for the right and left, but both are navigated by misogynist men, embodied on the left by the heterosexual autogynephiles who ultimately want women to stop with their bullshit and grant them sexual satisfaction by accepting them completely as women, and ultimately to do what they’re told without complaint. Just like their Christian friends on the right. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

It's BARBARIC. And puritanical. It legitimizes 'trans' genital surgery today. We need a moratorium on child genital mutilation, period. We’ve got to stop the millennia-long War on Children’s Genitals. It’s non-partisan. It’s as areligious as religious. It’s multicultural. It’s also sexist and misandrist, when we condemn other cultures for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) but turn a blind eye (and a deaf ear to the screams) of Male Genital Mutilation (MGM). I know—it’s a sacred ‘religious tradition’ for Muslims and Jews. Lots of bad ideas are ‘sacred religious traditions’, which are carte blanche for abusing others and attributing it to some divine being. Like child sacrifice in the ancient pagan days. And murdering heretics and witches in the Middle Ages. Enshrining abuse and submission of women. Blowing up nonbelievers—all very, very bad ideas rooted in spiritual mythology. There are almost zero good reasons for child genital mutilation. Any of it. Especially FGM for which there are simply no health benefits at all. It’s performed exclusively to remove sexual pleasure from the female body. The one convincing MGM health benefit that I can find: Phimosis: The inability of the natural foreskin of the penis to retract properly. This can cause genuine medical problems for males and often justifies medical removal of the foreskin. That’s when one needs circumcision. Uh, that’s about it. Here are some of the alleged benefits that strike me as, frankly, not very persuasive. I drew this from The Canadian Paediatric Society’s 2015 position on MGM, reaffirmed in January of this year: UTI (Urinary tract infection) reduction. Supposedly the foreskin makes a male (especially babies) a bit more susceptible to UTIs, which are painful and sometimes itchy but penicillin handles it. STI (Sexually transmitted infection) reduction. Uncircumcised men may be at higher risk for infection, as HIV targets particular cells on the inner surface of the foreskin, but not if the man wears a condom. Which every woman should insist on, no matter how much he whines. Cancer reduction. Medical professionals love to tout how it prevents penile cancer, a condition rare in developed countries, about 1 in 100,000. It occurs almost exclusively in unshaven schvantzes. It also reduces cervical cancer risk in female partners. However, HPV infection raises the penile cancer risk in both the shorn and the unshorn by 80%. But the HPV vaccination in females of all ages greatly reduces the cancer risk, and it likely reduces the risk of penile cancer in men, if enough dudes would take it so that we could get some hard data. Cleanliness. One can get an infection if the prepuce isn’t cleaned. Which is easy enough to do in the shower, just as a woman can scrub her nether regions with water (Don’t use soap! I learned that lesson the hard way when I was four!). Opinions will vary but it strikes me there’s only one good reason for whacking away at a kid’s dick and I seek to challenge those who argue we should. What’s really going on with all those religious and cultural groups who argue MGM is a ‘sacred tradition’? I’m squinting judgmentally at you , Jews, Muslims, Christians, Americans, Africans, Filipinos, South Koreans and Oceanians. What is your problem with male genitalia? The downsides to MGM include, not surprisingly, a great loss of erogenous cells, although sex is still more enjoyable for the genitally mutilated male than it is for the GM’ed female, from whom the clitoris is excised and sometimes the labia as well. MGM is painful, even when an analgesic is applied—including post-operatively. There can be minor bleeding, permanent damage to the penis and cosmetic issues, and a very rare possibility of sepsis. Complication rates are about 1.5% for babies and 6% for older children. ‘Partial re-adherence to the glans,’ is also a possibility, and can resolve itself in puberty, but occasionally needs further treatment. Doctors claim there isn’t much difference in sexual satisfaction and enjoyment from MGM, but some males who were circumcised after becoming sexually active report otherwise. A National Institutes of Health study in 2013 found ‘decreased penile sensitivity’. All this kerfuffle over a ring of skin evolutionarily granted all male mammals for reasons doctors are unsure about, whether it was to enhance sexual pleasure or if there are other protective elements, or whether it’s kind of a penile appendix. All this mischigoss so Jews could establish their covenant with God, as laid down by His Holiness with Abraham in Genesis. All this kalam farghi so Muslims can also express their solidarity of religious community, too. Geez, can’t you all just get a tattoo or something? All this bunkum for Christians who just don’t want to be left out of the sexual hostility, I guess. Christianity has long had a real hate-on for human sexuality and sexual pleasure. Their offered reasons harken back to the Genesis edict and also going in for the alleged health benefits, but also so that ‘Bobby looks like Daddy’, imagining that he’ll be scarred for life if his junior johnson doesn’t resemble Daddy’s pruned pecker. What is this hate-on humanity bears for male sexuality, too? Much hay is made in the human rights world over the unquestionable barbarism of FGM. FGM is a far starker demonstration of humanity’s hate-on for the female orgasm. MGM isn’t nearly as harsh but we really need to examine just how hostile to male genitals we still are, especially in light of what has emerged with this year’s revelations of the medical and scientific bankruptcy behind sex change operations for children—including full castration. If you weren’t horrified already at Jazz Jennings’ perfectly healthy, and, as far as anyone could tell at his early age, properly-functioning penis transmogrified into a fake vagina incapable of orgasm, the divulgence that WPATH’s Standards of Care 8 guidelines included a recognition of the ‘eunuch identity’ for children acknowledging the ‘need’ for castration should be enough to send you directly to the liquor cabinet or to blaze up a massive doobie. Several WPATH members were, it was acknowledged, in connection with a horrific sexual fetishist community of pedophiles who fantasized about castrating little boys. What strikes me as deeply weird about the ‘male circumcision’ debate is just how wedded to the idea of harming genitals so many are. Especially Americans, who can’t seem to shake the spanked MGM monkey off their backs, often arguing for father-and-son Matching Mandingoes or just reverting to the lame argument that ‘everyone else is doing it, so we should attack our baby’s penis too’. Human beings really do have some weird near-universal fetish against sexual pleasure, even when it’s done mano-a-pene in the privacy of one’s bedroom. The ancients couldn’t know that each ejaculation contains up to 150 million sperm, and that the average male can experience up to 8,700 ejaculations in a lifetime which, if you do the math, equals 1,305,000,000,000 - over one billion little swimmers, not exactly a birth dearth in the making. (Oh, go look for the Monty Python song yourself!) And if 8,700 lifetime spurts sounds awfully low to you, as it did to me, I calculated that, if, on average, a male started yanking it at thirteen and continued until he was 90, that equals 112 ejaculations a year, which seems awfully low. Okay, maybe he loses sexual function at 80, that’s still only just under 130 times a year. What’s he doing the other 235 days? I mean, aren’t they at that thing all day long? Some guys can’t let go of it even on the subway ! But, you know, I don’t have a dick so maybe I’m just ignorant. As always, debunk me in the comments if you feel I’m just jerking men around! (Never let it be said I don’t do the hard research for you!) (Huh huh huh, Beavis, she said ‘hard research’!) Trigger warning: Description of a disturbing circumcision research on babies and some ugly descriptions of Victorian ‘preventions’ against masturbation following. You can safely skip down to “The left’s mania for kiddie genital mutilation” which contains only general discussion of bottom surgery and the newer adoption of ‘eunuch’ identity. Don’t touch that! That’s nasty! The history of hostile adults terrified of the Unholy Ejaculation is riven with ugly tortures and treatment of boys who play with themselves. Boys have been threatened historically with ugly operations if they didn’t stop choking the chicken. Victorians devised hideous devices to discourage erections and keep them from nocturnally shining the sheets. Girls weren’t spared clitoridectomies and occasionally oviarotomies if they discovered their particular joy button, but there was very special torture for boys who couldn’t stop polishing the banister. This included circumcision without anesthesia or analgesics in order to teach the immoral miscreant an important lesson, and spiked penis rings to discourage erections. It included “bandaging and caging the genitals; tying the hands to prevent touching; sewing up the foreskin with silver wire to prevent erection and create sufficient discomfort to make sexual impulse unwelcome;” and concluded with the aforementioned anesthesia-free circumcision. The blanket theme over 150 years of all this obsession with junior genitals was masturbation, and preventing the imagined horrors thereof. Refraining from ‘self-abuse’ was a sign of self-control and manliness, of creating stronger men to defend the motherland and harkens back, whether they realized it or not, to ancient beliefs that a woman stole men’s power via his ejaculations. Theda Bara, the original ‘vamp’, like a vampire, stealing a man’s precious essence with her unholy sexual predations. What is this hostility to male genitalia and sexual pleasure? Promoted almost exclusively by other men? I wonder if jealousy plays a role. I had to get circumcised, so everyone should do it! I wonder about the unrecognized and unaddressed psychological trauma for men circumcised as infants, even if they don’t consciously remember it. A Psychology Today article details the research behind the harmful psychological effects of circumcision, including a hideous experiment with a control group of babies who weren’t given analgesics or a local anesthesia, and they had to stop the experiment because the control group was in incredible pain including some that started choking and one that had a seizure. Post-operative pain for all was described as ‘severe’ and ‘persistent’. Who the hell approved this experiment, Josef Mengele? Cortisol, the stress and pain hormone, as the article details, spikes in babies’ brains during circumcision, and while the child may not remember the traumatic event, the body certainly does, and results in greater sensitivity to pain throughout life. Experiments on neonatal animals point to increased anxiety, hyperactivity and attention problems, not to mention a link to mood disorders, which brings into question just how much male behavior considered adverse may be the result of an unnecessary torture when the kid isn’t even ten days old yet. All this to prevent the extremely unlikely event of penile cancer, STIs and UTIs easily preventable or treatable with antibiotics. Gee, maybe we should remove appendixes at birth too, as a preventative in the event it becomes infected and has to be removed. After all, better while the kid is conveniently in the hospital, rather than what may prove to be an inconveniently-timed appendectomy that results in lost school or work time, right? The left’s mania for kiddie genital mutilation One reason why the left may be as amenable to permanently sterilizing and rendering ‘trans’ children sexually incapable of orgasm is because we already legitimize hostility to children’s genitals, rooted in a historical horror of masturbation. The left has been groomed, and often groomed itself to never say no to anything, and for what reason can there be to say no to sex change operations for children when we already engage in a practice designed to prevent sexual pleasure in both males and females? The fact that some transactivists in WPATH are easily persuaded that ‘eunuch’ is a viable ‘identity’ that requires immediate validation should be a massive flapping red flag that there’s something deeply wrong with transactivism, especially aimed at children. A phimotic foreskin can be easily circumcised, most importantly for a boy or man who consents to the procedure because it causes him enough discomfort. Otherwise, millions of uncircumcised men all over the world function as the normal human beings they’re meant to be, untroubled by penile cancer or UTIs and can easily come to regard their natural penis as cosmetically attractive as circumcised penises have come to be regarded. One of the most horrifying images to come out of the transactivism movement is the attacks on healthy genitals in children who aren’t gender dysphoric so much as social media-addled; and enforced by an education system that takes one’s child away if the parents don’t cooperate. The attacks fashioning ridiculous-looking malfunctioning manufactured penises and vaginas, and the removal of healthy breasts in teenage girls, I think is rooted in humanity’s millennia-old hostility to healthy, unobstructed genitals. MGM dates back 8,000 years and FGM 2,200 years, that we know of. Circumcision should always be consented to, and I personally think there should be laws mandating that one must be 18 years of age. Wait until he’s old enough to have learned to question the value himself. There are plenty of holy injunctions we no longer permit because we’ve become civilized enough to recognize how barbaric they are, including human slavery, stoning sinners to death and killing children who make fun of bald men. Progressive societies have come to recognize how cruel religious traditions have been to women and homosexuals as well. So we can afford to tell these groups, ‘No more’. MGM and FGM are relics of barbaric pasts and encourage the modern transactivist barbarians among us. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Would you shoot Hitler if you could? What if Biden is the one who will bring ruin? What if a Trump victory means some American lives will be saved? I have to wonder what Donald Trump’s mental state will be like from now on: The man survived an assassination attempt and for the want of two inches, might be dead. Trump was one tortured individual before this happened, and in need of constant distraction from annoying cycling ‘bad thoughts’, at least so say those close to him. Whether you’ve done Buddhist or emotional intelligence work on yourself or not, you must know what the ‘bad thoughts’ are. They’re those unresolved demons that regularly cycle in our head, torturing us: I really hate my father! I really hate my father! He’s such a monster! I really hate him! He’s such a monster…! Now people want to kill Donald Trump. I wonder if his thought cycles turn this way now: What if there is a hell awaiting the unrepentant sinner? I like pondering Trump’s inner life more than my own because I’m struggling with my own bad thought. Shit! If only Thomas Matthew Crooks had shot two inches closer to the left! My inner Crappy Buddhist needs a time-out. Would you kill Hitler? If we decry the historically more-prone-to-violence right, then how can we justify wishing someone, dammit, would please just take out someone else we fear? Didn’t Crooks practice enough? I’ve said over the years, sometimes holding my metaphorical nose, that I wouldn’t wish assassination even on Donald Trump. We don’t have the right to kill others based on what they might do. (How Minority Report !) I was a baby during JFK’s murder, and I don’t remember Martin Luther King’s, but I do remember Bobby Kennedy’s, which was traumatic for a five-year-old grappling with a stranger who shoots a father for no comprehensible reason. I’ve lived through two attempts on Gerald Ford’s life and one near-miss on Ronald Reagan’s. It’s not okay to wish for it. It really isn’t. On a higher spiritual level, we must aspire to rise above our tribalist, animalistic impulses. Allowing negative, hostile thoughts juice our own cycling thoughts and keep us depressed and dangerously angry. If we can put aside the hysterical rhetoric for a moment, Donald Trump may be many things, but he ain’t Hitler. He shares many personality traits with Hitler, as I wrote last year , but so do many others who aren’t Nazis or wannabe mass murderers. Being an otherwise useless, incompetent little narcissist is a trait many share, most of whom never stumble upon the narrow little window of opportunity in which one is enabled to maleficent ‘greatness’. At least for awhile, by the cultural zeitgeist and power-mongers smarter than they, and for whom they serve as a useful idiot because the moronic masses like him, they really like him! If you could go back in time, would you kill Hitler? I pondered that in an as-yet unpublished novel I’ve written about a modern woman transplanted back to the summer of 1968 who hopes to change history and prevent 9/11, when her twin brother died. She considers all the problems inherent in considering how many lives you alter, how many will live and who now won’t, because maybe the Nazis unwittingly killed some mass murderers or, who knows, the next Hitler. Maybe the Jewish protagonist is alive, her hippie friend with whom she engages this question suggests, because some poor bastard who died at Auschwitz might have lived to kill her, or maybe his son would have. Finally I said, “So you don't think it would be a good idea to go back in time and alter history, so that World War II never starts?” He slowly turned his head and opened his eyes. Which were needle-thin slits. “If you had special information that could save sixty million lives right now, would you give it to whoever could stop the deaths?” Of course she would, she replies. I played out my own arguments while writing the conversation, because I myself wasn’t completely sure of the righteous consequences of saving sixty million WWII deaths. Who in the future might not be born? Maybe even myself, even if somehow saving sixty million lives now saved some truly bad actors. It would be much easier to justify travelling back in time to kill Trump if history proved his second term was a massive disaster resulting in the deaths or abject misery of millions of people. But not so much today, especially with the knowledge that liberal hysterics about what his first term would be like didn’t result in the end of democracy or free elections. A recent article in The Free Press about the assassination attempt, and how attempts and successful hit jobs changed the world, notes that, “So central was Hitler’s worldview and decision-making to the war and to the Holocaust that his death at any juncture between 1933 and 1944 would surely have changed the course of history.” How different might America be today if Bobby Kennedy Sr. had gotten elected President rather than Nixon? My old boyfriend and I used to ponder this and other deep questions on his apartment front stoop on warm summer nights. How different might America be today without Watergate? Thomas Crooks did in fact alter history—it’s now all but assured Trump will win, unless the Democrats can convince Sylvester Stallone to replace Biden. (Except he’s a Republican.) For better or for worse, here comes the Trumpocalypse. Again. It’s easier to look back on history with the certainty of an accidental time traveller and say, “Save sixty million people? Piece o’ cake!” than it is to look at the world today and be oh-so-certain bumping off Hitler or Trump will solve all your country’s problems. Maybe Biden, or some other candidate who will ultimately replace him, would be the one who started the nuclear war. Or devastated the country somehow. Maybe with another tidal wave of unfiltered, unmonitored immigrants. Goddess knows Biden’s done untold damage to the U.S. with his open-door policy. Even I will breathe a sigh of relief when Trump shuts the doors and deports illegals. Let’s see how much the crime rate goes down, shall we? How many American lives will be saved once the criminals are sent home? Or prevented from entering during Biden, Part Deux? Maybe you or someone you love will live because of a Trump victory. Or maybe Crooks has sealed our fate, and Trump will destroy democracy as the hysterics claim. Never mind that dictatorships aren’t built in a day, or even eight years as one Turk who lived through a democracy-to-dictatorship scenario recounts. Who died and made you God? Or the Ultimate Arbiter of Fates? I don’t like my Crappy Buddhist’s inner impulse. Assassinations prevent us from seeing the road not taken. Spoiler alert: Skip down to “Safe spoiler space” if you haven’t yet read Stephen King’s novel 11/23/63. Last chance! Last chance! Last chance! Scroll down now! Stephen King pondered the difference in an assassin’s bullet in his novel 11/23/63, where a time traveller plans to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, and does. He expects a much better world if John F. Kennedy escapes the bullet. He returns to 2011 to discover his world now devastated by a nuclear war, the Civil Rights Bill having never passed, Jonestown incidents happening more frequently and with higher death tolls, and never-ending wars. It’s a nightmare. A mess. He realizes he has to go back in time and fix it—let Kennedy be assassinated. Spoiler end Spoiler end Spoiler end Spoiler end Safe spoiler space! It’s understandable to want to see Trump dead. He’s a detestable human being, if you’re not part of the cult. I feel less guilty wishing, as I did when he was President, that he killed himself with a Big Mac heart attack. It’s amazing to me he’s still alive. I have Trump Fatigue Syndrome from all the hysterics about how he’s going to destroy everything good in the universe. I know the MAGAs are doing the same to themselves, hyperventilating over a second Biden term. They may look ridiculous to us, but Trump hysterics look equally as ridiculous to them, and I look back at the first Trump term and think, “Well, we did get through it. He didn’t destroy democracy. We had another free election despite the liberal media’s naysayers. The Republic still stood. And, we have less free speech now after four years of woke Democratic reign than when Trump left. So, like, is Trump really the only threat?” Trump can do a LOT of damage, especially if he finishes turning the Supreme Court into a fundamentalist Christian wet dream. Project 2025 is troubling, but there are a helluva lot of courts its policies would have to clear first, and Congressional mid-terms that could throw ice water on that little wank fantasy. Of course, it’ll be interesting to see the God-based fundamentalists face off against their arch-nemeses, the woke social justice fundamentalists, who are no less authoritarian anymore, who worship DEI rather than Jesus. I don’t think it’s our job to shoot people we think are dangerous. Trump is dangerous. So is a foggy old man surrounded by more cogent people I don’t trust any more than the MAGAs. Thomas Crooks’s established profile was as a potential school shooter; liberals would be far more condemnatory of his sharpshooting if he’d gone after Joe Biden. Just as they shout on X far more quietly when a mass shooter is ‘trans’ or ‘non-binary’ than when he leaves an online manifesto expressing emotional orgasms over far-right leaders and causes. If it’s wrong to exult when mass shooters bump off people they don’t like—gay nightclub attendees, music lovers at a festival, blacks, Jews, Indians, or Muslims—it’s not okay when they shoot people we don’t like. Assassinating a political candidate who hasn’t yet killed lots of people, that we don’t know will ever do that, is a lot different from, theoretically, bumping off someone you know will do something truly earth-shattering. I found myself lying in bed last Sunday morning pondering the ending of a movie I really feel compelled to watch again: David Cronenberg’s excellent 1983 movie adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, about a man who comes out of a years-long coma to find that when he touches people he sees their future. Absolutely don’t watch the video clip here if you haven’t seen the movie; it’s got one of the greatest plot twists ever. But it harkens to the question the protagonist faces: Dare I murder a currently innocent man? Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

An ex-friend pulled a Mean Girl on both myself and another friend, so we devised a way to avoid hurt feelings with better conflict resolution. It works very well! We call it the ‘Sheila Agreement’. Its purpose is to manage the disagreement that happens in any friendship or relationship. Named for the ex-friend who handled conflict like an eight-year-old (and wasn’t honest why she de-friended us on and offline), the Sheila Agreement outlines how Melissa and I handle conflict in divided times where the definition of a sundress can ignite a global flame war. Sheila pushed us both out of her sizeable friends group a few years ago. First she ejected Melissa, then, a year later, me and my good friend David. We don’t know why. Sheila never tells you because she’d rather bite off her own arm than engage in confrontation. She gives weird vague nonsensical reasons. It was Year 2 of the pandemic. Everyone had gone batspit nuts, as (continuously) did American politics; she and her husband are Americans and all us Yanks were on edge. I felt Sheila had been deliberately hurtful to us both; Melissa doesn’t think it was anything personal. Post-Sheila, Melissa started to worry about me. I’m not always the most attentive friend. I’m always writing, reading, researching, or catching up on things I’ve put off. I spend little time on social media. Or email. Sometimes Melissa would message me and I’d take awhile to get back. It made her a little crazy. Am I getting Sheila’ed? What did I do??? Or she wouldn’t respond to me and I’d comb back through my Facebook messages wondering, Did I say something to upset her? Melissa’s sensitive about certain things and maybe I made a joke that fell flat. Does she hate me??? Such are the thought patterns of biologically-born females. We’re wired for friendships, relationships and emotional connection. We’d rather bite off our own arms and suffer a slight in simmering silence than confront a friend with it. The cruelest thing you can do to a female of any age is cut her out of the friendship group. It’s done deliberately to spite and hurt another. It happens from the sandbox to the grave. It’s childish, but we live in an age where many are grown-ass children and what passes for grown-ass feminism is a reversion to the mass Mean Girlism of cancel culture and campus protests. But it’s also fair to note just how critically everyday social relations have degraded for decades, especially during the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, radicalizing both political sides further. Melissa is conflict-aversive to begin with and only speaks up if something is super-critically important. I think a lot of us are the same way. Very few enjoy conflict unless they’re abusive jerks. But biting your tongue is a recipe for a Big Blowup later which is how friendships end and feelings get far more hurt than if the two of you could just hash them out. I suspect that’s what happened with Sheila: She bit her tongue because she hates conflict. To be fair, I have a temper and a sharp, sarcastic tongue; but she also was there when I began exploring Buddhism and made a conscious effort with real progress to de-trigger myself, cut down the sarcasm, and find better ways to communicate with others. It’s one way we bonded; she discovered Buddhism before we met. As for Melissa, she is, in my experience, one of the kindest, most even-keeled people I know, so Sheila had less reason to fear working out a conflict with her. But hey, even Buddhists can be crap at handling conflict, n’est-ce pas? Melissa and I have done a lot of inner work on ourselves to be Better Grownups, so after multiple instances of her worrying I was mad at her I said, “We need a Sheila Agreement to handle conflict intelligently and maturely. The purpose is to work out misunderstandings and disagreements like big girls, rather than a third-grader.” The basic precepts: When one of us is unhappy with the other, we will bring it up to that person calmly, once we’re out of our anger phase The other person needs to listen calmly, and do their best not to get defensive The first person needs to say what they didn’t like in kind, non-emotional language. No swearing. No insults. No unfair judgements. “You think I—” never nails what the other person is thinking. The offender needs to listen (or read) politely and respond calmly and rationally, once again not in anger. Maybe step away from the computer or put down the mobile and cogitate for awhile. One great method is the Sandwich Approach: Say something good and positive about the other person, then offer the grievance, then finish with something positive. In this way you relieve some of the negative feelings criticism can’t avoid generating by observing the good things about the other person too. Melissa has a few points for basic communication overall that she uses with her husband: No ‘should’ing - no telling someone else what they should do or how they should feel No minimizing, diminishing, deflecting or invalidating the other's feelings. You may not agree with them, but their feelings still deserve to be heard and respected. Use ‘I’ statements to describe how you feel and the effect someone's words or actions had on you, not attacks regarding what they said or did. “I felt hurt when you said this.” Not “You did this, you did that.”  No personal, character, or ad hominem attacks No blaming, shaming, criticizing, labeling, attributing motives Stick to the point at hand. Period. No add-on insults, generalizations, blanket statements, absolutes, or references to the past or to others No aggression, violent language, profanity, or name-calling Only communicate when calm So far, so good! Melissa and I don’t argue much, but we have the typical misunderstandings or minor communication offenses between busy and sometimes inattentive friends. We’ve both invoked the Sheila Agreement on occasion and it’s worked out very well. Most recently we had a serious political disagreement and we invoked it on each other when it got a little heated. It’s the sort of disagreement that might break up a lot of friends or family members. We got through it okay without anyone nearing Facebook Block of Death mode. I’m really proud of us both! Later, I introduced it to David, my close buddy who had gotten ejected from Sheila’s friend group along with me and then later invited back in a classic Mean Girl move intentionally designed to twist the knife in my back. Sheila had offered one criticism of us that rang true: She complained we squabbled too much. It was her one moment of honesty. “She’s right,” I told David, “and I’m tired of it too. Melissa and I came up with something we call the Sheila Agreement and I think you and I should do this too. Let me explain it and see what you think.” He agreed, and we don’t argue anymore. It’s rather a relief, as we’d argued about stupid crap for years. We even had a break in the friendship for a few months several years ago. We get along much better now, and can even discuss politics without wanting to kill each other. I’m genuinely grateful to Sheila for that, at least. I introduced the Sheila Agreement to my neighbor. She’s socially anxious and worries that she’s offended me or put me out in some way. I sometimes worry the same. So we invoked the Sheila Agreement and now we explain things like, “You can text me a few times during the day; don’t expect an immediate response as I’m working, but don’t text a lot because the beeping can be distracting.” She’s told me that when I don’t get an immediate response from her not to take it personally either. We have fewer misunderstandings now. A Sheila Agreement returns the basic rules of courtesy sorely lacking in our deteriorating culture. We can’t blame Trump or the pandemic; I lost friends years ago for being ‘insufficiently liberal’. I didn’t move right; these ex-friends moved farther left. ( They defriended me. ) Perhaps others can forge their own Sheila Agreement with their remaining friends and family. It could be altered to lay down the guidelines of engagement (I don’t like rules ), for example, for discussing politics. A Sheila Agreement requires a certain level of social maturity that may be difficult to stick to at first. Melissa has a degree in psychology and works a job in which she teaches people to communicate better with each other. Buddhist philosophy years ago taught me to actively de-trigger myself and not react so quickly with anger when someone disagrees with me or calls me a nasty name. I understand now it says far more about them than it does me. I find conflict with my Sheila Agreement friends is less stressful. The heart of success is to keep your emotions in check. That can be hard to do when we’re angry, but in anger is when we say the worst things we can’t take back or hurl accusations or judgements not easily forgotten. You need to consider that you might be wrong about something or at least acknowledge how the other person feels. And talk about it. Maybe you messed up. Maybe they misinterpreted something or are being overly-emotional. I find apologizing can be empowering. I’m being a Big Girl! I hope others can benefit from their own version of the Sheila Agreement so we can get along better and not sunder what few friendships we have left. Life is far more peaceful, and you have a better sense of which of your friends you can truly trust. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Your imperfect body was born into 'woke' Original Sin. Abhor yourself and your detestable healthy body because misery loves company. How dare you be happy in your own skin, sinner! In the mid-’90s the speculation began:   Did teenage Britney Spears really get a boob job? Britney denied it, or wouldn’t talk about it, but Rolling Stone revealed in 2008 that her mother allowed her to get implants even though her breasts were still growing. Later, allegedly, Spears regretted the decision and had them removed. Beautiful, talented, and deeply distressed Britney Spears thought, and was probably told by soulless music executives, that she wasn’t ‘good enough’. Maybe it was a good career move, but often body modifications are a signal you’re not happy with the body you were born in; that it’s imperfect, not good enough, even when it’s healthy and not nearly as unattractive as mass and social media tell you. We fail to appreciate just what a ‘miracle of life’ we truly are. How wondrously human we were born, how marvelous our complex bodies, and especially our magnificently evolved brains. How amazing  it is that we were ever born,  regardless of the circumstances of conception. I learned a fascinating tidbit about how my brother and I came to be on this planet that I didn’t know until he told the story at our mother’s funeral last year. I knew Mom and Dad met on a blind date but what I hadn’t known is the extrapolated story Dad told my brother: Mom was a ‘third string’ and last-ditch choice! Dad needed a date for a boating trip with some married friends. They set him up with a woman, but she cancelled as the trip approached. “Don’t worry,” the friend told Dad, “I’ve got another one for you!” And that was set up and— she  bailed. “Oh man, I’m sorry about this,” the friend said. “Listen, I’ve got one more gal I can think of. I hope she can make it.” She was, and she didn’t bag on my dad. My brother and I exist because two other women cancelled! There’s an additional challenge to my own existence. Mom and Dad had a hard time conceiving. Three years into the marriage and no pregnancy. The doctor said everything was normal; finally a highly frustrated Mom conceived and my parents rejoiced. Then, Mom lost the baby. She was devastated. “Keep trying!” the doctor told them. “Your hormone count is really high! It’ll be easy to get pregnant again!” They did. I have long marveled at how, in a sort of sad sense, ‘lucky’ I was to be born when another was conceived before me. I might not be here if Mom hadn’t lost the first baby. Or would I? Ajahn Brahm, a teacher and monk with the Western Australian Buddhist Society , (he’s hilarious! ), tells the story of a young couple he once counseled who wanted a baby, and finally they got pregnant. They were so excited; so was he. But their darling, much-wanted baby boy was stillborn. They were near-inconsolable but they were going to try again and Ajahn Brahm told them to take a ballpoint pen and draw a mark on the lifeless baby, which they did. They drew a line a few inches long on one of the baby’s tiny heels, and then they buried him. A short time later, they got pregnant again and, like my mother, this time they delivered a strong healthy child—this one a baby girl. And she had a curious birthmark on one of her heels—a thin line a few inches long. The baby came back, said Ajahn Brahm. It was a revelation to me. I don’t know whether I believe the story or not but I don’t think he’d lie. It could be coincidence that the baby had a birthmark resembling the line they drew on the first one’s heel. But now I wonder: Maybe that was me Mom miscarried, and I came back. I relate these stories because it’s deeply disturbing how many critical mental health challenges Gen Z presents as they strive to be anyone other than who they were born to be. Are they really any more disturbed than previous generations, or are we simply obsessed with children? Every human being with a functioning brain has their dysfunctions and demons, and not everyone’s life is easy enough that they can still be glad to have been born. I’ve heard a few wish their mother had gotten an abortion. But I don’t know that any generation has ever been as guided, pushed, or pressured as much as later Millennials and Gen Z to fix the false notion that they were ‘born in the wrong body’. Is there any idea more destructive than that you’re defective at birth? That nature is so stupid it’s forever sending you into the world incorrectly? Not just, “You’re not pretty/handsome enough,” you’re not good enough from birth. Especially if you’re ‘cis-heteronormative’: The woke Original Sin. Or white birth. Or male birth. So many damned at birth. The toxic message you’re ‘not good enough’ has been with us since Cain slew Abel after a slight from God. (God is not a vegan!) My mother’s generation grew up watching beautiful sirens on the silver screen they could never match; although Mom, a beautiful woman in her own right, only ever expressed jealousy over Shirley Temple, whom she resented for being prettier. I grew up knowing I would never be as beautiful as The Love Boat goddesses and still, in some shameful secret place deep within me, want to be as beautiful as Barbi Benton, Judy Landers or Morgan Brittany. (No, not Morgan Fairchild, whose nose was too pointed for me and who looked like the bitch she always portrayed, although I understand she’s a very nice lady in real life.) Plastic surgery though, was now available to fix that, first for women and their tragically normal-sized breasts, then it came for the men (“Build up your pecs! Masculinize your jawline! Chisel that manly waistline with rib removal! Buy a penis so large you’ll have to cart it around in a wheelbarrow!”) I eschew plastic surgery, and laugh at women who spend huge sums of money and harm their bodies to please men, and those incels who fantasize or raise the money to do the same for women (shallow losers aren’t only female!) But I can’t laugh at ‘sex-changers’. It’s just too, too tragic, even when it’s emotionally disrupted adults rather than innocent lambs led to the slaughter by so-called ‘responsible’ adults. ‘Be authentic’ is what the Boomers and Xers told each other. ‘Be yourself!’ Strip yourself of society’s ideas of what you’re ‘supposed’ to be. Challenge the stereotypes and roles you’re ‘assigned’, especially when you’re male or female. Subvert the dominant paradigm! To some degree, that’s what the trans/queer movement has done—challenged those roles, questioned whether we need to define ourselves as binarily as we were raised, and that’s a good thing. But Big Surgery came for the kids since authentic people don’t buy anal bleaches  and pec jobs. Big Pharma had run out of pill-popping adults. Kids were groomed to become lifelong medical patients, for both Big Surgery and Big Pharma, told they were ‘born in the wrong body’. Not even that they weren’t photogenic enough, but nature fucked up and made everyone the wrong sex! And gay kids became anathema. The left continues to damn Christian ‘gay conversion therapy’ while they themselves mutilate, sterilize, and ruin the ability to orgasm because they’re terrified of children happy in their own skin. So much for Barney the Dinosaur’s positive, affirming  message in the ‘90s. Sure, it was maudlin, but don’t you wish he’d return? No, I can’t possible love you, you’re not good enough! The woke left needs more hugging and kissing and a lot less judgementalism and sourpussed guilt trips over how imperfect everyone else is. Of course  we’re imperfect; we’re human beings. Religions, philosophies and self-improvement regimes focus on what we can and should change: The way we act, think, talk and behave. We harm others far more with our behavior than how we biologically exist. Each one of us should acknowledge, if even only to ourselves, that we must try harder to treat others well, not obsess about our mostly silly-ass problems (which leads to us acting like assholes). What would Jesus do? What would Gandhi do? What would Superman do? We’d be better off without scrutinizing ourselves in the mirror and blaming all our problems on a conveniently scapegoated meat package. The body positivity movement, for all its obvious health-denying bullshit, does have a point that it wouldn’t kill us to accept ourselves and our wonderfully varied bodies for what they are. Especially if it functions more reliably than your car. Heart beating okay? Lungs drawing air in and out without a lot of phlegmatic drama? Legs support you and walk great distances? Eyes seeing the beauty of a sunrise or your child’s brilliant smile? No frightening weird lumps anywhere? Congratulations! You have a functioning, healthy body! Rejoice! Not everyone does, and life quality takes a hit when you can’t do what others do, go where others go, live the life you see others living denied you. People who choose sex change surgery buy into a lifetime of medical industry dependence, are further tormented by unaddressed psychological problems, and a heightened risk of suicide. What troubles me is how much children are taught almost from birth that they were born  imperfectly, ‘in the wrong body’, and that if they don’t love the right people (anyone except the opposite sex unless those people are properly not-cis-heteronormative), they’re bad, awful oppressors. You’re no longer ‘free to be me’. Be anyone other than yourself, because you were born inherently wrong! The hell with authenticity. The far left hates it. Isn’t this the message from the Christian Right we Good Liberals have been taught to eschew? Original sin is bullshit! Adam and Eve never existed! And if they did, more power to them for rebelling against the White Patriarchal Supremacist Oppressor in the sky as they yelled, “We WILL partake of the forbidden fruit! How dare you prohibit us from seeking knowledge! Who are You  to colonize it all for Yourself?” (I actually kinda like this myth for its rebellious spirit. Also I like the Jewish addendum of Adam’s first wife Lilith, who refused to accept Adam’s demand for a constant military sexual position, and wouldn’t put up with his lord-and-master patriarchal bullshit, so she went off on her own. God then created Eve, but he still fucked up the submission function.) Original sin is now whiteness; maleness; cis-heteronormativeness. The way we were born. In original left-wing sin. Authenticity is for right-wing jerks, I guess. (Which it’s not; inauthenticity is an inalienable human fault.) If there’s one thing we all have a problem with, it’s living comfortably in our own skin. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. - Corinthians 6:19-20 The New Testament abjures using the body for ‘harlotry’ and other sexual sins—whaddaya expect, the famously misogynist and sexophobic St. Paul wrote it—and it’s pretty well established in the 2,000 or years or so that followed that restricting sexual activity is a fool’s game. It doesn’t work for society, and it doesn’t work for many individuals. But there may be a modern lesson for us still: Be grateful for what you’ve got and stop longing for the other side of the fence, which is never as beauteous and problem-free as you imagine it. Yeah, we all aren’t happy with our bodies for one reason or another. Nor were the patrons of the Photoshoppers of centuries past: Court painters, who depicted their patrons as handsomer, more beauteous, than they actually were. We have no idea who was ‘the fairest one of all’ because they all painted themselves with toxic white lead and vinegar like kabuki players. Women wore bustles to make their hips and asses bigger, and corsets to make their waistlines smaller. Men availed themselves of painful high heels and wore whalebone corsets to keep them straighter and taller (I remember Vincent Price complaining about this when he was a guest speaker at our university; I think he portrayed Prince Albert onstage and the whalebone corset caused him much discomfort). Transgenderism or transsexualism is merely another form of body modification, and should be legal for grownups, just like tattoos and boob jobs (unless you’re Britney Spears’s mother). Humans alter their bodies for many different reasons, not always because Snapchat shows them they’re not pretty enough to be an influencer. But please, force the schools to tell children the truth: That it’s okay to be you. You were born in the right  body. Teach them the evolution science that offends and terrifies the woke: That we evolved sexually dimorphically to reproduce, whether we choose to do so or not, because life seeks to perpetuate more life. That you can’t change your immutable sex and that there’s nothing wrong with being a boy or a girl! There’s nothing wrong with boys who like girls and girls who like boys! Or who like both! Most of all, teach them to be deeply grateful for their healthy bodies, and for all the wonderful things it can do (even if some parts of it don’t work like everyone else’s). And be grateful for the gift of life. I love you, you love me. Be free to be you! Be yourself! As I’m fond of saying, “I have to be me. No one else would take this stupid job!” Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

What if the Western world was forced to 'celebrate' Christian Supremacy for a month after having shoved Rainbow Supremacy down everyone's throats? “Would you like to donate two dollars to Pride?” asked the store cashier last Saturday. “No thank you,” I replied. In times past, I donated. This time I didn’t. It’s no longer a worthy cause. Not going to the ‘gayborhood’ to celebrate and enjoy the drag-queenier-than-thou. Not going to the Parade. Not flying the flag. I’m done with this public virtue-signalling circle jerk of enforced Rainbow Supremacy. Marginalized my ass. Live how you want to live, but don’t yank it in my bathroom, guys. Pride events around North America are experiencing more backlash than ever. MSNBC talked to a Pride reporter about Pride flags slashed, graffiti sprayed on LGBTQ-friendly church walls, and other acts of vandalism attributed to ‘right-wing backlash’. Um, how do they know it’s specifically ‘right-wing’? Have all the perpetrators been arrested and their politics accounted for? The interviewer didn’t ask, and the reporter didn’t say. If there’s a ‘backlash’, why? DO NOT ASK. And why is tearing down a Pride flag ‘vandalism’, but a statue is ‘protest’? As the King of Siam would say, “Is a puzzlement.” How is it these reporters remain so blithely unaware of how much growing dislike for Pride there is on the left, with whom it has lost its former popular goodwill? News to these bozos. Remaining as ignorant about the entire Pride movement as they can be without induced coma is their raison d’etre. What would Christian Pride Month look like? USA Today reports that brands this year are pulling back on Pride displays and merch as they claim they’re targeted by ‘conservative groups’ who boycotted their businesses and for once, it seems to have worked. I’m more inclined to believe they’ve correctly identified ‘conservative groups’, because they’re engaging in lawful protest, unlike Pride flag destroyers who run ‘n’ hide since they’re breaking vandalism laws. No one seems to ask why there was a kerfuffle last year over a Hershey bar promo for International Women’s Day featuring a biological man who looks vaguely like a woman. At least no journalistic investigation beyond, Transphobia is the only explanation. You’re hard-pressed to find any gay people featured in Pride promos anymore. Fabulous dudes and even hot lesbians are out. Trans-identified men—far less trans-identified women—are the Pride stars now. No one asked whether the anti-woke backlash against trans-identified man and social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney was all right-wing or whether the public in general is fed up with woke values and fake women constantly shoved down their throats. Including plenty of liberals. How come I know liberals and left-leaners sick of transactivist extremism but the left-wing media doesn’t even know we exist? Then again, when I search for ‘WPATH Files’ and ‘Cass Review’ on MSNBC I find nothing, so maybe I expect too much journalistic integrity from people who know everything they need to know about trans from their Gender Studies classes at Columbia University. USA Today has nothing on the WPATH Files but does at least mention the Cass Review in a few articles. Transactivism ignores and cancels those who dare to challenge and criticize the erasure of biological women and gay people, and especially critics of the ‘progressive’ conversion of gay kids to more socially ‘acceptable’ heterosexuality. Pride groups shut down free speech and get people they don’t like fired . They’ve pushed their ideology into public education and woe to any parent who dares to protest. Left-wing do-gooders will take your children if you don’t get in line and goose-step the new step for a movement so awash in bright reassuring colours you could be blinded on a sunny day or wonder who slipped the Yellow Sunshine into your morning coffee. Spiked calls the ‘unbearable annoyingness of Pride’ ‘flag-shagging’. So I wonder as we wrap up yet another Pride Month: What if the next month was ‘Christian Pride Month’, was mostly organized by fanatical fundamentalist Christians, and whose support was as socially enforced as June’s Pride Month? Libraries would feature ‘Christian month’ book displays including works by C. S. Lewis, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, St. Augustine, the Left Behind series and actress Lisa Whelchel’s (‘Blair’ from The Facts of Life ) parental help books on how you can abuse your children in the most Christian manner possible. Books by Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens and Michael Shermer would be banned. National brands would include the fish logo on all their products as an easy way to virtue-signal allyship with Jesus-believers without having to do anything actually Christian, like give money to the poor or orphans. Attention hound Jesus supporters and their allies would flamboyantly dress like Jesus, Mary, Joseph, random disciples, Catholic saints, Crusaders and the most famous Christian in America, Donald Trump. Cities around the world would celebrate with Christian Pride Parades in which local companies would be pressured to provide gaudy floats depicting famous Bible stories. Like Kiddie Jesus teaching the rabbis, the Last Supper, the Passion, the Resurrection, Mary being informed she was gonna have to do some ‘splainin’ soon to her fiance, the deaths of the Apostles, St. Paul experiencing a Keanu Reeves moment on the road to Damascus (“Whhhoooooaaaa!!!! Look at that, like, flaming Cross, man!), John the Baptist’s head on a platter with lots and lots of dripping fake blood, and some really awesome wicked cool Revelation floats best viewed on three tabs of acid or a couple of ‘shrooms. Children would learn incessantly about Jesus and Christianity in all public schools and be constantly asked, “Are you sure you’re a Muslim or a Hindu? Many people are born into the wrong religion and you can change it! There’s nothing wrong with changing your religion; if you feel sad or depressed it’s not because you’re dealing with a lot of stress or your grandmother died; it’s because you were meant to be a Christian! You can change it right now! Look at my Genesisbread Man!” Any parent who disagreed with extreme Christian indoctrination and identified it as a sick, toxic cult would have their children forcibly removed and protected from their Christophobia because everyone knows that children, once they know they’re the wrong religion and need to transition to the right one, will commit suicide in a day and a half if you stop them, or even try to talk to them about it. Groups purporting to ‘help’ and ‘protect’ children would secretly mail them things they wanted that their parents had forbidden—crosses, Bibles, Communion wafers, swords of vengeance, Wal-Mart Biblical action figures , Jesus and Mary butt plugs . All right-thinking inclusive people would uncritically support this because children were essentially little adults who knew what was best for them, and the parents’ job was to get out of the way and let Little Moishe Brother Ezekiel become the pint-sized Bible-thumper he knew he was truly born to be. It’s not his fault his family is a bunch of liberal whackos and hate jobs who accept their gay cousin and teach their kids to hate doctrines like love and tolerance and the health benefits of quinoa. Churches everywhere will report hundreds, even thousands of children all applying to change their religion as soon as possible. Social media would be rampant with Christian ‘Warriors of God’ canceling and issuing rape and crucifixion threats to anyone who dared critique them. They’d seek to have liberals arrested, jailed, or at least banned from X for the ‘hate crime’ of pointing out there’s no evidence of God or for speaking out in favor of abortion and helping the poor. Anonymous young Christian losers with no jobs and no future would excavate the social media posts of anyone trying to accomplish anything seeking RATs (Radical Atheist Terrorists) damaging children with their scurrilous lessons that people can live moral lives without religion. Famously Christophobic Massachusetts would pass a ‘Don’t Say J’ law after the horror of Walt Disney’s annual Jesus Days inviting all those who love Jesus, warning Christophobes that this might not be the best weekend to take little Ahmed or little Parvati there, who might be subjected to blatant Christian love right there in front of Cinderella’s Chapel. Critics of Christian Pride Month would be denounced as Christophobic Nazarenis with crosses and fish spray-painted on their houses at night. Christian activists would attack any non-Christian trying to speak at a library or a hotel conference room and try to shut it all down, arguing that Christophobic hate speech was not protected by the Constitution. Christian activists would demand the right to be allowed into places formerly forbidden to Christians for safety purposes—synagogues, mosques, temples, Native reserves and reservations. Christian Pride Parade critics would complain about how gorier and kinkier the floats with Jesus’s suffering had become. I kid, but we’ve seen this before The cultiness and Orwellian Thought Police authoritarianism we condemn on the ‘woke’ social just-us left is the same we saw forty-three years ago with the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the so-called Religious Right, with one key exception: The Christian Right never attained the level of power and governmental infiltration the Regressive Left has achieved. It wasn’t for lack of trying, and the Right came damn close. Reagan’s election unleashed America’s right-wing kooks. I’m not sure if there’s a specific person or event that unleashed America’s left-wing kooks more recently, but theories are welcome in the comments. Conservative Christians in the ‘80s organized and strategized how to infiltrate the new, Christian-friendly government. They began, sensibly, bottom-up rather than top-down. They got elected to boring political positions no one cared about: City councillors and school boards. The ‘textbook wars’ began with a Texas couple named Mel and Norma Gabler, who sought to ‘cleanse’ America’s textbooks of anything they considered anti-family, anti-God or anti-American. They abhorred any teaching that contradicted conservative values or Christian mythologies. They hated evolution. Conservative Christians began chipping away at the eight-year-old Roe v. Wade decision. They wrote angry letters to the editor denouncing liberal values and accusing their critics of hating God, America and the family, which, admittedly, looks somewhat less insane today as the Queer movement has explicitly stated it has no use for the nuclear family anymore and campus protesters hate on the capitalism that privileged them enough to go to college and bite the hands that fed and raised them. The Christian Right always hated sex—mostly for females. Their lopsided calls for more sexual morality and purity forced us liberals to keep reminding them it takes two to make a baby, and if a woman is having sex she shouldn’t be, shouldn’t the man she’s having it with be rebuked as well? “Yeah, that’s wrong too,” they’d say and return to fulminating about wicked temptresses and Jezebels. Wayward dicks never bothered them as much as inviting vaginas. Because sexual morality was always the woman’s fault or responsibility, just as it is today in the Middle East and many other parts of the world. They never even stressed much when Christian Republican dicks found their ways into male mouths and anuses, which they frequently did , especially with Religious Right politicians. What men did with their penis was of no business for women, as far as they were concerned. The Christian Right worked their way slowly and patiently to the top echelons of political power, taking control first of the Republican Party and then Congress. Déjà vu. We’ve seen the rise of one fun-demented-list cult seizing the hearts and minds of Americans and now we’re seeing it again—from the other side. If today’s Christian Right is perturbed by the success of the woke social just-us cult, they wrote the vision and playbook themselves. Although Canada has never seen a religious right-wing authoritarian takeover attempt like the U.S. once did, we’re now seeing the rise in left-wing authoritarianism exemplified by our formerly feminist and liberal Prime Minister and his allies who are more concerned about ‘protecting’ trans people (men) from the mostly exaggerated stories of violence against transpeople than they are about protecting women from transactivist violence and hate speech, which is far more common. Karma has come back to bite conservative extremism in the ass. This is on you, Christies. It makes for strange bedfellows, as liberals like me ally with them on preventing ‘gender-affirming’ sex change operations for kids. We can’t otherwise stand them, knowing they share many common values with their hated enemies the far left— hatred of Jews and women , cult indoctrination in the schools, and shoving their values down everyone’s throats. And they all want women to stop saying No to penises. These are the people who got rid of Roe v. Wade and will sexually shackle our vaginas if given one-tenth of an opportunity. Shag the dog According to The Free Press, sex therapists are now advocating for the right to have sex with animals, even acknowledging that animals can’t consent to anything, but if we’re hunting them, breeding them, corralling them, murdering them with anal electroshock and eating them, what the hell, let’s fuck ‘em too! Don’t ‘yuck someone’s area of interest,’ sez one eloquent X guru. Now, I’m not so sure I even want to see the Rainbow Mafia’s Pride Month anymore. Call me when you’ve exorcised all the heterosexual straight dudes taking advantage of your movement to normalize their sexual fetishes. And if you want to fight the Rainbow Supremacists, the Old State Saloon in Idaho is featuring June as “Heterosexual Awesomeness Month.” They’ve got merch in case you want to rub it in everyone’s faces that you’re straight, and Hetero Male Monday in which you get a free pint if you’re a heterosexual male dressed as a straight, heterosexual male. Could I get a free beer at the Saloon if I came in dressed as a straight, heterosexual male? How do they know the men dressed as straight, heterosexual males are actually girly-fuckers, and not butch gay men (is there a lie detector test?) Well anyway if you liked this post, and wanted 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! There are also podcasts of more recent articles there too!

Big Pharma and doctors will literally say and do anything commercialist propaganda tells them to. La plus ça change. Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharms, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life , by psychiatrist and DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) contributor Dr. Allen Frances, was published in 2013, during the infancy of the social media-induced transgender mania we see today. Therefore, transgenderism isn’t mentioned at all, but it’s interesting that he didn’t think to include it in Chapter 6, Fads of the Future, in which he predicts the next targets of overdiagnosing, overtreating medical doctors and Big Pharma drug peddlers. He thought to include mood dysregulation disorder, formerly known as ‘tantrums’ in small children, neurocognitive mental disorder, formerly known as ‘normal slight mental decline in people who age’, ‘binge-eating disorder’, formerly known as ‘overeating’, adult ADHD (real, but overdiagnosed) and major depressive disorder, formerly known as ‘customary grief’. By 2013, the early signs of transgenderism had been around since the late oughts, but maybe he didn’t spend enough time on the Internet to notice that Tumblr was pioneering all the goofy labels to describe every maladaptive ‘gender difference’ unemployed, unemployable, infantilized young people could imagine. Frances argues that psychiatry is guilty of over-medicalizing, over-diagnosing, and over-treating what are often normal life stresses and problems for which they slap on some silly-ass label (perhaps there’s a coterie of unemployed psychiatrists on Tumblr?) to sell treatments and drugs to people who don’t actually need them. He argues for a return to recognizing that certain stresses and unpleasant feelings are perfectly normal and don’t require specialized treatment. He laments how psychiatric profession abuses have fueled the over-negativity of certain anti-psychiatry groups. He defends his profession when warranted, but the book is about all the crazes psychiatry has fueled over the years, and a pill-popping society trained for addiction with promised, but rarely delivered, quick fixes. He recounts the mental illness fads of years and centuries past: the ‘neurasthenia’ fad of the late 19th and early 20th century (vaguely, ‘weak nerves’, which served to ‘explain’ everything wrong with female complaints about anything), hysteria/conversion disorder from the same time period, the ‘70s and ‘80s MPD fad (Multiple Personality Disorder, which psychiatry now regards as bullshit) and the late 20th-century child sex abuse scandal witch hunts (unfounded ritual abuse allegations such as the McMartin Daycare and the Wee Care Nursery School cases, and overall ‘Satanic Panic’). The public was willing and ready to jump on any fad promoted by doctors eager to make a name for themselves and to make a quick buck from neurotics. Saving Normal describes the rise of Big Pharma and how it gained the power to medicalize anything negative a human being could feel. First they lobbied to change laws allowing them to market drugs directly to consumers, then by doubling the life of their patents by making only minor changes, like by tinkering with existing compounds a bit, to create a slightly different but patent-friendly drug to extend monopoly protection. When they needed a new market, the medicalization of children germinated. Primarily for behavioral issues. Frances says Big Pharma’s claims to putting billions into research is mostly bogus; where they put their dollars is marketing and lobbying for friendly changes to the existent laws prohibiting them from untethered profit-making. Gender critics will recognize the blueprint: Buying politicians; hijacking the medical profession to influence or pressure “doctors, patients, scientists, journals, professional associations, consumer advocacy groups, pharmacists, insurance companies, politicians, bureaucrats and administrators.” That certainly answers the question so many gender critics have asked: How did so many institutions get hijacked by the transgender revenue-driven complex? It happened before most of us had ever even met a so-called ‘transgender’ person. ‘Gender dysphoria’ is the new autism, ADHD and ‘aging as a disease’. As I read about the ways Big Pharma and the medical profession have vastly overblown the very real diagnosis ADHD, I considered how gender doctors are handling puberty as though it was some sort of mental disease. Normal life milestones are not ‘conditions’ to be treated. I remembered something my doctor said to me twenty years ago when I worried I might be hitting early menopause. “Don’t worry,” he said, “when the time comes we’ll be ready to treat you.” What had concerned me was that I was approaching forty and misunderstanding the normal signs of aging as something amiss. I came to realize his comment offended me. Why did menopause need to be ‘treated’, unless one was having very severe and life-impacting symptoms? I bought a book, instead about how to treat menopausal symptoms naturally through herbal and other natural products. As it turned out, I never needed it; I got lucky and my eventual menopause (perfectly on schedule) was remarkably easy. This is why I’m concerned about the mania to ‘trans’ kids who have to ‘put off’ puberty or they’ll ‘become suicidal’. Puberty, like menopause, is a perfectly natural physiological milestone; it doesn’t usually need to be ‘treated’ although it certainly requires plenty of guidance as it’s not an easy time for anyone. Puberty marks the end of childhood and a permanent push into adulthood, whether it’s welcome or not, and I suspect a lot of kids are agreeing to the highly damaging puberty blockers simply because they don’t want to grow up. Dr. Frances warns about paraphilias, which will one day contribute heavily to the transgender craze, as ‘a minefield of unintended consequences’. While he contributed to the DSM-IV, his concern was that the section on paraphilias (primarily male), was poorly worded and ‘allowed the widespread unconstitutional abuse of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization’. Since publication of his book, he has little to say about the transgender craze, which of course begs the question of whether he’s afraid of subjecting his family to physical threats by hateful transactivists. Can you blame him? For pete’s sake, science mag Nature is doubling down on trans pseudoscience, terrified of new research scientists are supposed to pursue, it’s their friggin’ job, but the woke social justice kiddies who manage Nature are afraid certain scientific inquiry might ‘pathologize’ and ‘harm’ the trans community. Read: Shed further light on uncomfortable truths that will permanently halt the Trans Train at the Zanyville station. Researchers are looking for a biological basis for trans-identity, and what if—they don’t find one? Interesting how terrified Team Trans is of exploring this theory, since a positive link would be very much in transactivists’ best interests if they could argue ‘incontrovertibly’ that ‘people are born trans’. It would be a mega-boon to the medical industry which is making untold billions off butchering children in service to The Boardroom. Team Greed is setting their financial futures for life: Creating permanent dependent patients of all ages with treatments and required supplements, never mind that one day said patients may find they can no longer pay for it themselves if Republicans take over and stop forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for genderwoo delusions. It will be too easy to argue that most of these people were born into perfectly healthy bodies, and made the decision to butcher themselves and render their bodies largely broken. I do wish Dr. Frances would speak out on this issue but he’s at retirement age and perhaps he’s hoping for a nice quiet life which he and his wife will never have if they have to field death threats and other harassment by speaking out on a subject backed by real science. Another issue Saving Normal acknowledges that bears directly on the transgender craze is how historically doctors have often ignored or not even bothered to explore the psychological problems or conditions a presenting patient may have, often in service to the fad du jour. He describes Mindy, a young woman during the Hippie Sixties who was institutionalized and treated for the then-faddish schizophrenia by a young doctor who only realized after she was discharged that her problem wasn’t schizophrenia, but the street drug abuse quite common at the time. Mindy was put through hospital hell with some similarity to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest . Dr. Frances admits that the young doctor prone to all-the-other-doctors-are-diagnosing-schizophrenia-so-it-must-be-cool was himself. Mindy didn’t have a childhood filled with trauma, but she turned into the moody, self-conscious, self-critical teenager many children do. Her problems with drug abuse stemmed from what appears to be the normal challenges of adolescence, and an ‘overpowering’ mother. If she wasn’t traumatized before, she was after she got drunk or high and passed out in stairwells only to find filthy toughs shoving their hands down her pants. “She taught me,” Frances writes, “to look for what’s fundamentally normal in people, not just what appears to be sick.” Frances decries how quickly doctors are willing to shove pills at their patients rather than take any time to explore issues in their lives. Is a doctor’s job only to do something, however quick-fix or piecemeal, to make someone feel better, or should it also include telling someone what they’re feeling is normal and that it will pass? Could G.P.s, I myself wonder, be better-trained in recognizing the difference between genuine psychiatric problems versus people who simply don’t know how to handle their emotional responses? Instead of trying to ‘treat’ puberty with blockers and other often permanently harmful snake oil, why not recommend resources for children to explore to ensure they’re not making a very bad decision from which there are no do-overs? Not likely something doctors are willing to do when TransPharma is selling and indoctrinating them to uncritically treat ‘gender dysphoria’ with pills and blockers and here, have some free samples! Give them to your young patients and tell them to come back for a prescription! Just repeat the hoary lie, “They’ll commit suicide, like, yesterday, if you don’t!” Saving Normal was published eleven years ago but proves itself as trenchantly critical of the newer transgender psychiatric fad as any previous ones. It’s well worth a read if you want to understand how the medical professions, both physical and psychiatric, were so easily hijacked by one of the most scientifically bankrupt medical crazes in centuries. The mentally ill were often treated with torture and execution in times past but at least the ancients could argue they didn’t know demons didn’t exist or that the human brain is the most complex creation ever. We moderns in the 21st century have reams of data from the Scientific Revolution and the lessons of the same mistakes made over and over and over again. And yet we fall for it Every. Single. Time. The medical and psychiatric professions weren’t so much ‘hijacked’ by transactivism as guided down a familiar path, and each new fad cements the process of uncritical thinking further. Fads come and go, but the psychiatric community abides by over-treatment and misdiagnosis forever. The real crime, as Frances notes, is that when ‘normal’ is pathologized, people who don’t need help receive treatment that harms rather than helps, and those who need psychiatric help the most don’t receive it. I think of the crazy indigent guy wildly accusing my friend of following him around every Toronto subway station a few years ago when he saw us talking. He turned threatening and I was scared for both of us as he is exactly the sort of person who’s not getting the help he desperately needs. Meanwhile, around the city, countless children and confused young adults are being ‘transitioned’ by medical professionals who vow to ‘do no harm’, but do— aided, encouraged, and pressured by large pharmaceutical companies whose prime directive is not to explore pre-existing psychological co-morbidities and address them, but to make quicker, ever-more insane profits. According to a new research study, the sex reassignment surgery market is expected to grow from $2.90B in 2022 to $6.3B in 2030. I wouldn’t invest just yet, though, if you’re a human psychopath seeking to strike it big in the stock market no matter how; the WPATH Files, the Cass Review , and the dialing-back of transgender medicine in Europe points very strongly toward a North American Day of Reckoning, always behind the rest of the Western world. It’s highly questionable just how lucrative this industry will be in a few more years, especially if there’s a Republican takeover in the U.S. in November. I predict bad times ahead for the transgender industrial complex. I don’t think transgenderism is going away entirely, nor do I think it should; I’ve argued in the past it can be undertaken for various good reasons, including even genuine but, I suspect, exceedingly rare gender dysphoria. Right now I’m reading a fascinating book by a trans-identified woman on what it’s like to become a man. (Expect an article eventually). He apparently is a quite passable man but ironically, still writes like a woman. So far, it’s not rah-rah-transgender-I-hate-TERFs, mostly because he transitioned before today’s trans-fashionistas were born. In fact, I chose to read it because it’s not political; I’m hoping for some interesting insights into the neuroscientific and cultural differences between men and women from someone who’s played both sides of the field. What I want to see tamed like a wild horse is the deeply dysfunctional, horribly harmful transgender medical industry, which has ruined so many lives already, and split up so many families , and often on the taxpayer’s dime. Let the delusionals pay for it themselves. Although honestly, a good shrink, an honest one still in possession of their critical thinking skills, divorced from the ‘woke social justice’ madness with which so many have already been infected , would be a better investment. I’d be more willing, as a taxpayer, to pay for that! 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!