Persephone Phoenix shares how women need to follow their own hero cycle. 'You go through hell and you triumph in the end. No one will rescue you: You have to rescue yourself. Here’s how I did it.' I am so pleased to introduce my friend Persephone Phoenix who has kindly allowed me to make her Grow Some Labia’s very first guest post. She prefers to remain anonymous to protect the innocent from the vengefully guilty. I met Persephone on another blogging platform years ago and we bonded over a similar power feminist value system—a tool of Da Patriarchy (dun dun DUNNNN!!!!) she’s ain’t :) We met once for dinner in Toronto before she moved to the States with her current (and, I hope, her last and lasting!) husband for his new job. What I love about her life is she was in an abusive marriage but she finally ‘grew some labia’ and said The hell with this! and LEFT! To be fair, she wasn’t in as grave a situation as other women trapped in marital hell so don’t take this as a ‘should’; that if you’re currently in a bad situation, you ‘should’ do the same. We don’t know what you ‘should’ do but we DO want you to understand that you have made and are making choices along the way. Persephone decided to leave. If you want to but you can’t, there’s help at the end of this article. I will shut up now and let Persephone tell her story, in her own way, including what she learned about taking back her power from an unworthy man. Part II concludes it on Saturday. When I was a high school English teacher, I taught a unit in grade ten English called “The Hero’s Journey.” The students read traditional myths, modern short stories, and viewed recent films, all through the lens of Joseph Campbell’s version of the hero cycle via Carl Jung. Versions of this symbolic system are used everywhere today, including in psychotherapy. It’s a popular theory that has become ubiquitous since Campbell published his seminal book in 1987.vgv Infographics of the cycle are all over the internet. Here’s one: It basically outlines how someone becomes a hero, or the best version of themselves. It’s as easy to apply this system to the ancient Greek myth of Theseus as it is to apply it to the story of Martin Luther King’s fight against racism in the 1960s (one year I showed the film Selma in my class). Fay Weldon’s 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, for example, noticeably follows the pattern. It’s one of the few feminist novels I read in the eighties that had the heroine take charge of her life once she realized her husband was an abusive dick. It may have even inspired me to leave my own oppressive dick of a husband. Anyone can apply the hero’s journey to their own life; you can easily cast your own struggles with adversity into a compelling story if you look at your life a certain way. There’s the rub; many young women today, coached by feminist theories, prefer to see themselves as victims of male aggression and oppression. Any pushback against this mentality is often seen as ‘blaming the victim.’ In so doing, they trap themselves needlessly in abusive relationships. The call to adventure: I meet a new man who is open to starting a family with me. I met my first husband at a restaurant where we both worked. We began dating. He was a recent immigrant, and he impressed me with his work ethic and discipline. He was also very handsome. He showed few hints of his fiery temper while he was courting me. If there were any serious red flags, I completely ignored them. He also said he wanted children, which was very important to me. Why the disaster happened in the first place, or how I accidentally crossed into the underworld or unknown world. I married this man at age 24. Our daughter was born when I was 25. Our relationship had developed quickly—too quickly. I was young and naive, and had also endured trauma from my abusive and neglectful parents. According to classic psychological parlance, I had unconsciously married my more negative parent— my mother. To be fair, my husband had also endured trauma; he was an immigrant from Iran who arrived in Canada as a refugee in the early ‘80s—right after the Iran/Iraq war. Not only was there a terrible war he could have been forced to fight in, he had also grown up in a violent, repressive society where women were routinely forced to wear the Muslim hijab or be subject to violence on the streets, and could also be beaten and killed for adultery. His father was an officer in the Iranian military and his younger brother was sent to the front to be cannon fodder (he miraculously survived). I will give him that pass—I know now that he was possibly more damaged than I was. I won’t give him a pass for how he treated me or our daughter- that’s on him. He was a narcissist who never engaged in any kind of self-reflection and his emotionally abusive treatment of me was not excusable. I got pregnant and also got started on my road of trials. The abuse started during my pregnancy. He felt stressed at having a baby in the first year of our marriage, so he felt justified in expressing all his spleen whenever the anxiety of responsibility hit him. He could be loving one minute and enraged the next. One time in about my seventh month, we were riding the elevator in our apartment building. We had been having a normal conversation when I said something like, “When the baby comes, we should…” He looked at me and said with fury, “I don’t want the baby!” I was floored; it was a little late in the game to be saying this when we had agreed that I would have the baby right after I showed him the pregnancy test. I thought it was settled. Turns out, no, he was actually pissed at me for being pregnant. Brimming with pregnancy hormones, I started crying. He got angry with me for crying. Bringing up baby or living in the belly of the whale This was the beginning of the abuse. After the baby was born, I spent most of my time isolated in our apartment while he worked six or seven days a week. I was caring for a newborn, with no experience and no help from my own mother who lived in a nearby city, and who was too absorbed in her own problems to care about mine. My wonderful sister stayed with me to help for a week, but she had her own baby and a life in a town two hours away. Even though I was overwhelmed with caring for a beautiful but colicky infant, I tried to do my share in our home. It was a losing battle. Sometimes I left the dishes unwashed (we had no dishwasher). He would take a picture of the messy kitchen, have the film developed, and shame me with the picture. The rest of my daughter’s infancy is a bit of a blur. He was rarely home. She didn’t sleep. One thing he would do was put her in her car seat at night when he got home from his restaurant shift and drive her around for miles until she finally fell asleep. This was helpful. Unfortunately, it was literally the only thing he did. He claimed he couldn’t change her diapers because the smell made him sick. Every time he ‘tried’ he would begin a dramatic retching performance so that I wouldn’t make him change her. I simply gave up trying to get him to contribute to her care beyond putting her to sleep at night. Oh, and I couldn’t help with that, because he actively prevented me from learning to drive. Making sure he diminished my light and our daughter’s light so we wouldn’t leave: sensing the abyss Our daughter transformed into an adorable little girl with curly dark brown hair and a mischievous laugh. She was literally hilarious. If I said something silly, she would say, “You’re fordicalos, Mommy!” (She meant ‘ridiculous’). She ‘wrote’ her own version of Cinderella when she was four. I would staple together pieces of paper into a book. She would illustrate the story with child-style pictures and then dictate the text that went with each picture: Cinderella lived with her two stepsisters. She was getting married the next day. "Or is it the day after that?,” she reminded to herself. For Christmas, she got a wedding dress and some shoes. She married the prince and the two stepsisters became the girl grand dukes. And they all lived happily ever after. The end. She had brilliantly re-conceived the original story so that no one was mean to anyone. That’s how innocent and good she was. And creative. What was his reaction to this story? “Not funny.” Much like Joe Dimaggio with Marilyn Monroe, he did his best to diminish her light so that she would not outshine him. My cooking was never good enough or a major challenge that tempted me with all kinds of fantasies of a future, healthy marriage: Magic flight. The only food he would eat was the Persian food his mother had made for him—about four different dishes. I bought a Persian cookbook and tried making some recipes. Everything was ‘disgusting’ and he would take one sniff and do the retching performance he did with the baby’s dirty diapers. I began to imagine a different kind of relationship. I admit that I got a little lost in fantasy. That said, I never even came close to cheating on him. Nevertheless, he sensed this, and developed some pretty paranoid behaviors. Once, at one of our daughter’s ballet recitals, I innocently looked around the auditorium to see if one of my friends was arriving, and he accused me of ‘looking for men.’ Oh, and during this period he actually engaged in several affairs. He was mean and demeaning to our daughter: Getting close to the nadir When she got a little pudgy from having pasta for lunch every day at daycare, he freaked out because she was making him look bad for being ‘fat.’ Later on, she developed a binge-eating disorder. She would take leftover food from the fridge and gorge on it, leaving the dirty dishes under her bed in shame. Then he would scream at her for it. He demanded that she massage his feet for him to honor him as a father like good Persian girls supposedly did in Iran. He abused me financially: The absolute nadir A lot of you might be thinking at this point, why didn’t I just leave him? I had a good job as a high school teacher (teachers in Canada are paid well and everyone is on the same salary grid no matter what school district they teach in). I had the financial means to hire a lawyer and set up my own household and a strong desire to leave, but I didn’t. Truth be told, I didn’t yet have the self-esteem I needed to make the break. I brought home a good salary (the equivalent of $100,000 per year in today’s money). How much was he contributing? I wouldn’t know because I was not allowed to know how much he made. When we briefly separated, he refused to pay child support. I became terrified of not being able to pay my bills, and I reluctantly moved back in with him. Honestly, I just didn’t have enough confidence in myself. I never had parents who talked to me about how to handle life. My upbringing was mostly them expressing hostility to me for my very existence. How I finally woke up: Consciousness expands. I developed health problems. A rheumatologist diagnosed me with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). He explained to me that some people are genetically predisposed to CFS, but do not develop the disease. Others do when they experience significant stress. He asked me about my childhood, my adolescence, and my young adulthood. What were they like? All stressful: Constant moves, eleven different schools, bullying, physical abuse, neglect, and one spectacular incident: A mass shooting at my high school when I was in grade nine. Add an abusive marriage to that list and you have a recipe for chronic disease. I knew I had to leave or I might actually not live long enough to see my daughter grow up. I left him for good: The apotheosis is on the horizon. I moved out of our beautiful marital home sometime after our fifteenth anniversary. It was basically my dream home. Growing up, and moving around so much, often to ugly suburban houses, helped me delusionally believe that a nice house would somehow make me happy despite anything that was going on in my life. No house, no matter how lovely, can make up for the ugliness of a life lived in fear and misery with someone who acts like he hates you. I still can’t believe how long it took me to realize this. I showed up at work the first day of the school year after I had moved out during summer break and started my new life. One of my colleagues remarked, “You look different. You look happier.” I had literally moved out two weeks before. I guess my whole demeanor and body language had changed in an instant. I felt free. I didn’t have to go home to my hostile, angry husband and our tension-filled house. He manipulated me into using his lawyer for our divorce: The refusal of the return. Despite my colleague’s observations, I was also so broken down before our legal separation, both the tiredness associated with CFS, and the lingering depression that I lived with throughout our marriage, that I allowed him to decide the terms of the divorce. I went to his lawyer’s office with him and signed a paper that stated I did not want to seek independent counsel. I had moved into an apartment in another house that we owned, not far from our marital home, so that our daughter could walk between the two homes. My (it turns out delusional) understanding was that I would get the second home (with two apartments, one of which I could rent out to help with mortgage payments), and he would keep the larger, fancier home that I didn’t want anyway, and didn’t feel I could afford to maintain. He had no intention of signing over that house to me. Or of giving me any kind of settlement. He had decided, living as he did in his own elaborate fantasy world, that somehow Sharia law would apply to our divorce, rather than Canadian law. When I finally demanded some actual paperwork for the property exchange, he told me he wouldn’t be giving me anything. He explained it by telling me I hadn’t actually contributed anything to the marriage. I reminded him that I had given him several thousand dollars a month for years to cover the mortgage and joint credit card bills. He dismissed that by saying, “All you did was make a few mortgage payments.” “The texture of the silence changed”: Revelation brings rebirth. I was utterly stunned. I walked back to ‘my’ house in a daze. I had completely screwed myself. I had signed a separation agreement that said nothing about a settlement. I thought that was the end. I would never own a house in our expensive city again. Not even a condo. And I had done it to myself. He could kick me out of the home I was living in any time he wanted to. For the first time, I got really, really angry instead of internalizing my anger and making myself sick. He phoned me not long after that and demanded that I pay half of our daughter’s first-year university expenses. We had started an education savings account when she was a baby. I knew how much was in that account. I told him to use that to pay for the year’s expenses and after that he could damn well pay for all her future years of education. I was giving him nothing. The fire had awakened. There is a scene in the novel The Life and Loves of a She-devil, where the heroine is sitting in her bathroom while her asshole husband is berating her through the door, explaining to her that he is entirely entitled to divorce her, take her children with him to live with his mistress, and to give her nothing, since she was supposedly nothing more than a worthless, unattractive hag. Fay Weldon deliciously captures the moment when Ruth, a woman almost completely lacking self-esteem, decides for once that she doesn’t have to accept her husband Bobbo’s low estimation of her worth: “On the other side of the door, the texture of the silence changed…” Bobbo waits for her acquiesce to his insane demands, and all he gets is silence. Uneasy, he leaves the house somehow sensing that his power over Ruth has been an illusion all along. If you have read the book or seen the movie, then you know that Ruth gets revenge on Bobbo by becoming attractive and rich, and essentially ruining his life the way he almost ruined hers. He thought he was going to be, in Orwellian terms, a jackboot stamping on [her] human face forever. He was wrong. As the great spiritual teacher Gary Zukav once said, “External power is an illusion.” People have power over us because we give it to them. When we stop believing in that power, it evaporates like Nikolai Ceaucescu’s hold over the Romanian people in 1989. My husband was also uneasy when the texture of the silence changed on the other side of our phone conversation. He protested when I refused to pay our girl’s education, knowing he had a lot more money than I did, despite his attempts to hide that from me. I told him, “I know that you know you can afford this and that I can’t since you ripped me off in our divorce settlement. And I’m not playing your game any longer.” Part II will be released on Saturday, April 6th. If you are in an abusive relationship and need help: If you are in IMMEDIATE danger, call 911, wherever you are in Canada and the United States. (NOTE: This doesn’t work in Nunavut and some rural parts of Ontario which still have no 911 service. We’re working to change that.) National Domestic Violence Hotline (United States) - 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). TEXT: 88788 (Text & Message rates may apply) Canada does not appear to have a national domestic abuse hotline. Not that I can find, anyway. There is a Crisis Text Line but I can’t get the website to load. For Canadian First Nations/Indigenous: 1-855-242-3310 Canadian Resources for LGBTQ - 1-855-687-1868 The iHeal app - “A free, private and secure app to help Canadian women who have experienced abuse from a current or past partner to find personalized ways to stay safe and be well.” 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!

Public hostility isn't always about what you look like, but what you've become Sometimes certain groups simply beg for the hostility and hatred. Like, you know, college students. The current backlash against elite colleges and their DEI enablers after the public flameouts of several university presidents blind to racist antisemitism demonstrates how university presidents, DEI consultants, and the Islamofascist students they pretend to teach are mostly racist assholes. And no one likes assholes no matter what they’re peddling, even when it’s putative civil rights, which no good liberal would reject. The cannier ones, however, reject the package when they perceive the hypocritical sins within. Black Lives Matter is Exhibit A. The vibrantly vintage hippie-ish disappointment looked exciting at birth. Every time a white cop shot a black guy, there was Black Lives Matter in front of the cameras uttering colorful catchphrases like the ‘new lynching’ and the ‘epidemic of white supremacy’ and the conveniently self-dehumanizing ‘black bodies’. But then we noticed how little BLM truly valued most black lives. Like whenever a mother grieved for her dead son murdered by another black man. A kid who might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Where the fuck were they? BLM bought a house and stocked a recording studio with donations while black parents continued to bury black bodies planted six feet under by black hands holding guns. Later came the infamous tweet that launched a hundred thousand condemnations: BLM’s deplorable support for Hamas. They’ve had less to say about Tyre Nichols, the black man beaten to death by five black cops in January 2023. It’s still all white supremacy’s fault, sez BLM’s statement: “Although the media has spent a great amount of time drawing attention to the fact that the police officers are Black, as if that is important [italics mine], let us be clear: ALL police represent the interest of capitalism and impel state-sanctioned violence. Anyone who works within a system that perpetuates state-sanctioned violence is complicit in upholding white supremacy. Assimilation into a system that is anti-Black is one of the most dangerous weapons stemming from white supremacy.” Who knew black cops could be WHITE SUPREMACISTS? BLM’s falls in moral grace make it clear: Their growing unpopularity isn’t because they’re marginalized, but because they’re infested with racist assholes. If your moral compass is spinning like you’re standing at the North Pole, and you can publicly bully others, you ain’t marginalized. You have power. The tide of public opinion has turned, except on the Loony Left, not because the country is getting more racist but because it’s progressing away from it. Except for Black Lives Matter which flaunted its own commitment to racism on October 8th and has since morphed into a huge clusterfuck of We have met the racist enemy and he is us. The Marginalization Olympics It’s interesting they identify as strongly as they do with the Palestinians, another highly compromised victim group. Neither woke black antiracists nor Palestinians can move beyond their own historical trauma and focus on the present or the future. BLM and other woke SJWs, desperately ignorant of human history, fail to realize that while today’s Israeli Jews and their descendants deserve accusations of being imperialist, colonizing oppressors, the Palestinians and their ancestors deserve no less. Many of them got there via invasion in the 7th century under the banner of the new, deeply antisemitic Islamic religion to take, steal, and settle the land the then-contemporary Jews had lived on for thousands of years already. Along with today’s Palestinians’ ancestors. But BLM understands history the way a fundamentalist Christian understands earth science. They may have begun with the best of intentions but social movements, if not kept in check with proper internal controls, inevitably evolve towards extremism. Contrast them both with the Vietnamese, horribly bombed, burned, My Lai’d, tortured, and leveled by American forces in a war the oldest generations there can still remember, yet who largely bear no grudge against the U.S. today. Or consider how the Japanese moved beyond the Bombs. However you feel about the rightness or wrongness of Truman’s decision, what happened to two cities are pretty arguably the most violent attack on other human beings the world has ever witnessed. The Vietnamese and Japanese don't nurture grievance against the United States and declare perpetual war. If ever there were two countries given good reason to hate the United States, it’s these two. Yet they don’t. Meanwhile, BLM thinks they’re living one lost election away from white supremacist annihilation. Just try finding the words ‘Hamas’, ‘Israel’, and ‘October 7’ on the BLM website for months after the attacks. Nadda word. Today, those three words each return only one result: A call for an Israeli cease-fire. Of course. No call on Hamas for a cease-fire of violent attacks re their express genocide mandate against Jews, Israeli or not. People with properly-functioning moral compasses know Hamas deserves the hate they receive around the world because they’re assholes. What does that say about BLM? The company you keep, folks. There isn’t any data so far on where public opinion lies for the organization post-October 7, but two Republican senators want to rename Washington’s ‘Black Lives Matter Plaza’, which received the name after the George Floyd protests. The senators blame BLM’s blatantly racist support for Palestinians, antisemitic rhetoric and celebration of Hamas’s violent slaughter. Seems pretty reasonable since BLM has little tolerance for statues of white historical figures linked to slavery or the Confederacy. If racists are bad, we shouldn’t commemorate them, right? Not sure how well-received that’s been by D.C.’s black mayor. Israeli news organization Haaretz posted their own open letter: Dear BLM Activists, We Also Can’t Breathe. The subtitle corrects BLM’s ignorant racist assumption: Let me tell you something about Israel, where most of the Jews are Brown people who came from the Arab countries and North Africa. The other side of Middle Eastern assholery What about Jews? I can hear some of you screaming from the sidelines. Yes, Israel started to look distinctly more asshole-ish about 25,000 Gazan lives ago. To whom I ask, How’s that last vote workin’ out for ya? Netanyahu? What the fuck were you thinking??? The George W. Bush of the Middle East, the ‘protector of Israel’, who left the southern border unprotected where Trouble with a capital T sailed in, literally. This buttmunch was already clearly a dangerous collaborator with Hamas before his re-election in 2022. And the Israelis bought it. Again. La plus ça change. Israeli Jews are hardly marginalized when they can destroy 24 times the number of people murdered on October 7th. An Israeli-fueled humanitarian crisis has engulfed Gaza as a fair chunk of the region is leveled and one-quarter of Gazans face chronic food insecurity. People are starving to death. Children in hospitals, so gaunt and elderly-looking from lack of food, if they were photographed in black and white could be mistaken for Nazi concentration camp victims. Israel, pissing off world leaders everywhere, prevents food from getting through, leading aid organizations to drop food supplies - not enough, but whatever they can manage - with parachutes from planes. The world is beginning to forget October 7 as, well, sorry, greater human suffering continues to unfold in Gaza. And speaking of genocide, this video—from t’other side, doesn’t help. Yes, it’s real, according to Snopes. Yeah—uh—genocide—it’s not just for Hamas anymore. “In another year there will be nothing there, and we will safely return to our homes. Within a year we will eliminate them all and then we will return to plough our fields.” Where are ‘they’ going, if you don’t mind my asking? Of course, the Gazans did vote for Hamas, who doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about the Pals. And didn’t they vote partly because they agree Jews must die? Gazans educate and indoctrinate their children to hate Jews and perpetuate their own cycle of violence, training the future terrorists Israel will one day bomb. And all for a history of pretty equivalent violence, oppression, and violation of each other’s right to exist that literally stretches back thousands of years. If you look at the full history of the people who today we call Israeli Jews and Palestinians, it’s hard to tell them apart under all that blood. The blood of their enemies. The Islamic world, which carefully cultivates its terrorist asshole image, can hardly call themselves marginalized with their long documented history of imperialism, colonialism, oppression of non-Muslims, a deplorable hate-on for Jews, and blowing things up. Their founder was a military commander. Christianity’s was a peacenik. Muslims can be individually victimized, and 35 were last year with hate crimes in Toronto. It’s not okay, but it’s also not okay to victimize others while you’re whining about your own victimhood, and somehow Muslims always jump to the front of the cameras whenever they’re given an excuse to ‘acceptably’ hate on Jews (‘Support’ for the Palestinians: The left’s dog whistle for antisemites). If you truly support Palestinians with no antisemitism, your beef is with Israel, the Israeli government in particular, and the people who voted for the politicians responsible for this. You don't attack every Jew on the planet - or a Jewish hospital in Canada - that’s antisemitism! Both sides are the oppressors, colonizers, and mass murderers they claim their adversaries to be. Muslims complain about ‘Islamophobia’, but is it always? Maybe it’s because too many are pretty infamously antisemitic and violence-supporting assholes. Verdict: You’re all assholes. The American right whines while acting like assholes too Conservative white Americans are more tolerant of white mass shooters, to whom they sympathetically attribute ‘mental health problems’ for their actions, yet are outraged and condemnatory when an LGBTQer or a Muslim shoots up a crowd. Is the woke left simply hysterical about Donald Trump, or is it because he’s the right’s biggest asshole? He supports Putin. He wants to be a dictator himself. He tried to steal an election and then juiced a massive riot which resulted in six deaths and the traumatization of the Capitol police. He stole highly classified documents and we don’t know who he showed them to. He doesn’t pay the people who work for him, the very sort who vote for him. Team MAGA works hard to be seen as assholes. Their butt buddies the Christian right, in historical hysterics over Bill Clinton’s consensual affair with an intern, overlook the rapey past of the right’s biggest man-whore, a guy who, in the immortal words of Bill Maher, is the only man who ever paid a porn star to SHUT her mouth. Try speaking about this with fragile righty snowflakes and you’ll receive the same condemnation and indignation as from the trans-nuts when you bring up the WPATH Files. Other fundamentalists are disliked because they’re homophobic, misogynist, religiously bigoted assholes. Being an asshole is almost a requirement for transactivists, bonus points if they want to kill TERFs. They demand with fundamentalist fervor the policing of public speech, and the ‘right’ to indoctrinate children into their toxic cult as they fight to keep the Bible-thumpers from doing the same. The Christian right and transactivists are stuffed with pseudo-marginalized people who are are entitled fundamentalist assholes. Which is why you’re finding transactivists, who only pretend to be liberal, in the right-wing asshole section. We can all be assholes, and some people and whole groups invite it by collectively acting like, talking like, and being assholes. The Second Amendment set claims liberals want to take their guns when in fact what we want is fewer guns in the hands of irresponsible assholes. So if you suffer from a martyr/persecution complex, piteously mewing that everyone hates you because they’re vile fascist Nazi bigots, or they’re woke snowflake gender-bending weirdoes, I offer some food for thought late at night when you’re lying in bed and can’t sleep: Maybe, just sayin’, the problem isn’t that you’re ‘marginalized’. Maybe it’s because you’re an asshole. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing!

Is it epigenetic, or do we all traumatize ourselves with historical knowledge? The dreams of medieval tortures began when I was around seven or eight. I can’t remember the brutal details, but generally — men coming after me, wanting to torture me. The dreams petered out, then flared up many years later. Burning stakes, cages and sharp blades. One memorable device I wasn’t even familiar with. The huge heavy weight looked like a child’s top, flat above, tapering to a dull but broad point. My persecutors wanted to center it over my belly and crush me. When I awoke I thought, “What the hell? I’ve never even read of anything like that.” Past-life memories? Intergenerational trauma? Psychically tuning in to another time? Maybe. Although the earliest dreams started when I read my first book on the European witch craze. Written for children, its descriptions of interrogations, tortures and executions were nevertheless graphic. It was too upsetting to finish. Later nightmare revisits coincided with my exploration of Wicca. My adult reading now contained far more graphic historical descriptions, and I also had a better idea of what a torture chamber looked like thanks to old Vincent Price movies and a Gilligan’s Island episode in which the castaways are held but not harmed in a mad scientist’s torture chamber. I learned that there was, in fact, a torture device rather like my belly crusher. But I wonder: Was it a past life memory, or had I learned about it years prior and forgotten it? One’s unconscious doesn’t forget as easily as the conscious mind shocked into welcome forgetfulness. I can’t swear I hadn’t learned about it when I was younger. Memory is odd; we forget things. When reminded, we may not even recall a sense of familiarity of once having known it. I read years ago about a woman who ‘remembered’ a past life involving a minor historical incident in which she recounted details confirmed by other history books. Turns out earlier records had gotten some details wrong. They’d been corrected in modern versions. She’d ‘remembered’ not the incident that happened, but the faulty narrative in a childhood book. Coleman Hughes - American writer and podcast host, vile conservative lackey to illiberals, a breath of fresh air to us remaining libs—has just published a new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. One might call him downright reactionary for suggesting we return to an earlier time for America when many civil rights leaders prescribed striving for colorblindness, and blamed racial inequities more on class struggles than systemic racism, even as Hughes acknowledges its current existence. He scandalizes ‘woke’ progressives when he dreams of a ‘colorblind’ America in which we recognize race, but treat each other like we do others. Easier said than done in the Ignited States of America, but seemingly doable in Canada, which doesn’t suffer from the lengthy slave legacy of America. Racism exists here, but is less prone to the racial hysterics of ‘woke’ American antiracism, which claims modern trauma from a slave history that ended nearly 160 years ago. No one is truly colorblind, but we can work toward it, and Hughes (I haven’t read his book yet) smashes the woke lunacy holding that claiming to be ‘colorblind’ is racist, and questions whether one can suffer trauma from things that happened to others. It would certainly give the rest of us opportunity to claim historical trauma, since it’s the story of the human race, although interestingly we never seem to suffer it if we don’t know what our ancestors went through. Like, I don’t have PTSD from my French ancestor who fought in Napoleon’s army and must surely have seen some shit. Nor did I know anyone growing up who suffered post-generational trauma from fathers who served in Korea or grandfathers in WWII. Colorblindness may be naive, for sure, but racist it ain’t. Not when one is making a good-faith effort to not be racist, however imperfectly. As any white person subjected to woke racism knows, there is no escape from being cast as a ‘white supremacist’. Even if you think you’re not, you are. White skin is the Mark of the Beast. Hughes’s skepticism of appropriated trauma caught my eye in his own article about his book on The Free Press. He questions the claim of PTSD (‘Post-Traumatic Slavery Disorder’) for those who’ve lived a more privileged life than their ancestors. Hughes briefly touches upon the emerging science of epigenetics, which explores whether historical trauma can become encoded in our genes. It’s an interesting theory which requires a lot more research. The early science leans that way, with experiments on rodents and nematode worms, with whom you have more in common, genetically, than you’d like to know. Genetic memories go back as far as 14 generations for our wormy cousins, and if it ultimately proves similar for humans, that’s 350–500 years back depending on how you count the length of generations. So yes, we could all hypothetically have genetic memories of trauma. Lab mice taught to fear and avoid a scent similar to cherry blossoms passed on that fear to the next generation. What I find a little questionable about human ‘inherited trauma’ is it only seems to affect people whose ancestral trauma was inflicted by white people. Other groups besides black Americans lay claim to inherited trauma too—specifically Native North Americans from white hands. But I wonder: How much of the spiritual trauma is caused by ‘ancestral memories’ or ‘genetic trauma’, versus how much of it is historical learning? Trigger warning: Some descriptions of medieval and Native American tortures and violence follow. I have a horse in this race myself, as I stated earlier. After reading about witches and fueling my nightmares with old horror movies, I became a modern-day Pagan over thirty years ago. I’ve witnessed and felt that same toxic confusion between the nightmarish abuses of centuries past, with the aggressive feelings and sometimes downright loathing for people today — modern men and the Catholic Church (the primary villains of the Witches’ Narrative). You see it when some female writers recount the tortures of the damned for moderns, in case we weren’t aware of how they ripped flesh from bones with red hot pincers or how the strappado worked. Let’s pour lemon juice on our wounds by describing in gruesome detail burning rods driven up vaginas, iron cages over hot coals, the rack tearing female joints apart like a hungry warrior with a leg of mutton. And yeah, they did those things to Jews, Muslims, atheists, heretics, and other assorted ‘not the right kind of Christians’. By the time you were done reading that shit, you were ready to firebomb your local St. Peter’s. Our angry feelings also bled over to modern men, most of whom, as far as we knew, thought the Spanish boot was something worn by hipster metrosexuals. We conflated the abuses of patriarchal dead guys with priests who no longer torture or burn women at the stake. I might arguably have my own ‘inherited genetic witch trauma’, as my genealogy stems primarily from France, a hotbed of witchmania, as well as England and Germany. England was a better place to be accused, Germany the worst. England eschewed the cruelest tortures, and preferred hanging for execution; Germany refined maximizing human suffering to a hellish art form and death by stake-burning took much longer. And they managed to make it even worse while you waited to die. Don’t ask. Just don’t. But I can’t say my dreams aren’t a direct result of my early childhood books and movies, and my draw to Wicca may be laid directly at the feet of an old Wiccan boyfriend in Massachusetts, where Paganism is no longer an executable offense. Why isn’t anyone who doesn’t read history books experiencing intergenerational ‘inherited trauma’? American blacks speak of the damage caused them by the American slave system, but never of the ancient system that existed in pre-colonial Africa. Nor does any modern black woman, to my knowledge, claim ‘ancestral’ damage stemming from a 2,000-year-old legacy of one of the worst human rights abuses ever, believed to have originated in Africa: Female genital mutilation. Where is epigenetic legacy of pre-European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Eastern Asian slavery, along with FGM? American slavery ended in the 1860s; FGM, along with slavery, is still practiced in some parts of Africa today. As for horrible slave ‘memories’, we are all likely descended from slaves. It’s a universal institution, spanning thousands of years and just about every single human community. We are blind to probably more than a few slave owners and traders in our own family trees. Black Americans’ genealogies, sundered by the slave trade, disappear only a few generations back, so they need never confront their own ugly past on the other side of the auction block: When their ancestors bought, sold and traded other human beings. Then there’s pre-European Indigenous violence. Again, don’t ask. But if you insist, go here. I’ll give you the thumbnail sketch: Mass murder, roasting alive, rape, torture, shit with pointy sticks you don’t want to know about, slavery (of course) and cannibalism. And that shit was just a few hundred years ago. Native Americans experienced horrendous genocide efforts from European colonists, but no one ever expresses ancient memories of being slowly roasted over a fire by warriors who looked a lot like themselves. Perhaps today’s slavery-traumatized modern blacks have done it to themselves with their own historical research, and, does mishandling that knowledge cause them to excoriate the wrong people? Are there better ways for all of us to handle knowledge of ancient abuses against our forebearers? I believe we must never forget history; we can never know too much, we must drill down forever deeper for new insights into the human condition and behavior; where we’ve come from, where we are, where we’re going. As ugly and traumatic as it is to revisit the trauma of slavery, or witch hunts, the danger lies in allowing ourselves to feel too victimized and even worse, to confuse the descendants with the villains of those dark times. The new conflation of ‘white supremacy’ with all white people today I believe is fed by an unhealthy preoccupation with the slavery era. I mean, we fought a damn war over it, people! It drives misplaced black aggression, confusing white people today with the slave owners of the past. As bad as modern, true white supremacists are, they’re a much tinier representation of white Americans. There are plenty of reasons for black Americans and women to be angry; but not for something no one supports anymore. It’s counterproductive to add needless anger aimed at moderns for things that happened generations ago. Women should be angry at patriarchal abuses today, but no longer for the wheel or the rack or Vincent Price’s famous pendulum. It makes no sense to be angry at Catholic priests anymore for abuses against women they haven’t practiced in hundreds of years; let’s instead excoriate them for the way they’re abusing children now. I don’t frankly care whether any of us are suffering ‘epigenetic’ or ancestral trauma. It’s the entire story of human history: Humans treating each other like absolute shit since we came down from the trees. We can be outraged by the oppression and cruelties of the past while keeping it in our modern-day perspective. Let’s continue drilling down deep, understanding the prejudices and conscious or unconscious biases that drove our ignorant ancestors, and recognize we all descend from cruel, stupid human beings, and that we’re not as morally far removed from them as we’d like to think. The baying human jackals of X and Instagram—on the right and the left—greatly resemble those whose cries arose for Nero’s circuses and Shakespeare’s bear-baiters. Human trafficking is also universal, including in your own country. Anyone who watches porn is pretty certainly supporting human slavery. Yes, we’re so much more civilized now. I will join the iconoclastic Coleman Hughes and other human progressives who encourage a return to sane, common-sense social justice values while we pull down ‘antiracism’s’ false idols: DEI, ‘Doing the work’, which too many of their own refuse to do, and ‘tolerance’, but only for themselves and their opinions. I’m done with the wounds of the past. The dreams have stopped screaming. I no longer live in the seventeenth century, and I hope ‘antiracists’ emigrate from there too. Trust me, for all its faults, the 21st-century is waaaaay better. 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!

This is for everyone who denies trans-identified males are a threat to women in private spaces. I've found some who are. I’m losing patience fast with the ‘trans ally’ perpetual ignorance about the documented dangers of allowing trans-identified men (TiMs) into women’s private spaces. Talk to the ‘woke’ about sexual predators masquerading as women to access places men were forbidden before, and you’ll find a wall of DGAFery  and a veritable Moron Tabernacle Choir of defensive ‘I never heard of that!’ That’s when skepticism struggles out of the dark hidey-holes of their brains and they need ‘cites’, ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’ that male bodies are a danger to women no matter how they ‘identify’. Trans allies never seem to require evidence  for things like obstructed transition teen suicide, but whatever. I have zero tolerance for woke ‘progressives’ who claim allegiance to women’s rights and freedoms, but turn all pissy when we draw the line for men at the hallowed doors of our rooms for getting semi- or fully-naked. The men fighting so hard to get into these places are not  gender dysphoric. They’re fetishists, sexual opportunists , and in the worst cases, predators. Particularly those who ‘identify’ as trans immediately after criminal conviction. And most especially those who landed in prison in the first place because they are convicted sex offenders. ‘Progressives’ can’t fathom the no-brainer that allowing people to ‘identify’ as something they’re not and using the toilet corresponding to their ‘feeling’ will be used by some  TiMs to gain access to places where they can more easily assault women and children. “That never happens!” Progressives feign ignorance when I cite research that TiMs exhibit nearly no difference in criminality  and violence than male-identifying men. It’s not rocket science; they’re men underneath the dress, and most importantly between the ears. But they never heard of that research! Progressives can be remarkably ignorant about a subject they have strong opinions about. Crime statistics are now skewed by a seeming rise in sexual violence committed by women because of the insistence on treating TiMs rapists and predators as female. A few brave news sites are properly gendering people with penises who shove their dicks into unconsenting orifices just like, you know, males. But most refer to ‘transwoman’ defendants as ‘she’ and even in court, female victims are often forced to refer to their accused with female pronouns. This has falsely increased the ‘rape by female’ crime stat by misgendering male rapists as female. Not to mention a further victory  for misogynist transactivists for forcing an already-humiliated woman to further bend to male desires and spread her forced lie on the stand in compliance. I’ve created a Resources section on my Substack nav bar where you’ll find this along with other articles I’ve written one can use to debunk the woke illiberal left professing ignorance of (whatever). I couldn’t find a convenient website or list chronicling the sexual predations of TiMs so I can send a massive citation to the selectively skeptical. So I compiled my own. It doesn’t include all trans crimes, like trans mass shootings or TiMs assaulting males, or trans-identified women. The purpose of this list is to demonstrate why males can’t be trusted in women’s private spaces. They’re segregated because some  men are sexual predators, and we don’t know who. Except in prison, where the crimes they committed are well-known. It’s only TiMs driving this push. They cite safety concerns but they resist the solution of third bathrooms or changing rooms. Why is that? Here’s something for ‘trans allies’ to consider: Every time a man commits a crime while trans, or transitions after arrest when it’s clear he’s going to prison, it increases the statistics for trans crime. Even when he commits it before transitioning, and especially if he commits a sex crime in a female prison, it becomes linked to the trans predator crime statistics and adds to the anti-trans narrative for those dreaded right-wing critics who jump all over these stories like a drag queen on a new pastel wig color. It further adds to the narrative that transwomen are or are prone to sexual predation and many, in fact, are not. It sure doesn’t help the trans ‘grooming’ reputation , deserved or not, either. Here’s something else for overly-defensive non-criminal TiMs and their allies to consider: How long do you think you can sweep these stories under the rug? How credible do you think you look when you deny the obvious? Why aren’t you joining others in pointing out how most ‘trans prisoners’ are trans-for-convenience, to get into women’s prisons? These guys are ruining your reputation! If you really don’t want to be lumped in with sexual predators, SPEAK OUT, BITCHES!!! I’ve arranged this list into four sections: Criming Before Trans, Criming After Trans, Criming In Prison and Women Speak Out. That last includes articles about the terrorism female inmates experience with ‘trans’ convicted sexual predators in their environment. This is by no means a comprehensive list; I haven’t obsessively looked for trans crimes, but when I see one I save it. I want to make something absolutely, positively, beyond all shadow of a doubting Thomas crystal clear: NOT ALL TiMs ARE SEXUAL PREDATORS. Countless TiMs go about their business every day without sexually assaulting anyone. This list is NOT meant to damn all TiMs. It’s to refute baseless claims that women have nothing to fear from strange men in places historically exclusive of men because human males have a long, ugly, millennia-long documented history of not being able to control their sexual urges. And we never know which ones to trust, so we ban them all. That includes you, TiMs. If that’s your biggest life challenge, it’s a First World Problem. My documentation process I’ve done my best to document these as accurately as I can. If I can’t verify a story enough I don’t include it. Right-wing news is where most of these stories emerge, as the left-wing media only acknowledges it when it can no longer be ignored. If there’s any there there, more reliable news sources at the time  or shortly after will feature it, and I use those. A lot of the information comes from feminist websites like Reduxx, and this is where one can find the most details. Telling the truth about trans anything when it doesn’t reflect well on their victimhood narrative is extremely difficult to get left-leaning websites to cover, as Lisa Selin-Davis  at BROADview in Brief  writes in her stellar article Why It's So Hard for the Mainstream Media to Get This Story Right . The left and factual information about trans: It’s like feeding spinach to a toddler. It’s difficult to know what to believe anymore because even formerly reliable sources, like Associated Press and Reuters, and once-respected science journals, have been drinking the social justice Kool-Aid and ignoring valid discussions in more right-leaning media about, for example, the lack of scientific evidence behind gender-affirming care or the teen suicide myth. The left can’t be trusted much either, just as the right can’t be trusted on climate change or Donald Trump. Let me know what you think. If there’s a better source for a story, or you think the story shouldn’t be included, let me know and why with supporting evidence or at least a good logical argument . My documentation process I’ve done my best to document these as accurately as I can. If I can’t verify a story enough I don’t include it. Right-wing news is where most of these stories emerge, as the left-wing media only acknowledges it when it can no longer be ignored. If there’s any there there, more reliable news sources at the time  or shortly after will feature it, and I use those. A lot of the information comes from feminist websites like Reduxx, and this is where one can find the most details. Telling the truth about trans anything when it doesn’t reflect well on their victimhood narrative is extremely difficult to get left-leaning websites to cover, as Lisa Selin-Davis  at BROADview in Brief  writes in her stellar article Why It's So Hard for the Mainstream Media to Get This Story Right . The left and factual information about trans: It’s like feeding spinach to a toddler. It’s difficult to know what to believe anymore because even formerly reliable sources, like Associated Press and Reuters, and once-respected science journals, have been drinking the social justice Kool-Aid and ignoring valid discussions in more right-leaning media about, for example, the lack of scientific evidence behind gender-affirming care or the teen suicide myth. The left can’t be trusted much either, just as the right can’t be trusted on climate change or Donald Trump. Let me know what you think. If there’s a better source for a story, or you think the story shouldn’t be included, let me know and why with supporting evidence or at least a good logical argument . Criming Before Transition Stephen Terence Wood (Karen White)  - UK - Transgender woman who sexually assaulted inmates jailed for life - The Guardian, 10.11.18. The U.K.'s most notorious trans-identified male had a long ugly history of sexual violence against women and children and was one of the first 'transwomen' to be sent to a women's prison, where he proceeded to rape two inmates. Daniel Lee Smith (Zera Lola Zombie)  - Oregon - Murdered his girlfriend  - Wanted transfer to female prison  - 09.11.23 Thomas Preston Lamb (Michelle Renee Lamb)  - Kansas - He kidnapped and murdered a woman in 1969 and then kidnapped another in 1970. He was serving three consecutive life sentences when he turned trans at the ripe old age of 81 and was quietly moved into a woman’s prison (duh). He blamed his crimes on his gender confusion. His full murder case is in the Kansas City Public Library. David Ayrton (Davina Ayrton)  - Transgender woman jailed for raping teenager (while still a man) - England - 03.04.16 Criming After Transition Freddie Christian Trenchard (Alyssa Christine Trenchard)  - England - BBC - Raped a woman while trans - 10.30.23 Gabrielle Alejandro Gentile (Barbie Kardashian)  - Ireland - Irish Times - Imprisoned for threatening to rape, torture and murder his own mother - 04.27.23 No birth name (Daniela D)  - Netherlands - Extremely violent TiM inmate moved to women's prison - 12.04.23 Adam Graham (Isla Bryson)  - Scotland - Found guilty of raping two women - BBC - 01.24.23 No birth name (Samantha Norris)  - England - Facing kiddie porn charges after being acquitted of exposing his penis to 11-year-old girls - MSN - 01.26.23 No birth name - (Maria Childres)  - Kentucky - Trans-Identified Male Accused Of Sexually Abusing Infant Will Be Represented By Trans Activist Lawyer - WPSD Local 6 - 02.07.23 Jamie Kevin Harold Waller (Abigail Walker)  - Sex offender back in prison after messaging underage girls on Facebook - Yahoo News Canada - 01.24.24 Darren Merager (No trans name)  - Serial flasher just can’t stop exposing his dick to women. This article is about his most recent non-sexual offense arrest last year, but chronicles his long history of indecent exposure in women’s-only spa changing room - California - 12.15.23 Cody D’Entremont (Desiree Anderson)  - Suspect arrested after report of sexual assault at women's shelter   - Ontario, Canada - 04.19.23 No real name (Rachel Queen Burton)  - TikTok transwoman star pleads guilty to child sex abuse offenses - Australia - 02.06.24 The alleged unnamed Saskatoon guy , or maybe transwoman, in the Shaw Centre girls’ changing room - Sasktachewan, Canada - 03/08/23. Allegedly, on January 27th of this year, some male person wandered around naked in the women’s changing room. The Saskatoon Council says the incident was misrepresented on social media, which is entirely possible, but won’t say exactly what did occur. What seems fairly certain, though, is that they’re committed to keeping the changing rooms open to people choosing depending on how they identify. Which sounds like something happened, or maybe it didn’t, but no matter, because if something happens there, or again, the Council will just tell critics to stop being transphobic. Sean Patrick Smith (Shauna Smith)  - Transgender woman charged with voyeurism in Target dressing room - Idaho - 07.14.16 Christopher Hambrook (Jessica)  - A convicted sex offender assaulted women in two Toronto homeless shelters, claiming to be a transwoman. It happened in 2012 so I’m having a hard time finding a reliable source for it (The Toronto Sun seems to have covered it the most but they’re not reliable) but I do find the incident cited in more reliable sources. - Toronto, 2012 Bathroom incidents (No names, high school students)  - After assault, Edmond transgender bathroom policy questioned - Oklahoma - 12.8.22 - An Edmond police report indicates an Oct. 26 assault in the girls’ bathroom at Memorial High School in which a girl was ‘badly beaten’ by a male student who identified as a female. Miguel Martinez (No trans name)  - Transgender man convicted of assaulting a 10-year-old girl in a bathroom - Montana - 10.20.17 No male name (Katie Dolatowski)  - 18-year-old transwoman sexually assaults underage girl in a supermarket bathroom - Scotland - 02.06.19 (Unnamed attacker)  - Woman who fought after transwoman attacker in a public park bathroom tells anti-trans group to stop using her story - Washington - 03.16.17 It’s important to note that TiMs are also attacked in public restrooms. That’s not okay either, regardless of whether they belong there or not. Clearly, the solution to this fiasco is third bathrooms, but certain TiMs don’t want that. Gee, I wonder why they’re not more concerned for their own safety. Like, you know, women are. Criming while trans in prison Strawberry Hampton and Janiah Monroe  - Illinois - Accused of prison rape - WTTW News - 02.19.20 Ramel Blount (Diamond Blount)  - New York - Trans prisoner on Rikers Island - raped female prisoner - Bronx County District Attorney Report (NY) - 04.25.22 Jermaine Gibson (Cyntara)  - New Jersey - TiM accused of raping female prisoner after his repeated sexual harassment - Reduxx - 05.29.23 Jonathan Roberston (Siyaah Skylit)  - California - Female inmates report brutal rape of female inmate by TiM inmate- Reduxx - 05.31.22. Trans allies, including Pink News, had successfully petitioned to move him from an all-male prison  where he lived in fear of his life, allegedly. (Unnamed) - Mexico - Trans-identified male with sexual violence history assaults female inmate  - Reduxx - 08.19.23 Grow Some Labia! is a reader-supported publication. I lean left, but not so far my brains fall out. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Women Speak Out Unisex changing rooms put women in danger of sexual assault, data reveals  - Independent UK - Sunday Times is better but paywalled - 09.02.18 Why transactivists keeping going to bat for rapists and murderers  - Eliza Mondegreen - Substack - 01.26.23 Transgender prison policy:  Women prisoners speak out - Woman’s Place UK - 11.04.21 Female prisoners sue California  for putting TiMs in women's prisons - 04.14.23 Men's Safety, Women's Danger: An Incarcerated Woman Speaks Out  - No sex crimes alleged, just a lot of female prisoner terror - 05.06.23 Other sources: Trans Crime UK  - Extensively documents crimes committed by trans individuals in the UK. Relies heavily on right-wing sources so I would remind you: Copy and paste the names, both birth and trans if the article contains them, into Google and see if you find a better source. The right doesn’t always get it right either. To my knowledge, no transmen are requesting to be sent to male prisons. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but I’ll be adding to it as I run across more stories. 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!

Something we should ask ourselves. Since a lot of speech is protected, ugly or not. Just call me Simone Geezernthal, Nazi Hunter. The Atlantic has been preoccupied with an alleged ‘Nazi problem’ on Substack. If you’re not familiar with the hubbub, Bub, they and their fellow journo lackeys keep writing about how Substack is infested with Nazis. Last fall some guy named Casey Newton on some popular tech newsletter I’m not familiar with left Substack quite raucously in a PR-fueled blaze of incandescent virtue signalling, huffing and puffing that Substack refused to do anything about its ‘Nazi problem’. The Guardian announced that he took ‘more than 170,000 subscribers elsewhere,’ which is a bit hyperbolic as probably most of them stayed put, while following Newton elsewhere for his work, unless they wanted to join the flamboyant anti-Nazi parade out the door. What actually materially departed was Newton’s paying subscribers, which is how Substack makes money. The Nazi naysayers hightailed it to Ghost, a famously highly-decentralized platform which, as Freddie deBoer pointed out, allows for no central moderation which means it’s pretty surely a hate-orgy free-for-all. Nor, as he notes, is it easy to tell whether a content provider is using Ghost or not, so for all Newton knows, the next time he goes Nazi-hunting, he may not need to leave his own ‘hood. Newton is almost certainly now in the company of far more Nazis and other unsavouries than he was on Substack. I learned about the fascism flap after finding an open letter to Substack encouraging the urge to purge. I was like, “I didn’t know we had any Nazis.” It was probably news to most, and, like me, figured it was just woke snowflake brains melting down over a deadnaming or a positive comment about Tucker Carlson. But no, The Atlantic and other Nazi hunters were talking about real Nazis, people who voice standard Nazi points of view even if you can’t find the verboten N-word in their publications. One pub, from The Atlantic story, and run by a genuine white supremacist, had a Nazi ‘sonnenrad’ profile image (it looks like the world’s most hideous spider). These weren’t woke ‘Nazis’ defined as ‘anyone who disagrees with us’. Substack, in response to the journalistic frenzy, did in fact purge a few genuinely Nazi accounts they claimed violated their Terms of Service, brought to their attention by The Atlantic’s story. I had encountered one pretty suspiciously Nazi dude already, but he found me. He’d called me a ‘kikesucking Zionist asswhore’, responding to a comment I’d left somewhere, sympathetic to post-October 7 Israel. The guy’s response was rife with antisemitism and what I can pretty confidently call some genuine expressions of hardcore, old-school, unquestionable Nazi sympathies. He’d gone through all the comments on the article and flamed others too. I calmly blocked him and had a lovely breakfast with my fellow Zionist asswhores. If there were any other Nazis on Substack, they didn’t show up in my feed. Substack's Terms of Service Like most blogging or social media platforms, Substack feeds its readers undiscovered content based on their tastes. Since my own skew heavily toward rational liberal and conservative thought, I don’t see extremist content. Not even woke crap, which I criticize regularly. Substack really does function rather effectively as an intellectual/ideological bubble. Most Substack writers and readers won’t see nutsy Nazis either. What us First Amendment lovers love about Substack is it’s one of the few blogging platforms left that doesn’t politically censor speech. Every platform has to censor at least a little. But Substack’s idea of protected speech more closely resembles the Constitution’s rather than their more authoritarian ‘woke’ competitors, like Medium, Substack’s biggest competitor. Where the woke rule is where free speech goes to die. Substack’s ToS states, “We host and celebrate a diverse range of thought and discussion,” and as far as I can tell, except for violence-spewing Nazis, that’s true. I’ve not once been called down, taken down, or excoriated by Substack for anything anti-woke I’ve written, and my articles critical of misogynist transactivism would melt down half of Medium memberships’ brains. Substack’s policies on ‘hate speech’ read like most other platforms’ with one key difference: Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition. What’s different is its definition of offending behavior as ‘credible threats of physical harm to people….” Credible threats. Like, “Kill all the gay blind left-handed Mexican trans-plumbers for Jesus,” not criticism of transactivists, Black Lives Matter, atheists, religious fundamentalists, LGBTQ, Fox News, Antifa, or people who love Israel/Palestinians/Hamas more than you think they should. I’m guessing if anyone’s whining to Substack that ‘Grow Some Labia is literally killing transpeople!!! with her g̶e̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶r̶i̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ transphobic articles,’ that Substack support staff, whiskey tumblers at their elbow, are ignoring them, or explaining that I haven’t violated their ToS by literally killing or urging others to literally kill transpeople. I’m an old-school free speech advocate. I want its boundaries to be as narrowly interpreted as our Founding Fathers, and Substack does. My no-nos include “From sea to shining sea, America will be free—of n——rs”, “We’ll pull another Jan 6 if Biden steals another election and this time we burn the fucker down!”, or “So-and-so is a pedophile,” (when they’re not). I got to wondering where the remaining, ToS-abiding Nazis are on Substack. Where have all the Nazis gone, short time passing? I began with the Nazi guy who’d flamed me at Thanksgiving. I found his publication and he is, so far, the most unquestionably blatant Nazi I’ve found. His pub features a hook-nosed Jewish cartoon character with a crazy-ass GIF incorporating a spiral, Satanism, Judaism, and Hillary Clinton. His music tastes indicate I’m not the only ‘kike-sucking Zionist asswhore’; count Miley Cyrus in my company. Substack’s Nazis tend to keep a low profile. Several are sparse on content and subscribers. I kept searching on popular Nazi and white nationalist keywords for ‘posts’, ‘people’ and ‘publications’ and couldn’t find much. I found a few via the original Atlantic/bandwagon-jumpers feeding frenzy. One publication claimed to be “a small professional team of pro-White advocates centred around a single mission: bringing a pro-White perspective to analysis of both foreign and domestic policy.” Lots of anti-Israel content and ‘replacement theory’ white nationalist crapola. Their recommendations led to another publication which complains about wealthy Zionists and the left and offers a dissection of Jewish power. Another recommendation led me straight to a genuine Fascist newsletter, which included book recommendations for the budding Fascist, an article about Christianity and Fascism, and promises analysis and discourse on Third Positionism, a neo-fascist political ideology. The easiest way to find Nazis on Substack is to dig up a Nazi and follow his Recommendations links. Two more goose-stepping goobers I found via the Atlantic article were described as practically dripping with antisemitism. I didn’t delve deep into the dismal dregs of Deutschblütig drek, and I did find some pretty straightforward antisemitism but I wouldn’t exactly call it a SwastikaSturm. I’m not defending it, and I wouldn’t mind if the Substacker effed off and took his shit to TruthSocial, but finding these and other Nazis was sort of like exploring the city you live in and finding a gang of skinheads in some far corner of town where you never go and probably could never find again unless you saved the coordinates in your GPS. Another publication was run by the notorious white nationalist Richard Spencer and denigrated Einstein as not being all that bright, frankly, while claiming that Aryans were mostly responsible for producing geniuses. There were also some podcast hysterics about Jews in caves in New York, a big not-news story if you missed it, about one actual tunnel underneath a Brooklyn synagogue that had the right wing hyperventilating all over social media. The publication that caused similar respiratory distress for The Atlantic, the one with the big ugly spider image, described itself as a ‘pro-white think tank and publishing house’, denies that valuing and writing about one’s own race is ‘dangerous’ or ‘supremacist’, and notes that Indigenous Americans regularly rally around and support their own communities. What The Atlantic failed to mention was how sparse that publication was, with an interview with some white supremacist dude, an ‘about’ page and another hook-nosed Jew caricature. I’m not sure how much of a ‘Nazi problem’ Substack ever had, really; supposedly, some publications gone bye-bye had thousands of subscribers, including a considerable number of paying ones. I suspect Casey Newton’s departed paid subscriptions hurt more than the Nazi lucre Substack shut down, but I could be wrong. Substack spokescritters have stated they don’t like Nazi content but if it doesn’t violate their Terms of Service they’ll leave it be. That won’t make anyone who viscerally loathes Nazis happy, especially Jewish readers and writers. But it does mean a lot other speech is protected. Including Jews’. And ours. Because we are all someone else’s ‘Nazis’, and some of them are more powerful than The Atlantic. Whose Nazi are you? This is important because censors never stop with genuine Nazis: Eventually, we all become their Nazis. In 2021, Substack was attacked in the popular press for allowing ‘transphobic’ writers, and transactivists launched a campaign to pressure them to remove the writers they found offensive. Transgender Map listed many respected, respectable Substack writers who wrote ‘anti-trans’ (i.e.,, gender critical) content. Substack is one of the few platforms that refused to back down. It’s clear, reviewing the list of ‘anti-trans’ writers, that transactivists’ gripes also include simply anyone who writes contrary to ‘woke’ narratives in general; Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel is mentioned, and he never writes about transgenderism that I’ve ever seen. Transgender Map disapprovingly cites his founding of Heterodox Academy and promotion of ‘intellectual diversity’ and challenging ‘enforced’ academic orthodoxies, which it claims are ‘buzzwords’ for ‘people who want academic freedom without academic responsibility of accountability.’ They also spuriously link him to some sort of ‘cover-up’ of some alleged ‘fabricated case report’ linked to a transsexual researcher they don’t like without explaining exactly what Haidt had to do with it, if anything. These are the ‘Nazis’ of which I am part: Transactivism-critical feminist, defender of free speech and challenger of ‘entrenched orthodoxies’, and who has been deplatformed by Medium, along with Vocal and X-Twitter wannabe CounterSocial for being too trans-critical. We forget that offensive speech is also covered by the First Amendment, as evidenced by the ACLU’s most (in)famous court case, the right of Nazis to protest in Skokie, Illinois in the 1970s, where many Holocaust survivors lived. (They ended up marching in a Chicago park instead by mutual agreement). Damn them all you want - and many of us did back then - but almost certainly, the speech the CensorNazis come for next is your own, and censorship has become much more fashionable for left-wing authoritarians in recent years. The ‘hate speech’ I’ve been banned for was for ‘transphobia’, meaning someone didn’t like my gender-critical commentary—absolutely protected by the First Amendment, but not required for public platforms to abide by. There’s an uncomfortably prescient quote from the story I referenced about the Nazi brouhaha in Illinois nearly fifty years ago. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League argued against the Nazi demonstration in full regalia because it would cause Holocaust survivors to relive their emotional trauma. “We responded,” Nazi defense lawyer David Goldberger—yes, David Goldberger—wrote on the 2020 ACLU memoir of the case, “that no one who objected [to] the Nazis had to attend their demonstration and that if claims of subjective harm could shut down a public assembly then anyone who objected to a controversial demonstration could prevent it by asserting it would inflict emotional harm.” Exactly like many arguments made by woke fragile flowers today to justify shutting down opinions or speech they don’t like, claiming the flimsiest of flimsy pretenses of emotional ‘harm’, as though they could be destroyed by an argument they can’t logically refute. Some of them even believe words can murder, which is where the accusations of ‘literally killing transpeople’ come from, against people who would literally be in jail if they had. Apart from clearly unprotected speech, like advocating violence against others, it’s too easy to say that this speech is fine, but that speech is not, and mission creep sets in. Holocaust survivors, and Jews overall, can argue genuine mental harm for having to tolerate Nazis, but less genuinely trans-identified males, themselves demonstrably abusive, now claim ‘harm’ from feminist resistance to their aggressive misogyny. Although I rarely run across actual transactivists on Substack, I did happen across a ‘woke’ one the other day bitterly lamenting Pamela Paul’s courageous article (for the otherwise trans-submissive New York Times) focusing on detransitioning kids and questioning whether their initial hasty transitions were justified. Transactivists know the jig is almost up. I doubt the whiny trans guy knows I even exist, and I’m not going to go poking his bear. I’m his ‘Nazi’, and on a different platform, he and his kind have successfully petitioned to censor this ‘transphobe’ writer and her ‘hateful’ content (all of which you can find here), as they have to so many others like me who offend not just the trans set but other cherished woke dogma. The folks who want to deplatform Nazis are almost always the same ones looking to deplatform anyone who runs afoul of their extremist illiberal worldview. Nazis are the easy target but they’re only the first shot across the bow. I blocked the kook-sucking anti-Zionist asswhore who besmirched our comment threads; he slimed back to the grody grotto he oozed out from. I’m done hunting Nazis and I’m quite grateful to Substack for upholding free speech standards. It’s comforting to know that unless the Woke Pod People leave pods in Substack’s founders’ beds one night, I’ll be able to snark my way through wokeness, MAGAs, transactivism, the Paw-Paws election, fluffy-brained feminism and even Hitler himself. In fact, making fun of our enemies is the best way to take their power. Thankfully, Substack’s got our backs. Real-life Jew Dick Shawn camps up hippie Hitler on stage in 1968’s The Producers, which made fun of Hitler and Nazis. It was made by a whole bunch of Jews including producer Mel Brooks, starring fellow Jews Gene Wilder, Zero Mostel, Kenneth Mars (who played the Hitler-worshipping ex-Nazi) Renee Taylor, and Jehovah knows who else. 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!

Gay activists brought this on themselves with over-inclusivity. They need to set some boundaries, and NOW. “My husband isn’t behind gay rights,” Janie, our church organist said back in my teen years. “He wonders if it’s a slippery slope. What’s next, necrophilia? Sex with animals? Sex with children?” “It would never go that far,” I replied. “That other stuff is just gross. Dead bodies and animals are against the law! And no one thinks it’s okay to have sex with children!” Forgive me my lack of prescience, it was 1980, and I was 17. Fast-forward forty-three years and things have changed. Rather a lot. Gay rights activists are having a come-to-Jesus moment, if you’ll pardon the expression. They need to draw some clear boundaries, and fast. Because conservatives, and especially Christians, have never been down with going down on thy fellow man, and gay men’s cruelest adversaries have for many decades spread what we might call the ‘blood libel’ for gay men, the old conservative canard that they’re out to seduce and convert kids to gayism. They’re not, but the optics aren’t good now, thanks to transactivists. LGBTQ has acquired persistent grooming accusations in the last several years, although it’s important to note that grooming can also include manipulating another for one’s own personal purposes , not necessarily sexual. But transactivism’s aggressive focus on children makes many look suspiciously pedo-y. LGBTQ is no more prone to pedophilia than straight people, regardless of how they dress, but they have to deal with this ugly resurrected optic. The historical liberal inability to say No to anyone persuaded the alphabet soup gang to allow the one letter heretofore prohibited - the ‘H’. This permitted entry, unintentionally or not, of a fair number of heterosexual male-to-female (M2F) transwomen, not all of whom were ‘gender dysphoric’, regardless of what they claimed. Historically, a particular male sexual fetish called autogynephilia has accounted for a fair number of transsexuals (now identifying as transgender) according to transsexualism research by pioneers Dr. Raymond Blanchard and Dr. Michael Bailey, author of The Man Who Would Be Queen . It’s much easier to garner public acceptance of a ‘dysphoria’ than for a sexual fetish. Particularly when kids are around. Related: Conservative Men In Conservative Dresses: The Article That Described Today’s Trans Movement Over 20 Years Ago - The Distance, Eva Kurilova The unintended consequence of this inclusivity unwittingly opened the door to certain heterosexual men unconcerned with how their child-focused behavior might be interpreted or affect the movement at large. It bat-signalled pedophiles to prepare to breach the LGBTQ fortress—again. Because guess what, this shit has happened before. Gay activists and other progressives are slow learners. Transactivists, with their queer-positive agenda, are the reason the optics aren’t good, as indoctrination and grooming is clearly present. Grooming isn’t always about sex with children. Catholic families have ‘groomed’ sons to become priests. One can groom (or attempt to) another for many different objectives. But it’s become closely associated with grooming children for sexual purposes, and that’s an image most LGBTQ know to stay miles away from. To be clear: Neither transactivism nor the transgender community is a hellhole of undercover pedophiles, with one exception: The prison system, where, in Canada, 44% of transwomen prisoners have a history of sexual offenses, nearly half in England and Wales, and half in the United States . But that’s a different story since male prisoners often identify after conviction in order to get admitted to women’s prisons. Apart from that, there’s no data to indicate non-prisoner transactivists, drag queens or gay men are especially attracted to children. No more than straight men who wear dude clothes and do dude stuff. Bring in the fetishists In the early years, the rainbow acronym wasn’t longer than George Santos’s impressive resume. In the beginning, it was LGB - Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual - but over the years, it’s grown into a late night comedian’s joke - LGBTQIA2+, and it now includes, indirectly, the least marginalized group ever - H(etorosexual) men. Related: We’re Running Out Of Letters Of The Alphabet! - Anthony Eichenberger, Medium M2F transwomen attracted to women aren’t the only heterosexuals in the movement. F2M transmen, especially young former teenage girls, exploded exponentially in the past twelve years, which included a fair number of budding lesbians. Many detransitioned teens have claimed they realized later they were simply gay. But we don’t hear too much from F2Ms, gay or heterosexual. The activism is primarily on the biological male (M2F) side. LGB activists’ introduction of ‘T’ - Transsexual or today, Transgender - around 2000 brought the pedophile image problem back to gay men by association in a roundabout way. Perhaps it was progressive worship of holy political correctness, ‘inclusivity’, or simply pressure to conform and belong. Gay Pride parades have openly displayed sexual fetishism they share with heteros for many years - ‘kink’, ‘bears’, puppy hoods, ponyboys, BDSM. Perhaps gay activists didn’t realize just how hetero transsexualism was, heavily populated by autogynephiles and cross-dressers . Gay men have always been hypersensitive to the conservative smear that they seduce children, an image not helped with a four-decades-long Catholic priest scandal, which is far less gay than one might think. Not all male-on-male perpetrators are gay, especially in the Church. But fifty-four years after Stonewall launched the gay rights movement, ‘inclusivity’, ‘tolerance’, and ‘non-judgmentalism’, coupled with some monumental past pedophile screwups, leave homosexual men facing renewed allegations of sexual grooming, thanks to Trans, and here’s how. Pedos, Part Un In the late ‘80s the International Lesbian/Gay Association idiotically admitted NAMBLA to their ranks, later discovered and busted by ultra-conservative Republican US Senator Jesse Helms (1994). Embarrassment ensued. Pedos, Part Deux Britain’s Paedophile Information Exchange for ten years lobbied for the abolition of the age of sexual consent. Its founder was a gay college student who didn’t identify as a pedophile, but whose affair with a 15-year-old gay teenager revealed to him that perhaps they needed to legalize laws allowing older men to have sex with underage boys (or maybe girls too, but EWWWW! ) (Note: Adults who like teenagers are not pedophiles, but hebephiles, which may or may not be legal depending on age of consent laws in their area.) PIE was pretty closely associated with gay UK culture. One member’s pro-pedophile speech at a 1975 gay rights conference raised a few eyebrows, not to mention a minor media shitstorm when it argued for the ‘sexual liberation’ of children . A survey in the late ‘70s revealed that its members mostly favoured sex with girls aged 8-11 and boys aged 11-15. Charges of ‘gay recruitment’ tailed the gay rights movement like an obsessed private investigator for many years after. Liberal Feminists: Some child molesters aren’t as bad as others For sixteen years organized gangs of U.K. Pakistani Muslim men sexually abused and exploited young white girls, teaching liberals that the only thing worse than raping kids is ‘stigmatizing’ dark-skinned rapists. While this scandal didn’t include homosexuality or LGBTQ, ‘progressive’ feminists, customary LGBTQ ‘allies’, normalized heterosexual pedophilia that was, shall we say, less condemnatory than it would have been for ‘non-marginalized’ [ie., white] perpetrators. Makes you wonder who else is getting away with molesting kids because 'progressives’ are afraid to be called the dreaded ‘R(acist)’ word. Ladies, if you’re going to be raped, make sure it’s by white men, or ‘progressive’ feminists will ignore you. Social media, Part Un Not much later in the U.S., the ‘T’s Ed Wood-reminiscent straight men aggressively lobbied for increased trans rights. Trans grooming began on social media but wasn’t about adult-child sex; it was to promote and spread trans/gender ideology, primarily by teens and young adults, not older ones. Transactivists groomed malleable feminists and progressives to accept (undercover) male desires. It’s a long, slow, but largely dependable process. Then the schools… This is where grooming adults, especially parents, really got started. Transactivists introduced gender ideology into public education, teaching kids in elementary school they have to figure out what sex they are despite millions of years of baby humans not requiring any assistance from the Genderbread Person. Transactivists pushed an aggressive agenda based on queer theory and indoctrinated mostly progressive parents to go along. If any resisted , education activists called them ‘ right wingers’ and ‘fascists ’ and told kids not to tell mommy and daddy if they wanted new pronouns or to be treated as something they’re not. Just imagine how those same ‘progressive’ parents would react if they found there was a similarly aggressive push by Christian fundamentalists to instill literalist Bible ideology in their kids, especially if it was offered as a counterpoint to gender ideology indoctrination. Teachers, principals and education administrators colluded by not informing the parents if or when their child wished to be treated differently. Slowly education’s transactivist ‘ally’ foot soldiers have been chipping away at parents’ right to know , which has led to lawsuits in Maine , California , Michigan and Wyoming , along with red states banning or pulling back on ‘gender-affirming care’ for children, and a 1 Million March For Children across Canada in September. Meanwhile, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is fighting a requirement for parental permission before teachers use chosen pronouns. Then there’s the controversial right-left censorship tug-of-war over the kid’s book Genderqueer , which includes many ridiculously inappropriate images including one guy giving another a blowjob. Yes really . No, nothing recruit-y to see here. Social media, Part Deux Social media-induced gender dysphoria has played a huge role in the explosion of trans people. Tumblr pioneered the plethora of labels and pronoun sets and churned out new ‘genders’ and identities, while YouTube offered what appear to be borderline trans recruitment videos with generalities offered for why one might be ‘trans’. A non-binary person notes that ‘discomfort with puberty’ and feeling like ‘you might be different’ are signs you might be trans. Somehow, older generations went through this too without requiring hormone blockers or surgery. Online activists encourage children to question whether they were ‘born in the right body’ and teach them how to approach their parents with this ‘problem’, and what to do if they encounter resistance. ( Threaten to commit suicide! ) Some position themselves as a child’s alternative ‘family’, one they could leave their birth family for if they aren’t supportive. The many types of grooming It’s not hard to understand why people conflate kid-focused transactivism with pedo grooming. The two agendas have several common elements, like teaching parents to accept authority that’s not theirs, to not question the adults who influence their children, to encourage their children not to tell Mommy and Daddy ‘secrets’ they won’t like, to help them source forbidden items like chest binders and puberty blockers, and using persuasive rhetoric to isolate children from their families, encouraging them to trust the stranger in the YouTube or TikTok video rather than the people who love them. The media has twisted its BVDs and Victoria’s Secrets into bunches trying to explain why transactivists aren’t actually ‘grooming’ kids for some nefarious sexual purpose. PolitiFact, an otherwise excellent resource for fact-checking the media and politicians, seems not to understand that grooming doesn’t only apply to describing pedo tactics, although that’s where it originated and is still strongly associated with it. It quoted David Finkelhor , a sociology professor and director of Crimes Against Children Research who defined grooming strictly as “a set of behaviors and manipulations that adults use to make it easier to introduce and complete sexual interactions with a child, without having to use physical force.” It misses that grooming can take other forms, sometimes connecting indirectly with pedophile objectives . One could argue that conservative religion grooms children by perpetuating a patriarchal structure that serves males by teaching young people to submit to male authority. While it’s not specifically about having sex with children, its norms nevertheless discourage young people from reporting sexual abuse by adults, especially those in direct authority like religious leaders or their aides. Another example might be child beauty pageants, long accused of grooming little girls and toddlers to sexualize themselves, offering what many regard as highly inappropriate performances that would be the envy of any drag queen. JonBenet Ramsey’s sexual abuse and murder is still unsolved 27 years later, and recent police attention has focused once again on a pedophile living in her neighborhood who may have been obsessed with the child who looked six going on twenty-six. The grooming image problem lies in the fact that transactivists have quite clearly been grooming children and parents to fit a murky gender agenda with unclear objectives. Some may be pedophiles with their own motives, but what’s much clearer is that with or without transactivist cooperation, pedophiles are busy rebranding while waiting for the right opportunity to apply for acceptability again, and transactivist narrative has groomed parents not to question their children, not to wonder whether an eight-year-old can know he’s ‘not supposed to be’ a boy, and that parents have no right to say no to or set boundaries for and around their own children. ‘MAPs’ A controversial doctor named Jacob Breslow on the board of a U.K. transchildren charity was forced to resign when a scandal erupted over a presentation he gave to a pedophile support group, in which he redefined pedophiles as ‘Minor Attracted Persons’ or MAPs. He compared masturbating and ‘cumming’ with a shoe to doing the same with a child, adding that it “requires a rethinking of both the child and of the person for whom the child is a sexual fantasy or partner." The charity, meanwhile, sent even underage kids breast binders on the sly, along with same-day cross-sex hormones, for kids with recalcitrant parents. Dr. Breslow’s pedo-friendly work sanitizing attraction to children may intersect shortly with parents groomed not to say No to their children. Parents have been taught to unquestioningly believe their children ‘know’ what’s allegedly best for themselves, and that they must accept new pronouns, names, and potentially fertility-destroying drugs and surgeries. The dangerous lesson primes parents to be ready for the day when they’re told, ‘It’s not your place to tell your child they can’t have sex with me. Children know what they want and need. Butt out.” [See: PIE, above.] And this just in: A pro-pedophile German activist group is demanding lesbians be removed from a Berlin Gay Museum exhibit claiming they have “submitted in every way to the anti-pedophile zeitgeist of the heterosexual mainstream.” Well at least lesbians can be counted on to defend kids, if not straight progressive feminists. The loudest voices in a large LGBTQ community where many are trans but neither activist, recruity nor groomy—have been encouraging us all to be more accepting, which is fine, transfolk have rights too, but it shouldn’t include a new class of sexual predators who already are a real threat to women and children, and especially female prisoners , where newly-transferred, newly-self-identified ‘transwoman’ prisoners exhibit high rates of prior sexual assault . ‘Woke’ initiatives to ‘respect’ male prisoners’ sudden trans identity has resulted in a spike in new ‘transwomen’ drawn directly from sexual predators. If these guys get out of prison and don’t drop the trans persona and offend again, it’s going to drive up trans sex crime statistics and greater public fear of transwomen. It’s unfortunate, because cross-dressers and autogynephiles may be fetishists, but their paraphilias have nothing to do with kids. Pedophilia is its own paraphilia, which can co-exist with others, but there’s no data to suggest other fetishes incline one towards children. In fact, the primary source of pedo-breeding may be freely-available kiddie porn , not LGBTQ membership. In the world outside prison, it’s the ‘T’, not the gay dudes, making the movement look predatory by association. It’s they who demand entrance to women’s-only safe spaces like bathrooms and changing rooms . The aggressive push by transactivists demonstrates how indisputably heterosexual male that corner of the trans movement is, as gay men have zero interest in seeing naked ladies, nor do they feel so ‘unsafe’ they need to use the ladies’ loo. I believe it’s also part of a greater political movement to force women to conform to male desires, which predatory heterosexual men have lost with modern feminism. Their allies are woke, illiberal and regressive ‘feminists’, easily manipulated by sexual predators. The LGBTQ ‘grooming’ problem isn’t just right-wing paranoia or moral panic. Many on the left have noted the similarities too. I’ve argued in the past that drag queens need to be mindful of similar concerns about themselves, and now those optics are focused on LGBTQ at large. It would greatly help if these transactivists were more respectful of parents’ rights to determine what education and socialization their child gets and not assume every parent who keeps a child home on Pride Day is necessarily raising a homophobe or transphobe-in-training. Grooming optics are a problem LGBTQ have created for themselves, and they can un-create it if they so choose. They need to know when to say No to aggressive transactivism. Or even kick out the ‘T’. They’ll get lots of support from unwoke feminists. And lesbians. I just gave my Pride flag, purchased at the 2010 Pride Parade, to a thrift shop as I find myself sort of embarrassed to have it now. I’m happy to re-adopt it someday if the movement cleans up its act. In the meantime, if you liked this post and want to see more, I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing!

The two bodies politic on the left and right have unleashed the dogs of hate on their two least favorite groups It was a feeling of déjà vu. Or maybe déjà Ju. Like, “There it is, now for the Jews.” The left’s cheerleaders for the Hamas attack seemed frighteningly familiar, even though I’m not Jewish. Oct. 7 unleashed the ugly boil of anti-Semitism that I’ve always known has festered beneath the surface of the left, just as Donald Trump unleashed it on the right with Charlottesville. I never truly recognized the depth of lefty Jew-hatred, but neither am I surprised by it. The left’s historical too-uncritical support for Palestinian ‘freedom’ has never seemed to have taken into account how deeply anti-Semitic they are, long before 1948, and that too many Palestinians believe they can’t be ‘free’ until all Jews are removed from their homeland (which is also the Jews’ homeland). The left’s commitment to antiracism and Indigenous rights has never seemed to include Jews. But racism is hunky-dory when they’re doing the Hamas happy dance, mislabeling Jews as white, conflating the Palestinians with historically enslaved American blacks, and wrapped up with growing illiberal racism against white people, including self-hating, guilt-ridden white progressives. I’ve never felt comfortable with the West’s ‘Palestinian freedom’ rap. It’s always seemed too suspiciously like a thin veneer for anti-Semitism. And now, here it is. Still, Israel isn’t above reproach I understand why many think the Palestinians have been abused, and how religious Zionism has sometimes veered into dangerous Jewish nationalism and anti-Islamism. I understand many on the Israeli right would rather see Palestinians pushed out from the river to the sea, and that Israel is primarily responsible for the humanitarian crisis that has emerged in Gaza, and that they keep telling Gazan civilians to evacuate somewhere else, and then shell that somewhere else. I understand that Netanyahu is a right-wing whack job and when he was re-elected last year, I thought, Ohhhh, this can’t be good for anyone, WTF, Israelis? Are you trying to start a war? Is 17,000+ dead Gazans and counting, only a third of which were enemy combatants, enough recompense for 1,200 horribly murdered Jewish civilians in early October? Apparently not. Can it all be blamed on Hamas’s human shields defense? Nuh-uh. Israel is reacting out of rage, with no one to reign them in. I remember reading about George Bush’s reaction on 9/11. I’m paraphrasing, but it came down to Let’s nuke the snot out of them, right fucking now. I understood his rage; I felt it myself, we all did; but I was still glad that cooler heads in his Cabinet reined him in. No, that’s not the right response. We can’t respond with rage. We have to be careful, think this thing through. Israel didn’t think this thing through. Bush could have started World War III that week, just as Israel and Hamas still might. What wasn’t clear to me before Oct. 7, though, is that the left had become so hateful that they could support Hamas. Yes, I expected they’d make the usual tugboat sounds— “Butbutbutbut all the ways Israelis have discriminated against or mistreated the Palestinians!”—yet it never occurred to me to believe they’d blame Israelis for a horrific attack of such diabolically considered cruelty, by a terrorist group who stands for everything progressive liberalism supposedly doesn’t. I guess I’ve been more naive about lefty anti-Semitism than righty anti-Semitism. Charlottesville didn’t surprise me. I understood how aligned with far-right nationalism and genuine white supremacy the Trump gang was and is. I always knew the left could be anti-Semitic, I just hadn’t realized they’d become virtually indistinguishable from the MAGAs. Maybe I just didn’t want to see the festering cesspool on my side of the political divide. The reason why a non-Jew like me is getting a sense of déjà vu is because something similar happened on the left for women several years ago: The gross, intense eruption of misogyny I’d underestimated on my own side as well. It’s always acceptable, for everyone, to throw Jews—and women—under the bus. The rise of transmisogyny I still have not yet come to grips with how much the ‘progressive’ left hates women. But it’s frighteningly clear they’re no more our allies than the Trumpers. They fancy themselves ‘feminist’ because they’re appalled at the destruction of Roe v. Wade. We share that much in common, still. Although I’m no longer certain if progressive men want it back because they believe women have a right to corporeal autonomy, or because it makes it easier for women to end a paternal inconvenience. The progressive left agrees that some men can be skeazeballs and need to rein in sexual harassment or objectification. But not all leftyboys are as feminist as advertised. Male ‘feminism’ can be an acquired mantle for horny dudes to score chicks. Certain men have built their own workaround for satisfying their sexual urges without women’s consent: The trans movement, powered primarily by adult human males appropriating womanhood. They’ve seized the opportunity to demand and then force women to submit to their sexual desires just as women mostly had to before ‘feminism ruined everything’. ‘Transwomen’ fight for access to women’s-only spaces. Like bathrooms, because they claim they’re not safe in male restrooms. So how come gay dudes can use them? Countless cases of transwomen using female-only spaces to gain access to potential sexual assault victims or to satisfy their fetishes have been documented: Domestic violence shelters, public restrooms, rape crisis centers and even women’s prisons. Crappy male athletes have successfully campaigned to join female sports teams and it’s not the Trumpers, the MAGAs, or the Charlottesville gang trying to destroy Title IX, it’s so-called progressive liberals. The ‘woke’. To cadge a favorite word from the illiberal left, and particularly its men, they’re perfectly comfortable colonizing women’s spaces, prioritizing men’s desires over women’s safety and privacy when the former claim to be the latter. Can someone please explain to me why it’s wrong for right-wing men to dictate who can access female bodies, but it’s fine when left-wing men do it? Transgenderism, or transsexualism as it was called fifty years ago, has always been heavily populated by fetishists, as documented by early classic books like Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire and Dr. Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen. Autogynephiles and other fetishists are primarily behind the aggressive drive to force themselves into women’s spaces. Women can’t even hold a women’s-only rock concert without men pushing for entrance and forcing themselves in without consent. Yeah, there’s a rape analogy there. The left fancies itself the champions of the oppressed—and, before wokeism radicalized and cadged hate models and violence as political expression from the right, they were. They never supported all oppressed and marginalized people, like, those harmed by globalism and runaway immigration on the right, but they still spoke for a lot of voices that couldn’t. Now they communicate the language of hate. Now they pontificate like the privileged, entitled elitists so derided by the right. Now they call women ‘transphobic’ and ‘TERF’ for daring to challenge and lay boundaries around aggressive sexual predators, as truly progressive feminists have done since the birth of Second Wave feminism. There have always been two exceptions to the left’s no-hate rule. Women, and Jews. I’m not sure where it went wrong, whether the left stopped realizing, or ever realized, that Jews have been hated and marginalized for thousands of years, before woke antiracism was invented, but it’s no mystery why they hate women. It all comes down to The Penis One thing I’ve learned in the last few years is just how committed to specialized male sexual pleasure some men can be, even without being sexual predators or pickup artists. I hadn’t understood before the power of the fetish, rooted in the Latin word facticius meaning an object made with supernatural powers, or which grants the ability of power over others. It then became the Portuguese word feitiço, and then the French word fétiche. Later it came to denote a sexual attraction to an object (like balloons, velvet or cheese) or non-genital body parts like feet or necks. In other words, something that had sexual power over a person. What I’ve also learned is how far The Bro Code will go to protect sexual fetishes, including for others, even if one is not particularly fetishistic himself. As Oct. 7 released the ugly dogs of anti-Semitism on the left, the trans movement made misogyny acceptable again for Good Liberals. Certain ‘Feminist’ ‘liberal’ men, along with self-hating, misogyny-internalizing fauxminists, have returned to the horndogs among them the ‘right’ to demand sexual pleasure from women. It’s not yet gotten to demanding and requiring women directly submit to sexual service, but I believe it’s heading that way, from both the left and the right. The largely male, self-obsessed trans movement, and particularly its violent transactivists (their rage largely directed at ‘TERFs’) have re-normalized misogyny on the left. The ‘Free Palestine’ pack, sporting the ‘progressive’s swastika—the kaffiyeh—has done the same for anti-Semitism. Women who aren’t easily gaslit by manipulative fetishists must stand with Jews against the hate speech we all receive from the right and the left. What used to be ‘our side’ are now ex-liberals who’ve turned on progressivism, just as Trump’s cult has turned on true conservatism. Many Trumpers embraced fascism, and I think we’re witnessing a concurrent emerging proto-fascism and authoritarianism on the left. They each have their religious extremism faves: Christian fascism on the right, and Islamic fascism on the left. Those of us who haven’t yet been subsumed with racism, hate, and misogyny must understand this: If there’s one thing women and Jews have always known, is that even when they’re not actively persecuting us, they still hate us. And we can always count on everyone to throw us under the bus. It’s always acceptable to hate women and Jews. 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. 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Are you the butterfly's wing that will change generations? Don't laugh. "The voice of a single individual ... would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!" So apparently, a key anti-slavery bill failed to pass in 1784 because some guy caught a cold or a stomach virus or something and missed a critical vote. We don’t know who he is or how he would have voted, but Thomas Jefferson seemed to expect he’d vote against legal slavery in all existing western territories. Jefferson, despite being a slave owner himself, famously didn’t like slavery and was defeated several times trying to limit or ban it. The 1784 national bill would have kept Alabama and Mississippi slavery-free. How different might the U.S. have become if Critical Vote Bob hadn’t gotten indigestion or something. The story of the guy who stayed home to do the barf-o-rama or maybe keep within running distance of the outhouse comes from Thomas Sowell’s book Black Rednecks & White Liberals, a collection of essays on race, racism, the history of slavery, Germans and Nazism, and black education. Whoever Critical Vote Bob was, he changed the course of slavery history in the nascent nation. He probably had no idea what a pivotal role he played in American history. When you know what you did when you die I drove to upstate New York two days after Friends star Matthew Perry died. A radio station host recounted his 2021 interview with Perry in which the star said people would approach him after the pandemic and tell him how much watching old Friends reruns really helped them get through a very tough time. “You could just see his face light up when he talked about it,” the host remembered. Perry was as famous for his addiction demons as for his role as Chandler Bing. He lived to help others overcome their own abuse. “I can tell which season of Friends it is by the way I’m acting,” he said. “That was a cocaine season. That was alcohol. Cocaine. Alcohol.” He died in a hot bath and the cause of death is as yet unknown. Although I was never a big Friends fan, I have a soft spot in my heart for people struggling with substance abuse. I’m betting on a heart attack brought on partially by his drug-addicted lifestyle. He died knowing he’d made a positive difference in the lives of others; not just those who escaped a dark time with his TV show but from strangers he helped for the asking. Perry would do what he could. Not all of us are TV stars or influencers, and we may never touch millions, but I think even one changed life (for the better) makes a huge difference. Sometimes the little, unremarked, butterfly’s wing of an act can change the world, permitting slavery to flourish in what will become the two most racist states in America, or helping others turn away from alcohol or coke. I’ve written about how we all may have ruined someone’s life, or at least permanently impacted it in some way, and never knew it, like, in my article’s example, Brett Kavanaugh. We never know how our actions, or our words, might affect others. Kavanaugh’s nasty prank on another teenage girl might not have resulted in a career near-derailment if she’d been more inclined to shrug it off as him being an asshole. But each person is different. It’s easier than ever to be an asshole in an age of often-anonymous social media. It’s easier to pour salt into a wound when you aren’t face to face. When you’re not witnessing their pain and suffering, and when it’s easy to forget they probably aren’t the monster you’ve mentally constructed. It’s also easier to be more constructively helpful. If you choose. The little things with giant ripples If we can ruin someone’s life and not even know it, or change the course of history for millions of Africans on account of illness, we can also arguably be invisible forces for change, so anonymous even we didn’t know what we did right. I was at a friend’s birthday party recently and encountered an acquaintance I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. She recounted hearing me speak about ‘linguistics, AI and language translation’ and sounding fairly brilliant (her words, not mine), speaking from a ‘place of power’ as a woman in a field mostly populated by men. It was inspiring, apparently. I wish I could remember it. It dredged up a very vague memory later. Her assessment came from mistaking someone who knew just enough to be dangerous as knowing more than she does. But I don’t care, I’ll take it! Even though I had no power at that machine translation company, was brilliant in nothing, and learned on the job. If I inspired another woman by appearing as a competent woman of power, I’m happy to have served as a (however unworthy) example. I’m prouder that others have taken my written words to heart on not allowing men to maltreat them, and to take responsibility for their decisions. I accept that enthusiastically, especially if it results in a woman’s commitment to avoid or end the cycle of abuse. Because here’s the thing: If I convince only one woman throughout my life to make better romantic choices, not only have I saved her from her own pain and suffering, but also her children’s, her future children’s, her grandchildren, and every succeeding generation after her who will now be a little different thanks to an ancestor who Just Said No, or perhaps No More, to abuse. Because of something I wrote. Or said. Let’s now consider her descendants: The peers they interact with, the students they teach, the strangers they help, because an ancestor they may not even be aware of made a decision to reject an ugly, detrimental environment and demand better. This is how changing just one person’s life makes so much more difference than we can ever know. Just as, on the flip side, Brett Kavanaugh had no idea how much pain and suffering he caused another human being for thirty-six years. As I ponder the people I’ve harmed, I think of all the ones I didn’t, the ones who thanked me for my conscious efforts, and the ones I never knew I helped. The ones I’ve forgotten about because we remember the negative things people said rather than the positive. Because women, especially, tend to embrace negative programming more. “You need to learn how to take a compliment,” I told a female friend the other day. I’ve had many tell me the same. As horrible and abusive as many social media denizens are, I know they’re also in pain, just as I’ve been in pain, just as I’ve written about the very real, undeserved pain the worst of the worst in the prison system are in. The late Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh said there’s no one we should regard as hopeless. Okay, I’d like to see what he could have done with Vladimir Putin, but I take his point. Maybe not ‘hug a thug’ but try to lessen a person’s pain even if we need to keep them locked up. If I saw a prisoner on the ground, screaming in pain from a broken leg - even if I knew he was a filthy rapist or murderer - I wouldn’t kick his leg to make him suffer more. I would show him mercy and call for help. He may be a lousy human being, but a good one wouldn’t torture him when he’s down. Or walk away. How can we change the future? I don’t know whether I’m silently changing minds for the better or simply shouting into the galestorm. I do believe my own personal social justice narrative is ‘better’, just as everyone from Trump to AOC believes theirs is. I know mine isn’t perfect and I try to stay open to new information. Perhaps each of our paths for paving the way to a sincerely better society is to spread the beneficial energy far and wide, never knowing where it lands or how it initiates positive change. I consider it my duty to speak evidence-based truth and to challenge delusional thinking. I suspect I can do more good sticking to ‘just the facts, Jack’ and not to besting some deluded asshole on XTwitter. A few weeks ago I whispered into my mother’s ear as she lay mostly out of it in a hospital ICU. The aides had told me she’d been in great distress earlier because all she could think about were all the ‘thoughtless’ things she’d said and done over nearly a century. I expressed to her how much she’d influenced my life and kept me from falling into abusive relationships when she spoke about the importance of never allowing a man to control or abuse you. She’d said to walk away without a second glance if a man hits you. She said never let a man control you. I told her I wrote blog articles about this and how I hoped to save others from bad relationships. I reminded her of all the people she’d been faithful to including many church people whom she helped. “Thoughtlessness doesn’t solely define you,” I told her. “We don’t remember all the helpful things we said and did.” What would you want on your gravestone? I don’t want mine to say, “She destroyed everyone she met on social media.” The vast majority of us can’t change the world like Elon Musk or those who broker peace; we can’t save lives like the countless anonymous surgeons who pull off daily medical miracles and enable others to live longer, more fruitful lives. We don’t have the platform or the audience that Congress’s Grand Inquisitor Katie Porter, the Dalai Lama, or Barack and Michelle Obama have, but to quote Hawkeye from M*A*S*H when a bombardier he and BJ had shamed snarls, “Whatta you trying to do, change the world?” "No,” shrugs Hawkeye with a smile. “Just our little corner of it.” 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!

In a story that's become all-too-common in North America, white 'pretendians' claim Native ancestry in an effort to be 'cool' Oh, will you look at that. Buffy Sainte-Marie ain’t a real Indian. She is, in a new word I just learned the other day, a ‘pretendian’. People pretending Indigenous ancestry may number in the ‘tens of thousands’, by the estimate of one Métis lawyer, and that’s just in Canada. We may have more fake Natives than real ones here, and they’re plentiful down south, too, where Indigenous populations are still referred to as ‘Indians’, presumably because Columbus didn’t want to admit he was hopelessly lost. Buffy Sainte-Marie, for the Canadian-challenged, is a folk singer who rose to prominence in the 1960s. She claimed to have been born on a Piapot reserve in Saskatchewan when in fact she was adopted into it, as an adult, by the band in 1964 when she visited for a pow-wow. Whether they did it because they believed she might be part Native (Sainte-Marie’s mother self-identified as part Mi’kmaq) or if they understood she was fully white, is unknown, but Indigenous peoples in many places around North America often adopted white, black, and neighboring tribe members into their own and regarded them as much a part of their families and ‘real’ Indians as their blood relatives. But a recent report by the Canadian investigative reporting program The Fifth Estate revealed that Buffy Saint-Marie is not really Native. She’s white, on both sides of her family. And white is so uncool. Indians and pretendians Being Native American has been ‘cool’ for white North Americans for many decades, or centuries if you count the Boston Tea Party. ‘Iron Eyes Cody’, the ‘crying Indian’ in a famous 1970s PSA, was an Italian actor who came to insist he was Native after playing Indians in westerns. Grey Owl, an Englishman-converted-to-indigineity, was a writer, conservationist and public speaker in the early part of the twentieth century. Other famous pretendians include Johnny Depp, who has claimed Creek and Cherokee descent, and the allegedly part-Cherokee Cher, neither with documented ancestry. North American academia has more pretendians than Custer had real Indians, with new scandals of ex-Native white people busted periodically. Claiming Native ancestry became A Thing in the 1960s and 70s with greater attention to Native issues and causes. I remember Floridian elementary school friends bragging they were part Seminole or Cherokee. I asked my mother if we had any Indians in our family and was terribly disappointed to learn our mutt-ley family lines all came from Europe. Buffy Saint-Marie finds herself in a place where she’s both a ‘real’ Indian and a ‘fake’ Indian. Her Piapot family accepts her as one of their own, but others are expressing their offense and disappointment in her, especially with some fabrications that pretty arguably crossed the line and harmed real Natives. Sainte-Marie embellished her fictitious Native past, claiming she was caught in the notorious Canadian ‘Sixties Scoop’ whereby Native children were seized by the government and placed with non-Native families, which explained, I guess she thought, why she grew up in Massachusetts in a white family. Except that she was born there, not deposited there, according to her Stoneham, Massachusetts birth certificate. She has spoken as though this ordeal for Indigenous Canadians’ pain was her own, when it wasn’t. It’s deeply hurtful and offensive to real survivors of such horrific family destruction. The Sixties Scoop, and the horrid residential schools to which these children were sent to ‘civilize’ them, has left some ugly legacy pain that will take many generations to heal. You don’t make those claims lightly. And especially not for personal gain, and one must wonder why she did it. Because she certainly gained. Her lies doesn’t erase her decades of social activism, her philanthropy on behalf of Native peoples or her fine music; nor her Oscar for Best Original Song in 1983 for Up Where We Belong, featured in An Officer and a Gentleman, although she’s now no longer the First Indigenous Person To Win An Oscar. But many are angered about several Native Canadian musical awards she’s won that went to a non-Native non-Canadian (at least until she applied for citizenship as an adult), all of them professional opportunities she denied real Natives. So she has harmed them with her near-lifelong deception, claiming awards that were not hers based on a history and victimhood she did not possess. It brings up other uncomfortable questions such as who is truly ‘Indigenous’, and how much DNA makes one a ‘real’ Native. It raises further questions for us moderns: If race is merely a construct then does it make any difference? And if ‘identity’ is king, as it is on the subject of crossing sex, then who is anyone to tell Saint-Marie she’s not a ‘real’ Indian? Who decides? Who’s ‘real’? Who’s not? The long-obvious hypocrisy is that it’s okay to identify as the opposite sex and the world MUST go along with it; but people who racially disguise are badbadbad because they ‘appropriated’ marginalization that doesn’t belong to them. Which, I agree, they did. In probably the only instance in which I laughed along with Donald Trump was when he called U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren ‘Pocahontas’, which the chronically aggrieved immediately jumped on as ‘racist’. She did turn out to have some Indigenous genetics, but not much. However, if you’re familiar with the history of white Americans pretending, correctly or not, to possess Native ancestry, the ‘Pocahontas’ jest was better than even Trump himself might have comprehended. After the virtue-signalling, copperwashed and Native-sanitized 1995 Disney movie Pocahontas was released, the 2000 US census recorded a big jump in Americans identifying as Native, some claiming descendancy from the most famous Indian herself. The truth? It took four generations before her line got prolific, but there are many who could claim descendancy from her. But can they prove it? What if Sainte-Marie has ‘done the work’? ‘Pretendian’ is pejorative, but not uncalled-for for people who engage in this racial identity fraud. Perhaps with a little more truth-telling, and a little less story-telling, those who choose and are honest about a different racial or cultural identity could be differentiated from the natal Indigenous. Because non-Natives adopted into a family or band or tribe may well be as much their kinfolk as my adopted cousins and niece are to my family. What Sainte-Marie’s critics might consider is the ‘work’ she’s done, the kind antiracists are always going on about for white people. Sainte-Marie knows and understands Indigenous cultures inside and out, through a lifetime of learning if not through a life lived there from the start. While a person who acquires a different ancestry for their identity will never be the same as one born into it, just as a trans-identified man can never truly understand the female experience, one can still ‘do the [longterm] work’ and legitimately stand up for others. What if we called people who appropriate Indigenous culture ‘Transnatives’, which sounds less pejorative, as long as they’re not making things up and harming or depriving real Natives with lies? If done with proper respect and honesty, with the only personal pain testimony permitted being one’s genuine trauma, we could learn a lot with Native-style Black Like Me stories from a different angle. I’ve argued it’s possible to give anyone who wasn’t born into the white experience a similar trip, too. We accept transgenderism, are we ready for transracialism? It can be beneficial to learn from those who acquire or appropriate different identities, if they’re honest and genuine about it. While no white person can ever fully understand what it’s like to be born and grow up Indigenous, Indigenous folks can gain a better understanding of white people if a few take a walk on the white side themselves. I don’t suggest any should do this, only if they want to. If transgenderism is okay, then so, in my mind, is transracialism and transnativism, which at least is more easily reversible. White and Native crossover experiences will be different, given their birth circumstances, yet both, I believe, will offer new perspectives we haven’t considered before. Some might be annoyed with white people who won’t listen to a Native person’s testimony, but will listen to a white man in redface. But some of those listeners might well include those who would otherwise write off Indigenous experience as, Oh, there they go again, always complaining about this country. Don’t they know how good they have it now? Some white people, unreachable otherwise, will listen to the white guy who says, They weren’t exaggerating. Especially about anti-Indigenous racism. Really, buddy? Was it really that bad? It was brutal, guys. Let me tell you how I almost got killed just south of Saskatoon… Where has all the authenticity gone, long time passing? We live in an age in which it becomes harder every day to know who and what is real, or fake. I wanted to cry, No, not Buffy! when I found The Fifth Estate story on YouTube. But yes, Buffy too. Pretendian. Dancing, singing and chanting as though she was to the reserve born. Perhaps the most important question we can ask is where our authenticity has gone; why do so many Americans and Canadians aspire to be something they’re not, whether it’s a ‘marginalized’ group like First Nations or Native Americans, or, more troublingly, a sex switch nightmare that results in lifelong dependence on drugs and may destroy fertility? Buffy Sainte-Marie was real on one level, fake on another. What some might derisively call an ‘apple’, red on the outside, white on the inside. I wonder how so many pretendians get away with it for so long. Surely Natives who feel deeply aggrieved at white appropriation notice at some point that someone doesn’t seem to be who they say they are? Sainte-Marie’s Piapot family never squealed on her, but surely others around them deduced after her rise to fame that she was never a child on their reserve. Perhaps the fault lies not just with white people trying to be cool, or gain popularity and professional success through a victimhood identity. Would Sainte-Marie have been as famous or popular if she’d been ‘60s Italian folk singer Buffy Santamaria, her birth name? I’m not sure she would have been. A Cree woman is cooler than an Italian one. Companies and organizations that ‘Indigenize’, add ‘Native’ personnel to diversify and raise Indigenous boats, also collude by not screening to make sure they’re giving a job or some other perk to a genuine Native. But Natives collude too when they don’t tell what they know to be a lie. I don’t understand why people today can’t accept themselves for who they truly are, but maybe, in the end, even adults can succumb to the lure of make-believe. Regardless of who likes it or not, your family are the people who love you when you come home. Whether you share their DNA or not. But if you can’t keep it authentic, at least keep it real. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing!

The content we consume normalizes values and beliefs in our brains in ways we don't even know, whether good or bad. Thank Goddess I didn't listen much to Whitney Houston. Treat me right Treat me right Open your eyes Maybe you'll see the light Ooh-ooh Treat me right! Pat Benatar, Treat Me Right, from Crimes of Passion, 1980 My friend Diane and I were in love with Pat Benatar. Her second album, Crimes of Passion, contained several songs permeating FM radio overplay, Sony Walkmans and mall background music - Hit Me With Your Best Shot, Treat Me Right and You Better Run. She was a hard rocker chick with a take-no-shit, take-no-prisoners attitude whose vocal persona demanded better treatment from men. Perhaps Benatar was drawing on her recent divorce from by then ex-husband Nick Benatar, whose name she kept because, I’m guessing, it was a way better rocker name than her own, Andrzejewski. She married her guitarist, Nick Giraldo, in 1982, to whom she’s still married today. I don’t know from where she got all the relationship sturm und drang material since her autobiography didn’t indicate a long romantic history before or between marriages. Maybe she had a lot of romantically dissatisifed girlfriends. In college I listened to and sang along with Benatar incessantly in the car as I commuted to school. I knew all the words and I completely dug her power-chick attitude. I didn’t know much about boys, men, or dating, since I’d been an adolescent wallflower, but Benatar’s treat-me-right message intertwined with the lessons my mother taught me about domestic abuse: I decide whether I will allow myself to be abused or not. Domestic violence, at least as portrayed on TV, didn’t look like much fun, so I decided against it, and Pat Benatar’s music reinforced Mom as I danced in nightclubs and sang along. They drilled it into my brain: Abuse was a choice, whether we realized it or not. I’m 60 years old and to this day have yet to be hit or otherwise abused by a partner. Diane didn’t absorb the same message, and chose a different path. This is your brain on music “What was I listening to in college?” I thought as I listened to a podcast by Dina McMillan, my favorite anti-abuse advocate. I recently found her series named after her TEDx Talk, Unmasking The Abuser. On Episode 23, Protecting Your New Superpower, she speaks of her interview on the podcast Triggernometry, in which the host spoke of his love of gangster rap. McMillan informed him how important it was to protect his brain from toxic influences. How gangster rap glorified misogyny and violence and she explained how listening to such content normalizes its values - even if you’re not prone to violence and misogyny. I remembered my most formative college years as my brain ripped through the plethora of ‘80s songs and full-stopped at Pat Benatar. Well of course, I thought. Although Benatar’s music never addressed physical abuse apart from her PSA anti-child abuse anthem Hell Is For Children, the rest of her albums repeated and reinforced well into her middle age a personally powerful shape up or ship out message for relationships. In fact, by about the seventh or eighth album, I began to think, “Patty, isn’t it about time you abandoned the bad-boyfriend narrative? You’ve been happily married for thirty years!” I then remembered Whitney Houston, the entrancing drop-dead gorgeous woman with the incredible voice. Sometimes she aggravated me with toxic messages, particularly the execrable I’m Saving All My Love For You, about a woman crying that her married lover didn’t spend enough time with her. I hated that song. I didn’t like people who deceived and hurt others with extramarital love affairs, regardless of who was married or not. At 23, I recognized the glorification of an unhealthy dynamic every woman would be better off without. I felt little sympathy for the song’s character. Frankly, I wanted to slap some sense into her. Houston’s mother didn’t like the song either. Houston also recorded countless songs lamenting the loss of a love the persona couldn’t get over, and I didn’t like the message that it was okay to stay at home sobbing into your pillow because someone didn’t love you, or loved you no longer. We’ve all been through that but we didn’t influence millions of teenage girls and young women with our glorified pain. On the other hand, I could easily get behind How Will I Know If He Really Loves Me? and The Greatest Love Of All which begins, “I believe the children are our future—Teach them well and let them lead the way—” That one made me cry, often. Whitney Houston’s music centred human love, also including happy loving relationships. But maybe she too should have listened to Pat Benatar more, since she fell into an abusive marriage with singer Bobby Brown. Later, she ruined her looks with a horrific drug habit and died tragically too young, drowned in her own bathtub with some help from cocaine and heart disease. What your brain’s doing behind your back Dina McMillan had a bastard of a point about the messages we imbibe; we can accept them, as I did, or ignore them, as Diane did. She fell into a string of bad relationships and bad marriages, and several years ago vented her rage on Facebook. The tenor of her posts indicated she’d finally learned that abuse was a choice. It took until her fifties, but finally she got it. McMillan describes exactly what happens between our ears when we think we’re just enjoying a movie or a song espousing values we don’t consciously hold. She notes only 5%-8% of the everyday choices we make are actually made by the logical, rational parts of our brain. Those are the decisions we make when not under stress - when choosing a product in a store, or thinking about what we can do with a free weekend. But our emotional and memory-processing parts, the limbic system and reptilian part of our brain, control our autonomic nervous system, negotiate our environment, and drive our most primal reactions: Fear, anger, hunger and lust. And the logical part, she states, ‘might as well not even exist’. It shows up after the party’s over to offer 20/20 hindsight or retrospective rationalizations to justify our choices. She notes how illogically-operating brains drive social movements and politics, with our limbic and reptilian parts primed to encourage us to stick with the group, espouse what it preaches, fit in, support what’s being promoted in the countless mass and social media messages we receive all day long. They spread ideas, memes, and causes like wildfire and eventually teach us to embrace people, values and beliefs in direct contradiction with what we believe are the ways we should live our lives. Toxic, values-antithetical content is absorbed into a largely emotional brain that can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality like our logical, rational parts do. It’s inaccurately processed as an accurate reflection of the values of your group, even if you don’t realize it. It doesn’t mean watching violent porn will turn you into a sadistic rapist, but it could normalize misogyny, that you don’t even know is there, because you’re not like that guy. Or the vulnerable woman in the Whitney Houston song pining over her married lover. Fortunately, it’s not engraved in stone tablets. When I was in college I loved A Clockwork Orange. The book absorbed me with its message about the criticality of free will, and how bad people often eventually choose good, and shouldn’t have it forced upon them, as it was the antihero Alex, who agreed to a treatment he didn’t understand would remove his free will, then it was returned, along with his desire to harm others. Eventually he chose a better path, at least in the British version of the book, as the American publisher removed the last chapter. Stanley Kubrick’s movie was amazing in so many ways, but now I can’t stand the subtly smirking glorified violence against women, and can no longer explain it away by observing it was released in barely-feminist 1971. I don’t find Malcolm McDowell’s Alex sexy anymore in a way I did in 1983, conscious even then that he was a monster. I’ve spent the last four decades analyzing the appeal of the Bad Boy and how he’s best left in the realm of fantasy. Although even back then I would never have allowed an Alex into my life. In the ‘80s, we had only a few truly strong, powerful, action-oriented female role models like Pat Benatar or the Alien franchise’s Ellen Ripley, a courageous, badass hero in a role traditionally served by men. We caught a shade of Ripley in her predecessor Princess Leia when she ripped the blaster out of Han Solo’s hands, blasted a few stormtroopers, then an opening in the wall, and yelled, “Someone has to save our skins. Into the garbage chute, flyboy!” Later came Buffy, and Xena, and female Ghostbusters that made social media’s Insane Troll Posse’s heads collectively explode with female heroes who didn’t need men to save New York from ghosts and other supernatural scaries. I wonder what happened to all the ladies of the ‘80s who consumed the ‘wealth porn’ of the era. The decade was infused with the Gordon Gecko ‘Greed is good’ fixation; movies extolled horrible romantic and sexual ideals. Like that fat girls were to be mocked (Porky’s), that it was okay to trick women into having sex with you (Revenge of the Nerds), that near-kiddie softcore porn was okay (anything starring Brooke Shields), that an older woman seducing a teenage boy was less offensive than the reverse (Private Lessons), that it’s okay to hand over your drunk girlfriend to another guy (and you’re the cute guy hero Molly Ringwald snags, Sixteen Candles) or that you should end up with a guy who treats you like crap (Pretty in Pink). The very, very worst movie that exemplifies a woman pursuing a clearly toxic relationship and glorifying it was from the ‘90s - the utterly ludicrous As Good As It Gets, with Helen Hunt as a single mother chasing an unattractive, misogynist, misanthropic obsessive-compulsive writer (Jack Nicholson) for which they both won Best Actress and Best Actor Oscars. I left the theatre with my then-partner fuming. “Who the hell could ever fall in love with an asshole like that?” Feed your head In an era of violent porn, truthless social media and sourpussed ‘woke’ movies and books promoting poisonous ideologies bankrupt of any genuine ‘social justice’, we have to feed our brains as responsibly as we do our bodies. I started reading a dystopian non-fiction book called Survival of the Richest, and it was so depressing I gave up before I threw myself off my balcony. I switched to Helgoland, the last of my last-Christmas books, about quantum physics (I’m weird) and it was better but I still felt mired in mental mud. So I put it aside for Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. Again. It’s my Bible. It starts: Please don’t think that because you are unhappy, because there is pain in your heart, that you cannot go to the Buddha. It is exactly because there is pain in your heart that communication is possible. Your suffering and my suffering are the basic condition for us to enter the Buddha’s heart, and for the Buddha to enter our hearts. I feel better, ready to meet the challenges I’m facing. What I must consider soon is how to be a social activist without allowing the news and the world’s growing inhumanity to ruin me. 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!

Cassidy Hutchinson learned the hard way. Let’s say Rex Heuermann, the accused in the Long Island Gilgo Beach murders arrested this summer, was out on bail and wanted to hire me for something. I wouldn’t take the job. Even without a conviction, he’d be the diciest of bosses ever. Danny Masterson? Wouldn’t work for him either. Even though, in both cases, I’m light-years outside their victim age demographic. How would I know Heuermann wouldn’t try to kill me? Or Masterson to rape me? I mean, these are two extremely sick individuals. Shouldn’t it be obvious that a woman shouldn’t work for anyone with these beastly Google results? Especially when a man is super-famous, and a well-established sexual predator? Apparently it wasn’t for Cassidy Hutchinson. She agreed to work for an infamous self-confessed pussy-grabber. Spoiler alert, Donald Trump never tried to grab her kittykat. But Rudy Giuliani did, during the Jan. 6 mayhem. Not to mention her titty-boo. Thus saith one of the investigation committee’s star witnesses in her forthcoming book Enough. As one might expect, the experience was pretty gross. Hopefully Rudy G didn’t spray—hair dye all over her. Vote with your—kitty Voting for sexual predators is one of many reasons why ‘rape culture’ persists. One can also vote with one’s pocketbook. Just how did R. Kelly get away with what he did for so long? We know a fair amount of white women, and an embarrassing chunk of Hispanic women, voted for Trump in 2016. Few black women did, but their numbers doubled in 2020. And Alabamans voted for famed mall predator and teen kitty hound, Roy Moore, y’all. I wonder if Cassidy Hutchinson voted for rape culture, too. She really shouldn’t be too surprised at what happened. She put herself in danger, old enough to consider whether Trump, or other predators in his administration, might come after her. (And they did). Instead, she seized the opportunity to work close to one of the most powerful offices in the world. I don’t know if she voted for Trump but she certainly supported him for four years. Was she ever on her guard? There’s no excuse for Giuliani’s behavior. The guy who infamously touched his own dick thinking he was about to get lucky with a journalist in Borat’s notorious movie scene bears full responsibility for his alleged actions against Hutchinson. I guess in the heat of the moment he felt the heat of the moment and stuck his hands under her clothes. Yeah, it had to be upsetting and disgusting. I can’t remember anyone ever doing that to me, although I’ve certainly experienced my share of grope-y, leer-y men. I can imagine, and sympathize with her. But damn, I wonder where her damn fool head was at! She’s old enough to know she’s got to be wary of male advances. She’s in her mid-twenties, and I doubt Rudy was the first guy to seek the Holy Grail in her Victoria’s Secret. So what did she think might happen if she was to work for a misogynist old pig like Donald Trump? His lechery, objectifying, and multiple trophy wives are legendary. She’s lucky she didn’t catch his eye. He’s been accused by a dozen women of rape, and a jury found him liable for ‘sexually abusing’ one and awarded her $5 million. No, the worst thing Hutchinson’s copped to so far is suffering the disgusting wrinkled old-man hands of America’s former 9/11 hero and now disbarred leaky ex-lawyer. I wonder if hotcha-hotcha Hope Hicks will ever spill any stories about Trumpian or related advances. I always wondered if she was hired for her skills or her looks. His ex-press secretary and now Governor of Arkansas Sarah Sanders likely has zero juicy stories like Hutchinson’s. The famously fat-phobic Trump brutally fat-shamed Sanders at least once. She collaborated in her own abuse when she agreed to work for the well-established misogynist who fat-shamed beauty queen contestants who failed to score high enough on his wank-meter. Any observant wannabe member of the Trumptourage should have recognized that she’d attract unwanted attention if she’s hot, and unwanted slurs if she’s not. What did Hutchinson think, that a guy like Trump would otherwise pick a bunch of fine, upstanding, mature men who understood that the only body that’s theirs is their own? By January 6th she’d learned he’d paid off a porn star to keep mum about their sexual affair while Melania nursed his newborn son, and E. Jean Carroll was making quite public her allegations that he’d raped her in a department store. St. Francis of Assisi he ain’t. You’re known by the company you keep, as an old college professor of mine liked to say. Hutchinson, along with many others, enabled and collaborated with a sexual predator in an environment that not surprisingly included others. Why did Hutchinson tolerate it? Why did she, on some level, think this was okay? Maybe her hyper-masculine he-man Master of the Universe father had something to do with it. According to Enough reviews, he once left her a ‘gift’ of two warm, bleeding deer hearts wrapped in tin foil in her mailbox. (Big surprise; her parents are divorced.) Daddy famously hated ‘wimps’ and demanded his daughter’s loyalty even as he cut her down at every turn. Maybe Trump seemed just like dear old dad, a fan of The Apprentice. Hutchinson wasn’t, supposedly, super-right-wing, and interned for Ted Cruz’s campaign only because he was the only senator who responded to her request. Hutchinson also admired Senator John McCain, but seemed to fall down the Republican nutbag rabbit hole fairly quickly. It’s possible her political views veered more to the right after putting in time for Ted Cruz, and reinforced her armor for dealing with crazy, misogynist men (Cruz is widely disliked by most who know him). I’ll read Hutchinson’s book when it comes out, but I’ll borrow it. She doesn’t deserve my money. Here’s why. I acknowledge and respect that she displayed a tremendous amount of courage spilling what she observed surrounding the January 6 events. How many of us would be willing to stand up to ‘Trump world,’ and tell the truth? She begged her Trump-addled father for support, which he gave, and put herself in danger of orange revenge. Still, she damn well owed it to the country after what she did. She supported and collaborated with his gutter administration and even was considering continuing his work at Mar-A-Lago until she realized that offer might not be forthcoming. So she didn’t learn much until she realized there was no future with him. (Her mother begged her not to go, noting that Trump would never change.) And what did we learn from this, young lady? We cut young people slack as adolescence lengthens with each successive generation. Millennials and now Gen Z endure perpetual childhood living with their parents, unable to find a good-paying job (defined as one you can live on) and home-owning dreams dashed, with nothing better to do than spew vinegar and venom online. It’s not all their fault; American education standards have slipped to new lows after the pandemic, diminished further by school lockouts and frazzled full-time working parents now expected to monitor whether schoolwork was getting done, and making sure Junior didn’t switch to the YouTube tab from his video class when adult supervision left the room. Cassidy Hutchinson was young but not dumb, getting into a good if unknown university, becoming a trusted aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, a man reportedly nonplussed at Capitol Hill rioters’ calls to hang Mike Pence. Trump thought he deserved it, Meadows told her, and that they were doing nothing wrong. She must have been good with political assassination, because she was still dreaming about a job in Florida. She endured what CNN describes oh-so-surprisingly as a primarily male environment of ‘casual sexism’ (I would have guessed ‘overt’), describing some creepy behavior from ex-House Speaker John Boehner and an attempt by Matt Gaetz to get her alone. (Kinda weird; isn’t she way too old for him?) Hopefully she can think for herself more now, and make moral decisions based on better character rather than a plum assignment for a beyond-question psychopathic megalomaniac. Has she self-examined yet to wonder WTF was I thinking? or has she not yet clued in to the connection between misogynist, predatory behavior and ‘rape culture’, especially her own contribution to it? I say the same for women who work for Donald Trump as I say for those who work at Hooters: No one has the right to sexually assault you, but working there gives them tacit permission. Any all-male environment should carry a heightened wariness for women, and in an unfair world they have to be prepared for the ‘cold finger up her thigh’ or the hand down her blouse. But when she’s serving an established sexual predator, she collaborates with that misogynist culture and implicitly suggests she’s okay with it. It’s called ‘rape culture collaboration’. It’s not just a guy thing. 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!

White people can be committed to genuine social justice if blacksplainers stop making it so hard to be allies. I’ve been learning a lot about the relative whiteness—or not—of the United States this year. I’m working on a multicultural-focused sales campaign and before I call smaller regional U.S. companies, I check first to see how diverse their community is. If they say they’re not interested, I’ll have a good idea why. I'm getting a feel for how pervasive the U.S.’s dandelion-seed demographic diversity is, clumpy in some areas, more homogenous in others. It can be crazy-making if you look too closely. A small town like Humble, Texas is far more diverse than I would have guessed, or maybe heavily white, depending on how you look at it. One could argue it’s almost equal parts black, white, and Hispanic, or perhaps white as fuck, with White (Hispanic) at 30.6%, White (Non-Hispanic) at 23.6%, Black at 31.3%, mixed+ (Hispanic) and Other (Hispanic), the rest. White is white except when it’s not? What the hell is a ‘White (Hispanic)’ anyway? If Hispanic is a category, and white is a category, then how are you white if you’re Hispanic, or vice versa? What, because you ‘pass’? Is Ted Cruz not a White Hispanic because he looks suspiciously arroz con maiz-ish? Or does he have to ‘identify’ as white? That won’t work, being white is one of the few identities you don’t get to assume, because you don’t decide if you’re white. Others do, like it or not. Other communities are a massive old-school typo correction fluid spill: South Beach/Florida, Madison/Maine, Presquille/Lousiana and Terre du Lac/Missouri. Rhode Island, our smallest state, is super-pervasively multicultural, not just ethnically but LGBTQ-wise too: Ayuh, wicked good! But on the othah hand, the uppah New England states, ya cahn’t get theah from heah, ayuh, they’re a blizzahd of white people - Vuhmont, Maine and New Hampshah ah all at 92%-ish white. If it weren’t for all the mountains, you could go blind driving through any of these states on a bright summah’s day. We do love our human constructs, don’t we? Progressives argue race is a ‘human construct’; the biology of racial differences only existing because we buggered off from Africa. White people seem like we’re the Lord God Kings and Queens of the Universe because, from the North American perspective, we clearly dominate. Until about 2044 anyway. But we’re fast-tracking to a more multicoloured state of the disunion. Some white people are happily moving aside, while others get a sharp elbow, to make room for more seats at the table, which looks decidedly less Norman Rockwell-ish than decades past. I mean, when three black women are bringing down the most powerful white man in America, it gets grating when certain voices in the ‘antiracist’ movement, clearly steeped in critical social justice theory’s obsession with privilege, slavery and white supremacy, carry on as though we’re still the Masters of the Universe, cracking the whip over Uncle Tom. “I will not be bullied,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James. “And so Mr. Trump is no longer here. The Donald Trump show is over.” When she’s done with him, and she’s put up with some hellacious abuse, racism and threats against her and her family, Fulton County District Prosecutor Fani Willis is waiting in Georgia to follow up on a baker’s dozen of felony counts connected to Trump’s conspiracies to steal the 2020 election. Thank Ms. Willis for that awesome, historical, already iconic mug shot meme bait no white man ordered. After that, Judge Tanya Chutkan is waiting for Trump in D.C. for the special counsel’s election case against him. It’s gotta be killing the half-senile ex-businessman that black women now hold so much power over him, after putting up with former old white lady Nancy Pelosi pwning him for four years. White power ain’t what it used to be, no, not even after Charlottesville. Black Antiracists ‘Splain Things To Me Some black activists love to blacksplain whiteness, white privilege and white supremacy. I may never understand fully what their lives are like, since I’m not on the receiving end of genuine systemic racism and, occasionally, real white supremacy, but they don’t acknowledge they can't know what our lives are like, either. They miss the ultimate intersectionality: The individual. Intersectionality explores the layers of oppression and marginalization people suffer - e.g., white women are oppressed by gender, black women are oppressed by gender and race, gay black women are oppressed by gender, race, and heteronormativity, etc. Take this cumulative song far enough - and the progressive left can always be counted on to ride the oppression train over the earth’s edge - and you’re left with the intersectionality of the lone stranger. No white person can understand the ‘black experience’, and neither can any given black person fully understand or appreciate the unique experience of any other black person, who came to where they are not just by skin color but also by different birth, families, education, immigration, personal tragedies and experiences, religious upbringing or not, neighborhoods lived in, class, economics, playmates, friends, cliques, dates, adult relationships, decisions, life choices, health, hopes and dreams. We really all are, ultimately, individual snowflakes. And if we can’t literally comprehend living another person’s experience, we are all human beings, our default brains differing less than our melanin levels, and, apart from psychopaths, largely skewed towards empathy and understanding for others. Even babies as young as six months show an ability to empathize with another being victimized or suffering distress. A Parenting Science article notes that ‘babies prefer underdogs and do-gooders’ which I find tremendously heartening: The real value of social justice may be ‘baked into’ our brains at birth, hopefully not to be destroyed later by toxic ideologies and idiot compassion. Suffering, marginalization, bullying, discrimination, and tragedy are human experiences we all share. I can feel kinship, as a white woman, with a black man who keeps losing jobs to suspiciously less-qualified white men, since I was looking for a job a few years ago at a time when anyone over fifty was considered hopelessly over-the-hill for any position in information technology. Biological discrimination sucks regardless of whatever reason the Automatic Trash System is shit-canning your resume. White people are not, regardless of what ‘woke’ huckstervists claim, automatic supremacist oppressors by dint of birth. ‘White supremacy’ is real, a consciously-adopted belief that white-skinners are given dominion over all the earth by God, as evidenced by the fact that Adam was white. You have to agree to the belief. When black activists tell us we’re unconsciously oppressing black people, even if we’re not actively doing it by choice, and there’s no way we can ever stop because we’re as hopelessly enmeshed in the white supremacist network as flies in a web, it makes many wonder what’s the point of getting a street gang together armed with broomsticks to tear the damn thing down. Why bother trying to change anything? Why shouldn’t white people just throw up our hands, say fuck it, and leave for the gender reveal barbecue and marshmallow roast? The Color Of Money Not everyone believes in the eternity of white supremacy, or black helplessness. I can even make a case for being more oppressed than Ibram X. Kendi, but it’s as stupid an argument as that I am oppressing black people simply by existing. The most powerful color privilege isn’t found in your skin; it’s the green in your bank statement showing how many zeroes following a whole number exist in your balance. I’m not sure what Kendi’s net worth is but I can honestly swear I’ve never earned $20,000 an hour for a virtual presentation on anything. And Kendi doesn’t even have to know much to make that kind of scratch; he just has to trash talk white people in a way that would get a white person talking about black people cancelled the hell off Elon’s X Twitter. I guarantee you Kendi’s words have far more pull than mine. I may be whiter than he but his bank account is a lot greener. He has clout and influence I don’t, despite being black. Despite having ancestors owned and abused by others. Despite not being part of an alleged racial supremacy secret off-Davos enclave. Of course, by dint of his penis, he is still part of The Patriarchy (dun-dun DUNNNN!) So he does oppress me too, without even knowing it, I guess! Ain’t nobody got time for that! I have no patience with racism. I have no use for Trumpers, and I have no truck with whiny powerful black people teaching other black people to give up on the system, or burn it down, or most of all, to embody the problem they claim they want to solve. I especially circumvent racists who demonize others as irreparably evil because of our skin color. I can ponder genuine justice, and join with those black activists who believe, as I do, that the oppressed must take charge of their own lives, and develop themselves without expecting the Dominant Group (white people, or men) to hand everything to them. Shelby Steele made that point over and over again in his classic work The Content Of Our Character: Black people must continue to fight for social justice, but it’s up to them to develop themselves; white people can’t do that for them. That’s how I feel about Da Patriarchy, which occupies very little space in my brain. The Patriarchy, and white supremacy, have only as much power as we allow them to have. That’s why my website is Grow Some Labia and not Why Men Suck. Because it’s time for all of us to take back our power and join together to make the world a better place than the small minds of extremism and bigotry can conceive. As Sweet Brown famously uttered in her viral YouTube video, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” I heartily concur. We’ve got real work to do. Disempowered whiners, get out of the way! 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!