It's probably not politic to bitch about politics, or anything else, during Christmas Week, don't you think? Happy holidays to all of my subscribers! Image generated by Poe AI I fully expected to have a good Christmas this week, despite my mother passing away two days before. Dying at Christmas is A Thing in our family; Mom is simply the third. My sister-in-law’s sister succumbed to everywhere-cancer in 2006; my father passed away a week before in 2011; and Mom cut it close. But dying in December isn’t as uncommon as one might think. Facebook friends offered their condolences and sometimes memories of their own families’ Christmas deaths. When my brother and I Facetimed with the funeral director, he mentioned that November, December and January were their busiest months, and it was A Thing for funeral directors everywhere. ‘Tis the season to be depressed and commit suicide, right? Or drink yourself to death, or super-shoot heroin, because you have no family left, or you can’t stand them, or they can’t stand you? Suicide is indeed seasonal, but it’s a myth that it increases during the holiday season. Suicides, for some reason, are more popular in warmer weather - spring and summer. December-January deaths are attributed to the cold, winter season. People die of heart attacks while overexerting themselves shoveling snow or trying to dig the car out, often exacerbated by nicotine and alcohol. Flu season, the Seniors Killer, is during the winter. People die on the roads when the weather is bad, although auto accidents go up a lot more during vacation season, once again the warmer months. Or they live in those parts of the South that aren’t yet used to the New Climate Change that now dumps more snow on their streets than they’ve ever seen before (or at all). But my mother passed away not due to Killer Christmas but because a week and a half ago, she and my family and the care workers at her retirement home agreed to put her into hospice. Mom made the final decision, while not having much idea of what was happening as we debated her future. Her hearing is shot and you have to speak directly in her ear. “Let’s ask Mom what she wants,” I said. “She’s of reasonably sound mind, right?” Everyone agreed she was. “What do you want, Mom?” my brother asked. “Do you want to continue physical therapy, to try and get better, maybe be able to get around with your walker again?” (Mom broke her hip in early September). “Or do you want to ‘rest’, as you put it to me earlier?” “I want to rest,” Mom said. “I think this is the end of the road.” That was a pretty clear signal. She was ready to die. We agreed with clear minds and clear hearts; we remembered the countless times over the decades, even when we were kids, that Mom said she didn’t want to be a vegetable; pull the plug on me! She didn’t want to be kept alive needlessly. She didn’t want to live in a hospital bed. If she couldn’t lead a quality life she’d prefer to die. Hell, we gave her the opportunity in late October; we pulled the plug on her, with the best data we had available at the time, and she lived. She would have been 92 in April; she doesn’t owe anyone anything. She died not because it was Christmas but because when you go into hospice, you give up. My brother called me two days before she died. “Just to warn you, I think Mom will pass in a few weeks.” I hoped to get through the holidays but I’ve been on Death Watch for months, so after I got home from dinner and a movie with a friend, I opened a suitcase and started throwing things into it. And then the 3:15am call came, Saturday morning, with the news. I’ll be in the States by the time you read this, and I’m good. I’ve lost my mother at 60; she lost her own at 28, and for my uncle at 23, far too young for people to lose their mothers. But that’s life. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut said. I guarantee you, Heaven just became a much funnier place. My mother was famous for her sense of humour, her wisecracks, her ability to lighten up a somber moment. I just hope she doesn’t tell Jesus that joke about the buxom newly-deceased woman and St. Peter. :) The year ends on a somber note with a new war in the Middle East (Oh no! Again?) begun with a horrific attack on civilians, with a level of cruelty that must have dead Nazis rolling over their bright red coals yelling, “Dammit! Why didn’t WE think of that?” As if the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine wasn’t already depressing enough. Now the number of dead Gazans far exceeds dead Israeli Jews and those of us of sound mind don’t know who to blame anymore. It’s the Middle East. And as Kurt Vonnegut said… But there are silver linings shining bravely through the dark clouds, and the one I hope will eventually shine brightest in 2024 is an end to wokeness. It’s clearly past its sell-by date, like a carton of milk. Social justice, fresh and new, is good for us but at some point it turns stale and then downright rotten. We’ve already explored Everything Wrong With Wokeness this year, maybe now it’s time to explore how we can bring reason, rationality and honest, nuanced discourse to a world sorely in need. With wokeness can go the Trump cult, and MAGAs, wokies’ equally-toxic brothers and sisters. I’m not at all sure what the next election holds for Trump, the most-indicted ex-President ever, or the U.S. if he wins. Whether he’ll be permitted to hold office. Whether he’ll do it from jail. Whether someone will find an unprecedented solution to keep the least-qualified President ever out of office (again). Which may or may not be the Supreme Court, depending on whether they ever get around to deciding the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision, and pending decisions from about a dozen other states, as to whether Trump can be kicked off a ballot in accordance with the 14th Amendment. The MAGAs are just as fact-free, reason-free, rationalism-free, or dismissive of universal human rights as the wokies. What can we do to save those who’ve not yet chosen extremism? What can honest conservatives do to bring their family members, friends, colleagues, and associates back from the brink of a wannabe dictator who’s now boldly quoting Hitler? What can honest liberals do? How do we bring back the working relationship between us grassroots and laypeople that once functioned in Washington DC attheendoftheday? We can’t fix Washington but we can fix ourselves. Those of us to the left and right still in possession of our critical faculties can find plenty of common ground, even if we never agree on everything. Maybe we can even begin to identify the best of both worlds, and the worst of both worlds, be honest with ourselves about what we’ve been pushing from our side that clearly doesn’t work, and seeing how we can smoosh the best of the best all together and whether that, perhaps, leads to a better, more equitable world in which everyone is happier, wherever they’re doing it, whatever they’re doing, and even whoever they’re doing ;) Thoughts? Comments? Vile, computer-melting flames? Let me know what you’d like to see me focus on in 2024, (or less). If you don’t feel comfortable leaving a comment, you can email me at n chardenet at gmail dot com. And I hope you will have a happy holiday, whatever you celebrate, and if your holiday is over already, hope you enjoy your time off thanks to some other god, and if you don’t believe in that religion stuff, thank Darwin for the time off you got thanks to everyone else’s Imaginary Superfriends. :) I leave you with my all-time favorite Christmas TV commercial (2007) from Virgin Mobile, about as politically correct in a very funny way as you can possibly get! 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!

Not to mention make it harder for other alleged victims to be taken seriously. Photo by Mo Eid on Pexels Look, I don’t know what really happened and neither does anyone else. Only two people do, and anyone who hasn’t talked to them doesn’t know much either. When a woman reports a rape we need to take the allegations seriously, meaning it needs to be properly investigated before passing judgement. A woman has accused a well-known writer of having raped her in June of 2021, and that must be, I repeat, investigated before we pass judgement on the veracity of the accuser or the accused. Celeste Marcus, a managing editor for Liberties Journal, has accused writer Yascha Mounck of the alleged crime. The only problem is, she hasn’t reported it properly. Instead of filing a report with the police, she took her accusation to The Atlantic, where Mounck was a freelance writer until they ‘severed ties’ with him because of the allegation. No police report. No lawyers. No formal accusation except on X, Marcus’s unnamed testimonial on Liberties Journal, and that which The Atlantic reports. Let me be clear. I am passing judgement on neither party. My goal is not to persuade you as to innocence or guilt; I don’t know nor do I have an opinion. At least, not yet. But the way this story broke bothers me greatly. Marcus didn’t go to the police; she accused first on X. Her post included an email exchange with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, in which she named Mounck. Hours later, Mounck was cut loose from The Atlantic. No trial, no jury, and as I must remind you, no police report. Marcus’s essay on Liberties Journal (there’s a paywall) in which she claimed she didn’t report it to the police because she was ‘feeling broken’ and could ‘barely function’, is a pretty common response to being raped, but it proves nothing. I render judgement instead against Marcus’s lousy judgement in how she handled this. She’s had two and a half years to think about it. If she has the labia to publicly call out her accuser, she has the labia to file a police report. Even now is a perfectly fine time to do it. But you DON’T report a rape first in the court of public opinion since, if Mounck is ever brought to trial, it will be extremely difficult for him to receive a fair one. Due process: I know it’s unpopular with feminists and the more extreme #MeToo corners, but it applies to everyone, even accused rapists. Even , I would remind us, to a certain ex-President. Full disclaimer: I subscribe to Yascha Mounck’s Persuasion newsletter on Substack. I listen to his podcasts sometimes. I like him, but I’m in no way Taylor Swift-level superfan. If I replace Mounck in my brain with someone I really can’t stand—say, Alex Jones—I would still write this commentary. Because questionable ways of reporting an alleged rape for the first time, and compromising one’s credibility up front, hurts all rape victims, and no one deserves to be maligned in the public forum without due process. No, not even Alex Jones. Image by kalhh from Pixabay It makes it look like there might have been a political motive behind it—Mounck’s accuser strongly appears to have set out to get him let go as an Atlantic freelance writer, which is a very prestigious website to write for. It sets a bad precedent for women who want to report, but are afraid of the backlash. She’s said on X, “I will not be raped with impunity.” She succeeded, but she harms the believability of rape victims and herself in the process. This wasn’t the way to do it. She probably doesn’t have much of a court case after two and a half years and no forethought to save anything that might genetically link him to the alleged crime. If she really was raped, she has the highly understandable desire to not let him get away scot-free. Whether he’s guilty or not, Yascha Mounck’s reputation is now permanently linked to a rape charge online, whether proven or not in a court of law. If he’s not guilty, she’s potentially created a new enemy for rape victims, and Goddess knows they have a hard enough time being believed. Some will take her accusation as sacred writ. Thou shalt not disbelieve , especially on hyper-polarized social media and office water cooler discussions. But she’s just invited a whole bunch of angry males fed up with unsubstantiated rape accusations to move closer to the far right, where all women are lying whores, and unless she takes Mounck to court, they remain unsubstantiated. Not all her new enemies will be right-wingers, men’s rights activists, incels, and other hyper-partisans who already uncritically believe Mounck didn’t do it as uncritically as some women believe he did. One side requires no evidence, the other won’t believe it if it exists. Some recruits will be those with serious doubts about extremist feminism and willy-nilly rape accusations. Certainly Jeffrey Goldberg and The Atlantic gang didn’t require any evidence, just one woman’s say-so. This is how people got horribly murdered in medieval Europe: Unsubstantiated accusations of crimes, which people just believed, and countless people were hideously jailed, tortured, and executed without a shred of evidence against them, just ‘witnesses’ who testified to the most outlandishly unbelievable ‘satanic’ acts of offense against their neighbors. From which we get the term ‘witch hunt’. This is how black men got hideously lynched in the South for many generations: On the evidence-free accusations of white men or white women, ostensibly for having raped a white woman or some such other nonsense. This is how people get murdered in the Middle East today, customarily called ‘honor killings’. Its victims are mostly women accused of some sexual impropriety which could be as minor as talking to an unrelated male. Or vicious gossip by other women who want to ruin or eliminate her. Men uncritically believe what they say and let the stoning begin. Or, in other places, pushing accused gay men off buildings. Here’s the thing: We don’t know what happened between Mounck and Marcus, as it was two and a half years ago. It sounds like something happened, however consensual or not, because Mounck responded, “That wasn’t rape,” not what you reply when you haven’t had any sexual contact with the alleged victim. Image by Jean Beaufort on Public Domain Pictures Whether Marcus was raped or not, and I emphasize yet again I don’t know and neither do you, if she can’t prove her claims she will be forever linked to what some could call a spurious rape claim, another black mark against rape claimants. If you’re inclined to excuse her ruination of Mounck’s reputation because you think he probably did it, or he’s a white guy so he must have done it, or so what because so many innocent women are raped, remember: Unsubstantiated allegations work both ways. While I don’t expect too many men will accuse biological women of raping them, there are many other he-said-she-said crimes of which they could be accused. Like issuing threats to him or his family. Or fraud. Or physical assault. Or abusing their children. Once something’s online, it’s forever. If you want to get back at your rapist, if you want to punish him for his crime, there are far more responsible ways to do it: Report it FIRST to the police. Preferably shortly after, but if you don’t, BEFORE you make it public. Take him to court if you can. Even if you don’t get a conviction, rape trials are pretty damn punishing and shaming, and not just for her. Keep any DNA evidence in a plastic bag. You never know when you might change your mind about going to the police, and your credibility will be much higher. It’s not what women and rape victims want to hear, but denying a person their due process rights by making unsubstantiated allegations in the public forum is dead wrong. If feminists are serious about wanting to end rape, there’s no way out of properly reporting it and going through the legal system. Yes, it’s very hard on the victims, but it will never change if more don’t do it and we don’t hold the legal system accountable and force them to evolve with each case. But we must remember: Due process is for everyone. No immunity from it for people you don’t like, like accused rapists. That, too, works both ways: No immunity from it for you , either. Taking it to the public forum first looks very, very bad for the accuser. It lacks seriousness and reduces her credibility. Learn from this. Do it right the first time. Even if it’s years later. Don’t harm other rape victims. If you’ve been raped and don’t know what to do next, please call your local rape crisis hotline. The (U.S.) National Sexual Assault Hotline (24/7 & confidential) is 1-800-656-4673. In Canada it’s 1-844-750-1648. For First Nations and Inuit it’s 1-855-242-3310. 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!

Almost-but-not-quite International Women's Day is 'inclusive' of all but one type of woman in Peterborough, Ontario Photo by Sarah Cervantes on Unsplash Here’s what’s not happening in Peterborough , Ontario today for International Women’s Day 2024. The INSPIRE International Women’s Day Event, which promised to ‘Inspire Inclusion’, the theme of this year’s global event according to the main IWD website, had been scheduled for today, but was cancelled in February due to—non-inclusion. Or ‘postponed’ as they put it, which is a bit weird as who the hell is going to come to an International Women’s Day event after the actual commemorative day? By ‘postponed’ I expect they mean ‘cancelled until next year’. Seems some women are less welcome than others. Image by Daniel Ullrich on Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-sa-2.0-DE INSPIRE rescinded the invitation to their scheduled keynote speaker, Leah Goldstein, who, as it turns out, has a ‘problematic’ past. Seems thirty years ago, when she was living in Israel, where she was raised after being born in Vancouver, she spent her military service in the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force. Goldstein served in training only, not combat. Before she moved back to Canada, she served as a police officer in the late ‘90s. So what does military service during the Yitzhak Rabin years have to do with Goldstein’s Israel-free keynote speech today? “In recognition of the current situation and the sensitivity of the conflict in the Middle East, the Board of INSPIRE will be changing our keynote speaker,” they told the media. Although Goldstein’s ethnicity is easy to guess by her name (she’s not married), one wonders if perhaps learning she’d served in the IDF was that left-wing dog whistle calling the anti-Semites to arms. It was, according to the National Post, “a small but growing and extremely vocal group”, who had a problem with Goldstein’s military service. It’s always a ‘small and extremely vocal group.’ ‘Social justice’ activists are like chihuahuas: The littlest ones make the most noise. Goldstein, presumably, was hired to speak at this event because of her accomplishments - she won a 4,800 km bicycle race in 2021, becoming the first woman to win the solo category of Race Across America, one of the longest in the world. She was also going to speak about becoming a 17-year old World Kickboxing Champion, along with “bravery, growth and overcoming sexism.” She sounds like a perfectly badass powerful motivated feminist chick, exactly the sort of role model one might want to promote on International Women’s Day. It takes some real labia to serve in the military and then move on to police service, and then to bike 3,000 miles across North America - and beat everyone else. But, the whiniest wokes yapped and scrapped, so INSPIRE caved like wimpy corporate CEOs and did what the chihuahua mob demanded. Inclusive, indeed. The festival’s organizer sparkies asked Goldstein to provide a statement about Israel prefacing her speech, although she hadn’t intended to address it at all or make it political. One wonders how much INSPIRE would have liked it if she had. Now INSPIRE may be investigated by the city’s DEI office, as has been asked by one of Peterborough’s city councillors. INSPIRE hadn’t asked Goldstein what she planned to speak about at the event, or to see a draft of her speech. But they wanted to make sure she held the woke-approved ‘correct’ irrelevant opinion, whether she intended to bring it up or not. I could perhaps see some concern about divisiveness if her speech touched upon the war—perhaps organizers might be concerned about a day devoted to inspiring and motivating women devolving into a crazy political free-for-all—but it doesn’t appear they asked to see her speech, or what she intended to speak about. According to the International Women’s Day website, under its call to commitment to ‘inspire inclusion’, it says, When women aren't present, we must ask: "If not, why not?" When women are discriminated against, we must call out poor practice. When the treatment of women is not equitable, we must take action. And we must do this each time, every time. What did INSPIRE do to respond to their failure to meet the standards for International Women’s Day 2024? They battened down their website and their Facebook page. You get a ‘private site’ message and a request to log in. I wonder how controversial INSPIRE’s keynote speech might have been had the speaker been a Palestinian woman describing getting bombed and displaced every day by the IDF, with nary a mention of Hamas or Gazan votes for. Would anyone have objected? At any rate, the Maneschevitz hit the fan once word got out about INSPIRE’s cancellation. The mass media got involved. Social media got involved. People flooded City Hall and INSPIRE, along with a few beleaguered unrelated women’s groups, with supportive comments, mostly for Goldstein rather than the wokemonsters of INSPIRE. As always, ‘progressives’ demonstrated their commitment to ‘inclusion’ stops at anyone with the ‘wrong’ political opinions or with ties to a group they don’t like. Maybe they should have invited instead a less controversial speaker—like a man pretending to be a woman, as the Hershey company did last year. You know, someone whose major life challenge is deciding which bathroom to pee in. There will be other rallies and events in Peterborough for International Women’s Day, but not for the Judaeophobic unINSPIREd. I hope they spend the day, rather, reflecting on just what ‘inclusion’ really means, and why ‘diversity’ never seems to include differing political ideas. Or why the hell someone’s military service decades ago matters. Or if it’s only with a military service they don’t like. Or why they felt the need to ask Leah Goldstein about her views on the war. Were they going to dictate the ‘statement’ they wanted her to make first? Would they have approached a Palestinian speaker this way, or, indeed, anyone other than a Jew? The whole thing just has a highly distasteful odor about it. The stench of antisemitism sandwiched within ‘progressive’ politics. Don’t judge the City of Peterborough from this sorry affair. It’s a lovely small town in the Kawarthas, a chain of lakes in south central Ontario. Peterborough is rustic and country and drop-dead gorgeous during the fall. Every town has its bad apples, and obnoxious, snappy little human chihuahuas. Hopefully they’re chastened at the demise of an event they themselves have wrought. Anyway, I hope you all have an awesome International Women’s Day! Go forth and be a badass, no matter what your politics! International Women’s Day: It’s for all women, not just the ones you like. Public domain image from Rawpixel Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I know, it's two days late! 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!

We TERFs hate to say "I told you so," but--goddammit, people! Will you believe us gender critics NOW??? Royalty-free photo from Pxfuel Transgender medicine is largely built on lies. It can be defined in three words: Conscious medical malpractice. One of the most ‘respected’ organizations (I’ve never understood why) supporting transgender medicine and ‘gender affirming’ healthcare is WPATH, the World Professional Association For Transgender Health. It was founded in 1979 and sought to create a network of ‘professionals’ specialized in treating transgender variance. A shocking leak of documents called The WPATH Files released early this week, compiles WPATH chat forum and email screen shots and Zoom videos in a new report with extensive documentation. Written by journalist Mia Hughes and released by Michael Shellenberger at Environmental Progress, it provides jaw-droppingly clear evidence WPATH’s ‘expertise’ is transactivist quackery despite a number of actual medical practitioners on staff. It’s about as ‘evidence-based’ as a Superman comic. It demonstrates a complete lack of respect for the scientific method, and proper research trials. It’s. Just. Horrifying! Michael Shellenberger , the activist who also brought us the Twitter Files, can be found on Substack along with a video he’s assembled of WPATH’s most horrifying Zoom hits. The full video is here . The WPATH Files PDF can be downloaded here: The WPATH Files: PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC SURGICAL AND HORMONAL EXPERIMENTS ON CHILDREN, ADOLESCENTS, AND VULNERABLE ADULTS WPATH has transformed itself into a leading ‘scientific’ authority on transgender health and medicine, particularly in the area of ‘gender-affirming’ care (GAC) of children. But The WPATH Files validate what both conservative and liberal gender-critical voices have been calling out the entire field for for years: That WPATH clinicians and healthcare providers know their GAC could or does cause incalculable harm to their patients, including children. They treat their patients with unproven methods for which there is little to no research; without knowing or much caring whether puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones lead to infertility, sterility, loss of orgasmic capability, brittle bones, cognitive impairment, and even death. They experiment: And they call it ‘medically necessary’ so insurance companies will pay for it. WPATH ignores the clear signs that some of these treatments are linked to cancer in their young patients, that many have psychological problems unrelated to their alleged ‘gender dysphoria’; and they even have embraced ‘nullification’ for those who want ‘non-binary’ genitals or who desire to get rid of their penis. Yes, these so-called ‘doctors’ discuss castrating even children . And some of them confess to having performed these surgeries in private chats captured by leakers who are probably in the Witness Protection Program now. And here’s a new one: Some of their patients want dual genitals: Both a penis and a vagina. Some WPATH ‘experts’ dismiss concerns about long-term outcomes, acknowledge that most children and teens are too young to understand and appreciate the potential future problems they might have, like not having children, a concept too far into the future for any of them to think, and whose reaction is often, “Oooh, babies, gross!” They acknowledge that even parents don’t have the medical understanding of what’s being done to their kids. They know these children and adults aren’t making informed decisions. That they can’t, given that the healthcare providers themselves don’t have enough data, or even any in some cases, to support it. WPATH knows. WPATH knows. THEY KNOW! Where’s the evidence? As a result, WPATH’s claims to provide ‘evidence-based care’ are a pack of lies. This will come as less of a surprise to those of us who’ve been following the slow-motion derailment of the Trans Train for years. Especially after the revelation last year that systematic evidence reviews out of the most liberal/progressive countries in Europe indicate there’s little to no scientific evidence to support the transgender industry’s claims that transitioning children immediately must occur to prevent them from committing suicide. The transgender suicide myth was addressed in a Finnish study just published in BMJ Mental Health (2024), Suicide Mortality Among Gender-Dysphoric Adolescents and Young Adults in Finland: The finding of low suicide rates and no evidence of benefits of gender reassignment continues to challenge the practice of youth transitions. In which was noted, “…the study found no convincing evidence that gender-referred youth have statistically significantly higher suicide rates as compared to the general population, after controlling for psychiatric needs.” [Italics mine] NewsNation scores highly for factualism and rated in ‘least biased’ category on Media Bias Fact Check Although we should note post-transition patients do have a high suicide rate, about which transactivists are strangely silent, so let’s understand that evidence indicates that the rate has to do with pre-existing psychological co-morbidities, which are routinely ignored and unexplored by transgender healthcare professionals [See: Tavistock scandal , England]. The lack of evidence that gender transition reduces the risk of suicide leads to hideously inverting the emotional blackmail with which GAC clinicians routinely terrorize resistant parents and caretakers: Would you rather have a dead daughter or a dead mutilated daughter? This report on WPATH’s gross medical negligence is merely the tip of the rainbow-hued iceberg. GAC gender woo has been problematic from its inception, especially when it focused on children. I have read the report; it’s 242 pages, 71 for the report and the rest the documenting screenshots and image captures of doctors speaking in direct contradiction to what they tell the public: What they don’t know, and must speculate on, as they confer with each other on the next experimental treatment for a patient. They make it clear they support and have performed surgeries on pre-teens and teens regardless of what the public is told about how that ‘almost never happens’. The report is well-written, in plain English, with a lot of highly-qualified footnotes if you want to get into the weeds. They speak of the detransitioners including those around age 32 who regret sacrificing their fertility, and if they could do it over again, would preserve eggs or sperm. One WPATH expert stated there’s a 27% regret rate . One professional acknowledges being ‘stumped’ by a 9-year-old grappling with ‘fertility’ issues. They discuss children and adults with intellectual disabilities, schizophrenia and homeless people; all are deemed worthy of consent to these life-altering, body-destroying practices. In defiance of their Hippocratic Oath to ‘take care that [the sick] suffer no hurt or damage’, they regularly advocate for a practice the very height of harm: mutilating and removing perfectly healthy tissue , because their uninformed, often clearly mentally disturbed and/or immature patients demand it. As I read with growing horror it occurred to me the only difference between these people and Nazi concentration camp doctors was consent. The male sexual fetishes and fantasies The horrors mount, one after the other. WPATH’s Standards of Care, most recently SOC8, removed the lowered age requirement to ‘avoid lawsuits’. In 2021, a systematic evidence review of the earlier SOC7 rated it as ‘low quality’ and ‘do not recommend’. SOC8 introduced advice for handling surgical ‘non-binary interventions’, part of the aforementioned ‘nullifications’ including castration. If you’re not familiar with the more horrifying male sexual fetishes out there, The WPATH Files document their discussion of a growing ‘Eunuch Community’ of men and the non-medical professional castrators they hire. It’s against the law, but so what if no one complains? The report mentions the ‘Eunuch Archives’, a website that caters to adult men who detail their child castration fantasies . WPATH doctors also debate the ethics (What? What are those?) of inducing lactation in an adult male who’s not interested in nursing a child, but just wants to experience it. Lactophilia, by the way, is a growing fetish among trans-identified men well-detailed in Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy ’s recent amazing discussion with two other feminists about the horrifying implications for infants being suckled by suspiciously pedophilic men who are turned on by getting their nipples sucked. Ironically, the WPATH doctors’ discussion of the wannabe ‘chest feeder’ ends with the decision that this particular patient’s desire for induced lactation (yes, it can be done for males and they will produce breast milk) ends with the decision that it’s not ‘medically necessary’. This patient is the only one to whom they said ‘No’. Some of the WPATHologicals exhibit some discomfort at the realization that at least some of these desired surgeries are in service to male sexual fetishes, primarily autogynephilia which throws the whole ‘gender dysphoria’ explanation up for debate. It’s HORRIFYING! The whole time my brain kept screaming. “WHY? WHY? WHY?” I read this terrible report with my mouth hung open mouthing the words, “What the fuck? What the fuck? What the bloody fucking fuck?” One of the many aspects of the whole transgender craze I’ve found unfathomable is the abandonment of evidence-based science-backed healthcare by medical professionals. It’s like social justice aliens turned doctors and clinicians and therapists into Pod People. How could this happen in the 21st century? The WPATH Files’s section on the history of ‘pseudoscientific hormonal and surgical experiments on children and vulnerable adults,’ answers how this could happen. In fact, again. The medical profession has looooong had a weird obsession with fixing psychiatric illness experimentally by removing or damaging healthy tissue—especially genitals and reproductive organs. It begins with the infamous lobotomies of the mid-twentieth century, then backtracks to the ovariotomies of the 19th century, in which every psychological malady that affected ‘hysterical’ women were attributed to their ovaries, and, like transgender patients today, they begged doctors to remove theirs, which the doctors were happy to do. It wasn’t until doctors started removing healthy ovaries from female prisoners that the public began resisting. Not surprisingly, doctors who resisted ovariotomies were attacked for being ‘wanting in humanity’ and ‘guilty of criminal neglect of patients,’ not unlike those attacked for being ‘transphobic’ or hateful today. It’s like the medical profession never learns that psychiatric distress happens between the ears, not the legs or hips. Is it the money to be made? Do they really believe they’re saving the world? What I still don’t understand is how they can remove healthy flesh and think they’re helping rather than harming. But I guess if parents can resist asking the obvious question Where were all the trans kids when we were growing up? it’s not hard to shut your mind off from the part of the Hippocratic Oath that prohibits that. Transgender healthcare is patient-driven, not doctor- or evidence-driven, and for the underaged, it’s kid-driven. The WPATH professionals routinely talk about their ‘experiments’ with trying to help patients receive the results conforming to the body image they want, despite being told that while people can be ‘non-binary’, hormones are not, and that each one comes with a package of changes, not all of which may be desired. Outside criticisms of their work, when they discuss it, are dismissed as conservative transphobia and hysteria. If you’re wondering what the trans community’s reaction is to this report’s release, guess. Just guess. The left-wing media, at least at the time of this writing, is near-silent on the subject. Nothing so far from the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Toronto Star, the Huffington Post, NPR, MSNBC, CNN, the Daily Beast, the Intercept, Washington Post, Politico, Time, or Newsweek. Nada x 13. One exception this morning: The Guardian. The collusion and collaboration with a scientifically bankrupt medical practice spreads far and wide, a filthy web littered with money, discarded breasts, mutilated genitals and the misguided intentions of progressive social justice activists who believe quite passionately they’re on the ‘right side of history’ when in fact they must know, not too deep down, that history may well judge them harshly, but hopefully after they’re dead. WPATH is considered one of the primary, perhaps the primary go-to for reliable, consistent, reviewed, scientific and evidence-based policy and practice for treating people with ‘gender dysphoria’, a term invented in 2013. It is none of these things. It’s the big pile of poo the entire field of transgender healthcare is rooted in: Lies. Unapproved, unethical medical experiments. Low- or no-quality research. A complete disregard for the clear harms they’re doing to their patients and except for the wannabe ‘chest feeder’, an otherwise utter lack of ability to say no to any surgery consumers demand, no matter how outrageous or inhumane. Dear God and Goddess, what have we become? CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 image by Peter Thoeny on Flickr 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!

Social justice is laudable. But privileged and luxury belief-laced extremism has turned to the same evils it claims to fight. Can it be saved? Pretty, serious-looking brunette young woman in the foreground, walking down a hall, the other people blurred In the late ‘90s I was on the Internet Usenet forum alt.support .childfree, for those who’d chosen the no-kids life by choice. It was a great support forum, for awhile. Later I complained to my then-partner, “It’s gotten very anti-child. We’ve always had a few of those nutters there, but now even the reasonable ones sound extremist about kids, and put down expectant mothers. They don’t seem to understand that kids are human beings too.” ‘Stork parking’, the spaces reserved for pregnant women at shopping centers, had just become a thing and many asc’ers were outraged. “Unfortunately that seems to be the way of discussion forums,” he replied. “Eventually the extremists take over if users don’t moderate.” I left a.s.c the day a friend with children scrolled through and was appalled at the nastiness. Embarrassed to be seen in such company, I didn’t offer a farewell or a reason for departure; I simply stopped contributing. The natural gravitation toward extremism Liberal feminists have achieved many fantastic victories. Women’s education, Roe v Wade, Title IX, better if not yet equal pay. Men no longer have the right to rape their wives, arguing that ‘We’re married, she has to give it to me.’ Black civil rights progressed down a close similar path, and, thanks to progressive liberals, only in red states now is gay marriage considered a scandal and an offense against God. Now, most of the progress to de-marginalize further lies with individuals’ responsibility to step up and ‘do the work’ of improving and developing themselves, trying harder, asserting themselves more, refusing victimhood. It’s up to you , baby. But social justice needs new mountains to scale, and because of the last half-century’s successes, activists must climb higher to find new forms of ‘oppression’ they can fight. They have to exaggerate and catastrophize because on some level they know their current projects are fairly weak. Hence the rise of ‘microaggressions’ and ‘intersectionality’ to find ‘marginalizations’ people didn’t know they had, and who are too privileged or too young to know what real discrimination feels like. These ideas have come to be known as ‘luxury beliefs’, those you need to be wealthy and educated enough to support. Rob Henderson, the author of the newly-published Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family & Social Class , argues that luxury beliefs are the new status symbols, in an age where almost anyone can afford luxury goods, or cheaper knockoffs, or you can just steal them. They’re beliefs people higher up hold that benefit themselves, but harm the classes below them . Social justice activism tends toward extremism on the other side, too. Conservative activism has moved toward a cult of personality and MAGAism after getting much of what they wanted—an end to Roe, unfettered access to guns, the end of affirmative action and a more conservative Supreme Court friendly to rolling back other liberal successes. Activists and the ‘chattering classes’ demonize the opposition and compete for attention expressing ideas and opinions ever more extreme, just as my compatriots once did on a.s.c. How privileged do you have to be to think the protected speech of ‘misgendering’ is actually a crime, however much you support trans rights? Those who police and criminalize protected speech that offends their delicate sensitivities and succeed demonstrate just how marginalized they aren’t . That goes for those supporting ‘Don’t say gay’ Ronald DeSantis or insurrectionists pitching a tantrum because their side lost. These, too, are luxury beliefs. What once was called ‘wokeness’, a commitment to social justice and correcting inequities in the system, is now primarily a well-to-do luxury brand for the non-marginalized of all colors, fast-tracking toward the authoritarianism they claim to fight. Twenty-four hours after the October 7 attack, students at academic moron factories celebrated antisemitism and a vicious terrorist cult, when they would have better served genuine human rights by encouraging Palestinians to stop murdering gay and transfolk . Regressive Left feminists turn into good little Handmaids for the Patriarchy when sly sexual predators claim the fake-ass ‘gender dysphoria’. Woke social justice activists claim to fight homophobia while ‘trans-ing’ any kid unfortunate enough not to fit the rigid gender stereotypes they condemn the right for, and favor ‘de-colonizing’ everything except men in women’s bathrooms , changing rooms and prisons. But still… Wokeness, the extremism that once properly called itself progressive and liberal, is rooted in pre-civil rights black social justice and originally referred to staying aware of impending violence and systemic racism at a time when it was still unofficially okay to lynch a black man. After the Ferguson, Missouri riots in 2014, it elevated the meaning of awareness of dangerous cops, a caution important for white people too. Is it possible to be ‘woke’ and ‘not a fasch-hole? On another note I also wonder: How many conservatives are tired of their political beliefs and ideologies being twisted by a narcissistic psychopath and his mouth-breathing miscreants? I use the word ‘woke’ somewhat less as I realized it was offensive to people who are ‘woke’ but not crazy-ass extreme, including some of my friends. The most extreme, I expect, have defriended or unfollowed me by now and the rest ignore me. I’ve taken to referring to wokeness as ‘illiberal’ which makes a very important point that some so-called liberals aren’t. It does seem a shame, on some level, for ‘woke’ to have been misappropriated as badly as it has been. Or ‘colonized by white activists’, if you want to wokely honest. I’m not sure it’s as effective anymore as a term solely for black awareness when there’s less racism in America, regardless of what you’ve heard about the prevalence of ‘white supremacy’. There’s something to be said for being ‘woke’ to injustice, if only we could agree on what that is. Is injustice really some old white lady who said ‘Negro’ because she was young in an era when that was a perfectly polite way to refer to black people, or is it better focused on the practice of ‘carding’ by some police departments, randomly stopping people and demanding identification, asking questions, who are often disproportionately black? When did ‘woke’ become so weak? It’s not as though the world lacks for oppression to eliminate. A black President drew out bald-faced American racism on the right the way Hamas’s attack on Israel vomited the anti-Semites and whitey-haters on the left. Maybe social justice is just weary after fighting so hard for so many genuinely progressive projects and they want easier assignments like de-’whitewashing’ Hollywood. Somewhere along the way it became the problems it tried to solve, and refused to look within and ‘do the work’ it demands of others. Marginalized = sinless, apparently. How is Ibram X. Kendi prescribing black racism against white people not 100% bloody racist himself? He’s a non-starter for many liberals because he’s the problem he claims to want to solve. It strikes me that the next iteration of ‘antiracism’ in America—2.0—should be examining and coming to terms with anti-white racism, which sounds right-wing and ‘yabbut’ but genuine antiracists can see how unserious woke ‘antiracism’ really is because it supports racism. Yeah, we can see where that’s going. If there’s one thing you can count on with humanity, it’s to exploit others. Will Kendi eventually advocate for 400 years of white slavery to ‘atone’ for a past we turned our back on 160 years ago? Wait for it. Woke social justice craziness isn’t over yet. I suspect ‘social justice’ will get worse before it gets better, especially if the Republicans and their golden god prevail. (Where are the statue puller-downers when you need them?) Unless those wokes who haven’t yet given their brains over to the dark forces of extremism join other level-headed liberals to fight to take it back. ‘Woke’ can be rehabilitated only if enough level-headed liberals grow the labia and balls to do it, and make it clear that illiberals are hardly ‘woke’ to racism, sexism, and homophobia when they’re pushing it themselves. Woke social justice warriors don’t listen to the right, so they have to hear critiques from their own, which is risky. The ‘woke’ are famously intolerant of those who fail to hew strictly to social justice doctrine, but the times they are a-changin’, and it may soon become less socially acceptable to identify as ‘woke’ in 2024. DEI, one of the main engines of toxic wokeness, is under fire. Colleges and universities are slashing their DEI budgets and the legal system is examining whether it’s constitutional to demand pledges to political narratives like ‘antiracism’ to get or keep a job. It’s becoming clear that DEI, as it’s implemented today, is creating and encouraging racism and other bigotries rather than alleviating it. ‘Don’t Call Me Karen’ Doesn’t Go Over Well At Uber The DEI industry could save itself, I suspect, if it embraced a universal social justice commitment to reducing all racism and discrimination. Like if it told the full story of slavery rather than treating it as though Europeans singularly invented it in 1619. It would enjoin POC to examine themselves along with their white cohorts and ask themselves whether they’re treating white people unfairly (or men, or ‘cis-het’, or whatever). Because tribalism is universal, and racism is tribalism, and anyone who hasn’t lived all their life in a cave knows it’s not just restricted to white people. Or men. Or cis-het. I don’t think DEI will do that, though. Illiberal fundamentalism has seized the far-left soul and I already know from twenty-plus years of arguing with Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. that you can almost never change the fundamentalist mindset. Ibram X. Kendi said it and I believe it! A Man’s Suicide Started With A DEI Consultant’s ‘Antiracism’ Workshop We have to hold these people to account, just as we do the crazies on the MAGA side—demanding facts, evidence, and rational theories pertaining to others’ suspected motivations, not conspiracy theories and blanket ‘they hate us, they hate America, they hate democracy’ condemnations. That’s whether they’re on the right or left, or you are. Hold your own as accountable as you do the other side. I have a formerly progressive friend who, over pandemic lockdown, fell down the rabbit hole of left-wing conspiracies. He gets really, really mad when I challenge some of his crazier assertions. It’s QAnon crap for the left. We need to make more ‘illibs’ like him really really REALLY mad. I’ve begun by challenging the broader, wokenized definition of ‘white supremacy’. Systemic racism exists, but if we hadn’t made progress black people would still be using separate fountains, feared for ‘contaminating’ swimming pools and Clarence Thomas would have picked pubic hairs off his Coke can on a park bench rather than a law office. White supremacists are the KKK, not you or me or even the guy who cracks a racist joke. White supremacists are racists, but not all racists are white supremacists. What can you do to challenge social justice extremism, and bring ‘woke’ back to some semblance of normalcy, not to mention social justice? Or the crazies on Team MAGA? I do suspect Americans are getting fairly tired of both, since voters are famously switching sides for the forthcoming election and I honestly don’t think anyone has a clue which candidate will win. We in the Murky Middle are the new Silent Majority, although maybe with the decline of power on both sides, we won’t have to be afraid to speak up anymore. 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!

NY Magazine's manly misogynist Andrew 'Andrea' Chu sees children as mere pawns and women as obstacles in the trans cult's weird, gender-bending games Image from Rawpixel It’s never about the evidence. Or lack thereof. Andrew (Andrea) Chu, the NY Magazine book critic, and winner of a Pulitzer Prize short story whose lead ‘graph is about all the things one could stick up one’s ass (don’t ask, but if you must know…. ), has written a cover story for the periodical that makes me very glad I don’t subscribe (and not just because I’m not interested in DIY proctology). Chu, a trans-identified male, has written a delusional, very dude-ish, and occasionally downright creepy cover story called Why Trans Kids Have The Right To Change Their Biological Sex , which demonstrates how divorced (acrimoniously) from humanity the trans craze is. He doesn’t mention the WPATH Files ; his story was published five days after its release so it may have already gone to press, or he deliberately ignored it. He’s defensive and dismissive and has that whole mansplaining vibe of a guy who’s been outside his wheelhouse ever since he slipped on his first Wonderbra. He argues about what I guess is a new human right we never knew we had—to change sex whenever the hell we want, at whatever the hell age we want. Damn the critics and those few brave scientists who say No, you’re assigned your sex at conception, not by the first doctor who sees your mini-wee-wee or wittle hoochy-cooch. Nadda mention of ‘gametes’ anywhere, which are the Ultimate Decider of how that shalt meander down one’s life’s journey. Gametes, in case you’ve forgotten your high school biology (don’t worry, I Googled so you don’t have to!), are an organism’s reproductive sex cells, X and Y, and you’ll probably at least remember from Mr. Hanson’s class that shit started When Eggy Met Spermy. Recall, please, that Eggy tosses an X, and Spermy tosses—something—and then it was a toss-up (ar ar!) as to what resulted until Birth Day, or with the ultrasound if you were born in the 1970s or beyond. I can’t find this sex-changing ‘human right’ anywhere in the U.S Constitution. Maybe I have a defective copy. I wonder how the Founding Fathers would react, say, if I travelled back in time and asked them about the right to change sex. It didn’t go well. The First Continental Congress degenerated into mass chaos and Button Gwinnett moved to forever ban women from Congress. Image generated by Poe AI, which knows historical white men when asked about them. The ‘right’ to gender reassignment Trans kids have this ‘right, Chu says, without the need for parental approval, and he puts words in their little mouths when he writes, “What trans kids are saying is this: The right to change sex that has been enjoyed for decades by their parents, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, and representatives, especially if those people are white and affluent — this right belongs to them, too.” First of all, no, they’re not sophisticated enough to think that way, and two, the way Chu describes it you’d think all the adult role models in kids’ lives have been racing to the trans clinic for decades switching back and forth—Heather Has Two Mommies! No, Wait, Heather Had Two Mommies, But Now One Is A Daddy—No, Scratch that, Heather Has One Daddy and One Non-Binary Parent—Now Heather Has Two Non-Binary Genderqueer Parents—Now Heather Has A Perpetual Prescription for Prozac Because She Doesn’t Recognize Either Of Her Parents When They Walk Through The Door And The Other Day She Called 911 Because She Thought Some Strange Weird Guy In An Expensive Dress And A Beard Was There To Steal Their Car. In Chu’s world, children should be understood as ‘full members of society,’ and claims ‘it does not matter where it [the desire to transition] comes from.’ Perhaps in their zeal to ‘destigmatize’ mental illness, which is one of the many non-dysphoric explanations behind the rise in transgenderism, the illibs decided to deny it even exists. Rather a lot like their denial of the differences in male and female brains. So, when someone experiences psychiatric distress of some sort, we treat the body rather than the brain? Then, I assume, if someone walks into the clinic with cancer, which is happening already with girls put on ‘T’(estosterone), [p.23, WPATH Files] we will teach them to woo the cancer away with, I don’t know, psychotherapy? Crystals? Rebirthing? If you’ve ever dealt with a cult, or a conservative religion that closely resembles one, you know there is no such thing as questioning the Sacred Dogma. Posted on Facebook, ‘Transwomen can’t have babies because men haven’t got a womb.” Public domain image from Picryl Evidence is for right- and left-wing whack jobs In Chu’s crazy transactivist world, which has gotten a lot crazier since the release of the WPATH Files, the massive collection of data, videos, screenshots of exchanged messages and discussions, and reliable citations isn’t enough to make the trans crowd take back what they’ve been saying for years (which no one expects they will), or rethink what they thought they knew , or at the very least, have the brains to STFU and hope everyone forgets about them when the world finally comes to realize what pseudoscientific and desperately harmful claptrap they’ve been promoting for years. Don’t expect the True Believers ever to acknowledge they were wrong. Chu’s abject denial of the evidence he acknowledges exists is breathtakingly Kool-Aidy. And OMG, the public is beginning to realize the jig is up! "First, it [an Atlantic article by Jesse Singal called When Children Say They’re Trans ] took what was threatening to become a social issue, hence a question of rights, and turned it back into a medical issue, hence a question of evidence; it then quietly suggested that since the evidence was debatable, so were the rights. This tactic has been successful: The political center has moved significantly on trans issues." Chu even identifies his previously unrecognized allies of his customary right-wing and radical feminist adversaries: Liberals. Those of us on the left who aren’t wokenized and fight his authoritarian illiberalism. His real tragedy is evidence, or clear lack thereof, moving public opinion! But now the facts are firmer with the release of the WPATH Files, not to mention support from the lib-iest in Europe. Which is: Gender reassignment is all a load of crap and experts know they’re harming their patients and that many will come to regret their decisions. But as Chu notes later, “If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will.” So they’re going to blame the high regret rates and ruined lives on the kids’ poor choices. How can children have the same free will as adults when youthful free agency only goes so far when you’re seven years old, eyeing the cookie jar, and your internal morality debate only rises to the level of How likely am I to get away with this? vs I should do what Mommy wants and stay out of the jar since I’m diabetic and that cookie could send me to go live with God! For men like Chu (and, as we shall eventually see, he absolutely thinks like and is very much a man), children have free will when it’s convenient for The Cause but I’m not so sure he wants empowered ten-year-olds driving down the highways by themselves. He adds, “This does not mean shooting testosterone into every toddler who looks at a football. But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right." WTF? Puberty is not something you 'consent' to! This is trans-narcissism writ large, fueled by the traditionally male medical arrogance that they can 'fix anything', including that which ain't broke. Puberty is a natural life transition that every human being who’s lucky enough to make it that far goes through; the ones that don’t rest in small coffins in cemeteries. If you want to talk about consent, name one human being who ever ‘consented’ to being born. Life’s a bitch and so’s the disembodied asshole who sentenced you to the life you got, with the parents you got, and if you don’t like it, tough shit. It’s just life, man , it ain’t easy, but people go on to have happy lives and the ones who fare best are the ones who don’t fight reality, unlike Chu who projects his own conscious decision to transition onto the “many opponents of trans rights who observe with horror that they too might have transitioned given the chance…” Has anyone in the last sixty years said that, ever? Because it’s been an option for that long, although most people had to pay for it themselves, they didn’t have woke health insurance covering sex-change operations, and Chu believes it should be covered under Medicaid for All. Funny how he and his fellow cosplayers fail to advocate for health insurance covering detransition, which is estimated in the WPATH Files as being as much as 27%. Chu further projects his personal fantasies onto teenage girls when he claims these theoretical jealous still-stuck-in-their-birth-bodies anti-trans-ers fight transitioners because “so intensely did they hate being teenage girls.” Speaking as a former teenage girl, I never hated it, just the bullying that comes with failing to be a stone cold fox. Speaking as a former little girl whose Depression-era mother tried to teach her how to be a ‘lady’ (spoiler alert, it didn’t ‘take’!) I remember being annoyed by needing to be this stupid thing when it was clear boys had more fun and more freedom. I never wanted to be a boy, I just wanted the same rights and freedoms they enjoyed—and I still do. At the same time as Mom tried to turn me into Grace Kelly, feminists were taunted by misogynists (in early ‘70s parlance, ‘male chauvinist pigs’) who asked them, “What do you want now, a penis?” No, just the rights and freedoms a penis symbolized. But in TransWorld, as in the medical profession which has embraced this new ‘human right’ so assiduously, if you don’t feel good, fix it. With a pill or some ‘T’ or some health-degrading lifetime drug-dependent surgery. Live for the now, fully rational and soon-to-be-sterilized nine-year-old for whom the prospect of babies are 10-20 years away! Who knows when you’ll change your mind, if you think you don’t want them? Famously child-aversive George Clooney changed his mind at 56, when he agreed to impregnate his wife. Future fertility, though, is something Andrew Chu sneers at, assuming that we’re all Elon Musks worried about repopulating the earth: “The specter of mass infertility [he acknowledges this] cannot be underestimated. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the anti-trans movement is driven by a deep, unconscious dread that society will not have enough working female biology to support the deteriorating nuclear family — and, with it, the entire division of sex itself." Yeah, because with only eight billion people on the planet, the next pandemic could wipe us all out or something. And when did his enemy the liberals worry so much about the nuclear family? He claims, “Sex-altering care can indeed affect one’s fertility but not always irreversibly,” (actually it is pretty damn irreversible, although we can’t yet say exclusively), “(but it's happening a lot), and the trans population is still far too small to bring about that sort of demographic apocalypse." Um, what about those today who might want kids later, which, especially for women, happens around age 30? And for men, who can change their minds at any time? No thought to the individuals, the humans these decisions are affecting. This is all about preserving the precious narrative, with sneering condescension and disrespect at the lives that may be ruined by all of this. (Sudden thought: I wonder if Andrew-ea is secretly sorry s/he transitioned? Regrets, ‘ave you ‘ad a few-ah, Ands?) Where were all the trans kids before this? There's always so little discussion of real science in these trans-debates. Chu dismisses Lisa Littman’s heavily peer-reviewed seminal paper on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria as a ‘sham’, the customary dismissal with which transactivists wave their large hairy man-hands when a scientific paper fails to parrot their genderwoo quackery. Don’t ask, of course, Why all of a sudden has evolution gone off the rails? We evolved as a sexually dimorphic species to reproduce in a specific, immutable, irrevocable way; whether we do as individuals or not is beside the point; it's how we're designed. Intersex people are chromosomal anomalies and the primary reason why we must preserve the ability to receive sex reassignment surgery if warranted; for all others, after we've eliminated all likely non-dysphoric reasons for feeling this way. Mia Hughes, the journalist who wrote the WPATH Files report, suggests waiting until 25, when the brain is fully developed, but that's still dicey as women's biological clock often doesn’t ring until they’re closer to thirty. Sterile men may find it harder to marry or partner if they can't produce children. And as the WPATH Files have taught only those who hadn’t been paying attention, kids can't think far ahead enough to prepare for eventual non-traditional fertility, and may not yet be old enough to produce viable eggs or sperm. What we do know is that people considering transition often change their minds when they’re given the full story of what to expect. The WPATH Files tells the story of Dr. Az Hakeem who ran therapy groups at the Portland gender clinic in London twenty years ago. He introduced those who sought transition with regretful post-transitioners who shared why. The wannabes were excited and euphoric, until they met the post-trans group, which Dr. Hakeem described as “mourning, depression, and sadness.” And, “ They realized they didn’t really feel that authentic in their transgender identity, so they were still feeling just as inauthentic, but just in a different body.” As a result, almost all the wannabes gave up their dream when they realized just how difficult post-operative life was, and how fantasy-based their expectations. The Dudest Dude Since ‘The Dude’ Andrew-ea Chu came to extreme transvestism (he’s had ‘bottom surgery’) not because he was ever gender dysphoric but via one of the most female-offensive avenues imaginable: Sissy porn. I’m not going to describe it. Click the link if you want to know more. This explains why his article is an exercise in resounding male cluelessness: He’s just another sexual fetishist. A cross-dresser as dude between his ears as he once was between his legs. There are people who try to understand the other sex and others who don’t. When I wrote for Medium I was frustrated by all the self-victimizing young ‘feminists’ who hadn’t the foggiest clue what it was like to be a man in today’s society and weren’t interested in learning. There are men who don’t know or care what the world is like for women, and don’t want to hear about it. Then there are men like Andrew Chu who, despite having declared themselves female, think they know what it’s like to be a woman and prove themselves laughably wrong whenever they open their mouths or set fingers to keyboard. Ye shall know them by their clumsy, klutzy inability to put themselves in someone else’s kitten heels, even for one tiny nanosecond. Chu accuses J.K. Rowling of “ anxiously projecting her fears of sexual assault onto them [trans kids] from across the sea.” I don’t think she’s worried about kiddie rapists; she’s worried about the documented adult rapists in women’s clothing. But it doesn’t get dude-ier than this: “The TERF does not, after all, fear being assaulted by a Y chromosome in a women’s restroom. Her paranoid fantasy is of a large testosterone-fueled body wielding a penis — an organ to which, as [transactivist author Judith] Butler points out, the TERF attributes almost magical powers of violence." Only. A. Man. Could. Write. This. ‘Paranoid fantasy’. And not just any man. Only the sort of knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, club wielding troglodyte who sees women as objects to be swept aside if they block men’s desires, and children as mere pawns in whatever weird-ass gender-bending game these jackoffs are playing. Only a man as large as Andrew Chu, who no one will ever try to rape because he clearly can fight back in a way a real woman can’t, fails to comprehend what it is to go through life always being minimally aware of the strange men around you, and hyper-aware if you’ve ever been critically assaulted. Only a man can write like this, for whom biological women are merely stumbling blocks to be removed, forcefully if necessary, so that entitled, narcissistic fetishists and misogynists can get whatever it is they want. For a fair number of them that’s autogynephilic male sexual pleasure, but I’ve seen enough to believe there are other reasons misogynist, dudier-than-The-Dude men might want to appropriate womanhood. There are political reasons. Pleasure reasons that may not involve autogynephilia per se: Simply forcing women to bend to your will, as they currently are permitted to do in what’s supposed to be the free Western world, or, more creepily, as one step closer to acceptance that if children have ‘free agency’, then they have the ‘right’ to decide with whom they want to have sex . This is where he’s going, whether he realizes it or not, when he argues children must be accepted as full members of society and it doesn’t matter why they want to transition. He's making an argument, in essence, that children are as logical and rational as adults and every wish of theirs should be respected. He's edging closer to, "Kids should be allowed to make their own decisions, period." The liberal media, with a few exceptions, is dragging its woke ass on acknowledging the release of the WPATH Files. So too, weirdly, is Fox News, and when I sent it to them I got a form email back saying they’d reach out if they want more details. So fuck ‘em. Tell your Congresscritters, especially the Republicans, that you demand a congressional investigation into WPATH and the medical profession at large. Canadians, we can do something similar since our Prime Minister is woke-as-fuck on trans rights over women’s rights. And if you haven’t already, download the WPATH Files and send it to any parent who’s considering or being railroaded into allowing their child to transition. The first step is stop with the pronouns. Now. It’s the only to way to fight back. 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!

Persephone Phoenix reveals how she grew the labia to leave her abusive partner, and encourages others to do the same If you missed Part I of Persephone’s awesome story, it’s right here. Go ahead, we’ll wait! Don’t miss her excellent advice for others stuck in bad relationships (especially the part about ‘bad feminist theory’) at the end of this one, either! He had an absolute fit. He drove over to my house, used his key to come in and started yelling at me. He kicked a side table across my living room. I calmly picked up the phone and called 911. I told the operator my husband was attacking me. I told him to get out. He went downstairs and meekly sat on the porch waiting for the police. They talked to him and told him to go home and get some anger management training. They made sure I was okay and left. I installed a deadbolt on the front door. He called me the next day and cried like a whiny little bitch, saying “I can’t believe you called the police on me.” So much for his big, macho, Iranian male power. I hired my own lawyer: new attitudes, beliefs, behaviors emerge. After we were divorced, I found a lawyer who specialized in unfair separation agreements. He was appalled by what I had agreed to. He sent me a summary of an even more extreme case that he had won for a woman with a scheming husband who made my asshole look like the sweet Tom Hanks character in Forrest Gump . He got her a substantial settlement after the fact. My wonderful lawyer immediately sent a letter to my ex-husband. He, in turn, hired himself a shark lawyer who countered with threats and outrageous demands. My lawyer countered that with some simple observations about Canadian law. And that was that.  I got my fair share of the fancy house that had considerably increased in value in a hot real estate market. It turns out the other house was half owned by his business partner, so he couldn’t have given it to me in the first place. But I got a share of its value as well. He turned our daughter against me: Luckily, it was too late to turn back. By the time I came to my senses and demanded compensation from my ex-husband, our daughter was about 19. And he was not about to let things go. He was pissed that I was asking for his hard-earned money. Unfortunately, she still lived with him. Even when she was 15 and I lived down the street from her, she decided to blame me for the divorce, and refused to spend much time at my house. Now that she was in university, she wanted her own apartment, so he provided her with that--which gave him more opportunities for badmouthing me. At one point, she phoned me and asked, “Why are you trying to take all of Daddy’s money?” (My settlement was a tiny fraction of his net worth).  When I tried to explain to her how marriage law works in the civilized world, she angrily shouted at me, “I don’t want to hear about it!” In true narcissist fashion, her father had love-bombed and manipulated her to see me as the enemy. The estrangement from my daughter lasted a few years. We still saw and spoke to each other regularly, but there was tension that never fully dissipated. She resented me for reinventing myself, for losing weight and being happy about it, for dating, for getting remarried, for moving temporarily out of town.  She was very, very jealous of my new boyfriend whom I met after my second husband died suddenly and whom I eventually married. At least she was proud of me for learning to drive! (I finally got my license in my late 40s). He disowned our daughter—his only child: a new nadir for him, not me. It seemed like I would always be the second-best parent to my daughter. Daddy gave her a free apartment with a marble kitchen and bathroom right across the street from the home she had grown up in. I lived miles out of town on a farm and she had to take the train to visit me.  Horrifyingly, she was raped when she was 25. She didn’t even tell me. She also didn’t tell her father fearing that he might actually kill the guy or have him murdered by the Persian mafia (I honestly wouldn’t put either of those things past him—he was physically violent with males who thwarted him and had hinted darkly at connections to the mob). But I was about to become a heroine to my daughter. My ex developed knee problems. In exchange for the fabulous apartment, he had basically enslaved his daughter (as he had tried and failed to do with me). He required her to come over to his house regularly to do things like scoop the cat litter for his cat. He insisted that she work at his cafés for less than minimum wage, despite her university degree and knowing her desire to work in the tech industry.  I worried about her career, because she was nearing thirty and had only worked in restaurants and coffee houses. I stepped in. I arranged for an internship in New York City with my boyfriend’s brother-in-law. I gave her enough money to rent a shared apartment and live in Brooklyn for three months. Her dad was pissed . He had lost his little servant. When she came back, he demanded that she manage his main café while he recovered from surgery. She was sick of the abuse and control and refused. After that, she was dead to him. She still lived in his apartment and he began harassing her by sending over his submissive Asian girlfriend with messages like, “You have three weeks to vacate the premises.” He stiffed her for the final electric bill of over $400.00 even though he knew she had literally no money.  She couch-surfed for a few weeks, got a menial job, and moved into a truly awful shared apartment with a stranger. But at least she was free of her father. She no longer needed me to rescue her; she got started on her own hero journey. Photo by Vie Studio My daughter eventually achieved incredible career success all on her own: the hero cycle continues. She is now a software designer making a competitive salary. Five years after her father disowned her, she no longer needs him. She lives in  her own cute apartment with an adorable rescue cat. Oh, and we are now best friends. I got some therapy: Almost at the return threshold. Before I could have a successful relationship with my ill-fated second husband (he died two-and-a-half years after our wedding), and finally with my new, utterly perfect husband, I had to get some counseling.  There were leftover issues from my childhood that were preventing me from relating in a healthy way with men. I dated fruitlessly for several years trying to heal my wounds: Getting over that return threshold is hard. I could probably write a book about the losers I dated before I found any kind of committed relationship. There was the drunk, the player, commitment-phobe, and also the many married men who reached out to me on dating sites looking for a little action on the side (these ones I knew enough to refuse). My second husband was not perfect, but he made me feel loved and desired. I was amazed that someone could actually be crazy about me; that had never happened before. When he died suddenly in front of me one morning, I was devastated. I thought we would live out our lives on his farm. We were only together for two-and-a-half years. I met my new husband at age fifty: my reward arrives. Less than a year after my second husband died, I met my true husband. He was younger and handsome, and…Jewish!  (I have always had a religious bent and had become fascinated by Judaism at an early age). I could not believe my luck.  A few years after we got together, I converted to Judaism. We have a blissful relationship: The ultimate boon. I could write a whole other article about how happy I am in my marriage. I will try not to gush too much, but this man is amazing! We have been together over a decade and married for a couple of years.  He does almost all of the housework (I do most of the cooking and grocery shopping). He loves my cooking (even better than his wonderful mom’s!). He encourages me to buy things I need (instead of, like my ex, yelling at me in stores if I dared to buy clothes while he loaded up his shopping basket with whatever attire he felt like). He praises me to others (instead of complaining about me to whoever would listen, often right in front of me). The best thing about being with him is the constant, delightful two-way conversational flow (my ex-husband thought I talked too much; he once held up my teaching license, which had just arrived in the mail and declared scornfully: “License to talk!”). In short, we are best friends. Even spending time basically 24-7 during the pandemic lockdown did not lead to fights or irritation. No, our relationship is not conflict free—that would be impossible. But any fleeting arguments are usually over and forgotten about within minutes. He likes it when I drive. He compliments me and thanks me constantly. And I do the same for him. We both love classical music, take music lessons, and joyously attend concerts together (My ex-husband explained to me that classical music is “for snobs”). We agree on life goals. I would move anywhere for him (we recently moved from Canada to the United States). He has to work, while I am retired, so I don’t mind being flexible. In short, we have as ideal a relationship as possible given that we are both homo sapiens , the most problematic and aggressive species on the earth. Final reflections: The master-mistress of two worlds. Yes, life with my husband, with my daughter, and even with my ex-stepson (my late husband had a teenage son when I met him and we are still close. He is now married to a lovely woman and they have two adorable tiny humans, one of whom is old enough to call me “Gamma”), is more or less my dream life. But that is not the point of my story. My advice to women (and men) in abusive relationships, is to stop accepting treatment you don’t deserve. Women especially, do not rely on feminist theory about how the patriarchy is making you powerless and spend your time complaining to your girlfriends about how bad your partner is and how much he is victimizing you (I did this to a horrifying degree).  It does no good and simply reinforces your victim status. Victims don’t become heroes. And please, please, don’t wait around for someone to rescue you. Get some self esteem, even if you had two narcissistic, abusive parents like I did. Find a good therapist. And don’t wait until your 40s to do that. Try to realize your real value. It’s too easy to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole with an abusive partner, too easy to accept his or her negative evaluation of you that only serves their dark purpose to keep you entrapped. Don’t be naive about human nature; people usually don’t change when they have power. When you stay with an abuser, you give him permission to abuse you and any children you might have. Don’t let that happen. Do not make excuses for an abusive partner. It doesn’t matter what his mommy or daddy did to him. Your sympathy will only embolden him. If you have a good job and are financially stable, get out! If you don’t, bide your time and get away when you can. If you procrastinate like I did, don’t get down on yourself. It’s never too late to leave. I have a friend who put up with his abusive wife until his 60s. He always told me it was too late for him. She died and he immediately met the love of his life. So leave. Maybe you want a better relationship, or maybe you want to be alone because dating in the 2020s is an absolute shitshow. That’s okay too. Live your best life. Don’t let anyone stop you. Be the hero that lives inside you. I want to hear from other women, and men, and transfolk who've gotten out of bad relationships. What did you learn about yourself? What made you think differently about who you were letting into your life and why you let them stay? Drop me a line from the contact form in my main menu! And in the meantime, 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!

There, rape activists. We said it. Some decide NOT to let this ugly event define them. Too bad feminist theory teaches women little of value re recovery. Free image from Pickpik I feel vindicated to read someone else say it. Not all women are destroyed by the trauma of rape. Eagle-eyed Grow Some Labia subscriber and Patriarchy bitch-slapper herself Persephone Phoenix sent me a fantastic article by Larissa Phillips on Quillette whose brutal, frank description of her rape by two undocumented North African migrants in Florence, Italy thirty-one years ago is framed within the context of her prior history of feminist perma-victimhood indoctrination, and how little it served her when Da Patriarchy dragged her into a park one dark night. She fought back, sustaining heavy injuries. She says resisting contributed to her recovery and she quotes two researchers in a 1985 report about avoiding rape who note that “[O]ne of the most important functions of physical resistance is to keep women from feeling depressed even if they have been raped.”  That’s the first time I’ve ever read or heard that! Fighting back is risky, for sure. Women have been murdered or permanently mutilated for their efforts. But some have successfully fought off their rapist, and Phillips, at least, is less depressed knowing she did what she could to stop the rapes. She condemns the feminist weakness-worshipping literature that teaches women to give up their power and thereby make themselves easier pickins for predatory males. Who knew that, if you fought back and survived, that it might actually contribute to your recovery? Phillips made the fatal decision one night to walk the two miles to her home in Florence when she missed the last bus and turned down an offer for a ride from friends who weren’t ready to leave the bar just yet. Two men dragged her into the park and did the dirty deed. Phillips’s screams prompted at least one person nearby to call the cops and report a possible rape in progress. Then she went home, and consciously showered off all the evidence except for her swollen and bleeding face. She had no intention of reporting it, of course; feminist gospel teaches women to just compliantly accept it. You’ll never get a conviction and he’ll get off scot-free. Rapists Who Get Off Easy Don’t Get Off Scot-Free Just one ‘problem’: Her boyfriend, Enzo, ‘unfamiliar with the feminist literature on rape,’ disagreed and pushed her to report it to the police. As it turned out, when the police finally showed up, they informed them that two men matching the description of her attackers had just been arrested for crashing a stolen car. Both were apprehended. And guess what, they fit the description of a recent past attempted rape victim too. Long story short, the feminist rape stories Phillips had been inculcated with were still right about some things, but ultimately wrong about everything else. Her treatment at the hospital by all-male doctors was, as predicted, further traumatizing; they were professional but it was invasive and humiliating. She watched from her room as her rapists were wheeled on gurneys down the hall. The nurses ‘snapped’ at her when she refused the pelvic exam, having had quite enough. They told her she’d wreck the investigation. Enzo got her to go along with it, recognizing what a mistake she was making. He promised to hold her hand throughout it, and he did. Then, months later, guess what happened. Despite all the failure prophecies by defeatist feminist rape activists, Phillips and her fellow victim got a conviction. What inspired Phillips to write her article was reading Celeste Marcus’s recent story in Liberties magazine and her public takedown of her alleged rapist, writer Yascha Mounk. How To Not Report A Rape And Compromise Your Own Credibility When You Do Phillips disagrees with the medieval-style justice meted out by Marcus to her accused when she alleged to The Atlantic editor, where Mounk was a writer, that they ‘had a rapist’ writing for them. So of course they severed ties with him. In our savage, disintegrating democracy, an accuser can get someone fired on an unproven allegation. Unlike E. Jean Carroll , Marcus has no proof; she preserved no physical evidence of the alleged rape, and unlike a woman in Tampa last year , she never filed a report. So, like, it’s he-said-she-said. Mounk denies it. Because Phillips reported the incident, she and the woman the two men had attempted to rape days earlier cooperated to put them in jail. Despite believing they’d never get a conviction, which is what Phillips’s female lawyer predicted. But they did. Phillips said, “Even if they had been acquitted despite my best efforts, the fact that I had pursued them to the furthest extent possible using the most effective tools available was important to me.” Fatalist feminism Had Phillips listened to Gender Studies weak-asses rather than her boyfriend, these two pricks might well have raped again. ‘Feminist’ literature collaborates with rape culture by preaching the article of faith that women won’t be believed, that there’s no point in reporting a rape because the process will be hell and they’ll likely never get a conviction. What they don’t tell women is that without a report, the rape never gets investigated, the rapist doesn’t get arrested, which also results, shockingly, in no conviction. What they also don’t point out is that the rapist is now free to do it again, knowing feminist theory has got his back. Phillips quotes Marcus’s Liberties article: “I don’t know a single woman whose rapist was punished by police. I don’t know anyone who does. Do you?” Well, no, I don’t. That’s because out of all the rape stories I’ve heard from the women themselves, I don’t remember any of them saying they reported it. I wonder how many others got raped because of that failure. I wonder how many of these women themselves got raped because someone else didn’t report. Phillips decided to report and, controversially, she points out, to emerge stronger than before. That’s verboten to many of today’s ‘progressives’. Feminist rape credo teaches that a victim’s job is to be traumatized, which is to be expected, but forever. She must be strong, but only in a vulnerable, victimized way. She can share her story and rail about The Patriarchy with other victims and women but she must never, ever, suggest that women can fight back or otherwise defend themselves. She must never note how women often fail to take personal responsibility to protect themselves, as Phillips did not, by not carrying pepper spray, or not walking home late at night because she believed Florence was fairly ‘safe’. Some places are, until someone gets assaulted or murdered. Permanently identifying with victimhood harms women by teaching them to comply with rape and to heal later, but not too much. Don’t emerge too strong, too smart, more accountable than thou for her own personal safety which might result in other victims realizing they maybe unconsciously collaborated as well, but who’d rather not learn from it and make better choices next time. Or warn others not to make those same mistakes. Phillips bears physical scars from her ordeal of which she’s proud; they’re badges of honor that she’s a survivor , that she fought back , that she refused to just lie down and submissively take it. She cites holding her attackers accountable as critical to her recovery. She chides the childish magical thinking from writer Roxane Gay, herself a victim of childhood rape, who refused female agency and personal responsibility at a conference by saying, “All of these problems could be solved by men learning not to rape.” Good luck with that, little lady. There are roughly four billion men in the world. Let us know how that works out for you. 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. When not to fight back Not all women could, or, Goddess help us all, ‘should’ respond the way Phillips did. There are times when it’s good not to fight back. Her attackers persuaded her to stop struggling and screaming when they held what she believed was a knife to her throat and threatened to kill her if she didn’t stop. They also threw her onto her belly and threatened to rape her anally if she didn’t comply. She complied. As I would have. As I expect a lot of women would have. Some women don’t have it in them to fight back, and we can’t fault them for that. You never know what you’re going to do in that situation unless you are. There are three immediate options available: Flight, fight, or freeze. Many of us, not just women, freeze in immediately dangerous situations. A military veteran has described to me how he and his fellow recruits were trained trained trained trained TRAINED to just respond how they were trained to many different dangers and they practiced until it became second nature to them. “Don’t think, just react!” We civilians don’t have that training, which is why self-defense classes aren’t necessarily the best protection against physical assault. Unless you’ve practiced it until it flows from your largest vein into your tiniest capillaries, you may very well freeze when shit gets real. It’s a quick way to die on the battlefield. It’s also a very good way to not die when you’re being raped. But women need to know that fighting back is a real potential option. Even when it doesn’t stop anything. Who knows; maybe something from that self-defense class will come to mind. Phillips notes from the 1985 anti-rape report Stopping Rape: Successful Survival Strategies, that the best ways to avoid rape are, from best to worst: Flight; screaming; fighting back; verbal reasoning; environmental intervention; no strategy. The most successful at stopping a rape were those who used more than one. It doesn’t always work, but the report notes that of women they interviewed about their rapes or attempted rapes, six—nearly half—of those who fought back with another strategy avoided rape. Physical force plus one or more techniques increase a woman’s chance of avoiding a rape. None of the women who used three or four strategies in addition to fighting back were raped. This report was published in 1985. Thirty-nine years later, what have modern feminists learned? Nothing; they promote the same submission from forty years ago, when we had a lot less research on how to avoid rape. If I sound harsh or insensitive, it’s because I’m very, very fed up with hearing the same goddamn stories over and over again for four decades and nobody ever learns anything new or valuable they can offer others. She Is Willing To Do Whatever It Takes To Be With Me Feminism today teaches women self-infantilization. To identify with vulnerability, not strength; with fear, not determination. I was raped. I am permanently ruined. I am hopelessly damaged. I am helpless against animalistic male sexual urges. Phillips reframed her experience when she discovered other women had been through far greater hell than she. She read, like a moth to the flame, of the horrors visited upon Bosnian and Muslim women as the Serbian army ripped through the civilian population during the Balkan Wars. The gang rapes of young girls, children. She realized she was a sexually mature adult when she got raped, and it was one time. By ‘only’ two men. She wasn’t raped or gang raped long-term, sometimes in front of her family or children. She wasn’t intentionally impregnated by her rapists and held hostage until she’d given birth to a Serbian child. She wasn’t permanently maimed, murdered, or forced to marry her rapist. She wasn’t reviled by her family and friends; they all supported her. She wasn’t blamed and murdered for her rape. Phillips observes that she made some mistakes that night. She got a weird feeling about the guy that had gotten out of the car to take a wiz on a tree and what she initially believed was a wife or girlfriend in the car. She had a strong desire to cross the street but she didn’t; why? Because the man was dark-skinned and she didn’t want to look like a racist. That’s another massive failure of progressivism’s ‘social justice’: Turning racism into the worst crime imaginable. This played into how Phillips unconsciously collaborated with her rapists. She didn’t want to be that white woman who crossed the street when she saw a black man. How convenient for any dark-skinned men who want to rape with impunity . She cited Gavin de Becker’s classic book The Gift of Fear which notes we’re better at sensing danger than we realize, and that when our hackles go up, when we can feel our heart, that’s the time to get the fuck out of there. In fact, in the beginning of the book de Becker cites a rape victim who got a weird feeling about the guy but ignored it, because up until then the stranger seemed okay. The next few hours were hell. The seeds for Grow Some Labia were planted the day I got into a strange guy’s car I’d met for coffee despite my feeling it wasn’t a good idea. He drove me into a dark basement. I got out, mostly because he wasn’t heavily committed to rape. Larissa Phillips decided to get on with her life, her loves and her interests, including classical art which she now realized was ‘saturated with rapes’. Her parents, divorced, supported her, and her father brought her books, including one by controversial feminist Camille Paglia. At first she disliked Paglia’s views on sexuality and rape, but she resonated with her views that women needed to be responsible for themselves, that it wasn’t, as feminists believed, ‘society’ that caused men to rape, but which kept more of them from raping. I’ve read several books by Paglia. Her essays and critiques she wrote in the ‘80s and ‘90s were spot-on refreshingly honest, real, and actionable. “Today, I am dismayed by my initial reluctance to report my rape and grateful that I was with someone who cared enough about my interests to talk me into doing so. The thought that I almost chose to treat the assault as something less than a serious crime worthy of judicial oversight is chilling to me,” Phillips writes. It’s something for all of us to think about. Women can be raped at any age, including in their nineties . Phillips, like me, regards women like Celeste Marcus as unserious about wanting to stop rape. I make no judgement on Marcus’s claims; I don’t know what happened, but I know she doesn’t look as credible as E. Jean Carroll who claimed to have a stained dress with which her accused, Donald Trump, could have exonerated himself by providing a current DNA sample. But he refused. Hmmm. If nothing else, when you’re raped, preserve the evidence! It takes seconds to remove the offensive garment—which you’re never going to want to wear again anyway—and safekeep it in a plastic bag. If archaeologists can extract DNA from a thousands-year-old skeleton or corpse, it can exonerate—or not—an accused rapist weeks or months or decades later. And if he refuses—well then, who’s the most likely rape liar? The one who says he did it or the one who refuses to prove he didn’t? Rape ends when WOMEN decide it ends. Not until. Sorry, Roxane Gay. I’m interested in hearing and writing men’s and transfolk’s stories about rape and sexual assault. I know it happens and it can traumatizing for them because people can take it less seriously than women’s stories. Anonymity is okay. Drop me a message at growsomelabia at gmail dot com. Don’t send a written story; let’s discuss it first. And don't forget to subscribe to my Grow Some Labia newsletter on Substack!

MAGA agitators and woke 'social justice' warriors make up, together, about 33% of political thought in the United States. So why is the 66% so afraid of them? Public domain image by Kai Stachowiak It was U.S. President Richard Nixon who first popularized the phrase ‘the Silent Majority’. He enjoined the nation in November 1969, “And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support." Who was the ‘silent majority’ to whom he referred? He meant those who weren’t counted among what might have been considered ‘wokes’ of the day. ‘Middle America’ remained silent but didn’t agree with the counterculture, the war protesters, the radicals, the women’s libbers, the highly vocal and smoke-enveloped, psychedelic visible shroomheads of the day. The phrase has long been popular with conservatives. Ronald Reagan appropriated it in his various political gubernatorial and presidential campaigns, as did New Yorkers Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in the ‘90s, along with Christian fundamentalist televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. The tacit assumption was always: We’re not like those filthy liberal hippies! Regardless of the decade. America’s blindness was in thinking that all of the right was included in ‘middle America’. The John Birch Society, Christian Crusade, and the McCarthyists were no more representative of the Silent Majority than the Yippies, Gloria Steinem or the Black Panthers. Middle America was a lot fuzzier back then. Americans couldn’t agree on much, but apart from the long-haired freaks and relentlessly buzz-cutted anti-Commie crazies, we did at least support the essentials of democracy and respected the Constitution, even if we didn’t always like Supreme Court rulings. At the end of the day, we could usually still shake hands. Thanksgivings still had to be mediated or prepped with what was verboten . “Don’t mention FDR in front of Grandpa!” Mom might counsel the kids, not that any of them had any clue what that crusty old fart in a wheelchair had done. “Please, don’t get him started on the New Deal!” “The war is off-limits , do you understand?” Dad might sternly inform his teenagers. “Uncle Bob and Aunt Edith have been warned too. They support it as much as you don’t, but what your mother and I support is a conflict-free family occasion, and anyone who violates this gets sent to the kitchen to finish dinner!” It’s time to redefine The Silent Majority in 2024, which no longer, and never truly has been, about who holds conservative values and who doesn’t. The far left, then and now, have always been among the loudest voices, but today the far right is just as noisy. In order for there to be a ‘Middle America’ there must be two sides. In the DisUnited States of the 21st century, ‘Middle America’ is now those of us who can’t stand either fanatical extreme. The Hidden Tribes of Americ a is a 2018 report I found awhile back and have referred to from time to time. It’s the brainchild of More In Common , a non-partisan organization that “does not endorse, support, or affiliate with any political candidates, political campaigns, or organizations,” and states they exist to advance the common good. Hidden Tribes examines the levels of polarization in the United States and divides Americans into seven groups or ‘tribes’. The more vocal and extreme elements, or ‘wings’, bookend the rest of us, the ‘Exhausted Majority’, which sounds like a pretty apt description of how I and many others I know feel about what passes for political discourse in the country. The left ‘wing’ are the Progressive Activists, what might be better described as the ‘woke’, although Common Ground never mentions that word. They’re defined as the social media addicts concerned about diversity, equity and inclusion. They comprise about 8% of political thought. The right ‘wing’, by their definition, is larger - including the ‘Traditional Conservatives’ (19%) with what we would call the MAGAs at 6%. That leaves the remaining four Exhausted Majority tribes as Moderates, Politically Disengaged, Passive Liberals, and Traditional Liberals. Interestingly, they include no conservatives inside the EM. I disagree with excluding the Traditional Conservatives. The report was published in 2018 which might explain the discrepancy. Polarization has happened swiftly in the last 10-15 years and six can mean a big difference. Conservatives aren’t as monolithic as they might once have been, and I know plenty who are as fed up as those of us on the Level Left. I suspect the report could use some tweaking as we face a federal election over which hangs a giant question mark with two deeply unpopular, elderly candidates, and the only people who love them are, it seems, those who think the other side is Evil Personified. Two reasons why I think more conservatives are part of the Exhausted Majority than the right Hidden Tribes ‘wing’ in 2018: The Political Homeless - Many liberals and conservatives, including me, are abandoning their party because it no longer represents their interests. But they still regard the other party with the same distaste they’ve long held for it. They don’t know who they’re going to vote for, and maybe they’ll suck it up, hold their nose, and vote for Our Grandpa, or maybe they’ll just say fuck it and vote for an independent, even if it’s a crazy conspiracist they know can never win. It’ll be more of a protest vote. The Reshufflers - They’re the side-switchers who will vote for the other side’s candidate if they think that party better represents their interests. It includes Republicans turning Democrat and vice versa. It includes blacks and Latinos who will not so reliably vote Democrat this time, along with Never Trumpers and those who voted for him before but are now thoroughly disgusted with ninety-one federal charges. I think this election with be a real nail-biter except for those of us who won’t be happy with either outcome. Let’s take a quick look at the rest of those Exhausted Majority Hidden Tribes: “Traditional Liberals  (11%) tend to be cautious, rational, and idealistic. They value tolerance and compromise. They place great faith in institutions. Passive Liberals  (15%) tend to feel isolated from their communities. They are insecure in their beliefs and try to avoid political conversations. They have a fatalistic view of politics and feel that the circumstances of their lives are beyond their control. The Politically Disengaged  (26%) are untrusting, suspicious about external threats, conspiratorially minded, and pessimistic about progress. They tend to be patriotic yet detached from politics. Moderates  (15%) are engaged in their communities, well informed, and civic-minded. Their faith is often an important part of their lives. They shy away from extremism of any sort.” This is a nice little sandwich of people who still care on either side along with those who are too fed up to give a shit. I strongly suspect it’s the Traditional Conservatives who are the right wing’s wild cards on their side. Some of them seem to be as fed up with polarization as those of us on the liberal but not radical left. According to a Pew Research Center poll, “ 65% [of Americans] say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics.” Seventy-eight percent say there’s too little focus on the issues facing the country, and 28% of the public had a negative view of both political parties. (Sept 2023) A few years ago, I met an early example at a political meetup in which I got into a friendly debate with a conservative who, like me, didn’t approve of violence. But he felt the left was as violent as the right and I disagreed, saying they might be eventually, but not yet. I now think I was wrong-ish. This guy talked about the then-recent CHOP protest in Washington state - a Capitol Hill Occupied Protest neighborhood shutdown in Seattle which was declared an unlawful occupation, in protest of the George Floyd killing. It was a minor protest but two people were nevertheless shot; one died. But January 6th it wasn’t, and the occupation didn’t last long. He also argued that the post-Floyd Minneapolis protests qualified and I again disagreed; however I simply wasn’t paying attention at the time. The killing was so depressing I avoided most discussion of it, compounded by the new lockdown world and my unemployment benefits having just run out. If I ever meet that guy again I want to tell him I was wrong. The Minneapolis riots and other Floyd-related ones pointed to more violent radicalization on the left, and now, in the post-October 7th era, college campuses are beginning to resemble mini-January 6ths. The CHOP protests were small potatoes and received more conservative fear than they deserved, but the Floyd riots were worse than I’d realized. Even the G20 riots and protests we had in Toronto in 2010 paled in comparison, although looking at the history of Gx protests, the signs have been there for decades that the left has the capacity to be violent. Again. Like it was in the 60s and 70s in the U.S. But here’s the thing: We in the Exhausted Majority (including, in my opinion, many Traditional Conservatives) are becoming a threat to others. I’ve just seen the first shot across the bow that illiberal ‘progressive’ activists are beginning to psychologically disengage from the notion that they themselves are ‘liberal’. Andrew/Andrea Chu, the really dude-y transactivist , sneers at liberals and blames us for being ‘the most insidious source of the anti-trans movement in this [the U.S.] country’. It’s the first shot across the bow I’ve seen of a ‘woke’ social justice activist showing hostility to (and fear of) liberals. I wonder how many others on the Illiberal Left have begun to regard us Traditional Liberals as The Enemy. It means we could find ourselves on the receiving end of their violence. WPATH Files (liberal!) activist Michael Shellenberger told a British interviewer on YouTube that he’s increased the security around his property in anticipation of violent harassment by transactivists. He expects he’ll likely get doxxed. It’s not good news the far left is beginning to match the far right’s violence record, but it is that they may be detaching from the rest of us. For one thing, it makes them more honest about who and who isn’t a liberal. For another, if we’re The Enemy of the far left, just as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) are The Bogeymen for the far-right’s True Believers, it opens up new avenues for the two less radical Majorities to come together and cooperate to resist and defeat the forces of authoritarianism in our respective extremist wings. As a woman, I know that authoritarianism is never good for us and children. As someone who’s been politically active for over forty years, I see that the problem with the far left is they can’t say no to anything , and the problem with the far right is they say no to everything. It’s why I won’t support the Democrats this November. I know Trump is bad for women and children although he’ll probably hit the brakes on trans nonsense, especially transitioning naive children, but I also won’t support a candidate who supports the misogynist and homophobic trans movement, as does Biden. I know I can work with at least some conservatives, and I believe some are coming to realize they can work with some liberals—we’re not all crazy antisemitic wokenazis. I encourage you to read The Hidden Tribes report, or at least skim the (somewhat lengthy) summary on their website . Maybe take the 8-minute quiz to see in which tribe you fit! (I scored as I expected: Traditional Liberal.) We are the new Silent Majority. But our day may be coming to speak up and drown out the voices of creeping authoritarianism. We’re biding our time. 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!

If it promoted a more experiential 'under the skin' empathy for others, rather than misogyny and abuse, many of us would become allies and supporters. Creative Commons image from Vice Gender Spectrum Collection I guess I can’t blame those who accuse me of being ‘anti-trans’ even as I still reject ‘transphobia’: I spend a lot of time critiquing and complaining about transactivism. I forget sometimes that most transgender people really are living how they want without a lot of self-serving performative drama. I think about how if my 21-year-old self was transported somehow to a modern-day college campus. I might be surprised at initially how at-home I felt among people who looked like my peers. Colorful hair, pierced appendages, androgynous clothing, crazy haircuts—it would all seem so typically ‘80s until I read the protest signs and wondered, “What the hell is a cis? What does heteronormative even mean?” Then I’d talk to them and realize they weren’t like the punk rockers, New Wavers, and other clashing-colors cultures I knew. I’d find young people more abrasive. More psychologically fragile. Unable or unwilling to relax. Emotionally destroyed by the flimsiest inconveniences. And why the hell did they ask me what my pronouns were? Wasn’t it immediately obvious? When I look at today’s LGBTQ with tabula rasa eyes, I see a genuinely promising social experiment unfolding, before you look below the surface. The Boomers pulled straight sex out of the bedroom, and Gen X pulled gay sex out of the closet. Millennials, and now Gen Z, say gender identity is a fluid spectrum and we may not be as straightforward male or female as we believe. Apart from our immutable sex gametes, they may be right. I came to understand a long time ago that sexual preference was a spectrum, and maybe gender preference is too. That said, I don’t think it comes naturally to many in a sexually dimorphic, ‘cis-heteronormative’ world; and perhaps only to the intellectually provocative. ‘Gender fluidity’ is likely more social media-induced and adopted than natural, but that doesn’t make it useless. I mean, some people are bisexual, right? Some are bi-ish but more gayish or straightish than others. Myself, I was and remain a pretty firmly straight chick, but I always thought bisexuals, the red-headed stepchildren of the gay rights movement who made many uncomfortable on both sides because they couldn’t commit, seemed silly to me because who cares? What skin is it off of any of our noses? All we need is love, right? Bisexuals struck me as folks who had seen, in the immortal words of Joni Mitchell, both sides now. But 2024 isn’t 1984, and today’s gender-benders aren’t as intellectually honest as their forebears, or as educated as their outrageous tuition fees indicate. It’s less about authenticity than untended mental health issues and malign sexual predation. And politics. It’s a shame, because gender-bending and gender-questioning are such rich, provocative undertakings. Why do we believe we are who we are? How much of what we think makes us ‘male’ or female’ is conditioning, how much is biology? What if we became ‘non-binary’? What would it feel like to be the birth sex you’re not? What is it really like to be a woman? To be a man? What does that mean? Perhaps it would have been a more healthily productive exploratory journey with the values and mindset of 1984 in which you lived as you wanted but didn’t expect everyone to validate your every emotional whim. If today’s genderfluid crowd ditched largely self-imposed narcissistic victimhood and were more open to new ideas that didn’t conform to some established narrative, especially a misogynist one rooted in pornography and the ever-present sexualization, objectification, and fetishization of women, I think it would be cool to hang out with them. With people who’d gone a step further in challenging and smashing gender norms, without all the dictatorial pronoun-policing, with whom you could ask questions without being called a fascist or a bigot. How Pornography Forged The Trans Movement - Spiked What if these social experiments in thinking outside the gender box were oriented toward what the world looks like from others’ eyes? Not just your own? When I was a kid I remember reading a short story in a kiddie magazine called The Under-The-Skin-Game , about a father who teaches his son to put himself ‘under someone else’s skin’ and imagine what is must be like to be them, in their circumstances. It was an early exercise in teaching kids to think outside their customary self-obsession. I think that’s where gender-questioning and especially transgenderism could still help people discover themselves as part of a larger humanity. Instead of focusing on themselves so obsessively, they could challenge everyone’s natural narcissism and enlighten the rest of us not inclined to personally explore. I’ve watched videos by transwomen and transmen who offer exactly the sort of helpful observations from ‘t’other side’ that those of us who stay in our birth sexes can’t know. Of course, when you weren’t born into the sex you chose you can never completely understand the AF/MACs (Assigned Female/Male At Conception), but switchers still offer a valuable and worthy perspective. The deeply dysfunctional transgender movement evolved, unfortunately, out of unaddressed mental and emotional distress in young people, with a big boost from pornography, and grew into a backlash against feminism. It germinated in what historians may one day characterize as the Age of Hate, poisoned by bipartisan toxic identity ideologies, but nurtured by a ‘progressive’ illiberal environment of authoritarianism, hijacked by political and sexual opportunists . Transgenderism, in its purest form, offers us another natural extension of intellectual and spiritual inquiry we might embrace as another way to experience, quite literally, being in someone else’s skin—transracialism. But identity politics is much more tolerant of crossing sex than it is of crossing race, and it’s clear that on the left, to paraphrase one of John Lennon’s now more-offensive lines, “women are the new[ish] N-words.” The only thing less acceptable than being white, to illiberal eyes, is being a woman who stands up to demanding men. Transracialism offers transgender-similar under-the-skin lessons, but in reality Rachel Dolezal is still badbadbad for trying to be black. I sometimes wonder if she’d be more acceptable as a transracialist if she was a guy (it’s certainly over-represented by white women). Transracialism is easier and less long-term dangerous than full transsexualism, which offers its adherents lifelong health problems, permanent dependence on hormones, and medications to keep them somewhat pain-free and alive. Nor does race-switching sterilize you or prevent you from ever enjoying sex. We Accept Transgenderism. Are We Ready For Transracialism? With growing awareness that transgenderism is driven much more by pornography, sexual fetishism , politics, and mental health problems than by ‘gender dysphoria’, perhaps it can be reinvented to embrace a more educational and socially healthy pursuit: Learning what it actually feels like to be someone you’re not. It makes no sense to argue that white people going Black Like Me is ‘white supremacy’ but that men appropriating womanhood isn’t ‘male supremacy’. I’m not being provocative; I’m serious. There’s literally no difference between the two crossover ideas, and I’d rather regard both as educational opportunities instead of petty supremacy spats. I have a book I got for Christmas called The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male by Max Wolf Valerio. I’m interested in what it was like for a woman to become a man. I will never take a walk on the guy side myself, nor am I interested in personally crossing the race line, but I’m interested in others who do. It’s a great failing of the transgender movement so far that it got hijacked, like pretty much damn near everything, by opportunists who aren’t the slightest bit interested in understanding the female perspective, but instead seem hell-bent on rolling back women’s rights and grooming the intellectually malleable to return to granting male sexual demands to women’s and children’s bodies and spaces. Rather a lot like the right is doing now. First they came for your womb, now they’re coming for your birth control. Transition and Apostasy: A Wife’s Perspective - Quillette Gender Ideology And Child Abuse Apologism: The Undeniable Links - by trans-identified man Julie Bindel, who draws a clearer line between the gender ideology movement and those trying to normalize and remove the stigma from pedophilia If only transactivists were using transgenderism to enlighten rather than oppress. Perhaps it’s time for a Trans Anti-Transactivist Rebellion by transfolk and their allies tired of non-woke everybody assuming they’re assholes because they’re trans or non-binary. I recently watched a video of the opening minutes of the hilarious (and horrifyingly prescient) movie Idiocracy . In 2006, we thought it was a searing critique of the right. We were only half-correct. It’s aged frighteningly well. When I remove transgenderism from its backdrop of misogyny, gay-conversion and kiddie cult recruitment, I see an adult’s iteration of the under-the-skin game. Experiencing, rather than just imagining, what it’s like to be someone else—the whole basis of make-believe—reduces our preoccupations with ourselves. Psychologists say it’s around the third year when children begin to understand that other people’s feelings may not be their own. That maybe Darla doesn’t like playing house or maybe she just doesn’t want to right now. It’s nothing to get mad about. Make believe isn’t something we necessarily outgrow, either. We have fan cosplay; furrydom; Mardi Gras; Halloween; and historical re-creation societies like the one I was in for over ten years as fifteenth-century French noblewoman Lady Gisele du Pont Avignon and later, Ayesha the Belly Dancer. I never believed I was Gisele/Ayesha, but I did grow as a modern woman via belly dancing and weekend make-believe. That’s me on the left, and my late high school friend Thom. 1987, Pennsic War XIII, Slippery Rock PA It was a healthy approach during my own identity formation years, and I developed more assertiveness, challenged traditionalist views of female beauty (I was a zaftig, rather than rail-thin, dancer), and taught other women, often ex-high school wallflowers like myself, watching them blossom and grow and feel the same sense of female power and confidence I felt, when I first began learning in 1987. I will be a bigger supporter of transgenderism and its sister transracialism, if it evolves to get under others’ skin—more beneficially. I think it can be helpful if it’s not so sourpussed, drop-dead serious, harmful to children , homophobic and disrespectful of women. And it needs to be a lot more honest. Like about medical transitioning, which brings very real risks, and others may not be fully mature enough to make that decision until well past the most stringent age of consent—twenty-five, when our adult brains finish developing, or even into our thirties when some finally realize they want children. I would like to see healthier, less invasive ways of exploring gender and race. The Black Like M e author took vitiligo medication to darken his skin, exposing himself to serious health risks. He suffered none, and contrary to an urban legend, didn’t die from contracting skin cancer from his epidermal experiment. There are always risks to transitioning , and no genuine backsies after genital surgery. Once your fully-functioning genitals are transitioned and less sexually responsive, changing them back just makes matters worse. Meghan Murphy expressed something in her recent article, I’m a TERF, You’re a TERF, We’re all TERFs that resonated with me: We’re not anti-trans; we’re anti-trans agenda/ideology/ activism; we’re anti-everything the activists force upon us. That sums it up perfectly. I don’t care whether people are trans or how they got that way as long as they’re happy, which clearly a fair chunk of them are not, regardless of what they say. It’s clear from the growing detransition movement that trans-ness doesn’t always last forever; for many it’s a phase; for others it’s something they internalize. Both are okay. But we need better backsies. In order to evolve, perhaps a healthier starting point for LGBTQ and transgenderism is to first and foremost embrace the authenticity it rejected many years ago: It’s okay to be you from birth. To be male or female, gay or straight, bisexual or genderfluid. Others don’t have to validate you by joining the club, they just have to accept you for what you are. Be respectful of others and their concerns; don’t push yourself where you’re not wanted and where you don’t belong. And stop blaming JK Rowling for the hate your transactivists have brought down upon all of you. You let the dogs in. Why Are Women Not Protected By New Hate Crime Law? - BBC If I’m being honest, I don’t want transgenderism to disappear. I think there’s a firm, socially adaptive, educational place for it, along with transracialism. Although I’m genderpeaceful with myself, I’m interested in an honest education in genderfluidity and androgyny, without the ugly identity politics, violent male hatred and insistence on adherence to logically problematic ideologies. Just an honest assessment as to what it all means. I think we could all learn something from it, if only our teachers weren’t such clear headcases themselves. That’s where I see it, anyway. 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!

Acceptance of reality means understanding you were abused. It can happen to men too. It's not funny or cute. And God help us all, it is NOT 'offensive' for men to speak out. Photo by Inzmam Khan I am so pleased to offer Grow Some Labia’s first guest post on domestic abuse - as suffered by a man. Jim McCoy, ‘ The Conservative Historian ’ and Jimbo’s Awesome Science Fiction & Fantasy Review decided to do this under his real name instead of anonymously because he wants other men to know they’re not alone, and that there’s help and support. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 1 in 4 men have experienced physical assault by a female partner. While Jim describes emotional and psychological abuse, he told me in email Nicole hit him twice. There is, as for women, a lot of shame surrounding being a victim of domestic violence, but it’s often compounded for men because it’s not taken as seriously. Certain feminists can be surprisingly (or perhaps not) unsympathetic to a man who complains of the very treatment they’d condemn him for. I am reminded of the social media ‘team-selection’ that occurred during the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial, and the reason why I haven’t written about it yet is because I haven’t yet figured out what the hell happened with these two violent headcases, although I wrote on my website blog about how similar Amber Heard’s words to Depp during therapy sessions sounded remarkably like a man’s. It was originally published elsewhere before the trial. What’s good for the gander is good for the goose. If we take domestic violence against women seriously we MUST take it seriously for men too. It’s not funny , cute, or, as Jim told me in email, ‘offensive’, according to some women who don’t want to acknowledge women can be abusers too or think abuse sympathy is a zero-sum game. It’s true that men abuse far more than women (although they may be abused more than we think when they’re silent), but talking about it doesn’t take away from the pain and suffering of women. Gay and lesbian domestic abuse is just as awful, and lesbian domestic violence happens far more often than we know as well. And while the numbers of transfolk killed every year are grossly exaggerated by transactivists, the majority of those who really are murdered are about 75% domestic violence casualties. THIS HAS TO STOP. Jim, take it away! It shouldn't take a funeral to make a person forgive someone, but it did for me. It was so hard to give up the anger and the hate. I was so used to being angry at Nicole that I didn't know how to function without being mad every time I thought of her. When you're divorced and she has your kids it's hard not to think of them. I was just so frustrated with her on a regular basis. It wasn’t because there was something wrong with me. It was more the fact that I married her mother along with her and that Nicole never seemed to care about my opinion on anything. Oh, Nicole would ask about everything but she never took anything I said seriously. My marriage ended over four words: Exaggerating . Nicole liked to scream this one at me every time I pointed out a problem. It didn't matter what it was. If I pointed out that she wouldn't take a day away from her mother to work on her marriage, I was exaggerating. If I pointed out that she mistreated my family and I got chewed because of it I was exaggerating. And the one to top them all: “Your dad wasn't forty-two when he passed. You’re exaggerating.” Dramatic. “You won't divorce me. You're just being dramatic.” “You didn't mean that. You're just being dramatic.” “I never told your sister she couldn't bring her kids to my house. You're just being dramatic.” Sarcastic. “No, Nicole. I don't want to spend all weekend with your mother.” “Stop being sarcastic.” “No, I really think we should wait on getting a car like we agreed to instead of buying a twenty-five thousand dollar car to avoid a two-hundred dollar brake job.” “You're just being sarcastic.” FUNNY. This one gets me more than the rest combined. Disagree with Nicole on anything? You’re funny. “No, Nicole, I don't want your mother to come over here every morning to get Riley ready for school.” Funny! “No. I'm not going to cancel my birthday party because my wife decided she wants to do dinner the day of the party after telling me she had other plans.” Funny! On and on. If it wasn't what she wanted to hear, she found a way to belittle it.. She would get mad when I wouldn't talk to her but why bother? She wasn't going to listen. It got to the point that I was considering offing myself to make it stop. She saved my life when she threw me out. I was that close. I don't know when or how, but it was coming. Looking back on it, suicide would have been a revenge killing. Nicole needed my help with the kids and she wanted the little bit of income I brought in. If I had offed myself she wouldn't have gotten it. I got the same effect from divorcing her, but I've never been a big fan of that. It was by far the better choice, but it wasn't my first instinct. I honestly believe that Nicole would scream “Exaggerating!” if she saw that. I needed a wife that took what I was saying seriously, I didn't have one. Then there was the fact that Nicole was attached to her mother at the hip. I don't get it. What I do know is that the only day of the year I could regularly count on seeing my wife without her mother was on our anniversary. There was never a day when I could count on seeing my wife and kids without Nicole's mother. Not. One. Single. Day. A. Year. Nicole's mother would threaten to not eat if we didn't come over every night for dinner. Nicole cooperated with the emotional blackmail. Seriously though, it was impossible to enjoy anything with Nicole's mother around. I’m told that was probably my fault because I was the one who didn’t want her around. Not a single dinner out. We had one dinner at home without Nicole's mother. My oldest daughter, just days away from her sixth birthday, remarked that she had never had dinner at home with just Mommy and Daddy before and how nice it was. It had never been like this until after I was engaged to Nicole. We went out with her parents sometimes, sure, but that's how it's supposed to work. Then when we were engaged, Nicole's parents split up. Oddly enough, Nicole's father moved out the day after the check to pay for the reception cleared his checking account. I'm told he did it on his own with no prompting from his wife. I needed a wife who would take some time away from other people to spend with just her husband and her kids. I didn't have one. I remember the day my grandmother passed. I was at work. I knew it was coming, but it was a new job and I didn't have any time off yet. I had talked to my mom on the way into the building. I knew what was about to happen and that it would probably be that day, but attendance points, right? Anyway, my mom called me to let me know. She was worried about me, but my wife? I called her. “Hey hun, my grandma just died.” “I'm sorry for your loss. I need to go. I have to talk to my boss.”“I just told you my grandma died. I need you here.”“I need to talk to my boss. I'll see you when I get home.” I was pissed. It got worse when my Aunt Janice passed and Nicole refused to answer her phone because she was at a baby shower and then screamed at me. I was bothering her. Then she refused to go to the funeral. Seriously. Two of the worst days of my life and my “wife” couldn't be bothered with them. It's not like she was there for the good times either. She didn’t come to my thirtieth birthday party. She showed up for my college graduation but she told me that I should be making everyone congratulate her instead of me. The exact words that came out of her mouth were, “I earned this.” Then she got pissy with me at my graduation party for the same reason. So basically, she was there but not for me. She was there for herself so that she could receive the congratulations. I needed a wife who showed up for things. I didn't have one. And forget about my health. If I missed work because my IBS was flaring, I was trash. My gout flared up one week and the grass didn't get cut on my day off. I got screamed at. Another time I had a gout flare and it was three days before she found out about it. Why? Why tell her? I had a job I hated for most of my marriage. I literally had to pull off of the road to puke a couple of times on my way in because I hated that place so much. What mattered though, was the schedule. I could stay home to be with the kids while Nicole was at work. I dealt with it. Any time I mentioned it though she would run around the house screaming “How do you think I feel?” at the top of her lungs. After that would come a lecture about some horrible crime I had committed in the past. Never mind what I was dealing with. I needed a wife who cared how I was doing, both physically and mentally. I didn't have one. Nicole knew I didn't want to be around her mother. She knew if she asked me if I wanted to do something with her mother I'd say no. She started asking me if I'd do something with just her and the kids and I always said yes. There was nothing I wanted worse than time with just the wife and kids when I was married. Then she'd wait a day or so and tell me her mother was coming too. The first time it happened I figured it was just a coincidence. The second time I was less convinced. By the tenth I was damn sure I was being lied to. I called her out for lying to me. She told me that she wasn't lying, that she had said that because she knew I didn't want to do things with her mother. I got fed up with it. The most common time she would do this would be on weekends. I got off early from work on Saturday and Sunday and she would ask me if I wanted to do dinner with just her and the kids on both nights. I'd say yes. Then she'd call or text me to tell me to meet her at her mom's house. Not this time. I got up for work one Saturday. I wrote a note. “I'm not going to your mother's house for dinner tonight.” I didn't do a ‘Dear Nicole,’ I didn't sign it ‘Love, Jim.’ I just wrote the words ‘I'm not going to your mother's house for dinner tonight.’ and folded the piece of paper in half, stuck it in my flip phone and left the whole mess on her purse. I knew she'd find it there. When I got home from work that day, I found a piece of paper stuck to the door. “We went to my mom's house for dinner. Meet us there.” Oddly enough, it was folded but the open side faced out. I pulled it off the door and flipped it over. My note was on the back. I took it into the house. Then I went to Applebees for dinner. She later told me she hadn't seen that note. I was supposed to believe that somehow, she ended up writing her note on the same piece of paper I had left mine on without seeing the note. I needed a wife who was honest with me. I didn't have one. Then one day, matters came to a head. Cecilia’s baptism was the day before. It should have been a good day, but my mother-in-law involved herself in an argument. That was nothing new. An argument with Nicole meant an argument with her mother. I needed a wife that could keep problems in our marriage between us. I didn't have one. Nicole came home from her mother's one night. I had planned to talk to her. She threw a fit because I argued with her mother. I let her wear herself out. She wasn't going to let me speak if I didn't. Eventually it ended. “I'm done with your mother. I will go over there on holidays because she's your family but I'm not going over there every day anymore. If you want to stay married you won't either.” Her response was what I expected. “I'm going to my mother's every day after work. If you want to see me or the girls you will too.” Yep, typical Nicole. I asked her to fix a problem. She refused to do so. We screamed at each other. She went to bed alone. I lay down on the couch and thought about my marriage to that point. I realized a few things I needed a wife who took what I said seriously. I needed a wife who would take some time away from other people to spend with her family. I needed a wife who showed up for things. I needed a wife who cared how I was doing. I needed a wife who was honest with me. I needed a wife that could keep problems in our marriage between us. I had none of the above. At the end of the day, I needed a wife and I didn't have one. But what was I going to do about it? I didn't want to leave my kids. The only reason I haven’t opened a vein was because I didn't want them to have to grow up with no father. I didn't want to see them have to live in a house without their father either. I knew if I left I'd be at Nicole’s mercy as far as when I got to see them. I knew this though: I was done. I couldn't bring myself to sleep next to this woman anymore. I was not going to her mother's house anymore. I was done beating my head against the wall. This couldn’t continue. I spent the next six months sleeping on the couch. With the exception of when we were trying to conceive Riley, sex had never been a frequent thing in that marriage. It's not like I was missing out on anything. I acted like Nicole had for her entire marriage: I did what I wanted when I wanted. I watched football with the guys. I read books. I played games. I was single again and all I had to do was the chores: Dishes, laundry, lawn mowing, taking the trash out, etc. It was months before Nicole even caught on that I hadn't come to bed. I brought it up. She was screaming at me about something and told me not to try having sex with her that night. I asked her when the last time I had come to bed was. She stopped screaming and ran into her room. The look on her face was epic. Six months later we actually hit Splitsville. I had lied to her about some stuff related to school. I was in graduate school. I had a couple of classes where I had taken incompletes because I couldn't write with my marriage falling apart around me. I told Nicole that my grades hadn't posted yet. She was too smart to believe me. I came home from school one night. I went into Riley's room so I could kiss my hand and touch her forehead with it. She wasn't there. I went into Sealy's room to do the same thing. She wasn't there either. Nicole called for me to come downstairs. She had hacked my email and saw where I had communicated with a professor about a new due date. She didn't tell me where my kids were. We got into a big fight because of what I had done. For the record, she had every right to be upset. The screaming match was epic. I was in the wrong here, but I couldn't take it anymore. I was just done. I took my wedding ring off and spiked it on the kitchen table. She went into her room. I went in to try to talk to her. She told me to leave her alone. She was shocked when I walked out of the room. I fell asleep on the couch. I was exhausted. The next day when I woke up, she was gone. At the time I figured she was at work, but now I wonder if she had been to see a divorce lawyer. She sat down and explained to me that she didn't want me living with her while we ‘went through this.’ She was careful not to mention what ‘this’ was. She told me I needed to leave. She would talk to me about when I could see my kids after I was gone. Then she left. I moved out a few days later. I filed for divorce a month later. I called her four times. When she didn't answer the last time I left a voicemail telling her what I had done. She inboxed me on Facebook an hour or two later and told me I was a joke. Here’s the thing: If I found myself in the same position again, I’d leave. Eleven times out of ten. It took the word of a Friend of the Court referee before it occurred to me that what I had been through had been abuse. Movies, TV, and the newspaper all told me that men were the abusers. I was a man, so there’s no way I could be the victim here, right? Even then I didn’t really take it to heart. It’s been echoed by two psychologists since though, and they’re the experts. And fellas, if you’re out there, know this: It can happen to you. Don’t let a woman abuse you simply because you’ve been told it can’t happen. It happened to me. And know this: There are those out there who will shame you for telling your story. I have been told that I am offensive for stating that I was abused and for divorcing a woman. I am putting this out there with my name on it because someone needs to. I hate the phrase ‘raising awareness’ but I guess that’s what I’m doing here. Do it anyway. Don’t make it easy on the woman who abuses someone else. Your brothers need you. Speak out. Stand up. Stop hiding what you’ve been through to protect your abuser. She’s not worth it. Don’t let your kids grow up thinking abuse is normal. They deserve better. And dammit, MEN, be there for your brothers. I can almost guarantee that you know a man who is dealing with an abusive wife. Let him talk. Sympathize with him. And, by all that you hold sacred, don’t dog the guy for putting up with it. Thank you, Brandon ‘Monk’ Thompson and family for offering to take me out of my situation. I should have gone with you that day. And understand this: If you are a man and you are stuck in this situation GET THE FUCK OUT!!!! Go somewhere safe. If you can take your kids with you, do so. You matter, even if she acts like you don’t. If you are being emotionally, verbally, psychologically, or physically abused by a female domestic partner, there is help. It’s sparse compared to that for women but it’s a start, and you can find other men in your situation you can network with. HelpGuide.org - Help for men who are being abused MenLiving - This is a support group for connecting men to live more intentionally and consciously. It doesn’t seem to raise any red flags for misogyny - in other words, it’s not the wrong kind of ‘men’s rights’ group although I’m sure they do discuss rights men have. It includes trans-identified females too. They describe themselves as “…regular guys – genuine, open and aware and we’d love to hang out with you.” Reach Out Recovery - Their ‘When The Men Are Abused’ link details the basics of male abuse, offers ‘Eric’s’ story as an example, and has some great resource links at the end Domestic Violence Against Men: No Laughing Matter - Psychology Today The National Domestic Abuse Hotline , 1-800-799-7233 (1-800-799-SAFE) is for everyone, not just women. You will not be judged if you call it. If she’s physically violent, it’s critical you get out while you can, and consider your children as well - who will she take out her hostilities on when you’re not there anymore? There is help. 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!

Campus life in 2024 looks a lot like 1970, and you know things have gotten crazy when the left has me cheering for Lauren Boebert. Bullet hole in a large metal sculpture at Taylor Hall, where the shootings occurred. Photo by the author Note: I should have published this on May 4th but I forgot. My apologies! It was 54 years ago today that the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four student protesters and wounded nine at a then-unknown small state university in northeast Ohio. Exactly one month later, on June 4th, the folk rock hippie band Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young released Ohio , enshrining the event in pop culture with its defiant opening guitar riff and lyrics. “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/We’re finally on our own/This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in O-hi-o!” The shootings put the college town on the map and ensured that anyone who graduated after 1970 for at least twenty years after answered the question, “So where did you go to school?” with “Kent State University, and no I wasn’t there during the shootings.” Because they’d always ask. The deaths shocked America, although no one paid attention to an unprecedented second campus shooting exactly two weeks later in Mississippi, when police opened fire on student protesters at Jackson State University, killing two students and injuring twelve. But the Jackson State kids were black, so no one noticed. This includes Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who, exactly one month later, did not release a song that began, “Two dead in Mis-sis-sippi!” I’ve often wondered what it must have been like to be a teenager or young adult back then; I was still learning to read. I’ve read the literature on the ‘60s, watched the movies, bought the old LPs (then downloaded them a decade later). I even was a bit of a ‘displaced’ hippie myself, a visceral response to the perfectly-coiffed, preppy-dressed, Young Republican vibe of the newly-inaugurated Reagan era. I’ve imagined how bugspit insane it must have been to grow up when, if you were a young man whose father lacked the wealth and connections to get you out of your draft notice siren call, you were forced to make a tough decision, if you were unwilling to fight: Face jail as a conscientious objector, flee to Canada or go kill people in a foreign land against whom you had no personal grudge. Because you were forced by your own government for reasons no one could clearly articulate. Campus unrest fifty-four years ago embraced also civil rights; especially in the South where the Klan still ran rogue and killed any ‘uppity n—ers’ that got in the way of conserving the dying Ol’ South. Other causes embraced free speech, the environment, or ‘ecology’ as it was called back then, and students’ rights. I keep thinking about Kent State and Jackson State as today’s college campuses, especially at elite universities, erupt in protests primarily about, once again, an unpopular war in another far-off land, but that no one in this hemisphere is forced to fight. The Blanket Hill bell, which you see in the old photographs. It was considered sacrosanct by some and only to be rung on solemn occasions, like the annual commemorative ceremonies. Rebels occasionally rang the bell anyway. I did, the night before my graduation. Photo by the author Today’s college students seem far less sympathetic than the ones I read about and studied. For pete’s sake, I never thought I’d see the day when I’d be cheering on Lauren ‘Jack-Off Queen’ Boebert trying to speak amid student shoutdowns. Free Palestine? Free speech , you student bitches! The protesters understand far less about that part of the world than their grandparents regarding Vietnam. Many can name neither the river nor the sea in their favorite genocide chant. I don’t remember reading that the student protesters of yore called for the elimination of entire groups of people, although Yippie Jerry Rubin spoke at Kent State a few weeks before the shootings and urged kids to ‘kill your parents’, as the first part of the ‘Yippie program’. “They are the first oppressors,” he added. It was a remarkably callous and wildly irresponsible remark nine months after the brutal Manson murders. Thankfully, no one took his advice. I wonder if some might take it as a call to action today. Student protesters have devolved from uncritically supporting Gaza to openly cheering for Hamas, a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist group that would kill every last one of them as filthy infidels, with especial torment for Team Rainbow. Student protesters are almost never exclusively non-violent, educated, free-speech-loving little angels. They have much in common with their spoiled, entitled antecedents and descendants. The protesters of yore deplatformed campus speakers as far back as 1825 when Thomas Jefferson had to face pissed-off students at the University of Virginia rioting for the right to goof off and to resist what they considered overly strict academia. Spoiled scions of the merchant rich, these pioneering protest brats’ first noble cause was to fight for their right to paaaaarty . A century and a half later, Kent State protesters were as ‘woke’, entitled, and fractious as in Jefferson’s day. A signed nailed to a tree in 1970 asked, ‘Why is the ROTC building still standing?’ A day later, it wasn’t— it was burned to the ground . And down in Mississippi, the students at Jackson State were throwing rocks at passing cars driven by white people, further inflamed by a rumor that Charles Evers, brother to a recently slain black civil rights activist by the Ku Klux Klan, had been murdered along with his wife (they weren’t). And then someone outside the school set fire to a dump truck. As disgusted as I am by today’s kids—who do have a right to protest, even if I don’t always agree with them (and sometimes I do )—I’m worried about when the bodies will fall. Maybe it will be the National Guard, if they’re called in, or the police. Or maybe it will be a mass shooting by ‘outside agitators’, or ‘external sources’ as they’re called now. Where Jeff Miller died, in the Prentice Hall parking lot. Photo by the author Today’s campus protests, as in 1970, are a moral clusterfuck of good and bad values, right and wrong action. FIRE—the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education—kind of the new ACLU—helpfully spells out for campus protesters what they have the legal right to do and not do. What constitutes free speech and what doesn’t. FIRE statement on campus violence and arrests Violence truly begets violence, and today’s Columbia University is rather a lot like yer grandmother’s. Back in 1968 students occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia, which also hosted a ‘Gym Crow’ protest over a segregated gymnasium. On Tuesday, police entered an occupied Hamilton Hall again and arrested dozens of the geographically-challenged. Hardcore university liberalism got a boost in the 1960s. According to Steven Mintz, writing for Inside Higher Ed , post-war federally enacted student loan and grant programs, with a special emphasis on making education available to the economically disadvantaged, increased college enrollments 45% from 1945 to 1960, and doubled them by 1970. College was also a good way to defer going to Vietnam. What distinguishes today’s campus protesters from their grandparents is how blatantly anti-Israeli and antisemitic they were from Day 1—34,000 Gazan lives ago, on October 8. Student America’s response to Hamas’s attack was immediate. The Israeli dead literally weren’t even cold before impromptu protests began around the country, encouraged heavily by Palestinian and other Muslim students. Young people who would never have tolerated rocks and abuse lobbed at black people told to ‘Go back to Africa, n-word!’ felt perfectly comfortable, and no, not hypocritical at all, chanting the famous geographic genocidal call to action. It’s why I’ve never taken any of them seriously. No, not even 34,000 lives later, with Israel smelling about as bad as Hamas and a seeming fuck-you-all, we’ll do what we want, you’ll hate us no matter what, so fuck it, you want genocide, THIS is genocide , bitches! I can’t even read about the Gazan War anymore. My sympathy for Israel has mostly evaporated. There’s simply no justification for the carnage, even though I shed no tears for dead Hamassholes. The terrorist group can’t be rehabilitated. But even so, as antisemitic and hateful as I find the protesters, as mindlessly psycho as so many on the Jewish left and right have become, as understandable as I find those Jewish protesters who morally sympathize with suffering imperfect humans, I flip the bird to those who align themselves with people who hate them and only tolerate their presence because they’re ‘good little Jews’, towing the ‘correct’ party narrative. I don’t want to see these kids die. They’re young, dumb, and full of rum, to put it politely. We’re all dumbasses of one sort of another when we know everything. But even dumbass young people shouldn’t die when they have their entire lives otherwise to pull their heads out of their asses and move forward through life hopefully wiser, more experienced, more circumspect. My concern is not that the police or a military response will bump them off (although that’s a possibility in the event of a Trump victory this November), but that some right-wing MAGA moron will mow them down. College campuses are full of large, tall buildings, ideal for snipers. Charles Whitman, the original mass shooter, popped off people on the street from a high tower at the University of Texas in 1966 after killing his mother and wife with knives (shades of Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza). Lee Harvey Oswald famously assassinated a president from the top of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas. Most recently, in 2017, Stephen Paddock fired down on a music festival in Las Vegas from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Hotel, killing 60 and wounding over 400. That’s what I think about: Tall buildings on college campuses where well-armed, militia-trained, right-wing MAGA morons can rain hot death from above. It would make Kent State and Jackson State look like a slow day in Detroit. Not all of today’s protests are violent, nor is all the aggressive police response justified. When kids and cops come together, civil rights are violated and laws are broken on both sides. Nothing has changed since the ‘60s, there. But what we didn’t have then was the established history of mass shootings, with a heavy percentage enacted by right-wing loners . Back in 1966, Charles Whitman was a fluke. Today he’s why one might buy a Kevlar jacket in the campus bookstore. I can’t speak for the descendants at Jackson State, but if you went to Kent State in the wake of 1970 you never escaped the taint of what happened. The reminders were everywhere. The May 4th Task Force, created to keep alive the memory of the four dead students and the nine wounded, permeated the campus, especially as the May 4th anniversary approached. I lived in the Prentice Hall dormitory, where protester Jeffrey Miller died in our parking lot. Later, I used to drink hairy buffalo and smoke weed and hash with my college dude neighbors. Miller had lived and partied there fifteen years earlier. Photo by the author’s father When I lived off-campus, two of my roommates were in the May 4th Task Force and one of the wounded survivors, who shall remain nameless, used to call and argue with Betsy. He’d been shot in the arm. There are two versions of how that happened: One, he says as he was ducking behind a tree his arm swung out and he got hit. Two, others say he hid behind the tree and stuck his arm out, hoping to take a hit. I’m not sure which to believe, but he was the go-to guy for the media every year as May 4 approached. I considered him an attention-seeking media whore. Only God knows, I guess. Today what happened at two colleges fifty-four years ago seems small potatoes considering the reality students live with now: Campus mass shootings by lone wolves who have no friends, have never had a girlfriend, and leave angry manifestos in their rooms or on the Internet. Virginia Tech must thumb its nose at Kent State’s and Jackson State’s petty-ass casualties; VT counts 33 victims in 2007. Today’s public schools do the same; entire classrooms of small children have died at Sandy Hook and Uvalde. I think today’s anti-Israel protesters are a lot more racist than they admit, but I support their right to shoot their stupid mouths off in public about subjects they know nothing about. Free speech is for morons as well as intellectuals. It’s for your Nazis and our Nazis. What’s a shame is so few in today’s media are holding today’s college students accountable for the hateful, misogynist, homophobic, and genocidal terrorism promulgated by Hamas. Oppressors vs oppressed? How can you tell the diff? Today’s Palestinians and Jews have literally been fighting each other for thousands of years in a war that’s been going on so long its germination is chronicled (lopsidedly) in a semi-historical document called the Bible. The Philistines, one of the many ancestors of the Palestinians, kicking the ass of their Israelite enemies for some goddamn reason or another. Public domain image from Internet Images archive. From the river to the sea. I hope everyone remains safe, regardless of moral purity. Young people are both brilliant and dumbass. No parent should have to send their child off to school, whether five or eighteen, and receive them back in a body bag. Whether it’s the government, the police, or some asshole with a grudge against the world, free speech is free speech, folks. It includes the right to asshole speech. But it doesn’t include the right to be violent or promote it against others. Jews have the right to live and walk freely, too. Which they don’t. Anywhere. Our fashionably kaffiyeh-clad friends conveniently forget that. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing!