Big corporate power and progressives in government legalized private-sector unions, incorporated them (corporatism), and then crushed them with out-sourcing, off-shoring, and mass immigration. They did this while pressing a cosmopolitan worldview onto the proletariat, smearing cultural and national integrity as backwards and bigoted. Unions shifted to cover the public-sector bureaucrats, the very corporate functionaries pushing multiculturalism and transnationalism, adapting its organization to become the mouthpiece for the credential professional-managerial class. We now live in an administrative state living administered lives with unionized bureaucrats administering them.
These are the same big corporations—enabled by the same administrative state, with its regulatory apparatus and technocratic corp—that pump forever chemicals into the earth and atmosphere and mine the human population for forever patients. This is the same ruling elite who push climate apocalypticism and use mass hysteria to rationalize globalization and restrictions on efficient food and energy production. It’s the same ruling elite that demand we agree to overthrowing the most basic truths of the world, such as the gender binary and its immutability.
The Democratic Party is the party of the elite. See what you see. Academic institutions, the culture industry, the mainstream media—these unelected de facto governing bodies push the party line. They are in cahoots, and folks on that side should admit it and lean into their post-truth world. But the folx deny it, and even more than this, tell you that they are the real voice of the common man. They think you’re too dumb to see it for what it is. Maybe some of you have been asleep. I confess, I was drowsy for a spell. But we’re not dumb. And we’re waking up.
The plane of organic solidarity
Who are the true defenders or free labor and conservationism? I grew up with them. I have come home to them. They’re the rural conservative individualist who uses the earth for survival but does so in a way that preserves the environment he knows he and his wife—and their children and their children—have to conserve to pass down to the next generation of virtuous republican citizens—not an inheritance of grievances, but an inheritance of republic virtue and good stewardship of the earth. They’re the small entrepreneurs who build their business to benefit the members of their community—the organic solidarity of the people, built on the traditional family system, ensuring their loyalty to their customers and employees, thus conserving the social ecology. Today, men and women with this spirit are rising and they’re making the Republican Party their means to return America to its populist roots.
If you ask little kids what they want to be when they grow up, many of the boys will tell you that they want to be police officers and firefighters, sometimes soldiers. Who are these men they want to grow up to be? They are the men who protect the community from danger and help people in need. The corruption of the medical profession aside, helping people is what doctors and nurses do, too, so one finds children wanting to be these things, as well. Yet, by the time they finish their education, the curriculum and pedagogical technique, now fully captured by progressives administrators, staff, and teachers, dispossess many of them of their natural instincts to defend country, protect community, and help the needy—replacing those instincts with a massive state bureaucracy that is not merely remote to their local concerns and needs but antagonistic towards the people and the culture naturally inclined to address those concerns and needs. Progressives seek to dethrone family and community and put big government in their stead. To be sure, policing and the military still find men who lean into their vocation, and there are many men around with broad shoulders who make a path to self-actualization; rural and small town America still exist; but that America is under assault, and the fact pattern attests to it.
Our children are groomed and recruited to be functionaries for the antagonistic force assaulting the republican ideal. Social and emotional learning (SEL) teaches them to focus inward, to dwell on their anxieties, insecurities, and vulnerabilities, while diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) selects the personnel that hones and implements the strategy of cultivating faux esteem and self-loathing. SEL conditions children to think not of how through service to others they may build courage and resiliency, but rather how the world has done them dirty, their ancestors either oppressed or oppressor, manufacturing the trauma of the victim (increasingly a sought status, with people inventing and stepping into novel categories of the oppressed), while at the same time instilling the shame of the oppressor, demoralizing the majority, teaching them to hate the very communities they are naturally inclined to defend and perpetuate—teaching them to hate themselves.
This is what explains the spectacle of campus unrest—and the summer of 2020 and so on. This is the pathological expression of hateful retribution for fictional and impossible harms and deep-seated self loathing learned from socialization in the inverted totalitarian arrangements of managed democracy with an agenda of managed decline. The modern nation-state, and its inherent principles of freedom and reason, are being dismantled by a power elite who seek the establishment of a global neofeudalism rooted in corporate statism where the proletariat of the earth will serve as serfs on high-tech estate. We can see the New Dark Ages approaching. Your comrades are the men and women who are bringing the light.
“Over the years, upside-down flags have been displayed by both the right and the left as an outcry over a range of issues, including the Vietnam War, gun violence, the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion and, in particular, election results. In 2012, Tea Party followers inverted flags at their homes to signal disgust at the re-election of President Barack Obama. Four years later, some liberals advised doing the same after Mr. Trump was elected.” —Jodi Kantor, The New York Times
A photo obtained by The New York Times shows an inverted flag at the Alito residence on January 17, 2021, three days before the Biden inauguration
Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. had an upside-down US flag waving over his house following the 2020 election. The flag in this position signals distress. It has been rebranded by The New York Times as a “Stop the Steal” symbol. Alito said that it was his wife, not him, who raised the distress symbol. “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito said in an emailed statement to the NYTimes. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
Progressives are countering that even if Alito didn’t raise it, he kept it flying. “It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia (to get a sense of her politics, here’s Frost’s profile page at the university). This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard,” she said, “which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases.”
So are progressives really saying that Alito—a man sworn to defend the Constitution—should censor his wife’s speech? Are these the same progressives who lost their minds over Harrison Butker’s graduation address at Benedictine, a private catholic college in Atchison, Kansas? This is a serious question: are feminists now good with husbands censoring the speech of their wives? Speaking as a feminist myself, I’m not good with that at all. Mrs. Alito has a right to fly any flag she wishes over her house.
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Speaking of Harrison Butker, the Kansas City Chiefs kicker, I listened to his speech yesterday. I got curious because the speech was being described as demeaning towards women and the LGBTQ+ community and inappropriate for a graduation. Inappropriate at a Catholic university? A petition for Butker’s dismissal from the Chiefs has nearly reached its goal of 150,000 signatures. Here is a video of his speech if you’re interested in listening to it:
After listening to the whole thing, I am at a loss to understand what is so objectionable? I don’t agree with some of his opinions, but none are outrageous. They are consistent with his religious teachings—which he has a right to—and mild compared to the preachments of Islamic clerics. There are things he said that I do agree with. The things he said about the rile of fathers, for example (Kansas City residents should take those sentiments to heart). He impressed me; he is an accomplished public speaker and, what is more, I learned a lot about a worldview that is different from mine, namely the Latin Mass. I appreciate men rising and expressing their opinions in an honest and direct way.
It did not surprise anyone, I think, when the NFL condemned the speech. “Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity. His views are not those of the NFL as an organization,” said Senior Vice President Jonathan Beane, the league’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. (Nice, they assigned their DEI man to articulate the criticism.) “The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.” Why does the NFL articulate positions on such matters? The NFL is an impersonal corporation. Shouldn’t it be an apolitical organization?
However, it did surprise many when Whoopi Goldberg came to his defense. Speaking on her show, The View, she said, “I like when people say what they need to say—he’s at a Catholic College, he’s a staunch Catholic, these are his beliefs, and he’s welcome to them. I don’t have to believe them, right? I don’t have to accept them. The ladies that were sitting in that audience do not have to accept them.” (Apparently the ladies in the audience liked them just fine, if the enthusiastic applause throughout the speech was any indication.) “I have the right to say what I say, he has the right to say what he says.” Goldberg continued. “When you say to somebody, ‘I don’t like what you said and I’m going to get your job taken away because you disagree with me,’ for me, that is an issue.” Of course, she had to twist the thing into a rant about how Trump is all about taking away the rights of everybody and we don’t want to be that way. Of course we don’t. Neither does Trump.
She ran into another issue when she compared the situation to Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49er who sat during the national anthem to protest what he described as oppression against black people. Goldberg said “The same way we want respect when Colin Kaepernick takes a knee, we want to give respect to people whose ideas are different from ours.” Kaepernick was on the job when he did this. Butker was giving a speech at a private university. While I think free speech rights should be upheld everywhere, the current interpretation of the First Amendment permits private corporations to censor speech and discipline those who speech the corporation finds objectionable. But that’s beside the point, some will argue. Kaepernick was let go not because of his protests but because he was no longer a competitive player in the NFL.
“Dr. Charnock had only one observation to make on Mr. Harris’s paper. The latter made a distinction between plants and the genus homo, that in the former both sexes are sometimes found in the same plant. Now, it had never been proved that the human spermatozoon was any gender, and the gender of the ovum depended upon the time fecundation; i. e., upon chance. Dr. Charnock spoke on the authority of Pouchet, Hofaeker, Lucas, Huber, and others.” —J. McGrigor Allan,“On the Real Differences in the Minds of Men and Women,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London (1869)
In an essay I published earlier this week (Gender and the English Language), I documented the use of the word “gender” to denote reproductive anatomy in the natural science literature over the course of several centuries. As the reader can see in the above quote, anthropologists used “gender” in the same way. Indeed, in the passage, the subject is reproductive anatomy. The same is true for sociology. The concept of “gender role” appears later on, but as a concept it was available long before its appearance; the concept of the “sex role” appears in the anthropological and sociological literature well before John Money’s alleged coining of the term “gender role.” Since I have established that gender and sex are synonyms, either construction is appropriate for denoting the societal roles organized around gender and the expectations and values that attach to those roles.
By way of example, in a 1942 issue of the American Sociological Review, “The Adjustment of the Individual to his Age and Sex Roles,” Leonard Correll, Jr. writes, “By way of further clarification it is necessary to call attention to the distinction between the use of the term role to refer to a modal system of responses which constitutes the culturally expected behavior and the particular system of responses with which a specific individual operates. Thus, when we speak of the individual’s ability to perform in his sex role, we refer to the relation which his behavior, in situations in which sex classification is relevant, bears to some modal pattern expected in a given cultural or subcultural group.” The concept of role is as basic to sociology as the concept of status.
Sociologist Talcott Parsons advanced a functionalist theory of gender roles in the 1930s
The sociologist most famously associated with the concept of “sex roles” is Talcott Parsons. In his work, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, Parsons discussed the division of labor based on gender within the family and society. Parsons introduces his concept of “sex roles” in his book The Structure of Social Action, published in 1937. Parsons argued that in traditional societies, there is a clear division of labor between men (instrumental roles) and women (expressive roles), and this division is functional to the stability of the family and the reproduction of society as a whole. His ideas were highly influential in shaping discussions around gender roles and social expectations.
The historical materialists understood this long before Parsons. Friedrich Engels, building on Lewis Henry Morgan’s work in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) and Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877), as well as his collaboration with Karl Marx, argued in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), that in primitive societies, there existed a form of social organization he and Marx called “primitive communism,” what today’s anthropologists call “hunter-gatherer,” characterized by communal ownership of property, egalitarian social relations, and a natural gendered division of labor. Engels theorizes the transition from primitive communism to class-based societies, particularly focusing on the emergence of private property and the patriarchal family structure.
Friedrich Engels theorizes the history of gender roles in the nineteenth century
Engels posits that, in early human history, societies were organized around maternal kinship and inheritance, with descent traced through the mother’s line (matrilineage). He argues that the development of agriculture led to the accumulation of surplus resources and the rise of private property, which, in turn, gave rise to class divisions and the oppression of one group by another. With the development of private property, men sought to ensure the paternity of their offspring to pass down property and thus instituted patriarchal family structures. This shift, according to Engels, involved the overthrow or subjugation of matriarchal systems by patriarchal ones, leading to the rise of male dominance in family and societal affairs. Thus we see the existence of gender roles in primitive societies and the transformation of those roles over time. Gender is not a social construct but an objective matter of natural history around which humans have always organized social roles.
Engels writes in the preface to the first edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: “According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.”
He continues: “The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of its products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups. However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval. In the collision of the newly-developed social classes, the old society founded on kinship groups is broken up; in its place appears a new society, with its control centered in the state, the subordinate units of which are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which the system of the family is completely dominated by the system of property, and in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles that have hitherto formed the content of all written history.”
The Internet will tell you that Money introduced the term in 1955 as if the history of the concept begins there. In reality, Money, a psychiatrist by training, lifted the concept from anthropology and sociology, substituted for “sex” the synonym “gender,” and passed himself off as the originator of an insight that already basic to social science. Another trick played is the reification of Robert Stoller’s invention of “gender identity,” which the psychiatrist used to denote an individual’s internal and individual experience of gender. In Stoller’s formulation, “gender identity” is a subjective thing to the person who “experiences” it—a sense of being a man, a woman, both, neither, or anywhere along the spectrum said to comprise gender (in fact, gender is binary and you can be neither both nor neither)—that others are told they must treat as if it is real. That’s a trick in itself; however, between 1968 and today, the words “role” and “identity” were dropped, and the word “gender” elevated to a socially constructed and subjective category of being.
Knowing these linguistic tricks allows the rational among us to expose the agenda at work here. There is nothing complex about any of this; it only requires we use the English language accurately and precisely. When somebody tells you that sex refers to reproductive anatomy and gender refers to cultural values and societal norms, they are simply saying that there are social roles associated with gender. It has always been true that gender in our species, and in many others species, as well, has been socially organized. Another way of saying this is that there is sex (reproductive anatomy) and sex roles (the cultural values and societal norms). It is important in conversation that you make that clear for everyone participating. Don’t accept the propaganda purpose of these terms; instead, insist on the important of using scientific terms to convey reality not ideology.
As for the identity piece of this, it is enough to observe that the gender of the organism, whether it is female or male, is the identity of the organism. Identity is the fact of being who or what a person or thing is—not who or what a person says he is. In the preface to his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx writes, “Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.” I use this quote to emphasize the importance of grounding knowledge in scientific materialism and realism. We don’t judge an individual by what he thinks about himself because what he thinks of himself may be the product of delusion or indoctrination. We judge the individual on the basis of what he is—that is, his identity—in the same way we judge historical epochs in terms of themselves, not by the distorted ways in which those epochs are represented by ideology (religion, etc.).
If an individual genuinely believes that his gender is what it isn’t, then he is either delusional or indoctrinated (he is possessed of an illusion, as Sigmund Freud put it). Those who affirm his subjectivity are either themselves delusional or indoctrinated, or they are exploiting the man. If he is mentally ill, which is possible, then the treatment for his delusion is to be found in psychotherapy. But this is not the approach of gender affirming care. Delusional individuals or those possessed of an illusion are referred to the gender clinic. Without mystifying gender, feminism sought to escape the constraints of the social roles and stereotypes that attach to gender in a given cultural space and historical period. By untethering gender from gender role, trans activists and the medical industry mystify gender to suppose individuals can escape the constraints of biology, which in turn justifies the use of chemicals and surgeries to produce simulated gender identities—and compel others to act in bad faith by affirming the validity of all this.
The constructs “gender identity” and “gender dysphoria” play vital roles in this, as well. With gender identity, shorthanded to simply “gender,” the mystification is totalized; gender is now not a cultural or social thing, i.e., an observable thing conceptualized by social science rooted in natural science, but an essential thing without any empirical indicators—that is, something like a soul or thetan. Gender dysphoria, which indicates a psychiatric disorder where a man or a woman is confused about his or her identity, again, a thing that is objectively determinable, is then reduced to the distress felt by a person when their subjective experience is at odds with reality, albeit the same thing but with different treatment options, options that generates large and sustainable profits for corporate firms and their stockholders.
In my blog on gender and the English language, I cited an article by David Haig who reviewed more than thirty million academic articles from the years 1945-2001 to determine the occurrences of the words “sex” and “gender.” Haig found that, at the beginning of the period, the usages of the word “sex” were more frequent than usages of the word “gender,” but flipped with the emergence of feminism. This shift is reflected in my discipline of sociology, which is to say that the sociology of today is quite different fro the sociology of yesteryear.
Testifying to the sorry state of contemporary sociology is this op-ed by Finn Mackay in a January 2024 issue of The Guardian. Mackay is senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England in Bristol. “Gender ideology is real,” she writes, “but it wasn’t invented by trans men or trans women, and it doesn’t just apply to trans or transgender people. The real gender ideology is the binary sex and gender system that requires all of us to be either male-masculine-heterosexual or female-feminine-heterosexual; and which attaches harsh penalties to those who deviate from this script. Almost all of us will have been socialised on to pink or blue paths from birth, if not by our immediate family, then by the books, TV, toys, clothes and adverts that surrounded us in wider society. This socially prescribed gender informs our gender identity.”
“Trans people didn’t create ‘gender ideology’,” she writes, “and should not be blamed for somehow making gender visible. Rather than pathologising a stigmatised minority, we need to focus instead on the gendered majority. Gender criticism should start at home.”
Make it make sense, the reader may be asking at this point. I can do that. Gender ideology does not rest on the fact of the gender binary; quite the contrary. What is strictly true is not ideological (although ideology may conceal or obscure truths nonetheless embedded in it). The gender system, by which Mackay means gender roles, at least not in enlightened Western society, carries no harsh penalties for deviation from stereotypes associated with those roles. For the most part and without consequence, girls and women wear pants and eschew makeup, and many of them cut short their hair. It is not true that almost all of us were put on paths of blue and pink (ironically the colors that comprise the trans flag). Boys have appetites for things that trans ideologues identify as blue (an arbitrary designation) because it is the nature of boys to have such appetites. The gender role is rooted in gender, which is the result of natural history. Whatever the concrete expressions of masculinity over space and time, and whatever the variable frequency of masculine and feminine traits in the overlaying distributions of the gender binary, boys and girls today are more like the boys and girls that came before them than they are different, and this will be true in the future presuming that the project to confuse children about gender fails in its totalitarian desire.
As we see, she doesn’t quite pull it off, but Mackay is performing the postmodernist trick of treating the eternal one of many possible narratives, this one prevailing because of the power arrayed against the trans identifying individual. The natural is recast as a form of social oppression, liberation from which requires consciousness raising that comes about by turning schools into indoctrination centers where children are gaslighted over gender and their gender-detection modules disrupted. Mackay writes that “in its guidance, the Department for Education states that gender identity is a contested belief, and that many people don’t consider themselves to have one at all. They define gender identity as a person’s sense of their own gender, which may or may not be linked to their biological sex. In the document’s explanation of pupils’ ‘social transition,’ this is described as using different names, pronouns, clothing or facilities from those provided for their biological sex.” This is indeed the queer project formula.
However, Mackay sabotages her own magic trick by finding in this “the bizarre claim that things like this have a biological sex in the first place. How can names, the fabric of clothes, or the porcelain of toilets possibly have a biological sex?” By her own lights, she regards these matters as gender not sex. Much of the essay is disjointed in this way. However, this immediately follows: “The fact is that all children should be ‘gender questioning’ and this is the natural state of children—it is something to be encouraged. If only adults could unlearn the lessons of gender ourselves, rather than subjecting our children to it.” Here is the agenda. This is grooming.
For Mackay, the queer project is not just another narrative, but the true view of the world, a world in which gender is learned along blue and pink paths constructed by the gender tyrants. It is not queer theory that’s ideological. The ideology is found in the practice of gender roles. The natural state of children, she supposes, is to question their gender. In this view, conservative ideas of gender roles suppress the natural proclivities of children. But for gender role socialization, children could have no predictable response that would align with gender as it is now constructed by the patriarchal heteronormative, cisgendered oppressors. This is John Money’s argument. The boy Money used to prove his case committed suicide. He is not the only won in the meantime. (See Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy.)
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In looking up a fact about Money, I ran across a story concerning Janet Frame, an author who attended some of Money’s classes at the University of Otago. Money was, like a lot of psychopaths, a charming man, and Frame found herself drawn to him and was eager to please him. In October 1945, following an essay in which Frame mentioned her thoughts of suicide, Money persuaded her to admit herself to the psychiatric ward at Dunedin Public Hospital, where she was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic. She spend eight years in psychiatric institutions, undergoing electroshock and insulin shock therapy. She narrowly escaped a lobotomy. See An Angel at My Table. The man was a monster.
“Because of the size of the room and because our relatives sometimes do not know how to act, the fire department is now here to shut us down,” Dr. Gina S. Brown, dean of the College of Nursing and Allied Health Sciences, said to boos.
Booing is a symptom of the pathology. Brown is right. There’s a cultural problem here. To be sure, as Brown assumes in formulating her statement, not everybody associated with a particular cultural variation acts like this—but when, in culturally relative terms, a significant proportion of individuals do, it’s time to take an honest look at the norms and values of that culture.
The collective irrational disruption of public events (and I emphasize irrational), the internecine tribal warfare associated with gangland conditions, the smash and grab robbery tactics forcing stores to close and businesses to leave—all these result from a dysfunctional culture.
We have been told that to speak about this is racist because of differential demographic profiles across cultural varieties. It’s a double standard. White culture is said to have the criticisms directed at it coming; black culture, on the other hand, is sacrosanct. But to observe that cultures differ from one another, and that some cultures are, at least in certain of their norms and values, superior, is not a racist observation but a rational one.
To say that the culture associated with a race is inferior is not to say that the race is inferior. Race is not culture. Race is an observation of the existence of constellations of phenotypic characteristics. Culture has a historical development. Indeed, to root culture in race is the original meaning of racism.
Listen to Dom Lucre:
I have written a lot about how progressive policy affects the life chances of black Americans (see, e.g., America’s Crime Problem and Why Progressives are to Blame). Lucre is not wrong. Do you know who did this to the black community? Progressives. When I say there is no systemic racism, I mean that it is not those who are blamed for the situation of blacks who perpetuate that situation. White conservatives don’t run blue cities. Democrats do. Joblessness, fatherlessness, poverty, demoralization, nihilism, crime, despair—these are miseries the Democratic Party brings. What they’ve done to black people, they will do to the rest of the working class. The Democratic Party is the party of the managed decline of the American Republic and everything dear to Western Civilization.
Hi. I’m back to make sure you don’t get caught up in the pandemic hysteria again.
Have you heard? Globally, from January 2003 to March 2024, 888 cases of human infection with avian influenza A(H5N1) virus were reported from twenty-three countries. Of those 888 cases, 463 were fatal. That is a case fatality rate, or CFR, of 52 percent.
Influenza A subtype H5N1
Scary sounding, I know. But, first, note the time frame. Worldwide, out of billions of people, only 463 individuals died from H5N1 in a span of more than two decades. That is a very, very small number.
Second, and this is going to sound a lot like my debunking of the COVID19 hysteria, but note that the figure given is the CFR not the infection fatality rate (IFR). If H5N1 is more widespread than the World Health Organization (WHO) would like you to believe, then it is less lethal than they tell you it is.
The WHO only reports cases that include individuals with symptoms severe enough to necessitate hospitalization and laboratory testing. In fact, to appear in the WHO statistics, a person must have an acute illness and fever within a week and test positive for exposure to the H5 protein that gives the virus part of its name.
To say that reporting on a handful of individuals already at higher risk of death is misleading is an understatement. It is propaganda in the service of a political goal (look into the global pandemic treaty).
There could be—and almost certainly this is true—a significantly greater number of individuals who have contracted the virus but remain asymptomatic or experience mild symptoms insufficient to prompt medical attention, which in turn leads to an underestimation of the virus’ prevalence and an exaggerated perception of its lethality.
Suppose the number of infections is just one hundred times the number indicated by the CFR, but the same number of deaths. Based on the numbers given at the outset, that would be 88,800 infections, which is not a very large number given the vastness of the planet’s population. The IFR would be 0.000052027, or 0.0052% percent, roughly one death in almost 20,000 infections. Based on patterns already in evidence, these would overwhelmingly be people of advanced age or with comorbidities, such as cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory diseases, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.
“Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
Words have meanings—the underlying sense or significance—and usages—how they are employed in language. When people say that meanings and usages change over time, they’re making a trivial observation. The relevant and substantive questions are how fast is the language shifting and why? Normally, language evolves slowly. Here there may be some sort of natural-history-like logic at work. However, when a language changes rapidly, a project to alter the meaning system to some end—be it commercial, ideological, political—is indicated.
George Orwell (AI generated)
For centuries, the words “gender” and “sex” existed in the English-speaking word as synonyms. The concept of gender was used by scientists in studies of animals and plants to refer to reproductive biology. It wasn’t until later, much later, only recently, in fact, and not everywhere, that the project to alter mass understanding of men and women by changing the meaning and usage of “sex” and “gender” appeared. At its back, the project enjoyed the power of the academy (eventually even 4k-12), culture industry, mass media, and the medical-industrial complex. Dictionaries dutifully revised definitions. Everything changed in a unified way. That sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident.
Yesterday, I recounted on Freedom and Reason an X (Twitter) exchange with users, unwittingly perhaps, committed to obscuring the meanings of sex and gender (see “The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands”). I was told, as if I didn’t know, that not all of the world’s languages past and present are gendered. That fact does not erase gender, of course. “How could propagation of the species in those cultures occur if there were no gender?” I asked. After all, plants have gender, I noted (I’m fond of noting this, as regular readers know), and plants have no culture or language. The flower contains a stamen (male organ) or pistil (female organ). It’s rather straightforward.
When I say that “sex” and “gender” are synonyms, I mean they are interchangeable. However, the term sex is used in a few different but related ways. Sex, like gender, may refer to the female and male of a species of plant or animal. Sex is also an action, i.e., how organisms reproduce. When an X user said he had never heard of anybody wanting “to have gender” with another person, I mocked him, but he was onto something. Apart from its use as a grammatical subclass (not entirely, of course), gender refers to reproductive anatomy, but can also be a verb in the sentence: “He gendered her correctly.” As I noted in yesterday’s blog, sex can also be a verb, as in “The farmer sexed his chickens,” i.e., he determined (not assigned) their gender. Like plants, chickens have genders. The male chicken we call a “rooster.” Although he could never list them on his social media profiles, the rooster has “he/him” pronouns. The female chicken is a “hen.” She has “she/her” pronouns. The hen is the one who lay the eggs.
It is a relatively easy matter to show that gender is a term in natural history, used by scientists to describe the reproductive anatomy of plants and animals. However, none of those who push the queer propaganda line will make any effort to enlighten themselves about it. They may run across the evidence supporting my argument, but they would never produce it themselves, opting instead to repeat the assertion that “while sex refers to this, gender refers to that,” or treating gender as if it were a category appropriated from grammar and that’s just fine as long as it furthers the political-ideological agenda of decoupling of sex from gender. Appropriating the category to use as a synonym for sex is entirely inappropriate for precisely the same reason.
In her article “Gender in Plants,” published in 1998 in Resonance, ecologist Renee Borges writes, “Recent studies have shown … that many hermaphrodite plants do not contribute genes equally through male and female function to the next generation. Individual plants range from being relatively more or less male to relatively more or less female. This finding coupled with the modular and indeterminate nature of plant growth and reproduction led to the important perspective that sex expression in plants is a quantitative phenomenon, i.e. it depends on the relative proportion of reproductive units of both sexes within an individual plant.” Did I note the name of the article? Yes, “Gender in Plants.”
“From this point of view,” Borges continues (the bold lettering appears in her text), “the term plant sex denotes the various mating systems of plants such as monoecy or androdioecy [i.e., sex as action] while the term plant gender refers to the relative representation of male and female function in the entire plant [i.e., reproductive anatomy and gamete size]. The phenotypic gender of a plant then signifies the relative proportions of male and female reproductive units in terms of flowers, pollen or ovules at any given time on the plant (see Box 1). The functional gender of a plant is its relative contribution to the next generation via the male and female functions in terms of how many offspring it has sired or how many seeds it has matured.” This lines up well with the history of these two terms, with “sex” denoting action or activity and “gender” noting kind or type.
I am including Box 1 from Borges’ article so readers can see the mathematical precision with which gender can be determined. Note that the equations are adapted from a text published in 1984 by Lloyd and Bawa. This would be David Graham Lloyd, a fellow of the Royal Society in London who made landmark contributions to the field of plant reproduction, especially his work studying plant gender. Gender is a precision term used in natural science—a fact trans activists refuse to accept or admit.
Source: Borges, “Gender in Plants”
As readers can see for themselves, gender is not a social construction in the sense that it is culturally or historically variable or exists as an internal subjective sense of one’s gender that may be at odds with one’s gender. Gender is an objective matter, a term denoting the reproductive anatomy and gamete size of plants and animals. This is universally true, and this truth is not changed by postmodernist deconstructionist jargon or the commercial language of so-called gender medicine.
In 2018 article in Plant Biology, Pannell and Arroyo write (and here I will bold the letters for readers), “The extent to which individuals in a hermaphroditic population deviate from the expected gender of 0.5 can be appreciated in terms of their ‘phenotypic’ quantitative gender, or in terms of their ‘functional’ gender (Lloyd 1980). A plant’s phenotypic gender describes its allocation of resources to one sexual function relative to the other, while its functional gender reflects not so much its investment strategy, but its actual success as a male versus female parent.”
“Thus,” they continue, “plants that transmit more of their genes to progeny via their pollen than their ovules will have a male‐biased functional gender (i.e., a gender < 0.5). This bias may reflect a male‐biased phenotypic gender or sex allocation, but it may also simply be the outcome of who mates with whom, i.e., because the individual happens to be a better than average sire. Similarly, a hermaphrodite may be functionally more female than male not through an adapted sex allocation strategy but simply because its seed production is less strongly pollen‐limited. Hermaphrodite individuals that vary in their floral morphology, such as those in distylous populations, may also vary in this way in their phenotypic and/or functional gender.” Note that the authors remind the reader that when they’re talking about gender they’re using it synonymously with sex in the case of phenotypic gender.
Before readers remark upon the gender fluidity of plants, a phenomenon anomalous in mammals, they should first admit that they cannot talk about hermaphroditic individuals without first acknowledging the gender binary. An individual cannot be both genders without two genders existing a priori. Moreover, before objecting to my well-known counter that the clown fish, which can change genders, is not relevant to the question of whether humans can, my point here is that gender is a scientific term native to natural history. I would no more argue that sapiens are plants than I would that they are clownfish, even though all three categories are gendered organisms.
In 2007, Thomas Meagher, in the pages of the Annals of Botany writes (here, too, I will bold some text), “Evolutionary models of gender evolution have, of necessity, posited genetic effects that are relatively simple in their impacts. Emerging insights from developmental genetics have demonstrated that the underlying reality is a more complex matrix of interacting factors. The study of gender variation in plants is poised for significant advance through the integration of these two perspectives. Bringing genomic tools to bear on population-level processes, we may finally develop a comprehensive perspective on the evolution of floral gender.”
Meagher recognizes that the use of gender in this way is an old one. “The general theme of the present review is evolutionary transitions among different gender states. One reason that the evolution of gender polymorphism has attracted so much attention is that the diversity of gender states found in flowering plants represents many independent evolutionary events. Moreover, gender variation in plants has a long history of scientific investigation.Darwin (1877) was among the first to focus attention on gender variation and its evolution in plants.”
But it’s even older than Darwin. The word “gender” entered the English language from Old French in the late fourteenth century. Originally, it was used to refer to “kind,” “sort,” or “type,” and was derived from the Latin word “genus,” meaning the same. Our species sapiens is the only extant species of the genus Homo. Our species, like all animal species, in turn contains two genotypes, female and male, which almost always present as corresponding phenotypes (derived from the Greek phaino, which means “appearance”). You may have noticed that the word genotype bears some resemblance to “gender” and “genus”—and “gene,” as well Indeed, genos is Greek for offspring or race, which indicates “kind,” “sort,” or “type.”
Thus when asking, “What gender is this animal?”, you are asking what kind, sort, or type of animal this is. Is it a dog or a cat? It’s can’t be both. (You don’t have to be a biologist to know that.) If there is a language that lumps house pets such that there is no separate word for different kinds, it doesn’t mean they are the same kind of animal. It just means that the language is constrained in such a way as to make it more difficult to differentiate between two things that look alike in some ways, or have a similar relationship to human, but aren’t alike in other ways. We expect that the answer given to this question in a culture with a language permitting accuracy and precision would be appropriate to the species or breed in question. “This is a dog.” “What kind of dog?” “A sheep dog.” “Is it a boy or a girl?” “How would I know? It can’t tell me.” “Does it have a dick?”
As I have noted in past essays, the use of “gender” in botanical contexts can be traced back to at least the seventeenth century, and possibly even earlier. As used in plant biology today, yesterday’s botanists used it in the same way: to differentiate between male and female reproductive organs or structures in plants. Its synonym “sex” entered the English language from Old French in the fourteenth century, as well. It’s derived from the Latin word sexus, which refers to the state of being either female or male. So we are back to kinds, sorts, and types. Thus, in its earliest usage in English, “sex,” like “gender,” denoted biological differences between female and male types of animals, particularly in terms of reproductive anatomy and functions. This usage remains prevalent today, particularly in scientific and medical discourse.
Let’s return to the common objection made by those ignorant of biology and history that gender is a noun subclass. I have had individuals insist that gender as currently used by queer theorists and the medical industry was derived from there and never referred to reproductive autonomy. They never bothered to ask themselves the obvious question, What does gender as a noun subclass do in language? It is really entirely arbitrary? Why do the words “feminine” and “masculine” appear when discussing gender as a grammatical category? Do they look like they might be related to these words: “female” and “male”? Indeed. The Latin femina means “woman” The Latin masculus means “male.”
But, to make sure, let’s consult a blog called Gender World, subtitled Musings of a woman who happens to be transgender, which I take to mean that a man wrote the entry (although elsewhere the individual claims to be “gender non-conforming,” a construct that once again requires the a priori existence of the gender binary, but could go either way gender-wise). In the entry “What is Gender?” (written in 2018 or early 2019) the blogger does the typical amateur move of uncritically turning to Merriam-Webster, reporting that gender as “a subclass within a grammatical class (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (such as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms.”
Did you catch the word “sex” in there? The blogger also shares definition 2a, the synonym “sex” defined as “the feminine gender,” b clarifying gender in this usage as denoting “the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex” (clarifying later on that “trait” is defined as an inherited characteristic). With what sex would “the feminine gender” be associated? That’s a question that’s only difficult for those who cannot define what a woman is. There is a part c to the 2 definition, one I am not sure would have been included then, namely the term “gender identity,” inserted without definition (because it’s not an actual thing). That the blogger didn’t share this part despite its political centrality in gender ideology strongly suggest that Merriam-Webster added the term after the blog was posted.
The blogger goes on cite an article by David Haig who, in a study published by Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2004, reviewed academic articles (over 30 million!) from the years 1945-2001 to determine the occurrences of the words “sex” and “gender.” Haig found that at the beginning of the period, the usages of the word “sex” were more frequent than usages of the word “gender.” This is because in the ebb and flow of synonyms, sex had become preferred. By the end of the period, however, uses of “gender” outnumbered uses of “sex,” especially in—wait for it—the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Haig traces the shift to the introduction of the concept of “gender role” in 1955 by the notorious John Money. But it was not until feminists took up the term to distinguish the cultural and social aspects of differences between men and women from biological differences, he insists, that “gender” returned to prominence. Interestingly, he found that, “[s]ince then, the use of gender has tended to expand to encompass the biological, and a sex/gender distinction is now only fitfully observed.” As we all know, that would change with the ubiquitousness of queer theory and the appearance of gender affirming care.
In this first chart, tracking data drawn from the Science Citation Index (SCI), Haig found that, from the late 1970s, gender began a steady increase in frequency of use, partly at the expense of sex. He notes that this increase in frequency of the use prompted the FDA to adjust their guidelines in 1993 to require studies of “gender differences” in all new drug applications. Obviously, then, gender differences here would refer to genotypic and phenotypic differences between females and males; in the scientific literature, gender was understood as a synonym for sex and guidelines adjusted to include the word as used in this sense because of its growing popularity. This is an important fact to grasp, as the appearance of gender in the medical literature, when not a marketing term for gender affirming care, is often wrenched from context or assumed to mean “gender identity” all along (more on this concept in a moment).
Proportion of titles in the Science Citation Index containing the word “sex” and proportion containing the word “gender” (source: Haig)
The next two charts track data Haig gathered from the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). As you might expect, preference for the term gender rose rapidly, and it is in these disciplines that gender takes on its propagandistic meaning. This corresponds to the emergence of feminist, postmodernism, and queer politics that sought to differentiate the gender (or sex) roles that have existed in the gender binary since time immemorial (not just in human animals, but in animals across the kingdom), by reducing the roles to cultural and historical variability (which anthropologists an sociologists had never done), disconnecting them from reproductive anatomy and gamete size, and claiming that gender is purely a social construct and therefore arbitrary or mystified. It was from here that the medical-industrial complex, through the mechanisms of psychiatry and sexology, powerfully enabled by Robert Stoller’s invention of “gender identity,” picked up the ball and ran with it, substituting for scientific materialism and safeguarding vulnerable populations the pecuniary interests of the corporate state. (See Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy.)
Proportion of titles in the Social Science Citation Index containing the word “sex” and proportion containing the word “gender” (source: Haig)Proportion of titles in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index containing the word “sex” and proportion containing the word “gender” (source: Haig)
On the basis of this article, Gender World concludes that, “prior to 1955, the word ‘gender’ referred to grammatical categories used in some languages to form an agreement between a noun and other aspects of language, like adjectives, articles, pronouns, etc.” But this conclusion is plainly wrong (so is Haig’s assumption, dictated by his periodization) and, moreover, misses what Haig’s content analyses reveals.
First, as I have shown in this and other essays, the conclusion is false; gender was being used to refer to reproductive anatomy and gamete size centuries before Merriam-Webster revised the definition of gender. Even hints of this fact escape the blogger. “Old English made use of grammatical gender, but mostly stopped with Middle English,” he writes. “We still have a few references to gender in Modern English, such as pronouns (he and she), and nouns associated with some animals (man/woman, stallion/mare, ram/ewe, etc).” Why would there be distinctions among animals as “man/women,” “stallion/mare,” “ram/ewe,” etc.? I already showed why in an essay dedicated to this topic, Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms, where I explain that the names for males of different species vary (man, stallion, ram, dog, tom, hog, etc.). I also note that the pronoun for males are the same regardless of the species. They are “he/him.” If you refer to a hog as a “she,” the farmer will correct you.
Second, Haig’s content analyses reveal a project across the arts and sciences to sharply increase the frequency of the word “gender” to represent both a political-ideological and medical science term, initially expanding the word to include the social and cultural aspects identified by anthropologists and sociologists decades earlier in the concept of the “gender role” (still useful and valid concepts), while gaslighting the public by claiming that “gender” was originally a system of grammatical classifications ironically used to refer to the gender (today, strictly the sex) of animals and things (as kinds and types). In other words, only very recently was “gender” repurposed by queer theorists and medical corporations to manufacture an ideological construct and commercial term for political and marketing purposes. But I am repeating myself.
This is not the only time a project has materialized to rapidly alter mass perception by manufacturing words and meanings. In a detailed content analysis of major media sources published in Tablet in 2020, “How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening,” Zach Goldberg tells us that, “[y]ears before Trump’s election the media dramatically increased coverage of racism and embraced new theories of racial consciousness that set the stage for the latest unrest.” Not just unrest. As I have shown, like queer theory, the jargon of critical race theory colonized the medical science space (see, e.g., my October 2020 essay The Problem of Critical Race Theory in Epidemiology: An Illustration.)
You can find Goldberg’s article here, and I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing, but I want to pull a few charts from the piece to make the point immediate for you. In the first two charts, the reader will see the drastic increase of reference to “racists” and “racism” occurring around 2010 and a corresponding rise in the percentage of the population who reported that racism in the United States is a problem—this after a long decline. If you ever needed to see the evidence of how the corporate media constructs and drives mass perception of social problems, Goldberg delivers it in spade (but then so did Haig).
Source: Zach Goldberg, Tablet, 2020
Indicated by the next several charts, the use of terms like “racists” and “racism” were buttressed by a slew of novel or academic terms developed by progressive social scientists and historians and pushed out by the corporate media and culture industry: “systemic racism,” “structural racism,” and “institutional racism”; “racial privilege” and “white privilege”; “racial hierarchies,” “whiteness,” and “white supremacy”; “racial disparities,” “racial inequalities,” and “racial inequities.” In this way, the alleged effects of “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” etc., were identified as causing racial disparities and inequities without any demonstration of the validity of the alleged independent variables or their explanatory power. No matter, the terms comprised the assumption in force. Reinforced by race hustlers like Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and through constant repetition, the abstract facts of racial disparity became their own cause, especially since even suggesting they were explicable by reference to causes outside of the antiracist narrative risked being labeled a racist.
Source: Zach Goldberg, Tablet, 2020
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. ” —George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
I write in my essay Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words: “By reducing definitions to power projection, to the manipulation of reality, proponents of [the postmodernist] view … mean to delegitimize the primary purpose of words, which is to describe and convey reality with accuracy, integrity, and precision (language’s evolutionary function), and repurpose words for exclusive use as tools for fabricating reality. When words cease to be regarded as a reliable means of describing and conveying truth, those who control the means of idea production can more readily rationalize their aims and desires by blurring the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.”
I continue, “Any of you who have more recently attended college and taken any humanities and social sciences courses, which is often required by the regime of ‘general education,’ will have learned that what is and its nature (the ontological) is determined by how we think about such things (the epistemological). It is very likely that you will have been told that the former is the result of the latter and, further, that we must not allow the masses to get their hairy little paws on the machinery of meaning production.” This is hegemonic across worlds of academic and corporate science: life in the woke progressive bubble is technocratic reflex. Ideology has replaced truth.
In the German Ideology, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels describe perfectly queer theory and the postmodernist attitude:
“Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. … The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away.
“Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.”
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel
This type of revolutionary philosopher has not disappeared from the West. Indeed, his presence is today ubiquitous—at least in the academy where I spend too much time. This type of revolutionary—and his devotees—believe that reality is reducible to words and that by denying the words or changing their meanings, he can deny and change reality.
But truth has its own integrity. The man and his followers are fools.
I was reminded today on X that there are languages that are not gendered. Of course, this is true. But that fact does not erase gender. How could propagation of the species in those cultures occur if there were no gender? Even plants have gender, I explained, and plants have no language. The flower contains a stamen (male organ) or pistil (female organ). It is as if people have literally never before heard about the birds and the bees.
One X user said he never heard anybody say they wanted to have gender with another person, as if the dual meaning of sex as description and action negates the fact that gender and sex are synonyms. If fact, if sex were only used to describe an action, then gender should become the exclusive term referring to gamete size.
Sex as action is, of course, shorthand for sexual intercourse. Since sex organs are what is engaged in this type of intercourse, it makes sense. Also, sex can be a verb, as in the farmer will sex his chickens, i.e., determine their genders. Yes, chickens have genders. The male chicken is a rooster. The female chicken is a hen. Hens lay eggs.
“Ironically, in seeking to free people from sexism, these efforts have instead reinforced it by inventing a plethora of identity labels for people who do not conform to narrow conceptions of gender roles rather than challenging those norms. This is not progress. Using my own experiences as an example, I argue instead for a return to a separation of sex and gender, and a rejection of this new gender ideology.” —Kaylee Walker.
This paragraph is from an interesting and well-written essay, “Gender Policing on the Left,” published by the Queer Majority. The first sentence is correct, as is the second; however, a problem occurs with the third sentence: the author says that she will argue for a return not to a distinction between gender (i.e., sex) and gender (or sex) role but for a separation of sex and gender. But sex is gender, and the reasonable left is always going to undermine its politics if it accedes to language falsely making a distinction between what have been synonyms for six centuries.
The reasonable left needs to return not to a separation of sex and gender, but a distinction between gender, on the one hand, and gender role on the other, while rejecting Stoller’s entity “gender identity.” There is no reason why a woman cannot express herself in culturally or historically masculine ways. Moreover, because of overlapping distributions, there are women with comparatively more masculine traits and attitudinal and behavioral proclivities. The same is true for men obviously. But there are no men with women’s brains, as Hirschfeld claimed in the early twentieth century. Like all other animals, humans are our bodies. Of course there are men who present with traits more commonly associated with women. This has always been true and is entirely normal. What is not normal is telling a tom boy that she is really a boy. That’s what queer ideology teaches girls—it teaches them to be estranged from their bodies. This estrangement is yet another feature of the alienation that marks a society in which the masses make history, but do not control the history they make, and are falsely conscious of the situation because they lack a cogent theory of the world.
A long time ago, in the 7th century CE, there lived a man named Muhammad ibn Abdullah. Muhammad was a merchant, managing caravans engaged in trade mostly in the Arabian Peninsula, including trade in slaves.
At age 40, while allegedly meditating in a cave on Mount Hira, located near Mecca, Muhammad told others that he had received a revelation from an angel named Gabriel. Gabriel commanded the merchant to “Read aloud.” Muhammad told the angel he could not, as he was illiterate.
Muhammad meeting with Gabriel in a cave on Mount Hira
The angel then embraced Muhammad and compelled him to recite the words of what would become the first verses of the book Quran, which means “Read aloud.” This hallucination continued over the next twenty-three years until his death. Muhammad filled his book with Gabriel’s words. People believed Muhammad, and his hallucinations became a new religion.
The book details a system of rules and values known as “sharia,” which guide all aspects of life. Muhammad called his hallucinations “Islam,” which means “submit” or “surrender.” Submit and surrender to what? To the will of an invisible entity he invented. The entity is known to the world as “Allah,” which means “god” in Arabic, but the entity has 99 names.
The book tells its adherents of a Day of Judgment, where they will be held accountable for their deeds. This is possible because each of them has an ethereal entity inside them known as the “ruh” (plural “arwah”) or soul. Paradise or hell awaits ruh based on faith and actions.
Today, Muhammad’s religion boasts of more than a billion and a half followers.
Joseph Smith Jr. was born in Vermont in 1805. He grew up in western New York during the Second Great Awakening. Smith’s family, involved in this religious fervor, was influenced by various denominations, including Baptist, Methodists, and Presbyterians.
At the age of 14, Smith claimed he had a vision in which God and Jesus Christ appeared to him. In 1823, Smith said he had an encounter with an angel named Moroni who revealed the existence of an ancient record written on golden plates buried in a nearby hill called Cumorah. According to Smith, these plates contained the religious history of ancient inhabitants of the Americas, including their interactions with God.
Joseph Smith meeting with Moroni on the Hill Cumorah
Smith was allowed to retrieve the golden plates in 1827. With the help of divine instruments the Urim and Thummim, he translated the writings on the plates into English. This resulted in the Book of Mormon, which he published in 1830. The book tells the story of several groups of people who migrated from the Middle East to the Americas thousands of years ago. It covers their religious teachings and eventual encounters with Jesus Christ after his resurrection.
The Book of Mormon is considered scripture by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smith claimed additional revelations. Today, the LDS Church is one of the fastest-growing Christian denominations in the world, with millions of members worldwide.
L. Ron Hubbard was a prolific writer of science fiction, he developed a system that he said could address various psychological issues and improve mental well-being. He called this system “dianetics,” publishing a book by that name in 1950. This was when he was around 40 years old.
In Dianetics, Hubbard conceives of an idea he calls the “reactive mind,” which was the source of irrational fears, insecurities, and other emotions and psychological problems. He claimed that, by using his system, individuals could rid themselves of the negative influences of the reactive mind (called “engrams”) and achieve a state called “clear,” where they would be free from these mental burdens.
The Church of Scientology
Hubbard pivoted from dianetics and created a church he called “Scientology.” According to the secret doctrine of the church, there exists an entity called “Xenu.” Xenu was ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, an ancient civilization that existed 75 million years ago. Xenu gathered large numbers of people from various planets, including Earth, under the guise of tax audits, and then subjected them to mass genocide by exterminating them with hydrogen bombs.
The disembodied spirits of these victims, called “thetans,” were implanted with false beliefs through a complex process, which has had lasting effects on humanity. The thetan is the individual’s true identity. According to doctrine, the state of the thetan greatly influences an individual’s personality and outlook on life. Traumas experienced in past lives are believed to affect one’s current state of mind and behavior.
One of the religion’s rituals is called “auditing.” It’s a central technique used to address spiritual trauma and improve the state of the thetan. During auditing sessions, a trained auditor guides an individual through a series of questions and exercises aimed at uncovering and resolving past traumas and negative experiences.
Scientology cannot boast of the numbers enjoyed by Islam or even Mormonism, the numbers of devotees to Hubbard’s religion may be in the millions.
In his late-30s, Robert Stoller, a psychiatrist and dabbler in dream telepathy, discovered an entity he called “gender identity,” which he said exists independent of the characteristics of physical body.
Stoller came upon the idea while working with patients experiencing body dysphoria. What these individuals told him was interpreted as persons experiencing a profound incongruence between their birth sex and the gender they really were.
Stoller took this as a genuine experience and created a system that differentiated biological sex (reality) from gender identity (mythology), arguing that, while the former is determined by physical anatomy, the latter is a deeply ingrained sense of being female, male, or something else.
Stoller taught his followers that “core gender identity,” which he said was a fundamental and unchangeable sense of being male or female, develops by the age of three.
Transgender vector flag with black health care medical sign.
Stoller’s ideas played a key part in the development of gender affirming care, or GAC, which involves chemical and surgical intervention to make a man into a woman. Thus, in this way, bodies of believers are physically and physiologically altered to produce simulacra of the gender identity they believe is their authentic self.
All these doctrines have this in common: concepts central to the respective ideologies enjoy no empirical support. Moreover, their core concepts are conveniently nonfalsifiable. In the case of gender identity, while Stoller’s construct is not falsifiable in terms of itself, the gender of a person is empirically determinable. If a man claims to be a woman, a check of gametes will determine whether this claim is true in nearly every case. But the followers of Stoller’s religion will always fall back on the nonfalsifiability of faith belief. Like the Muslims, Mormon, and Scientologist, the authentic self is a subjective claim impervious to disconfirmation.
The philosopher of science Karl Popper used the falsifiability criteria to distinguish scientific theories from non-scientific ones. According to Popper, for a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable; that is, there must be conceivable empirical observations that could potentially refute or disprove the theory. In contrast, nonfalsifiable claims cannot be subjected to empirical testing or falsification, often because they are formulated in a way that makes them immune to disconfirmation. This characteristic can pose challenges for assessing the validity or reliability of such claims within scientific or rational discourse.
If medicine is to proceed scientifically, then it must not rely on concepts that are impervious to disconfirmation. This is why the practice of auditing is not part of medical practice (that and Hubbard’s hostility toward the profession, not to mention psychotherapy has an established presence). At least presumably. After all, gender affirming care rests on a concept impervious to disinformation and Stoller’s construct is part of medical practice. It justifies the application of powerful drugs and hormones and surgeries to transform gendered bodies into simulations of their opposites.
But you don’t have to imagine a past in which the lives of gender nonconforming children were not riven with strife. If they haven’t forgotten the world of only yesterday, they know that nobody from our generation (I was born in 1962) or the generations before ours, would remember one of every five of us identifying as LGBTQ. That’s not because they were hiding their identities from us. It’s because the queer contagion hadn’t yet swept up impressionable youth into the fad. There were other fads. What Kanakia and his ilk want is for us to forget this and to assume that what is novel is eternal.
“Last year, a staggering 22 states across the U.S. banned gender-affirming care for minors,” writes Kanakia. “The conservative politicians behind this wave of legislation didn’t care that it went against the near-unanimous medical consensus that parents and doctors ought to be able to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether puberty blockers, hormones, or other interventions are what’s needed for a given teen to flourish and live their life authentically. These lawmakers felt the consensus was wrong, that the government should take medical transition entirely off the table, at least until the kids grow up and can make ’informed,’ adult decisions. And in their eyes, there was a bonus: Removing the option of affirming care would surely lower the temperature in afflicted homes; it might well preserve the parent/child relationship until the threat hopefully passed—trans teens could no longer blame parents for not “allowing” them to transition. Parents were now free to say ’There’s nothing I can do. You’ll simply have to wait until you’re older.’”
Articles like Kanakia’s function to cause anybody conditioned by the eternal present to forget the world as it was only a few years ago and feel as if the travails of the trans child has always been an issue, that children have always enjoyed access to “gender affirming care,” only to suffer the oppression of fascists who, suddenly and for arbitrary political and religious reasons, are passing laws forbidding it. The motive to restrict this to those who can consent to it couldn’t possibly be from the rise of GAC and growing awareness of its horrors (see Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy; Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology; Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy). It must be because they’re bigots.
Kanakia would never consider whether suicide rates were through the roof back then. In fact, for the general population, after falling in the mid-90s for males and the mid-70s for females, suicide rates for both genders rose steadily during the period of the proliferation of gender clinics and gender ideology—as well as SEL programming and the proliferation of wellness centers in educational institutions. When the data are disaggregated, among youth aged 10-24 years, suicide surpasses homicide in 2008 and soars, while homicide remains relatively stable at less than one percent per 100,000 (and, as readers of Freedom and Reason know, is concentrated in black-majority inner city neighborhoods). As Business Insiderreported in 2019, at that time, suicide among Gen Z is the second leading cause of death, and “a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age.”
It is necessary to believe instead that those denied their authentic selves always preferred death to living as the gender they were born as—to believe that there were millions whose authentic selves were being denied. It is a lie.
George Orwell warned us about organized forgetting in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the story, the Ministry of Truth is a government institution responsible for historical revisionism and the dissemination of propaganda. The Ministry of Truth manipulates information to align with the ruling Party’s ideology. Its workers constantly rewrite history to support the Party’s agenda. The memory hole is a mechanism used by the Party to eliminate inconvenient information. Documents, records, and even people are thrown into incinerators, erasing any evidence of their existence. This ensured the Party’s control over the historical narrative and suppresses dissent by eliminating opposing viewpoints.
Likewise, Guy Debord, a French Marxist theorist and filmmaker, wrote about the concept of the “society of the spectacle” and the notion of the “eternal present.” In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord explores the idea that modern society has become dominated by images and representations. The spectacle is a system of alienation and social control, where authentic human experiences are replaced by mediated representations. The eternal present refers to the way in which the spectacle perpetuates a state of constant distraction and superficiality, preventing individuals from engaging with the past or the future.
We are close but not yet submerged in Orwell’s world, and while Debord spectacular society feels ubiquitous, the truth is still available—if you seek and speak it; and the truth is that there is no historical record of centuries of families torn apart because states prevented the administration of puberty blockers, opposite sex hormones, and surgeries to minors. The “need” for health care and compelling everybody to accept gender ideology is recent invention, manufactured by the medical-industrial complex and the crackpots of sexology and queer theory.
To believe articles like Kanakia’s have any validity is to pretend as if we haven’t been alive for decades to know that this is novel phenomenon—and for those who know a bit more to know that this is a social contagion, only this one invented and sustained by power and profit. We were the freaks in high school. We were the clique who would have known before any body about the boys and girls who thought they were the other gender but were oppressed by parents and government. Our generation and the generation before us protested a lot of things, but we never protested sexed reality because there was nothing to protest. Quite the contrary. We were busy trying to get into each other’s pants.
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