“Knowledge is proud that it knows so much; wisdom is humble that it knows no more.”

Transgenderism is incompatible with either wisdom or humility

William Cowper, The Task, Book 6: The Winter Walk at Noon (1785).

Knowledge has been defined as facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education, the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. Wisdom has been called the quality or state of being wise; knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action; sagacity, discernment, or insight.

The primary difference between the two words is that wisdom involves a healthy dose of perspective and the ability to make sound judgments about a subject while knowledge is simply knowing. Anyone can become knowledgeable about a subject by reading, researching, and memorizing facts.

Clearly wisdom is elusive when compared with knowledge.

To be humble is to not be proud or haughty, nor arrogant or overly assertive and humility is the feeling or attitude that you have no special importance that makes you better than others.

Humility is the antidote to grievance

When sociologists of the future look back on where we are now, they will see that we live in an era defined and overwhelmed by grievance. The ascent of identity politics and the influence of social media have combined to pit us against ourselves in an unproductive struggle to promote a self-obsession at odds with community, civility, comity and compromise.

Yes, I am talking about the dual beliefs that as mammals, we can change or choose our sex and that gender is the most important feature of our lives when it is not. There is no humility in this, no humble recognition that science has anything to teach us about our biological realities or that the bodies we inhabit have physical limitations, beyond which no treatments or procedures will effect any real change.

The predominate grievance industry of today’s world is a belief in transgenderism. Those who believe that sex is irrelevant and that some chosen identity reigns supreme have decided that they hold the truth, no matter all the evidence to the contrary. 

Transgenderism is a cult, not a religion

The world’s major religions all have something to say about the virtue of humility.

In the Christian Bible, Philippians 2, 3-4 states: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.” Muslims reading the Quran learn the importance of “And turn not your face away from men with pride, nor walk in insolence through the earth. Verily, God likes not each arrogant boaster.” (Quran 31:18). For Hindus, the virtue of humility is mentioned in the Bhagavad-Gita (16.3) as absence of self-importance (na atimanita). Buddhist practitioners believe that only a humble mind can readily recognize its own defilements of craving (or greed), aversion (or hatred) and ignorance, thereby embarking on the path of enlightenment and liberation.

Those who prioritize the trans agenda are in thrall to the belief that society is best served by chaos and destruction and do not appear to realize the importance of societal cohesion and respecting the views of those with differing values.

Talking about trans is like boxing with ghosts

People in the grip of the glitter pooping gender woo unicorn occupy a different mental plane of existence than those who don’t. It is not possible to find a compromise middle position between those who profess to believe that everyone is born with some sort of gendered soul that may not match their physical bodies and those who believe that “gender affirming care” is no more than the deliberate mutilation of children and the normalization of (mainly) male sexual paraphilias.

And because trans is a cultural movement, immune to scientific evidence, rational thinking and based only on emotions, this entirely separate cultural system of belief remains disconnected from biological and physiological realities and from the usual persuasive methodologies we use in the course of normal debate.

When one side is perpetually screaming “no debate” there is no concern for the common good to be found. The normal cohesive glue of understood social contracts, trust and cooperation vanishes in the face of loud bullying and an insistence that is the very opposite of mutual cooperation.

There is no trust, respect or tolerance in the trans world.

An example of tolerance, trans world version?

The pro-trans agenda has no space for tolerance around respecting differing points of view or agreeing to disagree. As this author writes:

To the gender fundamentalists, scientific evidence is irrelevant: it’s impossible for youth medical transition to be harmful instead of helpful, because to believe otherwise is to question the entire cultural system of belief that they depend upon to make each other feel good about what’s been done to people’s bodies.

Boxing with ghosts or wrestling phantasms are not a useful way for us to spend our time, but it can feel as though this is our only option as gender ideologues are impervious to actual facts (which they claim are all “oppressive”).

The Cass Review: preaching to the converted and dismissed by the delusional

The Cass Review told me what I already knew: that mutilating children (many of whom are groomed by adults) only makes things worse, not better, that there is no evidence for “gender affirming care” because this involves expectations that can never be realized, and that blocking puberty ruins any future normal adult prospects such as having a pleasurable sex life and having one’s own children. Not to mention of course, being turned into a lifelong medical patient.

In a similar fashion to fetal development, puberty is a time critical period of massive changes in every body system of young humans. Turning us into adults (which in a biological sense means that we develop our reproductive capacities), involves a massive overhaul that is most visibly vested in the development of secondary sex characteristics, but this is just the tip of a very big iceberg.

Underneath those budding breasts in girls and boys losing their soprano singing voices, bone growth is determining our final height, eggs and sperm are becoming ready for action, bodies change shape and hair grows in new places, but the most profound, lasting and important physiological change is brain maturation.

Puberty blockers can create a forever non-adult brain

Page 103 of the Cass Review.

Thanks to centuries of scientific study, we know a lot about brain development, much of which has been learned by observing people who, due to accident, illness, age or injury have damaged brains. When some bit of us is not working as expected, it will be noticed faster than normal functioning ever is.

Brain development may be the most complicated thing that our human bodies ever experience and the opportunities to accidentally or on purpose foul this up are legion. From your mother’s choices in recreational drugs she took when you were a fetus, childhood traumas and accidents right through to puberty blockers, the chances of brain injury resulting in permanent and deleterious changes are plentiful.

One thing I have never seen in any “gender affirmation” reading is the fact that the hormones of puberty are essential for adult brain maturation, and that far from creating a “pause to consider your choices” (sic), blocking the upsurge in estrogen (in girls) and testosterone (in boys) can permanently pause frontal lobe development and leave your brain in a static non-adult state forever. And no, you can’t fool Mother Nature by reversing these two hormones any more than you can change sex.

This paper on adolescent brain development states that “Changes that occur or fail to occur during adolescence will determine behaviors for the rest of one's lifetime.”

The brain goes through many changes during adolescence, including the maturation of the cerebral cortex — the outer layer of the brain that is important for reasoning and abstract thinking. This image shows how this area develops during this time, with the blue color indicating areas that are more mature. Image adapted from Gogtay N, et al. Dynamic mapping of human cortical development during childhood through early adulthood. PNAS 2004;101(21): 8174 - 79, Fig. 3.

Hey, I’m in a cult so don’t need to reconsider!

The investment in a belief system that relies on faith alone has been huge.

Rather than putting time and resources into helping those with mental distress come to terms with reality, lobbyists for the trans agenda have pushed for the normalization of confused and delusional thinking because this feeds their own egocentric lives. And the money, oh, wow, the trans streets really are paved with gold, even if they look more like rainbow crosswalks.

Immeasurable profits have been made by clinics, doctors, universities, hospitals, insurance and drug companies, and a plethora of adjunct therapists practicing “gender affirming care”. They have all proved that indeed, there is a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow.

They have an investment to protect, so will just gaslight to the best of their abilities, the Cass Report’s findings. If your cultural norms are based on fantasies, wishes, hopes and dreams, your head may be too crowded to admit reality. There was already push back even before the Report was released so it is no surprise to learn that it is being pilloried by trans lobbyists.

When you read about the “disinformation” that the Cass Report is supposedly spreading, it pays to remember that these are the people who believe that sex is on a spectrum and can be freely chosen. Here is one good source for explaining why they are wrong.

This group of total believers also supports the truly magical belief that some women have a penis and not all people who give birth are women. When facts are discounted as irrelevant, it really is anything goes.

What is going to stop them? The same thing that has supported them: money. Particularly in the USA, where society is very litigious, when the damages from successful lawsuits start piling up, clinics, doctors and all those who have had bloated financial bottom lines from mutilating their patients will suddenly decide that this is no longer a winning gambit and will happily leave this area of “medical care” without a backward glance. Many current detransitioners have already learned that these professionals have no time for them, now that they no longer identify as trans.

Ideological commitment = an absence of wisdom

It took the Catholic church 359 years to correct the error it made when it sentenced Galileo to life imprisonment for stating that the earth rotates around the sun. I really hope it takes a whole lot less time for those invested in the cult of trans to repent, but I don’t have much faith in this happening any time soon.

This particular cultural system of belief is now so deeply embedded that our entire societal structure has been contaminated into promoting corruption as acceptable practice. (Funnily enough, there is not a single fertility clinic anywhere that will agree to help make a baby using any gamete combination other than one female ovum and one male sperm. No spectrum babies available I guess.)

Besides the many individuals who will need to either frantically back pedal or be seen for the dupes they are, many much larger entities have also adopted the rainbow lanyards and pronoun badges that are de rigueur for not being subjected to Olympic sized public bullying by trans rights allies.

Governments and organizations that peddle the myths that every body can do every thing have made things much worse for women, because trans women are men. No women have penises, all “birthing people” are women and every body has its own physiological limitations that are distributed along binary sex lines. Pretending otherwise confirms that even knowledge is an insufficient bulwark against the obtuse nature of an ideology underpinned by nothing at all.

The idiocy of groups such as La Leche League International that purport to help “everyone” to breastfeed even though only natal women who haven’t had their healthy breasts amputated have the capacity to manage this complex physiological act merely jeopardizes their credibility to comment at all on any aspect of infant feeding or the mother/baby dyad about which they claim to be the experts.

Those seven women founders of this mother-to-mother support group did not begin with academic or clinical knowledge, but they were richly steeped in wisdom. Some of the women on the current LLLI Board have immense amounts of knowledge about breastfeeding, that is not being transformed into wisdom. Instead, it being squandered on catering to an ideology that, far from being based on oppression, is in fact wholly dependent on empty grievance politics. 

Shredding the trust and cooperation of Leaders who are reality based is an exercise in virtue signaling. Ultimately it is disrespectful to everyone and disregards perspectives that only humility can bring.