Performance Art, Street Theater, Virtue Signaling, Pretzeling Ourselves into Oblivion
“He who can persuade you to believe absurdities can persuade you to commit atrocities.” - Voltaire
I’m not sure when the whole “trans” thing really came to my attention, but it was well before August 26, 2022, when the first ever Lucy Leader post hit the internet. I’m going to guess that “being kind” to trans identified men wanting to use the ladies’ room was one of the first bits of conscious awareness I took notice of. But as I have always been scientifically curious, this never really washed with me.
I don’t have a problem dealing with bodies, naked or clothed, but I know (like every other female on the planet) which sex is the predator and which sex is their prey and because I was raised in a progressive, Western country, I intrinsically understand the value of the women’s only restroom as a refuge for women in public. It goes without saying that I have never believed that “trans women are women” because no mammal can change sex so trans “women” are actually men.
On the other side, the whole “not all pregnant people are women” crap never flew for me either. I have seen many perineums and none of the ones that had a baby’s head emerging from it had a penis attached to it, not ever.
As I have repeated ad nauseam, identities don’t give birth, breastfeed or play sports, bodies do this. You can identify as an office chair or a lettuce, but what can be done with your body will have been determined the moment that your dad’s sperm managed to penetrate the egg that your mother supplied and there is no way to ever change this reality.
Children are socialized to fit in so they can find their place
Little Red Riding Hood is a European fairy tale about a young girl and a sly wolf. Its origins can be traced back to several pre-17th-century European folk tales. The two best known versions were written by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Through many folk tales, girls are taught that by ignoring the dangers around them, they are endangering their survival, while the same stories send very different messages to boys. Boys are socialized to vanquish societal foes and to be brave in the face of adversity through completing heroic deeds (which can involve rescuing the girls from the ‘bad guys’), while girls are taught that if they are not careful, some male may not ‘rescue’ them but cause them harm.
Women learn by osmosis that begins in childhood that we need to keep ourselves safe, not from other “people”, but from boys and men.
According to this source, humans are the second most dangerous creatures for killing other humans. (Mosquitoes are in first place for causing human deaths.) Figures vary slightly, but most sources put the perpetrators of this form of violence at around 95% men.
One explanation of the moral of this story is that it is not safe for children to talk to strangers, but I disagree. I think the takeaway lesson from this tale is that it is dangerous for girls to disregard the evidence of their eyes, ears, and other senses. Depending on the version being read, the girl (Little Red Riding Hood) is either eaten by the wolf posing as her Grandmother, or she manages to run away, but both versions involve the dangers for girls in pretending not to notice that their kindly old grandmother lying in the bed in the remote cottage in the woods has been replaced by a sly wolf wearing Grandma’s nightcap.
Does this mean that all men are killers? Of course not, but it does make it easy to see why most parents train their daughters to be cautious around men in general.
Undermining your instincts is a bad idea
Around the age of two, children become aware that we are all different and that one of the main distinctions between people are that some are boys and others are girls. This is important for many reasons, not the least of which is that this ability is part of normal and expected human development.
It may not seem important in small children, but we grow up eventually and need to prepare for what adults do, which is to reproduce our species. Humans are sexually dimorphic, which means that we are either one or another of two distinct sexes and in the majority of cases, whether we are male, or female can be seen at a glance (because our brains have been wired to notice this). Consider it part of our reproductive strategy, without which, we would be extinct.
And see above re women’s overall safety. Knowing if we are in the presence of men can be vital for women.
Because women also have the greatest investment in the next generation, we are also the “picky” sex. No man is going to have to sacrifice his body to produce new humans in any way at all. There is no paternal mortality/morbidity chart anywhere in the world because none is needed.
This article addresses this in part by discussing the differences between the sexes in regard to the “ick” factor. “This appears to be a primate feature as it has been observed in other apes and monkeys, in addition to people. Tara Cepon Robins, a biological anthropologist at the University of Colorado, told National Geographic: 'This is what disgust is all about- we’re hardwired to be grossed out by things that have harmed people in the past.'”
Put simply, being grossed out by something helps us to avoid becoming ill, which is particularly important for pregnant women or new mothers.
“There were no men on the ward”
In England, the legal definition of rape is when a person intentionally penetrates another's vagina, anus or mouth with a penis, without the other person's consent.
When a woman who was a patient on an NHS hospital ward officially complained to the police that she had been raped by another patient, the staff reported that as there were no men on their single sex ward, this could not have happened. Except of course it did. Because NHS staff have been instructed to deny biology in favor of an ideology that does not recognize sex as a salient feature of our lives.
Another institution that fails to safeguard women and babies is the mother-to-mother breastfeeding support group La Leche League (LLL).
If Leaders are required to abide by the LLL Inclusivity Policy, they are obliged to support “everyone” who wants to breastfeed, regardless of any extenuating circumstances such as vulnerable new mothers who don’t want to show their breasts to men they don’t know and women who belong to religious groups that forbid women from being in the presence of men they are not related to.
Birth and breastfeeding are primal states that rely on women ‘letting go’ of the veneer of civilization we live under. Conditioning women to override their normal instincts that keep them (and their babies) safe puts us into a dysfunctional state and impairs the caregiving that our babies need to thrive. Today’s women have to constantly argue with our own instincts: “Don’t make a fuss.” “I’m sure he isn’t a danger to me.”
Dr Michel Odent, who is a legendary French obstetrician and birth commentator (and responsible for the widespread adoption of water birth), has put forward the view that the inclusion of men in the delivery room can be detrimental to labor and birth. For a variety of reasons that include coercion (it is now expected that all fathers-to-be, will want to be there so opting out is problematic for some couples), lack of understanding of normal labor (there will be shouting!) and the inability to not be the center of attention for a period of time, the presence of even a much loved partner can change the way that women cope with labor, which can mean more interventions are needed and these all have (mostly negative) flow on effects into breastfeeding and early mothering of babies.
In a world that looks increasingly unsafe because of the loss of the social contract that allows women to operate safely in the public sphere, women are gaslighted by a new vocabulary based entirely on glitter and fairy dust that ignores reality.
Second wave feminists have a lot to answer for when it comes to mothering. They largely believed that the only way for women to live a liberated life was to either avoid having children or to come up with the equivalent of a duty roster so that men who were fathers would do their equal share of parenting. Unfortunately, mammal babies are designed to not really care about fathers at all and pretending this isn’t true creates its own difficulties.
Fudging the issue doesn’t solve anything
A contributing factor to the recent resignation of one of LLL’s Founders Marian Tompson, was that her fellow LLLI Board members refused to give her a straight answer to the direct question, “do you support men breastfeeding?”:
For me and for many other women and mothers, an important part of the value of LLL has gone by subscribing to the ideological cult of trans, because we lose the capacity to show women that far from becoming diminished by motherhood, we can be empowered by motherhood.
Using compelled speech, pretending to believe in illogical pretensions and virtue signaling to please the trans crowd is not what creates a safe world for anyone. All those women who believe that sex is immaterial and that babies don’t care who feeds them are just proving Voltaire correct: “He who can persuade you to believe absurdities can persuade you to commit atrocities.”
Thank Lucy. You always have something sensible and insightful to say.
For many years, I have supported an organization that promotes women's and children's health. It is critically important to understand how women and children benefit from reporting factual, evidence-based research based on our biological functions. I don't know anyone in this organization -who cares about the health of women and children- who is unkind to transwomen. It is just a fact that it continues to be important to have clear definitions in order to protect everyone's health. Thank you for making this point, Lucy!
"As I have repeated ad nauseam, identities don’t give birth, breastfeed or play sports, bodies do this. You can identify as an office chair or a lettuce, but what can be done with your body will have been determined the moment that your dad’s sperm managed to penetrate the egg that your mother supplied and there is no way to ever change this reality."