Stories We Tell Ourselves
The importance of continuously clapping for Tinkerbell
Today I want to talk about imaginary friends and how we make up stories to help make sense of our world. If you were a slightly strange girl as I was, with parents who were considered a bit weird by the parents of classmates, you need at least one friend who is always there for you in a way that real people just aren’t. I am also my parents’ eldest child, so I am the experimental model. By the time they had their last child, they were older and tireder than when I was going through the firsts of everything, so they were a bit slacker with the rules and regs bit of parenting too.
My parents never learned of my internal life because they never asked about it. They both grew up in families where feelings weren’t a thing and miraculously found each other as adults, got married and raised a family. “How are you?” was asked with the expectation that the answer would always be “fine thanks, how are you?”.
Like many strange girls, I was an early and voracious reader and this was my salvation. This was how I escaped the teasing and bullying at school and survived the somewhat emotionally barren home I was raised in. On my walks to and from school, I wove an exotic fantasy life where I engaged in wonderful adventures of derring-do and excitement and did many things that would have been impossible to actually accomplish in real life.
When I was about 10 or 11, for reasons that escape me, I told my piano teacher one of my adventures, as if it was true. I remain forever indebted to this wonderful woman, who not only let me believe that she believed me, she never told my mother either. Only much later in hindsight would I appreciate the special gift she gave me that day. By letting this just sit, she made me feel listened to, but she did not send me down a track that I would have had trouble reversing.
Thank whatever gods you believe in that this happened “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” and had nothing to do with gender or sex. Because today’s version of the young “Lucy Leader” would immediately be asked to decide if maybe she wasn’t a girl after all, despite clearly having a female body. “They” would be asked to imagine situations and concepts that a prepubertal brain is not capable of considering about events that they may not even be aware are a part of adult life.
The faith of cults
I view a belief in transgenderism as a cult. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a cult is defined as: “a system of religious veneration and devotion directed towards a particular figure or object; a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or as imposing excessive control over members. A misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular thing a person or thing that is popular or fashionable among a particular group or section of society.”
Thanks to queer theory, there is no such thing as truth so the alternative for adherents is faith, which is a religious concept, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a “complete trust or confidence in someone or something and a strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof.” This is a fancy way of saying ‘I believe what I believe and I don’t need any proof’ and ‘if you don’t believe what I do you are an evil person out to harm me’.
Logical fallacies are all they have
Because queer theory eschews everything that the Western Enlightenment is based around (for example scientific research and advancement and the use of reason and logic to improve the human condition) and happily appears to negate reality (“sex is a social construction”) they never feel the need to prove anything that they put forward.
I suspect that this is the guiding feature behind the “no debate” stance around transgenderism. When you haven’t got a convincing argument, you don’t enter the debate at all, lest you are seen to be as hollow as your position. The trans lobbyists are really good at one thing though; they are experts at promoting logical fallacies in place of, well everything that makes any sense, actually.
“Logical fallacies are flawed, deceptive, or false arguments that can be proven wrong with reasoning.” The number one fallacy that is all over the internet are straw man attacks on women (and any men who refuse to believe that mammals can change sex).
The form is always the same and can be seen in the signs and banners at any public gathering held to support the sex-based rights of women. It is short and easy: that supporting women is the same as wanting to either kill trans people or to state they don’t exist.
In no rational universe is upholding the rights of women dependent on eliminating trans people or saying they don’t exist.
Additionally, it is a false dilemma to argue that “trans rights are human rights”. No one is disputing this, but by pushing this agenda, it makes it appear to be true when it is not. This appeared right after former US President Trump made a video appearance stating he would be winding back President Biden’s “gender neutral” policies:
In no way have I ever been a Trump supporter, but recognizing women’s rights to single sex spaces and services in no way constitutes trans “genocide” or “erasure”. If I prefer knitting it does not mean that you cannot crochet and that you are an evil person if you continue this practice.
Fiction vs ?
‘Fully support us or we will claim you are killing us’ is a story that some adults are telling the world and by and large, I am fine with adults making up whatever stories they need to help them navigate the world as long as any harm is confined to consenting adults.
The problem with the trans agenda is that because it totally depends on faith to work, it needs the active participation by others to be ‘real’. Kathleen Stock discusses this in her book and has labeled it as a “performance art lifestyle”.
Faith is behind the harmful practice of using dehumanizing desexed language such as “birthing people”, “lactating parent” and “bodies with vaginas”. Those of us who insist on using the accurate, timeless and universally understood terms “women” and “mothers” are not trying to pretend that sex is immaterial in human relationships. Mammalian reproduction and the reality of our sexed bodies explodes the belief that one can “really” be the opposite sex to what was determined at our conception. I include the category of “nonbinary” here as well as this label is nonsensical in any mammal.
Widespread adoption of a falsehood encased in a story causes harm to everyone.
If the only way your story ‘works’ is if everyone is onboard, then it is fiction, not reality. In the first movie adaptation of the children’s book “Peter Pan”, there is a heartrending scene where the fairy Tinkerbell drinks poison to save Peter Pan’s life. She will die, the audience is told, unless we all clap and say “I believe in fairies”. To not clap would be to condemn her to death. This is what the trans lobby is preaching to us unbelievers; that unless we all spend our lives metaphorically clapping for those who identify as trans, we are killing them.
Imposing adult ideology on undeveloped brains
As bad as the situation is now, with “women with penises” invading women’s changing rooms and winning sports with unbeatable records, my real ire is reserved for those who seem determined to indoctrinate children, starting from even before they are born.
Picture books for those too young to read are in libraries and bookstores. Reading to your child has been demonstrated to confer many benefits to children that last a lifetime. But when cult handbooks are transformed into brightly colored, glittery stories for children, the harm these cause can elicit brain changes that can’t be undone.
Children are not born with a sense of gender at all and only gradually acquire the knowledge that not everyone’s body looks like theirs. The significance of this takes even more years before real comprehension is realized. Lying to children about what they can change about themselves is wrong and no child has ever been born in the wrong body.
The ‘you know who you really are’ story is not a healthy story for children and it is adults who are imposing this on them. Stories of boy babies making dresses out of their onesies are a clear demonstration of adult intent framing children’s actions.
So called “digital natives” (those who are raised immersed in the internet) already have problems with the stories they construct for themselves. One of the few immutable facts of life is our sex. Why are adults so bound to a version of untruth that it is considered acceptable behavior to deliberately confuse children in a way that is only going to cause harm to them?
It’s magic!
“Abracadabra” is a universal term used by magicians to divert attention away from what they are doing, to what they want you to see. This is called “misdirection” and it is a deliberate ploy (that everyone accepts is happening). Magic shows have always been, well magical. From the basic magician hired to entertain the kids at a birthday party to Las Vegas extravaganzas, most of us enjoy being fooled for an hour or two in the name of entertainment.
Magic shows only work though, because we know that what we are seeing can’t actually be done in reality. “Alakazam!” does not really make a rabbit materialize to be pulled out of a hat. No wordplay of any sort allows a woman to be literally cut in half and then rejoined.
No one can magically transform into the opposite sex. “Transgender” is fancy bit of psychological misdirection that is employed by the trans lobby groups and their supporters to ensure compliance with their cult beliefs. It is covering a mental disturbance with Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility, rendering it acceptable and turning an individual’s unhappiness with themselves into a ‘play pretend’ scenario that only works if everyone agrees to play along.
And we all know what happens to those of us who refuse to play the game. Online and in real life bullying towards those of us who ‘stopped clapping’ is composed of death threats and job losses. While the trans advocates claim that our words are literally killing them, it is their signs that tell the story of who is at risk when it comes to who is really promoting a violent agenda.
My childhood imaginary life was harmless in the end. It would not have been improved by any adults meddling with my head. It was not subject to any medical “treatments” that left me worse off than before, which meant that ultimately, my story included birthing and breastfeeding my beloved children. Today’s young girls and women will miss out on that experience and boys will never be able to father their children as they will have been needlessly sterilized to conform to an imposed story that came from adults, rather than forging their own stories.
Sorry Tinkerbell, but I can’t clap for you.
Excellent article!
“ This is what the trans lobby is preaching to us unbelievers; that unless we all spend our lives metaphorically clapping for those who identify as trans, we are killing them.” Thank you for your clear explanation about this madness.
I believe that it's fine to have a faith, or a fantasy world, or a belief of any sort, as long as we recognise that it's personal and not something to be forced or inflicted on others unless they actually want to join in on it. Trying to force others to believe our beliefs as well, is where the shit hits the fan. I know there are always overlaps - e.g. with a dominant culture 'forcing' their culture and beliefs on others - but haven't we learned some lessons from the past about that? We'll never be perfect, because we're human and humans will always have the same a variety of traits everywhere and at any time, but it seems to me that the TQ are trying to become a dominant culture. Their push for 'acceptance and inclusion' is just BS, imo.