“Wrong Does Not Cease to be Wrong Because the Majority Share in it.” ― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
“Ardent belief is not the same as researched medical fact.” -- George Kent, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Hawaii
In an earlier post, I wrote about parents lying to their children, using Santa Claus as an example. Santa is generally considered to be an acceptable tale to spin in many homes as part of a family effort to create a bit of magic for children (and for parents delighting in the pleasure of their children’s happiness). It is accepted that a belief in Santa is self-limited, usually by age. Part of the fascination of parenthood is watching your children gradually grow and develop into functional adulthood and realizing that your parents got the same sort of feelings when they watched you.
I am not aware of any permanent harms done to children when they realize that Santa is not real, even if this news is briefly distressing for some children. However, the same cannot be said of another myth that has become recently popular, which is that children can be “born in the wrong body” and have a brain that is misaligned with the sex they were “assigned at birth”.
Just as children do not create a Santa story without adult influence, no child is “trans” without prior indoctrination by the trusted adults around them. There are no “trans kids”, but there are children who have been manipulated by adults to believe that they are somehow faulty, but fixable. Lying to children to serve the needs of adults can cause traumas that may never be resolved as this article so plainly elucidates.
There are now legions of mutilated young people who have learned the hard way that they were lied to, as their bodies no longer function as they were designed to work.
A wrong being righted?
This was the first paragraph in a recent New York Times opinion piece:
On his first day back in office, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes, male and female, that a person’s sex is established at conception and that it cannot be changed.
One tiny correction: our sex is immutably set at the moment of fertilization. That tiny sperm that won the race to penetrate an egg had either an X or a Y sex chromosome and that single chromosome determined our entire reproductive future. Other than this minor point, I have no problem with this statement as it is true.
Following on from this, the article continued on in the usual weeping and wailing tone that the NYT has consistently employed on anything to do with the trans lobby when anyone has the temerity to question any aspect of identifying as trans.
One of the objected to phrases was “biological reality”, which kind of underpins my entire argument against transgenderism; that it is based on a combination of magical thinking, adolescent distress and male sexual paraphilias (depending on the age and sex of the adherents).
Jennifer Finney Boylan is a trans “woman” who is a regular contributor to the op-ed pages of the NYT. He just looked, well stupid and ignorant, is about the best I can manage when he wrote, “And yet it seems Trump administration officials are not up on their biology: At conception, sex has not yet been phenotypically differentiated.” Well duh, I doubt that “at conception” anyone, even with a powerful microscope, could tell “phenotypically” if a zygote is a potential new human or a potential new dog as the definition of phenotype is the set of observable characteristics of an individual.
Proving his total lack of commitment to the truth he then states:
After the order was issued, internet observers ran with the idea that it had actually just reset America to one gender — female — since about seven weeks pass before a gene on the Y chromosome triggers the development of testes. I found this suggestion wickedly amusing. “Welcome to my world!” I wanted to say to all my newfound sisters. Alas, though I love the idea of calling Donald Trump our first female president, that idea, too, is a misunderstanding of human creation. At conception, we are but a single cell.
The belief that we all “start out as female” belongs in the same knowledge box as the belief that “intersex” (sic) is as common as red hair. That is, that this belief is unwise as it isn’t true. And his inference that we remain a single cell female until for some of us that Y chromosome kicks in after the first seven weeks is patently ridiculous. Yes, a zygote is but a single cell for a whole 30 hours before cell division starts. But by the time an embryo is seven weeks old, it is roughly the size of a grape and new brain cells alone are being generated at a rate of about 100 per minute.
I don’t think it’s me that is “misunderstanding of human creation” as I am the one who knows that all us mammals have only two sexes and we can’t choose which one we want to be.
Both these articles went on to catalog the usual woes concerning trans advocates: men in women’s sports (no, there is nothing in any of these Executive Orders that prevents men from competing; they just can’t cheat women out of winning); children not getting the “gender affirming care” they “need” (tell that to the armies of detransitioners suing clinics for the mutilating practices that they lacked the capacity to consent to); and the myriad problems that men with kinky sexual fetishes will now confront, ranging from invading women’s private spaces and public restrooms to birth and breastfeeding support groups now that sex is being recognized as more relevant to real life than gender ever could be.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs don’t work
DEI initiatives sound good in theory but are often ridiculously useless in real life. For example, one of the latest causes that some men are finding important is their parental “right” to breastfeed, despite the fact that breastfeeding never has been part of the male reproductive cycle.
Men breastfeeding is bad for babies simply because if men are breastfeeding then mothers aren’t and disrupting the mother/baby dyad causes harms. I have written about this frequently; here is one post that explains my thinking in more detail.
Babies are not interested in a “diverse” range of “parents”, they just want the mothers they were born to. Which also leaves out some man with a fat wallet who bought them. Babies are not “inclusive”; they are happy to exclude everyone other than the women who give birth to them and their only “equity” is once again, embodied in their birth mothers.
Military service is another area that shows the stupidity of rolling out DEI in everything. In every country the military serves a very specific purpose that DEI can disrupt, as this opinion piece points out:
There’s no doubt the military has served to advance important moral and social values, never more so than in President Harry Truman’s 1948 order to desegregate the military or President Barack Obama’s 2010 decision to eliminate “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But those demands for equality did not require the Pentagon to lower standards or compromise lethality.
The difference with D.E.I. is that, almost inevitably, it does. It asks the military to become a social justice organization that happens to fight wars. In other walks of life, adulterated standards can lead to mediocrity — bad teaching in classrooms, bad medical care. In combat, it can mean death.
I have relatives and friends who have served their countries in their military forces, and I would prefer that none of them died because of DEI.
Special mention must go to Rachel (born Richard) Levine who on October 19, 2021, became the first openly transgender four-star officer in the USA's eight uniformed services. This married father will hopefully be looking for a new job, not in the US military since another of Trump’s Executive Orders bans trans people from serving. Levine is one of the architects of the WPATH removal of any lower age guidelines which permits the “necessary” mutilating surgeries for “gender affirming care” for minors. Levine has talked about the joy of being a father, while at the same time advocating for removing reproductive capacity (the possibility of becoming a biological parent) through the “treatment” of gender dysphoria. He believes that in medicine there is no need for “evidence” as long as “rights” are being upheld. (I do not agree with him that children have the capacity to consent to harmful procedures, with zero proven benefits.) I’m not sure that Hippocrates would agree with him either; I wrote about doctors violating their oath here.
There is actually no “social justice” in blanket “inclusion”
I wrote about social justice warriors (SJW) here and outlined how they work and the immense damage they can cause. One of the points made was that in a world with plenty of real trauma and difficulties, SJW often choose to elevate made up “problems” to the forefront and spend all their efforts in bullying others into compliance. I mean, do most people really believe that Western men in womanface are really more vulnerable and endangered than the entire population of women living in Afghanistan? Does La Leche League International really think that it benefits babies if they support “everyone” to “human milk feed” babies?
Gender ideology is a faith-based belief system that has been increasingly disconnected from factual reality to the extent that recently in a Scottish Employment Tribunal Dr. Beth Upton (a man who has adopted a woman’s identity) has stated that "I’m biologically female" and said sex had "no defined or agreed meaning in science."
Whoo boy, I wouldn’t let this dude take my blood pressure, let alone treat me for any problems I might present with. But as those with any sort of gender dysphoria are meant to be immediately and completely affirmed in their delusions, I guess that you don’t really need any medical training to work with these patients anyway. They tell doctors what they want, and doctors comply.
The only studies that have rated the effectiveness of DEI programs have found that most of them not only do not work as intended, but their implementation can make the situation worse. This article ends with the statement, “It’s possible they [businesses and organizations] will realize that a true commitment to D.E.I. does not lend itself to easy solutions.”
Irony is not dead because, Trump
Yeah, who knew that the Donald would emerge as a women’s rights champion? A serial adulterer, convicted of sexual abuse in a civil case because the statute of limitations for a criminal offense had lapsed, he is a man who has boasted about his use of women for his entire adult life, but I will take our wins where I can.
Here is a link to his recent Executive Orders that clearly prioritize facts over feelings. A few of the relevant Orders are:
White House Executive Order, defending women from gender ideology, extremism and restoring biological truth to the Federal Government, January 20, 2025
White House Executive Order protecting children from chemical & surgical mutilation. Issued 28 Jan 2025
White House Executive Order keeping men out of women’s sports, 5 February 2025,
Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling, 29 January 2025
Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the Federal Government, 20 January 2025
Yes, I know that there are already court cases that have been filed against these Executive Orders, but I am still celebrating the tiniest glimpse of light at the end of the very long tunnel that transgenderism has societally undermined. Everyone at one point in time also thought the earth was flat and sailing ships needed to take care not to fall off the edge.
Wrong is still wrong even if everyone believes otherwise and facts still matter even if many believe they don’t.
“Babies are not interested in a diverse range of parents.” So true! I love how Andrew Klavan refers to the New York Times. He always says “The New York Times, a former newspaper. “
I think many of us are still trying to make it work in our heads how Trump, the 'bad guy', has done what the (supposed) ;good guys' wouldn't.