Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent's faith is to say that I must not discuss it.
G. K. Chesterton.
The Gibson Girl, the iconic female figure of the early 1900s created by Charles Dana Gibson. The thing is, you see, she isn't, and wasn't, real.
There's been a story much in the news here, and indeed elsewhere, about a figure who is a guy but who claims he identifies as a girl, or more accurately, a figure who is a man who claims he identified as a woman.
What impresses me about this story isn't that aspect of it, so much as nobody, up until very recently, and after I started this post, has really bothered to dive very deep into the story, particularly from a psychological level.
It seems that they should.
Not that we should be too surprised about this. People rarely do. During World War Two, for example, in one rural area of Germany a figure held forth as a local open anti-Nazi member of the German nobility. . . except he wasn't a member of the nobility at all. He was lucky to get away with it, and his anti-Nazi stance was genuine. But a Junker he was not. Why did he do that?
Backstories to the public positions people take are very rarely looked at, but really should be. Some backers of causes that are strongly for them in a virulent way have a personal connection that undermines their position in one fashion or another. Others just make you wonder. Why, for instance, would a well-to-do young man with no employment history relocate to a Western state and run for office as a political firebrand on the populist libertarian front? You'd think voters would ask, but they largely don't. Why would an ostensible billionaire who has gone down in defeat in an election and who faces a pile of criminal charges be running so aggressively for office again?
We tend to take things at face value.
So too here.
There's some new data out that shows that for the majority of people who claim transgenderism, if left to develop that claim on their own, the claim itself is transitory and youthful. Most girls, for example, who in their very early teens feel they want to be boys, don't a decade latter. That's a good reason in and of itself not to allow "transitions" that can't be reversed, and any substantial one can't be reversed. Indeed, it's criminal to allow it in an existential sense, and ought to be in a legal sense. But what causes it?
Indeed, as a commentor on the story in Wyo File, which finally did look at some of the backstory, noted:
The strong correlation between trans identity and autism spectrum disorder has been recognized over the last three years by such professional organizations as the National Autism Society, The Institutes of Health, Autism Research Institute, and studies published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Noted was the observation that autistic youths were up to 6 times more likely to identify as trans than a similar non-autistic demographic. The medical field recognizes and treats autism as a disorder, not a normal expression of the spectrum of the human condition. Since it appears that trans gender identity is resultant from ASD, it should also be treated as a disorder rather than celebrated.
That's an interesting observation, to say the least.
Well, we've looked at it before, but in regard to the individual who has been so much in the news, why hasn't anyone looked up until now?
The data is there, or at least was, when this story first developed. It doesn't appear to be a happy story.
When this news first broke, there was a blog up, and maybe there still is, by the father. It wasn't on his sons, but his son appeared in the photos. He already looked different from the rest, having gained a lot of weight even as a child. But what the blog made clear is that the father was bitterly disillusioned.
Not with the son, but with his former wife.
His wife, he claimed, had left and divorced him, and her Mormon faith was the reason why.
Now, that was never explained. Mormon's can and do marry outside of their faiths, so there are a lot of roads that could be gone down there. Whatever the story was, from his prospective, the wife had left him and their children for her Mormonism.
Now, that doesn't really make sense. One of the things most noted about Mormon's is their deep devotion to the children. It's hard to imagine what the conflict was, but it was at least perceived that way by the former father.
Maybe the topic of the young man had already come up, and now based on the Wyo File story, it seems it definitely had. Perhaps that was the division. Or not. Maybe that had nothing to do with the split. Again, we don't really know.
I don't really know the definitive Mormon position on transgenderism. I do know the Catholic one which is that disorders are not sinful, but acting upon them if it's outside of the moral framework, is. This has typically come up in regard to homosexuality. Being a homosexual isn't sinful, but sex outside of marriage is, and marriage is just between a man and a woman. I believe the Mormon position is similar, but I can't say that definitively. If the boy's declared sexual dysmorphia became an issue in the household, with one parent taking the boy's side, and one not (and I don't know if that was the case), I can see where it may ultimately have been fatal to the marriage.
What we do know, and from long, long experience, is that its difficult in the extreme to raise a child in a one parent household and that this is so much the case that when one parent is present but really absent, such as one works all the time, or one is a drug or alcohol addict, it statistically impacts the outlook of the children and often for life.
Daughters, it's been shown, of a checked out woman are much more likely to turn out to be lesbians than daughters where the mother is present. That doesn't mean their relationship is necessarily rosy. But the daughters of what now is so charmingly called "the day drinking moms" who sit there in front of the television at 1:30 in the afternoon getting blotto tend to have no real female role model.* In contrast, a mother may be a Tiger Mom, or whatever, but if she's there, it makes a huge difference.
In contrast, the son's of men who are not there tend to be more likely to have same sex attraction as well. The two impulses, one in male and one in females, are not otherwise similar and other aspects go into it. Women who perceive, while young, that men are a threat are more likely to take refuge with other women. What about men?
Well, I don't know, but one thing that has been pretty clearly demonstrated is that young men who are exclusively around other young men, to the exclusion of females, are more likely to become homosexuals. English Boy Schools provide a well known example.
What about transgenderism?
One thing we do know, in spite of recent left wing attempts to scientifically legitimize it, much like was formerly done with eugenics, it has no biological origin. No set of hormones or the like is going to send you off into a different gender. That means it's purely psychological in origin.
But what's going on with it?
We don't know for sure, but we do know that with females it mostly hits in the very early teens and is gone by the early 20s. And we also know that young women are getting exposed to piles of gross pornography right now, and that those who are ADHD are more likely to take this direction. Often it occurs in groups.
Which may mean that its origin is much like lesbianism, except its much more destructive, but also much more transitory. Girls are seeking refuge outside of their sex as they fear the roles that their sex seems to have. Once it starts to clear up that the life of adult women isn't something featured on Pornhub, it wanes.
And men?
Well, it would appear autism is an element of it, as the subject is apparently on the spectrum. That's telling.
It would also appear that early on, he received "support" from elements after he started to reveal his claimed orientation. For one thing, his school had a "SPEAK" club, standing for Genders and Sexualities Alliance, of which he was a member.**
That's telling not because he was a member, but because it's well known that recruitment of people to anything, particularly anything destructive, tends to take root if done very young. There's a reason that the Nazi Party in Germany eliminated youth organizations and replaced them with the Hitler Youth, or why the Soviet Communist Party had the Young Pioneers. There's also a reason, although people now turn a blind eye to it, that homosexual men used to fairly notably recruit teenage men. If you start to dive into debasement, it's really hard to get back out.
Young pioneers... for the struggle in the name of Lenin and Stalin... be prepared! (1951)
So what else is over all going on here?
I don't know, but I suspect that a certain element of refuge, or indeed a large role of refuge, from the male role is at work here as well, in the overall story of transgenderism. In spite of a protracted effort to undermine it, male roles basically remain unchanged.
We tend, mentally, to still think of the Four things greater than all things are.
When spring-time flushes the desert grass,
Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.
Lean are the camels but fat the frails,
Light are the purses but heavy the bales,
As the snowbound trade of the North comes down
To the market-square of Peshawur town.
In a turquoise twilight, crisp and chill,
A kafila camped at the foot of the hill.
Then blue smoke-haze of the cooking rose,
And tent-peg answered to hammer-nose;
And the picketed ponies, shag and wild,
Strained at their ropes as the feed was piled;
And the bubbling camels beside the load
Sprawled for a furlong adown the road;
And the Persian pussy-cats, brought for sale,
Spat at the dogs from the camel-bale;
And the tribesmen bellowed to hasten the food;
And the camp-fires twinkled by Fort Jumrood;
And there fled on the wings of the gathering dusk
A savour of camels and carpets and musk,
A murmur of voices, a reek of smoke,
To tell us the trade of the Khyber woke.
The lid of the flesh-pot chattered high,
The knives were whetted and -- then came I
To Mahbub Ali, the muleteer,
Patching his bridles and counting his gear,
Crammed with the gossip of half a year.
But Mahbub Ali the kindly said,
"Better is speech when the belly is fed."
So we plunged the hand to the mid-wrist deep
In a cinnamon stew of the fat-tailed sheep,
And he who never hath tasted the food,
By Allah! he knoweth not bad from good.
We cleansed our beards of the mutton-grease,
We lay on the mats and were filled with peace,
And the talk slid north, and the talk slid south,
With the sliding puffs from the hookah-mouth.
Four things greater than all things are, --
Women and Horses and Power and War.
We spake of them all, but the last the most,
For I sought a word of a Russian post,
Of a shifty promise, an unsheathed sword
And a grey-coat guard on the Helmund ford.
Then Mahbub Ali lowered his eyes
In the fashion of one who is weaving lies.
Quoth he: "Of the Russians who can say?
When the night is gathering all is grey.
But we look that the gloom of the night shall die
In the morning flush of a blood-red sky.
Friend of my heart, is it meet or wise
To warn a King of his enemies?
We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,
But no man knoweth the mind of the King.
That unsought counsel is cursed of God
Attesteth the story of Wali Dad.
"His sire was leaky of tongue and pen,
His dam was a clucking Khattack hen;
And the colt bred close to the vice of each,
For he carried the curse of an unstaunched speech.
Therewith madness -- so that he sought
The favour of kings at the Kabul court;
And travelled, in hope of honour, far
To the line where the grey-coat squadrons are.
There have I journeyed too -- but I
Saw naught, said naught, and -- did not die!
He hearked to rumour, and snatched at a breath
Of `this one knoweth', and 'that one saith', --
Legends that ran from mouth to mouth
Of a grey-coat coming, and sack of the South.
These have I also heard -- they pass
With each new spring and the winter grass.
"Hot-foot southward, forgotten of God,
Back to the city ran Wali Dad,
Even to Kabul -- in full durbar
The King held talk with his Chief in War.
Into the press of the crowd he broke,
And what he had heard of the coming spoke.
"Then Gholam Hyder, the Red Chief, smiled,
As a mother might on a babbling child;
But those who would laugh restrained their breath,
When the face of the King showed dark as death.
Evil it is in full durbar
To cry to a ruler of gathering war!
Slowly he led to a peach-tree small,
That grew by a cleft of the city wall.
And he said to the boy: `They shall praise thy zeal
So long as the red spurt follows the steel.
And the Russ is upon us even now?
Great is thy prudence -- await them, thou.
Watch from the tree. Thou art young and strong.
Surely the vigil is not for long.
The Russ is upon us, thy clamour ran?
Surely an hour shall bring their van.
Wait and watch. When the host is near,
Shout aloud that my men may hear.'
"Friend of my heart, is it meet or wise
To warn a King of his enemies?
A guard was set that he might not flee --
A score of bayonets ringed the tree.
The peach-bloom fell in showers of snow,
When he shook at his death as he looked below.
By the power of God, Who alone is great,
Till the seventh day he fought with his fate.
Then madness took him, and men declare
He mowed in the branches as ape and bear,
And last as a sloth, ere his body failed,
And he hung like a bat in the forks, and wailed,
And sleep the cord of his hands untied,
And he fell, and was caught on the points and died.
"Heart of my heart, is it meet or wise
To warn a King of his enemies?
We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,
But no man knoweth the mind of the King.
Of the grey-coat coming who can say?
When the night is gathering all is grey.
Two things greater than all things are,
The first is Love, and the second War.
And since we know not how War may prove,
Heart of my heart, let us talk of Love!"
Kipling, The Ballad of the King's Jest.
But those four things are tough things too, resulting in physical and psychological injury and sometimes death, but also, in a proper view that Theophilus might hold, to quite another direction as well.
There's always been men who feared not measuring up to the male ideal or the male role. This has expressed itself differently in different eras. World War Two saw a surprising number of suicides undertaken by men who were rejected by draft boards. They couldn't stand the thought of what that meant, in their own minds, and took their own lives. I've already noted, in other threads, that the Apostolic clergy provided refuge for a certain number of men in former ears for same sex attraction.
It's been well documented that in prisons certain men who have never demonstrated a transgender inclination before, but who are physical weak and in need of protection, will take on female attributes and become the "female" object of a same-sex relationship.
In the extremely rough and violent world of Plaints Indians, there were, as is sometimes famously pointed out, men who would declare, at an early age, that they were really drawn to femininity and then would drop out of the male role for the female role. While moderns like to pretend there's no division of labor by nature in human beings, there very clearly is, and that tellingly reduced those men to cooking, cleaning hides, and the like. It meant they were exempt from killing other human beings and fighting, a normal part of cultures which exalted warriors.
Lakota warriors. No doubt, every one of these men had killed other men.
Put another way, Crow Heart Butte in Wyoming, and near where this boy is from, is named that because Washakie killed a Crow chieftain and ate his heart. Not because they met for tea.
And this raises an interesting point.
The waif like Audrey Hepburn in 1956, who was pretty clearly the model of female beauty for a man who recently promoted Bud Light as a woman. She's a model, however, of safe female beauty that wouldn't really attract unwanted male attention. By 1956, the other type of female beauty, one more admired by males, was very much in circulation, as Playboy was expanding and the screens were full of Marilyn Monroe.
Men who try to affect a female appearance tend to take on an exaggerated one. In modern society, if you go out on a city sidewalk on any particular day, you'll find at least a few young women wearing blue jeans and t-shirts and who are healthy muscular, in a female sense. In offices and in office culture, you'll find most women wearing suitable office attire. You'll never find, however, a woman walking around with a feather boa, or trying to look like Audrey Hepburn, or wearing something like a polka dress.
But in the transgender community, you'll find all of that fairly commonly, although in this particular case that's not being demonstrated.
Indeed, here, in spite of what we're supposed to say, what we really see is a guy who looks like a very large, soft looking guy.
Actor Robert Conrad, right, in The Killers. Conrad was always a big guy, but definately a guy.
Now, in the male world, you can be overweight, but being soft is pretty difficult. It no doubt goes back to our earliest origins. Most likely, our Cro Magnon ancestors didn't get fat, they were too resource poor to pull that off, but softness probably simply couldn't be tolerated. There wasn't any room for "I don't want to fight that new tribe that just showed up" allowed. And to a large degree, there still really isn't.
Going back to when I was really young, I can think of some instances of pretty soft teenage boys, but the way that they and everyone else handled it was different. They were soft, but not so soft that they were unreliable in a pinch. Basically, like a lot of people with different personality traits, they'd learned how to rise to the occasion, and in their cases often frequently, to overcome them.
We don't do that anymore. We face our failings by "accepting" them, which is not to face them at all.
Now, there's more to this than that, but perhaps not as much as we might think, for no sane man would ever want to be a woman.
Women like to be women, as their DNA provides for it.*** But very few men, if any, would be comfortable with bleeding a great deal on a routine and scheduled basis, being subjected to hormonal storms, or being subject to the numerous medical and physical problems just being a woman entails. Women's worlds change at least monthly, and in reality more frequently than that. Over the course of a lifetime, women's reality changed massively, once at puberty, later at childbirth, if they have children, and then again at menopause. Women live longer, to be sure, but the existential nature of their existence practically means they undergo a deep physical and psychological chrysalis at least twice if not three or more times. Women mature more quickly than men, but some of them endure such hard physical changes that the impacts are nearly shattering when they occur, and that doesn't even take into account the monthly cyclonic storms they endure.
To be male means having a predictable physical reality that only changes over decades and to some extent never does. And indeed, transgendered men in fact avoid that. They aren't going to endure the agony of menstruation for one thing, and they likely don't want to. Most just keep their dicks and balls and call it good.
Old Man : Hey are all farmers. Farmers talk of nothing but fertiliser and women. I've never shared their enthusiasm for fertiliser. As for women, I became indifferent when I was 83. I am staying here.
Line from The Magnificent Seven.
Two imagines, once expected, and one exaggerated, of 20th Century manhood. In the top image, a British Tommy holds the line. . . alone. He's probably going to die. In the second, the super macho and brooding Sgt. Rock, entertainer of thousands of juvenile males in the second half of the century, leads Easy Company into a charge.
To be a transgender male, in some ways, means dropping out of the expectations without picking up the pain and agony of being a woman. Male strength remains, and repeated naturally programmed female physical distress does not arrive. No matter what they may say, for the most part, transgendered men are dropping out of male society. Men don't want them as lovers, and most of them have physical attributes, even with their pants buttoned up, that make them unattractive even if an unsuspecting male eye was cast on them.
Beyond that, however, they're omitted from the male warband when young. Nobody is going to ever ask them what they'd do if they're drafted. And nobody is going to conscript them into a bar fight, which almost every living Western male has had happened or nearly happen. You aren't going to be asked to defend some woman's honor. You aren't going to intervene if somebody threatens your sister, girlfriend or wife. You aren't, moreover, ever going to hear "go over and ask her to dance", and all that means and what follows.
U.S. teenage pregnancy rates from the mid 1970s to mid 2010s. Contrary to what might be expected, if this chart went back to the 1950s, the rate would have started off even higher, as the 50s really saw the peak in recent U.S. teen pregnancy rates. Exactly 0% of these pregnancies were to the transgendered expressing as female. Some probably originated from the same group acting contrary to their declared expression.
You also, however, are going to usually be safe to women, except as alleged here where the allegations, which are denied, is that you are leering at boobs and getting erections. This isn't true at all of other men, no matter how friendly they may be. Some males, including some highly intellectual ones, hold that no real platonic friendship can ever exist between a man and a woman, as the man (not the woman) will always regard a female contemporary as at least a suppressed potential object of affection.**** While it may be misperceived, transgenendered men and homosexual men are usually received well by women, as that threat is generally absent, or at least conceived of being absent.
Highly romanticized illustration of a teenage mother from Street Arabs and Gutter Snipes, The Pathetic and Humorous Side of Young Vagabond Life in the Great Cities, With Records of Work for Their Reclamation 1884.
But none of that is natural, and all of it, in some fashion, is a cry for help. Even the cry for acceptance is just that.
Over the years, sometimes personally, and sometimes professionally, I've known people who ended up needing help, some well after they'd received it. I know one lawyer who is a convicted felon, but overcame that for a successful career. I've met people who were addicted to drugs or alcohol, and overcame that. Usually if you got down to it, you could see that they didn't take up their afflictions as they really enjoyed them, but because they were attempting to bury something else. One lawyer I somewhat knew disappeared for about a month before his family found him, in another state, in a hotel room, having crawled into a bottle. He wasn't there as he enjoyed drinking himself stupid in hotel rooms.
Some people, with more conventional afflictions, are like crashing trains right as you watch them. And interestingly, if is a more conventional and traditional affliction, like addition to alcohol and sex, or the two combined, its commented about backdoor, but nobody ever says that being in that condition is just a life choice. Everyone knows its not, and that is a disaster.
And so is this.
As the comment above notes, we help people on the autism spectrum, and we know that they may need help. It's not regarded as a life choice. But in 2023, everything sexual, except for pedophilism, is just an expression of individualism. The ban on sex with children only remains as its so disgusting, as otherwise all the logic that applies to "accepting" every other sexual behavior applies equally to it, save for that its destructive to children. But it's also destructive to adults, and its been shown that it tends to come on with people who have had multiple sex partners.
Transgenderism is like that. There's no reason to believe that it is not a mental illness, one associated with other conditions, that can be arrested and addressed.
But in our political purity of the age, we're not doing that. And that's destructive for the people making the declaration, who could have been helped.
We might, before concluding, stop to ask two questions. Does it really matter, would be the first.
After all, if somebody wants to drink themselves into oblivion, does it matter, if that's their choice? Or more particularly, if somebody wants to present as a woman, who is a man, what does it really matter to me or anyone else?
Well, it does matter if your view of humanity is that we are our brother's keeper. Oddly enough, in our contemporary world, it's the political left that claims that we are, while the political right, as exhibited by Jeanette Ward in a common in the last legislative session, feels we are not. But most decent societies, and all Christian societies, feel that we are.
So there's a duty to the individual to help them live an ordered life. We know that living a disordered one leads to unhappiness.
There's a wider duty, however, to society. Assaults on individual natures are assaults on nature in general, are destructive to us all.
And, additionally, telling a lie to yourself is one thing. But demanding, even with the force of law, that everyone else adopt the lie is quite another. That's completely destructive to the social structure, as enshrining lies as part of them inevitably leads to decay.
And finally, and more particularly, it's damaging to women in the extreme. Real women, that is. Women know that they aren't men. We all know that the biological life of a woman is radically different from a man's in nearly every sense. Psychologically, it isn't the same either. Reducing womanhood to appearing to have boobs is the most Hefnereque position of all, and an insult to women in every fashion.
Footnotes:
*I don't know how or why "day drinking", which is very often attributed to women, became cute. But it isn't.
**The existence of such non-academic clubs in schools is ample evidence of the intrusion of really left wing "progressive" values into schools. By and large I"m skeptical when such claims are made, but the recent library controversies over homosexual pornography in public schools shows there's definitely something to it, as do the existence of clubs that exist to effectively demand that inclinations that are poorly understood and fairly recently regarded as mental illnesses be accepted as normal.
***Having said that, there's plenty of evidence that well into the mid 20th Century, at least, plenty of women regretted having been born women, which isn't quite the same thing.
****Whatever hte truth of htat may be, it's pretty clear that it's not true of close relatives. The "taboo" on incest is clearly ingrained enough into us to translate over to close relationship, such as cousins.
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