Effective, and unwilling to back down

The continued obliteration of sex-specific spaces begs the question of whether the safety of girls is being considered. Quite possibly no. Worse yet, it is but ends up being discarded each time as unimportant.

Dr. Debra Soh

Jordan Peterson famously became a target of the left for refusing the mandated use of "diverse" pronouns at his university. Lately, many of the targets of the Gender Ideology essentialists have been women. Debra Soh, quoted above, is one of them.

Abigail Shrier is another. Ace reported yesterday on government agents in Spreckles, California grooming kids to be trans. Shrier initially spilled the beans on part of that story.

Recently, she spoke to students at Princeton. Likely some of the few students at Princeton who have escaped the grasp of the hard left. Reading her remarks made me want to finally buy her book. She thinks.

After summarizing an impressive education and background in law and some personal details about her life (including quitting at a law firm and having kids), she said:

I began writing a few op-eds for our local Jewish paper, one of which was spotted by a Wall Street Journal editor, who invited me to submit to the Wall Street Journal. I did, and in the course of that year, published 13 op-eds with the Journal. One of those op-eds inspired a reader to contact me and tell me the story of her teen daughter who was rushing into a sudden gender transition. After trying and failing to find an investigative journalist who wanted the assignment, I took it on myself. My investigations turned into a book called Irreversible Damage.

All of which is to say: I'm not a provocateur. I don't get a rush from making people angry. You don't have to be a troll to find yourself in the center of controversy. You need only be two things: effective, and unwilling to back down.

(emphasis mine)

Why am I unwilling to back down? Why wouldn't I prostrate myself before the petulant mobs who insist that my standard journalistic investigation into a medical mystery--specifically, why so many teen girls were suddenly identifying as transgender and clamoring to alter their bodies--makes me a hater? Why on earth would I have chosen to write this book in the first place and am I glad that I wrote it?

If you're here, you no doubt are familiar with at least some of the unpleasantness you encounter whenever you deviate from the approved script. So, again, what's it like to be the target of so much hate? It's freeing. That's what I'd like to talk about tonight.

As an undergraduate studying philosophy, I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering whether my will was free. . .

In 2021, it seems a luxury to worry that a will determined and shaped entirely by received ideas and our own personality-driven desires might not be entirely free. Today, before any of us decides what it is we want, we open our phones and participate in our own manipulation at the hands of those who actively want us to think, and see, and vote differently than our own wills would have us do. If we were not entirely free before, in other words--we are far less so now.

Every dating app pushes us toward the same few attractive mate choices; Spotify presses us to like the same music; Amazon pushes us to purchase specific books and away from others. If you're under the impression that the books Amazon recommends to you are based solely on a content-neutral algorithm, I can disabuse you of that fiction right now. I once asked one of my sources at Amazon, who was concerned about the ways the search results were being manipulated, whether he'd ever seen a book deliberately boosted. Yes, he said. Becoming by Michelle Obama. When that book came out - he told me - virtually every search you did led to the recommendation to buy the former First Lady's book. And the opposite is also true. There are books that are never recommended by the Amazon algorithm, irrespective of how well they've sold or how likely a specific shopper is to buy them. Or, at least, there's one such book. I'll let you try and guess what it is.

But the larger point is, your will is being toyed with, subverted, manipulated. . .

Something for students at Princeton, and us, to contemplate.

Back to today's practical world:

When polled, nearly two out of three Americans (62%) say they are afraid to express an unpopular opinion. That doesn't sound like a free people in a free country. We are, each day, force-fed falsehoods we are all expected to take seriously, on pain of forfeiting esteem and professional opportunity:

"Some men have periods and get pregnant." "Hard work and objectivity are hallmarks of whiteness." "Only a child knows her own true gender." "Transwomen don't have an unfair advantage when playing girls' sports."

On that final example of a lie, the one about transwomen in girls' sports, I want you to think for a moment about a young woman here at Princeton. . . Just before Thanksgiving, Ellie was defeated in the 500-meter, the event she held the record in, by almost 14 seconds by a 22 year old biological male at Penn who was competing on the men's team as recently as November of 2019. That male athlete now holds multiple U.S. records in women's swimming, erasing the hard work of so many of our best female athletes, and making a mockery of the rights women fought for generations to achieve.

Ellie Marquart swam her heart out for Princeton. When will Princeton fight for her? Where are the student protests to say--enough is enough. When a biological male who has enjoyed the full benefits of male puberty - - larger cardiovascular system, 40% more upper body muscle mass, more fast-twitch muscle fiber, more oxygenated blood--decides after three seasons on the men's team to compete as a woman and smashes the records of the top female swimmers in this country, that is not valor - - that's vandalism.

Where is the outrage?

You who are studying at one of the greatest academic institutions in the country only to be told that after graduation, you must think as we tell you and recite from this script--why were you born? What's the point of being alive? Computers are vastly better at number crunching. They'll soon be better at all kinds of more complex tasks. What they cannot do is stand on principle. What a computer cannot do is refuse to lend credibility to a rigged competition--to refuse to strengthen its coercion--making it that much harder for the next female athlete to speak up. What the computer cannot know is the glorious exertion of the human will when it refuses to truckle in the face of lies and instead publicly speaks the truth.

I didn't write Irreversible Damage to be provocative. In a freer world, nothing in my book would have created controversy. . .

You really should read her remarks. There is much more. Anyone collecting examples of how to write an essay would do well to include this. I hope a few in her Princeton audience were inspired and encouraged.

Related content from Debra Soh:

J.K. Rowling

Those seeking to understand why the average person is too terrified to speak up against transgender activism need only to look to J.K. Rowling. In a promotional trailer for Rowling's forthcoming film, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which she co-wrote and co-produced, her name barely appears. This contrasts with how prominently her name was featured in previous advertisements for the franchise.

Rowling has endured a continued campaign of punishment and harassment ever since she (rightfully) ridiculed the term "people who menstruate" last year on social media. Her most recent transgression, according to activists, was criticizing the police in Scotland for classifying offenders based on their gender self-identification. This means that a male rapist who identifies as female will have his offense recorded as being committed by a woman.

Canada bans discussing options to transgender conversion

Bill C-4, the ban on so-called Conversation Therapy, passed with the unanimous support of all parties in the House of Commons. . .

On today's episode of the Candice Malcolm Show, Candice is joined by sex neuroscientist Dr. Debra Soh. Soh says that Canada is going in the opposite direction of other Western liberal democracies who have mandated psychotherapy before transitioning and banned dangerous puberty-blocking drugs to those under 18.

She says that clinical therapy is essential for children suffering from gender dysphoria, and banning it is cruel and anti-science.

COVID vaccine divides people

In some cases, friends and family members proudly disown people, writing them off as ignorant, selfish, conspiratorial, or worse. This is reflected in a recent study about how vaccination status is dividing the public. More than 1 in 4 vaccinated adults have stopped associating with a loved one because they are unvaccinated. Vaccinated Democrats are twice as likely as vaccinated Republicans to report doing so.

No one deserves to be discriminated against or shamed for choices pertaining to his or her personal health. Coping with the stigma and social isolation that comes with speaking up may feel insurmountable, but know that your feelings are valid. You are not alone.

Social support becomes extremely important. If people close to you are not supportive, avoiding the topic of COVID-19, and perhaps politics more generally, in conversation may be the best approach to salvaging those relationships. If possible, try to find at least one other person in your life with whom you can share your concerns.

If that fails, as difficult as it may be to find them in our censorious climate, online communities can offer support. You don't necessarily need to agree with each other. What's important is the ability to discuss freely and without judgment.

I am aware of at least one such online community.

On the lighter side

You sang it, didn't you?

Music

Carol of the Bells

Hope you have something nice planned for the weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

posted by K.T. at 11:15 AM

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