Barbie and G.I. Joe: your models of femininity and masculinity

Gay vs. Transgender and Non-Binary

Did you expect two years ago that this year gay men would be leading the charge in the UK against queer/transgender propaganda?

The photo above is from Andrew Doyle, the brains behind Titania McGrath.

Gender identity ideology is rooted in deeply conservative stereotypes of male and female behaviour.

This is why it is so damaging to gender non-conforming kids, most of whom turn out to be gay.

Here's an image from Mermaids rating gender on a spectrum from Barbie to G.I. Joe...

"Mermaids" is a prominent "Transgender charity" in the UK which is treated as an authority. It is currently fighting alongside other organizations, such as "Stonewall" to keep an LGB organization from being granted charity status.

Concerning the Mermaids chart at the top of the post:

This is peak masculinity, guys! Do you measure up?

There has been a lot of angst over the years concerning girls trying to conform to the body image of Barbie . . .

Say! What about Ken? Remember, Mattel may get woke, go broke with a new pregnant Ken doll! There is even a video!

Pregnant Ken is not a typical gay man. Andrew Doyle has said this about the soon-to-be-closed Tavistock clinic in England: "Staff at the Tavistock used to joke that soon 'there would be no gay people left'. " He has written a book on How to take on the new puritans (The Woke). He is making some interesting points during his publicity campaign. Stonewall becoming anti-gay?

This is droll:

Spare a thought for English teachers in a world of narcissists… https://t.co/gO1zgxRVnu

— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) September 1, 2022

Another gay man, David Thompson, piles on:

You see, our aspiring role model has produced a book combining hardcore self-involvement with dysmorphic cartoon pornography, with the results being made available to schoolchildren, including 11-year-olds. As one might imagine, there have been some, shall we say, reservations regarding whether a book of this kind should be circulated among children without their parents' knowledge or consent. Readers may recall scenes in which parents attempted to read aloud passages from the book among fellow adults at school board meetings, typically resulting in reprimands, the shutting off of microphones, and threats of physical removal. Apparently, "vagina slime," fellatio and "strap-on hotness" are inappropriate topics for adult discussion, even as an attempt to specify a problem, but totally fine for kids. Who apparently need to know about the joys of masturbating while driving.

Ms Kobabe tells us that parents' concerns about the book being distributed among children are merely, "a very organised effort to erase trans and queer and nonbinary voices from the public sphere." A wickedness indulged in only by those "looking for books to complain about." This, we're informed, is part of "a very dangerous and upsetting effort to make it harder for trans people and nonbinary and queer people to live." And not, as seems more likely, a reluctance among parents to have their 11-year-olds exposed to somewhat outre; pornographic material.

Evidently inspired by both the gushing of leftist librarians and the disapproval of countless parents, Ms Kobabe is close to finishing a second book on much the same theme, one aimed at "younger readers," i.e., middle-schoolers.

Queer vs. Everybody Else

Non-Binary:

"We find ourselves in terrifying times in which young people are being affirmed into lying to medical professionals to receive surgery to try to turn them into the image of a word that we don't even understand the meaning of."

"What Is Non-Binary?"

One of the most common questions that I get asked in interviews is to explain the term 'non-binary'.

This has become a much more commonly used identity label within our society over recent years. We have seen numerous celebrities 'come out' as 'non-binary' and introduce their new 'they/them' pronouns. We have witnessed debates in Westminster as to the potential legal recognition of 'non-binary' as an additional gender. Just today, it was announced that the next London Marathon will allow non-elite competitors the option to sign up as 'non-binary'.

And so I decided to 'educate myself' by purchasing a book entitled 'The Book of Non-Binary Joy' by Ben Pechey. Surely, there cannot be a better book to give me a holistic and clear understanding of exactly what this term means and the practical implications for those individuals who identify as 'non-binary'?

My desire and hope for nuanced expertise and clear understanding were shot down almost immediately when I read these words from Pechey:

"I failed my biology A levels systematically, resat every single exam and scraped a D, so my knowledge of human biology is shaky at best".

Okay, so we cannot discuss biology then.

. . . In order to create new law that is well-crafted, intelligible and easy to enforce, we require clarity, above all else. Without such clarity, our laws are open to confusion and even abuse.

Again, I turned to Pechey's book, in the hope that it might shed some light and help to formulate a coherent definition of 'non-binary' for these purposes.

It did not.

Pechey states:

"To define non-binary beyond a personal level is to try to catch smoke with one's bare hands: impossible"

Three bits of advice for outsiders taken from the following paragraphs, from this magnificent book on "Non-Binary Joy":

"To try and hem us in with a set of rules and guidelines is to refute the very existence of non-binary. In trying to understand us you have erased us".

"This message goes out to cisgender people. Please direct your overly personal questions to your chosen internet browser. Non-binary people are not educators. We're people, and we might just like to be left alone".

"If you are cisgender and offended by anything I have said, please don't hesitate to email someone who has time to waste and that is not me".

Alrighty then. Maybe we're gonna have to turn to academic queer theorists instead of practitioners of "non-binary joy". More a little later.

The piece by James Esses continues on to describe regressive stereotypes promoted by this ideology, and the implications for our culture and for children. Including:

I do not believe that the way to treat gender dysphoria is with irreversible surgery. Yet, I have always said that at least in relation to those individuals who seek sex-reassignment surgery to become 'the other sex', that the doctors have a template and a common understanding of what 'the other sex' looks like.

However, what exactly does a 'non-binary' look like? What is it meant to look like? In truth, we have no idea because it is a recently created concept that cannot be defined or properly understood. As Pechey said, it's "like trying to catch smoke with bare hands". Why are surgeons performing double mastectomies on 'non-binary' people? How do we know 'non-binary' people do not have breasts?

Many prominent 'LGBT+' organisations even appear to condone the misleading of doctors in order to avail of such surgery. In one interview with Pink News, a former patient stated:

"At some clinics, non-binary people like me might have to pretend to be trans to be considered for top surgery".

There are additional important considerations in the full piece.

James Lindsay's New Discourses provides some valuable insight into why practitioners of "binary joy" seem unable to define "non-binary", in the "Translations from the Wokish" entry on Queer Theory. See if the quotes from Non-Binary Joy don't fit right in:

. . .queer Theory is positively phobic of binaries of any sort, particularly those having to do with sex, gender, and sexuality. Thus, being (gender) non-conforming, non-binary, or queer in some way intrinsically becomes a site of activism that deconstructs the binaries we expect and thus creates liberation and change. Because of the misunderstanding of Derrida's deconstruction at the sources of queer Theory, and the pessimism of the Theorists involved in it, this often takes ironic and obnoxious forms and is altogether unserious -- in practice a kind of strategic essentialism that's intentionally a bit too aware of its own absurdity (see also, pastiche and politics of parody).

This means that for queer Theory, not only is activism achieved by thinking about different "potentialities" and attempting to perform them, i.e., queering something, it is also achieved simply by being queer. This shouldn't be mistaken for being LGBT because being queer cannot accept normalcy or stability even within those categories. In fact, there should be no categories at all other than "queer" (which is to say woke or critically conscious under the doctrines of queer Theory) and "not-yet-queer" (thus, bad).

Thus, many people mistakenly understand queer Theory as somehow relevant to LGBT civil rights and acceptance--including most queer Theorists--but this is not at all the case. Queer Theory has nothing positive to say about lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender rights except to the degree that those can be made useful for breaking societal norms, and it has no interest in lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender acceptance at all, as that would make them fall within the reach of acceptable societal norms (i.e., normal) and thus a necessary location for disruptive and subversive queer activism. That is, while it seems because of its name that queer Theory is activism on behalf of LGBT rights, it is actually not; it is actually about destroying normalcy in all its forms, including for LGBT people, most of whom don't like or want this. Queer Theory elevates only one identity as authentic: the queer identity, which ceases to be queer the moment it is accepted or even able to be categorized.

This has the effect of making queer Theory self-defeating and simultaneously self-concentrating in a peculiar way. Because queer Theory nominally advances LGBTQ rights but actually only advances queerness, as queer Theory succeeds in its stated mission, it increases the need for itself, as normalized LGBT and Q issues become necessary sites for queering and other applications of queer Theory to subvert that normalization. This has the peculiar result of queer Theory's success in its apparent mission--LGBT(Q) rights--further marginalizing its true charge--a disruptive queer identity. That queer Theory lies to itself in this way is likely to be considered a feature, and a useful one at that, because the less sense something makes and more paradoxical it is, the more properly queer it is (making sense is, after all, normative).

This is probably not what you want for your kids.

History: TERF Wars

Back in 2015, Ace wrote Begun, The Vagina Wars Have. He quoted Jim Goad at Taki's, concerning conflicts which, at the time, seemed extraordinarily dumb:

As a connoisseur of leftist cannibalism, I enjoy watching the internecine squabbling of groups competing for the top spot on the hierarchy of oppression as if they were puppies stepping on one another's necks straining for a tug on the warm teat of sympathy.

Male-to-female transsexuals--who, as luck would have it, have always constituted the vast majority of those who feel they were born wearing the wrong genital costumery -- have recently emerged as perhaps the most rabidly militant of all identity groups strung along the vast fractured progressive rainbow. In their manic quest to force the world into parroting the obvious lie that they are women, they have stumbled upon an unexpected foe -- radical feminists who have real, God-given vaginas.

This is a struggle -- laden with a hilarious level of acrimony -- between men who insist they're women and women who insist that the most crucial part of being a woman involves popping out of your mother's vagina with a vagina of your own. The latter group is disparagingly referred to as TERFs -- Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists --- due to the fact that they feel male-to-female trannies are trying to party-crash their struggle against historical oppression. The TERFs argue that for men to pretend they're women is insulting to real women. To them, it is a genital form of blackface. . .

One especially amusing bone of contention between the two groups of shaggy yipping poodles regards the vaginal authenticity of male-to-female transsexuals. Old-school feminist Germaine Greer recently asserted that trannies aren't women because they don't realize what it's like "to have a big, hairy, smelly vagina."

Ace suggested that this argument was not a sign of superior female intellect. And it was readily answered. A pro-Trans feminist argued that "manmade vaginas are actually smellier than those of natural-born females."

There was another observation by Jim Goad back in 2015 that I think holds up well today:

Robert Anton Wilson famously said, " It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea. " Whereas those who would now be defamed as TERFs were on the far bloody cutting edge of leftist politics a generation ago, they now find themselves outdated or, as the kids like to say, " irrelevant." Without having changed a single idea, they find themselves labeled not as bold freedom warriors fighting the good fight against oppression but as hateful reactionaries who stand in the way of true progress.

It is also interesting that since that piece was written, adolescent girls have overtaken boys as the leading transitioners to transgender status. Don't know how long this will last with the new popularity of the "non-binary" label, plus other labels that activists may devise.

The TERF wars cover more TERF now

Since the piece above was written, Trans activists have won a lot of territory, pushing feminism and most other types of grievance studies (except race) into the background at most universities. They have carried out a somewhat successful, though inane, war against J.K. Rowling, labeling her as a monstrous TERF.

And the smelly vagina issue has gone mainstream today! Yay for Critical Social Justice! The tweeter below is just reporting. Don't blame her. It's the featured article that has the real poop.

Encourage women to smell their poop to be more inclusive to Trans women

Some women have a hole where their penis used to be, and that hole often shares microbiome with the colon—creating a distinct transitioning odor.https://t.co/iuVqiYtaN0

— Patricia Dickson (@Patrici15767099) August 31, 2022

Excerpt:

But before we get to the cultural impact and science of unique genital scents, read on to learn about the sad story that sparked a poovolution in a Canadian public school.

"As I was transitioning, I found it triggering that my cisgender female friends didn't smell like poo," the top of the fateful note read. . .

I can hardly wait for them to start teaching little grade school kids about this as part of "affirmative care" for little boys who like long hair. Little kids like to talk about poo. It's a natural! Lesson plan: "Everyone remember smell your poo. That is what some of your trans friends will smell like someday! Isn't that exciting??"

Focus: Trans Vs. Lesbians

Some Alinsky tactics going on here. Transgenders tried to shame men into dating transgender women for a while. That effort will probably continue with sporadic media attention. Now they are focusing hard on lesbians, who are vilified as transphobic if they don't want to have sex with a "transwoman" who still has a penis. Lesbians are being singled out as the worst of the TERFS:

Sept. 4:

A sign from this weekend's Dresden Pride ...

This kind of sexually aggressive nonsense is precisely why so many gay men and lesbians now reject Pride. It no longer stands for them.

If you think gender ideologues are on "the right side of history", you haven't read much history.

Comment:

The officer for queer matters (Queerbeauftragter) of the German government, Sven Lehmann, praised the Dresden Pride as "peaceful and colourful".

Not a single word about this incident. He should have condemned it.

The Officer for Queer Matters . . . . Has Biden appointed a Queerbeauftragter yet?

Remember, all opponents of trans ideology are terrorists!

It's the weekend

Steven Hayward has posted The Week in Pictures: Martha's Vineyard Agonistes Edition.

The spectacle of the left's reaction to a mere 50 "migrants" turning up in Martha's Vineyard has to be the most satisfying since Nixon's Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972. Just when you think liberal hypocrisy and virtue signaling can't get any more obvious, two airplanes and a few buses show how easy it is to find more depths to it. I believe this is what some notable person called "winning," and I'm not tired of it yet. I think I'll do my part and send a relief package of Mike Lindell's pillows up to the beleaguered residents of MV.

Lots of good things there.

But Hayward missed a few:

Music

Some gender stereotyping here in America from West Side Story, 2021 version. Where are the pink and blue hair folks?

More gender stereotyping in Tonight, 2021 version. Vocal coach reacts. Are you a fan, too?

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, Thread Before the Gardening Thread, September 10

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 11:19 AM

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