Andrew Sullivan Pulls Aside the Curtain to Expose the “Transqueer” Movement

Andrew Sullivan, a gay man who was a courageous leader of the movement to legalize gay marriage, has written a thoughtful article about the "transqueer" movement. Here's an excerpt:

"The truth is: we have come a long way in understanding and respecting the unique human experience of being transgender. In the US, trans people are protected by the gold standard of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They are everywhere in our popular culture. An entire generation has even been told that being trans is the most glamorous thing you could possibly be. But none of this is sufficient for the transqueers. What they want is an abolition of biological sex for everyone; the end of men and of women as separate categories; the sex reassignment of children on demand; the destruction of the nuclear family; an end to the Hippocratic Oath; the abolition of homosexuality; the presence of male bodies in women’s showers, prisons and shelter; the creation of fantastical post-everything genders and pronouns; and the criminalization of anyone who would ever question this cultural revolution.

They are not winning, but it is not for lack of trying. The pseudoscience behind child transition is beginning to be exposed and puberty blockers are now banned in the UK outside clinical trials. A new lawsuit is being filed against the NCAA for destroying women’s sports. Public opinion has responded to the transqueer ideology by moving in the opposite direction, and now gay people are being caught in the queer crossfire."

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The Lies that Destroy Institutions

Do you ever wonder what is keeping you from saying the simple, good-hearted and obvious statement: "All Lives Matter"? It's the modern version of woke totalitarianism. Through the use of lies and cancel culture, it is destroying most of America's institutions.

Michael Shellenberger, author of "Totalitarian Manipulation Of Language Behind Woke Destruction Of Harvard, New York Times, And Other Elite Institutions. It's time for counter-Wokeism."

Investigative reporters have exposed a pattern of plagiarism by Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, that directly violates the university’s policy. . . .

The first salient feature of the above episodes is the willingness of institutional leaders to lie about what they are doing. The first response from Harvard’s Board of Directors was to deny that President Gay had committed any instance plagiarism and to threaten the New York Post with a lawsuit if it reported the opposite of that. The New York Times similarly lied about the op-ed piece it had published and effectively asked the oped page editor to lie about his departure. And similarly, the AAA falsely claimed that the anthropologists who wanted to discuss biological sex on a conference panel had not accurately represented their topic.

In each case, the institutional leaders lied in order to cover up unethical behavior. Harvard was covering up both the plagiarism of its president and the unwillingness of Harvard to do anything about it. The New York Times misrepresented the substance of the op-ed in order to disavow it and, perhaps, to justify forcing out the op-ed page editor. And the AAA lied about what the dissident anthropologists did in order to justify its blatant censorship.

And those lies and unethical behaviors all rest upon a set of underlying lies. Harvard lied when it claimed that it had selected its president on the basis of her qualifications, even calling Gay a “scholar’s scholar” despite her having a below-average scholarly record. The New York Times and the Harvard president, when she was still the Dean of Arts and Sciences, had been misrepresenting Black Lives Matter protests as peaceful and driven by a genuine epidemic of police killings. And AAA’s cancelation of the panel was based on the organization’s claim that biological sex is a spectrum rather than dimorphic. All of this lying is characteristic of totalitarian regimes...

Woke totalitarianism advances values that are contrary to the ones it espouses. It claims to be opposed to racism and sexism and yet promotes them through perpetuating the idea that people, by dint of their race or sex, are either victims or oppressors. It claims to be liberatory and empowering of those individuals designated victims while promoting the idea that they cannot escape their victim identity. And Woke totalitarianism promotes the notion that it is wise and truthful despite promoting such monstrous lies."

What is the solution? It's not going to be pleasant or easy, but we need to confront those who are tearing down our institution with their corrupted language.

Once we understand Woke activists and leaders in elite institutions as being in the grip of an anti-social and dehumanizing dogma which uses dishonest esoteric language to manipulate emotions and people, we can know to take them seriously, but not literally. At an interpersonal level, the best way to deal with narcissists is to ignore them, thereby depriving them of the attention they seek; at an institutional level, they must be confronted in a public way.

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Sasha Stone: How to Remake America

On a recent podcast, Sasha Stone condemned the Biden administration, offering some words of support for Donald Trump. Unlike Stone, I would never consider voting for Trump. Nor can I in good conscience vote for Biden, as I did three years ago. That said, I very much agree with Stone about the many ways the United States has gone off the rails during the Biden years. An excerpt:

Four words on a red hat. Make America Great Again.

Make America able to take a joke again.

Make America understand basic biology again.

Make America the land of the free and home of the brave again.

Make it okay to be white, a Christian, a male, a Jew, a woman, a mother and American again.

Make Thomas Jefferson a hero again.

Make movies watchable again.

Make America a country where we can still say what we think without fear of banishment, public humiliation or the loss of our jobs.

Make America tolerant again.

Make reality cool again, make it okay to reward merit.

Make it okay to be friends with people you don't agree with.

Lots of the hysteria is happening on both sides. It has to do with algorithms and their effects on our brains and our perception of reality.

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Anthropologists in Denial about Biological Sex

At Public we learn that many anthropologists consider it impolite to acknowledge that there are two sexes. An excerpt:

In the field of anthropology, it’s difficult to avoid talking about sex. For physical anthropologists, much of the field’s focus is on skeletal remains where body size, bone mineral density, and other sex differences are of utmost importance. For forensic anthropologists, determining the sex of remains is a crucial element of identifying crime victims. Archaeologists, too, glean valuable insights into social structures by studying "grave goods" interred alongside individuals of each sex.

Thus, the distinction between males and females is crucial in the study of human beings and their cultures. So when a group of anthropologists organized a panel titled, ‘Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology,’ for the 2023 American Anthropological Association (AAA)/Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) conference, the only reasonable question that should arise is why this seemingly evident truth even needs stating at all.

However, we are not living in reasonable times. Despite having their panel approved by both the AAA and CASCA in July, a little over a month before the event, the panelists received notice that their session had been removed from the conference program. The rationale behind this decision was that the ideas to be discussed would "cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large." What’s more, the AAA explained that the decision to cancel the session about one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence was reached in the spirit of respect for the values of the AAA, the “safety and dignity of its members, and the scientific integrity” of the program.

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