Colin Wright Offers a Front Row Seat to a Seminar Featuring Gender Ideology

Colin Wright is a biologist who has followed transgender issues for years and who is not afraid to ask obvious questions. He recently attended an online workshop directed to parents, facilitated by two purported experts in transgender issues. The name of May 26, 2022 workshop was “Supporting Your Trans/Non-Binary Youth: A Starter Guide for Parents and Caregivers." Wright's article sets forth the content of the the seminar along with his criticisms and concerns. You can read Wright's entire article here: "EXPOSED: Gender Workshop for Parents Supporting Trans/Non-Binary Youth Gender “experts” say that children are the real experts." These were experts who could not even tell Colin the difference between a man and a woman or a boy and a girl.

Here is Wright's summary:

This workshop represents the standard introduction into transgender issues. It is not an outlier in terms of content and ideology. The only thing that makes this workshop somewhat unique is the fact that I was there asking the questions that your standard believer never does in order to force the presenters to grapple with fundamental issues with gender ideology.

Are gender identities based on stereotypes? How are “man” and “woman” defined? How can we expect children to understand concepts that people with masters degrees claim is beyond their capacity to understand? These questions should not be viewed as aggressive or out of bounds. These are fundamental questions that any gender “expert” should be able to easily answer, but they can’t. Yet they somehow remain so sure of the truth of what they believe that they’re willing to shuttle children down the path to irreversible hormone and surgical treatments to conform to identities they readily admit are “arbitrary words to describe experiences.”

Children are not the paragons of wisdom and self-knowing that gender “experts” claim they are. Children lack the life experience and perspective to make radical permanent decisions about extreme body modification. It is the duty of parents to apply their real life experience and perspective in order to ensure their children make it through childhood with healthy bodies and minds.

Gender ideology indoctrination does the exact opposite.

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Jordan Peterson: The Danger of Obsessing About Yourself

Jordan Peterson had a long and intense discussion with writer Helen Joyce about transgender ideology. It is a well-worth listening to the entire episode, including the discussions of social contagion, the reasons girls reject their own bodies, the disrespect shown to older women (by younger women) and the pervasive role of narcisism. Peterson, who has worked as a clinical psychologist, offers this advice for people who suffer from social anxiety. From my personal anecdotal experience, I think this is spot on and important to note:

Helen Joyce: And alongside that, that you must choose your identity off a list of dozens, and sometimes hundreds, that require the most intense, constant rumination and self-examination. I mean, I was talking to somebody just yesterday--who was telling me that who has this check sheet for how do I feel? ... But you were meant to be thinking all the time, like, how am I feeling right now? And it was, you know, on a scale of one to 10, how happy am I? This is all a terribly bad idea.

Jordan Peterson: Well, it's clearly bad. One of the things I learned when I was treating people who were socially anxious, I had a lot of anxious people in my, in my clinical practice, which is hardly surprising because that that's the kind of suffering that requires people to seek clinical intervention. Socially anxious people, when they go into a new social situation, think obsessively about how others are thinking about them. Yes. And so then they become self conscious often about bodily issues. But not only that, they might become self conscious about their lack of conversational ability, and the fact that they're not very interesting, and the fact that they're being evaluated by other people, it's a litany of obsessive thoughts. And you can, you might say, well, you can train people to stop thinking about themselves. But you can't stop people from thinking about something by telling them to stop thinking about something. But what you can train people to do is to think more about other people. And so one of the techniques that I used in my practice was okay, now, when you go into a social situation next time, like we'd go through the niceties of introducing yourself and making sure they knew your name, and get that ritualized, so that it was practiced and expert and therefore not a source of anxiety. But the next thing is, your job is to make the other person that you're talking to as comfortable as possible, to pay as much attention to them. And so we know that the more you think about yourself--this is literally true--there is no difference between thinking about yourself, and being miserable. They load on the same statistical axis. And so these kids that are constantly being tormented by 150 identities, that's a front not of freedom, but of utter chaos. And then asked to constantly reflect on their own state of emotional well being and happiness is the surest route to the kind of misery that's going to open them up to psychogenic epidemics. The clinical data on that are clear.

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Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer Discusses the Importance of Getting Along with Others

Retired Justice Stephen Breyer was interviewed on the October 6, 2022 episode of the "We the People" podcast, hosted by Jeffrey Rosen. Justice Breyer retired from the U.S. Supreme Court in June, 2022. The discussion included the following on the importance of being civil:

[Stephen Breyer]: We discuss these cases, the nine of us around a table. And after we hear the case, within a day or two, we are sitting at the table. ... And we each talk in turn, nobody speaks twice until everybody speaks once. Okay, that's very helpful. Then after everybody has finished saying what they want, which usually takes three or four minutes for each person, we then discuss it back and forth. ... And then we write, we write opinions. And we write our reasons. And that's what we do in our job. So when we're doing our job, we do our job. And then, when we go to lunch, we talk about the latest basketball game, or what we've read in some kind of mystery story or so we're perfectly good friends. No reason not to be. No reason not to be. You don't have to disagree personally with people who disagree with on their ideas about politics. ... What's important is, you can disagree, but don't do it in a disagreeable way. Listen to people, talk to them, find out what they're thinking. And the benefit of that is they're much more likely to come along and understand what you're thinking too. So that's what I really learned, I think in the Senate, and it has stood me in good stead throughout the rest of my career.

[Moderator]: One of our students says that, how is it possible that you on the court, were able to be such good friends with Justice Thomas, when you disagree.

[Stephen Breyer]: I sat next to him for 28 years, and . . . he has a great sense of humor. I think he's a very decent person. I think he's an honest person, I think. And he knew what these cases were about, I promise you. And so we were friends, and we are friends, people who think we shouldn't be friends, in my opinion, are just wrong. Because you can be friends with people you really disagree with politically or professionally or in some other way. It's not just the same. It's true. I remember ... we're all having lunch upstairs. And just before that, we'd been in a conference. And we'd split five, four on two different cases. And I said to Rehnquist, who was the Chief Justice, and I said, you know, it's amazing here, we are actually having a fairly good time talking to each other, it's perfectly pleasant, and so forth. And just half an hour ago . . . He said, "I know, half an hour ago, each half of the court thought the other half was totally out of its mind." That's what it is. People can get along personally, and they do. And . . . deciding cases, we don't have to agree. And very often, we don't. We try to agree.

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