Amy Welborn

I’m about to hit the road air, so let’s clear out the Gender Files. My general take? The tide is gradually, minutely turning. Whatever the pace, it’s certainly not moving in the direction of Greater Acceptance of the Most Marginalized Group in Human History. It’s sort of…hovering…with things getting so insane that the normies are going…wait up….really? That’s what’s this is about?

So my task tonight – as I should be packing – is to share a few links with you, since you, being sane, are probably not scanning the interwebs for material related to this issue. I’m giving this all over to you so – as I’ve said many times before – you can see that there is a great deal of conversation about this issue happening, it’s not all “right side of history,” and the questions and objections being raised are coming from all different perspectives, and if you dare to question it, no, you are not engaging in some violation of Christian hospitality or whatever the latest gaslighting tactic is.

Ritual reminders for those new here:

Many of my other posts on this subject are here. It’s not been updated in a couple of months. I’ll get on that soon.Well, I said that last week. Sorry.

If you would like to keep up with this issue, here are some of my favorite follows. There are tons of other resources and sources of information out there, but you can find most of them via these links.

My own gender-critical follow list on Twitter

Kara Dansky – this is the only Substack I actually pay for.

Graham Linehan and his contributors.

The Ovarit discussion board

The Mumsnet sex & gender board

Reminder: many, if not most – well, if not all – of these individuals and entities have opinions on other issues that I don’t share. I’d add that my approach to this particular issue is different than theirs as well, and not just in the spiritual dimension. For example, it’s blindingly obvious to me that when a global culture spends decades redefining personhood, and tells people that a being is a human being only when individuals with power over said being declare it so – well, then, there’s your nominalism at the heart of it all. I also think it’s hard to deny the role of contraceptive culture in this, as I have written here. When sexuality is divorced from procreation, sexuality tends to performativity.

That said, I have no hesitation in learning from and if the chance comes, joining forces with those with different views on these other issues to fight this horrendous, destructive, misogynist movement.

So let’s get to it

The Deconstruction of women:

When a convicted double rapist is treated with more understanding and sympathy by our system than the women voicing concerns about male violence, something has gone badly wrong. The trans lobbyists seem to have won this round: they have joined in with our old enemies, the pimps and the pornographers, to split women apart into usable chunks in order to appease a tiny population of men who want to be women but who don’t have the biology. They have refused us the right to our language and our perception of ourselves, and they have influenced powerful men (and some women) who have forgotten that women and girls are human beings, let alone human beings who deserve rights. 

Journalism is failing women:

Sometimes this claim of womanhood is so preposterous, generating such negative backlash, that it is withdrawn. The Scottish Prison Service was perfectly willing to incarcerate double rapist Isla Bryson in the female prison estate, but the public’s reaction was so intense and negative that Nicola Surgeon had to declare in parliament that the decision had been reversed.

 Most times, it happens a lot more insidiously. A female pronoun to describe a rapist or a paedophile, with no photo of the offender in the news, is all that it takes to present these most male of crimes as having been committed by a woman. To challenge this narrative means to enter a Kafkaesque nightmare, as I experienced for myself.

Soul Dysphoria

If we become fully free from the constraints of physical form, if we even develop the technology to “feel” whatever we want, then we really will become nothing more than the chemistry sets that the crudest materialists imagine us to be: joy will be an electro-chemical occurrence, unrelated to any objective excellence or achievement. In our effort to liberate our spirits from our bodies, we will make our spirits and our very consciousness into the mere mechanical illusion that machinists already imagine it to be. Dissolve the boundaries of your body and you dissolve the boundaries of yourself. If you feel an instinctive disgust at this dystopian futuristic prospect, it is because you have a felt intuition of what we really are.

We can have compassion for gender dysphoric people without making them the central ideal of all our aspirations. Without a trace of malice toward them, we may observe that the measures they take to transform their bodies are not steps in a direction we find particularly attractive or healthy. Treating the body like an endlessly permeable and cumbersome appendage is just as degrading as ignoring it in favor of constant online entertainment, and for the same reasons. Both are means of seeking escape from our physical forms, and both promise liberation while actually leaving us sick, remorseful, and listless. We have indulged for too long in the vague fantasy that if these kinds of life are pushed to the extreme, they will suddenly become fulfilling—that if we just proceed down this path that is currently making us sick and miserable, we will eventually be happy and free. This, as always, is a dubious proposition.

Every Gender Identity Is ‘Authentic’—Until It Isn’t

The question brings us to one of the odder aspects of what some call “gender ideology”—the system of beliefs that casts gender identity as a soul-like spirit marker lodged within every one of us, completely independent of biological markers of sex, and utterly unknowable to the world except through acts of self-identification.

The ideology asserts that individuals are capable of unerringly determining their authentic gender identity; and that it is incumbent on everyone else in society to treat them accordingly. But since these acts of self-identification are based on subjective feelings with no associated set of measurable traits or behaviors, the new identities end up being not only ill-defined (especially when it comes to the “non-binary” label) but unstable. Since the only criterion for gender identity is simply, “I am who I say I am,” the associated claims are treated as completely unfalsifiable, no matter how many different “authentic” forms are presented in succession. Even if one concedes that such individuals are acting entirely in good faith, there’s no guarantee that today’s “authentic” self won’t be denounced as tomorrow’s self-deceiving lie.

 

Finally, let’s talk Dylan Mulvaney. Hopefully, most of you remain in ignorance of this person – the repulsive _____ days of girlhood dude? He would not be worth discussing except that he has millions of social media followers, and is somehow making a name for himself as a male transitioning into a female, based on the ideas that: