Weekly Recap | Reality's Last Stand
Welcome to Realty’s Last Stand! This newsletter features weekly commentary on the previous week’s most important news regarding gender ideology and sex denialism.
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“What is a woman?”: Matt Walsh Exposes Gender Ideology
Last week on Dr. Phil, Matt Walsh exposed the absurdity of gender ideology to a massive audience. He did this by asking the simplest question that every gender ideologues should be able to answer—“What is a woman?”
Walsh correctly points out that if someone is claiming to identify as something, then it’s necessary requirement of basic logic to be able to describe what that thing is. For Walsh (and likely those reading this newsletter), the word “woman” has a clear and delineated meaning—an adult human female. We define adults as individuals who are over 18 years old; a human is a member of the species Homo sapiens; and a female is an individual with reproductive anatomy organized around the production of large gametes (i.e. ova). This is about as clear and concise as definitions get.
But gender ideologues, including those in this video, are completely unable to give a similarly clear and concise definition. In fact, they are not able to give a definition at all. Instead, they default to radical subjectivity. When Walsh asked the panelist Ethan if they could define “woman,” Ethan responds with, “No, I can’t, because it’s not for me to say. Womanhood looks different for everybody.”
Then Addison, the other panelist, steps up and claims that the word “woman” is an “umbrella term” that describes “people who identify as a woman.” It should go without saying that this definition contains zero informational content and doesn’t bring anyone any closer to understanding what a woman actually is. It’s as though I told you I identified as a “snarblatt,” and when you ask me to explain what a snarblatt is I simply responded “anyone who identifies as a snarblatt.” Are you any closer to understanding what a snarblatt is, or how to distinguish snarblatts from literally anything else? No.
This exchange went viral because it demonstrated to the masses how utterly absurd gender ideology is in a way that many who aren’t on Twitter (i.e. most people) have never seen before.
This could be a promising turning point in the public discourse on gender ideology.
New Genderbread Person
Many readers will be familiar with The Genderbread Person, an educational poster and website designed to teach children about gender identity, sex, sexuality, and expression. I’ve deconstructed its problems before with Joe Rogan and in my article “Sex Is Not a Spectrum.” But now there is a new version—version 4.0—that has updated its content, likely in response to activists complaining that previous versions contained problematic elements.
Here’s the latest version:
The main differences between this and previous versions is that the new version has removed the term “biological sex” completely, as activists now claim that the term is a “dogwhistle” or a slur.
“Biological sex” has now been split into two categories—“anatomical sex” and “sex assigned at birth.” According to the new poster, traits such as “body hair, chest, hips, shoulders, hormones” and even “chromosomes” and “voice pitch” are considered part of one’s anatomical sex.
I’ve written at length about how these traits are considered secondary sex characteristics, but they do not qualify as sexual anatomy. And, apart from being factually incorrect, this way of thinking relies on a regressive playground bully logic that would, for instance, tell a girl they’re “less of a girl” for having deeper voices, harrier bodies, and narrower hips than girls who fit the opposite description.
The new “sex assigned at birth” section is equally absurd, but for different reasons that I’ve discussed at length in my essay “Is Sex ‘Assigned’ at Birth?”, so I won’t cover that here.
In the “gender identity” section of the poster, we see what I and others who are critical of gender ideology have been saying for a long time—that their concept of “man” and “woman” is rooted in sex-related stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, respectively. The poster explicitly states that your degree of “man-ness” and “woman-ness” depends on your “personality traits, jobs, hobbies, likes, dislikes, roles, [and] expectations.”
They’re no longer hiding the fact that they view men and women as people who embrace or “identify with” the social roles, norms, and expectations associated with their sex. This is regressive in the extreme, and exactly what feminists have long been fighting against—the insistence that manhood and womanhood should be necessarily defined by rigid stereotypes.
The Secret Indoctrination of Children
Parents in Clay County, Florida, are suing a school for holding “secret meetings” with their daughter over her “gender identity confusion,” despite laws being in place that prohibit schools from withholding information about a child’s wellbeing. The parents claim they were only informed about these secret meetings after their daughter attempted suicide by hanging in one of the school’s bathrooms.
There is now a federal lawsuit being filed against Clay County in order to require schools to divulge important information regarding their children without the interference of government officials.
This isn’t the first time we’ve encountered these types of secret gender meetings. Last November, Abigail Shrier uncovered documents and audio files from the a California Teacher’s Association (CTA) conference that advised teachers on “best practices for subverting parents, conservative communities and school principals on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation.”
What is most concerning about all this is how gender ideology actively creates gender dysphoria in children who likely would not exhibit it otherwise. Take, for instance, the way The Genderbread Person website defines gender identity:
Given definitions like this, is it any wonder that children like the girl who attempted suicide in the above video are experiencing “gender confusion” or having a “gender crisis”?
Engineering a definition of gender identity more confusing and nonsensical than this would be nearly impossible task, yet activists are currently telling children not only that everyone has a gender identity, but that it is perhaps the most important thing anyone can know about themselves. They then layer this with warped pseudoscience about biological sex and stereotyped notions of what it means to be a “man” and “woman,” and conflate sex and gender identity wherever possible. The end result of this “education” for many children is a perfect psychological storm of mental illness and delusion.
And, to top it all off, this “gender confusion” is then used as the primary justification for administering puberty blockers to children, purportedly buying them time to work on solving Loki’s impossible gender identity riddle.
This is seriously grotesque stuff.
Gender Ideology in Genetics Class
The organization Parents Defending Education recently revealed that pseudoscientific gender ideology is being included in biology curricula as part of a unit on genetics at Needham High School in Massachusetts.
A student shared slides from their lesson and told Parents Defending Education that many students interpreted the material as “trying to show kids that wanting to change your sex is a feeling that is common throughout nature.”
The upper-left slide attempts to undermine the notion that there are only two sexes by claiming that this idea is the result of social conditioning, and that we should refrain from using “gendered terms” because doing so ensures that people with “diverse (a)sexualities, (a)genders, bodies, and (a)romantic orientations are included and respected.” Robbing people of the words required to describe reality accurately is an important first step in the indoctrination process.
The lower-left slide is material directly from The Genderbread Person website (I am NOT making this stuff up!), and includes pseudoscience relating to the biology of sex and gender identity.
The upper-right slide gives completely false information about the prevalence of intersex conditions, which I completely debunk here. The purpose of this slide is to begin blurring the categories of male and female in children’s minds in order to prime them to accept that sex is somewhat, or perhaps entirely, arbitrary.
The final lower-right slide is then used to draw a false equivalence between humans and other animal species that can change sex. The intended result of this series of slides is to instill confusion in children about their sex and identity, and to plant the seed in their mind that their sex is mutable and possibly even a matter of choice.
I would find this all hard to believe if I hadn’t seen this first-hand. It really is as crazy as it sounds.
If you have children in public school, you need to discover whether these or similar materials are being taught. And, if so, you need to expose them, protest, and remove your children from the school if possible.
PinkNews v. Giggle App
Sal Grover is the Founder & CEO of giggle, a female-only social network that allows women to connect with other women for private conversations, finding roommates, engaging in freelance work, finding friends, dating, and more. Grover’s giggle app uses facial recognition AI to ensure with high confidence that only females will be on the app. This means that males, no matter how they identify, will not be able to create profiles on giggle. You probably see where this is going…
Last week the infamous online LGBT “news” magazine PinkNews reached out to Grover claiming that trans women have been complained about not being able to create profiles on giggle. They asked Grover whether trans women were “encouraged to join the app,” and whether the “error” with the app (i.e. the app not allowing trans women to create profiles) will be fixed.
The email exchanges between Grover and the PinkNews “journalist” are a sight to behold, so I’ve included them below (read left to right) for your enjoyment.
After all this back-and-forth, PinkNews eventually ran the hit piece, claiming that the giggle app was “excluding trans women.” The keywords at the bottom of the PinkNews article are “Giggle” and “transphobia.”
U-Penn’s Transgender Swimmer Lia Thomas Is Making Waves
Lia Thomas, a male athlete at the University of Pennsylvania who identifies as a woman, has been making headlines lately after shattering numerous swimming records. In one race, she bested the 2nd place female swimmer by an eye-popping 38 seconds. While many women athletes are staying silent out of fear of being accused of transphobia, some people are starting to speak up.
One of those people is Rice swim coach Seth Huston, who recently spoke openly about the issue with Lia Thomas being allowed to compete in the women’s division. Huston said that he respected Lia Thomas and her having “the opportunity to compete,” but hints that special accommodations need to be met, such as having a “third division” for transgender athletes.
But the issues with Lia Thomas extends beyond the swimming pool, because extreme reality denial will continually clash with that reality. Recently one of Lia Thomas’ teammates reported to the Daily Mail that her and other women feel “uncomfortable in [their] own locker room” because of Lia’s male body parts combined with the fact that Lia is attracted to women.
The swimmers claim that they have raised their concerns multiple times, but were told that they “could not ostracize Lia by not having her in the locker room and that there's nothing we can do about it, that we basically have to roll over and accept it, or we cannot use our own locker room.” The team members also claim that Lia “doesn't seem to care how it makes anyone else feel.”
Needless to say, this is all completely insane. No women should be forced to compete against male athletes or undress in their proximity.
Jordan Peterson on the Overlap of Masculinity and Femininity Between Males and Females
Last week, psychologist Jordan Peterson appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and made a point that I also frequently make about the overlap between men and women regarding degrees of masculinity and femininity. It is a nice dose of sanity.
I’ve transcribed the video below:
The most reliable difference that psychologists have ever found between men and women—the biggest difference—is interest. So, women are reliably more interested in people, and men are reliably more interested in things. Now there’s still overlap, it’s one standard deviation, which is a big difference, but that isn’t to say “no women are interested in things,” because some are, or that “no men are interested in people,” because some are. Like, I’m a man who’s more interested in people than things—that’s why I’m a psychologist. I actually have a relatively feminine personality structure because I’m pretty high in negative emotion and I’m pretty high in agreeableness. And that’s the typical feminine structure.
And that’s an interesting discussion to have too, because we have this idea in our culture that you can be a woman born in a man’s body, and that’s not true. But you can definitely be a man with a feminine personality structure. Like 10 percent of men are as feminine in their personality as the average woman is, and vice versa. Ten percent of women are as masculine in their personality structure as the average man is. Now you can move those boundaries around and say that it’s 5 percent and 40 or something, but it doesn’t matter.
The point is there’s plenty of men who are as feminine in their personality as the average woman. That doesn’t mean they’re in the wrong body, it just means that men and women are more alike than different, even though they are different, and that there’s a huge range within both genders. We need to know this.
Transgender Woman Corinna Cohn Defends Women’s Sports
Last week Corinna Cohn, a transexual women, gave testimony in support of Bill HB1041, which aims to strengthen the rights for girls and young women competing in sports. I have had the pleasure to interact with Corinna briefly on the Clubhouse app, and I am so happy to see and hear her lending her voice to this cause.
It can’t be easy to have dysphoria and feel the need to draw attention to the very facts of her biology that produce it in order to help keep the rest of us sane, and her testimony is about as sane as it gets.
I’ve transcribed a short section of it below, but please watch and listen to the whole three-and-a-half minute video above.
I am here to speak in support of HB 1041, which aims to strengthen the rights for girls and young women competing in sport. My testimony today is based on my personal opinion as a transexual; that is, a person who was born male and used pharmaceuticals and plastic surgery to feminize my body so that I appear to be a woman. Despite having this procedure, my sex is male, and neither science nor medicine can change that.
I began this process as a teenager, and although my testosterone levels have been in the female range for nearly 30 years, male puberty has endowed me with physical advantages such as height, bone structure, and increased lung capacity. For example, I stand at 5-foot 10-inches, which puts me in the 99th percentile for women’s height. I am just an inch shorter than the female athletes who play in the WNBA. The average male height is five inches taller than the average female’s.
Banning males from participating in women’s and girl’s sports would be justified on this basis alone. Everyone can use their own eyes to observe how these advantages play out in the real world.
For UnHerd, scientist and trans woman Debbie Hayton wrote a piece about a recent meeting of the Council of Europe last Tuesday, where they gathered to condemn “the extensive and often virulent attacks on the rights of LGBTI people.” The list contained many countries you might expect, such as Russia, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, etc. But the list also included the United Kingdom.
Hayton thinks it is absurd to include the UK on this list, which has some of the strongest protections for individual—including LGBT—rights in the world. Furthermore, the Council conspicuously failed to mention “sex” as a protected category in their statement, choosing instead to include “sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or sex characteristics.” But “sex characteristics” are not the same as one’s biological sex, i.e. whether someone is male or female.
Let’s be clear: the LGBTI community is made up of people whose human rights deserve to be protected. But other groups also have human rights, and sometimes rights need to be balanced. When vulnerable women need single-sex provision, they must not be expected to share with members of the opposite sex, however we might identify.
For The Critic, gay men Rob Jessel and Hassan Mamdani wrote an article opposing the recent ban on conversion therapy in the UK. While they are both in support of the original laws that banned conversion therapy for sexual orientation, they claim that the recent inclusion of “gender identity” is a bridge too far that actively harms gays and lesbians.
Jessel and Hassan point out that “gender identity is nebulous and lacks any stable definition that is not either self-referential or predicated on regressive stereotypes,” and that it is “totally disconnected from one’s physical sex.” In short, they are concerned that including gender identity in the conversion therapy ban will prevent gender confused children—many of whom will turn out to be gay—from finding comfort in their own bodies and who may instead pursue a path of surgery and life-long medicalization.
If you genuinely abhor conversion therapy, take a minute to reflect on the concerns of GIDS whistleblowers who said that the pressure by parents and trans charities to medicate physically healthy, likely homosexual young people “felt like gay conversion therapy”. Or consider the dark joke circulating around the clinic, that soon “there would be no gay people left”.
For Quillette, J Peters wrote a powerful piece going over the DSM-5 guidelines and its diagnostic criteria for diagnosing gender dysphoria. She explains how she, as well as many other lesbians, would likely be classified as transgender had they been children today—“If there was ever a case for a trans child, I was it.”
The diagnostic criteria for “gender dysphoria,” the diagnosis that determines whether you are considered “transgender,” include things like:
A strong desire to be of the other gender or insistence that one is the other gender.
A strong preference for wearing clothes typical of the opposite gender.
A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play.
A strong preference for the toys, games, or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender.
And more…
Peters explains how she fit nearly all of these criteria for gender dysphoria as a child.
I was saved by the grace of discovering this phenomenon too late. By then, I was 20 years old, and had already found ways to cope with my so-called gender dysphoria that didn’t involve turning myself into a lifelong pharmaceutical patient, or subjecting my already fragile body to more and more unnecessary surgeries.
The Glenlivet Caribbean Reserve
Last weekend I tried a new Scotch—The Glenlivet Caribbean Reserve. During the holidays my dad bought a whisk(e)y advent calendar, and this was included. We didn’t end up drinking the whisk(e)ys on the appropriate days, so I decided to open this one up and use it for this week’s review!
This is a relatively cheap Scotch, hovering at just under $30 USD.
Nose
There is not a lot that immediately jumps out from the glass. However, when I really dig my nose in the glass, I begin to pick up notes of honey, apricot, and something akin to a pancake breakfast. These notes did take some effort to detect, however, and I did not pick up any of the expected Caribbean rum I was hoping for.
Taste
Again, this is not a very complex Scotch, and myriad flavors are not swirling around my mouth apart from the standard Scotch profile. With effort I am able to pick up notes of honey, apples, and a floral note somewhat like a rosewater. Watery mouthfeel.
Overall
This was extremely unoffensive, but nothing special. If this is all that’s available, I would happily enjoy a neat pour, but this is not something I would recommend except perhaps as an introductory bottle for Scotch novices.
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