He-she-me-we-us-it…welcome to the gender menagerie!
My maternal family is of…dare I suggest it?...white northern European derivation. Specifically, hailing for the most part from transplanted French Huguenot-cum-Austrian protestant roots. If you are even modestly familiar with the heretofore predominantly white Anglo-Saxon culture that formerly characterised the first 200 years of American history, you probably know that the French Huguenots were protestant victims of virulent Roman catholic bigotry and persecution, back in the yay-whon era of Europe’s post-1500 (ACE) days, who were successively chased from many refuge states by the Imperial bias of the Holy Roman Empire’s vestigial rump culture.
In our case, 'we' ended up in the Southwest lower corner of the Habsburg Empire (Greater Austria, below Austria’s Kärnten and Steirmark regions), where they acculturated themselves in an ancient monarchical land known for more than a thousand years as ‘Carniola’ (more strictly, the Herzogtum Krain in German, which since the end of WW1 has been dissolved and absorbed into what is today modern Slovenia). There they ‘Germanised’ themselves, adopting the surname ‘Windisch’, after a fortuous amorous tryst evolved into a formal marriage into a very eminent Austrian-German family. ‘Windisch’ originated as a name associated with the East Frankish March of Carniola (in 1364), as it was identified in earlier epochs and those bearing the surname therefore have a rather illustrious heritage and history. But this is all explanatory ‘backstory’ to preface the subject of my intended topic, covered here: the modern youthful ‘craze’ of transgendering.
In the past decade, the percentage of those under 30 that have ‘come out’ as transgenders has increased by an order of magnitude, as the present wave of politically correct racial/ethnic/gender-identification sentiment continues to have a profound effect on our younger citizens’ sexual orientation.
For me, someone who was born in the immediate post-WW2 era into a conventionally ‘straight’ home, with conventionally ‘straight’ parents who believed in a Supreme Being and regularly attended (a Christian) church, this whole phenomenon has been a source of both bemusement and interest. Back when I was a child, such things as ‘gays’ (homosexuals and lesbians) existed as a somewhat peripheral aberration that I was only very vaguely aware of. When we did regard such strange anomalies (as gays), it was usually in a profoundly derogatory context. To accuse someone of being ‘a queer’ was the ultimate playground insult, even though almost none of us actually knew what that term really encompassed in terms of both its application and implications as an invective slur.
I well recall, however, that we had several such individuals whose behavioral affect clearly advertised the fact that they were at least somewhat effeminate in their public persona. This glimmer of awareness was most probably fostered by Hollywood media (movies, films, etc.) of times prior to about 1970 in which homosexual stereotypes were grotesquely blatant and exaggerated to an extreme. Certain gestures, body language and modes of speech, infliction and tonal dynamics as such were quite well established in the 40s and early 50s, as a result, thanks to the depiction of homosexuals as disreputable, amoral anomalies of American culture.
While we didn’t make an obvious point about regarding ‘Homos’ as aberrant deviates up front, or in their direct presence (since we were still pretty much confused about what ‘that’ all meant or was about, to a large extent), there were plenty of surreptitious references made in private conversations and behind their backs.
One of these individuals I well recall from high school days. He was a biological male, but extremely effeminate in his overt mannerisms, body language and speech. So much so, that he took up baton-twirling (at that time practically the exclusively franchised domain of girls, both little and big) at a very early age (it’s uncertain how much his parents had to do with that, if anything) and by the time he was entering in into his freshman year in high school, he was already recognised across the entire state for his twirling adeptness. By our reckoning, female baton-twirlers were sex-objects, to be oogled, gawked at and serve as pre-pubescent incentives for what would follow in our (supposed adult) lives.
We (and by ‘we’, I mean all my straight but savage little buddies and I) regarded our male baton-twirler (understandably, given the excessive ‘macho male’ spirit that predominated among the male role-models of most boys of my age) with the same mix of disdain, scorn and puzzled curiosity that a freak in the local two-bit circus, recently come to town, would incite in a side-show viewing crowd.
Trevor (not his name), the cause of our gender-confusion, continued to be the star of our high school marching band and over several years took top honors for his twirling-expertise at a number of musical competitions across California. As things naturally develop, once we all graduated from high school, we all went our separate ways and I for my part naturally lost track of Trevor, no longer concerned with him or much else from the old school.
Only a number of years later did I learn that he had prematurely ‘passed away’, although the obituary was far more than usually somewhat ‘obscure’ about what the cause of his death had been. Those of us who had any interest in old school buddies at all, soon learned that he had succumbed to AIDS, which for a few of us seemed to confirm what pretty much everyone had long suspected: that Trevor the male baton-twirler had been ‘queer’.
I think at about the time I came to hear of this, I was working in cardiovascular medicine at Highland General Hospital, the major Alameda County hospital and medical trauma center located in the San Francisco Bay’s ‘East Bay’. We were in 1983 experiencing a wave of extremely strange and very scary afflictions, among many of certain parts of our patient population, that were originally thought of as an exclusively ‘gay disease’. AIDS and the Human Immunovirus strain seemed to daily be killing disproportionate numbers of individuals clearly identified (or self-identifying) as homosexuals and at that early stage of developments, it was viewed as nearly unstoppable and in danger of becoming epidemic.
My concerns in this area were especially acute, since my laboratory patients often had to undergo pulmonary function studies (given their AIDS-compromised pulmonary status) and we had absolutely no idea whether the sterilization and disinfection procedures we used to clean these machines after patient use were effective or not!
Furthermore, I had responsibility for taking serial arterial blood specimens from these patients for lab diagnostic analysis and as it had been reasonably well established that the AIDS infection could be transmitted through inadvertent cutaneous contact with blood specimens, despite standard double-gloving and other hygienic precautions, there was always the possibility of an accidental ‘dirty needle stick’ or contamination through inadvertent contact with a blood smear.
Needless to say, with so much totally unknown about AIDS and HIV, all of us were dogged by uncertainties about our personal safety around these patients. If it helps, compared that situation to that endured by healthcare workers in the very first months of the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic. About all that was known by the threat at that time was that nearly everything about it was unknown!
But I digress. ‘Trevor’ had apparently demised due to ‘gay’ coital associations. It was no real surprise, despite the suspicions that we had all had had about male ‘baton-twirlers’. There were a couple of other kids at our high school whose behavior had cast suspicion on them, three of them on our schools’ competitive swim-team, but again, lacking any real ‘in flagrante delicto’ evidence of their suspected gayness, they merely remained suspect (again due to what we considered excessive ‘femininess’).
That was really all the awareness we had of anything having to do with ‘gayness’, back then. Even then, such a thing as ‘adolescent gayness’ was almost unknown, or the act of so-called ‘coming out of the closet’ as a kid to declare homosexuality.
You need to note that this was in a small town of between 3000 to 6000 people, in the San Joaquin County…an agricultural community perhaps most famous to the rest of the United States for its involvement as a site that figured prominently in John Steinbeck’s seminal ‘Grapes of Wrath’ and certainly not for any cosmopolitan aspects of its cultural flavor.
A great many years later, after relocating to the East San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley/Oakland) my personal awareness of what is now commonly called ‘the gay community’ expanded considerably. Starting with my interest in the so-called ‘Beat’ generation’s western terminus (San Francisco’s North Beach area) and the fact that some of the prominent Beats were declared homosexuals (such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and a number of other poets and artists that circulated in the demi-monde) and expanding to that of the Berkeley neighborhoods wherein I lived, worked & studied (at UC Berkeley). Since San Francisco’s sex-clubs and bars encouraged those who were already inclined to be favorable to sexuality of all kinds, San Francisco had always been a sort of haven for homosexuals. Of course, back then, homosexuality was still socially unacceptable and those who were ‘gay’ expressed their gayness openly largely at their peril. It was still very much the age of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Love that dared not speak its name’, to a large degree.
In recent decades, all this has changed so radically that a great number of younger individuals cannot even imagine such a time when they couldn’t openly declare their sexual preference, let alone flaunt them openly with the full support and permission of a society that now bends over backwards to embraced them in a spirit of total inclusion. But this all relates to what was formerly a fairly narrow stratum of human sexual expression, a thin layer of society in which individuals were either ‘male homosexuals’ or ‘female lesbians’. Gender uncertainties, such as they even existed back then in the fairly recent past, were characterised largely by a form of gender dysphoria that is fairly well detailed in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders), for that was what sexual (or more properly, gender) dysphoria was considered: a well-defined type of aberrant mental disorientation. Think, “sick puppies”, per the psychiatry boffins who put the DSM together. Of course, that entire conceptual viewpoint of the psychiatric profession has now become furiously rejected by the liberal progressive left these days, who would like to pretend that ‘natural biological pairings’ aren’t at all the norm (at least not among humming beans, although there are still no examples of ‘gay’ animals below the primate orders to be found anywhere in nature). Gender dysphoria thus seems to be the exclusive provenance of us ‘higher orders’ of animal equipped, ostensibly, with the ability to reason sentiently (and what a what a joke THAT seems to be, these days, by the way).
As for me personally, I’ve never had any particular disregard for anyone’s sexual or gender preferences, figuring that the living of one’s life is strictly a private matter and the prerogative of each individual person to live as he/she/it sees fit. I was that way back in school and have been that way all my life, seemingly. Gay or straight has always made no difference to me in terms of how I interact with others I come into daily intercourse with (no humor intended, here). And so I have been throughout my life…until very recently. But let me, as Lucille Ball’s hubby ‘Desi Arnaz’ would put it in his ubiquitously cubano manner, esplain.
The fairly recent ‘revolution’ in the status of gays (of all types, from L through Q) has now grown from a mere ‘coming out’ phase to a full-blown ‘we will bloody well forcefully cram our operative philosophy, ideology and ‘Raison d'être’ down your throat every chance we get, whether you like it (or need it) or not.’
Case in point: today’s leftist progressive liberal media seems so hell-bent on rubbing our noses in gayness and LGBTQ+ pride that, frankly, a great many of us otherwise empathetic people are starting to become quite antipathetic towards the subject. And this is ironic, since I have never had any need whatsoever of being ‘reeducated’ by the ‘social media and commercial enablers’ of LGBTQ+ propaganda to accept what was formerly called ‘deviant’ sexual orientations.
All about us we daily encounter the gay/LBGTQ+ theme in commercially sponsored media, as well as Hollywood ‘entertainment’ media. The trend is so painfully obvious as to be about as deliberate as the LBGTQ+ agendas that all that indoctrination is stemming from!
I say all this, not as a God-fearing Christian evangelical (since I’ve been a lifelong atheist, from puberty onwards), but as a rather rational, well-eddicated and egalitarian individual who bears no incipient ill-will towards any group of people, regardless of their lifestyle choices. But I most definitely DO when I am summarily tossed into the lumpen proletariat hoi poloi by some intellectuals who think that all others, saving their own sainted, august souls, are hopelessly discriminatory, biased and prejudicially disposed against sexual preferences other than straight male/female pairings! In other words, my own intellect is highly insulted by this sort of morally cavalier and insensitive treatment and I find that I am becoming increasingly indignant over it.
But let me take a moment here and tell you about two specific instances involving sex and gender preferences that have affected me personally. The first involves a cousin of mine (a first-cousin, for that matter), who although now in her 80s and living with a same-sex partner, first ‘came-out’ (through living example, rather than a declaration, of intent, as such). That would be my cousin Susannah, who has the same rather conservative familial heritage I share (although her family was Presbyterian…not quite a full ‘Scots Presbyterian’ heritage, severe that it could be). As a girl she was quite a Tomboy by seeming nature, despite sharing a love of horses (as many young girls so) that found expression in her competing in western rodeos at county fairs (in such events as women’s barrel-riding and calf roping). Moderately attractive, with brunette hair and classic features, she gave no real indication of having any but ‘normal’ boy-girl affinities until after her unhappy marriage to a doctor and the start of a family (that soon included two girls).
Whether there was a significant dysphoric component in this relationship with her husband or not is unclear, but what is known is that not long after having had her second child, she divorced her husband (on grounds of incompatibility). After the divorce, she went through quite a bout with acute alcoholism, although after many years, she did manage to shake that phase off and swore off drink from then on (successfully). Well and good, of course. Divorces happen all the time (and so does alcoholism), but in her case, one of her two daughters also later ended up with a female life-companion. The daughter was quite active on her school’s swim-team and exhibited, coincidentally, many of the same ‘Tomboy’ characteristics her mother had evinced. She is today ‘marrying’ her companion, who is a good-looking blonde young woman (not that looks has anything whatsoever to do with this).
When I first learned of my cousin’s divergent path of life, you could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather, since her family has heretofore been about as morally ‘straight’ as any can be!
The ‘other’ rather unsettling experience along these lines I have had involved a neighbor’s young daughter who was living right next to my girlfriend’s house, back in the early 80s, when I was resident in the East Bay Area (we were going together…she a resident at Highland General Hospital and I the Cardiopulmonary Program Coordinator at that facility).
Since my GF and I were an Asian-American/white guy pair, the couple next door happened to be, by coincidence, also an Asian/Occidental pair and their small daughter of about 8-9 years was one of the cutest and brightest little tykes I have ever known. Since her daddy was Jewish (and mommy quite bright, as well), she had inherited a pretty potent genetic mix of attributes and both my GF and I immediately took to her winsome nature and ways.
My GF in particular would occasionally take her up to the Berkeley Hills to fly kites with her little white girlfriend (with the rather unusual name ‘Barley’) and watching the two of them together filled me with a strong sense of paternal wistfulness. They were exactly what I hoped my own future wife (for so I had intended, in this instance) and my own daughter would be like! Sadly, as I have related several times in other written recollections, this personal ambition was not to be, but for at least a year or more we both vicariously ‘shared’ our little neighbor girl, taking anticipatory delight in her obvious promise of growing into a very bright and formidable young woman.
I suppose this is as good a time as any to resurrect that hoary old admonishment “Be careful what you wish for!”, since what evolved from that day to the present leads directly to the inspiration for writing this piece: the contemporary ‘transgender’ craze among young women. And how, you ask, does this relate to that? Stay tuned and I shall elucidate.
This wonderful young girl, who had inherited her Asian mother’s and her father Ashkenazi Jewish genes, did grow up, but not in any manner I had expected or anticipated.
In 1983, my GF having betrayed our mutual trust by ditching me for a law student at UC Berkeley, I departed on a sort of French Foreign Legion caliber quest for the healing balm of forgetfulness abroad (to Saudi Arabia…truly a sort of desert ‘Lost Legion’ destination, as I saw it at the time), leaving my GF and our cross-cultural neighbors and former GF behind to assume a position as a medical contractee for the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation in Taif. I much later learned that our neighbors had also sold their home and departed for an inland California location, with their daughter.
It wasn’t until about 14 years later that, upon returning to California, after having lived a full and rich life abroad as an expatriate American, that I learned more about both my neighbors and their frightfully charming young daughter.
‘Savannah’ (not her real name) had grown up and her father’s ETOH affliction had also levered his marriage apart so that both he and his wife were now separated and living in different residences.
I reestablished contact with Savannah’s mother, after a while, and was absolutely shocked beyond imagining to learn that cute little Savannah had decided that she was a lesbian, having ‘come out’ in school prior to going off to college. Knowing what chronic alcoholism can do not just to marital partners, but to their children’s perceptions of ‘normal life’ as well, it certainly shouldn’t have surprised me to hear of this set of dysfunctional events (even if it was still ‘shocking’) that Savannah bore the unhappy brunt of.
Savannah, by all accounts, and a highly creative, sensitive soul, had apparently suffered greatly from the effects of her parents’ breakup and as such, she had clearly gone through some major emotional trauma as she grew to maturity. Of course, this was back in the late 80s and early 90s, when there was no formal or organised LBGTQ+ ‘movement’ within which to seek some respite from all the turmoil and emotional angst that she must have suffered. And, more importantly, it had led her to making decisions concerning her personal sexuality that were more of an effort to make sense out of the ‘insensible’ than a response to any sort of psychiatric, lifestyle ‘coaching’ or attitudinal prompting that might have been (but were not) available to her.
Properly aghast when I learned of all this, well after the fact, I chalked it all up to the vagaries of life and got beyond it. Savannah, to her immense credit (and to her obvious intellectual strength, as well) went on with her studies, after considerable scholastic foundering for a few years, and eventually obtained her PhD in a technical discipline! For me, that’s where my awareness of the unfolding of her life ends, since I have since lost touch with both her mother, her father and her. But to say that it impacted me profoundly, even if as merely a peripherally involved, ‘coincident’ individual, is considerably understating things! A lot of my assumptions about life and many of my former, largely unshakable allusions also winked out of existence, as a result.
OK. That brings us (finally) to the catalytic source of all of the foregoing ruminations. Namely, a newly published book (2020) by a very brave woman named Abigail Shrier (a writer for the WSJ, among other things, and also a graduate of the University of Oxford, with a Juris Doctor (JD) degree from Yale Law School…in other words, one VERY bright and capable cookie!).
Her latest book, titled ‘Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters’ delves into an area of contemporary social change that reflects in quite a startling and very unsettling manner a phenomenon that has considerably dangerous ramifications, in my opinion.
The book draws largely upon the pioneering (and also amazingly brave) researches of Dr. Lisa Littman, Assistant Professor of Public Health at Brown University (and a Jew by faith) into a phenomenon she characterised as ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’ (or ROGD) in some original studies published in 2018 in professional journals.
In this original research work, Littman described and examined a rather new dynamic in the field of public health studies (ROGD) that veers off remarkably from traditional understandings and assumptions about transgenderism and the mechanics of it as a factor in female sexual development.
A quick consult of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) editions prior to the DSM-5 will establish that the traditional pattern of ‘sexual dysphoria’ noted by psychiatric professionals follows a fairly uniform set of early and continuing dysphoric gender uncertainties in human adolescent development. That is to say, discomfort about one’s sexual identity quite early in life (childhood) and continuing for many years, that lends itself to readily documentable study and clinical diagnosis.
Dr. Littman’s ‘heretical’ hypothesis, boiled down in all its myriad complexities to a simple proposition, focuses on a relatively new and recent phenomenon involving predominantly young women, that runs in strange contrast to well-documented bodies of literature relating to sexual dysphoria in past decades, and proposes that it appears to be largely the direct result of…are you ready for this?...social media!
For those who are relatively young and who were literally raised on smartphones and today’s ‘social media’ internet cliques, this obviously sounds preposterous, but a great number of those in the LGBTQ+ camp are exactly in that category: ‘recent new generationals’ who can’t possibly conceive of a world without the sort of highly artificial, ‘virtual’ peer associations that social media venues comprise and the effortless (if highly ‘impersonal’, after a fashion…or ‘non-vis-à-vis’ contact’, if you prefer) connectivity to one’s chosen referent peer-groups.
[Note: As a filthy male-chauvinist, card-carrying, biologically male pig of many years standing, I must bow to the obligatory and highly politically incorrect custom of observing that both author Shirer and Dr. Littman are quite attractive brunettes which means that I am inclined at the outset towards being favorably disposed to their expostulations. There, I’ve set that out in a straight-forward manner, so get it out of your system, eh? Thank you.]
Naturally, both Littman and Shirer are on the LBGTQ+ ‘Most Wanted’ hit list and both are being furiously pummeled by the ‘queer world’ and its advocates. Following is a quote from a particularly vitriolic flaying directed towards them that appears in the ‘TransAdvocate’ (Hello, hello!) on-line venue, particularly towards Dr. Littman herself:
“Dr. Littman describes the condition experienced by these girls as “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD). It develops during or soon after puberty and mainly affects girls with no previous signs of childhood gender dysphoria. Many, however, do have a history of mental illness, and some are on the autism spectrum. The most controversial element of Dr. Littman’s research is her claim that ROGD spreads via social and peer contagion.
“ROGD also spreads by social media according to Dr. Littman; some parents describe their daughters binge-watching YouTube transition videos. “It is plausible that online content may encourage vulnerable individuals to believe that nonspecific symptoms and vague feelings should be interpreted as gender dysphoria stemming from a transgender condition,” Dr. Littman writes in her research article.
“Ray Blanchard thinks ROGD is real. Dr. Blanchard is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto who spent many years working in a gender identity clinic. He says Dr. Littman’s problem is that she has challenged some sacred taboos. “The idea that social influences may be involved flies in the face of the ‘born that way’ or ‘you are who you say you are’ narrative, which calls, perhaps, for a different approach with regard to best clinical practice,” he said in an e-mail.
“In other words: Just because a 14-year-old girl says she’s a male doesn’t always mean she’s going to feel that way next year. And in fact, Dr. Littman reports that many of these cases resolve within a couple of years…”
It needs to be noted here that ‘TransAdvocate’ is a perfect example of the sort of highly organised effort that espouses vehement, almost rabid support for confused young females who have been (so Dr. Littman hypothesises) subtly coerced into believing that they are ‘transgender’ predominantly via their social media peer-groups and not principally attributable to long-established gender dysphoria uncertainties. Dr. Littman covers this all quite adequately in her book’s opening chapters.
Among the many startling (and extremely well documented) findings that Dr. Littman’s research has disclosed is the startling and highly disturbing revelation of the role that our ‘public schools’ are now playing to facilitating that supportive LBGTQ+ ‘transgender agenda’.
Of special note, as regards California’s school system (and a number of other progressive states that follow California’s lead in many scholastic trends), is that fact that laws now in effect have been passed that allow schools to ‘hide’ student personal records from parents, if it has been determined that the student’s parents hold staunchly adverse opinions concerning the gender identification that their child has assumed. The premise is that in their desire to provide a ‘safe environment’ (safe from whom? Bullies?) for self-declared transgender students, they are thus ‘protecting’ the student in a sort of virtual ‘safe haven’, free of undeserved, ‘inappropriate’ and unjust (they feel) parental prejudice. One wonders (as author Shirer notes) if the ‘bullies’ in reference aren’t the parents, within this specific frame of reference?
Shirer continues to reveal a great many unsettling things about the sort of pressure-tactic dynamics that our California school children have become subject to, in the State Board of Education’s eagerness to be supportive of the LGBTQ+ transgender movement. And these are just a few things that relate to the insidiously harmful role our public schools are now playing in both fostering and furthering gender rather presumptive uncertainties among children about which gender they belong to (regardless of biological, or ‘birth’, gender).
The truly scary thing about the above is that 1) half the parents of children enrolled in public schools have absolutely no clue as to how all this is playing out, once their child is ‘safely’ in the embrace of the school classroom, and 2) the other 50% are probably so ‘dumbed-down’ and mindlessly vapid that they DON’T care about any of these aesthetic ‘minefields’ their children are daily negotiating.
Dr. Littman notes (among much else) that whereas prior to the smartphone/internet era ‘gender dysphoria’ was predominantly (a fact well documented) a childhood and adolescent male affliction, at roughly the start of the present smartphone/internet/social media generation, this syndrome changed rather startlingly into a predominantly FEMALE syndrome. Littman, to her immense credit publicly disavows ‘reading anything into’ her factual findings, but the inference is clear enough (as Shirer points out) that young women are far and away vastly more emotionally ‘connected’ than males, tending to turn far more readily to their BFF peers with highly emotional personal issues and feelings than young males. As such, they are also far more empathetic to each other and to ‘shared’ outlooks. One obviously conclusion that emerges is that in a highly ‘impersonal’ age in which little direct contact occurs, these desperately isolated and lonely young women who may suffer gender uncertainties are drawn to ‘identity affirming’ common causes such as LBGTQ+ ‘transgender groups’ out of a desire to ‘belong’ to an exclusive (‘cut above’) group than even conventional ‘gay’ social groupings.
This hypothesis certainly makes logical sense to me, despite my relatively sparse professional knowledge pertaining to psychiatric/psychological medical areas of learning and clinical practice.
Quite obviously, social media (among those who are younger) tends to be both a source of bias affirmation AND what passes for reality testing, these days. Sadly, any reality that may exist (that is so quickly shared among young peers) is often quite specious and bereft of any greater understanding that those with a bit more maturity and experience may possess.
Clearly, the subject of ROGD is just starting to be considered in the professional world and meanwhile the LGBTQ+ community continues to ferociously refuse to accept the fact that any it is valid. Again, as I said earlier, both Dr. Littman and author Abigail Shrier are extraordinarily courageous individuals to almost single-handedly explore these possibilities and we can expect that none of the LGBTQ+ transgender advocates (and supporters of their dogma) will willingly back off or concede any of the ground they have already claimed in our increasingly autocratic, politically correct, liberally progressive American society!
I highly suggest that, rather than join the brow-beating bloodbath that is aimed at such LGBTQ+ ‘heretics’ as Littman and Shrier are considered to be, buy a copy of Shrier’s excellent (and highly informative, if also greatly alarming) book and read it for yourself! That much, at least, we owe to both our children and to the preservation of whatever remains of our rapidly eroding sense of social sanity!
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Sources for further reading:
IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE: THE TRANSGENDER CRAZE SEDUCING OUR DAUGHTERS by Abagail Shrier JD, Regnery Publishing, 2020, ISBN 978-1-68451-046-7, Ebook ISBN 978-1-68451-046-7, Div. of Salem Media Group, Washington DC.
THE MADNESS OF CROWDS: GENDER, RACE AND IDENTITY by Douglas Murray, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019, ISBN-13 978-1635579987, Ebook ASIN B07VK9J63L
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A note in passing:
I have always maintained a keen interest in matters of human sexuality, finding it an area of knowledge that has considerable bearing on just about every aspect of human relations and interactions.
One of the chief awarenesses I have come into possession of over the years is that human sexual experience is, like so many other things, an amalgam of accumulated perception, learning and direct experience. Someone with a scientific bent would say, as author and brilliant astrophysicist Avi Loeb (whose recent book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, 2021, examines the first real evidence of the possibility that our solar system has been visited by an interstellar intelligence!) recently put it (or words to this effect): “Scientists must follow the evidence. This leads to a process wherein dogmas and unsupported beliefs are inevitably replaced by and/or largely supplanted with direct, observable data and quantifiable findings, and this advanced state of awareness usually only comes after considerable experience in life and much observation.” [It’s a compelling argument for the belief that younger people are not as fully grown and mature as we give them credit for these days, among other things!]
Sexual attitudes, awarenesses and orientation are also subject to this rule of thumb in that the more you know about human sexual interactions, the more erudite one’s understandings become in both a qualitative and quantitative context. ‘Sexual pleasure’, it follows, then depends greatly on one’s familiarity with both physiology and methodologies used to stimulate and/or obtain positive sexual satisfaction.
An important corollary may be posited here: that given human beings’ constant need for ‘new experience’ and exposure to a broader and broader range of sensory inputs, the more one’s familiarity one with sexual techniques intended to provide pleasure, the broader one’s acceptance of the available (and hence acceptable) means used to achieve it.
Thus, it stands to reason, that the more someone is completely bereft of proscriptive religious-based beliefs and moral systems, the more readily that person will tend to find little wrong with just about anything that he/she/it experiences as ‘pleasurable’. The whole range of human sexual acts, including those traditionally deemed ‘deviant’ by certain faiths & religions (such as anal intercourse, sado-masochism, sexual fetishes and what have you) all become perfectly acceptable to those with such a ‘liberated’ awareness of the possibilities for obtaining sexual release. For this reason, anal intercourse (formerly considered both ‘sinful’ and illegal in many areas) is now commonly accepted by most younger individuals as merely another alternative to conventional penile/vaginal sex and it is in fact taught in school to students as an unexceptional, unremarkable part of the present public school courses in sex education. Try getting old Aunt Beulah to accept that!
Seemingly then, the only real criteria that defines whether ANY form of sexual interaction is ‘OK’ or not boils down to whether or not it poses a significant health risk to an individual. Since STD’s do comprise a rather serious and unignorable risk factor in human sexual practices, awareness of this must be encouraged, to be sure! But if there’s no detectable risk involved with any particular form of sexual stimulation, it stands to reason that logioc would dictate that there’s otherwise no really compelling reason to NOT engage in it.
This strictly unreligious, highly pragmatic philosophical underpinning that forms the substrate of modern younger generational outlooks thus figures substantially in all aspects of human sexuality, including gender-transitioning, and the entire range of unconventional sexual orientations we see taking root around us today, are just about everywhere.
Distilled down to its most basic form, the old ‘If it feels good, just do it!’ attitude that first became popularised in the hippie era is perfectly fine…as long as there is no serious risk of exposing one’s self to a serious threat to one’s health and physiological well-being in the exercise of it (since that otherwise requires use of appropriate and suitable prophylaxis measures).
Regrettably, the downside of this attitudinal stance is that human beings are capable of unlimited thirst for variety and richness of experience and once the fruits of human sexual polymorphism are tasted, there is, effectively speaking, no absolute limit to their scope and magnitude: once again, “Be careful what you wish for.”
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