“Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, “I am.” We are ontological oxymorons.” Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
[i]Sexual violence against enemies has been a fixture of warfare for thousands of years, and it continues 
unabated by the supposed niceties of modernity. Violence as violation and humiliation is not new, nor has it been abandoned as a tool of intimidation, terror, revenge, and subjugation. Rape of men, women, and children; force-marching publicly naked citizens and defeated enemies as tools of degrading your enemy sexually has been a particularly vile method of emphasizing dominance and victory. [ii]
Rape has been used to complete the “disappearance” of an entire people from their native ethnicity to vanish into the progeny of the conquerors. Kill (or castrate) all the males, most women past fertility, and children, then impregnate the remaining women and repopulate the defeated city with a whole new generation.
Castration of men, cutting the breasts off women, and forcing captured men to rape both men and women continue to be instruments of subjugation – statements of control and loss and ruin. No sexual equipment, no children. No breasts to feed them, and no children. Reducing conquered people to permanent sterility and defeat. [iii] A quick search turns up examples in more recent times in Myanmar[iv] and Sierra Leone. [v]
St. Pope John Paul commented on pornography as treating human beings as “ambulatory meat.” Perhaps such a perfect description of dehumanizing men and women is applicable in this context as well. Such awful violence utterly denies the individual dignity and spirit of the person, treating human persons as prey to be savaged at will –a terrible slavery and violence imposed most brutally against the most intimate and tender of human vulnerabilities.
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A short caveat and preface to what follows: what was formerly named “gender identity disorder” became “Gender Dysphoria,” and is now routinely called in complicit media “transsexualism,” as though that is possible. Whatever it is named, it is a real, frightening and terribly challenging condition for those afflicted. Those who suffer from this affliction deserve acceptance, tolerance, kindness, and love from any of us meeting and interacting with these precious and vulnerable human persons. Prejudice and bigotry, ill treatment and bullying against those folks are dreadful cruelties and ought to be punished severely and perpetrators ostracized.
But there is another kind of cruelty, one obscured by millions, perhaps billions, of dollars and fawning press coverage. Not the savagery and hot blood of war, but the cold, clinical, disinterested violence of a surgeon’s scalpel.
“But I paid $5,000 to be made into a woman. This would mean I’m not really a woman. I’m just a guy with a mutilated penis.” “Ms.” Garrison, South Park [vi]
Layla Jane, Keira Bell, Chloe Cole.[vii] Three names we probably will not read often in the New York Times or hear on CNN, yet they may well represent the thin edge of the wedge that will split the fault in our ideological fantasy. They are young women who regret their decisions to ingest puberty blockers and powerful synthetic hormones and fell victim to prosperous and now numerous “transition clinics” which sliced off their healthy young breasts when they were too young to consent to a man seducing them into sex without committing statutory rape, too young to buy cigarettes from a store clerk in a 7-Eleven, too young to acquire licenses to marry, too young to get their ears pierced without parental consent, too young to vote, too young to buy alcohol, too young to go to R rated movies, too young to drive a car legally, too young to get an aspirin from the school nurse without a legal sign off note from home. Too young.
These courageous young women are separately suing three different thriving transgender practices which robbed them of the capability ever to nurse a baby along with some or all the rest of the “treatments” that permanently disfigured them. Three quotes synopsize their cases from the articles linked to their names in the footnotes.
“I should have been challenged on the proposals or the claims that I was making for myself,” (Keira) said. “And I think that would have made a big difference as well. If I was just challenged on the things I was saying.”
“I don’t think I should have been allowed to change my sex before I could legally consent to have sex,” Layla said. “I don’t think I’m better off for the experience, and I think transition just completely added fuel to the fire that was my pre-existing conditions.”
“These butchers have gone unquestioned and unchallenged for too long. My goal in this lawsuit is to set a precedent that will change the landscape for these barbaric processes and to create a pathway for other de-transitioners to seek justice,” said (Chloe) Cole. Here is a link to an full interview with Chloe: Detransition – the wounds that won’t heal.
The incoherence of policy that allows these things with or without parental complicity is evident in a recent Connecticut child protection state law forbidding marriage for anyone below the age of eighteen in the same state that allows if not outrightly encourages teens of the same age to “transition” [viii] from their biological sex determined at conception. Connecticut absurdly fabricates the oxymoron in their laws which assert that a child is incapable of choosing a marriage partner with whom they will presumably engage in sex yet is perfectly competent to choose to get themselves cut up to be rendered permanently sterile and lose the ability to engage in sex to procreate and physically nurture their own children without even more bizarre surgery and contortions.
One of my daughters when she was three or four told us she wanted to be an airplane when she grew up. I thought that was a laudable ambition with some potential wonder filled soaring, however we never pursued any experimental surgery to attach alerions and engines to the kid. She outgrew the desire and now has five beautiful children, a great husband, and a couple of degrees. I am thankful we never got those wings sewn on. Tragically, for too many children, surgeons will hack away their ability to procreate their own kids.
A blog post is far too meager a venue to investigate the efficacy and long-term outcomes of these procedures chosen by adults[ix]; this is about protecting children from their own fears and insecurity before they are ready to understand and deal with them as grown-ups. In their position paper “Gender Dysphoria in Children”, the American College of Pediatricians stated, “Experts on both sides of the pubertal suppression debate agree that within this context, 80 percent to 95 percent of children with GD accepted their biological sex by late adolescence.”[x]
Further confusion gets mixed into this muddled dog’s breakfast when ideological bias suppresses detailed studies such as well-recognized Northwestern University professor of psychology Dr. Michael Bailey’s study of social contagion in Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.[xi] The publisher took it down when the trans activists lit up the place. Similarly, Brown University physician and professor Dr. Lisa Littman’s study of the same subject was withdrawn from publication when it challenged the “narrative;”; she was subsequently fired by Brown.[xii]
We have lost our grip on the reality that a person born with XX chromosomes in every cell in her body cannot ‘become’ a man, nor can a person born with XY chromosomes in every cell in his body ‘become’ a woman. Certainly, it has been demonstrated that they can embark with the enthusiastic help of those enriching themselves by performing the procedures to become, well, someone else – sterile, patched together, perhaps ruined physically, and sentenced to ingesting powerful synthetic expensive and dangerous hormones for the rest of their lives to sustain the illusions, sad effigies, and tragic collateral damage in the culture wars.
Radical, enduring, ill advised, medical intervention on young people signifies more than just another delusion in our ideological debate; this is emblematic of what is at stake: nothing less than a redefining of what it means to be male and female, what it is to be human, an error of ontology and anthropology, no mere political disagreement. Such practices oppose the common sense and wisdom any carpenter or store clerk possesses without hesitation. Of course, we don’t cut the kids up.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, page 474
Let me suggest a thought experiment from a waking dream I had last week as applicable to the whole alphabet proliferation of LGBQT+, Et cetera. Before anyone writes me a hostile email, I plead nolo contendere to an accusation of being a troglodyte. Guilty as charged.
Semi awake I thought of being challenged with the stakes being my entire future and life. I envisioned four items: a piece of 1 x 3 pine about 3 feet long with a perpendicular pencil line drawn about a third in from the end, a claw hammer, a handsaw, and some 6 penny nails. The task was to cut the board at the pencil line and nail the resulting two pieces into a simple cross. I needed to figure out the proper use of the tools and nails based on their design. Their function was inherent in their design, their nature should direct me in their suitable employment.
I thought I could turn the hammer claw side down, if I chose to, and whack away at the board somewhere near the pencil line until it weakened enough to be snapped apart in rough splintered ends. That would work. Then I could hold the nails head side down and use the saw handle to attempt to bang them into the two crossed pieces of smashed 1 x 3 until the nails bent or broke and the saw was bent and probably ruined.
Or I could study and understand the nature of the tools. The balanced flat heavy head of the hammer, the perfect set of the teeth and sharpness of the saw blade, and the penetrating pointed end of the nails. I could place the thumb of my left hand immediately next to the pencil line, carefully draw the saw blade back against the edge of the board guided by the edge of my thumb and proceed to cut a smooth kerf in the wood exactly along the line until the 1 x 3 was separated into two neat pieces. Placing the pieces at a right angle to one another, I could hold the nails one at a time with the pointed end down perpendicular to the top piece of wood, set the nail with one tap to hold it firm and put it away with a couple of well- placed practiced strokes of the hammer. Mission accomplished.
Our bodies are created with purpose obvious in their design and morphology. Male and female they are created, a perfect design for balance, complementarity, and the perpetuation of our species. Any other use of them sexually is a distortion and can leave us bent and probably ruined. Sterile. Dead ended like a salt sea at the final destination of a river with no outlet.
Dr. Anthony Esolen described our peril succinctly and accurately in a worthy article, which is a must read, referenced below in the footnote.[xiii]. Excerpted from the beginning and the end of his essay: “What is at stake in our current controversies regarding male and female? Nothing less than creation itself.” ….… “It is the tired old lie, in a new and grotesque form: “You shall be as gods.” And it repudiates the fount of all revelation: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And that, as I said, is at stake—everything.”
As Tiny Tim would remind us, “May God bless us everyone.”
“At the sight of the crowds, his heart was moved with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few, so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.” Matthew 9: 37-38
[i] Image – Rape of the Sabine Woman, Andrea Andreani (1541–1623), Chiaroscuro woodcut from three blocks in grey/brown, donated to Wikimedia Commons open source as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
[ii] Rape as an ancient weapon of war or this: Sexual Assault of Women in Ancient Rome
[iii] Sexual violence against men in war.
[iv] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/a-soldier-cut-off-her-breast-rohingya-survivors-recount-atrocities/
[v] https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/january-2005/sexual-violence-invisible-war-crime
[vi] Not for the kids and brutal but expresses epigrammatically the inherent paradoxes and delusions of our time. Clip from South Park. Trigger warning, not for those weak of stomach. https://youtu.be/0dD7w7F0a3Q
[vii] Layla Jane, Keira Bell, Chloe Cole. Each name has a link attached with some coverage of their lawsuits.
[viii] Connecticut State Department of Education Guidance on Civil Rights Protections and Supports for Transgender Students.
[ix] The most comprehensive study on the outcomes of these drugs and surgery was stated in a Swedish investigation of hundreds of post-surgery gender dysphoric adults. “Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.”
[x] Gender Dysphoria in Children, American College of Pediatricians, citing Cohen-Kettenis PT, Delemarre-van de Waal HA, Gooren LJ. The treatment of adolescent transsexuals: changing insights.
[xi] My Research on Gender Dysphoria Was Censored, but I Won’t Be. Free Press. https://www.thefp.com/p/trans-activists-killed-my-scientific-paper.
[xii] Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria. See also these articles on the subversion of ‘go where the facts lead’ science in these articles: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subversion-of-biology/ and https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/psychology-has-been-hijacked-by-gender-activists
[xiii] Crisis Magazine, Materialists against the Material World, Anthony Esolen, June 22, 2023
Two recent stories connect obliquely in noteworthy testimony to our troubled times. 
A third curiosity in this collection of apparently unrelated curiosities.
A case could be made that our postmodern culture war finds its best analog in WWI – epitomized in the Battle of the Somme. Eventually victors may emerge from the trenches, but many bloody years are laid to waste, and the dead are legion. The dividing lines are so deep that peaceful reconciliation seems remote. Like sitting on the southern slope of the Grand Canyon and looking out, contemplating the depth and breadth. Impassable crevasse.
I’ve missed many bandwagons in my life. I missed buying in early with Enron. I missed investments with Bernie Madoff that could have made me rich. I completely missed the wave to be rich because I wasn’t born yet when Charles Ponzi schemed, won, then lost. (shown in his mug shot picture here).
millennia, and you can hold it in your hands. Heavy stuff. Gold also has intrinsic value as it is used in many industries for many purposes and can be formed into lustrous beautiful designs
The problem when an unregulated immature genius owns both a trading company and the exchange on which it trades is the mixing of money and the lack of controls. Be like an out-of-control Bill Gates owning Microsoft and NASDAQ, but with less oversight. In August, SBF was the wunderkind who last year cashed out $300 million burying it into his own maze of tax haven Bahamian bank accounts. He allegedly took and mixed investor’s money who traded on FTX with his corporation’s and used it to prop up Alameda, which had started to hemorrhage.
Years ago, I was on the road often in Maine and carried a pager. That was my introduction to being always on call. Prior to that, I would call my office for messages a couple times a day. I knew where the best payphones were in many towns and cities. My favorites were hanging on a wall by a table on which I could spread out necessary supporting documents and notes in a warm café with good coffee, free refills, and a tolerant owner. I kept the numbers of several of them in my planner and could schedule incoming calls.
In 1997 Sebastian Junger published his first major book.
Proponents dearly love to frame the conversation in superficially clever emotional terms (“Keep your rosaries off our ovaries.” Or “Our bodies, Ourselves.”) or some version of freedom necessary for women to succeed or marginalizing the pro-life position as religious ‘extremism.’ They decline the opportunity to conduct a reasoned moral argument. The syllogism looks like this: A.) It is always morally repugnant, and no justification exists to deliberately attack and destroy innocent human life. B.) A fetus is just another word for small developing human being. Therefore, C.) Deliberate killing of a human fetus is morally repugnant. No religion is required for the propositions or the conclusion. Some prominent atheists are pro-life advocates with arguments based on logic, science, and the existence of objective truth that is knowable.
The red pumper bounced onto the driveway of the large ante bellum colonial with siren blaring. The house had once served as an inn, and currently was occupied by a half dozen mostly benign refugees from other late sixties communes. The flames fully engaged the structure and were seen through the windows. Everyone got out.
A “domestic disturbance” was treated like this: no police involvement because they were too far away to help. Bia, a recent resident, had moved into an apartment next to a small store front downtown, where she opened up a sheet metal artisan shop, welding and cutting small decorative pieces sold at craft fairs. Her boyfriend was an odd, slender, bearded, pony tailed archetype prone to buckskin jackets, cowboy hats, silver buckles and a 14” Bowie knife carried in a sheath on his belt. Bia’s daughter was my daughter’s age, and they became friends during the few months since Bia arrived in town. In January, our phone rang about eleven one weeknight, long after our bedtime. She called because we were one of the few she had gotten to know. The boyfriend, whose name fades, let’s call him Jim, was drinking, smoking dope and hitting her. Could I come down to help? Sure, I agreed, groggily.
steed, well actually, an F150. What could be better for a chainsaw guy than getting to play knight errant? On the way to her place, I practiced some tough threat lines involving emergency rooms, reconstructive dentistry and eating through a straw, all of which turned out quickly to be completely inadequate to the situation. The denouement was less than noteworthy. Jim had fled out the back door on the snow over the ice of Lake Minnehonk. I followed his tracks into the dark, axe handle in hand, and found him seventy yards out on the ice in a tee shirt disconsolately sitting and shivering in the snow, his knife still in its sheath. I asked him if he had a place to go. He said he did, in Waterville. I told him that’s where he would be staying. He started to cry. Bia packed a duffle bag into his dented Saab with Boulder County Colorado plates, and that was the last anyone ever saw of him. I went home to bed; Rita was glad to see me.
Back in April, the sun rose earlier each day on the eastern horizon and set later and farther to the north on the western horizon until the summer solstice sprinted by on June 21st. The daylight prior to the solstice persists a few minutes longer each day in felicitous, tiny, precious increments. Early mornings are more welcoming, and evening sunsets linger. Here on our little island, the sun rises over the Sakonnet River or the Atlantic out on Sachuest Beach and sets over Narragansett Bay.
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