We all need to read and promote The Transgender Leviathan, a 40 page report written for The American Principles Project by Pedro Gonzalez of Chronicles Magazine. Though written by someone decidedly on the right, Leviathan is comprehensive and fair, and it implicates people, corporations, and institutions across the political spectrum. It’s pure fire starting with its title page,
After the apocalypse of 1945, a number of global organizations have been formed with the aim of maintaining and expanding totalitarian liberalism. One of the earliest organizations formed for this purpose was the war alliance "North Atlantic Treaty Organization", or NATO, which can be seen as the military wing of globalism.
In addition to ensuring that Washington always has international support for its military campaigns, NATO as an institution is explicitly anti-white and explicitly dedicated to "racial justice" for racial aliens living in white countries. As early as 1999, NATO authored reports blaming nationalists for a number of modern problems and warning against the influence of nationalism.
In 2023, the war alliance held a summit at its headquarters in Brussels on race where the alliance's leaders pledged to fight "homogeneous attitudes" and to use NATO's "collective intelligence" for the purpose.
In fact, NATO is so dedicated to its anti-white agenda that it openly advocates that institutions must be reshaped to be "inclusive," in other words, restructured to be more anti-white, and consist of fewer white employees and executives.
It a just a pity that the left really was a democratic party for the people and not soloist leaning first and foremost AND that the right was rather a slightly conservative party to instill morals and ethics above bein gf driven by capitalist rhetoric. I think they all switched priorities somewhere... Also, a government was never supposed to govern what people believe, just protect the people, protect the borders, protect the assets and instill a safe and healthy environment.
I have quickly read through Transgender Leviathan and found it to be a pretty thorough treatment of the issue. But I was disappointed not to find an answer to one lingering question: why do insurance companies cover trans surgeries and hormones? In my experience, the health insurance company is always looking for ways to say "no" to any kind of treatment that is cosmetic in nature.
"Pritzker also created the first chair in transgender studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The current chair, Aaron Devor, founded an annual conference called Moving Trans History Forward, whose keynote speaker in 2016 was the renowned transhumanist, Martine Rothblatt, who was mentored by the transhumanist Ray Kurzweil of Google. Rothblatt lectured there on the value of creating an organization such as WPATH to serve “tech transgenders” in the cultivation of “tech transhumanists.” (Rothblatt’s ideology of disembodiment and technological religion seems to be having nearly as much influence on American culture as Sirius satellite radio, which Rothblatt co-founded.) Rothblatt is an integral presence at Out Leadership, a business networking arm of the LGBTQ+ movement, and appears to believe that “we are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful, and beneficent.”"
So, tons of billionaire money goes into pushing this.
On Page 4 of the referenced article, the author states: “...nearly one in five people ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender today...” with a footnote to a source from UCLA.
THIS STATEMENT IS PATENTLY FALSE. The source actually says this: “Nearly one in five people who identify as transgender are between the ages 13-17...”
Having found this one glaring error puts this entire paper in question. I wouldn’t rely on any of the information without checking the sources first.
When the Pew research says “sex assigned at birth “, I bristle. Any research that uses those terms is in my view suspect. Why do they have to bow down to trans language?
We have to reach across the aisle on this issue. Real activists, activists who want to actually create change, compromise. They create coalitions. They are practical.
I’m on the left, but I’ll coalition with almost anyone to fight gender nonsense. I’m a feminist, but I’m thrilled that Ben Shapiro is a star right now. Once the threat to our kids is gone, I will go back to criticizing Shapiro and his ilk for what I view as sex-essentialist beliefs. But for now, I’m on his team.
I’m sorry but I think you’re being foolish. People like Tucker Carlson have spread baseless racist conspiracy theories and laughable misogynist claims about testosterone. They oppose transgender ideology because it looks left just like they oppose reproductive rights, LGB rights and they lie about elections because they aren’t winning. People like us have to carve out a left space for big questions about transgender claims not give way to the nasty right.
If Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union could find common ground to fight in the WWII, surely the two parties can in the current war.
Reaching across the aisle to find support amongst like minded people doesn't mean you support people like Tucker Carlson. Both sides need to band together. The media is just stoking divisiveness and I'm not going to fall for it.
I agree with reaching out and working alongside people with other political beliefs. I also find it really helpful to talk through things from another perspective than my own. And I think Tucker is a step way too far and he's willing to lie which is a big problem.
Great. I have downloaded and will start reading. Maybe I will finally get an answer to the question that puzzles me: why have so many insurance companies agreed to cover transition pharmaceuticals and surgeries in the first place? They don't cover anything else that is remotely cosmetic . . .
For the US, the original rulemaking of HHS on section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act stipulated that "discrimination on the basis of sex" encompassed discrimination on the basis of gender identity. That was the root cause of most health plans being required to cover drugs, behavioral health treatment, and some medical treatments related to gender transition. The physician orders were documented as having medical necessity to treat a diagnosed condition. The rule was later changed, but many insurers/health plans did not remove the coverage after it was instated.
I'm also an activist for people who have been permanently disfigured from pit bull attacks. Insurance does not cover facial reconstruction for kids whose faces were mauled. They call it "cosmetic" rather than "functional". And, for years the pit bull activists have engaged in the same tactics trans activists do - getting people banned on social media, reporting them to their employers and getting them fired, etc. The pit bull activists have openly claimed they "have friends at Facebook" who protect them while censoring us.
An interesting note is one group of anti-pit bull advocates published an article several years ago in which they announced that most pit bull owners are Republicans. They got rationed so bad they deleted the article!
It’s easy to find a ton of groups on both sides of the pit bull issue on Facebook. Just search. Barbara Kay writes good articles. Here’s a newsletter: https://www.animals24-7.org/
It is a broadside attack on our shared language and humanity. When realities like male and female are muddled linguistically, it throws a spanner into human cognition, never mind pronouns.
It is sponsored by the biggest capitalists in the world, the ones who can buy out the ACLU and Amnesty.
It's many things at the same time. Social media obsession and mass hysteria meet up with big pharmaceutical companies (who brought us the opioid crisis) they go on a double date with leftist victim politics and political polarization.
Some of the wealthiest people involved in funding transgender academics are Republicans. See J. Bilek for details. She’s pretty rightwing herself so there’s no bias there.
We may well be in the midst of a party realignment. In any successful revolution, the revolutionaries eventually become the new elites As the 60's radicals and their children have assumed control of most American institutions, they haven't shed their identification with the "oppressed and marginalized", but they have re-centered their oppression axis from class to race & sexuality. The former (class equity) would be a threat to their new power and wealth in a way that the latter (racial / sexual equity) is not, since performative behaviors allow them to become "allies" and therefore immune from criticism.
As this article says, DeSantis and Hawley and Gonzalez are pushing the Republicans to jettison their libertarian streak and assert a "common good and common sense" agenda that can slice through the sexual and racial groupings the Left uses to keep people atomized. Either the GOP will figure out how to unify poor rural whites and poor urban blacks under a single class-based platform, or it will be replaced. The latter prospect frightens me, since the successor party might well abandon the cross-race outreach and run on straight ethno-nationalism, which is really just a Right-wing version of Left-wing wokeness. It's not accidental that Richard Spencer (the white nationalist guru) and Ibram Kendi (the antiracism guru) both agree that race is the most important quality of any human being. their philosophies are mirror images of each other. Choosing between those two isn't even a "lesser of two evils" problem. It's just pick "the evil that doesn't want me dead" problem. For 90's liberals who were terrified of the Christian Right... wait until you meet his nasty cousin: the non-Christian Right.
I don't normally talk about this stuff here on PITT, but the whole trans issue is really just a subset of a much larger war between postmodernism and reality. Reality will eventually win. Reality always wins -- it's real. But models of unreality (like postmodernism) and false views of man (like communism) can do a lot of damage, especially while they're failing. Will there be anything left of Western Civilization when reality eventually reasserts itself? I honestly don't know, and I suspect it depends on how hard we push back now.
"the whole trans issue is really just a subset of a much larger war between postmodernism and reality."
Brian, I'm glad you mentioned that.
Because trans is NOT the end-game. There is no end-game. Trans is merely the latest in a line of bizarre inventions intended to go on forever.
We may defeat trans. I hope we defeat trans. But defeating trans is not enough. We have to understand the roots of trans well enough to defeat (or prevent) the NEXT abomination. Thank you for helping to do that.
Sorry but I thought the Republican Party was already running on straight ethno-nationalism with a dash of reproductive misogyny. There is no larger war between postmodernism and reality. Postmodernism is a somewhat unimportant philosophy, just as is your conception of "Western Civilisation".
Material and economic reality is, as you sort of acknowledge, the most important thing. Perhaps if you were talking about that your post would seem more relevant to the impact of trans ideology on young people and the level of support they have received.
Go listen to Richard Spencer (if you can stomach him) and tell me honestly that you think the mainstream core of the Republican party embraces ethno-nationalism. Are there kooks that do? Sure. There are kooks in every group of people. But they don't even run the populist branch of the party, and the populist branch still doesn't run the party yet -- look at the problems Josh Hawley or JD Vance have had implementing their populist agenda even within the GOP. Ethno-nationalism is still fringe on the Right, just not quite as fringe as it used to be, and that's what's scary to me.
I wish very much that you were right about postmodernism being irrelevant to this issue. I wish it was a "somewhat unimportant philosophy" (as you call it). However, it is not. To see an example of the connection to trans: Why is it that trans advocates will go all-in to defend slicing the private parts off children? It is politically unpopular and given any remotely accurate model of the world, obviously absurd: the same child can't get a tattoo without Mom's permission. So why are they willing to die on that hill? Postmodernism.
The core assumption of postmodernism is that reality is constructed by the way we describe it -- the real world is either nonexistent or at least inaccessible to us. That's what they mean when they say something (like sex for example) is "a social construction". But if words actually create reality, then using the wrong words can be violently disruptive of reality, hence "offensive words = violence". If words create reality, screaming "trans-women are women" over and over makes total sense, you're literally "saving the world". If words create reality, refusing to use someone's made-up pronouns is actually "denying their existence" and could be considered an criminal assault (in England and Canada both, this legal change has already been made.) And if words create reality, a 12 year old girl who says she's a boy... actually becomes a boy by that declaration. Refusing to acknowledge the 12 year old as a boy would imply that there IS, in fact, a real world. That our words aren't CREATING a subjective reality but struggling to DESCRIBE an objective reality, however imperfectly (as most philosophies stretching back to Plato -- the origin of Western Civilization BTW -- have believed). The vigor and violence of trans advocates can only be explained by postmodernism; it makes no sense otherwise. I'm not saying that all trans proponents realize this. We're all woven from philosophical threads that we only loosely comprehend, but postmodernism is a core thread for trans advocates, whether they know it or not.
As I said, I wish trans kids were just this weird outlier that could be defeated and everything would go back to normal. I think that's wishful thinking. But even if you and I completely disagree on the underlying philosophical basis of the trans movement, hopefully we do agree that it needs to be defeated.
The lobotomy EUGENICS transgender trifecta is conspiratorial nonsense. I don’t support transgender ideology but this kind of free associating fantasy belongs with Qanon. The anti-VAXers have shown that it is possible to have pages of references With absolutely no serious research content. Please don’t go down the rabbit holes people. Stay with facts and real connections. Sorry they are hard to understand and follow not simple like conspiracy thinking.
I'm not trying to pick fights here, ever. The trans movement does have the surgical treatment for mental health issues in common with the lobotomy craze which fell out of disfavor after a while. I don't think noticing that is conspiracy theory. If I were to play with that fire, I'd guess Russian or Chinese efforts to destabilize western governments are helping push this online.
I'm surprised that no mention was made of the fact that Gonzalez is an Hispanic name. Don't folks on the right get victim points, too? That would only be fair!
The concept of "divide and conquer" is at least as old as Julius Caesar, and most likely older than him.
Sane liberals and sane conservatives need to be allies. It's also a special joy when I see someone like liberal feminist Naomi Wolf on conservative shows like Steve Deace or Steve Bannon.
They want us infighting with each other while they take over.
Sane liberals and sane conservatives....the one thing that has been refreshing for me regarding gender ideology is seeing parents from the left and parents from the right finding compassion for each other and shedding party polarization in order to fight a common enemy.
There's really only one party. I think it's orchestrated so the Democrats pull the country to the Left and the Republicans only pretend to slow them down. So no matter who you vote for you get the same results.
James Lindsay put out a very interesting postulation about Abortion. He said it is a mistake to think there are two sides to the Abortion issue. There are actually three sides. But the third side masquerades in one of the others.
The sides are this:
Pro-life: Life is precious in all its form and abortion squelches out a life. Therefore, it should never be allowed.
Pro-choice: Life is precious, but there are circumstances where abortion is the better alternative for the new born. Such as: The baby is born with a genetic disease that ensures it will die within a week. Or the baby is the product of rape or incest.
Then there is the third.
Gnostic position: It is unfair that women are born into a body that produces life and gets pregnant. No woman asked to be born with such a body. To have full freedom a woman must have full control over her body and her life. She should not have to have a baby in her womb if she doesn't want to. She should not have to raise a child if she doesn't want to. Abortion should be legal all the way up to the moment of birth, or even after birth.
If we look at it this way, Pro-Life and Pro-Choice have more in common that they think. But the Gnostic position has disguised itself in the pro-choice camp. It completely negates the child at all. Even the pro-life position may acknowledge the tragedy of the choice, but the gnostic position jettisons all that, with only the will of the mother as the concerning variable.
This is absolutely correct. I'm in the pro-life camp and have been involved in the moment my entire life, even as a child.
The biggest problem for the Pro-Life movement is that Dem voters who wanted a much less extreme abortion policy and firmly rejected the "Gnostic" position on abortion, rejected any association with Pro-Lifers like me and wouldn't even consider voting for a Pro-Life, or "restrict abortion" candidate that was a Republican. Yet, from Roe V Wade even to today, the strong majority of voters want some restrictions and do not support the "Gnostic" position which is abortion on demand, for any reason, at any time. However, most Dem voters did not know and still don't know that the majority of Dem office holders and abortion rights activist groups support the "Gnostic" position. I've had lawyers scream at me and tell me that abortion is only available in the first term of gestation and were absolutely clueless that abortions can even happen after birth to a healthy and normal infant.
I see the same thing dynamic forming around the transgender issue.
Camp One: I am firmly in the sex binary camp. I believe gender flows from biological sex and is never in contradiction to it. I believe actual medically intersexed people have nothing in common with the trans cult ideology or gender expression. For the record, No, I would not support transitioning young adults either because the transcult is obviously targeting vulnerable and confused young adults. I think it is horrible for families when a middle aged man or woman comes out as transgender but I am less inclined to activism about the gender binary on their behalf, however, I still believe this is wrong, at any age.
Camp Two: The sheer numbers of those young people transitioning cannot possibly be organic. They are being manipulated for the most part and the protocols for recommending any medical transition should have more gatekeeping. Children especially should not be given puberty blockers or gender affirming care. There are a few cases of actual gender dysphoria in children and adults but they are rare and those people should have access to medical transitions but only after all other issues are addressed.
Camp Three: Destroy the gender binary! No gatekeeping at all. The solution to every teenage angst is transitioning the child to the opposite sex and getting them medicalized as soon as possible. Children should be removed from the parents' care if the parents are hesitant.
There is only one way to destroy Camp Three and that's for Camp Two to align with Camp One. I do not believe that will happen though because Camp Two is mostly Dem voters and Cam One is mostly Republican voters. Camp Two has animosity and deep antipathy to Camp One based on our political polarization that will keep Camp Two away from Camp One. Meanwhile, Camp Three will have an easy and direct line to push their narrative, malign Camp One and use propaganda to keep Camp Two thinking that "reasonable approaches" will prevail eventually.
You hit it on the nose. That's part of the reason many of James Lindsay's lectures now talk about gnosticism.
What does the pro-gnostic view in both Abortion and Transgenderism have in common?
The answer is they are both a denial of physical realities and say that both should be subordinate to our Will, right or wrong.
Lindsay's argument is this is not new. This is, in fact, a modern manifestation of a very ancient religious cult.
An excellent example is to look at Gnosticism reexplaining the Garden of Eden.
Imagine that G-d is not a loving creator that loves his world and the people He created to live on the world. Imagine, instead, that G-d is a prison warder, a jailer. He made the world as a prison to punish and torture souls, kicking and screaming into physical bodies against their wishes.
Now imagine the serpent showing the way out. "Eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And you will be LIKE G-D. Then YOU will determine good and evil. YOU will be the one to decide.
The Serpent was the original Gnostic. His sales pitch to Eve was that G-d was lying to them about the fruit. G-d didn't want them to eat the fruit was not out of love, but out of fear of competition. And the way to rebel against this tyrant was to eat the fruit and assume his role.
Whenever we deal with reality we are dealing with the rules G-d set down. Water is wet, fire is hot, people need food and water to live, men and women are different yet need each other, because they both have a part the other needs.
They want to break ALL of that. There's no male or female. Water can be dry. People can eat grasshoppers and be just as well as off as if they ate steak. Children are bad for the environment. And all the related madness.
It's anti-reality, because they want to set reality on their own terms -- which makes them into gods. Or so they believe.
Reality has a way of snapping back. No matter how convinced you are that wearing the red Superman cape will let you fly, once you jump off the building and hit the pavement, reality can be very convincing.
But millions of people can die before they figure it out. It's happened before.
"The moderator started everything off with a little cheer about breaking the binary." yep. This is the only part that scares me. We can already see the human debris littered along the paths of those who follow this "Gnostic" vision. It can get far, far worse.
I'm sure those in the early days of Leninist Bolshevism, the sane thought to themselves, it'll all sort itself out soon. This can't continue It didn't. It went from bad to worse, than Stalin, then purges and show trials, famine and WWII.
Most everyone in the Weimer Republic believed an end to the economic depression and the perversions overtaking Germany would soon end because it just couldn't continue. It got worse, much much worse. First the street fighting, then the putsch, then the brownshirts, than the SS, night of the bloody knives, Nuremberg laws, Kristalnacht, WWII, the holocaust and Germany ended up pulled apart into two countries.
I do believe hope is important and yes, eventually, hope is not in vain and the truth and love win. The problem is, how many will be destroyed and will we as a nation survive until truth and love win. Will History even remember us? Will there even be history when we pull out of this?
Vaclev Benda was a anti-communist dissident in Czechoslovakia. He and his wife were devout Roman Catholics. However, they had to make common cause with free-love, pot-smoking hippies who also hated communism. (Yes, there were hippies in Eastern Europe too.)
This is what we must learn to do, and I include myself in that "we". If this insanity is to be stopped, it will require people like me being willing to vote for a non-woke socialist or sane progressives being willing to vote for a non-woke Christian conservative.
Thank you! Now I'm hoping there's a Spanish version as well. I work with the Hispanic population and am distressed with the lack of info. Anyone have suggestions about this, please let me know.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." - John Adams
Conservatives will be the first to tell you that most Republican lawmakers are more interested in power, money, and being on TV than representing conservative constituents. We're like Charlie Brown and the football.
I'm printing this out right now -- can't wait to read it tonight! Thanks for letting us know about this!
I've lived in various countries around the world. I would much rather live in a "moral and religious" society, regardless of the specific religion, than one where anything goes.
I'd like to have more time to read and check the sources on what to me is the most damming part of this. The money. The hospital management pushing for profits in the hormones and surgeries will result in more hormones and surgeries. It explains why the United States, with for profit medicine, is the world leader in affirmation, affirmation, affirmation. Even if a doctor doesn't want to go along the hospital management can exert substantial pressure on him or her. The drug companies are publicly traded, and at least some of their data will be in financial reports.
NATO = NORTH ATLANTIC TRANSGENDER ORGANIZATION
After the apocalypse of 1945, a number of global organizations have been formed with the aim of maintaining and expanding totalitarian liberalism. One of the earliest organizations formed for this purpose was the war alliance "North Atlantic Treaty Organization", or NATO, which can be seen as the military wing of globalism.
In addition to ensuring that Washington always has international support for its military campaigns, NATO as an institution is explicitly anti-white and explicitly dedicated to "racial justice" for racial aliens living in white countries. As early as 1999, NATO authored reports blaming nationalists for a number of modern problems and warning against the influence of nationalism.
In 2023, the war alliance held a summit at its headquarters in Brussels on race where the alliance's leaders pledged to fight "homogeneous attitudes" and to use NATO's "collective intelligence" for the purpose.
In fact, NATO is so dedicated to its anti-white agenda that it openly advocates that institutions must be reshaped to be "inclusive," in other words, restructured to be more anti-white, and consist of fewer white employees and executives.
https://nordfront.se/nato-en-antivit-och-familjefientlig-institution
Pedro is a hero!
It a just a pity that the left really was a democratic party for the people and not soloist leaning first and foremost AND that the right was rather a slightly conservative party to instill morals and ethics above bein gf driven by capitalist rhetoric. I think they all switched priorities somewhere... Also, a government was never supposed to govern what people believe, just protect the people, protect the borders, protect the assets and instill a safe and healthy environment.
I have quickly read through Transgender Leviathan and found it to be a pretty thorough treatment of the issue. But I was disappointed not to find an answer to one lingering question: why do insurance companies cover trans surgeries and hormones? In my experience, the health insurance company is always looking for ways to say "no" to any kind of treatment that is cosmetic in nature.
Here is a weird element someone on here pointed me toward:
"What is the Trans Agenda? - Questions For Corbett (video)"
https://www.corbettreport.com/what-is-the-trans-agenda-questions-for-corbett-video/
There are definitely some billionaires who back trans-humanism/synthetic sex identities
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
"Pritzker also created the first chair in transgender studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The current chair, Aaron Devor, founded an annual conference called Moving Trans History Forward, whose keynote speaker in 2016 was the renowned transhumanist, Martine Rothblatt, who was mentored by the transhumanist Ray Kurzweil of Google. Rothblatt lectured there on the value of creating an organization such as WPATH to serve “tech transgenders” in the cultivation of “tech transhumanists.” (Rothblatt’s ideology of disembodiment and technological religion seems to be having nearly as much influence on American culture as Sirius satellite radio, which Rothblatt co-founded.) Rothblatt is an integral presence at Out Leadership, a business networking arm of the LGBTQ+ movement, and appears to believe that “we are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful, and beneficent.”"
So, tons of billionaire money goes into pushing this.
Huh, that's such a good question. Also, why does the US military pay for it? Maybe it is about political pressure or posturing?
For sure patients are ignored when they are unhappy afterwards. I know of one piece of legislation which is about addressing that:
https://flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/952
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/02/22/how-will-the-trans-cult-react-to-this-proposed-bill-in-florida-n1672775
“Florida ‘Reverse Woke Act’ would make employers liable for detransition care”
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3868043-florida-reverse-woke-act-would-make-employers-liable-for-detransition-care/
On Page 4 of the referenced article, the author states: “...nearly one in five people ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender today...” with a footnote to a source from UCLA.
THIS STATEMENT IS PATENTLY FALSE. The source actually says this: “Nearly one in five people who identify as transgender are between the ages 13-17...”
Having found this one glaring error puts this entire paper in question. I wouldn’t rely on any of the information without checking the sources first.
There is a Pew research study from 2022 that supports a 5% number.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-say-their-gender-is-different-from-their-sex-assigned-at-birth/
I so wish for evidence based scientific consensus.
When the Pew research says “sex assigned at birth “, I bristle. Any research that uses those terms is in my view suspect. Why do they have to bow down to trans language?
We have to reach across the aisle on this issue. Real activists, activists who want to actually create change, compromise. They create coalitions. They are practical.
I’m on the left, but I’ll coalition with almost anyone to fight gender nonsense. I’m a feminist, but I’m thrilled that Ben Shapiro is a star right now. Once the threat to our kids is gone, I will go back to criticizing Shapiro and his ilk for what I view as sex-essentialist beliefs. But for now, I’m on his team.
I’m sorry but I think you’re being foolish. People like Tucker Carlson have spread baseless racist conspiracy theories and laughable misogynist claims about testosterone. They oppose transgender ideology because it looks left just like they oppose reproductive rights, LGB rights and they lie about elections because they aren’t winning. People like us have to carve out a left space for big questions about transgender claims not give way to the nasty right.
If Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union could find common ground to fight in the WWII, surely the two parties can in the current war.
Reaching across the aisle to find support amongst like minded people doesn't mean you support people like Tucker Carlson. Both sides need to band together. The media is just stoking divisiveness and I'm not going to fall for it.
I agree with reaching out and working alongside people with other political beliefs. I also find it really helpful to talk through things from another perspective than my own. And I think Tucker is a step way too far and he's willing to lie which is a big problem.
Awesome resource! Thank you for sharing it. I've downloaded it too!
Great. I have downloaded and will start reading. Maybe I will finally get an answer to the question that puzzles me: why have so many insurance companies agreed to cover transition pharmaceuticals and surgeries in the first place? They don't cover anything else that is remotely cosmetic . . .
For the US, the original rulemaking of HHS on section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act stipulated that "discrimination on the basis of sex" encompassed discrimination on the basis of gender identity. That was the root cause of most health plans being required to cover drugs, behavioral health treatment, and some medical treatments related to gender transition. The physician orders were documented as having medical necessity to treat a diagnosed condition. The rule was later changed, but many insurers/health plans did not remove the coverage after it was instated.
I'm also an activist for people who have been permanently disfigured from pit bull attacks. Insurance does not cover facial reconstruction for kids whose faces were mauled. They call it "cosmetic" rather than "functional". And, for years the pit bull activists have engaged in the same tactics trans activists do - getting people banned on social media, reporting them to their employers and getting them fired, etc. The pit bull activists have openly claimed they "have friends at Facebook" who protect them while censoring us.
Yes! I’ve noticed that pit bull activists can be pretty “in your face” as well. Such a weird thing to be so divided about.
Thanks for that information. It’s really interesting. Have you got any web links please?
An interesting note is one group of anti-pit bull advocates published an article several years ago in which they announced that most pit bull owners are Republicans. They got rationed so bad they deleted the article!
It’s easy to find a ton of groups on both sides of the pit bull issue on Facebook. Just search. Barbara Kay writes good articles. Here’s a newsletter: https://www.animals24-7.org/
I personally think this trans cult is more ideology than capitalism per se.
It is a broadside attack on our shared language and humanity. When realities like male and female are muddled linguistically, it throws a spanner into human cognition, never mind pronouns.
It is sponsored by the biggest capitalists in the world, the ones who can buy out the ACLU and Amnesty.
Ideology? More like a religion.
It's many things at the same time. Social media obsession and mass hysteria meet up with big pharmaceutical companies (who brought us the opioid crisis) they go on a double date with leftist victim politics and political polarization.
Some of the wealthiest people involved in funding transgender academics are Republicans. See J. Bilek for details. She’s pretty rightwing herself so there’s no bias there.
We may well be in the midst of a party realignment. In any successful revolution, the revolutionaries eventually become the new elites As the 60's radicals and their children have assumed control of most American institutions, they haven't shed their identification with the "oppressed and marginalized", but they have re-centered their oppression axis from class to race & sexuality. The former (class equity) would be a threat to their new power and wealth in a way that the latter (racial / sexual equity) is not, since performative behaviors allow them to become "allies" and therefore immune from criticism.
As this article says, DeSantis and Hawley and Gonzalez are pushing the Republicans to jettison their libertarian streak and assert a "common good and common sense" agenda that can slice through the sexual and racial groupings the Left uses to keep people atomized. Either the GOP will figure out how to unify poor rural whites and poor urban blacks under a single class-based platform, or it will be replaced. The latter prospect frightens me, since the successor party might well abandon the cross-race outreach and run on straight ethno-nationalism, which is really just a Right-wing version of Left-wing wokeness. It's not accidental that Richard Spencer (the white nationalist guru) and Ibram Kendi (the antiracism guru) both agree that race is the most important quality of any human being. their philosophies are mirror images of each other. Choosing between those two isn't even a "lesser of two evils" problem. It's just pick "the evil that doesn't want me dead" problem. For 90's liberals who were terrified of the Christian Right... wait until you meet his nasty cousin: the non-Christian Right.
I don't normally talk about this stuff here on PITT, but the whole trans issue is really just a subset of a much larger war between postmodernism and reality. Reality will eventually win. Reality always wins -- it's real. But models of unreality (like postmodernism) and false views of man (like communism) can do a lot of damage, especially while they're failing. Will there be anything left of Western Civilization when reality eventually reasserts itself? I honestly don't know, and I suspect it depends on how hard we push back now.
"the whole trans issue is really just a subset of a much larger war between postmodernism and reality."
Brian, I'm glad you mentioned that.
Because trans is NOT the end-game. There is no end-game. Trans is merely the latest in a line of bizarre inventions intended to go on forever.
We may defeat trans. I hope we defeat trans. But defeating trans is not enough. We have to understand the roots of trans well enough to defeat (or prevent) the NEXT abomination. Thank you for helping to do that.
Sorry but I thought the Republican Party was already running on straight ethno-nationalism with a dash of reproductive misogyny. There is no larger war between postmodernism and reality. Postmodernism is a somewhat unimportant philosophy, just as is your conception of "Western Civilisation".
Material and economic reality is, as you sort of acknowledge, the most important thing. Perhaps if you were talking about that your post would seem more relevant to the impact of trans ideology on young people and the level of support they have received.
Go listen to Richard Spencer (if you can stomach him) and tell me honestly that you think the mainstream core of the Republican party embraces ethno-nationalism. Are there kooks that do? Sure. There are kooks in every group of people. But they don't even run the populist branch of the party, and the populist branch still doesn't run the party yet -- look at the problems Josh Hawley or JD Vance have had implementing their populist agenda even within the GOP. Ethno-nationalism is still fringe on the Right, just not quite as fringe as it used to be, and that's what's scary to me.
I wish very much that you were right about postmodernism being irrelevant to this issue. I wish it was a "somewhat unimportant philosophy" (as you call it). However, it is not. To see an example of the connection to trans: Why is it that trans advocates will go all-in to defend slicing the private parts off children? It is politically unpopular and given any remotely accurate model of the world, obviously absurd: the same child can't get a tattoo without Mom's permission. So why are they willing to die on that hill? Postmodernism.
The core assumption of postmodernism is that reality is constructed by the way we describe it -- the real world is either nonexistent or at least inaccessible to us. That's what they mean when they say something (like sex for example) is "a social construction". But if words actually create reality, then using the wrong words can be violently disruptive of reality, hence "offensive words = violence". If words create reality, screaming "trans-women are women" over and over makes total sense, you're literally "saving the world". If words create reality, refusing to use someone's made-up pronouns is actually "denying their existence" and could be considered an criminal assault (in England and Canada both, this legal change has already been made.) And if words create reality, a 12 year old girl who says she's a boy... actually becomes a boy by that declaration. Refusing to acknowledge the 12 year old as a boy would imply that there IS, in fact, a real world. That our words aren't CREATING a subjective reality but struggling to DESCRIBE an objective reality, however imperfectly (as most philosophies stretching back to Plato -- the origin of Western Civilization BTW -- have believed). The vigor and violence of trans advocates can only be explained by postmodernism; it makes no sense otherwise. I'm not saying that all trans proponents realize this. We're all woven from philosophical threads that we only loosely comprehend, but postmodernism is a core thread for trans advocates, whether they know it or not.
As I said, I wish trans kids were just this weird outlier that could be defeated and everything would go back to normal. I think that's wishful thinking. But even if you and I completely disagree on the underlying philosophical basis of the trans movement, hopefully we do agree that it needs to be defeated.
🤦🏻♀️
Thank you for this thoughtful comment. I am all for the Sanity Party wherever it resides.
This post captures my feelings perfectly: https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/official-endorsement-for-president
Either that or the bumper sticker my 15 year old daughter has on our refrigerator: "Obi Wan 2024: He's our only hope."
Love it!! Both of them. ;)
Or you're either on "Team Normal" or "Team Crazy", to put it succinctly.
Oh good! Maybe the idea can get some traction.
Yesss! Reality will always win! We must insist on this.
The lobotomy EUGENICS transgender trifecta is conspiratorial nonsense. I don’t support transgender ideology but this kind of free associating fantasy belongs with Qanon. The anti-VAXers have shown that it is possible to have pages of references With absolutely no serious research content. Please don’t go down the rabbit holes people. Stay with facts and real connections. Sorry they are hard to understand and follow not simple like conspiracy thinking.
I'm sure Martine Rothblatt and Jennifer Pritzker are quite happy that you won't dig deeper into their motives and distribution of 'charity'.
That's real facts and connections by the way.
I guess you are the Liberal LaLa Lunatic here to tell us all about why we are wrong.
Liberal wackadoodle lunatics are the drivers of the trannie insanity.
I'm not trying to pick fights here, ever. The trans movement does have the surgical treatment for mental health issues in common with the lobotomy craze which fell out of disfavor after a while. I don't think noticing that is conspiracy theory. If I were to play with that fire, I'd guess Russian or Chinese efforts to destabilize western governments are helping push this online.
The promotion of trans on platforms largely owned by China like Tik tok should be suspect to any discerning nose.
"Though written by someone decidedly on the right, Leviathan is comprehensive and fair..."
The word "though" makes it seem like an incongruity. It's not.
I'm surprised that no mention was made of the fact that Gonzalez is an Hispanic name. Don't folks on the right get victim points, too? That would only be fair!
The concept of "divide and conquer" is at least as old as Julius Caesar, and most likely older than him.
Sane liberals and sane conservatives need to be allies. It's also a special joy when I see someone like liberal feminist Naomi Wolf on conservative shows like Steve Deace or Steve Bannon.
They want us infighting with each other while they take over.
Sane liberals and sane conservatives....the one thing that has been refreshing for me regarding gender ideology is seeing parents from the left and parents from the right finding compassion for each other and shedding party polarization in order to fight a common enemy.
There's really only one party. I think it's orchestrated so the Democrats pull the country to the Left and the Republicans only pretend to slow them down. So no matter who you vote for you get the same results.
James Lindsay put out a very interesting postulation about Abortion. He said it is a mistake to think there are two sides to the Abortion issue. There are actually three sides. But the third side masquerades in one of the others.
The sides are this:
Pro-life: Life is precious in all its form and abortion squelches out a life. Therefore, it should never be allowed.
Pro-choice: Life is precious, but there are circumstances where abortion is the better alternative for the new born. Such as: The baby is born with a genetic disease that ensures it will die within a week. Or the baby is the product of rape or incest.
Then there is the third.
Gnostic position: It is unfair that women are born into a body that produces life and gets pregnant. No woman asked to be born with such a body. To have full freedom a woman must have full control over her body and her life. She should not have to have a baby in her womb if she doesn't want to. She should not have to raise a child if she doesn't want to. Abortion should be legal all the way up to the moment of birth, or even after birth.
If we look at it this way, Pro-Life and Pro-Choice have more in common that they think. But the Gnostic position has disguised itself in the pro-choice camp. It completely negates the child at all. Even the pro-life position may acknowledge the tragedy of the choice, but the gnostic position jettisons all that, with only the will of the mother as the concerning variable.
This is absolutely correct. I'm in the pro-life camp and have been involved in the moment my entire life, even as a child.
The biggest problem for the Pro-Life movement is that Dem voters who wanted a much less extreme abortion policy and firmly rejected the "Gnostic" position on abortion, rejected any association with Pro-Lifers like me and wouldn't even consider voting for a Pro-Life, or "restrict abortion" candidate that was a Republican. Yet, from Roe V Wade even to today, the strong majority of voters want some restrictions and do not support the "Gnostic" position which is abortion on demand, for any reason, at any time. However, most Dem voters did not know and still don't know that the majority of Dem office holders and abortion rights activist groups support the "Gnostic" position. I've had lawyers scream at me and tell me that abortion is only available in the first term of gestation and were absolutely clueless that abortions can even happen after birth to a healthy and normal infant.
I see the same thing dynamic forming around the transgender issue.
Camp One: I am firmly in the sex binary camp. I believe gender flows from biological sex and is never in contradiction to it. I believe actual medically intersexed people have nothing in common with the trans cult ideology or gender expression. For the record, No, I would not support transitioning young adults either because the transcult is obviously targeting vulnerable and confused young adults. I think it is horrible for families when a middle aged man or woman comes out as transgender but I am less inclined to activism about the gender binary on their behalf, however, I still believe this is wrong, at any age.
Camp Two: The sheer numbers of those young people transitioning cannot possibly be organic. They are being manipulated for the most part and the protocols for recommending any medical transition should have more gatekeeping. Children especially should not be given puberty blockers or gender affirming care. There are a few cases of actual gender dysphoria in children and adults but they are rare and those people should have access to medical transitions but only after all other issues are addressed.
Camp Three: Destroy the gender binary! No gatekeeping at all. The solution to every teenage angst is transitioning the child to the opposite sex and getting them medicalized as soon as possible. Children should be removed from the parents' care if the parents are hesitant.
There is only one way to destroy Camp Three and that's for Camp Two to align with Camp One. I do not believe that will happen though because Camp Two is mostly Dem voters and Cam One is mostly Republican voters. Camp Two has animosity and deep antipathy to Camp One based on our political polarization that will keep Camp Two away from Camp One. Meanwhile, Camp Three will have an easy and direct line to push their narrative, malign Camp One and use propaganda to keep Camp Two thinking that "reasonable approaches" will prevail eventually.
You hit it on the nose. That's part of the reason many of James Lindsay's lectures now talk about gnosticism.
What does the pro-gnostic view in both Abortion and Transgenderism have in common?
The answer is they are both a denial of physical realities and say that both should be subordinate to our Will, right or wrong.
Lindsay's argument is this is not new. This is, in fact, a modern manifestation of a very ancient religious cult.
An excellent example is to look at Gnosticism reexplaining the Garden of Eden.
Imagine that G-d is not a loving creator that loves his world and the people He created to live on the world. Imagine, instead, that G-d is a prison warder, a jailer. He made the world as a prison to punish and torture souls, kicking and screaming into physical bodies against their wishes.
Now imagine the serpent showing the way out. "Eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And you will be LIKE G-D. Then YOU will determine good and evil. YOU will be the one to decide.
The Serpent was the original Gnostic. His sales pitch to Eve was that G-d was lying to them about the fruit. G-d didn't want them to eat the fruit was not out of love, but out of fear of competition. And the way to rebel against this tyrant was to eat the fruit and assume his role.
Whenever we deal with reality we are dealing with the rules G-d set down. Water is wet, fire is hot, people need food and water to live, men and women are different yet need each other, because they both have a part the other needs.
They want to break ALL of that. There's no male or female. Water can be dry. People can eat grasshoppers and be just as well as off as if they ate steak. Children are bad for the environment. And all the related madness.
It's anti-reality, because they want to set reality on their own terms -- which makes them into gods. Or so they believe.
Reality has a way of snapping back. No matter how convinced you are that wearing the red Superman cape will let you fly, once you jump off the building and hit the pavement, reality can be very convincing.
But millions of people can die before they figure it out. It's happened before.
"The moderator started everything off with a little cheer about breaking the binary." yep. This is the only part that scares me. We can already see the human debris littered along the paths of those who follow this "Gnostic" vision. It can get far, far worse.
I'm sure those in the early days of Leninist Bolshevism, the sane thought to themselves, it'll all sort itself out soon. This can't continue It didn't. It went from bad to worse, than Stalin, then purges and show trials, famine and WWII.
Most everyone in the Weimer Republic believed an end to the economic depression and the perversions overtaking Germany would soon end because it just couldn't continue. It got worse, much much worse. First the street fighting, then the putsch, then the brownshirts, than the SS, night of the bloody knives, Nuremberg laws, Kristalnacht, WWII, the holocaust and Germany ended up pulled apart into two countries.
I do believe hope is important and yes, eventually, hope is not in vain and the truth and love win. The problem is, how many will be destroyed and will we as a nation survive until truth and love win. Will History even remember us? Will there even be history when we pull out of this?
Vaclev Benda was a anti-communist dissident in Czechoslovakia. He and his wife were devout Roman Catholics. However, they had to make common cause with free-love, pot-smoking hippies who also hated communism. (Yes, there were hippies in Eastern Europe too.)
This is what we must learn to do, and I include myself in that "we". If this insanity is to be stopped, it will require people like me being willing to vote for a non-woke socialist or sane progressives being willing to vote for a non-woke Christian conservative.
Precisely
Thank you! Now I'm hoping there's a Spanish version as well. I work with the Hispanic population and am distressed with the lack of info. Anyone have suggestions about this, please let me know.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." - John Adams
Conservatives will be the first to tell you that most Republican lawmakers are more interested in power, money, and being on TV than representing conservative constituents. We're like Charlie Brown and the football.
I'm printing this out right now -- can't wait to read it tonight! Thanks for letting us know about this!
I think all of the classical liberal philosophers/economists thought that even when they were not religious themselves.
I've lived in various countries around the world. I would much rather live in a "moral and religious" society, regardless of the specific religion, than one where anything goes.
Well said. I'm not religious at all, but geez, I miss religion in this country.
"Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you got 'till it's gone..."
Try getting that song outta your head! Enjoy the earworm, friends!
I've always loved Joni Mitchell. Such a great song that she wrote!
😂 Earworm, indeed.
Me, as well.
I'd like to have more time to read and check the sources on what to me is the most damming part of this. The money. The hospital management pushing for profits in the hormones and surgeries will result in more hormones and surgeries. It explains why the United States, with for profit medicine, is the world leader in affirmation, affirmation, affirmation. Even if a doctor doesn't want to go along the hospital management can exert substantial pressure on him or her. The drug companies are publicly traded, and at least some of their data will be in financial reports.
the hospitals need perfect CEI & ESG scores to get their funding, pushed by the WEF.