Feminists who have raised concerns about the transgender cult deserve the support of all decent people, and conservatives ought not to withhold that support because of ideological differences. When you’re at war, you need allies, and if Churchill could make an alliance with Stalin for the sake of defeating Hitler, then I see no reason why conservatives and feminists can’t make an alliance to defeat the transgender cult.

How many issues do I agree with Magdalen Berns about? Probably very few, but THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A LESBIAN WITH A PENIS!

“Lesbians don’t have penises. . . . If you’re born with a penis and [testicles], you’re male. You don’t get ‘assigned’ reproductive organs. Males are defined by their biological sex organs. Likewise, a homosexual is someone who’s attracted to members of the same biological sex. . . . Males can’t be lesbians.”

— Magdalen Berns

Where do weirdos like Riley Dennis and Zinnia Jones get the idea, first of all, that they can “identify” as female and demand that the rest of us accept this identification as legitimate? But having once made that leap beyond the bounds of biological reality, how do these deranged people then have the effrontery to call themselves “lesbians”? Well, this is the logical conclusion of the “gender equality” argument.

Why did the Supreme Court rule that VMI could not continue as an all-male institution? Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority decision invoked the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment, but that amendment said nothing whatsoever about “gender equality.” The 14th Amendment was intended to protect the rights of the former slaves whose freedom had been won as a consequence of a war fought by all-male armies, and the amendment was ratified by all-male legislators in an age when women did not even have the right to vote. More to the point, when feminists had attempted to enshrine “gender equality” in the Constitution, legislators had rejected the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. What Justice Ginsburg and the Supreme Court majority were doing, in the case of United States v. Virginia Military Institute, was nullifying the democratic process for the sake of a “progressive” ideology that the American electorate had never embraced.

Let’s quote the opening paragraph of Justice Scalia’s dissent:

Much of the Court’s opinion is devoted to deprecating the closed mindedness of our forebears with regard to women’s education, and even with regard to the treatment of women in areas that have nothing to do with education. . . . The virtue of a democratic system with a First Amendment is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly. That system is destroyed if the smug assurances of each age are removed from the democratic process and written into the Constitution. So to counterbalance the Court’s criticism of our ancestors, let me say a word in their praise: they left us free to change. The same cannot be said of this most illiberal Court, which has embarked on a course of inscribing one after another of the current preferences of the society (and in some cases only the counter majoritarian preferences of the society’s law trained elite) into our Basic Law. Today it enshrines the notion that no substantial educational value is to be served by an all men’s military academy — so that the decision by the people of Virginia to maintain such an institution denies equal protection to women who cannot attend that institution but can attend others. Since it is entirely clear that the Constitution of the United States — the old one — takes no sides in this educational debate, I dissent.

Exactly so. At some point during the 20th century, those whom Justice Scalia called “the society’s law trained elite” reached a consensus that anything done in the name of “equality” was good, and that all opposition was bad. It is unjust “discrimination” to believe that all-male institutions serve a useful purpose, and if the state of Virginia cannot be permitted to maintain an all-male military academy . . .?

FACT: Riley Dennis is the reason Donald Trump won the election. https://t.co/m0YoCQ7Khy pic.twitter.com/01znn5boq4 — The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 28, 2017

It may seem like a strange leap from the VMI case to a perverted idiot like Riley Dennis claiming to be a lesbian with a penis, but the premise of “gender equality” leads inevitably to such a syllogism. This was obvious to me in 2009, in regard to the same-sex marriage issue:

Are men and women equal in the fullest sense of the word? If so, then equality implies fungibility — the two things are interchangeable and one may be substituted for the other in any circumstance whatsoever. (La mort à la différence!) Therefore, it is of no consequence whether I marry a woman or a man. . . .

This is why so many of those who would defend traditional marriage find themselves unable to form a coherent argument, because traditional marriage is based on the assumption that men and women are fundamentally different, and hence, unequal. Traditional marriage assumes a complementarity of the sexes that becomes absurd if you deny that “man” and “woman” define intrinsic traits, functions, roles.

To declare men and women unequal, however, puts one outside the law — you are guilty of illegal discrimination if you say that there is any meaningful difference between men and women. Yet if you refuse to argue against sexual equality, you cannot argue effectively against gay marriage . . .

Far be it from me to dictate to others how they organize their domestic lives. My own marriage isn’t Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver or any other 1950s situation-comedy model of “tradition,” yet the basic roles of husband and wife, mother and father have a way of scripting themselves according to circumstances and human nature. The idea of complementarity is to combine counter-balancing forces, male and female, in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Specialization, division of labor, economies of scale — these are logical advantages of a well-ordered family life, and it is a dangerous error to imagine that we can remodel family life in the name of “equality” without undermining the stability of the structure.

My oldest daughter married a wonderful man, who has devotedly performed his equal share of domestic duties. They recently had their first child, however, and I can confidently predict that, as my daughter stays home to care for their newborn, she will inevitably find herself doing a larger share of the household chores, while her husband works longer hours at the office to pay the bills, and their marriage will thus tend toward a more traditional division of labor, at least until such time as their baby (and any future offspring) is ready to start school.

No matter how committed a couple may be to an ideal of “equality,” the natural division of labor in family life is implicit in human biology, and only a fool would resent this arrangement as unfair. As pleasant as it might be to imagine a world where everyone can do whatever they please in a utopia where money grows on trees — where there are no electric bills or mortgage payments to worry about, no diapers to be changed or dishes to be washed — we do not live in such a world, and find ourselves constrained to live within limitations. We have duties we cannot escape, especially if we believe that the responsibility of caring for our children cannot be outsourced to government bureaucrats (which everybody should believe). As the welfare state has expanded, however, many have forgotten this sense of duty, which is why divorce is so rampant and 40% of the nation’s children are born to unmarried women.

“If Americans can be divorced for ‘incompatibility of temper’ I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.”

— G.K. Chesterton, 1910

You may not see how this discussion of marriage is relevant to the claims of the transgender cult, or to the Supreme Court’s 1996 VMI ruling, but the elite’s commitment to radical notions of “gender equality” has opened Pandora’s Box, from which a spirit of chaos has emerged. Permit me to enunciate a simple truth of human nature:

Men and women are different

in ways that are socially significant.

Commit that sentence to memory — it rhymes, and is easy to remember — and you will never succumb to the error of “gender equality.”

"Let's create a student group for sexually confused teenagers, because what could possibly go wrong?" https://t.co/0DEqtr39N1 cc @4th_WaveNow @conservativelez pic.twitter.com/JIRpz136S1 — The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 27, 2017

A major reason why feminists battling the transgender cult find themselves in such difficulties is that the feminist movement has spent the past half-century arguing for an ideal of “gender equality” based on a belief that there are no meaningful differences between men and women. Having made equality the first premise of their syllogism, however, feminists claim to be startled by the conclusion — lesbians with penises! And they are further dismayed that young women are getting their breasts amputated and injecting themselves with testosterone in order to become a Frankenstein’s monster simulacrum of a “male.”

In a free society, I cannot forbid others from “the pursuit of happiness,” but neither can I be forbidden to call insanity by its right name. What has happened, under the regime of “equality,” however, is that our right to free speech is being infringed if we express sentiments (or make reference to facts) that contradict whatever fashionable notion of “equality” the progressive elite may endorse at any given time. We are supposed to condemn as “hate speech” the concerns of parents like Susan Nagel:

About a year ago my then 16-year–old daughter told us she believes she is transgender. Soon after, she began begging to take testosterone, to wear a breast binder, to have others call her by male pronouns, and to legally change her name. . . . Over the course of a month or two after coming out, she changed from a generally cheerful person to a morose one who spent hours crying and who told me to hide the knives.. . .

I am a liberal, and I fully support equal access to housing, employment, education, and healthcare for all marginalized people, including transgender people. I do not think being transgender is immoral or that gender diversity is disturbing. Still after spending many sleepless nights researching the transgender movement, I have come to be very afraid for my daughter. . . .

I encounter many well-meaning people who believe the transgender movement is simply a civil rights movement. They do not understand my concerns and assume I am ignorant or a bigot. I think it is because most people’s knowledge of the transgender movement is limited to mass media accounts focusing on discrimination against transgender people or on an individual’s struggle to be true to his or her self. . . .

I am shocked by how readily some friends accept the idea of using synthetic hormones for the purpose of transitioning teenagers. Some of these people avoid drinking milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormone and avoid eating inorganic vegetables or food tainted by genetically modified organisms. If teenagers ingest risky chemicals for politically correct reasons, is the harm is somehow reduced? . . .

You can read the whole thing. The point is that concerns about the transgender cult are spreading, as more and more young people are being recruited by a network of online sites that present “transition” as a panacea that can cure whatever it is an unhappy teenager is unhappy about. These concerns involve rapid-onset gender dysphoria and the ways in which peer pressure can create a transgender social contagion.

What we are witnessing is a new appreciation of enduring truths about human nature among women whose feminist commitment to progressive ideals of “gender equality” had blinded them to reality. It’s rather like the way the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939 shattered the Popular Front.

In which @MagdalenBerns instructs Riley Dennis in basic biology. pic.twitter.com/oq9fAnYmHg — The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) December 28, 2017

This brings us back to Magdalen Berns, who holds a physics degree from the University of Edinburgh and describes herself as “a critic of religion, capitalism, identity politics, conservatism, neoliberalism and socially imposed gender norms.” She’s no right-winger, in other words, yet she is fighting the same “social justice warrior” (SJW) mentality that was exposed in 2014 by the #GamerGate activists. And what a pugnacious fighter she is! It would seem that SJWs have reached their Stalingrad, so to speak, and radical feminists like Magdalen Berns are the Red Army, ferociously defending the embattled city against the onslaught.

Give me such fighters as allies, I say, and I will not quibble with them over ideological differences, so long as the war continues.







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