This is the most vulnerable, guilt-inducing, scary and uncomfortable writing I have shared openly to date. Yet these feelings are eclipsed by a recognition that this isn’t talked about, and I want there to be at least one more voice out there. Even though what I experienced is in a small minority, perhaps it’ll resonate with someone who needs to be validated in the way I never was.
When I was eleven, I started to desire being spanked. Not erotically, but as punishment, like my step-dad would do to me. In anger, with a hand, over the knee, with my pants pulled down for the worst offenses, and excruciating. I feared what I wanted: I was terrified of his blows, yet still wanted ones just like his.
The development of my desire for spankings was before I was sexually conscious, so at the time it was just something I really liked. I would look up the word “spanking” in the dictionary. I would invent stories where I was sent to facilities with spanking machines. I spanked my plush toys. I envied medieval whipping boys. I asked my best friend spank me in my parent’s basement, which he obliged. Meanwhile I was petrified of my step-dad actually hitting me.
The summer I turned thirteen my dad was dating an emotionally unstable woman. When she threatened a spanking in the car on a vacation, I egged her on to do it. Once we got to the hotel she ordered me on the bed and gave me a few light taps. I was disappointed. I had wanted it to hurt. Later in the summer, something else happened, and I asked her to spank me. She approached my dad, who then asked me if I had said that. I denied it. I ended up running away from there when she went to beat me with a horse whip at the end of the summer.
My step-dad last threatened a “spanking” when I was eleven, though when I was fifteen he gave a neighbour permission to spank me while he was on a vacation with my mom in Europe. My neighbour had an incredulous look reading the letter out loud that informed him of this; I just looked down and said “yeah”. At home my step-dad had replaced spankings with threats of kicking my ass, usually to silence my anger. I needed to let those emotions out and adapted at first by smiling, but that only made him worse. I finally took to hitting my head in my room. While his last threat to kick my ass was when I was sixteen, I didn’t stop fearing his anger until I was twenty.
At twenty-one, I had my first consensual spanking as an adult. In the same encounter, I was also sexually assaulted. I had been trained I couldn’t say no, and so when he fingered me without asking, I just took it. That began a realisation that I did not like sex. I would come to like the intimacy it gave me with my partner, and the satisfaction of giving myself to my partner, but not the sex itself. The only thing that got me off was thinking of spanking. Spanking was my sexual orientation. But it went beyond sexuality; I needed to be spanked as punishment for real errors. This differed from all other descriptions of adulthood spankings I had heard, in which it was for play and sexual intimacy. Even in D/s dynamics. This wasn’t play for me. It wasn’t sexual in this way. I craved real non-consensual spankings. If I did anything wrong, even if I had made amends and was forgiven, I had great difficulty tolerating myself. Physical punishment felt like the only release valve to make the world feel right again.
I came to figure that my desire for spankings was my body’s way of adapting to an environment in which a parent was inflicting incredible pain on me regularly. Had his spankings been more like my birth mom’s or my dad’s girlfriend – a few light taps more meant to register displeasure than to hurt me – I doubt this adaptation would have developed. It didn’t take a lot to get spanked by my step-dad: if I didn’t go to the bath with enough enthusiasm, if I asked him to help me find something and he found it first, etc. I have felt guilt for developing this spanking paraphilia when my experiences weren’t that bad compared to others. This shame is still there, but less so, with the assurances of my last therapist that such a profound reaction is not out of the ordinary for sensitive children.
At the end of my twenties, I dated a person who was spanked harshly growing up. She also developed a desire in childhood for pain, but inverted, as the person who inflicted it. We had a lot of kinky play sessions, where she gave me spankings in the style of my step-dad only amped up. She spanked me with a belt, overcoming my teenage fears of it. Later, at my request, she gave me two real spankings. These were for misdeeds in our relationship and were not for play. The anticipation, pain, and ensuing relief felt amazing for me, despite being a genuine moment of accountability. She, however, cried afterwards both times. She explained later that she felt like the spankings silenced her and prevented her from expressing the pain with my initial actions. It put her in a one-sided parental role. We talked more about it, and she made me realise that being spanked like this was incompatible with emotional growth of both partners. This is not what I wanted. I had worked very hard in my twenties to undo the effects of my upbringing in my relationships and diminished emotional regulation and wanted to keep progressing.
When the next person I dated, who also spanked me for play, ended the relationship citing she felt she had taken on a parental role, that made me question what had become my sexual orientation. There were other reasons why that relationship ended related to that comment, but this was nonetheless a remark that hit close to this mess of emotions and conflicted desires around spanking.
One of the therapists I saw suggested I could move on by masturbating to conventional porn. I tried. It was honestly like trying to get off to a piece of toast. I only get turned on from fantasies of being spanked. What will my life be if these desires persist, and remain unfulfilled for the sake of healthy relationships?
I’m still conflicted. Part of this is trauma reenactment, not trauma play, yet I have nothing else to replace it with to fulfill the sexual void. And moving forward in life, without physical punishment for my mistakes, is like moving forward with a big weight attached to me. Up until recently I didn’t think anyone else could relate. This was so unlike anything I had heard described online. Google searches yielded articles about the harms of childhood spankings, or porn, or taken in hand / domestic discipline blogs, but nothing like this.
That’s changed recently. I have found stories of other people like me. These make me feel less isolated by letting me know that I haven’t been the only one to experience this. While I’m not yet aware of a way to move forward with this affliction, this talk helps validate and process. Maybe one day I’ll be able to manage this in a way that is more satisfying to me. I’ve included passages from their stories below:
When my parents were kids, when they misbehaved they had to pick out their own switch. They weren’t quite so harsh with me, but I was spanked whenever I did something wrong.
It fucked me up. I always feel guilty for everything wrong I do, even if I apologize and whomever I wronged accepted the apology, I still feel like I need physical punishment or else it cannot be forgiven. In the real world that is really Not Fucking Normal, so I continually feel guilt over things that have happened literally six or more years ago, because I was conditioned as a child that true absolution of a wrong is receiving physical punishment.
I was very young when the fantasies began—no older than six or seven. It’s hard for me to remember a time when I wasn’t aroused by images, descriptions or fantasies of being spanked, hit, or beaten. However, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that the physical sensations I had been experiencing since I was a small child had anything to do with sex.
In the other fantasies, there was finally someone who punished me out of love, the way my pastor said they should—someone who genuinely hated causing me pain, but did it because they loved me so very deeply. This was always a man whom I admired, trusted, and desired to please (unlike my father). I always felt deeply ashamed of my need to be punished, but willingly subjected myself to his loving blows. In these fantasies I felt safer, happier, and more loved than I ever did in real life. This was the closest thing to emotional intimacy that fit into my worldview.
Real life spankings were terrifying, painful and humiliating. Why did I willingly relive them over and over and over again? Still, it never entered my mind to think that my physical reaction was not a normal response to fear, guilt and shame.
I became incredibly conflicted about sex. I loved the physical sensations and feeling so close to my husband, but the only way to climax was to allow the images of abuse to flood through my mind whenever I started to feel aroused.
I strongly believe that frequent spankings and the message that love requires causing pain to the object of one’s love—both of which are so prevalent in conservative homeschooling circles—played a significant role in the development of this disorder. After all, who could ever think that repeatedly hitting a child on an erogenous zone of the body would not have a sexual impact?
I began to imagine being spanked to arouse myself (though it’s weird to type the word “arouse” since I had no grasp of what was even happening). I pictured myself being forced to strip, doing things that I hated, that made me feel sick, vulnerable, and ashamed, feeling the burning hits on my bottom. I imagined it in vivid detail as I would touch my little five year old body. Yes, you read that right: five. Maybe I imagined it even earlier than that – I don’t remember. But it went on for years.
Before I knew the slightest thing about sexuality I’d already spent nearly ten years masturbating to the equivalent of BDSM fantasies — all inspired by the spankings I endured.
My parents really did love me and I know they were only spanking me because they thought that’s what God wanted them to do. Would they even believe me now if I told them? I don’t blame them as much as I blame the generally held belief among fundamentalist Christians that if you spank your children nothing will go wrong. Something went very wrong with me.
The worst part of getting spanked was never the humiliation or the pain or the endless guilt and self-loathing or even the forced hugs and prayers. The worst part was that every single time I got spanked, I would get turned on. A lot of people hear this and say something along the lines of, “Well that is why you should never spank someone past puberty.” I have news for you. It didn’t start at puberty. If it had, I might have been able to understand that it was something sexual or weird. It started by my earliest memories of being spanked. I remember it every time I remember getting spanked. I just thought it was part of the deal. It wasn’t until I learned about sexual arousal as an adult that I understood it.
By 8 I was sneaking my mother’s parenting books, looking up the word spanking in the encyclopedia and dictionary. Anytime someone was spanked in a book I would read it over and over and over. I wanted to discuss spankings for hours with my friends, but they didn’t have the same response as me. I did not connect it as something sexual until my late teens/early 20’s.
Eventually, I found “Christian Domestic Discipline” sites where the husbands would spank and punish their wives in other ways. Again I felt relief and happiness that I was not alone, and there were not children involved, so maybe I wasn’t actually a pedophile — just a freak.
I had incredibly strict parents and was spanked until I left for college (that’s a whole other subject that probably needs to be addressed). Now when I think back to some of those spankings, I get really turned on and would love to reenact them basically exactly as they happened with someone I love and trust. My husband gets along well with my parents and other than knowing that I was spanked growing up, he’s doesn’t know how often and how late I was spanked. … Nothing was abusive, per se, but it was definitely not normal and probably the reason I’ve sexualized it.
My whole life, I’ve been obsessed with spanking. Spanking occupies the place in my life that sex occupies in the lives of most people: As a child, it’s what I was curious about; as an adult, it’s the only thing I fantasize about and the only thing that satisfies me.
Sex [to me], as I write in the book, is like masturbating to the thought of toothpaste. I just don’t care about sex. Spanking occupies that space in my life in every way.
The fact is, by the time I was 3 or 4 or 5, certainly by the age of 10, spanking was a sex act to me. My body and my mind experienced it as such, so when this happened to me non-consensually, something sexual was happening to me non-consensually. And that’s how I reacted.
While there are thousands of peer reviewed articles and a multitude of medical organisations that support the acceptance of trans people, there are also a handful of articles and medical professionals that are in opposition. Yet this handful is over-represented in newspapers and television. After hearing mental health professionals inquire about both the Swedish Study and Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria at a training session, I thought I’d address them here.
How Opponents Use It: “A 2011 long term Swedish study that followed a 30-year trajectory of 324 people who had sex reassignment surgery found that suicide rates 10 years after surgery were 20 times that of the non-trans population… Surely it is the government’s first responsibility to try to prevent suicides rather than to validate emotive claims made by those least capable of assessing their condition with objectivity.” Source.
The leading author of the 2011 study, Cecilia Dhejne, has also spoken out against the interpretation of her research by opponents. She said “People who misuse the study always omit the fact that the study clearly states that it is not an evaluation of gender dysphoria treatment. If we look at the literature, we find that several recent studies conclude that WPATH Standards of Care compliant treatment decrease gender dysphoria and improves mental health.”
How Opponents Use It: “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 . According to the study, parents say that many girls 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. While the incidence of gender dysphoria in the general population is quite low – less than 1 per cent – it’s not uncommon for two or more girls in the same friendship group – or even half of them – to begin to identify as transgender. ROGD also spreads by social media according to Dr. Littman; some parents describe their daughters binge-watching YouTube transition videos.” Source.
What’s Wrong About It: The study did not speak to or collect any data from trans youth for this paper on trans youth. The author surveyed 256 parents recruited from websites advocating against the acceptance of trans youth. The children described were 82% assigned female at birth and some were as old as 27. The author appears to conflate the gender dysphoria being new to the parent as being new to the child, calling it rapid onset gender dysphoria.
Following criticism, PLOS One, the journal that published the paper, released a statement stating that it would “seek further expert assessment on the study’s methodology and analyses. We will provide a further update once we have completed our assessment and discussions.”
Brown University, where the study’s author is based, released its own statement saying “After the research paper was published in the Journal PLOS ONE, concerns were raised about the paper’s research design and methodology by leading academics in the field… Given the concerns about research design and methods — not the controversial nature of the subject — the University decided to stop featuring this news story on its news site.”
How Opponents Invoke Them: “Let’s say it were possible to take a 10-year-old kid and make them either a well-adjusted lesbian or turn them into a female-to-male transsexual,” Blanchard told Rogan. “I don’t see anything wrong with saying it’s better to make this kid into a lesbian, because being a lesbian doesn’t require breast amputation, the construction of a not-very-convincing false penis, and a lifetime of testosterone shots.” Source.
“We urge them to say, ‘Let’s figure out what other things you can do besides play with that doll,’” Zucker says. “In some situations, we have to work hard with parents’ own issues about gender. Could be a mother who’s had difficulty with the men in her life and has a lot of mixed feelings toward men. That gets translated to the boy, and her fear that he’ll grow up to be like those men causes him to reject being a boy.” Source.
“The trans movement is crossing ethical lines with a particularly vulnerable subset of young people struggling with issues of gender identity,” writes Susan Bradley. “A recent article by Elise Ehrhard in Crisis Magazine, a Catholic periodical, addresses the aggressive approach by adult trans activists in recruiting adolescents with Asperger’s Syndrome or other types of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to their cause.” Source.
In 2016, The New Atlantis published McHugh’s article “Sexuality and Gender“. The current faculty at John Hopkins disavowed McHugh’s article citing that it “was not published in the scientific literature, where it would have been subject to rigorous peer review prior to publication” and that it “mischaracterizes the current state of the science on sexuality and gender.” While The New Atlantis purports to be a scientific journal, it is not peer reviewed, was founded by the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, and publishes articles like “The Population Control Holocaust” in apparent reference to birth control and abortion.
How Opponents Invoke Him: “HRC and other pro-LGBTQ organizations are trying to discredit McHugh because he is the most respected medical and psychiatric authority debunking transsexual “gender change” ideology, which includes recommending “sex reassignment” surgical reconstructions — even minors —of healthy sexual organs to imitate body characteristics of the opposite sex.” Source.
What’s The Deal: Previous to Jordan Peterson, arguments against trans rights centered around the bathroom predator myth. As the sexual predator argument was losing steam in the face of increasing acceptance for trans people, Peterson popularized a new argument: that human rights legislation would require people to use the right pronouns for non-binary individuals. He wrote of pronouns, “These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.” Peterson has never researched trans people.
How Opponents Invoke Him: “In the later years of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, the government made it compulsory for people to use the “Heil Hitler” salute in all public greetings. They risked prosecution, arrest and even death for refusing to do so… Prof. Peterson is facing intense criticism from students, professors and administrators for saying he will not use genderless pronouns (such as “they”) to refer to transgender students, if asked. … Forcing members of private organizations to call transgender people by the personal pronouns of their choosing is a form of conscripted speech.” Source.
How Opponents Invoke Them: “Dr. Michelle Cretella is Executive Director of the American College of Pediatricians who focused on children’s behavioral health as a general pediatrician. I asked her about the Brown University study, and the increase in children identifying as transgender… “Yes. Regarding transgender identification, social contagion is unleashed on teens via the internet, mainstream and social media, messaging in schools, peer pressure, and sadly, from the medical elites who propagandize gender ideology as science.””
Meanwhile: The evidence-based American Academy of Pediatrics has advocated to support trans youth stating “The American Academy of Pediatrics stands in support of transgender children and adults, and condemns attempts to stigmatize or marginalize them… The AAP supports policies that are gender-affirming for children – an approach that is supported by other key professional organizations.”
The National Post is one of two leading national newspapers in Canada. From 2011 to 2018, the National Post has released at least sixty editorials advocating against the acceptance of trans people. Most of these date from after 2014.
So I thought I would paint a picture of trans people, as depicted by the National Post. I’m doing so without commentary as I believe it’s more revealing this way.
Radical transactivists are guilty of the worst form of misogyny in their ruthless campaign to erase from our thoughts the human female body as a unique life form.
Such an absurdity — a woman literally redefined as a man or a woman — could be sloughed off as an over-reach if politicians, the justice system and school boards were not similarly complicit in enforcing compliance with this lie.
Whatever is going on in his mind and heart, a biological male “is” not a female. Two plus two “is” still four.
“Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a f***ing woman,” [Germaine Greer] said.
However, to be a woman involves a set of biological and social rites that someone who merely looks like a woman can never fully appreciate.
She objects to transgender men appropriating her gender and flaunting a surgically enhanced caricature of it. They are engaging in a fantasy of womanhood free of its dangers and pitfalls.
Ms Talackova, you will recall, is the surgically transgendered woman who successfully challenged the rules of the Miss Universe Canada contest when she was rejected according to the rules disallowing transsexuals.
I should think that amongst the diminishing coterie of non-ideologues for whom beauty contests still hold significance, Ms Talackova’s presence was a joke. A joke, mind you, they have been well trained in political correctness enough to understand they mustn’t laugh out loud at, but a joke nonetheless.
Mocking the transgender argument that people are whatever gender they feel they are — male, female, something in between, or none of the above — Clark refuses to concede longstanding facts of life: “Men don’t have vaginas or female anatomy … and women don’t have penises,” he says.
I finally figured it out: the Vanity Fair cover of Caitlyn Jenner represents none of what matters about women, and lots of what harms us. That a man — athletic, accomplished, successful — can, in 2015, announce to the world: “I’ve decided to become a woman,” and then go on to proudly present herself as a corseted, puffed-and-buffed bimbo whose only credentials as a woman are breasts and professional makeup. What’s worse: people are taking it seriously.
As Mark Steyn puts it in a deeply insightful column analyzing the new tyranny of trans correctness, Caitlyn is neither man nor woman – “she’s a transwoman – a new, separate … category…
By her family, Caitlyn is a woman, and by her 10 million Twitter followers, Caitlyn is a woman… But by doctrinaire feminists – and I never thought I would say this, but they seem to me, in terms of ideological integrity, to be the brave ones in this affair – she’s not a woman.
And it’s instructive to contrast Dolezal’s fate for saying she feels black with that of Bruce Jenner for saying he feels like a woman.
It perfectly captures the modern spirit of narcissistic relativism. And once you abolish truth you never find a stopping place. Social change is a process not a destination. But once “Caitlyn” Jenner has been lionessized on the cover of Vanity Fair, what frontiers remain?
And if you can change your sex just by saying “Ecce femina” why not your race while you’re at it? And your height.
It’s an odd world. Glamour magazine recently named the former Bruce Jenner as its Woman of the Year. … In this context, coming out is simply to be understood as an act of self-declaration. If a person self-identifies as X, Y or Z, then he, she, ze or hir has to be what he, she, ze or hir professes to be. If it’s a nightmare for grammarians, just think of the chaos in biology departments.
“I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that won’t turn me into a fucking cocker spaniel,” [Germaine Greer] said.
I have a chicken-and-egg theory about the whole trans phenomenon we are witnessing. It only took off in a big way when the chemical means became available to artificially mimic the opposite sex in self-presentation. In other words, the notion that one was born in the wrong body only became a social contagion when the look of the assumed identity could be approximated via medication.
From Sex and the troubled mind (Original title: Gender issues are a matter of sex and the troubled mind):
It has become politically incorrect to suggest that transgenderism or transsexualism is anything more than an alternate lifestyle … In the new parlance, “normal” is not how people are born biologically, it is whatever they think they are.
…we should lend our efforts to research that will lead to a cure for this terribly sad psychological problem.
But, barely pausing to celebrate their victory on gay marriage, the identity-group enforcers have gone full steam ahead on transgender issues.
Having done an impressive job of demolishing the basic societal building block of the family, the ambitious liberal is now moving on to demolishing the basic biological building block of the sexes.
Biological homelessness — “gender identity disorder” in the jargon — is a very real, biologically rooted condition, but it is nothing to celebrate or encourage.
Yet the message we are getting from academics and pedagogues fixated on gender equality is that biological ambiguity should be valorized and even encouraged, at any rate certainly not discouraged.
“Let’s say it were possible to take a 10-year-old kid and make them either a well-adjusted lesbian or turn them into a female-to-male transsexual,” Blanchard told Rogan. “I don’t see anything wrong with saying it’s better to make this kid into a lesbian, because being a lesbian doesn’t require breast amputation, the construction of a not-very-convincing false penis, and a lifetime of testosterone shots.”
A trans child coming out is cause for parents not to accept them (and parents are the victims here)
“Out of the blue,” never having shown signs of gender dysphoria before puberty, a girl announces she is trans.
Many parents, influenced by a bullishly trans-supportive cultural environment … offer uncritical support for transitioning. By contrast, the skeptical parents think medicalization is too drastic for what could be a transient phase, and resist. What happens to them isn’t pretty.
Imagine yourself the parent of an adolescent boy or (more likely) girl without a single previous sign of body dysphoria, who “out of the blue” decides she is transgender.
Parents often felt betrayed by the unprofessional attitudes of clinicians they consulted: psychologists, pediatricians, gender therapists and endocrinologists. Many were resistant to exploring other sources of distress, or hostile to parental testimony regarding their children’s fabrications.
Their parents felt confused at what appeared to them to be a sudden change in their daughters.
Their experiences align with accounts by parents of “trans” kids on the blog, 4thwavenow.com, described as “a community of parents and friends skeptical of the ‘transgender/child/teen’ trend.”
Almost invariably, these teenagers spend an inordinate amount of time on certain websites, notably Tumblr and Reddit. Here they can find advice on how to lie to clinicians: “Get a story ready in your head … keep the lie to a minimum” and “look up the DSM for the diagnostic criteria for transgender and make sure your story fits it.”
She found reviewing Reddit, SubReddit and Tumblr comments very troubling. Disparagement of heterosexuals and “cisgenders” is rife. Contempt for parents is encouraged. Feelings of victimhood are promoted.
I have a chicken-and-egg theory about the whole trans phenomenon we are witnessing. It only took off in a big way when the chemical means became available to artificially mimic the opposite sex in self-presentation. In other words, the notion that one was born in the wrong body only became a social contagion when the look of the assumed identity could be approximated via medication.
Linda had resisted affirming her daughter’s decision to transition because of its suddenness, and because the daughter had a history of other psychological issues. She voiced her concerns to the group, expressing her opinion that [Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria] was a “social contagion” rather than a true identity. Linda said she would not support medical intervention.
One reinforces the theory that [Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria] can be a form of “social contagion.” (In one case study, a 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends announced they were transgender within a year of a popular coach’s announcement that she was transgender.)
Trans people are exploiting children (with sex education)
The trans movement is crossing ethical lines with a vulnerable subset of youth struggling with issues of gender identity.
A recent article by Elise Ehrhard in Crisis Magazine, a Catholic periodical, addresses the aggressive approach by adult trans activists in recruiting adolescents with Asperger’s Syndrome or other types of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to their cause.
Sex merging is especially present in domains where pre-sexual children are ripe for indoctrination.
At the gender-neutral Egalia pre-school in Stockholm, staff avoid using words like “him” or “her” and address the 33 kids as “friends” rather than girls and boys.
Ideologues applaud these bizarre initiatives, but I don’t know any ordinary person, including myself, who is not appalled by this absurd and dangerous impulse toward social engineering.
SOGI 123 [curriculum supplement on sexual orientation and gender identity] represents a sectarian belief system, whose advocates seek normalization of the statistically rare phenomenon of irreversible gender dysphoria through an unproven concept — despite the assertions of transactivist militants, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that biology and gender are unlinked — that can cause psychological harm to children.
I predict a surge toward home-schooling by parents who refuse to allow their children’s minds to be exploited as pedagogical guinea pigs.
B.C., it is clear, does not view schools as a place in which children are taught the basic tools necessary to navigate life – math, science, geography – but as petri dishes for social experimentation in which teachers are lab technicians with unwitting children as their mice.
On Monday, the Vancouver School Board approved a policy change aimed at accommodating gender identity and sexual orientation. … Parents who questioned the change argued, quite reasonably, that six-year-olds aren’t qualified to understand all the intricacies of identity issues.
This is abundantly clear in the third grade of the Ontario sex-ed curriculum, where children are introduced to the thought-experiment that their gender identity may be at odds with their biological sex. They can be a male trapped in a female body, and vice versa.
The moral and psychological and health implications of this experimental teaching alone would be worthy of a parental revolt. The suicide rates for trans people rises above 40 per cent.
Yet even purely intellectually speaking, the public education establishment is involved in disseminating what can only be termed propaganda.
Much of what children are learning about transgenderism today, at a very tender age, is not science-based, but activist-dictated theory that can result in psychological harm.
Advertisement run in the National Post on September 24, 2011. The Post apologized a week later following complaints, stating the ad among other things singled “out of a specific group of people who have made choices about their sexuality with which the group disagrees”.
Meanwhile, they’ve observed “the mental health and social relationships of children with [Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria] get much worse once they adopt transgender identities,”
And they are correct, as many apparently transgender children accept their biological identity at puberty, and many adults express regret over their surgeries.
Of the 324 surgical patients studied, the suicide rate was 20 times the non-transgender population.
A 2011 long term Swedish study that followed a 30-year trajectory of 324 people who had sex reassignment surgery found that suicide rates 10 years after surgery were 20 times that of the non-trans population.
Surely it is the government’s first responsibility to try to prevent suicides rather than to validate emotive claims made by those least capable of assessing their condition with objectivity.
Trans women should be prohibited from women’s washrooms
Transactivists bristle at the very idea that girls and women may be at risk in single-sex environments when biological males have access to them.
A Sept. 2 article in The Sunday Times states the newspaper’s own investigation showed that “(a)lmost 90 per cent of reported sexual assaults, harassment and voyeurism in swimming pool and sports-changing rooms happen in unisex facilities, which make up less than half the total.”
On a practical level, there may well be concerns with allowing biologically male or female children to use a communal bathroom belonging to the opposite sex, and the NDP should respect a school’s discretion on this point.
So the apparent message is that if you want to have a career, even start one, stay away from anyone espousing what have very suddenly become intolerable views on gender like that men shouldn’t pee in the girls’ bathroom.
But Trent has instituted a policy of gender-neutral washrooms, and Brown balks at sharing intimate space with members of the biologically opposite sex. She discovered that expression of her discomfort is more than unwelcome on her campus; it has literally become a forbidden opinion.
To conclude on a personal note, from what I understand of Transparent’s Maura, she would have been perfectly happy to pee in a designated single-stall bathroom, physical relief, not tyranny over others, being her objective.
Because of a settlement reached four years ago in a case brought to the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 2013, the Ontario Hockey Federation, the governing body for most of minor hockey in the province, has now trained its coaches in gender diversity…
If only Jesse Thompson … wouldn’t have needed to file a human rights complaint — and now, there wouldn’t be a whole new set of rules and regs tailored to 0.7 per cent of the population with issues that were only ever a problem for 0.7% of the hockey population.
I think a mandatory pronoun check-in is regrettable because of the emphasis on difference as opposed to an emphasis on oneness — that we are all the same.
Then transgender rights came along and within a couple of years we had people born male racing in women’s track events and heading feminist organizations, and academic censorship of opposing views. Can it really keep going like this?
It’s okay to disclose the genitals of trans people to an international audience without their consent
I can’t even get my head around what it must be like trying to determine what “they” want for dinner; it must be like an endless game of who’s-on-first.
I find it precious to be asked to call a single human being by a plural pronoun, I would, if asked. (I wouldn’t write it that way, however, because it just gets stupid. See what-do-you-want-for-dinner, above.)
I would not use what have come to be known as “preferred pronouns” to refer to people who believe that their gender does not fit neatly into the traditional categories of male and female.
I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words “zhe” and “zher.” These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.
Finally, it is absurd to insist that each person should have the right to, or could practically, choose their own pronouns.
I have and continue to urge against and dismiss as absurd and outrageous the demand that those who purport to be in a transgender condition that is neither male nor female, have a right to be addressed in a new vocabulary of their devising.
Bryson’s official profile on the UBC site uses the pronoun “they” to refer to her, as in, “Throughout Mary’s 27 years at UBC, they have served in many senior administrative roles…” I take from this that “they” is her preferred pronoun, but I decline to use it.
“Ze” for he or she and “Zir” in place of his or him are the sticking points, but what is accumulating behind these imbecilic distinctions is quite sinister.
But no individual or group has the right to invent a new vocabulary and a new co-equal gender because of a state of ambivalence or confusion about which sex they are.
On Thursday, the Senate passed Bill C-16, the Liberal government’s legislation that adds “gender identity or expression” to grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Few Canadians realize how seriously these statutes infringe upon freedom of speech.
In other words, failure to use a person’s pronoun of choice — “ze,” “zir,” “they” or any one of a multitude of other potential non-words — will land you in hot water with the commission. That, in turn, can lead to orders for correction, apology, Soviet-like “re-education,” fines and, in cases of continued non-compliance, incarceration for contempt of court.
Prof. Peterson is facing intense criticism from students, professors and administrators for saying he will not use genderless pronouns (such as “they”) to refer to transgender students, if asked.
Forcing members of private organizations to call transgender people by the personal pronouns of their choosing is a form of conscripted speech.
The aim of the exercise is to remove any hint of gender from the language. It’s the goal of people who feel that being identified as male or female is a trap, or a prison, and wish to break free. They do not “identify” as either of the conventional genders, and feel their perspective should be recognized and respected by others, and that the language should be adapted to suit their needs.
If the language can be bent to suit every individual preference, it ceases to have rules and becomes yet another victim of political purity, as dictated by whatever identity group has the megaphone today.
The cowardice of the regime limped to the aid of the winner of the media and public relations contest, as the University of Toronto did last year when transgender groups tried to force Peterson to address them in a special vocabulary, the words “he, she, and you” being somehow disrespectful.
The older, raw, honest tyrannies told people what not to speak. But the new, wilier versions, midwifed by our famous human rights overseers, are proposing to insist on what we must speak. Here be the new axioms of our day: we own your pronouns, use no others. “He” and “she” are assault words. Freedom of speech is the life-raft flotsam of gurgling obscurantists and bigots going down for the last time.
He’s a hurricane of fresh air, this university professor who baldly says that one of the many reasons he won’t adopt the faddish new non-binary gender pronouns is that “the people who made those words are possessed by ideology and not to be trusted anyway.”
The recent controversy over Professor Jordan Peterson’s refusal to mouth the latest neologisms for transgenders — the “xe, xir, xem” and the like — earned for him accusations of being “transphobic.” I think any fair reading of Peterson’s arguments utterly deflate that accusation.
Accentuating the differences of a group already afflicted by feelings of being outcast, through inventing and mandating the use of discriminative gender identifiers, will only exacerbate feelings of ostracism.
In the later years of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, the government made it compulsory for people to use the “Heil Hitler” salute in all public greetings. They risked prosecution, arrest and even death for refusing to do so.
Prof. Peterson is facing intense criticism from students, professors and administrators for saying he will not use genderless pronouns (such as “they”) to refer to transgender students, if asked.
Forcing members of private organizations to call transgender people by the personal pronouns of their choosing is a form of conscripted speech.
I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words “zhe” and “zher.” These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.
Bill C-16 [adds “gender identity or expression” to grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act] is dangerous legislation. Those who formulated it and who are pushing it and its sister legislation are dangerous people.
In his writings on totalitarianism, George Orwell powerfully exposed the link between the manipulation of language and the erosion of individual liberty. Ideologues understand that linguistic control precedes, and is crucial to, political and cultural power. The novel 1984 illuminated the shame in being compelled — figuratively — to endorse the lie that two plus two is five.
Categorization is the basis of knowledge. Whatever is going on in his mind and heart, a biological male “is” not a female. Two plus two “is” still four.
Shepherd had created a “toxic climate” and an “unsafe learning environment,” and had violated the university’s “gender and violence policy,” and had incited “gender-based transphobia” by presenting, with contrary argument, the views of Peterson.
The inquisitors falsely described Peterson as a “white supremacist” who “targeted and harassed” transgender students and incited “transphobia” in a manner that is illegal under human rights legislation.
The cowardice of the regime limped to the aid of the winner of the media and public relations contest, as the University of Toronto did last year when transgender groups tried to force Peterson to address them in a special vocabulary, the words “he, she, and you” being somehow disrespectful.
It’s a harsh word, but “totalitarian” is the mot juste to describe governments that use their power — and public resources — to enforce ideological agreement with the maximum leader. That is exactly what the federal Liberals are doing in imposing an ideological test and coerced speech upon the Canada Summer Jobs Program.
But now, in order to qualify, the federal department of employment demands that the “organization’s core mandate respect … the right to access safe and legal abortions … and the rights of gender-diverse and transgender Canadians.” If you refuse the loyalty oath to Liberal party policy, you can’t apply.
On Thursday, the Senate passed Bill C-16, the Liberal government’s legislation that adds “gender identity or expression” to grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Few Canadians realize how seriously these statutes infringe upon freedom of speech.
In other words, failure to use a person’s pronoun of choice — “ze,” “zir,” “they” or any one of a multitude of other potential non-words — will land you in hot water with the commission. That, in turn, can lead to orders for correction, apology, Soviet-like “re-education,” fines and, in cases of continued non-compliance, incarceration for contempt of court.
He’s a hurricane of fresh air, this university professor who baldly says that one of the many reasons he won’t adopt the faddish new non-binary gender pronouns is that “the people who made those words are possessed by ideology and not to be trusted anyway.”
He was influenced by the likes of Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl and “more peripherally by people like (the former Czech Republic president) Vaclav Havel, who noted very carefully the tight causal relationship between the pathologizing of everyday language and the degeneration of societies into authoritarian states.”
C-16 amended the Criminal Code to extend protection against “hate propaganda” to any segment of the public “distinguished by gender identity or expression,” and made “bias, prejudice, or hate based on gender identity or expression an aggravating circumstance when it is a motivating factor in a crime.”
As Senator Linda Frum tweeted: “Proponents of Bill C-16, including Justice Minister [Wilson-Raybould], testified that Bill C-16 could not be used as a tool to silence reasonable free speech. Yet here we are just a few Orwellian months later.”
For gender Marxists, pronouns are the latest patch of hotly contested terrain in the ongoing revolution.
Being compelled to validate someone else’s unsupported hypothesis by using what he believes are meaningless words, offends Peterson intellectually (and is sure to offend many religious people: “male and female He created them”).
Peterson is also prepared for an eventual trial in front of a human rights tribunal. Such a show trial would be a perfect object lesson in “velvet totalitarianism,” a trope coined decades ago by recently deceased University of Toronto psychology professor emeritus John Furedy.
In deference to transgender activists’ opposition to binary gender categories, her bill replaces most uses of the words “mother” and “father” in Ontario law, substituting for them “birth parent” and “parent.”
Clark calls Bill 28 “the Handmaid’s Tale Act,” referencing Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel in which women are coerced into bearing children for infertile theocratic elites. That’s because it “literally rewrites motherhood and fatherhood,” he says. “In fact, it redefines motherhood out of existence.”
There are increasingly eerie parallels to our own time. For instance, in [Brave New World], the words “father” and “mother” are taboo, vulgar, even obscene. As recently as 2002 I felt Huxley was straining to make a point here. Yet politically correct government forms now forbid these terms as oppressive to gays, the transgendered and what have you.
Before classes even started last fall, teachers underwent serious “gender training” given by QMUNITY, an organization for LGBTQQ2S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning and two-spirit) people. Teachers were told in no uncertain terms, for instance, that “no one is 100-per-cent male or female” and that everyone is somewhere on the “gender spectrum.”
What happened to the teacher over the ensuing few days sounds like something out of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, where people were subjected to what were known as ideological struggle sessions, forced to “confess” to various imagined sins before large crowds, and roundly denounced.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions, Pimlott said, but the university has a “duty to make sure we’re not furthering … Jordan Peterson.”
They were oblivious to the fact that they themselves were proving him right by holding the 2017 equivalent of the “struggle sessions” so beloved in Mao’s China.
The older, raw, honest tyrannies told people what not to speak. But the new, wilier versions, midwifed by our famous human rights overseers, are proposing to insist on what we must speak. Here be the new axioms of our day: we own your pronouns, use no others. “He” and “she” are assault words. Freedom of speech is the life-raft flotsam of gurgling obscurantists and bigots going down for the last time.
In my observation … the least “vulnerable” and “marginalized” people on campuses today … are those in the trans community. Their professors, the administration and equity officers are falling over themselves to make life “safe” for them. We saw proof of that in the Maoist “struggle session” Lindsay Shepherd experienced. Her interrogators demonstrated that they consider “transphobia” to be an egregious thoughtcrime.
Meanwhile advocating for genocide of trans people should be permissible
But the advocating-genocide-against-any identifiable-group business was interesting. It was just recently, via Bill C-16, that “gender identity” and “gender expression” were added to the Canadian Human Rights Code and the criminal code.
With the criminal code, it means the section against hate propaganda — this is the one under which advocating genocide falls — is similarly enlarged to include the tiny percentage of people who don’t have the same gender identity as their biological sex.
No wonder Peterson raised the alarm.
Defy the stultifying parameters around public discussion that exist in this suffocating country at your peril.
It’s harder being transphobic now
From Sex and the troubled mind (Original title: Gender issues are a matter of sex and the troubled mind):
It has become politically incorrect to suggest that transgenderism or transsexualism is anything more than an alternate lifestyle … In the new parlance, “normal” is not how people are born biologically, it is whatever they think they are.
It is increasingly difficult for those studying transgender issues to report any findings that challenge the progressive narrative.
They have had the integrity to explore sexual variation in all its complexity, but have been stymied by transgender turf warriors bent on imposing an absolutist dogma that chills scientific and therapeutic progress.
But, thanks to aggressive activism in the trans movement, today any interventions to prevent gender transitioning in children is deemed by LGBT loyalists — and increasingly by legislators — as insensitive or even abusive. Ontario’s 2015 Bill 77, for example, bans funding for “any services rendered that seek to change or direct the sexual orientation or gender identity of a patient, including efforts to change or direct the patient’s behaviour or gender expression.”
Gender politics is putting a chill on objective research and psychiatrists’ ability to offer reasonable clinical help to distraught families.
Referenced articles
A total of 60 editorials published by the National Post with anti-trans commentary were selected for this article. The oldest editorial dates from 2011, the vast majority were published from 2014 until now (September 2018).
The Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities intends to direct HEQCO to undertake research on campus free speech, and to monitor and evaluate system-level progress on the free speech policy.
Compliance will be monitored by the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities which is led by Merriee Fullerton. Fullterton has a history of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric.
What conservatives perceive as a loss of free speech is in fact a shift from a homogeneous view on campuses to a heterogeneous one that now also includes the voices of minorities.
These voices have helped institutions recognize that when they give resources to individuals that perpetuate harmful stereotypes and misinformation on minorities, they are fuelling prejudicial attitudes that in turn make acts of prejudice more commonplace. It is a dynamic exemplified by the pyramid below:
The transphobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, etc. speech being contested is hardly facing extinction. As I noted in a previous article on free speech, it is regularly expressed in streets, newspapers, television and politics. What is threatened is its dominance in every space.
It is the loss of that supremacy of that single perspective, that which only concerns itself with straight white men, which so scares conservatives.
This is why John Ellison, the Dean of Students at the University of Chicago, spoke out against safe spaces quoting the Chicago Statement. The idea that gay students or black students could have a room on campus where they wouldn’t be exposed to dehumanizing speech is threatening.
The Chicago Statement was popularized when John Ellison’s statements went viral. This is the context that the Progressive Conservatives have chosen to adopt by going with this particular document. Given the party’s embrace of homophobia and transphobia, and that this led by a member of Parliament that is openly Islamophobic and xenophobic, I do not have any faith that this about ensuring that a multiplicity of voices are heard, but rather that this is about finding a return to a historical norm where only one narrow perspective was elevated.
A few years ago I gave a workshop Algonquin College’s Pride Centre about transmisogyny. Fast-foward a few years later, and I got to revisit the topic as I was asked to give the workshop again, this time at Project Acorn, a summer camp for 16-24 year old queer & trans youth or from rainbow families.
I found out about Project Acorn when I was 25, so I never got to be a participant. Most of my friends have, however, and the experiences they shared of their time at that camp was always glowing. So too was the case for my other friends who went there to facilitate workshops and support the youth-led annual event.
Finally going after all these years, albeit as a workshop facilitator, I can see what they meant. Uplifting community building events. Laughter. There was a dramatic reading of memes when I was there. There were workshops on decolonization and family building.
When it came time to make the slides for this group, I started from scratch. A lot had changed since I had last given this. Language that once needed to be explained, like “cisgender”, was now in everyone’s vocabulary. There was much more awareness about transphobia as a whole. And all the stats and cultural references I had were dated. I also did territorial acknowledgements now that went beyond saying how we were on unceded territory, a tokenistic gesture at best when it was repeated without further advancement of dialog.
The workshop seemed to have gone okay. Feedback was generally positive, though I thought I could have done a better job of promoting dialog, pulling from people’s experiences, and getting a discussion going.
