Identity Politics in 2018 and Beyond: Are Conservatives Ready?

Here is Jonathan Haidt delivering the 2017 Wriston Lecture to the Manhattan Institute, Nov. 15 (the emphasis is my own):

Today’s identity politics . . . teaches the exact opposite of what we think a liberal arts education should be. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a utilitarian or as a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or as a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.

But what do we do now? Many students are given just one lens—power. Here’s your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens. Everything is about power. Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult. It’s a fundamentalist religion. It’s a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety and intellectual impotence.

He continues — and this is an interesting way to frame a state of mind:

I am actually pessimistic about America’s future, but let me state very clearly that I have very low confidence in my pessimism. Because until now, it has always been wrong to bet against America, and it’s probably wrong to do so now. My libertarian friends constantly remind me that people are resourceful—this is what many people forget. When problems get more severe, people get more inventive, and that is actually happening right now.

Haidt is not alone in his concern about the future. On November 28, 2017, Trey Sanchez writing at Truth Revolt had this to say:

‘LGBT’ Gets Like a Thousand More Letters to Represent All Possible Combos (So Far)

And to think, this is not even peak ridiculousness!

A flyer from an “inclusiveness training” seminar earlier this year in Canada has gone viral because “LGBT” has gotten an upgrade of 12 extra letters.

So far, we’ve had to navigate slight variations such as GLBT, or LGBTQ. But with all of the intersectionalities, gender identities, and sexual preferences leftists have dreamed up, the new acronym looks more like a randomly generated password, an auto-correct gone wrong, or the old secret codes to warp levels on the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Now they want us to type “LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP.”

Here’s what that stands for:

Lesbian, Gay, Genderqueer, Bisexual, Demisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Twospirit, Intersex, Queer, Questioning, Asexual, Allies, Pansexual, Polyamorous

Have fun looking up what some of those mean.

Leftists are making it so easy for conservatives to make their case – too bad too many conservative leaders are failing to do so.

Here is a clip from my “Welcome to America 2017” file:

Feds Spend $138,000 Asking Four-Year-Olds About Their ‘Internal Sense of Gender Identity’

A grant for a two-year study was awarded to the University of Washington this summer. The project will interview 250 children aged four to six, and their parents, asking a series of questions about “gendered behavior.”

“Prominent theories of gender development have discussed the degree to which gender identity results from an internal sense of gender and socialization processes,” according to the grant. “However, tests of these theories have been limited because, for most children, internal gender identity and environmental socialization substantially overlap, rendering it impossible to distinguish the relative impact of each factor on gender development.”

As noted last time, Laurie Higgins wrote that much of this foolishness is “transforming the country at breakneck speed” because of the “ignorance and cowardice of conservatives.” She is exactly right — conservatives need to educate themselves “resolutely resist” the efforts of Leftists to fundamentally transforming our culture away from common sense and into paganism.

Up next: Paraphilias of the day: Peodeiktophilia and Homeovestism.

PLEASE consider a financial gift to IFI to sustain our work.
We’ve stood firm for 25 years, work diligently to accomplish our mission to
“boldly bring a biblical perspective to public policy” in Illinois.

Science-Deniers Claim “Men” Bleed–Monthly

*Reader Discretion Advised*

One of the movements in our movement-cluttered, chaotic world is the “period-positive movement” which seeks to destigmatize menstruation. And one of the ways period-positivists seek to destigmatize menstruation is to make it more “inclusive.”

Menstru-philes bristle at the idea that “menstruation is equated with femininity and womanhood.” They argue that “Menstruation stigma is definitely rooted, but that doesn’t mean it only affects women.” Menstru-philes argue that “if we frame menstruation as only a woman’s issue, we imply that trans men and non-binary people who happen to menstruate are actually women.” They recommend that when referring to “those who menstruate,” we not call them “women and girls.” Instead, refer to them as “people” or “people who menstruate.”

Into the period-positive movement has marched Cass Clemmer, a young woman, reproductive health “educator,” and artist who identifies as “trans” and “queer” and wants to be referred to by the plural pronouns “they” and “them.”

Clemmer argues that “A lot of us are taught to keep periods to ourselves, to the point that even having a wrapped tampon outside the confines of the bathroom can feel inappropriate.” She also claims that the “deeply conservative community” in which she was raised “taught everyone to be ashamed of their periods.”

That must have been some weird community. I’ve never met any woman who was raised to be ashamed of her period or any woman who is or was ashamed of her period. Perhaps Clemmer mistakes modesty and the concomitant desire for privacy for certain activities with shame.

Let’s hope Clemmer doesn’t start an excretion-positive movement to destigmatize urinating and defecating by bringing those activities out into the open.

Clemmer believes that tampons should not only be brought out into the open but also that they shouldn’t be associated with women.

She recently posted an Instagram photo of herself themself (themselves?), “manspreading” in light-colored men’s trousers on a park bench with menstrual blood soaked through her pants crotch and holding a sign that says, “PERIODS AREN’T JUST FOR WOMEN #bleedingwhiletrans.” Of course, she is objectively a woman, so the sign is silly.

In the service of destigmatizing menstruation, Clemmer created a coloring book for little girls—er, I mean, young humans with breasts and vaginas that will one day menstruate. The coloring book, titled The Adventures of Toni the Tampon, features Toni, “magnificent Marina the menstrual cup,” Patrice the pad, and Sebastian the menstrual sponge. Clemmer wanted a male character because in her science-denying world, “yes, men do get periods.”

Clemmer dreams that one day her coloring book will “inspire” menstruators of all genders “to walk to bathrooms with tampons outside of their shirtsleeves.” I wonder why Clemmer thinks menstruators with tampons dangling from shirtsleeves should bother walking into bathrooms at all? Doesn’t that stigmatize menstruators? Why not use them out in the open?

According to the website Mashable, “Clemmer admits the decision to include genderqueer and transgender characters undoubtedly makes the coloring book harder to market in a world that largely believes only women get periods. But risking profits and popularity in the name of inclusivity and accurate depiction was more important to the artist.”

Clemmer said, “‘I’d rather help just one genderqueer or trans menstruator feel like they were seen, than sell a thousand copies only to reinforce the boundaries society draws by gendering periods in the first place.’”

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t society that “gendered” periods.

How very unselfish of Clemmer to sacrifice profit in order to deceive children. Too bad there aren’t more conservatives willing to sacrifice profit in order to protect children and promulgate truth.

Clemmer wrote a “poem” about her period that reveals her pathological response to her own biology:

[L]et me take you back, To the details that I can still recall, Of the day I gained my first period, And the day that I lost it all…. Everyone told me my hips would grow, I looked at them and couldn’t stop crying, “What’s wrong with you? You’ll be a woman!” They kept celebrating a child dying. See my body had betrayed me, That red dot, the wax seal, On a contract left there broken, A gender identity that wasn’t real. Most people deal with blood and tissue, And yet my body forces me to surrender, Cause every time I get my cycle, Is another day I shed my gender. My boobs betray me first, I feel them stretching out my binder, I send up questions, “am I cursed?” And wish to god that she was kinder. The five days it flows, I try to breathe, I dissociate, While my body rips outs parts of me, Leaving nothing but a shell of hate. The blood drips from an open wound, Of a war waging deep inside my corpse, The battle between mind and body,

If there is a mismatch or battle between mind and body, how does Clemmer know that the problem resides in her healthy, normally functioning body and not with her mind that causes her to see her breasts as a betrayal and curse? Why does she not view her mind which dissociates from her hated female body as the traitorous and disordered enemy of health and truth?

Period-positivists who see that properly functioning menstruating bodies are something to be valued and seek to help young girls view their menstrual cycles positively don’t see the irony in supporting the “trans” ideology that promotes the chemical and surgical mutilation of healthy female and male bodies.

Period-positivists like Clemmer see negative views of menstruation as a problem within the minds of young girls and yet tragically don’t see negative views of breasts, vaginas, or penises as problems in the minds of “trans”-identified persons of all ages.

In order to have pregnant and chest-feeding men, you must first have menstruating boys. They all live in the state of Confusion on Flat Earth where they futilely practice human alchemy and speak Newspeak.

And destroy lives.

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

Indulging Transgender Fantasies Makes Them Worse

Written by Denise Shick

From the time I was nine, my father decided he was a woman. He became “Becky.” Sort of.

The truth is no amount of hormones or cosmetic surgery could change my dad into a female. Of course, not even a simulated tampon could change his natural biological sex. His DNA still said male in every cell. No matter how much make-up, cosmetic surgery, and dresses he wore, my dad was a male who, after all, had fathered children with my mother. That is reality.

We are in the cultural grip of what the American Psychological Association celebrates and champions: creating a genderless society at the cost of reality. Glamour magazine recently naming Caitlyn Jenner its 2015 “Woman of the Year” is only the tip of the iceberg. So society continues down delusional lane by reinforcing unhealthy ideals of gender and favoring a pretend world of identity politics that manufacturers gender-confused children. These children are being pushed to reject their bodies as biologically male or female. Instead, they’re being told to choose a range of gender fantasies.

It is telling that media’s most celebrated transgender boy, Jazz Jennings, told Cosmopolitan: “A lot of transgender individuals are attracted to mermaids and I think it’s because they don’t have any genitals, just a beautiful tail.”

Mermaids are neither real nor human. This is a make-believe world that tells children never to grow up, and to live forever in their fantasies.

Marketing Sex Change to Kids

Americans can no longer believe that this issue will not affect them personally. It already does. Hollywood produces shows such as “Becoming Us,” “Orange is The New Black,” “Jazz,” and Bruce Jenner’s reality show to make sure they come into your living room. Many Americans are naïve to the bigger implications behind the transgender movement, which destabilizes the family unit.

Just look at what’s happened in Oregon. Legislation there allows 15-year-old children to have sex reassignment surgery without parental consent, even though these children would need their parents’ consent to get a tattoo, smoke, or donate blood. Lori Potter of Parents Rights and Education says, “This is trespassing on the hearts, the minds, the bodies of our children. They’re our children. And for a decision, a life-altering decision like that to be done unbeknownst to a parent or guardian. It’s mindboggling.”

These kinds of laws and bills should be considered child abuse. Especially when 70 percent to 80 percent of those kids will spontaneously lose those feelings, according to Paul McHugh, the former chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and one of the few honest voices on this. Meanwhile, the rest of the medical profession enthusiastically embraces this idea, alongside the big pharmaceutical companies.

The media shuts up any messages that counter the one the message that Caitlyn Jenner conveys on the cover of Vanity Fair. We’re just supposed to accept as fact that one can go from being a 60-year-old man to a 20-year-old pinup despite biological reality, genetics, and the lack of a backward time travel machine. Reality these days is whatever a person can imagine and pay for. And whatever culture applauds.

We’re Ruining People’s Lives for Fantasies

Here is the truth I lived. No matter what surgery or hormones one takes, his or her biology, neurology, and genetic composition remain the same, just like that of my dad’s. Yes, he called himself Becky. But my dad was male. He was a son, husband, and father.

The goal of the transgender movement is to destroy reality, which destroys childhood, as well as families, wives, children, and parents. What is left in its place is the media’s “new normal.”

The human costs to the individual and the family are real. Parents are essentially being told their son Henry never existed, but that instead they have a daughter, Heather. And Henry’s wife needs to accept her same-sex marriage, which is not what she had intended when she married Henry. Not only does this try to dismiss the purpose of male and female bonding, it also demands that everybody continuously role-play in the transgender’s personal delusion.

On the most basic level, children are left abandoned to search out other male role models because their own father is busy playing Rita Hayworth. The family also learns that now their new daughter Heather has found an entire community of other folks who are celebrating her as a brave hero and demonizing her entire family. Heather is essentially cut off as this new community gains control and reinforces the delusion. That’s what cults do.

Don’t be fooled. This is all about gaining control of the minds and bodies of children.

68-Year-Old Man Gives Women Dating Advice

Jenner recently teamed up with fellow transgender writer Jenny Boylan, another former white guy, now a professor at Barnard, a women’s college. They talked dating for People magazine. Jenner is looking. Boylan, in the spirit of “sistahood,” warned: “It’s a thing that women do. We look to men to give us self-worth.”

We have officially stepped off the precipice of reality and are in a postmodern sexual identity politics free-fall. More postmodern indoctrination into imagining a male sexual fetish is really “just like civil rights,” People says. Has anyone ever seen a 68-year-old woman discuss “dating” in a national magazine? No. So why do people buy into this?

The sexual identity crowd is doing what they called in the 1960s a mind game. According to the transgender lobby, sex and gender are way different—completely different. And in the new world order, the more confused you stay, the better for media-generated propaganda campaigns.

Here’s the difference: gender is a cultural and social construct, which includes behaviors, attributes, and social responsibilities people assume as either male or female in the culture. On the other hand, sex is biological.

Sex: Females have XX chromosomes in their cell nuclei. Males carry the XY chromosomes.

Gender: Boys play with trucks, girls like dolls.

Media, popular culture, and the LGBT lobby all seem to be telling us we have it all wrong about sex and gender. Not only are we wrong, but we are also “ignorant” and “bigoted” unless we accept their correction. Correction: a 68-year-old male is now telling women about how authentic men are when they claim to be women.

The New Normal Is Disordered

Until very recently, people who were distressed about their gender saw responsible psychologists, therapists, and medical professionals who by and large accepted biology over the person’s feelings or “identity.” Something has changed. We have been forced to conflate gender and sex. In truth, it is an organized effort.

We have an adult sexual identity movement using confused children to obscure their adult male sexual fetish. One desired result of this ad campaign is that we exaggerate any and all gender confusion to make it seem more common, then make sure people celebrate this as “the new normal.”

Let’s remember the old normal. As parents we know children role-play. They play superheroes and cartoon characters. They play house and doctor. In today’s climate, this can be dangerous. Children who simply role-play by transgressing gender roles are immediately swooped up and given this new diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

Adult transgenders, on the other hand, suffer from a disorder of assumption. We see this in middle-aged men, fathers and husbands who claim to be “women” despite the fact that they were born male and lived as men. There is no scientific evidence to support this person’s “assumption that they are different than the physical reality of their body, their maleness or femaleness, as assigned by nature.” McHugh has explained this very well.

Today’s Satire Becomes Tomorrow’s Reality

Of course, a female transgender (born male) child does not experience biological female maturity. They do not menstruate or mature into women. They are given, while still children, puberty blockers to suppress their inherent male traits and hormones. This becomes the first step on the life-long road of cosmetic surgeries and pharmaceuticals.

United Media Publishing recently satirized the transgender craze with a write-up about a line of pretend feminine hygiene products for the man who identifies as a woman. The spoof ad for “Fem-Flo” may strike many realists as hilarious. But guess what? Such a product may very well appeal to a transgender who desires the sense of having a period. Someone living in that fantasyland could take the following words from that mock-up very seriously:

Our product is designed to give post-op trans-gender women the full-spectrum experience of menstruation. You don’t have to be deprived of the beautiful and womanly occurrence of menstruation merely because you were born without uterus.

Read on, and the idea becomes darker. You may be horrified to have to think in terms of what “post op” really means:

The product comes in 3 designs. ‘Fem-Flo Petite’ is for the trans-woman who is still working to achieve maximum dilation, yet still wants to produce menses. ‘Fem-Flo Intermediate’ provides dilation and an average amount of menstruation. And last, but not least, the ‘Fem-Flo Lush’ for the trans-woman who wishes to enjoy ‘heavy’ menstruation.

The ad copy describes this tampon-like product as “a cotton core that contains a small, vegetable-based capsule which upon reaching body temperature releases the ‘menses’ contained within.”

This concept may have started out as satire. But it’s not any more.

So now, by legal degree, woman is defined as a feeling a man has.

Denise Shick is author of “My Daddy’s Secret,” “When Hope Seems Lost,” and “Understanding Gender Confusion.” She serves on the academic council of the International Children’s Rights Institute and directs Help 4 Families Ministry.

This article was originally posted at TheFederalist.com