Inversion

Just heard something on the radio about transgenderizaton. It's the perfect inkblot of common sense. Mutilate your penis -- not by cutting it off but by turning it inside out and pushing it in -- and castrating yourself, albeit passively by having it done, and injecting hormones and maybe silicone, and that makes you a woman. Electrolysis and Adam's apple shaving -- that is, the actual cartilage ground or sliced down with some sort of cheese grater. And then regretting it, as a very large percentage of the victims of this series of mutilations does. Depression and suicide.

Or the pair of humans, both born female, now both mutilated to approximate an external similitude of a male form, and counting themselves as men. Were they lesbians? Are they homosexuals? Are they into sodomy? I'd expect them to be basically asexual now. Seems like a paradox, but I just think all the confusion sort of neutralizes itself out. Neutered, so to speak.

Imagine the level of confusion. It can count as nothing less than a sort of madness. A combination of magical thinking and a failure to transition out of object impermanence. Infantile, then. But if we do imagine it, we cannot help but be subjected to some measure of compassion. How wretched a state. Fretful, self-spiteful, self-loathing. Like taking a razorblade to yourself, the way disaffected teens do. I'm sure most of us have some sort of secret issue. But for my part, I really like my penis and its accoutrement.

Then there's the idea that the government should underwrite these mutilations. If there is such a thing as gay marriage, where the state ratifies the union, well, why not the changing of a gender? If Evolution is real, where one thing becomes another, then alchemy is a literal if not scientific reality. Just because it's not recognized doesn't mean it's not real. So is it real? Law is reality. If the state recognizes a thing, it brings the coercive power of its institutions to support and protect and promote that thing. So gay unions, and sex removal operations, and don't ask don't tell -- these matter in more than a passive, a societal-mutilation way. They have expanding consequences, the way castration causes depression, sort of a postpartum thing.

Ah well. Nothing is ever solved. We just throw out lifelines, trying to rescue or to be rescued. Sometimes it's just words. But honestly. If I think my left arm is possessed by Satan, and suffer somatic dysphoria from this, is the appropriate therapeutic remediation to amputate the arm?

J

Case Studies

This, from 6/27/07. Puts me in mind of good old Thomas nee Tracy Beatie. Hot hot hot.

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But let's be serious for a moment. I'll try to refrain from sarcasm -- from a lot of sarcasm. The first item is from the Boston federal court, where hundreds of hours of testimony from experts, paid tens of thousands of dollars, have been heard in a case to determine whether a murderer -- one "Michelle" nee Robert Kosilek, who is serving a life sentence for murder -- should have a sex change ... I mean a "sex change" operation at taxpayer expense. Inmates rights advocates ... inmates "rights" advocates maintain that such a procedure is a "medical necessity." (That last is a quote, not sarcasm.) Kosilek is suing on the grounds of "cruel and unusual punishment." (Quote.) So far the case has cost taxpayers some $52,000; the surgery would cost about $20,000.

Yeah, I'd do her.

ahem

Castration and having one's penis hollowed and turned inside-out, made into a sort of little pouch and stuffed into the lower abdominal cavity is a medical necessity, apparently. News to me. Some might think of it as, er, cruel and unusual punishment. I believe the scrotum would be reshaped into a sort of labia, but I might be imagining that. Mmmm. Ahem. Advocates "say in some cases -- such as that of Kosilek, who has twice attempted suicide -- sex-change surgery is as much a medical necessity as treatment for diabetes or high blood pressure." Well, erections are a sort of high blood pressure.

Kosilek strangled his wife some 17 years ago because she spilled boiling tea on her testicles Kosilek's testicles -- I'm a little confused about whether K was a woman back then. He claimed self-defense. Let me bludgeon the irony for a moment: he killed a woman because she spilled tea on his or her nuts, which he now wants cut off, so that she can be a "woman," like what he killed. If she'd spilled tea on his face, would he want a face lift? If a dog had bitten him, would he want to be a dog? I'm confused. There is a sort of logic to it, if only I could figure it the right way. Something to do with pronouns.

After receiving court-ordered female hormone treatments, laser hair removal and psychotherapy, Kosilek still testifies that "I would not want to continue existing like this" -- existing, that is, while possessing a complete array of male primary genitalia. I can sympathize. As I sometimes suggest, I have a serious problem with depression. It's been particularly acute recently. I can barely speak nowadays, and when I do it's pure acting. I was depressed Tuesday at the very moment I was engaged in grappling. I'd thought that was impossible. My deterioration is accelerating. I don't want to continue existing like this. But I will. So I understand, this living in a body you don't belong in. I love my penis, and my testicles are unmatched ... well, they're matched, don't get me wrong, relatively symmetrical and possessing the same weight and firmness -- I just mean that I'm pleased with them. They do a great job. Mine is more an existential dysphoria than a gender dysmorphia. I don't belong here.

It's a minor case. It hardly means anything. But when major news outlets refer to a castrated man as "she" -- or in this case, a man who simply anticipates castration -- we must have reached such a point of confusion that irrationality offers a sort of comfort. Logic as it has traditionally been understood hardly means anything. But I'll make one stab at it: it isn't about spending fifty thousand dollars to save twenty thousand dollars. If "sex change" becomes a right, how many hundreds or thousands of convicts will exercise that right? Unlikely, you say? I respond by asking if the prison population is likely to be what we straight squares call "well-adjusted". (Frankly, depressed and neurotic as I am, I'm not sure if those quotes are sarcastic or not.)

So that's one thing. The second item involves yesterday's Oklahoma execution of double-murder Jimmy Dale Bland, who had terminal cancer -- expected to be fatal within six months. "Death penalty opponents have called the execution ... pointless, while prosecutors have said Bland's health is no reason to show him mercy."

I'm sorry. I really don't get it. What would the fact that Bland might have died eventually from known causes have to do with his scheduled execution? Justice is not about convenience. Since we're all going to die, it might always be easier to wait for nature to take its course. This fact makes execution pointless? Such thinking misses the point of what execution is. It isn't about bloodless logic. It's about justice, which is sometimes bloody.

It comes back to the issue of axioms. Some start with the premise that all violence is wrong and immoral. War, and executions, and the coercive power of the state, and self-defense. Immoral. Others start with the premise that the same action can be right or wrong, depending on motives. Thus, to kill the brigand to protect one's family is a duty, not a crime. This is too basic to need to expand.

Mercy? Of course we need mercy. I've made the case before, and don't like to repeat specifics. The matter hinges on wisdom. Sometimes severity is wise. Sometimes gentleness is wise. Wisdom can discern between the two. It cannot be quantified. It's an intangible.

Well, enough. My work here is done. The theme of this piece is that there are certain actions that disqualify someone from getting what they want. Murdering people is one of those actions. After that, you should, generally, be executed. If mercy is extended, it should not include elective surgical mutilation of the genitals at taxpayer expense. Unhappiness is almost inevitable, it seems to me. That might just be my depression talking. But death is most certainly inevitable. The proper attitude when we receive mercy instead of justice, or happiness instead of anguish, or a penis complete with matched testicles instead of an unconvincing counterfeit and non-functional sac, is one of gratitude.

We should even be grateful when we are unhappy. Things can always get worse. We could be on death row. We could want to be castrated.

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I no longer grapple, and the depression has subsided, for some reason. My testicles are working overtime, and I have mixed feelings about this. Maybe that tranny is on to something. I suppose I could sort of compromise, and have just one testicle removed. Make me more like ordinary men. As for my penis ... well, nothing. I just wanted to mention my penis.


J

Name Changes

"Thomas" Beatie is back in the news -- announced to Barbara Walters Thursday he was pregnant again. This was what I had to say about it in July, when he was busy having his first baby.

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There's that pregnant man in the news. Sure, you must have heard. His name is Thomas Beatie, nee Tracy before he exchanged his natural hormonal profile or his unmutilated vagina for a sort of leathery chawbone bit of Halloween skin kind of like what all men have, even if it has to be manufactured out of ear cartilage and armpit tissue. See? A sex change is just as easy as that -- changing your name. Tracy transmogrified into Thomas, and the metamorphosis is complete, without even a need to change monograms. His and hers. And we can always prick out the extra threads. He he. Har har.

Years ago you see, long long ago and once upon a time, he, Thomas, underwent a "partial sex" "change oper" "ation". You'll have to pardon my uncertain use of the quotation marks. It all just confuses me, hidebound as I am to so many parts of my own hide. The thought of changing them, exchanging them, if even partially ... I'm thrown into a tizzy. Anyways, Thomas grew a beard ... same as me! And he married a woman -- I did that once! But, woman. Pardon the anachronism. "Women" -- an obsolete concept. What would happen if the woman changed her sex? I mean the wife woman, the beardless one. Oregon doesn't have same sex marriage yet, does it? Would it become a gay marriage? Or is it gay already? It's just too confusing for me. I'll need a Venn diagram.

Thomas opted to keep his uterus and ovaries. The news is unspecific, regarding his birth canal. But lots of men have cesareans. Or would if they needed them. And he was artificially inseminated. Someone else would have provided the semen, testicles not being requisite to pregnant manhood. After all, some men are born with out ... without testicles. Nature is highly ambiguous in this regard. Many lizards and fish can change their gender. Read a book.

But while Tom opted to keep his womb, he did get rid of those pesky bosoms.

Yeah, I'd do him.

ahem

You can't even see the scars, hardly. That helped him a lot, in becoming a man. For what is a man, really? And who after all are wee blah, blah blah? Yammer yammer! Oprah, yada ya dada. Surely Oprah cannot be in error? As Tom so eloquently states, he wishes we all could open ourselves up "to the gamut of human possibility." But why just human? Surely species is no more fixed a concept than gender? As long as there are skilled surgeons, the possibility of being opened to such gamuts is always an option. Gender, like all such issues and tissues related to the reproductive function, is nothing more than medical waste.

Change change change. The times they are a-changing. What are we to do? Ignore it? Embrace it? Shave our beards or change our names? How could people tell who we were? Because if society has taught us anything, it is that we are only labels, and that words are magic. Change the name, and reality follows. Nothing lies beneath the surface. There are no graves.

_____________

So there it is. Thomas the pregnant dude. Kept his old junk, if that's what chicks call it, but by virtue of testosterone injections, her -- yes, her -- clitoris took on a semblance of a very small penis, with which she has intercourse with her female paramour. One wonders how this is anything other than a lesbian couple, or a couple of lesbians. Children's dress-up games do not adults make, any more than mudpies are nutritious. But gender, apparently, is a matter of declaration.

I was coincidentally thinking just the other night about this person, with regard to race. If someone feels black, are they? If they darken their skin and adopt certain mannerisms, are they eligible for affirmative action? Did God make a mistake, and put them into the wrong body, and they know it's true because they've always felt black? Is the analogy false? If so, what, pray, is the difference?

Madness. But such are the times we live in. The gays are attacking the Mormons, but not the black churches, many of which teach the same man-woman doctrine regarding "gay" "marriage". Mormons are safe to attack, you see. Cowardice. Inconsistency.

But there's nothing to be done about it. It will take a plague. High cost for reformation, but that's what it takes. Ah well. No matter. There's nothing to be done about the tide. It comes in, it goes out, and all we can do is try to stay afloat.


J

Spelling Test

Moslems do not tell me how to pronounce English words. It is not "Muslim". It's Moslem. Same with Peking. Apparatchiks under Mao's hateful totalitarianism do not tell me how to pronounce the English name of a foreign city. I don't know what "Beijing" is. Something the Red Chinese told me to say? No. The word, in English, is Peking. Do the Germans tell me how to pronounce Munich? Are we somehow incorrect if we don't say München? Must I celebrate gay Parie? No. We're speaking English, here, in an English speaking country. Same with Burma. A fascist junta will not be changing the name of a country, and I honor it. Myanmar? Kampuchea? No.  I did and shall repeat this, in past and ensuing years.

That's all. There's a reason for it, you see, my orthographic quirks. Most of them, anyway. Orwell got it right. When they control language, they control thought. Shall we give them that authority? We've seen the battle over words. Choice/abortion. Affirmative action/quotas. Gay/homosexual. Nigga/nigger. Mental illness/spiritual illness.  When it goes beyond what someone wants to be called, and moves into ideology, we do not have to comply.

So apparently there was a nine year old girl pretending to sing at the Peking opening Olympic ceremonies. The real singer was seven. Is this a big scandal? I only just heard about it. The on-camera girl was pretty; the singing girl could sing. Said Chen Qigang, general music designer of the ceremonies, "The reason was for the national interest. The child on camera should be flawless in image, internal feeling and expression."

"The reason was for..." Sort of an incomplete expression of the subject, eh? The reason for what was for...? The reason for our manipulation, our deceit, our lies...? But it's just show biz. Like makeup, pushup bras, airbrushing, lipsyncing. This is a scandal? For some reason, yes, it is. The Olympics, its spirit, is about excellence. Personal and human excellence. Authenticity is implicit in the entire enterprise. It's why drugs are banned. That's the theory, of course, the ideal.

The reality is that castrated men can somehow compete in women's categories -- so how is this silliness even worthy of notice? Is it that we know in advance about the castrated men, if we choose to be informed on the matter? I don't know enough about it to say. But we feel fooled, with these little girls. And the Red Chinese used them for political, for "national interest" purposes. Same deal with those opening-ceremony fireworks. Digital effects, mostly. And you've heard about the high walls that keep Western eyes from seeing Chinese slums. (See? The Left knows that walls do work.) Not to mention the thousands and tens of thousands and millions and hundred of millions and 1.3 billions of "dissidents" who've been jailed or otherwise kept from freedom. The reason is for the national interest.

Turns out that spelling is much more complicated than we might have thought. I like to keep things simple. Peking is a city in China. "Beijing" is an effort at thought control. You see? Even when I'm not in accord with convention, I'm understood. It's called communication, and it has layers.


J

The Age of Aquarius

You’ve heard about the fish. And the amphibians and the reptiles. How they’re changing their sex all the time. Like they’re from San Francisco. The Potomac is full of such transgendered vertebrates. How symbolic of our times. Such transmutations are natural, in certain species. Years ago I wrote a book on Evolutionism, encyclopedic in scope, in which for some reason I cited a type of fish in which the largest female of a group where there is no male will simply become male. Certain lizards can manage the same feat. How interesting. But the Potomac fish are a different kettle of, um, fish. The females are normal. Eighty percent of the smallmouth bass males, however, produce eggs instead of sperm.

At this same time, there is a sharp rise in reported cases on college campuses all along the Potomac of impotence and a lack of sexual interest by males. Hm. Being the unbelievable stud that I am, this seems an odd and strangely desirable problem to have. I am troubled by a surfeit of hormones, you see. And at my age. Poor little me. Perhaps I should get my drinking water from the Potomac, which is full of feminizing chemical endocrinal disruptors.

The soft female-like boys of this latest generation, however, cluster not only along the Potomac. We find them everywhere. Throughout the continental USA, in England, in Greenland, in Japan. All over. As for our human females, they are enjoying an early puberty, starting around age eight. That’s so hot.

Well? Male alligators in Florida are turning up with shriveled testicles and high female-hormone counts. The phenomenon has been linked to phthalates, which are used in clear plastic drinking bottles -- water, Coke, Pepsi and so on. The specific actor is polyethylene terephthalate, PET. When the bottle gets a bit heated, as in a hot car, and the liquid has a plastic taste, that’s PET. All those plastic bottles from Disney World end up in the watershed and affect the alligators. Hmm. PETs act like female hormones. Girls testing as having high PET levels tend to enter puberty early. See? Six times higher levels means eight-year-olds with large breasts.

I saw something of this when I taught fifth graders some few years ago. Little boys, and a handful of ten year old girls with fully developed breasts. It’s very different than when I was a kid, and most likely when you were. In those days the boys were behind the girls by months, rather than years. By thirteen the girls where through puberty and the boys were entering. Now the lag time is three or four years. It’s not just PETs. It’s a lot of chemicals. Endosulfan, for example -- a major commercial pesticide -- was shown in 2003 to disrupt the onset of puberty in boys, by blocking the effects of testosterone and other androgens.

The actions of these industrial chemicals are overwhelmingly feminizing, and hasten puberty in girls, and delay and distort masculine development in boys. Seems like a problem to me. The plastic in baby bottles, for example, has been shown actually to damage male neonate animal brains, specifically in memory and motivation functions focused in the nucleus accumbens. The same damage does not occur in females. The males demonstrate less curiosity about their environments, and their activity profile strongly resembles that of control females. Strangely, females exposed to the same plastic demonstrate heightened activity, environmental curiosity, and increased learning ability. Again, the only relevant variable here is the plastic.

Ah well. Increased ADHD in boys. Decreased testosterone and semen levels than in my generation, lower sperm count, and endemic infertility. Genital malformations are up by three times; pregnant mothers who drink phthalates are ten times more likely to have boys with undescended testicles, or subaverage penis-size, or hypospadias (misplaced urethra terminus). No, it’s not funny.

From these specifics we might derive any number of insights, environmental, political, sociological, ethnographic. I won’t bother to flesh it out. I could talk about us planting the seeds of our own destruction, for all that there are fewer and fewer seeds. I could suggest that the underdeveloped moslems are outbreeding the West not only because we choose to have smaller families, but because we are not capable of having larger ones. I could point out that the rise of modern liberalism, so self-loathing/blameful and disloyal and irresponsible, might derive as much from biology as from philosophy. I might call it the End of Days.

Why bother? Everyone talks about history, but nobody does anything about it. Is there a solution? Well, first, is there a problem? Maybe it’s a good thing? We become extinct and save the planet from our pollution and global warming? We remove our unclean presence and leave the world to the purity of a certain desert faith? What after all has freedom given us? Melting icecaps and mutant fish. Yin yields to yang.

On the other hand, we might choose not to use clear plastics to drink from. We might wash our vegetables (don’t think meat-eating is the answer -- animal flesh stores such chemicals at an even higher density). It starts with being aware of the problem. After that one can choose to care, or not. If biologically generated motivation from out of a healthy nucleus accumbens is insufficient to make us care, perhaps ethics and a commitment to some intellectual ideal might do it. How would I know what could move you?

But that’s why I eat the way I do. Health matters for so many reasons. One young fella made his standard joke today about how healthful meat-eating is. One suspects he does know better. But it’s all so emotional. Emotion is not a free pass.

As usual, mine is an appeal to rationality. These are the facts, some of them. Do with them what you will.

Does the title of this post seem impenetrable to you? We did not know what the New Age would bring. The triumph of hippie values is brought about by the very thing they rebelled against. Corporate chemicals -- as opposed to hallucinogenic ones. Their feminine ethos triumphs against masculinity at the cost of infertility. The New Age is bringing not love, love, love, but sterility, deformity and extinction. What is the point of saving the planet, if we fail to save the baby boys?


J

Facts

California and Texas are the two largest markets for school textbooks, so whatever their laws are regarding content will determine the policy for the whole nation. Textbook publishers are not going to tailor texts for every state and district. The economy of scale is what drives their thinking, and they are not wrong in this.

I cannot say what the legislature of Texas requires. I look with favor upon Texas and the South in general. The grave crime of slavery was expiated by the blood of the Civil War, and the sin of racism has largely been cleansed from the polity - what remains is the hard moral core of true and traditional American values. I have said, and sincerely, thank God for the South. It's most of what remains of America. But of course I speak from impressions - I have not lived in a Southern state. I could be wrong.

But I am most assuredly not wrong about California. I was born in southern California, and have spent a large part of my life in the county of Los Angeles. We have one of the most reprehensible state legislatures in the nation. California used to be a Republican state, and still elects Republican governors, but the Assembly is a cabal of the most radical anti- everything- commonsensical hacks you could wish on your enemy. Some number of these morons supported the boycott by the illegals, a few weeks back - enough to approve a motion of support. So, uh, "our" "representatives" "thought" an attempt to damage the economy would be a good thing. I won't call them bitches, but they are.

This socialistic radicalization came about when the hardcore Dems, and Republicans, realized that it was they who controlled the primary system that selects candidates. The party faithful are generally the only ones who turn out for such elections, and they pick the most extreme candidates, not the moderates. So if a Dem wins, it will be a wingnut Dem. The Dems win. And their seats are safe, because they've gerrymandered their districts to assure their incumbency.

Special interests have not so much a symbiotic relationship with pols, as a mutually parasitic one. They're all pigs, feeding out of the same trough, just from different sides. A sort of Mad Tea Party, where they are eternally eating each other's leftovers. So atheists and conservative Christians, Arabs and Jews, Blacks and Browns, Armenians and Poles - whoever - get in the bread line and start mewling for their hushpuppies. To mix several metaphors. We can't complain about this. It is inevitable.

Since 1976, state law has required that school texts provide "positive" portrayals of specified groups. Blacks and women and Indians and women and blacks and blacks and women ... well, I'm forgetting who all. The usual suspects. Insofar as there is a need for such sensitive portrayals, this is not inappropriate. Women and blacks and all them other folks that we didn't hear much about, should have been heard about. Insofar as they did important things.

Even a "positive" requirement, rather than a merely truthful one, was not necessarily inappropriate. Even the decree that learning materials must promote a "sense of pride" in ethnic heritages is not entirely odious. There is something really sad in the story of little kids on the reservation watching a cowboy movie and cheering for the cavalry rather than the braves. It shouldn't be about identity politics, but we do, all of us, want the people who look like us, who are from where we're from, to be the good guys, at least some of the time. Role models really do matter.

That texts must not include any "adverse reflection" on any group might be defended, to some degree. Not rigorously defended - not validly defended - but defended, the way even a guilty criminal ought to be defended in a courtroom. So some months ago a Hindu group protested to the State Board of Education, demanding that the texts be changed from saying women in ancient India had fewer rights, to saying they had different rights. Gods. But they are not wrong, to defend their culture. It's called loyalty. Not loyalty to objectivity, but, nevertheless, loyalty.

Makes you wonder why Hollywood always wants to make America the bad guy.

The California Legislature has required that for history texts, in comparison to men "equal portrayal" of women "must be applied in every instance." Word for word, paragraph by paragraph, as much ink must be used describing the actions and effects of women, as of men. If dealing with only the past few decades, this would have little distorting effect. But prior to that, the policy is simply insane. Presidents' wives were important to the man, but not, simply not, important to the nation, compared to the man. Duh. On this day Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Meanwhile, Mary Lincoln bought some antique moiré and hid the bill. (That's not a good example, because Abe got nine words, while Mary got eleven. We'll make up for it when we talk about Rutherford B. Hayes.)

And now we have SB1437, the state law mandating that gays and lesbians - and presumably bisexuals and transgenders and celibates and polymorphs and crossdressers and maiesiophiliacs and shoe fetishists and necrophiliacs and urolagnials and boiz who are into daddies & chubs - be dealt with in an equally even-handed and fair-minded manner. So our second graders have that to look forward to. Mommy, what's a strap-on?

History is a messy, and an ugly, discipline, however. It isn't about feeling good. It's about being warned. How they're teaching about Hitler, nowadays, I just haven't bothered to check. I hope they are sufficiently positive. Our young Aryans mustn't suffer any emotional turmoil, after all. But the cognitive dissonance they - all of them - will suffer when they finally and inevitably learn their education has been a vast uncontrolled experiment in social engineering - well, the fall will be catastrophic.

Reality matters. Fact: criminals in prison have a higher self-esteem than college students. Fact: the academically lowest-performing ethnic group has the highest self-esteem. Fact: the highest-performing ethnic group has the lowest self-esteem. Fact: history is full of important scummy people. This is a fact that our children need to be taught. Reality cannot be amended by a legislature. This is what Orwell so famously wrote about. Realty matters.


J