On my 24th birthday, I felt a sense of doom. Something wasn't right, and my mind started slipping into dark places. Over the next couple of weeks, this spiralled into a full-on depression where I could hardly get out of bed. I slept constantly, when I'm someone who has never wanted or needed a lot of sleep. I went days without eating. I stopped drinking coffee because I found it too painful to be so awake. Music, too, which I used to listen to all the time, stirred up too many emotions for me to handle.

Initially, I passed all of this off to others as a stomach bug, which was easy to do as I wasn't eating. I knew it was more than that, but I didn't want to tell anyone. I didn't want to drag anyone in and bring them down with the details of what I was experiencing. This was compounded by the fact that there was no good reason for it. Nothing bad had happened to me. Everyone I loved was okay. I had just finished up with university and was the freest I’d ever been in my life. I was writing full time and I was happy about that. So the idea of telling anyone that I was almost psychotically depressed felt very shameful.

The days dragged on, and I somewhat learned to function and not be in bed all the time, but I was only ever half there. I still could hardly eat. In fact, food often simply tasted horrible. I dropped a lot of weight very quickly and whenever anyone would compliment me on it I would thank them while thinking if only they knew why I looked like that. I still couldn't even look at coffee, because I worried that being even slightly more aware of the world around me would just shatter me.

I went through a cycle almost every day where I would wake up almost in a panic. I'd move slowly, get myself up, and maybe try to eat. I would often try to help myself by reading. I read a lot. It seemed to kick-start my brain and allow me to physically move again. But invariably I’d end up feeling exhausted and lie down and close my eyes. Even then, I couldn't relax, because it's like I would start dreaming right away even when not actually asleep. My brain sort of ran off on its own creating all sorts of nonsense, much of it quite sinister, until I couldn't stand it anymore and opened my eyes and forced myself to be awake.

By the end of the day, however, I was generally feeling better and went to bed more relaxed, sometimes even feeling relatively good. I always hoped that feeling would last till morning, but it rarely ever did.

There were major ups and downs for almost a year. I got a part-time job as customer service at a mall a couple of months after this all started, and that did seem to help. At the same time, several months later, I remember being in a restaurant with all of my sisters and sneaking away to the bathroom to fervently pray for my brain to stop feeling so depressed, not only so that I could enjoy my time but so that I could give everyone else the best of me as well, because it was the least they deserved.

An incident that really illustrates where I was still at an entire year later was when I was visiting some friends in British Columbia and they had put out some Bertie Bots Every Flavor Beans—but only the gross flavors. Here and there I had a few, but I didn't say anything, because while they did taste gross to me, I was going through another increased bout of depression and everything still often tasted gross to me. After a few days they finally cracked and told me about the jellybeans because they were absolutely astounded I hadn't said anything. I tried to laugh it off and say I assumed I was always getting unlucky with the gross flavors and taking my chances to find something good.

I could have explained, I guess, that my brain was filtering most things about the world as sinister, and it simply didn't faze me anymore. But I was still mostly keeping these feelings to myself, still out of a sense of shame and not wanting to bring anyone else down.

At this point, at least, I was starting to have some more good days. I'll admit that over a couple of months I tried self-medicating with a few small, almost micro-doses of MDMA. I don't necessarily condone doing this, but I do consider that it helped. I even tried growing magic mushrooms, but I managed to only grow mold. Sometime later, however, I did get my hands on some and had a nightmarish trip where I was forced to confront a headless demon that laughed at me and said, “you thought you got rid of me, but you didn't.”

Oddly enough, I started to feel better after that and considered it my turning point. This was about a year after it all started. Slowly I got my appetite back, started drinking coffee again, and even started listening to music again.

Of course, I don't think it was just the mushrooms, though they certainly did something to reset my brain. Like I said, I had also been reading. I was reading almost nonstop throughout the whole year, because I'd always feel like a little better after I did. Sometimes only for a few minutes, but to me, that was something.

A few days after my depression hit I took William James' Varieties of Religious Experience off my shelf and brought it with me on a trip around Alberta with my wife's family. The trip was a nice distraction but I was still in a state of half panic all the time, particularly when I woke up, so I would try to read it when I could. I think I was hoping to read fantastical experiences that could provide me with insight into the questions of life and the universe—some guarantee of hope and meaning. Interestingly enough, this book, while it does detail such accounts, also has a section on “The Sick Soul,” where James talks about exactly the kind of crisis I was having at the time, as well as how I ended up trying to deal with it:

When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion or religious regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In melancholiacs there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with.

[…]

Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the profoundest astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery is concealed, and a metaphysical solution must exist. If the natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter, the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying religious solution.

It was nice to feel like what was happening to me wasn't anything inexplicable or new. While I don't think the book mentions it, I also remembered the idea of the “Dark Night of the Soul,” which is popularly known as a period of existential crisis characterized by a total collapse of meaning. However, to St. John of the Cross, who coined the term, it was specifically a spiritual phase of purification characterized by a sense of the withdrawal of God's presence, where one has to live only by faith, without consolation. It is a step between an initial awareness of God's presence and full union with God.

This seemed a fitting enough framework because, before my own “Dark Night,” I did have a kind of passive, easy faith, not so much in an articulated idea of God but in life itself. I felt sure of a fundamental goodness and meaning of the universe, something I'd felt confident in since I was a child. But that was all gone now. It was like my faith had vanished. As Tolstoy said, “I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested.”

So I embarked on reading many other books in a similar vein, the theme being, I suppose, a search for meaning. I read everything from The Tibetan Book of the Dead to books about extreme mountaineering. I also read hundreds, if not thousands, of near-death experiences, both books about them and direct reports. These provided a sense of calm to quell the panic, at least for a while. Then I would feel the fear again and have to go back and read some more.

But eventually, the panic did start to fade, and I started to feel better. In fact, there were times I felt I truly found the sense of sacredness and meaning I had been looking for. I had settled on the idea that to live well and feel happy was to love others the best way I could (not at all to say that I managed to live up to this ideal). This seemed to be the message of all the near-death experiences I had read. At some point in all my reading, I had also picked up Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, and two quotes from it kept ringing in my head:

The wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all blades of grass.

He who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.

I hoped fervently that this period of relative peace and joy would last, and that I would never have to deal with such a dark depression again, but of course that's not what happened. It came back again when I was 27 and again when I was 29, both times lingering for several months, though thankfully not as long as the first time. I always dealt with it and got out of it the same way—lots and lots of reading and a search for meaning. These times I also did a lot of walking and really prioritized being outside. I remember, the third time I was depressed, feeling so weak but forcing myself to walk even just once around the small dog park next to our place. I'd do that three times I day if I had to so that it at least amounted to something.

No, I never “talked” to anyone, like a counselor, or got on any medication. I did consider medication when it first happened just so I could function normally and not burden anyone, but to pursue it I’d have to have told at least a few people and therefore, I thought, burden them. I knew that something was very clearly wrong with my physical brain. My entire experience of the world was changed, right down to the way food tasted, and that is all modulated by the brain. But still, I considered it more of a spiritual sickness than anything. Rightly or wrongly, I thought that any kind of therapy, or medication, or help from “professionals,” or help from really anyone at all, would only be a band-aid, if anything. This was something I needed to deal with on my own.

To give some credit to my wife here, eventually I told her what was really going on and she has of course been a wonderful source of help and support for me. There were more than a couple of times I called her, panicked, while she was at work, just to hear her voice, which helped me calm down.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention how much it probably helped to take part in activism. Having a cause certainly lends itself to a sense of meaning, and my fight for women, children, and societal sanity did just that. But more than that, like I have always said, it was about the people. Through my activism, I got to meet so many amazing people. I am convinced that this has been a large part of why I have been relatively okay for such a long time now. To see so many fundamentally good people willing to stand up for what they believe in even if it's unpopular, even in the face of attacks against their character and their livelihood—it has been impossible not to find so much hope in that, and so much love of life itself.

I wish I could say I went through my dark night and came out the other end in full union with God, as St. John of the Cross envisioned, but that's clearly not what happened, since it came back again and again. Maybe that's why I'm not a big believer in life-changing epiphanies that result in full conviction. Maybe one day I'll have an experience that changes my mind, know knows? I'm certainly open to it. I chased that kind of revelatory experience for a long time. But it's not something I am actively changing anymore. I do believe in change, but of the more gradual kind. I definitely changed and grew in my outlook on life. Maybe some of that comes with time and maturity, but it did teach me a lot to go through what I did. I took away a lot from all my reading as well. I try every day to live up to the way I think life should be lived, failing, of course, but trying nonetheless.

One place where my new, somewhat cobbled-together faith after three bouts of major depression led me was into the pursuit of having a baby. This was not something I took lightly at all. In fact, I was very close to never letting it happen because of what I had gone through and feared I would again.

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Last weekend, Canada's federal New Democratic Party (NDP) held its leadership convention, and it was quite the spectacle. Social media exploded with clips of the most unbelievable examples of woke excess. Well, unbelievable if you're not familiar with how radical progressives think and operate. For those of us who are, there was nothing surprising here. Unfortunately, most Canadians don't know just how ridiculous things have become.

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In one of the most viral moments, a trans-identified man complained that his “equity card” didn’t prevent a “cis woman” from speaking before him. Then there was the instance where a woman wearing a keffiyeh made a speech against Canada's and America's involvement in the Iran conflict only to be sternly reminded by the chair, Vancouver lawyer Adrienne Smith, that she is “non-binary” and not to be referred to as “Madame.”

Smith, by the way, had previously opined that Johnathan Yaniv’s loss at the BC Human Rights Tribunal after trying to force immigrant women to wax his testicles was a “step backward for trans human rights.”

Why are these people all so ridiculous?

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Well, it seems God had a sense of humor in ensuring that the French acronym for NDP was NPD, which is also the acronym for narcissistic personality disorder. This party and the ideology it espouses are irresistibly attractive to narcissists, and I mean actual, clinical, diagnosable narcissists. The party's devotion to analyzing everything through the lens of the hierarchy of intersecting oppressed identities means that it has become completely overrun by people who view themselves as perpetual victims—in other words, by narcissists. It's not that oppressed people are narcissistic; it's that narcissistic people believe they are oppressed.

Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by a high sense of self-importance, a need for excessive attention and praise, entitlement and an expectation for compliance, and envy. So, when you have a political party that hands out cards meant to grant special privileges based on whether someone deserves more attention and consideration than others, you're naturally going to attract a bunch of these people, and they are naturally going to squabble over who is more oppressed and therefore who deserves more privileges.

I have previously written about how the psychopath is the perfect victim to the woke; how psychopathic traits like emotional instability, lack of impulse control, narcissism, and sadism are seen as reactions to oppression (think trans-identified men writing J.K. Rowling murder fantasies) and therefore, perversely, as proof of oppression. This is just another inevitable outcome of basing value not in any sort of moral framework or assessment of someone's character but purely in the hierarchy of oppression. In any situation, anyone deemed “oppressed” is always good and anyone deemed “oppressor” is always bad, no matter their actual behavior.

Provincially, Alberta's NDP party also caters to the victimhood mindset, notably when it comes to trans issues. After the Conservative government introduced three very sensible pieces of legislation meant to protect women's sports and the bodily integrity of minors, the Alberta NDP wouldn't stop, and still hasn't stopped, talking about how the government is killing “trans kids.” They have zero compunction about sending kids the message that their government wants them dead and less than zero about actively promoting suicide to a vulnerable group of young people. They are the victims of the big meany conservatives, you see, and so their horrible behavior is just an expression of their oppression.

It's all very disturbing, and I don't understand why more people aren't completely put off by this. Many don't know just how crazy things have become; that's true. Still, far too many are attracted to victimhood, especially because today it comes with a lot of social cachet. But that's only if you're the “right” kind of victim according to the oppression hierarchy, of course. A woman victimized by a man flashing her in the changing room actually turns into an oppressor if she complains, because she is “cis” and he is “trans.”

But it's true that not everyone in a party like the NDP takes the role of the victim. Some are “allies” instead, which, grossly enough, sometimes gets them treated like punching bags by the poor “oppressed” people that they are so graciously trying to help. As I have also written before, what these people get out of it is that they get to play the “Rescuer” role in the Victim-Persecutor-Rescuer drama triangle. Playing the role of Rescuer gives them a sense of moral superiority and also lends them the social cachet of being properly progressive and “on the right side of history.” By keeping the victim dependent and stuck in their persecutory fantasies, they get to occupy this role and reap its social benefits indefinitely.

And so, you get a bunch of people fighting imaginary battles with imaginary demons, unfortunately with negative real-world consequences for the rest of us.

It's not wrong to fight for people who are actually oppressed, obviously. And it's not wrong to fight for your own political interests. But centering the narrative of victimhood in politics is naturally going to devolve into a clown show—which doesn't mean there's anything funny going on here. It may have been on particularly prominent display at this convention, but these are the beliefs of Canada's ruling class and we have seen terrible enough results come from them already, from men in women's prisons to anti-free speech rulings by Human Rights Tribunals.

It’s easy to laugh at “non-binary” women insisting that others play blind, deaf, and dumb to their sex, but these people seek severe punishment for “misgendering” and other crimes against progressive orthodoxy out of narcissistic injury, and that the psychology that is driving this movement is nothing to take lightly.

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When it comes to the nature vs. nurture debate, I come strongly down on the side of nature. I think most of who we are—our personalities, temperament, preferences, and intelligence—are just… who we are. I think these things are largely inborn and that upbringing isn’t going to change them, not much anyway.

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This is not to say that the environment someone is raised in has no impact on how they turn out at all. I think a bad environment that involves neglect and abuse certainly harms and stifles a person, which is why I think the most important job of parents is to provide care, protection, and security. Beyond that, however, I don’t think you’re going to change much about who the little person you are raising is going to become.

So, I’m not too concerned about impacting who my own daughter is going to become aside from getting her there lovingly and safely. She certainly was no blank slate and has an amazing personality that I take no credit for, aside from the genetics that contributed to it. I want to let the best parts of her flourish and help her with whatever she may struggle with, and I can’t wait to see what all of that entails. I think that’s all you can really do, and I think that’s just how it should be.

But one thing I would like to nurture in her and bring out as best as I can is a love for nature, and I think we’re off to a great start. By the time our daughter turned 10 months old, my wife and I had already taken her to quite a few of our favorite mountain spots. Experiencing these places with her by our sides made them more beautiful than ever.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to take her to the Athabasca Glacier before her first birthday as I had hoped in that post. She got roseola and traveling that far would have been a terrible idea. But we were able to change our booking to a year from our original date, so we are hoping we can make it out there before she turns two. That will be really special; we visited the glacier right after deciding to create her.

As for why I want to raise a nature lover? Well, I think it’s a self-evident good. The natural world is amazing and deserves appreciation. I think spending time in nature is a great way to feel more happiness and satisfaction. I think it’s good to experience beauty, and I have had some of the most wonderful times of my life in the mountains. I want my daughter to experience the best that the world has to offer. But there’s more to it than that.

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***

I've been reading When the Trees Say Nothing, a collection of Thomas Merton’s writings on nature. I'm embarrassed to say I've been reading this tiny book since I got it for Christmas. But I do make a point to read at least a page or two after putting my daughter to sleep every night, while still in her room. I keep it next to her diapers.

In addition to all of the wonderful descriptions of nature, there was one passage that really struck me:

Man can know all about God’s creation by examining its phenomena, by dissecting and experimenting and this is all good. But it is misleading, because with this kind of knowledge you do not really know the beings you know. You only know about them. That is to say you create for yourself a knowledge based on your observations. What you observe is really as much the product of your knowledge as its cause. You take the thing not as it is, but as you want to investigate it. Your investigation is valid, but artificial.

There is something you cannot know about a wren by cutting it up in a laboratory and which you can only know if it remains fully and completely a wren, itself, and hops on your shoulder if it feels like it.

An appreciation of nature, to me, is not just an enjoyment of the trees and creeks and birds and wind and sun and sky. This is all important and wonderful and something I want my daughter to enjoy, but it's not just about spending time outside. It's about an appreciation of nature as in the way things are. In other words: a direct experience of life and living things.

I think this is extremely important today when so much of our lives actually comes to us second-hand. Everything is representation, often through a screen. I don't think this is always bad or sometimes we can or should avoid. I use screen, obviously. My daughter has some access to screens because I don't want it to become a kind of forbidden fruit. But it does encourage a disconnection and dissociation from the world, which I think robs us of the chance to really know ourselves and others.

My daughter is growing up in a world where she will have endless access to information. But information isn't experience. I also think a lot of modern issues and obsession with “identities” stem from the way in which we have forgotten how to be and instead only know how to verbally identify. Worst yet, sometimes that declared identity has nothing to do with who or what we actually are. I don't want her to get lost in this hall of mirrors. I may not be able to control who she is, but I want to give her a way of looking at the world. Not a guide for what to look at but a guide for how to look.

***

So we take her into nature every chance we get, and most recently that was a trip to Johnston Canyon, my favorite place in the world.

I've lost count of how many times I've done this trail. I've been going regularly since my early 20s. One time, I even saw a bear and felt like we really connected (but to be fair, I was on drugs). Those days were fun, but behind me and replaced by something better and more significant. Now, I get to show my daughter, and it seems that she really does love it too. So, we found ourselves on the trail again earlier this month.

This Johnston Canyon trail is notorious for being very icy well into spring, and you’re best served if you come prepared with gear like crampons and poles. Well, we didn’t have any of that. The goal was mainly to see how far in we could go.

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A lot of people assume “trans” is a new fad that started about a decade ago. In some ways, they are right. That’s when gender ideology really went mainstream and we began seeing men who identify as women make increasing demands for entry into women’s spaces, services, and sports. But long before that, these men were popping up in the radical feminist and lesbian movements.

It is also often pointed out that women are more likely to support gender ideology. I agree that is, disappointingly, true on the whole. But it is certainly not all women (and also of plenty of men), and when male doctors and clinicians were coining terms like “gender identity” and developing “sex change surgeries,” it was women, often specifically feminist women, who were some of the first to encounter the consequences of these ideas and push back on them.

I’ve collected here some snapshots from throughout the 1970s of letters, events, and controversies involving men who claimed to be women and the women who fought back.

(Longtime readers may recognize some of this material, as it is a conglomeration of a series of semi-locked articles I did in 2023. I thought it made much more sense to collect and edit it all together in one place for ease of reading and sharing!)

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1970 “Letter from a Transsexual”

In 1970, a man named Elliott Basil Mattiuzzi, who called himself Beth Elliot, decided to write a letter to the radical feminist newspaper It Ain’t Me Babe about how he was really a lesbian. “I am a transsexual,” Mattiuzzi begins. “On the intellectual and emotional levels, I know myself to be a woman; on the physical level, my own body denies me this.”

Mattiuzzi goes on to describe how he met and fell in love with a woman named Bev, who, apparently, made him realize that all his life he had given a “woman’s love.” Bev was Bev Jo, a radical lesbian feminist writer who has accused Mattiuzzi of stalking her and taking a name that sounded like hers. I have spoken to Bev Jo and written up here side of the story, which you can read here.

Later, like the very heterosexual man he was, Mattiuzzi fell in love with another woman named Mary, who he met at the Gay Lib coffee house. He described Mary as “exclusively gay” but said that she was able to “see beyond” his body and love him as a person. Mattiuzzi also described how he felt “trapped” in a man’s body and was seeking to start estrogen treatment as a preparation for “sex-change surgery.”

The editors responded that “this we don’t dig at all as a solution.”

They invited Mattiuzzi to visit before publishing the letter to “check out his vibe” and try to talk him out of the operation. During the visit, they noted that his understanding of women was “too passive/submissive.” He was also insistent that the only way he could live and behave as a woman was to be “totally female.”

The editors insisted back that a sex-change operation wasn’t a healthy solution to his predicament and that men must start discovering a “new reality” for themselves, just as women were doing at the time.

I thought that this letter and the response provided a fascinating look at the history of an issue that has been smoldering mainly out of the public’s eye for over 55 years.

As for Mattiuzzi, he walked away agreeing to give accepting himself as male a shot. However, just a few months later, he became the vice president of the San Francisco chapter of a lesbian political organization called the Daughters of Bilitis. In 1972, he was removed from the group after accusations of sexual harassment. This unfortunately didn’t stop him from continual involvement in lesbian communities (more on that below).

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The Emperor’s New Clothes

In 1971, we get another interesting letter, this one published in the Detroit Gay Liberator and signed by “Pat Maxwell (a transexual).”

According to Maxwell, “man’s transsexual fantasies are endless,” but it is only the transsexuals who take responsibility for these desires and become women. He also argues that when a man “becomes” a woman, he suddenly feels the total weight of chauvinist oppression, writing:

When a man in our society grows his hair long, puts on a dress, and walks among us, she is in effect giving up his male privilege. She is not oppressing women, she is threatening men! The queen is the lavender menace to the male chauvinist.

A man who grows his hair long and puts on a dress may face threats from other men in certain places, but there is hardly a better example of “male privilege” than that man’s ability to declare himself to be a woman. (The actual Lavender Menace, by the way, was a group of radical lesbian feminists.)

Maxwell asserts that women will only cease to be sex objects when all men are able to cross this sex role boundary, which is hilarious because most of the men who seek to cross it do so specifically because of the desire to be a female sex object themselves.

This odd essay is followed by another section titled “Transvestite and Transsexual Liberation.” It begins by noting that transvestites and transsexuals are oppressed by both homosexuals and heterosexuals.

Then we are treated to a list of demands, which readers will recognize are similar to what the trans movement is still demanding today. Note the particular demand to do away with any safeguarding for transition and for the state to freely provide hormones and surgery, no questions asked.

What’s particularly interesting to me is that, as far as this list goes, it is still in many ways rather conservative by today’s standards. For example, it argues that only those who have made a full anatomical transition should be able to obtain full cross-sex identification. We’ve gone much further than this with sex self-identification.

After the list of demands is a short section that declares, “We share in the oppression of gays and we share in the oppression of women.”

The trans movement was born out of a hijacking of real liberation movements by men who wanted greater freedom to live their fetish openly. Unfortunately, this effort to force-team the trans movement with the gay and feminist movements continues to this day, more fervent than ever.

“We Must Not Call Him Sister”

“Thirty-two years of suffering in the androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the name ‘woman’.”

- Robin Morgan

In 1973, Elliott Basil Mattiuzzi was back, this time with a guitar. Fancying himself a folk singer, he was slated to perform at the West Coast Lesbian Conference. But drama ensued. On the very first night, a lesbian separatist group called the Gutter Dykes protested his involvement by handing out leaflets. After a quick performance, Mattiuzzi left.

These events caused keynote speaker Robin Morgan, a renowned leader of the international women’s movement, to amend her speech with a powerful section railing against considering crossdressing men to be women.

Are we, out of the compassion in which we have been positively forced to drown as women, are we yet again going to defend the male supremacist yes obscenity of male transvestism? How many of us will try to explain away—or permit into our organizations, even, men who deliberately re-emphasize gender roles, and who parody female oppression and suffering as “camp”? Maybe it seems that we, in our “liberated” combat boots and jeans aren’t being mocked. No? Then it is “merely” our mothers, and their mothers, who had no other choice, who wore hobbling dresses and torture-stiletto-heels to survive, to keep jobs, or to keep husbands because they themselves could get no jobs. No, I will not call a male “she;” thirty-two years of suffering in the androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the name “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister. We know what’s at work when whites wear blackface; the same is at work when men wear drag.

I strongly encourage you to read the whole address. Only a portion of the speech is actually dedicated to the topic of male crossdressers, while the rest covers other major issues of the day. For example, Morgan makes it clear that the gay, lesbian, and women’s movements were never one big happy family:

With the creation of GLF [Gay Liberation Front], a few of us Jewish Mother types spend a lot of time running back and forth between the two movements, telling straight women that the Lesbians weren’t ogres and telling the Lesbians that the straight women weren’t creeps. Simultaneously, the intense misogyny coming against Lesbians from gay men drove many women out of the “gay movement” and into the Women’s Movement.

The speech provides an invaluable snapshot in time not only of the gender wars but of the gay rights movement, feminism, and the broader cultural moment.

The Lesbian/Transsexual “Misunderstanding”

I’m not one to toss around the word “mansplaining,” but it was all I could think of when I came across a 1975 editorial in Gay Community News titled “The Lesbian/Transsexual Misunderstanding” by a trans-identified man named “Margo” (pictured above), where he mansplained to lesbians how he was a lesbian too.

“I sometimes feel as if the whole Lesbian community is down on me for being transsexual,” Margo begins. “My hope is that honest misunderstandings between the overlapping Lesbian and transsexual communities are at the root of most problems.”

Margo bemoaned the fact that he had experienced a “great deal of pain from the conduct of some lesbians towards me as a transsexual.” In fact, he considered his situation to be similar to the situation of lesbians in the women’s movement just a few years prior:

Last year I became involved with a group of Lesbian anarchists; I was immediately accepted as myself, a very freaky Lesbian. Then, at the beginning of the next meeting, everyone froze toward me: I had become a “problem” to them, as Lesbians were a problem for straight feminists not so long ago.

Still to this day, men like Margo use the fact that lesbians had their own historic struggles to argue that men should therefore be allowed in women’s movements and spaces, with the insulting nature of this argument completely lost on them.

Also like Margo, they insult us further by insisting that genitals (and the entire male or female anatomy that genitals are a proxy for) don’t matter:

Regardless of my native genitals, I feel myself to be a woman who loves women, or simply a Lesbian.

Margo continues:

Unfortunately, my sister Lesbians sometimes hold anti-transsexual attitudes. By anti-transsexual attitudes, I mean prejudices which would exclude from the Lesbian movement those transsexuals who are living full-time as women, and would exclude them for any reason which would not equally exclude their native sisters.

The remark about living “full-time” as a woman also betrays the fact that Margo sees womanhood as nothing more than a performance, which is not at all surprising.

Margo then goes on to compare the plight of trans-identified males in the women’s movement to the civil rights struggles of black Americans—both during slavery and under Jim Crow—of women, and of gay people, concluding:

Thus it is not surprising that transsexuals should be treated in the same way that Blacks, women, gay people and Lesbians specifically have been treated, and all in the name of “revolution”…

All Lesbians (transsexual and native) should reject this logic of slavery and hypocrisy and all transsexuals who respect themselves should challenge it aggressively and without hesitation or apology.

This tendency of the trans movement to co-opt the struggles of other groups is among its most obscene, yet it remains the mainstream trans activist view today.

At the end of the piece, Margo makes one final call for the inclusion of penises in women’s and lesbian spaces:

The time has come to unite women regardless of native genitals.

You'd think maybe he would stop lecturing and pestering lesbians after that. But of course not! Gay Community News published a follow-up piece by him titled “The Lesbian/Transsexual Misunderstanding Part II.”

The article begins with a blurb that informs the reader:

Last time Margo told us that Lesbians and transsexuals do not understand each other. This week she explains some of the reasons and opts for a better relationship between native and transsexual Lesbians.

Margo begins:

To some Lesbians, transsexuals are essentially men who enjoy donning dresses, going out on the street for five minutes, and then claiming the honor of being a woman.

He very generously grants that these kinds of men “have no place in the women’s or the Lesbian movement” because they are not transsexuals (today’s trans activists would likely disagree).

Instead, true transsexuals, like Margo, feel from a “very early age” that they are “female.” He also asks us to believe that he is a lesbian in addition to being female because he fell in love with his chemistry teacher at age 17. In fact, he “wanted to be like her” which is “essentially a Lesbian passion.” I can confirm that's not how it works.

Margo continues:

An understanding of transsexualism as a deep and life-long identity crisis concerning one’s most basic gender identity will distinguish it from the kinds of impersonations which Lesbians reject, and reject rightly, as a basis of female identity. Once this distinction is made, much of the ground for anti-transsexualism will suddenly vanish.

Margo offers no rationale for why lesbians can reject other men’s claims to womanhood and lesbianism but not his own. Why must we be beholden to certain men just because they have a “deep and life-long identity crisis”?

In the next section, Margo the male lesbian discusses the “overly narrow concepts of lesbianism.” He argues that lesbian sexuality has nothing to do with genitals. He also says that sex change surgery does not make one a woman. But that “the crucial turning point is changing socially from a man to a woman.”

Then we get this gem:

I am taking a careful approach to surgery, and, in the meantime, celebrating my Lesbianism in non-genital ways.

Non-genital ways. To explain himself, Margo tries and fails to wax poetic about how a “genital relationship” between two women is “patriarchal” and how what lesbian love is really about is “love, affection, commitment, and empathy.”

Obviously, a loving relationship has all of these other factors. But the downplaying of physical attraction and intimacy is nothing but a self-serving way of asking lesbians to consider partners that they are not attracted to—like men.

After he’s done telling women they should accept men sexually, Margo turns to the broader issue of including trans-identified men in lesbian and feminist movements, writing:

The idea of ignoring or even crushing such a group of sexually oppressed people in the name of a feminist revolution shows the kind of patriarchal ruthlessness which male chauvinists confuse with strength and commitment.

What’s astounding to me is that this blatant guilt-tripping has worked on so many women and lesbians. It is the constant refrain of liberal feminists that ALL women (meaning women and trans-identified men) must fight together against the “patriarchy,” while ignoring perhaps the patriarchy’s most obvious expression in our society today: the ability for a man to put on a bad wig and spy on young girls in women’s changing rooms.

Morgan continues trying to hammer home the point that knowing what men and women are is patriarchal and sexist:

There is a danger now that the Lesbian feminist movement will cling to sexist definitions of femaleness and maleness in dealing with transsexuals.

The sexist definition may be summed up by these three rules: (1) All people can be classified physically as either male or female; (2) all people have gender identities which match their physical sexes; and (3) it is impossible for a person to change sex.

He refers to these very basic and obvious truths as “two-genderism,” and calls it a form of “oppression.”

He attempts to debunk them all, starting with the invocation of intersex people, then asking questions like “what is a woman’s body in the first place?”, and finally insisting that “people do change physical sex.”

Then, he takes some time to feel sorry for himself in a passage I found interesting enough to quote at some length:

In my experience, and I say this with regret, most of the people who have been down on me have been radical Lesbians and feminists rather than liberals. For example, at the time of my social change I was a graduate student at a certain Jesuit institution; and this university changed my records without any hassle. The people in charge were not only tolerant but even helpful.

Now living as a woman, I naturally went over to join the campus Women’s Center. Several of the members knew about my transsexualism, and they encouraged me to help out. I continued for five months without problems.

Then three of the members called me to meet with them and they declared that they were just not “comfortable” with me because of my transsexualism. Further, they argued that I could not really be a good staff person, because I did not have first person experience with birth control and abortion!

To me, this entire lament shows a stunning lack of empathy. Morgan’s attempt to live and be treated as a woman likely wasn’t going to affect random people in a school’s record office (not yet at the time, anyway), but the people who it did affect, like the women at the women’s center, were the ones who very understandably had a problem with being asked to play along.

Instead of understanding their point of view, he tells radical feminists how they should be doing their feminism better (and more favorably to him):

Breaking with old rules always leads to insecurity. The question arose: “If we no longer follow the traditional roles, then what actually makes us women?” The truly radical answer would be: “We are women because we have female gender identities, regardless of either our genitals or our adherence or nonadherence to sex roles; in short, we are women because we feel ourselves to be women in our own terms.” Quite naturally, this answer would lead to the embracing of transsexuals as sisters.

We are still dealing with exactly these kinds of arguments from exactly these kinds of men today.

The Woman Within Or Women Without?

In 1977, the feminist lesbian publication Lesbian Tide also explored the issue of men identifying as women and lesbians in a feature of its May/June issue titled “Transsexuals: The Woman Within Or Women Without?” by Sharon McDonald. The piece begins with a quote from none other than Margo the mansplainer!

“Most transsexuals are straight, but those relatively few who identify as lesbian feminist women are forcing the lesbian movement to come to a more exact definition of womanhood and lesbianism,” the article begins.

Indeed, most trans-identified men have always been and still are straight, but not in the way that McDonald seems to mean (attracted to other men). They are heterosexuals with an autogynephilia fetish. The fact that there were enough of them to cause problems for lesbian communities in the ‘70s is telling in and of itself. I have always said that I believe autogynephilic men outnumber actual lesbians.

Back to the article: we get a short discussion of the “innate femaleness” that I think highlights how these men gained the foothold in feminism that they did. Rooting femaleness in some sort of “innate” sense instead of firmly in the biological reality of literally being female was, as McDonald also points out, exactly the in that trans-identified men needed.

McDonald then touches on the Olivia Records controversy (more on that below). In summing it up, she writes:

For those women who feel that the transsexual has “paid” for her privilege in personal pain, there is no resentment. But for other women, there is no way the transsexual can repay the debt incurred by years of male status and advantage.

Unfortunately, I think both views are a problem. How much privilege a man has before and after transition should be immaterial to the question of if he should be considered a woman or a lesbian. “Male” and “female” are not differing states of oppression; they are two different and mutually exclusive sexes.

This is, of course, a radical feminist magazine, and I am not surprised to see discussions of privilege in regard to the sexes. But framing the discussion of who is and isn’t a woman in this way is, I fear, a part of what led us to the predicament we are in today. And the problems were already starting then:

As more transsexuals come out of the closet and community awareness of transsexualism grows, protests over the presence and inclusion of transsexuals at all-women’s events are escalating… What is distressing is that more and more transsexuals, both pre and post-operative, are are being accepted as lesbian women.

Radical feminist lesbians of the 1970s were resistant to rooting femaleness in biology out of fear that it would reify sex roles. This is understandable, but it was an attitude open to exploitation by trans-identified men, and that’s exactly what happened.

Indeed, McDonald writes that, “The conflict between lesbian separatists and lesbian transsexuals is a crucial political dilemma for the lesbian movement, demanding a definition of womanhood so concrete as to be unmistakable, so cut and dried as to be cold-blooded.”

But there is nothing cold-blooded in knowing that a woman is an adult human female, and I am heartened by the fact that today’s gender critical movement is not afraid to speak about the biological differences between the sexes while affirming that both are equal in value.

This is the sort of message, I believe, that doesn’t allow trans-identified men to lay claim to femaleness. They are men, no matter what level of privilege they believe they have given up or what innate femininity they believe they harbor. In a sense, I am relieved that the discussion has changed, because it shows that we are not just going around in circles.

Maybe, just maybe, we won’t be stuck in this same loop for another 50 years.

The Sandy Stone and Olivia Records Controversy

Imagine if an avowed all-women record label announced today that they had a trans-identified male working as part of their music collective. Well, this is exactly what happened in the ‘70s.

In November of 1977, Lesbian Connection magazine published “An Open Letter To Olivia Records” written by Candace Margulies.

Olivia Records had apparently announced several months prior that a trans-identified male named Sandy Stone had been hired by the label in 1976. Other sources note that the relationship actually goes back to 1974.

Margulies begins her letter by expressing a sense of betrayal at the revelation, accusing Olivia Records of keeping Stone’s identity a secret because they knew they would face significant disagreement.

Here are some choice excerpts from the rest of the letter:

Olivia exists as a women’s recording company to be run by women and to provide women’s music; Olivia concealed the sexuality of an employee; the concealment was revealed; and Olivia has attempted to convince the women’s community that this transexual is a woman.

I am willing to believe that Stone has contributed greatly to your expertise, that he is an excellent technician and that he now looks and behaves like a lesbian/feminist. I also believe that your fundamental purpose is to be a women’s recording company and you have crossed that objective by hiring a transexual. I do not agree with either your conclusion that Stone is female or with the logic that leads you to that conclusion. Stone is not a woman because he now experiences women’s oppression.

The term Women’s Recording Company, women’s anything for that matter, has been a term that I’ve come to trust and respond to. You at Olivia have violated that trust; not only because you’ve hired a non-woman, but also because you chose to decide for me that that was alright, and continued to trade as a “women’s” recording company. I am stunned by the audacity of your making such a decision for your consumers.

It is one thing to believe you are female and to undergo a physical change to resemble the female. It is a very different thing to invade women’s space as Stone has invaded you.

She ends on an uncompromising note:

That a man can go anywhere he wishes, even be taken wholly into the female realm, is a devastating injustice. By admitting Sandy Stone into Olivia, you have permitted men yet one more.

In February of 1978, Lesbian Connection published a few responses to Margulies’ letter, spanning a range of perspectives.

One writer offered her full support to Margulies. “He’ll always be a man,” she said about Stone, “and it’s pretty obnoxious that he can worm his way into women’s spaces!”

Another felt tension between her discomfort with exclusion and her recognition of the important differences between “transsexuals” and “womyn.”

A third was upset with Lesbian Connection for publishing such “distorted filth” in the first place!

The controversy was far from over. Janice Raymond also wrote about Stone in her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.

Masculine behavior is notably obtrusive. It is significant that transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists have inserted themselves into the positions of importance and/or performance in the feminist community. The controversy in the summer of 1977 surrounding Sandy Stone, the transsexual sound engineer for Olivia Records, an “all-women” recording company, illustrates this well. Stone is not only crucial to the Olivia enterprise but plays a very dominant role there. The national reputation and visibility he achieved in the aftermath of the Olivia controversy is comparable, in feminist circles, to that attained by Renee Richards in the wake of the Tennis Week Open. This only serves to enhance his previously dominant role and to divide women, as men frequently do, when they make their presence necessary and vital to women. Having produced such divisiveness, one would think that if Stone’s commitment to and identification with women were genuinely woman-centered, he would have removed himself from Olivia and assumed some responsibility for the divisiveness.

To be perfectly honest, I do have some sympathy for Olivia Records and even Stone himself here. I value freedom of association and I abhor guilt by association. By all accounts, the other members of the collective desired his inclusion and stood by him. On the other hand, I also completely understand why women were upset that Olivia Records had presented itself as an all-women and women-centered collective when it was working closely with a man. I find their grievances pretty justified and reasonable.

This may have all happened five decades ago, but similar scenarios are only popping up with greater frequency today. And the issue is that, today, women and lesbian groups often don’t actually have freedom of association and must accept these men or face actual legal consequences.

Can Men Be Women? Some Lesbians Think So!

Also in 1977, the editors of DYKE A Quarterly of Lesbian Culture and Analysis were starting to catch wind of male transsexuals “invading the women’s movement,” in their words. So they decided to run a feature called “Can Men Be Women? Some Lesbians Think So!” to explore the issue.

Editors Liza Cowan and Penny House were clear about their stance at the outset, writing:

We don’t think that cutting off his genitals makes a man a woman, and we do not believe that a woman can be born into a man’s body.

They continued:

We thought at first that the doctors in the gender identity and transsexual field believed that women could accidentally be born into male bodies, and that by operating on them they could correct this mistake of nature. This is the line that is being used by transsexuals and being bought by the straight press and some Lesbians. We read several books by well known “authorities” in the gender and transsexual field… It becomes clear reading the case histories of transsexuals that they themselves know that they are really men, unless they have completely gone off the deep end.

While some DYKE readers had expressed that they were “sick of reading and thinking about transexuals,” the editors realized that it was a vital conversation to have. Not only were these men trespassing in lesbian communities, but there were also already “dozens” of gender identity clinics and “hundreds” of doctors performing surgeries for anyone who would pay. “There are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of male to ‘female’ transsexuals around today,” they wrote.

“We must deal with them before a trickle becomes an avalanche,” the editors declared. “We need to develop more than just a gut reaction.”

To these ends, they presented two conversations about transsexuals. The first was between Liza and Edna Lerner, “a psychologist who used to do counselling and testing of pre- and post-operative transsexuals.” Right off the bat, Edna starts by pointing out that the ratio of males to females wanting “sex transformation” was about seven to one. Today, of course, among younger cohorts, the ratio is flipped.

Next, Edna explained, “the transsexual’s craziness is in this little narrow defined place where they think that if they get rid of their penises and have the operation, they will be women.” She described one patient who had to go through several operations after being “messed up” on the first one. The patient became psychotic and really believed that he would be able to have a baby.

Edna also noted that some of her patients wanted to become women because they were narcissistic and wanted to be taken care of. They thought that life would be easier as a woman. And, though she was aware that transexual men were invading the women’s movement, she was quite taken aback when Liza informed her that some of these men were calling themselves lesbians. “To hear that they are attracted to women I find bizarre,” she said.

Liza then told her that it was not just the post-operative men calling themselves lesbians, but that “it has reached such contortions that pre-operative transsexuals, who still have a penis, who have not had the operation, are calling themselves ‘women,’ calling themselves ‘Lesbians.’” When asked if she could explain that, Edna could only reply:

Well, you know a transsexual who feels that he is a “woman” and has a feminine gender identity, then moves to try to give himself a feminine body. In my mind that is psychotic but at least it is consistent. It is less psychotic than saying “I am a Woman” and waltzing around with a penis. Which is truly bizarre.

Indeed it is.

The DYKE editors then listened to the Edna tape with filmmaker Janet Meyers and singer-songwriter Alex Dobkin, both lesbians, recording this second conversation as well.

Janet, Liza, and Penny were on point right off the bat, and I thought it best to simply share their insightful words in full:

Janet: What is so incredible is that a lot of Lesbians seem to be saying to transsexuals, “If this is the way you want to think about yourself, I guess I am obligated to participate in that illusion, because far be it from me to get on anyone’s case, to make a judgment about the self-deception that you are involved in.” That is what is so weird to me, what I find so scary about the way a lot of Lesbians have reacted to the transsexual issue. The attitude seems to be that however someone presents themself, that is the way you are supposed to see them. You are supposed to suspend your perceptions of that person and completely accept, in some kind of mindless way, that person’s evaluation of who they are. It seems to me that this is a very dangerous way of looking at the world and a very passive way of looking at the world. No distinction is made between respecting someone else and suspending your own perceptions. It is always tempting to be passive.

Liza: It is also very tempting to be generous. I think that a lot of Lesbians say they have gone through such a hard time being accepted as Lesbians and now these poor transsexuals are having such a hard time and here we are in the same boat, both oppressed by the same culture. If we recognize them as our sisters it helps everybody. It is very generous and I appreciate that in women, but it is really shortsighted.

Penny: It is misguided. The fact is that you have always in life to make distinctions and judgments. It is not in itself destructive to make a judgment, to make distinctions, to have a conception of right and wrong. Not just right and wrong, but to have any kind value.

The women continued to discuss that the claims made by transsexuals about having a “woman’s soul” or being in the wrong body are not only nonsensical but galling. Janet astutely points out that this may be “preparatory to dispensing with women entirely.”

I think that women, Lesbians, should be very clear about whether we really are willing to say that a man can go to another man, that some sort of technological exchange can go on between them, and then one of them will walk out of the room as a woman. If women are willing to say that these sort of hospital frat parties can produce sisters, I think that is really nuts. I can’t believe that there is that response from Lesbians, even though I understand that it comes out of generous impulses.

To illustrate this harrowing point, the editors include a reprint of a column that appeared in Sister Magazine that same year, where a proud transsexual named Angela Douglas Berkeley discusses how “genetic women” are becoming obsolete.

The women then discuss how the lesbian community had allowed itself to be infiltrated by trans-identified men, mincing no words about what a mistake it was. As Liza puts it: “It means you do not have an understanding of what is male and what is female, and you don’t understand you have the right to be in a group that is all women.”

They also lament that a lot of women seem to give these men a pass because they have given up their male privilege:

Liza: It is also that somebody has renounced something, therefore he is equal to you.

Penny: He has come down. A man who has come down to a woman’s level. All that prevents women from being men is being given the privilege of being men. If we had the privilege that men have, would we be men? No!

It is sad to read these words from more than four decades ago and realize how much worse the problem is today, as well as how little has changed in the rationale given for why some men are actually women. In fact, more people than ever are parroting these ridiculous ideas.

But it is also heartening to know that, even though many lesbians did give away the community, others have been thinking, speaking, and writing clearly on this topic since the beginning.

On the last page of the feature, the editors chose to include an excerpt from the book Sex and Gender Vol. II, The Transsexual Experiment by Robert J. Stoller. They titled the passage, “If This Had Been a Woman They Would Have Locked Her Up,” and they were probably right. It is a jarring but unfortunately accurate representation of some of the types of men they were dealing with at the time and that we continue to deal with today.

This is nowhere near an exhaustive look at early trans infiltration of women’s movements and spaces, but I think it illustrates how shockingly long it has been a problem and how what we are dealing with today is nothing new. The only good news, I suppose, is that since I initially dug up these historic snapshots in 2023, the landscape has indeed changed. Gender ideology is a major political topic and there is significant pushback against it now. Not everywhere, unfortunately. In some places (and particularly in Canada), it’s only getting worse. But more people across a broad segment of society now are at least aware and speaking out about it. I’m thankful for them and for the women who paved the way.

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Like many, I have spent the past month watching the Olympics, or what I can of it with a toddler hanging off me. My favorite sports to watch are freestyle skiing and snowboarding, and how cool is it to have two versions of each event—the men’s and the women’s—to tune into? Especially because, unlike in this past Summer Olympics, we didn’t have men competing against women (in combat sports, no less), which was a nice reprieve. I think there was a they/them in a bobsled somewhere: a woman, of course, competing with other women, so it was a total non-issue. But it’s still got me thinking, as watching sports does, about the very obvious sex and performance differences between men and women and the fact that some people just can’t, or won’t, see it.

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For example, I’ve come across more than a few posts on X bemoaning the fact that hockey, in particular, is commonly called “hockey” when referring to the men’s game and “women’s hockey” when referring to the women’s game. This is not untrue and is perhaps an understandable gripe when it comes to the Olympics, where most other sports are known by their names, and people further specify whether it is a men’s or women’s event. In my favorite sport to watch too, sport climbing, which I follow even outside of the Olympics, men and women are given very equal time and attention. There are male and female superstars on both sides and, as far as I can tell, men’s and women’s events draw equal crowds.

This is great! But there is an important difference that the “hockey” gripers are missing. As people invariably point out in the comments, the tendency to consider certain popular men’s sports that have their own professional leagues to simply be the default is because the professional leagues technically aren’t closed off to women. If a woman could be competitive in the NHL, NBA, NFL, what have you, then she could play. But they aren’t, so they have their own protected leagues where men aren’t (or weren’t, anyway, when we had any sense) allowed to play.

This answer is usually dismissed by many, especially my fellow women, unfortunately, as “misogyny.” That’s right. They truly seem to believe—or seem to want to believe—that the reason you don’t see women on men’s sports teams is just bias and bigotry. It’s a kind of wilful blindness to reality that astonishes me and has annoyed me since I was a kid, when “girl power” pushed the idea that men and women were the same, and I could clearly see we are not.

Going back to my title, it particularly astonishes me that one can maintain this delusion when the Olympics offer men’s and women’s categories in every event for easy direct comparison. We are all free to check out men’s and women’s times and speeds. We can all see for ourselves the differences in amplitude, spins, and trick difficulty in the freestyle sports. Women simply would not be competitive with men. They are not worse—they have fundamentally different bodies that are shorter, lighter, less muscular, and built to house a whole extra organ!

The fact that women are not just smaller men but our own type of human entirely is precisely what makes it so great to have women’s events to watch. They aren’t just downgraded men’s events; they are unique events in their own right, with women’s unique skills and strengths on display. To deny women their own category is to deny them the chance to shine, which is exactly how it used to be and which is what these sex denialists seem to want to go back to.

As I’ve written before when discussing sport climbing, there are so many amazing female athletes whose names no one would even know if they had to compete against men and if they were not afforded their own protected female category. Likewise, there were many amazing female athletes in the limelight this Olympics who have benefitted from exactly this.

Many women seem to reject sex differences and the rationale for female sports because they find it insulting to even consider the idea that women are not competitive against men. But this attitude is an infantile and defensive knee-jerk rejection of reality and is, in fact, the real insult against women. If you think there are no real, physical differences between the sexes, then the only way you can explain the performance discrepancy between men and women is essentially to say that women don't try hard enough. This is what bears taking offence to.

So yeah, maybe it's annoying that we talk about “hockey” and “women's hockey,” but it is also a reflection of the good reality that women have protected sports. I'm all for interest between the two equalizing and for people to naturally start referring to men's and women's hockey separately as a result. But this is not a change that's going to come about by insisting there are no differences between the two games and trying to force everyone else to play along. It can come from pointing out that, as in many other sports today, women are worth watching on their own merits. They aren’t in the men’s games or categories because they lack skill, drive, or effort—they aren’t in the men’s game because they aren’t men.

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It's getting more common on social media now—particularly on X but on other platforms as well—to see criticisms of same-sex couples raising children. I personally see this a lot because some of the circles I am in overlap with those making these criticisms. And no, it has not sent me running into the arms of radical progressives who want to transition children, even though those people are also more likely to support same-sex marriages and parenting. My politics aren't only about maximizing benefit to myself.

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But I do happen to be a lesbian mom raising a baby girl with my wife. So, is it hard to see this sentiment among people on my side on other issues, even among people I genuinely like? To be honest, not at all. The best thing in the world has happened to me. It doesn't feel right praying for anything else because I already received all my heart ever truly wanted. To care about what anyone else thinks after getting such a gift would feel almost blasphemous.

Of course, how this will all impact the daughter I am raising matters even more than what I feel and think. That's who all this is for at the end of the day. And I don't agree, as a common narrative that's been going around claims, that it's selfish to simply want children. I don't think the desire to create a person you will love more than yourself means you are prioritizing adult wants over children's needs. Children should be wanted. That is a circumstance that is good for a child to be born into. In fact, I think one of the best features of modernity is that more and more children are being born because they are purely wanted, not because they were accidents or to work the family farm. (Obviously, accidental children can also be enthusiastically welcomed and loved, I'm just saying that this has become less common nowadays).

When it comes to my own daughter, her entry into life has been one of the most cosmically blessed entries in the entire universe, when you really take all of human history into account. She is happy, safe, cared for, and surrounded by people who love her. And she wouldn't exist if everyone involved in creating her wasn't who they are. This wonderful little girl simply wouldn't be here, and the world is certainly better with her in it.

Obviously, this argument doesn't apply to every situation. Many people exist—and it's good that they do—because of terrible circumstances that you wouldn't wish on anyone else. A tragic situation isn't made right just because someone exists because of it. But my daughter's situation is not tragic. She was wanted and planned for and continues to be cared for by the people who wanted and planned for her. Even if you think it's not ideal, it's certainly no tragedy.

For my part, however, I do think it is ideal. She is being raised by the people who loved her before she even existed. She is exactly who she is because we are exactly who we are. There is no other way for any of this to go, no other ideal to strive for, because this is our ideal. And part of that includes the fact that she will know the truth about everything: her creation, her origins, her family, everything.

Nevertheless, I genuinely don't hold anything against people whose belief that I should not be raising a child with my wife comes from a place of care and concern for the child. This is a good place for that belief to come from, and I don't feel personally offended, much less hated. But obviously, I think they are wrong, and in the end, I am living the life I wished for with all of my heart and soul. To be bitter that not everyone agrees with it, despite still getting to live this way, would be deeply ungrateful. In the end, I won, and I don't mean that in a petty way. It just means I'm not a victim of anyone else's views.

Yes, it's true that people with these views might make it harder for people like me to live how I do in the future, and I do think there is a backlash coming our way due to the excesses of trans, queer, and overall woke politics. Of course I wouldn't simply stand by and let that happen just because I already have what I want. I would fight the same way I always have about issues I care about.

But I would also remind people like me to enjoy and be thankful for what they do have, and to focus on gratitude rather than on feeling like victims just because some people don't agree with them. And don't always assume that you are hated just because people disagree with you. I'd be a hypocrite to accuse people who disagree with our use of a known donor of bigotry, as I myself feel a certain way about anonymous gamete donation while harboring no hate for the people who choose that path.

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When I was in the middle of labor, my nurse referred to me as “they.” Why? Because I have short hair. That's it. That's the only reason. All my medical records say I am female. I mean, I was about to give birth, so there was really no doubt about that. But I am a woman with short hair, and in today's world, that means it’s quite possible I think of myself as a man, or non-binary, or anything but as the woman I actually am.

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I'm not writing this to complain about the nurse—she was lovely, and she only did it the one time, probably because I managed to scoff loudly through a contraction. But I think this incident illustrates the point that when the concept of gender identity becomes accepted, as it has in the nursing profession, then gender non-conformity loses. You really do end up having to pick one. Either you think that people's hair styles and fashion choices don’t change what sex they are, or you buy the concept of “gender identity” and you think that signs of gender non-conformity mean that someone is trying to deny their sex.

I know another woman with short hair who keeps getting asked her pronouns in various situations. She has started asking the people who do this if they have inquired about the pronouns of any other woman around. They never have, of course, so she then questions why they seem to think she is less of one. She told me she has made it her mission to make them too scared to ask anyone else. I am proud of her.

Her situation also perfectly illustrates how the concept of gender identity cannot coexist with the simple fact of gender non-conformity. Once too many people have bought into the idea that being a man or a woman (or something in between) is totally separate from your physical body, then any obvious enough deviation from a typical male or female appearance is read as evidence of an incongruous “gender identity.”

Trans activists have been so successful that this is exactly where we are now, and I am bitter about it. People already find it hard enough to understand, much less accept, gender non-conformity. Don't get me wrong, I am grateful for the acceptance that we have. At the end of the day, however, the sexes are different, and people who deviate from those typical differences do stand out. Still, at least we had reached the sort of “live and let live” ethos that made it so that those of us who were a little different could go along and get along without much issue.

Today, however, gender non-conformity does present an issue. People walk on eggshells, feeling like they are going to get in trouble for using the “wrong” pronouns for a woman who doesn't present stereotypically feminine or a man who doesn't present stereotypically masculine. I'm sure part of what happened with my nurse was that she was concerned she would offend me if she referred to me as a woman. It's highly possible she’d had a laboring female patient get upset at being referred to as a woman in the past, and so she decided to err on the side of caution.

But I'm not trying to frame this as a deliberate attack by trans-identified people against gender non-conforming people. Sure, I think there probably are some autogynephiles seething that even women like me get accurately perceived as female virtually all the time. But, as a group, trans-identified people, both the males and females, are simply looking out for their interests.

The sad thing is that I don't believe it was always the case that their interests collided with ours in this way. Back when trans-identified people largely used to seek to “pass”—when they believed that the onus was on them to elicit a perception in others that they were the opposite sex—the world could safely assume that if a person appeared male or female, then they likely saw themselves as such.

I'm not saying that was an ideal situation and that anyone should necessarily seek to appear as the opposite sex. I think it is a drastic step to make the extreme physical changes you likely need to achieve passing, and I'm hard-pressed to agree that it's ever a good option for anyone, even those who I may believe have managed to go on and be happy in life. But with that attitude, at least, trans people were living their lives without causing anyone else's “gender” to be questioned.

But modern trans and queer activists exhibit an external locus of control and seem to think that the onus is on everyone else to see them as they wish to be seen. What they desire in order to feel accepted and affirmed is for society to see markers of gender non-conformity—like, for example, short hair on a woman—and assume that the person is aiming to present as something other than the sex that they are.

Unfortunately, asking society to function this way works against my interests, and so we are at odds. I'm sure many women who cut their hair off and want to be perceived as men as fine and nice people, but I don't want people to think I'm trying to present as anything other than a woman. So, this really isn't personal. It's not a declaration of war against individuals who claim a trans identity. I just don't want to be associated with that way of living and being in the world, but widespread acceptance of the concept of “gender identity” does force me to be associated with it.

More importantly, I don't want my daughter growing up to think that she isn't a girl if she also ends up with some gender non-conforming likes and interests, or if she chooses to style her hair and clothes in a certain way. I don't want her to reject her body or feel that something about the way she is is wrong for a girl.

It's obvious to me that gender non-conforming people lose when the concept of gender identity wins. We either accept people the way they are or we expect that they are trying to be something they are not. Society only has room for one of these narratives.

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Last month, the government of Alberta used the notwithstanding clause to protect three pieces of trans-related legislation from legal challenges launched by activist organizations. If you would like an overview of the legislation, I wrote about it last year when it was first announced. I have also written about the two activist organizations involved, Eagle and Skipping Stone, and what I found isn't pretty. With the help of large amounts of federal government funding, especially in the case of Egale, these organizations are staunch advocates for the transitioning of children, for pushing gender ideology in schools, and for other trans related policies like allowing men to compete in women's sports—all areas that the government’s legislation is meant to address.

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But the government is fighting back so that it can move ahead with this legislation, and many, including myself, support its actions. However, a not-so-small number of people are losing their minds over it and accusing Danielle Smith and the UCP of hatred and authoritarianism. I've seen Danielle Smith called a Christian Nationalist—because the only way you could propose sensible policies like allowing children to grow up whole and safeguarding women's sports is if you're coming from a place of religious intolerance. If that makes one a Christian Nationalist, count me in.

I know I shouldn't be, but I've really been surprised by the number of people who are so vehemently against the legislation, and in particular by their fervor. This legislation doesn't even seek to curtail adult transition. In fact, the Premier has stated that she'd like to attract more medical experts in this area to the province. This legislation does, however, seek to curtail the right of trans-identified men to do anything they want, all the time, and for trans activists, that's a huge problem. It also makes it harder to target children, and that's a very huge problem.

So no, I shouldn't be surprised, but I guess I've been a little insulated from such people lately. My real life and online circles are all in support of the legislation, and it's more common now to come across stories about the transitioning of minors or men in women's sports and see them widely criticized—or at least that's what the algorithm had been showing me.

But after the government announced its use of the notwithstanding clause, my X feed was suddenly inundated with Albertan progressives raging against it. There are many of them, and they are loud. I honestly didn't even think these people spent much time on X anymore, but I guess we do all get really enmeshed in our own little pockets of the conversation.

It was almost inconceivable to me to see just how many people (and of course, the ones online are only a small sample of all of them), in 2025, are still so invested in the medical transition of children. I scrolled through endless posts about what a terrible human rights violation it is to not allow children to pause and alter the course of their development. Some also spared words for how unconscionable it was to no longer allow men into women's sports, but the focus was on the insistence that children must have the right to make decisions that could completely alter their future sexual function and fertility—if not totally obliterate it.

The fact that these people can't even conceive that the legislation and the support for this legislation could be born from anything other than pure hate is also a constant source of disbelief for me. To hear concerns about these children’s futures and to completely brush those concerns off is an incredible display of cognitive dissonance. If these people could entertain for one moment that such concerns might have some merit, then they would be horrified. But they can’t begin to entertain these thoughts because to do so would be to go against their political side and to briefly take the viewpoint of their political opponents. Making sure they don’t sympathize with the enemy is more important than considering what is best for children.

I’m not saying that anyone who briefly takes my viewpoint would necessarily come to agree with me completely. On this issue, I think most would, because what is happening is so egregious and, in real life, when people actually hear me out, they do come to agree. But I’m sure there would be some holdouts, most especially parents who believe they have a “trans” kid and who would have to admit they’ve harmed their child if they changed their view.

Still, I can’t help but believe that if those who are so upset at Danielle Smith could at least bring themselves to admit that, hey, we all just want what’s best for kids here, then they could at least speak intelligently about things like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. But they can’t. I have not seen one single advocate of transitioning children with the ability to discuss these “treatments” in anything approaching a sensible or honest manner. All they can ever really seem to come up with as an argument is the line that “puberty blockers are reversible,” so let's dissect that for a minute.

For the sake of argument, let's allow them to have this claim. Let's allow them to get away with saying that “puberty blockers are reversible” despite concerning evidence that they harm sperm production and lower IQ. Let's entertain the idea that if a child goes off these drugs, then they will resume normal puberty and no harm will be done.

Okay… so what? That’s not pertinent to the conversation at all. Trans activists argue that “trans kids” should not go through their natural puberty—that “forcing” them to go through the puberty of their sex would be abusive and lead to increased rates of suicide. The whole point of calling a kid “trans” is so that they can progress from puberty blockers on to cross-sex hormones, which are not reversible in any sense of the word, no matter how generous you want to be. And, in fact, kids who receive the “trans” label do progress from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones virtually 100% of the time, at least according to UK data.

This is, of course, exactly what trans activists want, or else they would not be painting Danielle Smith as the devil for trying to preserve the choices of minors. But they also know that if they came right out and said they support permanently damaging the sexual function of minors if those minors claim a trans identity, it would not go over as well with the uninformed public. So they hide behind the theoretical reversibility of puberty blockers while at the same time fighting laws that would actually allow children to sexually mature.

Sadly, most of the people protesting these laws and the use of the notwithstanding clause aren't thinking that deeply about the issue. They just know that slogans like “listen to trans kids!” and “puberty blockers are reversible!” sound nice, and they consider themselves to be nice people, so they say these things. They also know that Danielle Smith is evil (she's the leader of the conservative party after all, so her evilness is just a given), and so it must be nice to be against whatever she supports.

And so, you end up with a bunch of people shockingly passionate about halting the sexual maturation of children, allowing those children to take levels of cross-sex hormones that would never naturally be found in their bodies, and having access to surgeries that would destroy whatever sexual function and fertility they had left (which would generally be none, by that point). I am not being ungenerous. If this is not what they support, then they would not have such a problem with the legislation, as it aims to safeguard against all that.

I do understand people who oppose the legislation because they don’t think it is the role of government to get involved in medical decisions. I largely agree with this, but I make an exception for what I think is one of the largest medical scandals in history. Regardless, trans activists are, by and large, not motivated by this perspective. They simply want children to have the option to medicalize.

Alberta may be leading the way in the pushback against gender ideology, but because of that, our government has also inspired a fervent backlash and had a galvanizing effect on the opposition. It's an important reminder not to get complacent. These people are out there in numbers that shocked me and with a passion that I don't think is going to burn out any time soon. But that's alright, because it will just inspire us to fight harder.

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Before I got pregnant, I entertained a naive fantasy that if I actually managed it and had a baby, then I would never be truly sad again. I figured if I got this one wish and had the baby I so desperately wanted, that any problems would seem small in comparison.

Of course, I knew even then that it was a bit of a silly pipe dream and that life would continue to have its struggles despite the blessing. And it has. The past year has definitely been the hardest of my entire life. I can report that I've been sad. In fact, I've fought hard against becoming totally depressed—my tendency to which made me hesitant about having kids in the first place.

So no, having this beautiful baby hasn't prevented sadness. But she has been my way out of it every single time. And I just can't believe it's been a year already!

And what a year it has been. A couple of months ago, I detailed all of the adventures we had been on so far. I also mentioned that we had plans to see the Athabasca Glacier before her first birthday! Well, had a room booked along the Icefields Parkway, but the trip didn't end up happening because she got sick. But that's alright, we'll try again next year.

Regardless, we had a wonderful end to her very first year.

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If you've been fortunate enough not to have heard of Barbie Kardashian until now, then I am sorry to make you aware of his existence. Born Gabriel Alejandro Gentile, he is a trans-identified man who has indeed legally changed his name to Barbie Kardashian, but I cannot bring myself to refer to him as such. There are more recent images available of this man as well, but I also cannot bring myself to share them, as I generally make a point of not sharing content that I find disturbing (and yes, I find the new images even more disturbing than the photo above). However, I do feel the need to talk about Gentile because of what I think his situation says about gender ideology and the contemptible apathy of society.

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Gentile is a dangerous and psychopathic young man who has just been released from prison in Ireland, where he served only two and a half years for threatening to rape, torture, and murder his mother. After sentencing, he was initially placed in a women's prison but was transferred out a short time later for posing a threat to inmates and staff. Before this, Gentile had over a dozen other convictions for threats and physical and sexual assaults.

How did he come to be this way? Reduxx provides a good summary:

As a child, Kardashian was the victim of sustained abuse at the hands of his father, who also directed depraved abuses at his mother. His father had prevented his mother from breastfeeding or holding him when he cried, and physically and emotionally abused him throughout childhood.

Eventually, his violent father initiated his son in participating in the abuse of his mother.

At age 8, his mother fled with him to a safe house, but Kardashian was already extremely violent and directed much of the abuse towards her. Just two years later, Kardashian was taken into special care after carrying out a brutal attack against his mother. The woman was forced to move to another part of the country as Kardashian continued to express an urge to rape and murder her, including detailed plots of how he’d torture her.

According to court documents from 2018, at 13 years of age, Kardashian attacked the female driver who had been transporting him from court after appearing on a bench warrant. Without warning, Kardashian grabbed the woman from the backseat, tearing off her eyelids and ripping out clumps of her hair. He later expressed disappointment that he hadn’t been able to murder the woman outright.

After his release at the beginning of this month, Gentile spoke to Gript columnist Paddy O’Gorman. During the 20-minute interview, he expressed his desire to track down and murder his parents. He also said that he enjoys hurting people, that he needs people to view him as a woman, and that he will use women’s public bathrooms.

Both Reduxx (of course) and Gript have been referring to Gentile with male pronouns, but they are among the few outlets to do so. After Googling “Barbie Kardashian” and clicking on some of the top stories, I quickly found The Irish Times, Daily Star, Yahoo News UK, Irish Examiner, and Irish Independent all referring to this deranged man with a sexually violent past and murder fantasies with female pronouns, and I’m sure the examples of this are endless.

All I can ask, looking at this completely demented situation, is why? Who is it for that these outlets and journalists are pretending that a man who is sexually violent against women, including his own mother, is a woman?

It isn’t for normal, sane, and sensible people, because the majority of such people would have no problem reading Gentile referred to with male pronouns. Normies, let’s call them, who generally don’t buy into the more extreme aspects of gender ideology but who probably are okay with sometimes using opposite-sex pronouns for certain trans-identified people, would certainly not express outrage at media outlets for referring to Gentile accurately as a man. So, it’s not for them.

It's certainly not for trans-identified people as a whole because stories like this, and specifically referring to men like Gentile as a woman, only serve to erode support for the trans cause. I can only imagine how many people have completely turned against the movement because of this. Quite frankly, I'm surprised it didn't immediately wake the whole world up to this madness when Gentile was initially placed in a women's prison. That speaks a lot to the apathy I find so disconcerting about all of this, and I'll say more on that in a bit.

It definitely isn't for Gentile himself that the media is doing this. Most journalists and editors probably regard him with a mixture of fear and disgust—not any kind of respect that might lead them to honor his “preferred pronouns.” Nor would he have the social power to wage a cancellation war against them. And if anyone is doing it out of a sense of sympathy for the boy he once was, then they are horribly misguided. It's obvious that his trans identity, along with his personality disorders and psychopathy, is a manifestation of his severe childhood abuse. Why, if you were trying to have some sympathy and understanding for what led him to be who he is today, would you “affirm” one of the rotten fruits of his rotten past?

Certainly, my heart hurts when I read about a baby boy who was not fed or comforted, and who was so horrifically abused. When I had my own baby and I saw how helpless and vulnerable she was, I had intrusive thoughts about abused and neglected infants. To think about a case that actually happened is painful. To see the result as a sexually violent young man who dresses up as a sexualized and terrifyingly clown-like caricature of a woman makes me uncomfortably aware of the corrupting power of evil. To the extent that I have sympathy for Gentile, I would never pretend that his miserable life's trajectory has turned him into anything akin to a woman.

But what outweighs my sympathy is my horror at what he is now—a dangerous psychopath that needs to be reported on with accuracy. He is not a she, and his requests to be referred to as such should fall on deaf ears. However, like I said, it isn't for his sake, at least not his sake alone, that the media is doing this. They are doing it out of fear of the numerous other psychopaths who push the radical trans cause. Militant, radical trans activists are driven by a dark psychology that I delved into in my very first post on this Substack and which I still think is easily one of the most important pieces I've ever written.

Many people fear this dark psychology and don't want it directed their way, and understandably so. Accusations of bigotry, intolerance, and transphobia can be incredibly damaging. Nobody wants to be brutally canceled for upsetting the trans mob, as they have seen it happen to so many others. They've seen reputations trashed and livelihoods destroyed for failures to affirm—and sometimes even to adequately celebrate—trans identities. A lot of people have very good reasons for staying quiet on this issue and for trying to play nice with the radical trans activists.

But the capitulation and downright cowardice has to stop somewhere, and at the very least, it could stop short of referring to a twisted and sexually violent man, a man who gleefully shares his desire to rape and murder his mother, as a woman. At the very least.

But it hasn’t stopped there. We are so scared of these psychopathic activists that our media even refers to such a man as a woman, and I am strongly reminded of C. S. Lewis’ prescient warning about “men without chests.” As I explained previously in a piece on Realty’s Last Stand, these are individuals devoid of honor and virtue who have lost all sense of the right, moral, and good. What is ultimately concerning is that “men without chests” are subject to the whims of what Lewis terms “the conditioners,” those who would reshape human nature and values according to their own will. In other words: psychopaths.

Reality’s Last Stand

Don’t Fall for the New Morality

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2 years ago · 137 likes · 24 comments · Eva Kurilova

Our media referring to Gabriel Alejandro Gentile as a woman has nothing to do with respect, empathy, or even social niceties. It is a sign that we have already slipped down a very dark path toward the kind of psychopathic totalitarian dystopia that Lewis warned about. While I don't think time has necessarily run out to correct course (what has happened in the United States, for example, is very promising), the fact that so many are still allowing gender ideologues to condition them into referring to “Barbie Kardashian” as a woman is not a good sign. The rest of us have to get over our contemptible apathy and find our chests again.

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Charlie Kirk believed that marriage is between a man and a woman and that children should be raised by a mother and a father. Now, I have a wife and we have a daughter, but I don't have a big enough victim complex to believe that he would have hated me, or that he hated gay people in general. In fact, I think we would have gotten along quite well and seen eye to eye on the importance of treating people as individuals. I am much more wary of those who frame his beliefs and opinions as hateful, and I want nothing to do with people who use them to excuse his murder. As for those who celebrated—I'd like to forget I even share the world with them, even though most of them probably support gay marriage.

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I did not know Kirk before he was assassinated beyond a name, face, and political leanings. It is to my dismay that I only learned afterwards what he did and how he tried to encourage dialogue. It has hit me hard to find out just how good he actually was; how firm in his beliefs but tempered in his approach to others. I've come across clips of him expressing opinions I very much agree with or otherwise respect. And then I come across people attributing to him hate, hate—and I think, how blissfully, proudly, and wilfully ignorant you are.

As I said on X, I would so much rather live among people who don't want me to get married than people who want to kill people who don't want me to get married. I'll add in those who would celebrate, condone, or justify such a murder. And yes, I realize that people took issue with many of Kirk's views besides those on homosexuality. But seeing as immediately after his murder many began spreading the falsehood that he advocated stoning gays to death, I think it is a pertinent example of just how misrepresented and maligned all of his views—and in fact his entire character—really were.

None of this is to say that murdering, or celebrating, or justifying the murder of a more unpleasant person with more offensive views would be any less wrong. But I think the reason this has struck a chord with so many, including myself, is that it has become obvious that normal people with normal views have been elevated to the level of literal Nazis, which excuses violence against them. Note, I was initially going to write “normal as of 10 years ago,” but that isn't true. Many people agree with a lot, or at least some of what Kirk had to say. A lot of them just don't know it because his views have been misrepresented, or they don't realize how unacceptable their own normal and reasonable views have become in the current political climate.

And then of course there's the fact that it struck a chord because he fundamentally meant well, and he was a husband and a father of two young kids, and it's all just really sad.

I can't understand the level of hatred that would drive someone to murder a person because they disagree with them. Thankfully, I think most other people don't understand this either. But what a shocking number of people have shown is that they will celebrate, justify, or excuse such a murder, and that’s what really scares and upsets me. We've reached a point where strong enough disagreement can be used to condone deadly violence.

This is, quite frankly, insane to me. Some of the people I have been most drawn to in my life are people who had different opinions and ideas on some pretty fundamental questions. Politically, I've been friends with or admired people ranging from staunch traditional conservatives to Marxists, whereas I’d probably fall somewhere closer to a classical Liberal, which I'd argue is today’s small “c” conservative. (To be totally honest, I'm ideologically a libertarian at heart, but I'm also not an idealist, so I don't believe in pursuing my ideal world). On a spiritual or religious level, I've loved people who are deeply religious and people who are completely atheist, whereas I love God and have a fondness for religion (I have a Bachelor's degree in religious studies) but would never be able to fall into either camp.

I've liked these people because I like them first and foremost as people, and the areas where we differ are the result of them daring to think, even if their thinking leads them to a different conclusion than my own. In my younger days, I lamented that a particular friend saw nothing of value in any kind of spirituality. Today, I try to appreciate everyone I respect for exactly who they are, because the totality of who they are makes them a person I respect.

I also find it hard to lob accusations of, for example, misogyny and homophobia at people for stating beliefs that they truly think would lead to a better world. Kirk, for example, didn't base his ideas about marriage from a place of hating women and gays but from a belief that God ordered things a certain way for the maximum benefit of men, women, and children. I think the vision he shared is a positive one for many people. I just think my place in the world is meant to be a little different.

I am a millennial woman, and a lesbian to boot. I was one of the main demographic targets for the postmodern, queer theory-saturated progressive victimhood culture. But I never wanted to be a victim, and I'll never make the mistake of thinking anyone hates me just because of their political views or religious beliefs. Some men do actually hate women, and many people in this world actually hate gays; it's true. But that's why it is so abhorrent to me that I should pretend to find additional enemies in people who don't actually hate me and the groups I belong to. And Charlie Kirk didn't.

In a world that has no shortage of real monsters, the desire to create boogeymen out of people for their beliefs and opinions is incredibly misguided, at best. If I could fight against this impulse amidst a culture that encouraged me to embrace it, then I really can't excuse it in anyone else. Disagreement isn’t hate, and confusing the two is a fatal mistake.

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We started our adventures when it was still pretty chilly in March (it was a LONG winter!). When she was a few days shy of five months, we took Gracie to Elbow Falls. We didn't actually see the falls themselves because the stairs to the viewing areas were closed off and slippery. I've ignored the closures in the past, but things were a little different now when carrying a baby! Anyway, it's all the more reason to take her back.

We were able to get close to the water just before it tumbles down the falls, and she was enamored with the sound and the sight of it. It was actually an even colder and windier day than I expected, so we didn't stay long—her nose and cheeks were turning red!—but Gracie was a real trooper and didn't seem to mind.

In May, we decided to go a little further to Barrier Lake, because it's still close enough. Again, I underestimated how cloudy and windy it would be, especially right at the lakeshore, but Gracie loved it. She shrieked and kicked her legs happily while she watched the dog play in the water. She seemed to really take in the scenery as well!

Later in May, we decided to stay overnight in Canmore. After a short walk by the beautiful Bow River, we turned in for the night with the goal of heading to Johnston Canyon the next day—my favorite place in the world!

And make it to Johnston Canyon we did! To be honest, we all overdressed after the previous few experiences. We were also quite surprised that this early in the season, we had to park in overflow, so we started our walk from further back than we anticipated. But it was still a wonderful hike, like it always is, and Gracie did amazing with the sound of rushing water and the crowds and crowds of people (so did our dog, Freya!).

We were hoping to make it at least to the Lower Falls, but Gracie started getting a little fussy, and we had to take her out of the carrier. Keeping in mind how far we needed to go to return, we decided to head back a early. She was happy in our tired arms on the way back and slept soundly the whole way home.

Later in June, we finally made it out to Forgetmenot Pond with Gracie’s aunt, uncle, and cousins. We posted up by the Elbow River, which runs just behind the pond, and enjoyed some time under the sun. We stayed while dark rain clouds started approaching, and the edges of our blankets were suddenly in the water even though we had initially set them back several centimeters. Somehow, it didn’t occur to us that this meant a lot of rain was on its way.

When the first few raindrops started falling, we packed up to go. But it was too late! On the way back to the car, we got caught in a huge downpour. We were running as fast as we could, and I felt so terrible that Gracie was getting absolutely soaked. I thought she'd for sure have a meltdown, but when I finally sat down in the car with her and looked into her soaked face, she gave me the biggest smile. I dried her off, changed her clothes, fed her, and she snoozed happily in her on the drive home through a torrent of rain and booming thunder.

Next time we headed out, which was to Cascade Ponds a couple of weeks later, we put Gracie in a rain jacket.

It rained on and off a little, but mostly it was a beautiful day. We stayed fairly close to the car, just in case it got too cold and rainy, fearing a repeat of last time. Thankfully, all we had was a slight drizzle, so we took our time and let Freya splash around in the water and tried for some pictures with our tripod.

August’s adventure was the one I was looking forward to the most—Banff! Generally, Tara and I avoid the town during peak season (I can’t remember the last time I was there in August!), but her aunt who officiated our wedding was in town and it was a fun family trip. On the first day, we took a walk down the main street and visited the Carter-Ryan Gallery.

The next day, we were gifted a beautiful canvas print which had caught our eye but which I never would have considered buying for ourselves. It made me cry!

After that, we visited Lake Minnewanka. The parking was full, of course (this is another spot we usually only visit in the off-season!), so we were sent back but luckily found spots to park more than a kilometer from the entrance. But that was fine, because the short walk was very scenic.

So, that’s Gracie’s first 10 months, with the last five in particular packed with as many adventures as we could manage. I’ve been so proud of her and often teared up thinking of how well she handles traveling. She loves being in her carrier and she’s great at staying in new places. She may not always love her car seat anymore after several hours of car rides, but who can blame her!

I hope she will love nature, and I think it’s clear that she already does. I want to show her as much beauty as we can.

I’m a little late to the story of Alberta’s supposed book ban. My nearly 10-month-old daughter doesn’t really like to sleep, leaving me precious little time to write—or even think. But this will surely continue to be a topic of discussion, especially with the new school year approaching, so I figured I would add my two cents to the issue. For those who might not be completely familiar with what I am talking about, let’s start from the beginning.

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In May of this year, Demetrios Nicolaides, Alberta's minister of education and childcare, announced that the Alberta government would create consistent, province-wide standards to ensure the age-appropriateness of books available in school libraries. This move came after books containing sexually explicit content were brought forward by concerned parents.

The media release from the province provided examples from four graphic novels: Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe; Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; Blankets, by Craig Thompson; and Flamer, by Mike Curato.

The minister expressed that this was not, however, a ban on specific books and titles but about establishing clear policies and guidelines for the province’s school divisions. This, of course, did not stop Canadian media like CBC and Global News from referring to the guidelines as a “ban” once the ministerial order was issued in July. The progressive outlet The Walrus went as far as to call the government’s actions a “blatant act of cultural vandalism.”

The Alberta Teachers' Association was none too pleased, either. ATA president Jason Schilling released a statement claiming that the ministerial order would “have a chilling effect on our schools and signal to students who are coming to understand themselves that some expressions of their gender and sexual identities are shameful and should be hidden away.”

Quite frankly—and I have expressed this again and again—it personally enrages me as a lesbian that people like Jason Schilling insist on connecting children’s access to sexually inappropriate material with “sexual identity.” No, actually, the existence and even the acceptance of same-sex attraction doesn’t hinge on showing children the kind of material exemplified in the government’s media release. The insistence that this is somehow crucial for children coming to understand themselves has done great harm to same-sex attracted people.

On the same day as Schilling’s statement, ATA News also released a piece by Kristine Wilkinson echoing the same sentiments, titled, “Are we on a slippery slope toward book bans?” In the piece, Wilkinson states, “Should the books in schools be developmentally and age appropriate? Absolutely,” and “Sure, we can’t let students read anything they want in class.” So, she is essentially in agreement with the government here. However, she also takes issue with the fact that the order specifically made an example of books that “explore identity, culture and, yes, the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.” It doesn’t seem to matter how inappropriate the books in question were.

I am willing to bet that there are other books in Alberta’s classrooms that explore topics like sexual orientation. These books were not targeted by the new rules because they are not sexually explicit. And I am begging people like Jason Schilling and Kristine Wilkinson to stop making it seem like the only way to approach the issue of sexuality is in an age-inappropriate manner.

Due to all the hand-wringing and fear-mongering, Minister Nicolaides published an op-ed in the Edmonton Journal on August 8 to once again clarify that the government’s actions are not about banning books but about “ensuring young students are not exposed to graphic sexual content in a school library book.” He also responded to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s accusations that the policies would result in banning books like George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, stating that, “this is not the spirit, intent or wording of the policy.”

Now, this is where I do see the side of some of the critics. While I support the government taking the step that it has, there is a point of real contention here. As an Edmonton Journal letter by Kevin McBean stated two days later:

As a high school English teacher, I can say that both books — which many would acknowledge should be required reading — contain scenes which violate the criteria of the order.

So, the government can say they aren’t coming after these books, as they clearly are not, but I do agree that the policies as written could be construed as applying to them.

Consider the example of explicit content in Gender Queer, which depicts felatio on a strap-on. While I don’t want this book on school shelves, I think it’s fair to say that something like The Handmaid’s Tale contains sex scenes—or rather, rape scenes—that are more graphic and disturbing. So why make an example out of this book?

Because it’s obvious that among the types of material the government is trying to target here is material that pushes gender ideology more specifically and queer theory more broadly, and I think that’s a good thing. However, in what seems to be an attempt to escape accusations of being “anti-LGBTQ+,” the government is hiding behind the claim that all that’s wrong with the material is its sexual explicitness.

But that isn’t all that’s wrong with it. I don’t want “Gender Queer” on school shelves not just because it depicts felatio on a strap-on—though that’s plenty reason enough—but because it promotes dangerous and stupid ideas about sex and sexuality. Just how stupid? Have a look at the book description:

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.

It is okay to say that, in addition to not wanting school libraries to contain sexually explicit and developmentally inappropriate material, we also don’t want them to contain material that encourages children to deny the reality of their sexed bodies. This is particularly important right now, when transition is so obviously a social contagion among young people. As I have written before, in Canada, “it is disproportionately girls, indigenous kids, and kids with mental health issues who are targeted for a pathway that will destroy their sexual functioning.”

I wish that decisions about the materials on the shelves of school libraries could be left up to librarians, teachers, school boards, and administrators, just like I wish medical decisions could be left up to medical professionals without the government stepping in. But medical and educational professionals have completely abdicated their duty of care by promoting and supporting ideas that can cause grievous bodily harm to young people. In these cases, I support the government stepping in, and I am happy that it is trying to.

And yes, any policies and guidelines about materials on school shelves are necessarily going to lack complete objectivity. This is not actually a bad thing, and I don’t think the government should shy away from the fact that there has to be a subjective element to this. This is how life works and how decisions are made all the time, especially concerning children.

Some decisions, like those about the types of materials children are exposed to in schools, require subjective judgments to be made. No spreadsheet or mathematical formulas can be called on to make our judgments for us. It is perfectly okay—good, even—that books such as 1984 and The Bible are judged to have educational value despite passages that are indeed sexually explicit, and it is okay that books which seek to confuse children about something as fundamental as whether they are a boy or a girl are judged to be inappropriate.

I wish the government would more pointedly affirm the inappropriateness of such material, seeing as they are already facing “anti-LGBTQ+” accusations anyway. Regardless, I am happy that they are at least taking a look at some of the concerning content that has been cropping up in schools. I could be wrong, but I think the guidelines aren’t going to end up getting used for many books other than the ones already highlighted. I think, eventually, they will be forgotten, and we will return to using good sense and sound judgment about schools and children, like we already do in most situations. At least, until then, there will be some recourse to tackle overly sexual and ideological material.

And finally, I do recognize that it is possible for people to have a good-faith disagreement about the government’s actions and feel that this is not the government’s role, even if they agree that there should be standards around the types of material allowed in schools. But for the love of God, I am asking progressives to stop crying about “anti-LGBTQ+” bias every time someone brings up concerns around sexual explicitness and children. All you’re doing is making us look bad. Please shut up.

Young lesbians today feel a lot of pressure to be champions of the trans cause. While they do carry some points on the oppression hierarchy by being same-sex attracted, they also have the “privilege” of being “cis,” and so they are asked (or rather, demanded) to stand in solidarity with “trans” people. What this generally looks like in practice, however, is young lesbians acquiescing and sometimes even groveling to trans-identified men in their own communities. Somehow, our sexuality is framed as a debt to men who very often wish they were us.

Well, as someone who pretty much lives the quintessential lesbian life (I’m a gold star married to my high school sweetheart who I now have a baby with), let me tell you that you really can just live a gay life and have nothing to do with trans at all.

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This might seem obvious to people who aren’t in the current lesbian scene, but it’s not nearly as doable as it sounds for those who are. Lesbian groups, spaces, and bars face immense pressure to be maximally “inclusive.” What this means in practice is to affirm trans-identified men, penis and all, as lesbians as well. Lesbian spaces live and die by their commitment to this cause. Step one toe out of line, perhaps by using the phrase “biological women” to refer to actual women, and face the cancellation mob. And, to be fair, many lesbians themselves take part in and enforce this. But many others don’t necessarily like it and choose to stay silent because of what they have seen happen to the ones who speak up.

Lesbians are kept in line mostly through guilt tripping. As I mentioned above, one way is that they are made to feel like they have “privilege” over “trans” people. Another is that they are told they owe their “rights” to trans people, which is simply not true, least of all of the heterosexual men who are forcing their way into lesbian spaces. The early gay rights movement had nothing to do with “trans.” In fact, the “T” only became a part of the conversation during the third March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, and only because a contingent of trans activists bullied local organizers into it (TransSisters, Issue 1, pg. 13).

So no, young lesbians, you don’t owe these men anything. You don’t owe them access to your spaces and certainly not to your dating pool. You don’t have to uplift their voices—certainly not at the expense of your own—or champion their grievances (which so often include the demand for access into lesbian bedrooms). You can be a lesbian because you are attracted to women, and that’s enough. You don’t have to be a trans activist, and you certainly don’t have to adopt postmodern queer philosophy and pretend that you don’t understand what sex is. You do know what it is because you know you are a woman attracted to other women, and you don’t have to gaslight yourself into seeing men as women and as potential romantic and sexual interests.

Of course, there is another way that the trans movement impacts lesbians, and that is by encouraging them to transition as well. While I don’t think that lesbians make up the majority of young women today who seek to transition, I do believe that they are disproportionately represented. It makes sense that a gender non-conforming woman, which a lot of lesbians are, would internalize the messaging that being more masculine than average means she is a man. It also makes sense that she might simply feel it would be easier to move through the world perceived as a man than as a masculine woman.

I have a lot of sympathy for this. I can’t imagine what it would be like growing up today and having transition presented as an option for me. It would be tempting, no doubt. I was a major tomboy, and developing feelings for other girls in my early teens would have surely made me wonder if I had been “born in the wrong body.” Thankfully, I was born too early for this narrative, but when trans messaging started picking up steam in my late 20s, I did wonder if I would wake up miserable one day because I should have been a man (and I did wonder if it was the cause of my recurring depression).

So no, I don’t say so confidently that you can live your life without all this stuff because it was a walk in the park for me. It certainly wasn’t awful; by the time I came out, Canada had already legalized gay marriage, and I don’t feel that I have been in any way politically “oppressed.” But it wasn’t always an easy thing to navigate with family and friends, and even today, I am aware that many people in the world hate my relationship and would even be fine taking my baby from me. I know what the rest of the world is like, and I’ve received enough unsavory comments online to know how many people even in the West feel as well. But I focus on the positive and gratefully live the life I know I am lucky to have, thanks to the time and place I live in.

This is what I want for young lesbians today, too. I want them to know how rare it is that we can have the lives we want, but not because I want them focused on their own victimhood and oppression. I want them to use this historical oddity of a time to inspire them to chase exactly the lives they want without feeling like they owe anything to others claiming an oppressed victimhood status, least of all men in dresses.

Of course, we can all have our causes. I’m the last person who should preach against activism and advocacy when I fight against the sterilization of children and the erosion of women’s rights. I’m not trying to preach an “I’ve got mine” philosophy. But I would caution young lesbians to make sure that the people who are making a claim on your time, effort, energy, and the goodwill your community has built up are actually deserving of it. And I would argue that the men using you to force their way into women’s single-sex spaces, sports, and provisions are most assuredly not.

I also wish for gender non-conforming lesbian women to be stronger and more assured in being themselves and to resist the fiction of “gender identity,” which would have them believing that their masculine-leaning preferences somehow make them less of a woman. Again, I want us as a community, while being aware of the challenges that absolutely exist, to be grateful that we do, today, have the opportunity to live openly and authentically. To squander that and escape it by “transitioning” into men is, in my opinion, a great waste of that opportunity. Not to mention that wilful lifelong medicalization is far from a desirable state of being.

You really can just stay a woman, and you can find another woman to love, and you can even build a family if you want to. You really can have a happy gay life, and “trans” doesn’t have to factor into it at all. It may seem difficult to do today, but I’m very happy to report that I know plenty of lesbians younger than me who have managed it as well.

Tune out everything and everyone else who is making claims on you and telling you how to live. Tune out the radical progressives who want to use you as the face of a movement that is hurting women and children, and tune out the voices on the right that would rage at you for finding your happiness in an unconventional way. If you are blessed enough, like I was, to have the opportunity to live the life you want, then take it and don’t look back. You don’t owe anyone an apology, and you don’t owe “solidarity” to people with wildly different (and often opposed) political goals.

You owe only truth to yourself, goodness to your loved ones, and, in my opinion, gratitude to the community that welcomes you. And by “community,” I don’t mean the LGBTQ collective, I mean the people you live and work and spend your days around; the everyday people who really do just want to live and let live, who just want to go about their day and let you go about yours. And no, I’m not naive. As I said above, I am very aware of the real hatred that is out there for us, which is why I am all the more grateful that this hatred is shunned by the mainstream. Most people are actually pretty accepting, if you’ll give them a chance, and if you’ll excuse that they might not always say the right thing in the right way.

These people are the reason you can live life on your terms—it’s not thanks to the queer and trans activists who keep pushing and pushing the more radical ideas which are starting to erode the goodwill we’ve built up. If you leave the victimhood mentality behind and integrate yourself into the communities around you, rather than the “queer” community, you will come to see that. You will come to see that the trans and queer attack on family, community, and the very reality of sex itself is an attack on your life and the life you want to live. You owe nothing to a movement like that.

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I believe that people can change, but I don’t believe they can change overnight. I think it takes sustained effort and consistent attention to your habits and mindset to produce a change that is real and lasting. I think people who do claim a radical and instantaneous change are usually mistaking emotional enrapture for conviction. That’s why I very rarely buy claims of sudden road-to-Damascus-type conversions in belief or behavior. Well, unless you are literally Saint Paul, I suppose.

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I mean “conversion” here in a very broad sense, not just religiously. In a time of extreme polarization, political and ideological conversion come to mind. I see many people dropping one set of beliefs and uptaking wholesale the set presented as the opposite. For example, someone leaving the radical political left and jumping straight into the radical right, claiming that now they finally see the real truth.

I think another great example of this is the modern-day conversion known as gender transition. Many people who adopt a trans identity describe a sudden moment where it all just “clicked,” and the idea that they were really trans explained everything about their lives. They may even go further and claim that transitioning resolved all manner of issues, from depression and anxiety to problems with self-confidence. They ride on an emotional high, buoyed by endless lovebombing from the trans community, congratulating them on discovering their “true self” and reinforcing the emotional fervor.

But I would include religious conversion as well, especially today, when more people seem to be going back to religion. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing! But I do think that many run the risk of getting wrapped up in the strong emotion of it all and claiming a conviction of belief or a change of behavior that doesn’t align with their thoughts and actions.

Okay, but why is this a problem? So some people get worked up into an emotional frenzy, so what? Well, in the trans example, at any rate, blindly following an emotional high and doing something that “feels” right in the moment without giving any real pause, thought, and consideration to other perspectives could and does lead to irreversible physical changes and damage. While other types of conversions might not cause such physical damage, I still think that if your goal is authenticity and actual change, then mistaking strong emotion for these things is a waste of time and energy and could mean you never actually achieve your goals.

When I encounter claims of rapid and rabid conversions, I think of these words from Thomas Merton:

In any degree of the spiritual life, and even where there is no spiritual life at all, it can happen that a man will feel himself caught up in an emotional religious ferment in which he overflows with sensible, and even sentimental movements of love for God and other people. If he is completely inexperienced he will get the idea that he is very holy because of the holy feelings that are teeming in his heart.

All these things mean very little or nothing at all. They are a kind of sensible intoxication produced by some pleasure or other, and there is only an accidental difference between them and the tears that children sometimes shed when they go to the movies.

I think it is a shame to get caught up in sensible intoxication and to mistake it for something real, authentic, and lasting. I think it’s a shame to chase emotional highs that cause you to be convinced you finally have all the answers, only to have it all come crashing down around you. I think it can turn into a very narcissistic endeavor as well, causing one to become convinced in their own holiness or goodness because, as Merton said, of the holy or good feelings in their heart.

It’s hard to see the mistakes you are making because something just feels so right and because you’ve seen the light, dammit, and such lofty thoughts and feelings must surely signify something real and true.

This is bad enough on a small, interpersonal level, but it’s something I see in cult leaders and mega-influencers (which you might say are pretty much the same thing). I have a morbid fascination with cults. I am always trying to understand how people become cult leaders and how it’s possible for anyone to follow them. What it comes down to for me is everyone getting whipped up in very strong feelings that what they are doing is good, right, and true, and these feelings usually come from some moment of conversion or special revelatory gnosis.

And then I think of words by Thomas Merton again:

The most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling is the more he is convinced of his own infallibility. And if the sheer force of his own self-confidence communicates itself to other people and gives them the impression that he is really a saint, such a man can wreck a whole city or a religious order or even a nation. The world is covered with scars that have been left in its flesh by visionaries like these.

I think people are particularly vulnerable to falling for these types of “visionaries” today because we crave meaning, but many of the usual roads to it have been destabilized. So, it’s tempting to look at the self-confident man (or woman) and seek to follow him in an effort to induce the same big, warm, sweet interior glow that he seems to have. But we need to know that there isn’t necessarily any real substance in that warm, sweet glow. Worse yet, it may be hiding a very profound emptiness. Those who jump from emotional high to emotional high, from one dramatic conversion to the next, are often hiding deep issues of self-worth and identity.

To be clear, it’s not that I think emotions themselves are the problem. We would be lost without them. We wouldn’t be able to make any decisions at all without our feelings to guide us. I think people who are convinced they make perfectly rational decisions without their emotions to guide them are mistaken about their own thought and decision-making processes. Emotions and, especially, intuition, are nothing to knock.

The issue is more about being passionately inflamed by feelings of holiness or some other kind of specialness and importance. These feelings feed the ego, and they can convince people, as Merton said, of their own infallibility. They’ll make wild claims and overconfident pronouncements but have little to show in terms of positive behavior. They often don’t treat others well at all. I’m thinking of everyone from the abusive cult leader who claims to be an incarnation of God to the devout lefties who cut family members out of their lives for voting for Trump.

Just like emotions themselves aren’t the problem, I also don’t think that intense moments of emotional highs are themselves bad either. These moments can absolutely serve as inspiration for change that eventually becomes real and lasting. I’m thinking back to the ordeal I went through to give birth. It wasn’t “positive” in any surface-level sense of the word, but it was incredibly deep, and it had a really big impact on me. And, of course, at the end of it, my daughter was born! But I didn’t suddenly become a new and much wiser person. In fact, the several months after were extremely difficult, and I felt like I lost myself a little bit. Now, looking back and processing it all is helping me in my efforts to become more of who I want to be.

A lot of things in life that are worth doing and that will help you grow aren’t necessarily going to produce a warm, fuzzy glow and fill you with a passionate fervor, at least not all the time or not right away. What “feels right” is a good guide, but it needs to be examined.

So yes, I do believe that people can change, but I think grandiose claims of epiphanies and conversions are nothing but that: claims and emotional bluster. A true marker of conversion would be an actual, sustained change in behavior for the better. This is what happened with at least one person on the road to Damascus—if you believe the story. But for others claiming a similar revelation, I will retain a healthy skepticism unless they actually produce the fruits you would expect of true change.

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Bad Canadians is an interesting podcast that I will continue following, and I hope you do too. The YouTube description reads:

Join host Jared Michael as he attempts to understand Canada's contrarians. Working Class Roots. Free Speech Lens. Canadian Contrarians.

While the website further explains:

Here at Bad Canadians we will attempt to understand Canada’s contrarians. We believe contrarians are sometimes the only people holding valuable information the rest of society desperately needs.

Jared is an excellent interviewer. He was so easy to talk to, and he had a lot of really great and thought-provoking questions that, even though I’ve discussed this topic a lot, helped explore it in some new and deeper ways. I am so glad he is taking on this project, which I think is a really important one.

And if there is one other episode I would encourage you to check out besides mine, it’s Lisa Bildy’s. Lisa is an incredible lawyer who has taken on some high-profile civil liberty and free speech cases, including that of Amy Hamm. I can’t say enough good things about her, and I had the honor of meeting her at Realty Based Women Unite 2024. On top of being a badass lawyer, she’s a total sweetheart.

Fertility rates are falling, and everyone has their pet issue to blame. It’s feminism! No, it’s because men suck! No, it’s all the toxins in our food, air, and water! And so the conversation goes around and around in circles. For what it’s worth, I’ve decided to chime in as well. And yes, I am a lesbian, so I imagine some people won’t care much for my perspective—that’s fair enough. But I am a woman, a woman who has always wanted a baby, and who did end up having a baby at the significantly higher than historically average age of 34. The way I see it, there are fewer babies around because they simply don’t just happen anymore.

Humans are actually pretty good at dealing with things that we are forced to deal with. Our adaptability is our evolutionary superpower. That’s how it was for pretty much all of our history when it came to children. Kids were a part of life. They just happened. So society built up all sorts of systems around them. Now, we’re in a historically unprecedented situation where that’s no longer the case much of the time. Kids don’t just happen. We plan for them, and we have to feel like we are “ready.” In that sense, I am chalking up a lot of this to birth control, because it gives people the option to wait until they’ve achieved the level of readiness they desire.

But while I think birth control is a huge part of the puzzle, I don’t think it’s the only answer. Fertility was already on the decline before it made its appearance, and I don’t think fertility rates would need to have fallen so much after the introduction of birth control if it wasn’t for other cultural factors. It is also a question of our priorities. We feel that we have to have everything in order before we welcome a child. And I don’t think that is necessarily bad! It’s certainly better for children not to be brought into chaotic situations. But, as with most things we over-prepare for, we can get stuck in a loop of never feeling ready enough. Armed with condoms, greater knowledge about fertility, and abortion, it is quite easy for people to delay children while they wait for that magical moment of readiness.

Older generations might have rolled their eyes at this, but I am a product of my time, and I understand the anxiety and the intention to be in the right place before bringing life into the world. I particularly understand it on a financial level, as this was the main reason we continued waiting even after we felt “ready” in an emotional and psychological sense (and I did have some psychological hangups to get over, mainly my fear of having a depressive episode while having to care for a child). But it wasn’t until we were in a situation where my wife and I knew we would have a financially easier time that we finally decided to go forward with it.

The way I see it, my wife and I are like a couple using the most effective form of birth control, and so we did what other couples who have greater control over their fertility do nowadays, and we waited until some overwhelming sense of “readiness.” But the truth is that if it were possible for kids to have just happened to us much sooner, we would have just dealt with it and managed. In fact, if it were possible for us to get pregnant naturally, it’s possible we would have had an older teenager by now!

But we waited until a magical moment where everything seemed to come together. We were about to move into an easier financial situation, we felt emotionally ready, and we had decided who to ask to be our donor. There was simply no more reason not to do this thing that we always knew we wanted to do someday. And even though the details of our situation are unique, I think it’s still similar to the way that many heterosexual couples, now more in charge of their fertility than ever, are also waiting for that moment where there doesn’t seem to be a reason not to do it anymore. Hence, you get later births and a lower birth rate.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I don’t think there is anything too nefarious going on. I think this is what human psychology does when we have too much control over something, especially over something that we largely didn’t control to this great of an extent throughout our evolutionary history. It’s hard for me to say that this is necessarily a bad thing, though, especially given my unique circumstances, and I think many women—and plenty of men, too—feel the same. Otherwise, we wouldn’t all be in this situation.

I do, however, think that people in general are waiting way longer than they need to for things to be perfect, and if they welcomed kids earlier or if they weren’t 100% ready, then things would still be fine. We have certainly swung too far into overly cautious territory, and I think there needs to be a correction. And while we are searching in various directions for the root cause of falling birth rates and the right solution, I think more than anything, we need people to know that it’s okay, you can handle it even if you don’t think you’re totally prepared. Overall, we just need to be a lot more welcoming of babies than we are.

As for me, do I regret having a baby a bit later?

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Over the past little while, I have seen an increase in the use of the phrase “sex characteristics” in material about human rights. The phrase piqued my interest because it is clearly an attempt to deconstruct the concept of sex itself. While activists will tell you that the push to include this language in human rights legislation is for the sake of people with disorders of sex development (DSD) (or, intersex people, as queer activists always call them), I don’t buy this. I think DSDs are being used as cover to further queer theory and its neverending fight against the “normative,” right down to the idea of whole and indivisible sexed bodies.

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“Sex characteristics” first appeared in legislative language in 2015 in Malta, when it passed the Gender Identity, Gender Expression and Sex Characteristics Act, which also introduced sex self-identification to the country. This was a significant step because not even the original 2007 Yogyakarta Principles included the phrase anywhere in the document. The Yogyakarta Principles, it is important to note, were a global driving force behind the push to include sex self-identification into human rights law under the concept of “gender identity.”

After Malta, many (so-called) human rights organizations began to lobby for the attribute of “sex characteristics” to be included in the Yogyakarta Principles as well. This included the International Service for Human Rights, ARC International, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, and the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute. In 2016, the United Nations also released a report, titled Living Free & Equal, that had adopted the phrase.

And so, in 2017, the Yogyakarta Principles plus 10 were adopted, this time featuring the phrase “sex characteristics” over 100 times throughout the 27-page document.

Now, as for why this is a problem. Obviously, I do not have an issue with legal protections for people with DSDs. These protections generally revolve around the right to bodily autonomy and freedom from discrimination. For example, advocates would say that medically unnecessary cosmetic procedures shouldn’t be carried out on children before they can consent to them. I think it is important to note, however, that some DSDs require medical identification and intervention for the healthy functioning of the individual’s body.

The problem comes with subsuming what are medical conditions under the broader “queer” cause—and by queer I mean that horrible philosophy that frames everything normal as oppressive. I don’t believe this does people with DSDs any favors at all. In fact, I think that connecting it with sexuality and the nonsensical concept of “gender identity” only serves to confuse society about their unique issues.

To illustrate this, let’s take a look at some definitions of “intersex” proposed by some of the organizations that are pushing for the addition of “sex characteristics” in human rights legislation.

From Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression, and Sex Characteristics at the Universal Periodic Review by ARC International, the International Bar Association, and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association:

‘Intersex people are born with physical sex characteristics that do not fit medical norms for female or male bodies’ or as earlier defined ‘intersex people are born with physical, hormonal or genetic features that are neither wholly female nor wholly male; or a combination of female and male; or neither female nor male.

From Born Free and Equal: Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Sex Characteristics in International Human Rights Law, Second Edition, by the United Nations Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights:

Intersex people are born with physical sex characteristics that do not fit the normative definitions for male or female bodies.

(Note that the first edition of this document in 2012 did not include “sex characteristics” in the title.)

I want to draw particular attention here to the use of the words “norm” and “normative.” These definitions do not concern themselves with what actually constitutes male and female, but only with rebelling against whatever they say others deem to be normative. The first definition even makes it seem possible to not be wholly male or female or, ultimately, to be neither.

Again, I am not sure how any of this is supposed to help people with developmental disorders. Framing them as not being “normative” only serves to alienate them from their sex, which is obviously the goal here.

We see this again in the 2018 publication Sexual and gender diversity in SRHR: Towards inclusive sexual and reproductive health & rights through mainstreaming by Rutgers International, which states:

Not everyone is born with bodily sex characteristics that are wholly female or male, according to the norms in society.

The way of framing this issue as one of social “norms” is done completely in the service of ideology, and it ends up providing people with a very skewed perception of reality.

DSDs are sex specific, and the vast majority of people who have them are easily identified as either male or female. People are as wholly male or female as they are human, and developmental disorders don't change that. We would not say that someone with a developmental heart condition has a different type of circulatory system or is an entirely different type of human. We would not (I hope) frame properly functioning hearts as merely representing a social norm. We would see such a person as wholly human despite their medical condition. But what these NGOs and supposed “human rights” organizations have done is position “intersex” people as something “other”—definitely as some “other” sex, in many instances.

It should not be surprising that such muddled, ideologically driven, and inhuman thinking has already led to some shockingly confused legislation. For example, in Australia. From April 29, 2024, the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 made it “unlawful to discriminate against a person because of their sex characteristics.”

Again, on the government website, we see that infernal term “norms” creep in:

Some people have innate variations of sex characteristics and their bodies don’t conform with medical and social norms for female or male bodies.

But it gets worse. Here is one of the examples given of possible discrimination faced by someone with “variations of sex characteristics”:

For example, a man with intersex traits being disadvantaged when seeking treatment for ovarian cancer because a health service’s medical records system fails to recognise that a man may have some typically female sex characteristics.

So, to be clear, in this hypothetical scenario, a man is seeking treatment for ovarian cancer. This is patently ridiculous. A person who has ovaries is female because ovaries are part of the female reproductive system. Ovaries are not merely “typically female sex characteristics”; a body that has them is a wholly female body.

And here lies the crux of the issue. Supposedly serious human rights organizations have adopted a view of the person as something akin to a machine composed of parts rather than as a living, breathing, and fundamentally whole human being. Even worse, these disparate parts can be mixed and matched to such an extent that you somehow end up with a man who has ovaries. And keep in mind that this example person was not presented to us as a trans-identified woman.

This way of viewing human beings is—and I don’t say this lightly—inhuman. We are fundamentally not machines built of interchangeable parts that can be swapped out on a whim, and sex characteristics don’t just pop up in random combinations on different people. This view that has been drip-fed to the public over the last decade has resulted in no small number of people convinced that it is possible for humans to have two functional sets of genitals or to produce both types of gametes. This is not possible because the male and female developmental pathways are mutually antagonistic, yet such a very simple and basic fact of our species has been deliberately obfuscated. But to what end?

Again, because I feel this cannot be overstated, my argument here has nothing to do with believing that people with DSDs should not be protected from discrimination. They should, and I believe they easily can be with protections for “sex,” but that would require us having a proper view of sex. Introducing the language of “sex characteristics” and muddying our understanding of sex is not the answer and does nothing to help such people, and I don’t believe that was ever the goal in the first place.

While no doubt many advocates for these changes are people with DSDs themselves, I believe this was largely done in the service of gender ideology more specifically and queer theory more broadly. Disrupting our understanding of sex and making it seem as more of a mixed bag of various “characteristics” rather than the way the entire body is organized makes it easier for trans-identified people to claim to be the opposite or some “other” sex. It also helps to further the “queer” fight against “norms,” which at this point has become a battle against the norm of reality itself.

None of this leads humanity anywhere good. It isn’t furthering our understanding of minorities like people with DSDs, people who struggle with gender dysphoria due to many different possible reasons, from discomfort with puberty to autogynephilia, or people who are same-sex attracted. Queer theorists have taken our experiences and used them to create a distorted representation of what it is to be human built from an assortment of identity labels and sliced up (sometimes literally) physical characteristics that have no spark of life when stitched haphazardly together.

You are not just a bundle of identity labels and physical characteristics. Religious ideas about the soul aside, the fact remains that you are an indivisible human being developed as a whole from the moment of your creation, not bit by bit, part by part. The sex of your body is no more able to be carved away than your heart could beat or lungs draw air independently. We can’t lose sight of this fundamental reality, and I fear what could happen if we do.

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Recently, I had the unpleasant but very strong suspicion that someone I thought was a friend was just using me. Now, most things aren’t black and white, and I’m sure there were feelings of genuine friendship there, but I can’t shake the feeling that I am seen more as someone who they could use to further their own interests. As I have now spent more than a year either pregnant or caring for a young baby and therefore haven’t had the opportunity to be all that useful, I got to see another, much more impatient and demanding side of that person.

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It’s not that I am upset for myself. I am more mildly annoyed, if anything. But it does disappoint me that this is something you can and probably should expect when taking part in activism and advocacy, and perhaps I have been a little naive and idealistic in this regard. If there is one sincerely held belief that I know I actually live my life by, it’s that people are not a means to an end. Everyone I choose to have a relationship with has value to me that begins and ends in themselves, not in their capacity to do something for me. As I’ve said before, I don’t want allies, I want friends.

Yes, there are people I have met through activism. Most of my current friends came about that way, but the cause is always secondary to the friendship. We became friends who then might do activism and advocacy together because it’s something we both care about, but our primary interest became building and maintaining a good relationship with one another.

And don’t get me wrong: through activism, I have also met people I admire and even some people with relatively high profiles. Obviously, this was exciting to me! I am not immune to feeling starstruck, and I have gushed about why I’m glad I met my heroes. But meeting these people, making these connections, and building these friendships has never been about how I can use them. If I’ve ever been excited to meet someone, it’s because I sincerely think they are an amazing person who I want to get to know. Simply getting to know someone who I look up to is valuable to me in and of itself. I have no interest in using anyone to further my personal causes.

Now, I have been able to have my voice heard politically on trans issues, but my ethos on relationships is summed up in the fact that I never have a proper answer to the question, “How did you do it?” because I don’t feel like I actively did anything. I think people asking this question expect me to say that I was relentless in making phone calls or e-mails, or that I got someone to introduce me to someone else, or other actions of that nature. But I feel like all I did was write and make myself available to anyone who wanted to move forward on this issue. If someone else also wants to take it up and is interested in collaborating, then I am ready, always. But the idea of imploring someone to care if they don’t already have the intrinsic motivation to act on it is completely unappealing to me.

I actually make a pretty terrible activist. I have no desire to push people to do things, even if it’s things I really want. To me, the best relationships born out of activism are when people see each other as two worthwhile human beings of equal value who, in a happy happenstance, can do something together about a cause they care about, rather than as stepping stones to greater things and more influential people. That’s why this one instance where I do feel like I’ve been used as a stepping stone has been bothering me.

But, at the end of the day, how lucky am I to be able to say that it has only happened once? Sure, it made me think, but to engage in much self-pity would feel like ingratitude in the face of the relationships I have been blessed with. Part of the reason I’ve been somewhat naive and idealistic up until now is because the people I have met through my advocacy have, by and large, turned out to be real, genuine, and incredible friends. These relationships are what I wrote about nearly a year ago when I was overcome with gratitude for the people in my life:

I’m not going to change the world, but I can try to make a difference in the way people do for me—in a way that hopefully lets them know they are valued. And the extra energy that is inevitably created from that exchange will go toward fighting the good fight, like it always has.

[…]

So, what I really want to say is thank you to everyone who gives me the time of day because even that, to me, is everything. For a moment, you expand your world, which is no doubt full and demanding your attention from every corner, to include me. I feel grateful every time because I’ll never feel entitled to it. It means more than you will ever know.

In my own experience, at least, being used is the rare exception, not the rule. So many other people have made me feel that they value me for me and not for what I might be able to do for them. I suppose it doesn't really come down to activism at all but rather to how willing someone is to use another person for their own gain (though I also suspect these types may be overrepresented among activists).

At least the one good thing that's come from being a new mom is that, in some ways, it's made it easier to see who truly values me for me now that I've become a little less useful.

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This week, my wife and I finally got to take our baby to the mountains to celebrate both the 18-year anniversary of our relationship and our baby turning six months old, which fell on the same day. It was a bit of a delayed celebration, off by a couple of weeks. Most things that we manage to do nowadays are delayed by about that much, from getting the car maintained to seeing friends. I feel like we are constantly running but staying in place, like on a treadmill—and yet somehow the time is breezing by.

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