Saturday was Detrans Awareness Day, calling attention to cases of people who formerly identified as transgender before “detransitioning” and re-identifying with their biological sex. Ed Driscoll at Instapundit called attention to the case of Helena Kerschner, now 23, who began testosterone injections at age 18 and continued for more than a year before the mental health issues — testosterone is a helluva drug, y’know — forced her to quit. From her account of her college experience:
The anger started as a smoldering anger at first. I found myself feeling more irritable, less able to put up with the little things that bothered me about other people. I was uncomfortable with my newfound tendency to get bent out of shape at everybody so I started isolating myself, trying to hide this awful person I thought I was turning out to be. I didn’t make the connection between this and the testosterone, I just thought I was a bad person. I didn’t feel like being around people, and when I was, I felt so unlike myself that I didn’t know how to relate to them. . . .
I had always had emotional problems, but this was different. In high school, I had always banked on the future where I would be in college, transitioning, and part of me genuinely thought testosterone would somehow make me into this outgoing male jock archetype and I would be handsome, have lots of friends, and love life. That wasn’t really panning out. I was lonely, enmeshed in toxic and stressful relationships, on academic probation, in legal trouble due to substance use, and feeling possessed by some sort of demon I now recognize was at least partially the testosterone’s worsening grip on my mind.
Checking out Helena’s Twitter timeline, I found her expressing great sympathy for men, perhaps due to her hindsight realization of what men have to deal with in terms of their rage issues. Boys must be taught to restrain their temper, and the common feminist complaints about men “not being in touch with their emotions” is misguided, if you understand that men’s natural “emotions” are so often an urge to strangle somebody or pound them into a bloody pulp. You want to see a guy “in touch with his emotions”? Do a Google search for “mass murder suspect.”
You think of me as a happy-go-lucky guy, but you’ve never seen me in a traffic jam, yelling obscenities at the top of my lungs, and struggling to restrain my urge to ram those idiot drivers off the road. These are the feelings — our beastly primal nature — that every man has been dealing with since he was 12 years old, and those of us who didn’t end up in a prison or an early grave can congratulate ourselves on our success in this basic struggle of manhood. The idea that teenage girls would inject themselves with testosterone to become “men” strikes most people as completely crazy, but the transgender movement has created this myth of people being “born in the wrong body,” which is accompanied by a “transition-or-death” propaganda. Pointing to high suicide rates among transgender youth, the movement blames this on “transphobia” so that the regime of synthetic hormones and surgery is presented as “lifesaving treatment,” and if you are opposed to this, well, you just want teenagers to kill themselves. Never mind, of course, the fact that research indicates that “transition” doesn’t cure these suicidal tendencies; if self-hatred is at the root of transgenderism, you’re not going to solve that problem by medical interventions. But I digress . . .
Helena Kerschner is not an unattractive woman. She has a certain pre-Raphaelite beauty — the kind of face you might find in a Rossetti painting — and yet she spent her adolescence feeling ugly:
By the time I was thirteen, I was isolating myself, self-harming, and had developed an eating disorder. In eighth grade, I lost touch with most of my school friends, and was too self-conscious and preoccupied with my eating disorder to put myself out there again. I started skipping school, spending lunch in the bathroom, and in general just keeping my head down, trying to get through the day unnoticed.
She found a “community” in the Internet’s septic tank — Tumblr:
Between sharing photos, drawings, and fanfiction, these girls were posting about their lives and going into deep detail about their struggles. Many were social outcasts like me, also struggling with things like self-harm and eating disorders. Finding a community of such like minded people felt amazing, and I quickly began spending nearly every waking moment on Tumblr or messaging some friend I had met on there.
The self-selecting nature of online communities is insufficiently understood. To be part of such a “community,” after all, you have to spend a lot of time online, whether it’s ranting about politics on Twitter or sharing “fanfiction” on Tumblr. And the people who become obsessed with this — the core of any such online community — tend to be “social outcasts” who lack healthy real-world connections with actual human beings. Kerschner recognizes this factor in hindsight:
Being such a secluded platform with a fairly homogenous user base not only demographically (mostly teenage girls, many of whom white and middle to upper middle class), but especially in terms of personality type, [Tumblr] developed its own culture, distinct from the youth culture of the general population. Because many of its users were like me, using Tumblr as an all-day alternate reality escape from the real world, this “culture” should be understood in the most literal sense of the word. One should think of Tumblr, especially from 2009-2016, as a secluded island nation whose people rarely interact with the outside world, and thus have language, customs, hierarchy, and history that is entirely unique and at first incomprehensible to people from other nations visiting the island. There’s something about it that almost selects for a particular type of person, and I’ve heard so many times from normal people (for lack of a better word) that they “tried Tumblr, but couldn’t figure it out.”
It was within this environment — an online hive of unhappy, introverted teenage girls — that transgender mania took hold. Under the weird “social justice” peer pressure, Kerschner found herself seeking “evidence that deep down, I wasn’t really a girl”:
I hated my body; it must be because I don’t like that its female. Boys have never been interested in me like they are with other girls; well, maybe I would be attractive as a boy, and then I could be like all these cute “gay trans boys” I saw dating each other online. I didn’t have many friends, it must be because being a girl isn’t my “authentic self”, and that was getting in the way of my social life. Plus, people were nicer to me since I said I was trans so that must be an indication that being trans is the right thing to do to make friends.
Strange as this might seem, it gets even weirder:
Female sexuality is hypersexualized and pornified, yet it’s supposed to be “empowering” for women to do porn, be prostitutes, or have dangerous, kinky, scary sounding sex with many different men. I heard that my discomfort with this made me “vanilla”, and a girl who is vanilla has no chance of really pleasing a man when competing with “empowered” women.
WTAF? Where are girls getting this message? But this was the kind of liberal “pro-sex” feminism that was in vogue 10 years ago when eighth-grade Helena Kerschner was struggling with her adolescent awkwardness. Of course, in just a short time, by 2014, there was a drastic shift into a very different sort of feminism, as the “rape culture” hysteria took hold on university campuses and suddenly any guy who so much as looked at a college girl was guilty of harassment. Any attempt to get to second base with a girl was almost certainly sexual assault, and as for actually hooking up — well, “PIV is always rape, OK?”
Online pornography, which studies show most kids are now exposed to by the age of 13, has become virtually inescapable. Faster than we can even measure its impact, this new world of porn is drastically changing how young people form their perceptions of sexuality and adult relationships. It would be foolish to think that it wouldn’t have major consequences. In my own life, I can see how being inundated with pornographic imagery as a young woman, much of it violent, and being repeatedly told that this was normal and even cool led me instinctively to look for an escape from womanhood. . . .
As a young woman who both identified as transgender as a teen and grew up in a very online, pornography-influenced environment, I believe there is a profound connection between this new way of exploring sexuality and the identity confusion that we are seeing in so many young people today.
Many young girls today, including those that identify as trans as I did as a teenager, internalize a hyper-sexualized caricature of what a girl or a woman is. It mirrors the image of women as extreme sex objects that boys derive from porn, but whereas for boys that may be titillating, for some girls it becomes the reason why they feel they aren’t really a “girl.”
On social media, it’s become normal for women to farm engagement and money by either presenting a highly sexualized image of themselves or outright selling homemade pornography. . . .
Most of the explicit content online isn’t about healthy sex between two people who love and trust each other; it’s about bizarre kinks and degradation.
In these porn-saturated circles, submission, degradation, abuse, and suffering are all highly associated with women.
The mainstreaming of S&M “kink” captured public attention when Fifty Shades of Grey first became a bestselling book (2011) and then a movie (2015). It is obvious that this phenomenon has been fueled by the prevalence of Internet porn. When I was in college in the 1970s and early ’80s, there was a joke: Masochist says to the sadist, “Hit me, beat me, make me feel pain!” To which the sadist replies, “No.”
Joking aside, however, nobody I knew back in the day was into that kind of whips-and-chains stuff. If there was any kind of widespread “kink” subculture in America back then, I never encountered it, and certainly I was no prude. But the Internet seems to have changed that, and the mainstreaming of BDSM culture through online pornography has spawned all manner of real-world consequences.
One of these consequences appears to be that girls are afraid to become women because, in the porn-warped view, being a woman means being something that no one in their right mind would want to be. Having imposed this fear via Internet pornography, the online world then offers “transition” as the solution. Satan himself could scarcely have imagined anything more wicked. Y’all need more Jesus.
It was indeed a good week in Washington for the Senators, as we took two out of three from the division-leading Injuns (we would have won the third game, too, but Sudden Sam McDowell had other ideas) and then swept the Reds in a two-game series. Next up are the AL West-leading Pilots, who have a two-game lead on the perpetually-moaning Minnesota Twins. I am almost tempted to start my worst pitchers against the Pilots, because the Twins’ tears are delicious, but that would be Wrong, because we are, after all, Professionals. Also, I hate losing, and all three of the games in our last series were close, even with “Limp” Dick Allen in their lineup.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
Sunny skies and cheerful music waft over RFK Stadium this week.
“I give you my word as a Biden: I will never stoop to President Trump’s level.”
— Nov. 20, 2019
“I give you my word as a Biden: If I am elected president I will do everything in my power to protect our children from gun violence.”
— March 10, 2020
“I give you my word as a Biden: When I’m president, I will lead with science, listen to the experts and heed their advice, and always tell you the truth.”
— March 18, 2020
When I first noticed him using this “my word as a Biden” phrase during the 2020 campaign, I was puzzled. Has the Biden family been so prominently associated with honesty that when Joe says this, most Americans say, “Well, that settles it”? Of course not. In fact, Biden’s first presidential campaign, in 1988, collapsed in disgrace specifically because of Joe’s dishonesty, when he was caught plagiarizing others — most notably British Labour leader Neil Kinnock — in his speeches:
Democratic presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr., a U.S. senator from Delaware, was driven from the nomination battle after delivering, without attribution, passages from a speech by British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock. A barrage of subsidiary revelations by the press also contributed to Biden’s withdrawal: a serious plagiarism incident involving Biden during his law school years; the senator’s boastful exaggerations of his academic record at a New Hampshire campaign event; and the discovery of other quotations in Biden’s speeches pilfered from past Democratic politicians.
Joe Biden lies about a lot of things, including his own biography. It is fair to say he is notoriously dishonest, and yet he seems to believe that nobody knows this, and that he enjoys a reputation as a truth-teller.
Twice in the past week, Biden has used the phrase “simply not true” to dismiss criticisms of his administration’s policy. On Tuesday, after accusing “oil and gas companies and . . . the finance firms that back them” of being engaged in “padding profits . . . profiteering . . . price gouging,” Biden said: “First, it’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production. It’s simply not true.” He then offered various statistics which he seemed to think disproved criticism of his policies. But let’s go to Marc Thiessen:
Biden blames Russia for a 75-cent rise in gas prices. But the price has risen $1.85 since he took office. The week before Biden’s inauguration, the price of a gallon of regular gas in the United States was $2.46; at this writing it is $4.32. Before the war in Ukraine, Biden presided over the largest year-over-year price rise in at least 30 years.
What drove those record price spikes? We can start with Biden’s war on fossil fuels. Upon taking office, Biden implemented a policy of energy disarmament. He rejoined the Paris climate agreement, canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, suspended all oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and began working on his pledge to ban all “new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters.” He came into office having promised that his administration would “end fossil fuel.” When you announce your intention to tax and regulate the fossil fuel industry out of existence, investors and workers listen. The results are less production — and higher prices.
So, I’m sick of this stuff. We have to talk about it because the American people think the reason for inflation is the government is spending more money. Simply not true.
I don’t think we need any lectures from our friends on the other side about fiscal responsibility, for God’s sake. Look, we have an ambitious agenda. So let’s go get it done.
Notice the clever pivot there. After denying that increased government spending causes inflation — which, in fact, is provably true — Biden then takes a shot at Republicans as unfit to speak about “fiscal responsibility,” thus returning to a Democratic talking point from the 1980s. Democrats claimed then that federal deficits were caused by Reagan’s tax cuts, even though it was easily demonstrated that federal revenue increased after the tax cuts were enacted. (Thus the proof of the so-called “Laffer Curve,” with lower marginal rates causing economic growth that actually produces more tax revenue.) Because Democrats were so committed to a “tax the rich” policy, and also committed to continuing expansion of the Welfare State, they refused to acknowledge the basic economic truth involved and, instead of doing anything to reign in government entitlement spending, blamed “Reaganomics” for the deficit.
We may grant that Republicans in recent years have not approached a Barry Goldwater ideal of fiscal restraint, to put it mildly, without endorsing Biden’s belief that pouring trillions of new federal spending into the economy has nothing to do with record-breaking inflation. Yet in his mind, any criticism of his “ambitious agenda” is “simply not true” — no one can honestly oppose or criticize Joe Biden.
The problem, in an age of political polarization, is that about 40% of the population will automatically believe anything a Democrat tells them, even if it contradicts the most basic principles of economics, and there is a vast media establishment which won’t even question Biden’s bizarre counterfactual claims about inflation, energy policy, etc. All that matters to them is the cynical question, “Cui bono?” Who benefits from a particular belief — Democrats or Republicans? If a certain belief is favorable to Republicans, then this belief will be attacked as a “myth,” and will endlessly be undermined by media “fact-checkers.” Whereas if a belief benefits Democrats — e.g., increased government spending does not cause inflation — the media will advocate and defend that belief.
Thus does “truth” become a partisan prize, over which one party claims a monopoly. By selling their souls to advance this belief system, the media destroy their own credibility. Then they wonder why we don’t trust them.
There are no mugshots of William Michael Stephens, 39, but there is surveillance video of the dangerous lunatic’s final suicidal episode, in which he rammed his pickup truck into a federal building in downtown Seattle and emerged firing a rifle before being felled by police gunfire. Given the location, I thought when this incident was first reported March 5 that it might be some kind of radical terrorism, Seattle having been the scene of a lot of Antifa protests and such. But instead, it turns out, Stephens was just a garden-variety kook who had descended into paranoia in the weeks leading up to his death:
Before he crashed his pickup into a federal building in downtown Seattle, before he fired a rifle seemingly at random, before he was fatally shot by Seattle police officers, William Michael Stephens scrawled in permanent marker all over his garage door about how there was a plot to kill him.
Stephens, of Bellevue, was moving toward officers with a rifle when he was shot and killed, according to body-worn camera footage released by Seattle police Tuesday. But in recent weeks, Bellevue police and others who knew him had become alarmed by his spiraling mental health crisis, court records show.
He was identified Tuesday as William Michael Stephens, 39, by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, which determined he died from multiple gunshot wounds. . . .
(You don’t need a coroner’s report to figure out the cause of death when somebody’s full of bullet holes.)
Stephens’ mental health appeared to deteriorate significantly in the last several months, to the extent that five days before he was killed, a Bellevue police officer filed a petition seeking an extreme risk protection order that would have barred Stephens from buying or possessing firearms, court records show.
(That’s nice — his mental health “appeared to deteriorate”? As if there were some doubt? You’re afraid to jump to conclusions?)
In recent weeks, Bellevue police and social workers, along with Stephens’ former attorney and psychiatrist, were gravely concerned by his deteriorating mental state, but were unable to stop him from driving to downtown Seattle on Saturday night and instigating an armed confrontation with police.
(Liberals always tell us that hiring more “social workers” is the solution to problems like this. You might actually believe this, unless you knew any sociology majors in college, in which case you know that there is no problem to which those people are the solution.)
Stephens appeared to believe he was being threatened by the Brazilian mafia, his ex-wife and his ex-pastor, and that evidence of their conspiracy was contained in social media posts, according to the ERPO [extreme risk protection order] petition filed in King County Superior Court on Feb. 28.
A court commissioner signed a temporary ERPO order that same day, but a police officer who attempted to serve Stephens with the court order on March 1, was apparently unable to locate him, the records show.
Police had been called to Stephens’ Bellevue house at least twice in the preceding months, once in January and again Feb. 15.
Both times he tried to explain to officers about a plot to kill him, according to police reports.
On Jan. 29, officers wrote, they tried to offer mental health services, but Stephens refused, insisting his case needed to be taken to the FBI. He never threatened others, they wrote, and did not meet the criteria for involuntary commitment.
(Guy’s nutty as a fruitcake, sure, but he doesn’t “meet the criteria,” because you have a constitutional right to be crazy.)
On Feb. 15, Stephens again called police to his house. Again, he said he did not want to harm himself or others and declined offers of mental health care.
Police referred his case to Bellevue Fire CARES, a city service where staff members, including social workers, seek to help people with needs that may not merit a 911 call or a fire or police response.
(Again, “social workers” prove to be utterly useless.)
Staff at CARES, or Citizen Advocates for Referral and Education Services, called Stephens two days later but got a full voicemail. Three days after that, they visited his home but he wasn’t there.
Two days before Bellevue police asked for the protection order, Stephens’ former psychiatrist, in a witness statement, wrote that he believed Stephens’ behavior was “of grave concern.”
His concerns, the psychiatrist wrote, were for both Stephens and for his ex-wife.
“Mr. Stephens is suffering a very serious Delusion and rapid mental health decompensation and deterioration,” the psychiatrist wrote. “I have treated individuals over the course of 44 years with behaviors such as this which may have the potential to manifest in violence. I believe that Mr. Stephen’s condition is very dangerous.”
(“In short, your honor, Mr. Stephens is daft, demented, wacko, bonkers, a few fries shot of a Happy Meal, which is to say, he’s crazy.”)
At his five-bedroom home on a quiet Bellevue cul-de-sac, Stephens scrawled words and sentences in black and blue permanent marker across the garage and front door. It’s unclear whether Stephens had a specific mental health diagnosis, but the words and phrases suggest the person who wrote them was struggling with paranoia.
(He wasn’t “struggling with paranoia.” He had dived head-first into deep end of the paranoia pool and was swimming in it.)
“I need protective custody,” one says.
“3 Red Lights = compromised Home.”
“Flash one Headlight for signaling.”
“Bellevue Police scared of truth only believe mafia.”
Several of the messages appear to threaten Stephens’ ex-wife. Stephens was arrested for fourth-degree assault domestic violence in 2020.
The ERPO petition for the protection order says Bellevue police believed Stephens “poses a significant danger in the near future” of injuring himself or others if he has a firearm. Stephens has had recent contacts with police, in the last month, the order says, and “appears to be in a declining mental state.”
It says he had recently obtained a concealed pistol license and tried to purchase a gun at Wade’s Gun Shop in Bellevue earlier in February.
Wade’s declined to sell him a gun, the petition says, “after he expressed concerns about a mafia plot to kill him.” . . .
One of Stephens’ neighbors, who asked not to be named to protect his privacy, said he noticed a change in his friend about four months ago when he said Stephens began dating a woman online who lives in Brazil.
Stephens began to believe he was in danger, the neighbor said. He closed down his landscaping business, sold most of his possessions and began sleeping in the attic and the crawl space, the neighbor said. His Facebook page is peppered with incoherent posts about a cult, murder plots and the mafia.
“Really quickly he became super paranoid,” the neighbor said. “He kept asking people what to do, ‘who do I go to, there’s watchers all over the place.’”
Indeed, the “watchers” are everywhere. We’re all under constant surveillance. If you’re reading this on your laptop, probably Microsoft or Apple or Google have a complete list of every website you’ve ever visited, and if you’re reading this on your smartphone, “the watchers” have got your location via GPS. Considering the way technology has made us all vulnerable to surveillance, being paranoid isn’t necessarily the same as being crazy. But what are the “watchers” going to do with all this personal data they’ve acquired about us? Even if we stipulate their malevolent intent — Facebook is obviously a satanic conspiracy — we are somewhat protected by the general incompetence of the authorities.
The case of William Michael Stephens illustrates this. He believed the “watchers” were out to get him, but even while everybody was trying to get him shipped off to the looney bin, he was still free to wander around all over the place, and it wasn’t until he went berserk with a rifle in downtown Seattle that the cops were finally forced to shoot him.
Hate crime hoaxer and disgraced actor Jussie Smollett has been sentenced on Thursday to 150 days in Cook County jail, 30 months of probation, pay a restitution of $120,106, and a fine of $25,000.
The actor repeatedly shouted, “I am innocent, and I am not suicidal,” as he was hauled off to jail.
“You’re just a charlatan, pretending to be a victim of a hate crime,” Judge Linn said to Smollett. “Your very name has become an adverb for ‘lying.’”
“Your performance on the witness stand can only be described as pure perjury,” the judge added. “You are now a permanently convicted felon.”
“There is nothing that I can do here today that will come close to the damage you’ve already done to your own life,” Judge Linn said before delivering the sentencing. “You turned your life upside down by your misconduct and shenanigans.”
Judge Linn added that Smollett’s “hypocrisy is astounding,” given that the actor has taken a keen interest in social justice issues for many years, yet staged a hate crime against himself, because he “really craved attention.”
“I believe that you did damage to real hate crime victims,” the judge said to Smollett.
“The officer asked you a simple question. And then you start to lie and haven’t stopped lying since,” the judge said. “You’ve been lying and lying and lying about this case, and that’s why you’re here today.” . . .
During the trial, prosecutors showcased how Smollett had gone through extraordinary lengths in January 2019 to stage a hate crime against himself, in which he hired and paid Nigerian brothers Abel and Ola Osundairo to carry out the attack.
Smollett had claimed he was physically attacked by two men wearing MAGA hats who put a rope around his neck, poured bleach on him, and shouted racial and homophobic slurs at him, before eventually yelling, “This is MAGA country!” — referring to former President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan.
The brothers later testified that Smollett gave them money to buy the rope they turned into a noose to put around his neck, and the ski masks to hide their faces.
Wild moment: After getting sentenced to 150 days in jail, Jussie Smollett maintains his innocence and repeats how he is not suicidal.
"I am not suicidal. I am innocent and I am not suicidal … if anything happens to me when I go in there, I did not do it to myself." pic.twitter.com/AnDsLcINKL
