‘This Tragic Epidemic’

Posted on | January 18, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘This Tragic Epidemic’

One of the things I used to do when I was on the campaign trail was to use my blog as a sort of notebook, where I’d pile up stuff during the day and then, in the evening, cannibalize this raw product to produce my American Spectator column. So after Thursday’s “Transgender Victimhood Narrative Update,” I realized this was column-worthy stuff:

After 24-year-old De’janay Lenorra Stanton was found fatally wounded last August on the South Side of Chicago, the story received nationwide attention. This was not because homicide is rare in Chicago, where 589 people were murdered in 2018, nor was the method of Stanton’s death — a single gunshot to the head — newsworthy in a city notorious for armed violence. Rather, what made this crime a subject of national attention was a matter of identity and presumed motive. Stanton’s murder highlighted “the urgent need to address the epidemic of violence against the transgender community across the U.S.,” declared Helen Parshall of the LGBT activist group Human Rights Campaign. “Stanton’s death marks the 18th known killing of a transgender or non-binary person this year,” Parshall wrote, bemoaning “this tragic epidemic” of anti-transgender violence.
This theme was reiterated in other coverage of Stanton’s death. “Transgender women face considerably high rates of violence in comparison to cisgender women, though that risk is even higher for trans women of color like De’janay,” Leila Ettachfini wrote on the feminist site Broadly, citing research by activist groups: “For many transgender women of color, the threat of violence is constant.”
Every time such a murder is reported, the media repeats and elaborates this message, as in the case of the recent murder of Dana Martin in Montgomery, Alabama, which was reported by the New York Times: “At least 26 transgender people were killed in 2018, the majority of them black transgender women, according to the Human Rights Campaign. In 2017, advocates reported at least 29 transgender people fatally shot or killed by other violent means.”
Police in Montgomery say they have no suspects in the murder of Martin, who was found shot death in a car Jan. 6, thus becoming “the first known transgender person killed this year in the United States.” A local LGBT activist told the Times that murders of “trans people of color are just happening more and more often and very little is being done about it.” This is self-evidently false, as even the statistics cited by activist groups indicate that the number of such crimes declined about 10% in the past year, despite the rhetoric about an “epidemic” of anti-transgender violence. As to the question of what is “being done about it,” the police in Montgomery, as in other cities, say they’re doing their best. There were more than 17,000 homicides in the United States in 2017, the most recent year for which Justice Department figures are available, and the reported number of transgender victims was a minuscule fraction of a single percentage point of those murders. No one should imagine, of course, that the liberal media and activist organizations have suddenly taken an interest in supporting the law enforcement community and urging them to bring criminals to justice. No, all the noise about an alleged “epidemic” of anti-transgender violence is about blaming President Trump. . . .

You can read the rest at The American Spectator.

In The Mailbox: 01.17.19

Posted on | January 17, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Nancy Pelosi – Leaving On A Jet Plane?
Twitchy: Video Of Adam Schiff Getting Off Bus After Trump Cancels Dems’ Junket Wins Reactions It So Richly Deserves
Louder With Crowder: Poll Shows Trump Picking Up Support From Latinos – A LOT Of Support

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Real Problem With Masculinity
American Power: Can Dems Keep A “Big Tent” In 2020?
American Thinker: Today’s Democrats – Anti-Christian, Anti-Israel, & Anti-God
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Loony Shoes News
BattleSwarm: Judge To City Of Austin In Gun Lawsuit – BOOM!
CDR Salamander: Grow Or Harvest Critical Thinkers
Da Tech Guy: Can The President Build The Wall By Declaring An Emergency? also, If You Really Want To march To Save Womens’ Lives, Black Lives, And Jewish Lives
Don Surber: Trump Tells Pelosi She’s Grounded, also, A McChicken In Every Pot
Dustbury: Karma.exe
Fred On Everything: The White Man’s Burden – Reflections On The Custodial State
The Geller Report: Muslim Shot In Arizona Cop Ambush Plot Charged With Terrorism, also, Border Ranchers Say They’ve Found Prayer Rugs On Their Property
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, A View From The Far Side
Hollywood In Toto: Punisher Falls Back On Hollywood’s Go-To Villain
Joe For America: CA Lawmakers Pass 400% Gas Tax Increase, Give Themselves Free Cars & Gas
Legal Insurrection: Former Staffer Claims Rep. Barbara Lee Fired Her After Her Rape Allegation, also, German Army Catches Iranian Spy In Its Ranks
The PanAm Post: ELN Suspected In Deadly Police Academy Attack In Bogota
Power Line: Ilhan Omar Appointed To House Foreign Relations Committee, also, Loose Ends
Shark Tank: Rubio Protects Consumer Privacy With ADD Act
Shot In The Dark: Movie Rights Are Currently On The Table
The Political Hat: The Democrats’ Coming Assault On The Second Amendment
This Ain’t Hell: Passing Of A Code Talker, also, Thursdays Are For Cooking
Victory Girls: Ilhan Omar doubles Down On Vile Comments About Lindsey Graham
Volokh Conspiracy: Audio Of Recent Federalist Society Teleforum On Sanctuary Cities
Weasel Zippers: Illegal Alien Charged In Polk County FL With Child Rape, also, SPLC Slapped With Racketeering Suit
Megan McArdle: The Best Solution To Brexit? Leave, Good And Hard
Mark Steyn: There’ll Always Be An England (Brussels Permitting)

Category: Linkagery

Transgender Victimhood Narrative Update

Posted on | January 17, 2019 | Comments Off on Transgender Victimhood Narrative Update

Dana Martin, 31, was found shot to death in Alabama.

The New York Times has important news of nationwide significance:

An Alabama woman has become the first known transgender person killed this year in the United States.
Dana Martin, 31, identified by advocacy groups as a black transgender woman, was found shot to death in a vehicle in Montgomery, Ala., on [Jan. 6].
Ms. Martin, who lived in Hope Hull, Ala., about nine miles southwest of Montgomery, was well-known in the transgender community of Birmingham and Montgomery, said Meta Ellis, the director of Montgomery Pride United, an L.G.B.T. advocacy organization in Alabama.
“Our community is devastated because the murders going on especially of trans people of color — are just happening more and more often and very little is being done about it,” she said. . . .
It is still unclear why Ms. Martin was killed.
There have not been any arrests in the case and there aren’t any suspects or known motives, said Capt. Regina Duckett of the Montgomery Police Department, which is investigating the crime.
“At this point, the circumstances of Dana Martin’s homicide are unknown,” Captain Duckett said on Friday. “The death is confirmed as a criminal homicide.”
Ms. Martin’s body was discovered when the police and fire medics responded to a vehicle crash on Brewer Road on Sunday around 11 p.m., the police said. Emergency workers found Ms. Martin in the vehicle, which was in the ditch line. Ms. Martin, the driver, had a fatal gunshot wound, the police said, and it appeared as if the shooting had occurred near the vehicle.
Based on their review of legal documents and a forensic examination, the police did not identify Ms. Martin as a woman in their news release, Captain Duckett said.
How a homicide victim identifies is “a personal matter that becomes relevant to our investigation only if it is determined to be a reason the victim was killed,” Captain Duckett added.
In Alabama, changing gender identity on a driver’s license requires gender-affirming surgery, Ms. Ellis said, something many transgender people don’t find necessary or are unable to afford.
At least 26 transgender people were killed in 2018, the majority of them black transgender women, according to the Human Rights Campaign. In 2017, advocates reported at least 29 transgender people fatally shot or killed by other violent means.

Notice that this business of the national media reporting the annual number of transgender murders began with the inauguration of Donald Trump as president. This is a crucial aspect of the Transgender Victimhood Narrative, i.e., the suggestion that Trump’s election signified the onset of a “climate of hate” which is to blame for violence against “transgender women of color” and other “marginalized communities”:

Many people have asked if the current regressive political climate legitimized by the language and policies of the Trump administration and others could be contributing to the rise of hate violence. Our answer is yes. . . . Over and over, President Donald Trump and his administration have attempted to erase, demonize and discriminate against members of the LGBTQ community.

This week, CNN provided a fresh update on the “climate of hate” theme:

Despite an all-time high in trans-visibility, with celebrities such as Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox now mainstream media stars, violence against the community is getting worse, community advocates say. . . .
Activists say anti-trans rhetoric stigmatizes the community and raises the risk of violence. . . .
Tillery, of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, feels that Trump has created a “really scary time for the whole LGBTQ community.”
“Every week, there is another news event that is equally triggering and terrifying, that leaves people not knowing where they can be safe. They are left with an uncertain future in this country,” Tillery said. “When you dehumanize people and try to erase them completely from existence, it emboldens those who hate this community, and no one is really stopping them, aside from the community rising up.”

Thus, the murder of Dana Martin is not just another unsolved crime, it’s part of the anti-Trump political narrative, which makes it a subject considered worthy of national media coverage. However, analysis will show that (a) there has not really been a “surge” of violent crime against transgender people, and (b) none of these killings have been inspired by Trump or by “anti-trans rhetoric.”

After the media began promoting this theme two years ago, I repeatedly debunked the Transgender Victimhood Narrative:

Aug. 5, 2017: The Transgender Victimhood Narrative Encounters Inevitable Difficulties
Aug. 23, 2017: Further Difficulties Emerge for the Transgender Victimhood Narrative
Aug. 25, 2017: Transgender Victimhood Narrative: Police Shoot Knife-Wielding ‘Person’
March 4, 2018: The Transgender Victimhood Narrative Continues to Sustain Damage
March 30, 2018: Crazy People Are Dangerous: The Strange Case of ‘Gwynevere River Song’
April 1, 2018: Police: Transgender Prostitute Murdered in Louisiana Motel by Tattooed Ex-Convict
July 14, 2018: Loony Troons: Fantasy, Mental Illness and the Transgender Victimhood Narrative

What anyone may discover, by careful examination of news accounts, is that most of the victims of “anti-transgender violence” were drug addicts or working as prostitutes, and were killed in circumstances related to their habitual association with the criminal subculture. The activists who compile the inventory of these homicides are just counting numbers of victims, and the national media generally fail to do follow-up reporting when suspects are arrested and the motives for these crimes determined. The obvious reason for this absence of follow-up reporting is that the facts do not corroborate the media’s “climate of hate” theme.

Consider the case of 24-year-old Dejanay Stanton. After Stanton was found shot to death on the South Side of Chicago last year, the pro-LGBT activist group Human Rights Campaign said that this homicide showed the “urgent need to address the epidemic of violence against the transgender community across the U.S.” But an arrest was recently made in the case and I think everyone will agree that this news is not helpful for the Transgender Victimhood Narrative:

A 17-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting a transgender woman last year in a secluded area on the South Side was ordered held without bail Sunday.
Tremon T. Hill was charged with first-degree murder in the Aug. 13 slaying of Dejanay Stanton, a 24-year-old trans woman escort he was in a sexual relationship with, according to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.
Stanton received a text from Hill the morning of her killing asking her to meet him in a lot in the 4000 block of South Calumet Avenue in Bronzeville, Assistant State’s Attorney Britt Steinberg said at a bail hearing Sunday in the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
Just after 11 a.m., Hill is alleged to have shot Stanton in the head and left her lying on the ground outside of her car, which was left with its doors open and a purse and cellphone inside, according to Steinberg. Police responded to a ShotSpotter alert at that location and found Stanton, who died minutes later, Steinberg said.
Text messages between Hill and Stanton revealed that their alleged sexual relationship began in July, when they arranged to meet at a South Side hotel after Hill indicated he was 18-years-old, Steinberg said.
The pair continued communicating, sending each other more than 400 messages, in which Hill allegedly expressed he was interested in having sex with Stanton but not with a transgender person, Steinberg said.
Over multiple texts, Hill urged Stanton to delete photos of him from her phone, which she later did, Steinberg said. Hill also told Stanton that their sexual relationship had caused him to become suicidal, Steinberg said.

Chicago authorities have not released a mug shot of Tremon Hill, “a lanky Phillips High School student who . . . played on the school’s basketball team,” but it seems highly unlikely that he is a Trump supporter influenced by “anti-trans rhetoric,” as activists might wish us to believe. And I suspect that the national media will ignore this latest development in the Dejanay Stanton case, because hooking up with high-school boys is not exactly helpful for the Transgender Victimhood Narrative.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)

Category: Crime, Media Bias, The Transgender Cult

Caroline Calloway and the ‘Creativity Workshop’ Influencer Tour From Hell

Posted on | January 17, 2019 | Comments Off on Caroline Calloway and the ‘Creativity Workshop’ Influencer Tour From Hell

Caroline Calloway spending Daddy’s money in Europe, 2013.

In November, Glamour magazine announced that it would cease print publication and it’s not just the downward trend in print publications in general that is to blame. What has happened is that the fashion industry increasingly promotes its products via marketing arrangements with so-called “digital influencers,” which is a fancy term for pretty girls with lots of Instagram followers. Parlaying a popular Instagram feed (and maybe also a YouTube channel) into a lucrative income is a matter of “branding,” and one of the most popular “brands” of recent years is a young woman named Caroline Calloway. She comes from money. Her parents sent her to an elite boarding school in New Hampshire, and she attended New York University ($69,984 a year, including room and board). In 2013, at age 21, she spent the summer traveling in Europe, meeting good-looking Italian guys, and posting what she hashtagged #adventuregram photos with long storytelling captions. and then in the fall, she went to Cambridge University in England, studying art history and — ZOOM! — she soared to Instagram superstardom.

Evidently, there are lots of girls on Instagram who wish Daddy had enough money to send them to Cambridge where, in addition to “studying art history” (ahem) Miss Calloway got herself a dreamy British boyfriend named Oscar and had all kinds of #adventuregram moments that she chronicled for her growing digital audience.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Miss Calloway is not, nor will she ever be, a historian of art or anything else. She’s a no-talent spoiled rich girl who might be taking orders in a truck-stop diner were it not for Daddy’s money. But her tales of romance at Cambridge were enormously popular with her loyal fangirls on Instagram, and so Miss Calloway had a brainstorm — a book! And believe it or not, in 2015 a publisher offered her a $500,000 contract for a memoir on the basis of a 100-page proposal which her New York agent called “brilliant.”

What kind of “memoir” does a 24-year-old rich girl write?

Answer: We’ll never know, because Miss Calloway failed to deliver the manuscript, which meant she had to return the advance and — oops! — I guess Daddy’s not that rich, because she was left owing $100,000 to the publisher. That was summer 2017, after Miss Calloway had finished “studying art history” (ahem) and moved in with her boyfriend Oscar in London. She then began attempting to market herself as a “digital influencer,” apparently with not much success — certainly not enough success to pay back the $100,000 she owed the publisher. Finally, this past December, having lost Oscar and moved back to New York, Miss Calloway announced she would be doing a “Creativity Workshop” tour:

Topics to be covered included ‘Creativity — How to cultivate it, how to nurture it, and how to express it in a way that is true to who you are insdie’, ‘the basics of establishing style, crafting jokes, reading like a writer, and how to balance entertaining your audiencce with expressing yourself’, build a brand on Instagram by using my brand as a case study and explaining how I conceptualized, how I grew it, and why it works’, and ‘how to begin architecting a life that feels really full and genuine and rich and beautiful for you.’ All the spelling mistakes are hers.

So explains Kayleigh Donaldson, a Scottish journalist who has observed Miss Calloway’s online antics long enough to despise her quite thoroughly. Miss Calloway announced in December that her “Creativity Workshop” tour — to which she sold tickets for $165 — would begin in January. Yeah, lots of advanced planning there:

Calloway started selling tickets for her nationwide tour, with locations in Boston, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Austin, Charlotte and DC, before she had booked venues. Any event manager will tell you that rule number one is to make sure you have a location confirmed before you start selling tickets to it.

Many things — many, many things — went predictably and disastrously wrong with this doomed “Creativity Workshop” tour plan. The New York event this past Saturday will, apparently, be the first and last stop of her “tour.” Ticket-holders to previously announced dates in other cities have reportedly gotten refunds.

So what’s the lesson here? Kayleigh Donaldson concludes:

No, Calloway is not the worst scammer on the internet. Plenty of people have been quick to tell me they don’t think she’s a real scammer, just an incompetent dolt who got in way over her head. But I’m not sure that option is much better. All the warning signs were there and she powered through because there was money to be made. She harnessed that fan devotion for profit based on skills she did not possess and services she could not provide, and anyone who dissented from that loyalty was ‘inauthentic’. . . .
Being incompetent is not charming. Scamming people out of hundreds of dollars for the chance to be ‘real’ with an influencer is not good business. Other people’s work and emotions are not yours to appropriate as part of a brand.
Caroline Calloway is merely the sloppiest and most obviously incompetent version of the influencer economy run amok. She has had every opportunity handed to her, including a book deal that would be life-changing for most, but she had no intention of following through. The workshop tour merely exposes how unprepared and unwilling to learn she is for such experiences. Calloway’s main problem is that she doesn’t want to be an artist or a storyteller or a writer: she wants to have made art, to have told stories, to have been a writer, to have taught, and so on. But that requires work, research, planning, sacrifice, and an acute understanding that not everything you do will be successful or worthy of celebration. She has nothing to offer but is selling everything.

Miss Calloway is 27 now. She’s no longer the fresh-faced girl posting #adventuregram photos and spending Daddy’s money on an extended vacation “studying art history” in Cambridge. She’s got hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers but has yet to succeed in monetizing her “brand” because she’s unwilling to do any actual work.

Like, you land a $500,000 book contact — half a million dollars! — at age 24, and you can’t deliver the manuscript? Why? Because you were too busy “studying art history” and hanging out with Oscar? Or was it because you realized that your shallow life wasn’t really interesting enough to merit a “memoir”? But if somebody’s willing to pay you $500,000 for it, maybe you could fake it? For $500,000 I could write all kinds of wild stuff, maybe even the True Story of the Kentucky Fried Chicken Robbery, although otherwise I’d have to invoke my Fifth Amendment rights on advice of my Samoan lawyer.

Probably nobody wants to read any stories of my drug-addled adolescence outrunning the Austell, Georgia, police in a 1973 Volkswagen Beetle, but for $500,000? Yeah, how soon do you need that story, Mister Publisher Man? For a half-million bucks, I’m gonna make it good. But first, I’d have to hire a cute little “editorial assistant” and set up a writing office in Key West, so I could really concentrate on my work.

No, it’s never gonna happen, and not just because anyone who knows me would warn the publisher that I’m far too irresponsible to be trusted with $500,000. No matter how interesting my youthful misadventures were, publishers nowadays only want “memoirs” by girls fresh out of college with lots of followers on Instagram and YouTube, because that’s where the marketing analysts tell them the money is. Anyway . . .

This message has been brought to you by Flying Dog™ Beer.

Now that I’m a digital influencer, who’s up for a “creativity workshop”?

Category: Celebrities, Culture

In The Mailbox: 01.16.19

Posted on | January 17, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #502
357 Magnum: Why Do They Want To “Feel Safe” As Opposed To Actually “Being Safe”?
EBL: It’s Fig Newton Day – Make Your Own Fig Newtons
Twitchy: Let’s All Share Our Heartfelt, Totally Woke, And Absolutely Real Conversations With TSA Agents
Louder With Crowder: “If Bible Characters Had Phones”

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Do You Put Your Own Personal Interests First, Or Your Nation’s?
American Power: The Case Of Caroline Callaway & The Influencer Economy
American Thinker: Understanding Why The Deep State Had To Take Down General Flynn
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: Parliament Rejects May’s Dog’s Brexit, Yet, May Survives No-Confidence Vote
CDR Salamander: In Asia, Piracy Takes A Pause
Da Tech Guy: Cleopatra – STILL Not Out Of Africa, also, I’ll Take Two Bags Please
Don Surber: Shutdown May Shrink Government, also, Democrat Capitulation Begins
Dustbury: The Buck Stopped There
The Geller Report: Georgia Muslim Arrested For Plotting To Bomb White House, Other DC Sites, also, Muslim Mobs Close Four Churches In Egypt
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, An Attempted Totalitarian Twofer
Hollywood In Toto: PTC – Where’s Outrage Over Family Guy Groping?
Joe For America: Pelosi Makes Huge Rookie Mistake – Security Already In Place For SOTU
JustOneMinute: Quite The Terror Plan
Legal Insurrection: Pelosi Demands Trump Postpone SOTU Address, also, California’s New Governor Wants To Tax Drinking Water
Michelle Malkin: Procter & Gamble’s Toxic Sanctimony
The PanAm Post: Being & Appearing To Be President, also, Macri/Bolsonaro Relationship Thaws As Argentina & Brazil Hold First Bilateral Talks
Power Line: Gillette’s Razor – And Occam’s, also, Silence Of The Dems
Shot In The Dark: Unconstitutional
STUMP: LA Teachers’ Strike – Pensions Are A Factor
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Nairobi Vacation Bad Idea
The Political Hat: Literal Human Sacrifice For Gaia
This Ain’t Hell: Extramarital Affair Leads To Soldier’s Murder, also, TRICARE Fee Increases, Vet Benefit Cuts To Slash Deficit?
Victory Girls: State Lawmakers Partied While California Burned
Volokh Conspiracy: Surveyr Shows Most Extreme GMO Opponents Know The Least
Weasel Zippers: Judge Orders Susan Rice, Other Obama Officials To Answer Questions On Benghazi, Clinton Email Server, also, DOJ Official Warned Steele Dossier Was Connected To Hillary, Might Be Biased
Mark Steyn: Births & Brexit, Beijing & Brussels, also, Last Orders

Category: Linkagery

A World Without Norms: The Influence of Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Trouble’

Posted on | January 16, 2019 | 2 Comments

Feminists protest in Los Angeles, January 2017.

“When did feminism go completely bonkers?”

That question is sometimes raised when I relate the latest outburst of madness from academia (e.g., “How has the form of your child been culturally interpreted?”) or from popular culture (e.g., Gillette’s advertising attack on “toxic masculinity”). Indeed, this spiraling descent into insanity has disturbed many feminists themselves. After Meghan Murphy got banned from Twitter for criticizing transgender ideology, it became evident to many that the feminist movement is now suffering an existential crisis (for which Donald Trump is not to blame). If the basic categories of “male” and “female” are no longer coherent — the persistent theme of Third Wave gender theory — then how is it possible to speak of “women’s rights”? But the crisis of feminism also comes from the opposite direction, namely the breakdown of the social order. After all, the object of feminism is to destroy “patriarchy,” the etymology of which denotes rule of the fathers, a term borrowed from the field of anthropology to describe the basic kinship structure of tribal societies.

Yet the collapse of the marriage-based family in the United States, where rates of divorce and illegitimacy have skyrocketed in the past half-century, makes it increasingly difficult for feminists to make “patriarchy” the scapegoat for every problem young women experience. As one Twitter user commented in response to a discussion of “toxic masculinity”:

43% of boys are raised by single mothers
78% of teachers are female
So almost 50% of boys have 100% feminine influence while at home & an 8/10ish chance of 100% influence at school.
Toxic masculinity isn’t the problem. Lack of masculinity is.

It could be argued that many of the problems now affecting young women are not caused by “patriarchy,” but are instead unintended consequences of the feminist movement’s success in destroying the institutional structure of patriarchal society, i.e., the marriage-based family.

When millions of boys are being raised without proper paternal influence, without married parents who provide them a model of effective male-female cooperation, it is not surprising that many of them will grow up to be men with bad attitudes and bad habits. It is misguided to blame “patriarchy” for the problems emerging from this social breakdown, since it is a post-patriarchal (or perhaps more accurately, anti-patriarchal) culture that has shaped their personalities. And what tool does feminism suggest to fix these problems? Gender theory.

‘Gender Trouble’ made Professor Judith Butler a major academic figure.

Professor Judith Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is more or less permanently ensconced in the Amazon Bestsellers in Women’s Studies, as I have remarked, “not because it is pleasant reading, but because it is required reading in so many college and university courses”:

Every year, many tens of thousands of young people enroll in Women’s Studies classes, and are introduced to Professor Butler’s version of feminist gender theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix.

Anyone who has ever endeavored to read Professor Butler’s influential book knows that she expresses herself in a nearly opaque academic jargon, so that even a highly literate reader will often be forced to scan a paragraph two or three times to comprehend it. Even then, however, Professor Butler has a habit of asking questions that merely suggest or imply a meaning that she never bothers to state explicitly. Her purpose, as she says in the subtitle, is the subversion of identity — to force readers to question the standard categories of “male” and “female” — with the idea that this subversive project is the fundamental goal of feminism.

Much of the current conflict within feminism over the issue of transgenderism can be traced directly to Professor Butler’s book and its pervasive influence in the so-called Third Wave of feminism. Feminist critics of transgender ideology generally align themselves with the “Second Wave” (i.e., the radical Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and ’70s), rejecting the claims of those who, following Professor Butler’s argument, assert that the category of “women” does not provide a definite subject for feminist theory because the meaning of “woman” is socially constructed. Professor Butler’s theory reflects the influence of French postmodernist philosophy, particularly Michel Foucault. Critics of Professor Butler are expected not to call attention to the fact that Foucault was a gay pedophile (or, at least, a defender of pedophilia) who died of AIDS in 1984, in the same way that we are expected to ignore that Gayle Rubin, another of Professor Butler’s key sources, praised NAMBLA and is an advocate of homosexual BDSM.

Some would say that it is an ad hominem fallacy to note the personal perversions of the authors cited by Professor Butler in Gender Trouble, but I consider this relevant not only to understanding her arguments, but also explaining why her book so quickly gained quasi-religious authority in academic feminism. You see that what Professor Butler was telling her readers is that there are no rules when it comes to sexual behavior. Every feasible limit on sexual behavior — even the distinction between “male” and “female” — is dismissed by Professor Butler as socially constructed, an artificial product of an oppressive society. There is no such thing as “natural” or “normal” sexual behavior, nor do men and women possess any innate characteristics of personality or behavior that can authentically be described as “masculine” or “feminine.” The subversion of identity requires the obliteration of behavioral norms, you see, and this was evidently something that many academic feminists wanted to hear circa 1990, which explains the near-universal embrace of Professor Butler’s book as a required assignment in Women’s Studies programs.

Did I mention that Professor Butler is a lesbian, and that her theory of gender expressed a distinctly lesbian perspective? This is not speculation on my part, but something that Professor Butler has herself explained.

In her 2004 anthology Undoing Gender, Professor Butler explains (p. 207) that her first aim in writing Gender Trouble was to “expose . . . a pervasive heterosexism in feminist theory,” because feminists explained “sexual difference” in a heterosexual context. After invoking French feminists (Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray), Professor Butler then cites (p. 209) lesbian feminist Cherrie Moraga “and others” who were “beginning to theorize butch-femme categories” in ways which “were calling sexual difference into question”:

What happens when terms such as butch and femme emerge not as simple copies of heterosexual masculinity and heterosexual femininity, but as expropriations that expose the nonnecessary status of their assumed meanings? Indeed, the widely cited point that Gender Trouble made was the following: that categories like butch and femme were not copies of a more originary [sic] heterosexuality, but they showed how the so-called originals, men and women within the heterosexual frame, are similarly constructed, performatively established. So the ostensible copy is not explained through reference to an origin, but the origin is understood to be as performative as the copy.

You may have to read that 102-word passage very carefully to understand that what Professor Butler is saying is that there is no such thing as human nature. There can be no such thing as an authentic masculinity if, as she asserts, the “butch” lesbian’s behavior is accepted as an equally valid “masculinity,” rather than an attempted imitation of an authentic original. If the heterosexual man’s masculinity is as “performative” and as “constructed” as the lesbian’s “butch” persona, then there are no natural differences between men and women, and the traits we call “masculinity” and “femininity” are a sort of illusion, a fiction, a myth.

Except . . . no.

There are real differences between men and women and, while these differences may not be apparent (or particularly relevant) in a university classroom, they cannot be ignored in a place we call The Real World.

Look carefully at that list of the 20 most dangerous occupations and ask yourself why feminists aren’t demanding “equal opportunity” in the logging industry or on commercial fishing vessels. In 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, 5,657 Americans were killed on the job, of whom 5,228 — 92.4% — were male. While I don’t have an specific data on occupational hazards for university professors, I’m certain very few of Professor Butler’s colleagues have been killed on the job. The fatality rate per 100,000 workers in the field of “Education, training, and library occupations” was 0.3, whereas in “Construction and extraction occupations” it was 12.3, i.e., 40 times higher.

The Real Men of the Real World

Suffice it to say that men who work these very dangerous jobs are not only quite masculine, but almost entirely heterosexual. The Real Men of the Real World are not only quite different from women, but they’re also different from the kind of men who typically work in academia. Let’s face it, a crew of a dozen or so Alaska tuna fishermen could probably whip the entire male faculty of the University of California-Berkeley in a bar fight, and it wouldn’t even be close. My point is not to disparage men in academia, but rather that Professor Butler’s gender theory was developed in a context where masculinity is less crucial than in many other environments, where such traits as physical strength are paramount. And for most of human history, people didn’t work in air-conditioned offices or have such amenities as health insurance. Even in an entirely gender-neutral modern environment, human beings still possess traits inherited from ancestors who survived for generation after generation in conditions of primitive savagery. How would Professor Butler fare in rural Alabama where my grandmother was born in 1884?

Yet women in the not-so-distant past had their own very dangerous job: Motherhood. Pregnancy and childbirth were rather routinely a cause of death for women in the many thousands of years that preceded the development of modern medical technology. There has lately been much media attention to the maternal death rate in the United States, said to be the highest in the industrialized world. Yet the U.S. ranks 138 among all nations with 14 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births which, while higher than the U.K. (9/100,000) or France (8/100,000), is far lower than in sub-Saharan Africa, where maternal death rates are more than 600/100,000 in nine nations, and above 300/100,000 almost everywhere. Many of these maternal deaths are caused by infectious diseases. Keep in mind that penicillin, the first antibiotic, was not discovered until 1928 — five years after my own father was born. Before the widespread use of antibiotics, men and women alike died of infectious diseases that today can be easily treated. More than a half-million Americans died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, most as a result of secondary infections of bacterial pneumonia.

My point is that it is the comfort and safety of modernity which permits Professor Butler to engage in speculative critical theory about gender as a social construct, speculations which not only ignore the primitive conditions in which male-female differences developed, but which also take for granted the continuation of modernity. One wonders what the tribesmen of Afghanistan would make of Professor Butler’s theory about the “nonnecessary status” of a “performatively established” masculinity.

“People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf,” as Richard Grenier observed (a quote sometimes mistakenly attributed to George Orwell, whom Grenier was merely paraphrasing, in reference to a Kipling poem). The peace and prosperity that permits Professor Butler to engage in theoretical speculation (and collect a taxpayer-funded annual salary of nearly $300,000 for doing so) ought not to be taken for granted, but this is exactly what her theory does. Not only does the authentic masculinity of Real Men in the Real World “stand ready to do violence” against terrorists, criminals and hostile foreign powers, but these men also do the thankless (and often dangerous) work that enables her to enjoy her enviable standard of living. The truck driver who delivers the food for her dinner, or the pilot who flies her to her next academic conference — does any of these men count for anything at all in Professor Butler’s calculations of the value of masculinity? Of course not.

Working in my cozy home office on a morning when the temperature outside is 28°F, it would be easy for me to forget that the heating oil that makes possible my comfort is provided by men in the business of “Oil and gas extraction” which, according to the Labor Department, has an occupational fatality rate of 15.5 per 100,000 workers. And the power for my computer is supplied by men working as “Electrical power-line installers and repairers,” with an on-the-job death rate of 29.1.

A remarkable sort of insanity is required to ignore or take for granted the value of authentic masculinity, as does Professor Butler’s gender theory, and yet this lunatic ideology now enjoys a hegemonic authority in academia. When Dr. Lisa Littman published a study of “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” Brown University removed an article about her research from its website because of “concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.”

What did Dr. Littman’s research discover?

This is the phenomenon Brown University public-health researcher Lisa Littman has identified as “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” ROGD differs from traditional gender dysphoria, a psychological affliction that begins in early childhood and is characterized by a severe and persistent feeling that one was born the wrong sex. ROGD is a social contagion that comes on suddenly in adolescence, afflicting teens who’d never exhibited any confusion about their sex.
Like other social contagions, such as cutting and bulimia, ROGD overwhelmingly afflicts girls.

Why are girls more vulnerable to “social contagions”? Without any professional credentials in psychology, I can only offer speculative suggestions, but isn’t it possible that this vulnerability to social influences is hard-wired into female neurology by the same hereditary process that hard-wires men for risk-taking and aggression? One does not need a Ph.D. in evolutionary psychology, however, to notice male-female differences. My experience of parenthood, as the father of six children now ranging in age from 16 to 29, qualifies me to make some general suggestions in this matter based on direct observation.

What accounts for the deranged mentality of so many teenage girls in 21st-century America? Why has Third Wave gender theory driven so many young women insane? Isn’t it a fact that, by destroying social norms of sexual behavior — including our traditional understanding of male-female differences — contemporary feminism has thrust these vulnerable teenagers into a world where there are no common-sense rules to guide them toward responsible adulthood? All teenagers are prone to chafe against the constraints imposed on them by parental expectations, but what happens to girls when parental authority is absent or undermined by social and political forces which communicate to impressionable youth that Mom and Dad are hateful bigots for expecting their girls to be girls? The transgender cult now insists that parents who don’t cooperate with their agenda are guilty of child abuse.

Gender and the Psychotic Teenager

We might identify many factors (e.g., the omnipresence of social media) as implicated in the emergence of rapid onset gender dysphoria as a phenomenon among teenage girls, we cannot deny the role played by proponents of Third Wave feminist theory who have lent an aura of intellectual respectability to the subversion of identity and the attack on the gender binary. An ideology that insists there are no rules when it comes to sexual behavior, which celebrates abnormality while stigmatizing “heteronormativity” as oppressive to women — i.e., the ideas promoted by Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble — will predictably produce confusion once this belief system escapes from an academic context to run rampaging through popular culture, like Godzilla stomping Tokyo.

Like the mad scientist in a horror movie who has created a monster, Professor Butler seeks to evade responsibility for the harm to innocent lives she has caused by insisting that her intentions were noble and enlightened. Permit me to remind you of what manner of damage these deranged young women are inflicting on themselves:

‘James’ in 2015 (left) and in 2018, after ‘top surgery’ (right).

“James Waters” is a 22-year-old self-declared Marxist who uses the pronouns “he/xe/it.” She used to have breasts, but had them amputated (double mastectomy, known as “top surgery” in the jargon of the transgender cult) earlier this year, after two years of testosterone treatment. You can watch a 2016 YouTube video of “James” mumbling about her/“his” hormones, but did I mention “he/xe/it” is schizophrenic? And has a Tumblr blog? Yes, “James” is “a gay schizophrenic indigenous artist,” as she/“he” explained in a January post soliciting donations . . .
How old was “James” in 2011, when she/“he” first “came out and began transitioning”? She was a 15-year-old girl, with “an eating disorder and severe self harm problems,” which is not surprising because gender dysphoria has high rates of co-morbidity with other mental illnesses. . . .

You can read the rest of that June 2018 post, which makes the important point that in many places (including Canada, where “James” lives), transgender treatment is being provided at taxpayer expense. How did it become acceptable practice to treat mental illness with hormones and mastectomy? And why is this treatment so urgent and necessary that governments are spending taxpayer money for it? How are we to comprehend such craziness — taxpayer-subsidized abnormality, as it were — except as a real-world consequence of the Third Wave gender theory originated by Judith Butler and promoted by many hundreds of other academic feminists who have made Professor Butler’s ideas a sort of campus cult religion? The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

As commonly understood by Third Wave feminists, gender theory means that there are no natural differences between men and women, that every human being is a blank slate — tabula rasa — with no instincts or innate characteristics. It is from this belief that the idea of male-female differences as the product of “social construction” emerges and, in turn, the idea that we can be molded to conform to whatever pattern the intellectual elite prefer. The executives at Gillette apparently believe that male behavior can be altered by radical feminist sermons delivered as TV advertising, and we are thus bombarded with anti-male propaganda by the marketers of shaving products while, simultaneously, the government is spending taxpayer money to amputate the breasts of teenage girls and inject them with testosterone to turn them into “men.”

Actual males are stigmatized as “toxic” for being masculine, but we are required to celebrate what Professor Butler calls the “expropriation” of masculinity by women. Indeed, you can be punished — fired from your job — if you do not endorse transgender ideology. But forcing people to play along with this charade will not turn illusion into reality. What will happen instead is that requiring everyone to participate in this make-believe game of “gender” will drive people crazy. It’s already happening — just look at the daily headlines about the epidemic of mental illness among the young, and the rising rates of opioid addiction and suicide.

A world without norms is a world without meaning, and an ideology that tells people that their lives have no meaning or purpose, that there are no moral standards by which they can determine good or bad, right or wrong, will predictably lead them into decadence and despair.

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The Sex Trouble project has been supported by contributions from readers. The first edition of Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War on Human Nature is available from Amazon.com, $11.96 in paperback or $1.99 in Kindle ebook format.