This day in Herstory: Queen Elizabeth I of England was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Pius V on February 25, 1570. He issued a papal bull, titled Regnans in Excelsis, which declared "Elizabeth, the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime" to be excommunicated and a heretic, releasing all her subjects from any allegiance to her. Catholics who obeyed her orders were threatened with excommunication. (more)
More Controversy at Britain’s Transgender Youth Clinic
From National Review (USA)
By Madeliene Kearns
February 25, 2022
The National Health Service Trust overseeing Britain’s transgender youth clinic — which has been plagued by controversies — is facing discrimination claims after a job candidate who maintains that sex is an immutable characteristic was turned away on that basis.
Kate Grimes, a retired hospital CEO, responded to an advertisement for a chairman and two non-executive positions but was told in an email by a representative from a recruitment firm,
I have to say that your view on sex being immutable is not a view point that the trust would wish any of their non-executives to hold and as such I would not recommend that you waste time making an application for this — it will be one of the questions I will be asking candidates at first stage interview. … read full article
Judges say ‘no reason’ people can’t self-declare on census
From The Times (UK)
By James Mulholland
Feb 25, 2022
Senior judges have said they “see no reason” why people in Scotland should not be able to self-declare their own sex in the census next month.
Lady Dorrian and two colleagues explained in a judgment why they rejected an appeal from a feminist group opposed to the change. The Fair Play for Women campaigners went to the Inner House of the Court of Session this week to argue that Lord Sandison was wrong when he ruled that Scottish government proposals to allow people to identify as male or female in this year’s census — regardless of what is on their birth certificate — were lawful.
Transgender rights activists have welcomed the move, believing that it will have no impact on the quality of data and that people should be able to answer the census in a way that reflects their everyday experiences. … read full article (paywall)
"Trans Educator" Describes Arousal At Wearing Women's Clothes, Denies Biological Sex
From REDUXX (USA)
By Genevieve Gluck
Feb 25, 2022
Leaked footage of a webinar hosted by a top UK "trans awareness training" organization shows its founder discussing getting sexually aroused by women's clothing.
In the footage, Cool2BTrans founder Martin “Katie” Neeves is heard describing in graphic detail how, as a youth, he would steal his sister’s underwear and try them on for sexual gratification. Clips from the webinar were posted by Twitter user @SarahSurviving, who says she had been subjected to the purported diversity training Cool2BTrans offered through her place of employment.
“My earliest memories were of my mum catching me trying on a pair of my sister’s knickers. I remember when I did it, it felt so right. But then my mum came in, and she caught me and told me off,” says Neeves in one of the clips.
“In my childhood, I used to secretly dress in my sister’s clothes whenever I had the opportunity. And whenever I did it, it felt so right. But then those feelings of being right were very quickly overtaken by feelings of guilt, shame, and self-loathing. Because what I was doing was wrong, it was dirty, it was naughty, and not what respectable people did,” he continued.
In January 2018, at the age of 48, Martin Neeves declared himself “Katie," the alter-ego he says he used when dressing up for sexual gratification. … read full article (and SUPPORT REDUXX!)
Coming Home
From Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT) (USA)
February 25, 2022
When my daughter was 13, I had a friend of mine who was also the mother of one of my daughter’s peers, tell me that my girl was using a boy’s name in her friend group. This woman shared with me her daughter’s written guest list for her upcoming birthday party in which every girl invited was recorded as how she identified along the rainbow. It was my daughter’s 8th grade year. We were already having a rough year and this news seemed pretty silly at first. Then I started researching. I found Transgender Trend, 4th Wave Now, and writings by Lisa Marchiano and the reality of what we might be dealing with sunk in. And I became terrified. Then an incident happened during which my daughter hinted that she was considering or might already have begun harming herself. I was an educator and a fairly confident mother who prided myself in my liberal mindset and in my healthy relationships with my children. When I reflect, this was the moment my confidence dropped out and I started to really doubt myself as a mother.
My daughter never “came out” to us and an action-packed year followed with our family attempting some very unorthodox interventions for our daughter’s failing mental health. We pulled her from school and she spent 3 months in a wilderness program (a decision I deeply regret). We attempted several months of “world schooling”, and we moved our family of four from the suburbs of our smallish city to downtown. Approximately a year following that initial conversation, I found myself wondering why my tall, lanky 14 year old girl, who had started her period about 12 months prior, remained completely flat-chested. The frightening research I had done the previous year continued to haunt me, and I decided to push the topic.
One evening after picking her up from spending time with her friends, one of them said in parting, “Later, Bro!” I asked her about using a boy’s name with her friends. Because of the research I had done previously, I knew to navigate this conversation carefully. I maintained a calm, curious demeanor that night but really had to pry to get her to tell me that she thought she was actually, somehow, a boy. She and I agreed to have a longer talk the following day and that finding a therapist would be a good next step. (I didn’t realize at this point how difficult this task would be.) That night I descended into terror again as I researched and realized things had continued to worsen over the year, with more families being torn apart as scores of teen girls opted into this institutionalized bodily harm. Somehow, the next day, I managed to show up again, calm and curious, to have an extended conversation during which I extracted a good amount of information including a strong sense of how steeped she was in the ideology and that her breast binder had been purchased for her by a friend approximately a year and half prior. She’s never told me which friend.
I regret to report that I failed to maintain that same calm, curious demeanor. Within a few days, I became gripped with fear and anxiety, a sense of complete failure and impotence, and experienced what I suspect would be called panic attacks almost nightly for months. Being this fragile made it quite easy for me to become triggered in conversations with my daughter, and on occasion, pushed even into a rare state of rage. Rage I didn’t even know I was capable of expressing. These are the moments she still holds onto and uses to justify keeping me at a distance; they contribute to the narrative she’s working hard to create about what type of parent I am.
What type of parent I am. What type of parent am I? At some point, and with the help of some guidance from unexpected sources as well as amazing resources, it dawned on me what kind of parent my daughter needs me to be. What only I, the mother who birthed her into this strange, new culture, within this wondrous and awesome world, the woman who she has most contact with and with whom she attached as an infant, was responsible for providing her. This experience has illuminated what she truly needs from me:
My daughter needs me to model being a strong, adult human female who trusts her intuition and navigates the extreme highs and lows of life with some grace. She needs me to get clear on my values and live in alignment with those, modeling a grounded authenticity. She needs me to trust that she’s doing the best she can to get through the ravages of puberty in a pornified culture. She needs me to not let this experience wreck me, and better yet, she needs to see me living a satisfying and meaningful life so she knows how that can look. She needs me to embrace adulthood as the rich experience it is, in a way she might want for herself. She needs me to view the world through a lens of gratitude and to model awe and wonder. She needs me to not be a victim who blames external sources for my experience.
She needs me to show her how to identify and let go of things beyond our control, choose to get up each day and find meaning in life’s mundane tasks, and model healthy boundaries. She needs me to make mistakes and then acknowledge those mistakes, taking the initiative for relationship repair. She needs me to see competence and courage when I look at her; to notice her creativity, her determination, her intelligence, her capacity for growth and wisdom. She needs me to normalize suffering and the human condition. She needs me to learn from this experience, and to emerge stronger and wiser for it. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to PITT!)
The security services have gone woke
Spies and soldiers should not be promoting identity politics.
From Spiked (UK)
By Rakib Ehsan
Feb 25, 2022
We live in an increasingly volatile and unpredictable world. There are many hostile foreign-state actors, eager to infiltrate British public institutions and undermine our democratic structures. And there are myriad terror-related threats, too, especially from Islamic extremists.
Yet while the threats to our national security grow, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ chiefs are reportedly encouraging spies to focus on checking their ‘white privilege’. According to media reports this week, back in December staff were issued with a dossier entitled ‘Mission Critical’, and told to avoid using words such as ‘manpower’, ‘strong’ and ‘grip’ because these words can ‘reinforce dominant cultural patterns’.
Not to be outdone, the UK’s Ministry of Defence has launched its very own woke offensive in the past few days. As Russia plunged Europe into war, the MoD’s blue-tick verified ‘LGBT+ Network’ Twitter account proceeded to explore the meaning of the terms ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’, ‘transgender’, ‘queer’ and, last but not least, ‘questioning’ – which, according to the MoD, is ‘the process of exploring your own sexual orientation and / or gender identity’. The account also celebrated the MoD’s ‘commitment and efforts to be a LGBTQ+ inclusive employer’, which have been recognised with a Stonewall ‘Workplace Index Silver award’. … read full article
How Twitter forced us to hate
Tribalism has infected every media narrative
From UnHerd (UK)
By Park MacDougald
Feb 25, 2022
It is hard not to be cynical about “the media” these days, especially if you work in it. Spend any significant amount of time reading newspapers and magazines, watching cable news, or following discussions on Twitter, and you notice that a great deal of what is written and broadcast has a drearily predictable quality. Indeed, discrete events seem almost irrelevant except insofar as they can be slotted into pre-existing storylines.
Take the debates surrounding the trucker protests in Ottawa. The mainstream press, by and large, has attempted to assimilate the protests into categories familiar from the Trump years.
According to Politico, “far-Right” truckers, some of them sporting “Confederate and Nazi flags”, have “wreaked havoc on Canadian cities”. In the Guardian, one writer warned that the “siege of Ottawa” was an “astroturfed movement funded by a global network of highly organised far-Right groups and amplified by Facebook’s misinformation machine.” Slate, after dropping the trigger words “militia”, “hate”, “extremist”, and “Nazi”, called the protests an “armed occupation of a G-7 capital”. All linked the truckers with the domestic threat posed by Fox News, the Republican Party, and the American far-Right.
Critics of the establishment have responded with their own counter-narrative, aimed at portraying the truckers in a sympathetic light while focusing attention on the tyrannical response of the Canadian government. After Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergency Powers Act, Tucker Carlson labelled Canada a “dictatorship” and warned that similar measures would soon be coming to the United States. Over the weekend, as Ottawa police attempted to clear the city centre, Twitter was filled with viral videos of police violence against the protestors, juxtaposed with old quotes from progressive leaders praising the BLM protests of summer 2020, intended to highlight their hypocrisy.
These narratives have a recognisable logic, which holds whether the underlying event is the truckers or the Capitol riot. They are tribal, pitting a virtuous “us” against a malevolent “them”. They are curated to provoke fear of, and rage against, the out-group, often through “empathic triggers” that highlight aggression against the in-group. They are also, in a loose sense, conspiratorial, running together phenomena that have no logical connection except within the pattern of the narrative.
This is easy to recognise in Right-wing conspiracies about the 2020 election, but establishment media indulges in something similar. When CNN leads a story about Joe Rogan’s use of the n-word with a line about a man carrying “a Confederate flag inside the US Capitol rotunda”, the purpose is to train readers to create an emotional connection between the podcast host and white supremacist domestic terrorism, when none exists in reality. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to UnHerd for free!)